In a dream many years ago, I was in an ancient city.  It is night and it is quiet.

I am standing by the great wall that protects the city.  It is more like a mound.  It does not rise straight up from the ground.  Still, the wall is high enough to protect the citizens.  Then, in the dream, I am viewing the city from the air, noting the great embankment making a circle around the buildings, castles, streets and homes.  In the dream, I am noticing a feature of the stones that make up the protecting walls that reminds me of dragon scales.  Looking closer at those walls, I am realizing that those are scales.  Suddenly it becomes clear to me that the great circular wall surrounding the city is a mammoth serpent, asleep, protecting the city as she dreams.

That which we seek protection from, that which frightens us most, by its very nature is the very barrier that protects us.  Our armor and the weapons that seek us are the same.  What keeps us separate is also that which most terrifies us.  Those edifices that provide us our identity are the very things that can take our identity away.

This is the paradox of being human.  Becoming separate, we acquire split consciousness and self awareness.  What most terrifies us is the loss of that isolation.

I started this work a dozen years ago, seeking the origin of the dragon myth.  I followed hundreds of dragon tales and their telling on six continents through a hundred books over a year and a half.  Deep into the exploration, I found myself studying serpent myths, myths of the great goddess.  These dragon tales were rooted in these serpent stories from ancient societies that preceded the patrilineal invaders that retold them.

Finally, lingering over Marija Gimbutas’s hypothesis regarding human matrifocal, paleolithic origins, discovering Christopher Marshack’s moon calendar interpretation of ancient serpent carvings on rock, antler and bone while integrating anthropologist Chris Knight’s hypothesis of female-driven human social evolution, I found that a new origin story began to form.

Whereas Western society is founded upon the Indo-European, male viewpoint that the fittest survive, the new story precedes the Indo-Europeans, predating Darwin, Adam Smith and men with swords.  The new story is how we discover that there is no enemy and that we are all connected.  The new story recognizes the wall as also the answer to the riddle of our separate self.

It is in dream that our deepest truths lie sleeping.  I seek a theory of evolution that integrates dream with waking life.

I’ve noticed that it takes several days of deep concentration on a sand castle project, exercising techniques I’ve used a thousand times, teaching them to children, observing variations on a theme proliferating across a project, before the unexpected occurs.

Often, the unexpected is proceeded by a dip in emotion, a depression, a feeling of helplessness and of being alone.  Somehow, I get scoured out by the emotional isolation, and then, without thought, I am creating something wholly new where an emotional hole was moments before.

New kinds of towers are created.  New ways of making connections between structures are devised.  New ways of approaching age-old problems emerge, and I am consumed by the possibilities.

Joseph Pearce wrote a book almost 40 years ago called Crack in the Cosmic Egg, where he explored creativity as a process with structure that could be studied and reproduced.  Pearce discovered that a head-over-heels, long-term, deep commitment to a project can result in a sudden “Aha” experience leading to unique solutions and emotional elation.  Pearce noted that the “Aha” often comes after the person is separated from his devotion for a little time.

Darwin commonly punctuated time spent in his study with strolls around his property.  I would not be surprised if many of his insights came to him on those strolls.

For myself, I’ve had the repeated odd experience of spending time in deep study over prolonged periods to have an insight join me while I was taking a bath, sitting on the toilet or sitting on the shower floor.  Solutions to an intellectual riddle often find a way to unexpectedly communicate themselves to me while I am in a distracted, pleasant kinesthetic state.

December and early January are often very difficult emotionally.  I’ve observed this in the people I know and in myself.  Over the twenty years I ran a sales firm, I got the whole month of December off.  Stores were selling, not buying.  Assaulted by depression almost every December, my routine broken, I’d grapple for a project that I could find consuming.  For me, creative projects often begin when I feel most helpless and alone.

And, unexpected “Aha” integrations often follow brief depressions.

Depression seems to often accompany the beginning and beginning of ends of projects.

I’m not clear on the exact relationship between depression, creativity and consuming isolation, but there seems to be a dance with predictable steps revolving around the process.  Building sand castles, I experience the process microcosmically while playing within a context of modified space and time.  While theorizing about evolution, I’ve experienced several cycles of deep study, then depression followed by cascading insight.  The study is often isolating.  The depression is isolating.  The insight feels integrating and people-embracing.  Sometimes the experience of expansive integration is followed by depression, particularly when I feel unable to successfully share the details of the insight.  Still, there is a pattern to the three-step shuffle.  Depression seems integral to the process.

