TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is an annual event that presents individuals doing extraordinary work in these three areas. I have posted several wonderful videos and the one below featuring multimedia director and performer Natasha Tsako is another standout.

Natasha is a Swiss born artist living in Miami and performing there and around the world. Her appearance at TED last year featured excerpts from her one-woman show, UP WAKE, that integrates sound, computer generated images and a live stage performance. Her performance is amazing and her empowering concluding comments on the video are powerful. I have extracted them so readers can appreciate their depth. Enjoy!

“A bitterwseet, funny, tragic world with existentialist shades of Samuel Beckett and especially Marcel Marceau.     “Octavio Roca, Miami New Times

There is a revolution
It’s a human and technological revolution
It’s motion and emotion
It’s information.

It’s visual, musical, sensorial, conceptual, it’s Universal

It’s beyond words and numbers:
It’s happening.

to create intelligent, meaningful and extra-ordinary work.

It’s now.

Natasha Tsakos
president and founder of ZERO llc
Learn more about Natasha at natashatsakos.com

I have discovered a very interesting workshop developed by Britta and Rajyo that has women supporting men in healing our individual and collective wounding that developed over the centuries. Men have often blamed themselves and some women have blamed men for their past actions and attitudes. It is rare for men to be seen for something beyond our past betrayals of ourselves and women.

Since I am in Asia till the 23rd of May, I will be unable to attend the March workshop but plan to attend their October event. Perhaps there are a few men subscribers whose lives may be enhanced by attending.

Woman Knighting Man

Are you frustrated about ever having the intimacy and connection with women that you know is possible?

Are you longing to be seen, heard, met and truly honored by women for the amazing man that you are?

In this workshop you will be able to heal your wounds, fears and resentments with women, whilst being held by an experienced female staff. You will be able to feel safe enough to go into the places within your own heart where you have shut down to love, and to rediscover those vulnerable and soft places where your true masculine strength lies. From there you will be able to fully express your true power and presence as a man.

The feedback we get from the men is that they have an experience of being unconditionally loved and honored through the power of feminine love and devotion, which allows them to open to trust again. During the Rite of Initiation, the true Noble Man in them can emerge. It is an amazing experience of alchemy between man and woman, on a personal and a collective level. The healing is profound, and the experience truly transformative and life changing.

For the women holding space, the opportunity to really stand in the essence of their love and devotion, and to witness men bearing their hearts and souls, is a very humbling experience. Women often think that they are the only sex that suffers, and set up a barrier of judgment and separation with men. Holding space in this group is such a gift because it allows these walls to crumble on both sides, and both men and women are able to see each other with fresh eyes and open hearts once again.

When: March 25-28, 2010

Where: Dancing Deer Farm, San Luis Obispo, Ca (a 100 acre retreat center)

Investment: $895 – $695 Sliding Scale, Payments available

Download Registration Forms: http://celebrationofbeing.com/noble_man.html

Email: info@celebrationofbeing.com

Call: 415-320-2086

Testimonials from Noble Man Participants

The Noble Man showed me the Truth about myself, it showed me it was o.k to be fully myself in the presence of women. The core benefit of this workshop: TOTAL FREEDOM!!

~Mark White, London , UK

Never in my life have I been so enveloped by women who drenched me in unconditional love and non judgmental acceptance. This was so healing for me, to be seen and recognized for who I am as a man. I was able to both clear previous wounds with women in my life, and to build inner strength to be able to love and accept women without projecting my stuff onto them. Quite simply I feel free to love and be loved.

~Scott Baugh , LA, CA

In this workshop, Love becomes a way of life, rather than just a lonely man’s dream. Men and women sharing themselves totally and honestly in the moment. I am not the same man I was when I started. I now have the capacity to love, myself and others. If only the rest of the world could be the same!

~Hank, Marin Co., CA

I am hopeful, I glimpsed God, for the first time in over 40 years, and I feel I have a purpose here on Earth.

~Fletcher, Oregon

Course descriptions, schedules and Resources: www.celebrationofbeing.com

This is how we must think if the world is to heal.

