mexico woke up

In October artbeam will present Gabriela Leon's "Paseo dominical por el zócalo de Oaxaca" or "A Sunday Walk to the Zocalo of Oaxaca" at UC Riverside's Sweeney Gallery curated by Director Tyler Stallings. The exhibit will feature the dress Gabriela made from artifacts she gathered from the barricades that were set up by the People's Movement (APPO) here last year. APPO sought to gain benefits for the teachers of Oaxaca and subsequently for the ouster of its repressive Governor Ulyses after he ordered the teachers annual peaceful protest be broken up with the aid of tear gas and riot police. The video below, a series of images and an installation to be created at the space will also be included in the exhibit. The music for the video is from Nine Rain and Steven Brown who lives in Oaxaca.

It was my birthday last week and this year I did something I have not done for a very long time. I did what I "felt" like doing. In fact it "felt" so right I did this for nearly a whole week. You could call it a vacation, but it really wasn't like that. I have been gradually moving in this direction for some time now. I have been paying a lot of attention to my breath in meditation and in my daily activities. This follows a 13 year on again off again period of study and a 10 year practice of non-attachment to various things for defined periods of time. Also I was fortunate to inherit access to a great library of Buddhist works over the past year and have been taking great advantage of that. I am seriously considering taking refuge as a Buddhist, to seek to become a Bodhisattva, but that is a longer discussion. For now let's just say I am fascinated with the idea of training my mind with the help of a 2,500 year lineage of contemplative practice.

Generally in our lives we take a grasping approach. Trying to attach ourselves to different situations in order to achieve security. Either we are being fed by someone or we are feeding others... The urge to commitment – that we would like to “belong,” be somebody’s child, or that we would like them to be our child – is seemingly powerful. I am working hard at being comfortable with my way of being in the world, accepting it instead of fighting it, and instead being open to what has been presented to me right now. I am working hard at not being attached to outcomes I have imagined, nor distraught at pathways that did not materialize. This is not intended to be a selfish thing. Rather I am striving to act with "compassion" in the Buddhist sense. According to Chogyam Trungpa:

"When a person is both wise and compassionate, his actions are very skillful and radiate enormous energy. This skillful action is referred to as upaya, “skillful means.” Here “skillful” does not mean devious or diplomatic. Upaya just happens in response to a situation. If a person is totally open, his response to life will be very direct, perhaps even outrageous from a conventional point of view, because “skillful means” does not allow any nonsense. It reveals and deals with situations as they are: it is extremely skillful and precise energy..."

OK Mark that's all well and good, but it still sounds pretty selfish and an excuse for doing whatever you want. To be honest this is the hard part. Chogyam Trungpa continues:

"But true compassion is ruthless from ego's point of view, because it does not consider ego's drive to maintain itself. It is "crazy wisdom." It is totally wise, but it is crazy as well, because it does not relate to ego's literal and simple minded attempts to secure its own comfort... "

To be continuously on alert for my own motivations in this regard is what sets this approach apart. Am I acting in some way to satisfy my ego or because it is an open and honest response to a situation as it is? If I am not attached to an outcome I am freer to let it go and if it stays, well then maybe it was meant to be. In this regard, I'm often reminded of strategies of negotiation. If I am able to walk away from a deal and move on to something else I am in a much better bargaining situation. In this case, the bargain is with myself - to leave my self aside.

Reposting my blog on Attention Curves here since it is getting a fair amount of attention lately. It was just picked up by KLD here. I have my work cut out for me to evolve these attention curves as a valuable and consistent tool for the capital market for good.

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In a recent conversation with Tony Audino, a Seattle-based entrepreneur and VC friend of mine, we talked about the blended value market and its various market sectors, both old and new. At one point he said “you know you should develop a “hype curve” for this market.

Hype curves are most frequently associated with Gartner Group’s technology charts that measure market visibility and maturity ranging from an initial “technology trigger” to a “plateau of productivity” along a curve just like the one below. However the nomenclature utilized there is not appropriate for the blended value market. What you see below is an adaptation of the general hype curve idea that I call an “attention curve."

A “social trigger” occurs when some new way of creating both social and financial value is developed and begins to spread. New social enterprises are born and some level of acceptance of the idea emerges among a group of insiders. This initial success may or may not be driven by a new technology. In many cases such as microfinance or fair trade, a new bargain is struck and/or a new series of transactions are created or redefined. In any case this social trigger allows others to see and do things differently that result in the creation of both social and financial value. Attention follows and soon an emerging market sector is born.

Typically this attention follows a curve upward until a level of “peak attention” is reached, most recently exemplified by the way everything has gone “green” - from special popular magazine issues on the subject to the Oscars and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.

Of course from this point there is no place to go but down in terms of attention. It is in this down cycle where the sector shows its mettle. While significant attention usually brings a flow of new money, these new ideas have to actually work or they slowly disappear off the radar. This is the period I call “market acceptance.” The idea either proves to be sustainable or it falls off the chart. If indeed it proves out, a more mature period of expansion and development occurs supported by smart money. In the case of clean technology for example, this has meant a quadrupling of venture investment in the last six years. Ultimately the acceptance of the idea becomes so commonplace that “market liquidity” develops as it has with the affordable housing market.

Admittedly, the positioning of certain sectors on the attention curve is somewhat subjective. To help guide my judgment I used Technorati’s charting tool that shows the number of hits on keywords over time from the 84.6 million blogs it tracks. Here is the Technorati chart on “green” for example.

Certainly there are other methods for determining positioning on the curve that we at Collective Intelligence intend to explore, but for this first pass, I offer it up as is. The attention chart points out that blended value has been around for a long time, with serious market successes to point to. It also says there is a lot more where that came from, a wave of new ideas, companies and non-profits, albeit at different stages of maturity, that are following on the heals of their predecessors. I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Thanks Mark

I'll preface my comment here by reminding you that I live in Oaxaca and have somewhat purposely avoided the constant demand for attention our devices seem to have on us. While I am online 8 hours a day, maybe more, I do not use a cell phone here. I was begged and cajoled by associates into having one in the States to make it easier for them to reach me at any time. Often it seems its primary utility is that they can wait to choose the place to meet until the very last minute. Certainly there is also a convenience there that works in US culture.

Twitter, from the outside looking in, seems like the ultimate distraction tool- incessant chatting about trivial stuff. Even if you are using it during "down time" in a bus or waiting for your coffee, it distracts you from the present. I've found it can be highly rewarding to pay attention to the immediate physical environment, particularly the people who happen to be sitting next to me.

More personal context: in general, when I am in the United States it is commonplace to be distracted by an incoming cell phone call to the person I am with. We have to completely have put the next utterance on pause until they choose to return to the conversation. To me the greatest gift you can give someone is your attention. Certainly I am not capable of doing this all the time, but I am very conscious of my actions in this regard. I guess that's what I am saying here, it seems important to me to be truly mindful of the value of someone's physical presence.

btw bruce sterling has attempted to label the "always on, always connected, location aware" future as hyper-local in the current issue of wired.

Sure seems like we will miss a lot of the present if this is our future.

paz
mark
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