Building powerful sand castles is only somewhat about the sand constructions topping hills and meandering down the beach.  I learned early that a sand castle is about the chasm, the abysses dug across the shoreline from where the wet sand is mined to create the towers.  The deeper the depression, the more powerful is the metaphor of the construction.  The more space occupied by the deep, dark, wet channels of water, the more evocative the castles become.

Sometimes the height from where I stand inside a quarried channel to the top of a tower is almost seven feet.  People observing the process of castle creation are often as attracted to the holes at the foundation of the process as they are to its productions.

Depression is part of the process.  Creativity requires a foundation in whatever’s real.

When I begin building the towers that form the foundation of my sand castle constructions, I pick spots as high and far from the pits of water and wet sand as I conveniently can.  When the towers start to proliferate, I can’t reach past them to construct behind them unless I dig a new hole on the other side.  Also, hands filled with wet sand leave a trail.  If I have to lean across existing towers, the dripping sand often damages what I’ve created.

When working in brush and ink, I always begin at the upper left side, working across and downward.  This keeps my right palm from smearing fresh ink.  The same principle applies to sand castle building.  Where I build has much to do with where I will be building.

There is no story narrative accompanying the various constructions as they go up.  Sometimes I get images of kings, queens and princesses.  Mostly I experience a sense of the passing of mythic time.  Every hour is almost a hundred years as I watch decorations fray.  Over the course of a day, I watch civilizations pass as a noon’s intricate construction by evening is a worn old building approaching ruin.

Towers are always the first edifices to rise.  If it is a tall tower on the top of a high hill of sand excavated from the ditches where the watery sand is coming from, the hill of sand has to be patted firm to hold the weight.  These towers can be heavy.  If the sand is fine and the sun hot on a cloudless, windless day, over 20 layers of pancaked sand can create a four-foot pillar.  Sometimes the highest towers are grounded directly on the beach on densely packed, wave-flattened sand.

The towers rise using a number of sanditectural techniques.  It depends on how the wet sand is held and allowed to fall onto the just-established layer.  The sand can form as a pancake, as a brick, a ball, a crescent, vertical slivers, etc.  Towers rise, acquiring personalities based upon the techniques used.  Over the course of the day, architectural styles can suggest an epoch that inspired excess or a more humble, less ambitious time.

Against the towers, flying buttresses are engaged.  There could be two, three or four, depending on what the design demands.  Rising from near the main tower, the buttresses lean over and then support the central tower with a graceful arch.  Sometimes the arch leans effortlessly without a supporting hand.  Sometimes I break the sand bond between layers to force the buttress to bend.  Often I build the buttress in a fashion that it rises while leaning on my hand, which I keep in position while wet sand dries.

Sand arches are made in much the same way, except two buttresses rise and lean against each other.  I sometimes create a row of arches, often of ascending heights.  Often the arches span a road.

The large sand hills demand roads to make it possible for the eye to easily move up and down.  With a tower or towers on top, a road switches back and forth down the hillside, or around the mountain, bringing phantom carriages to and fro.  Balustrades line these pathways with drip sand filigrees topping the railings on both sides.  Arches often shade the roads, with some arches sharing a foundation with buttresses that caper off in an opposite direction.

Balconies with filigreed details often blossom off the towers, usually near the base, with sand pillars keeping the horizontal sand construction firm.  Tiny sand doorways suggest an egress.  Doors can’t be too ambitious or they violate the weight.  These towers have limited entrances and exits.

Children spy the play possibilities before the sand is dry.  Towers suggest damsels, roads imply knights, wide boulevards evoke carriages and coronation rituals.  I hear muttered stories from little mouths as the day progresses.  I’m deep into the passage of time, feeling decades pass within the hour, observing the effects of the elements on the machinations of humans.

Before I begin a project, I pay close attention to the waterline, noting where the high tide ends.  I always build beyond the high tide.  It creates the opportunity for there to be towers intact upon my return the next morning.  In places like Jamaica, which are populated with European children with parents nearby, unattended castles are not reflexively destroyed.  I can work the sand civilization over a period of days.  Often, the hard work of digging the holes only has to be done once, the first day.  Most other days can be all about the towers.