Find more videos like this on c3: consciouscreatives.net

Dancing with the Divine: Photographic Visions by Colette from Colette de Gagnier on Vimeo.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom proved that people can—and do—work together to manage commonly-held resources without degrading them.

The biggest roadblock standing in the way of many people’s recognition of the importance of the commons came tumbling down when Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Garrett Hardin described the Tragedy of the Commons with a hypothetical example of shared herding land: If all herders make the individually rational economic decision of increasing the number of cows they graze on the land, the collective effect will deplete or destroy the common.

Photo by Brenda Anderson

Over many decades, Ostrom has documented how various communities manage common resources – grazing lands, forests, irrigation waters, fisheries— equitably and sustainably over the long term. The Nobel Committee’s recognition of her work effectively debunks popular theories about the Tragedy of the Commons, which hold that private property is the only effective method to prevent finite resources from being ruined or depleted.

Awarding the world’s most prestigious economics prize to a scholar who champions cooperative behavior greatly boosts the legitimacy of the commons as a framework for solving our social and environmental problems. Ostrom’s work also challenges the current economic orthodoxy that there are few, if any, alternatives to privatization and markets in generating wealth and human well being.

The Tragedy of the Commons refers to a scenario in which commonly held land is inevitably degraded because everyone in a community is allowed to graze livestock there. This parable was popularized by wildlife biologist Garrett Hardin in the late 1960s, and was embraced as a principle by the emerging environmental movement. But Ostrom’s research refutes this abstract concept with the real life experience from places like Nepal, Kenya and Guatemala.

“When local users of a forest have a long-term perspective, they are more likely to monitor each other’s use of the land, developing rules for behavior,” she cites as an example. “It is an area that standard market theory does not touch.”

Garrett Hardin himself later revised his own view, noting that what he described was actually the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.

Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, also a Nobel winner, commented, “Conservatives used the Tragedy of the Commons to argue for property rights, and that efficiency was achieved as people were thrown off the commons…What Ostrom has demonstrated is the existence of social control mechanisms that regulate the use of the commons without having to resort to property rights.”

The Nobel Committee’s choice of Ostrom is significant considering that many winners of the prize since it was initiated in 1968 have been zealous advocates of unrestricted markets, such as Milton Friedman, whose selection helped fuel the rise of market theory as the be-all end-all of economics since the 1980s. Policies based upon this narrow worldview sparked the rise of corporate power and the diminishment of government’s role in protecting the commons.

While right-wing thinkers scoffed at the possibility of resources being shared in a way that maintains the common good, arguing that private property is the only practical strategy to prevent this tragedy, Ostrom’s scholarship shows otherwise.

“What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved,” she explains.

YES! Magazine’s special issue, Reclaiming the Commons

A classic example of this are the acequias, a centuries-old tradition of cooperative irrigation systems in New Mexico and Colorado where the small flow of water available for agriculture is allocated by the community as a whole through a democratic process.

Ostrom is the first woman to be awarded the Economics prize, which some observers say helps explain her emphasis on the role of people’s relationships in our economic arrangements rather than the focus on individualized market choices expounded by many male winners of the Nobel.

Equally noteworthy is the fact that Ostrom was not trained as an economist, but as a political scientist—a factor that may be even more useful in explaining her outside-the-box approach to economics.

Yale economist Robert Schiller, quoted in the New York Times, welcomed the merging of the two fields. “Economics has become too isolated and stuck on the view that markets are efficient and self-regulating. It has derailed our thinking.”

Elinor Ostrom has always been explicit in recognizing the importance of the commons—she helped found the International Association for the Study of the Commons, also based at Indiana University—and her selection as a Nobel Laureate marks an early milestone in the emergence of a commons-based society. Her works shows that our social, environmental and personal advancement depends on the vitality of the commons.

Jay Walljasper is the author of The Great Neighborhood Book, a senior editor for the Project for Public Spaces, and a fellow and editor for OnTheCommons.org, where this article originally appeared.

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. Walljasper, J. (2009, October 27). The Victory of the Commons. Retrieved November 19, 2009, from YES! Magazine Web site: http://yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-victory-of-the-commons. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License