Sometimes, several days into a project, immersed in the world of sand castles, working and reworking established themes, I find that creativity comes visiting.  It is always several days into a project that the new ideas come.

I sometimes feel that what I do best is create sand castles.  Having developed a specific style over 40 years, I use no tools, work exclusively in fine shell sand and specialize in unique towers, some four feet tall.  Whereas while developing evolutionary theory I often experience a lack of connection with an audience that expresses appreciation for my productions, when creating sand castles I am able to experience the approbation of an approving gallery of casual walkers, almost without cessation.

A number of specifics come to mind when I consider what is involved when creating sand castles.

Fine shell sand is essential.  Pensacola offers perhaps the best I’ve ever found.  Florida’s west coast, St. Petersburg Beach and points farther south, have consistently excellent sand for sand castle building.  The east coast of Florida, not so much.  For example, stretches of sand around Ft. Lauderdale are terrible.

Almost fifteen years ago, I discovered almost perfect sand in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  Returning there this summer, I found it had totally changed.  Far coarser now, it was not useable for my purposes.

Sand can change over time and over the course of a few yards up or down a beach.  There are sections of Negrille in Jamaica that are excellent not a hundred yards from stretches that are not useable.  The quality and coarseness of fine shell sand can change radically over space and time.

Sun, temperature and wind are vital variables even when your sand is perfect.

Clear days are by far the best.  Even partly cloudy days can mean the sand won’t bake hard and fast enough for an intricate construction.  Sometimes on a partly cloudy day, I dig when the sun is covered and build towers, bridges, arches, balconies and balustrades when the sun is out.

Hot days are essential.  Below 85 and the water evaporates too slowly from clumps of sand lifted from the water cisterns where sits the slurry.  The faster the water leaves the sand, the higher the towers can go, the more intricate the drip style filigree illuminations.

The difference between making sand castles in the Gulf of Mexico or farther south in January or February vs. March or April is immense, like the difference between McDonald’s and home cooking.  Cloudy, cooler, windy weather depresses creativity and capabilities.

Wind accelerates the decades.  Whereas windless days can see a flying buttress, balcony or arch last perhaps eight hours, details intact, a little wind can half the time a construction can weather eons.  On one trip, I created castles that lasted six days while the wind stayed low, and children respectfully let the towers stand and local beach security received special dispensation not to raze the structures in the middle of the night (someone could fall in one of the excavated holes).  Each 24 hours was almost 500 years.  After two or three days there would hardly be an older edifice still standing

When I begin on a sunny beach in Florida or the Caribbean, I often pick a shady spot that will be sunny when the shadows move.  My first two hours are often spent just digging, quickly drilling down to water to make it easier to lift out sand by keeping my horizontal excavations mostly below the waterline.  By making almost all my digging in the cool wet sand, my fingers can keep their strength while suffering fewer pricks from the sharp shells and stones that linger near the surface.  Also, as cave-ins keep loosening upper layers, the speed that I can root, break up and excavate makes for lightning fast moving of the sand.

Often mornings are too cool, the sun not high enough in the sky, the light too indirect.  This is a perfect time for digging.  I start around 9:00 in the morning, gouging channels for several hours.  The deeper the penetration, the longer the channel, the larger the circle or moat, the more dramatic the final work.  A deep depression surrounded by high mountains of sand forms the perfect foundation for the intricate productions that will follow.

But a sand castle is not a sand castle without children.  While burrowing through the morning, I’ll make a tower tease.  A single tower will draw interested kids.  I invite them to make some of their own.  While I continue to dig, helpers gather.  Sometimes by the time I am ready to begin construction, several children are planted in my watery depressions making little towers and tunnels.  Walkersby are delighted by the sight of a gaggle of little ones working away.  And I haven’t even begun!

Around noon, I start work on the first cluster of towers.  I pick a spot at the top of a high hill of sand, plant my feet in the wet depression and begin.

Marian Annett and others have concluded that those anomalous dominant individuals with two cerebral hemispheres the same size often exhibit astonishing intelligence and creativity.  Michael Fitzgerald’s Autism and Creativity describes the kind of intelligence that sometimes accompanies these people.  The males of the group are often very maturational delayed.

Individuals severely traumatized in early childhood are often maturational delayed.  It’s as if large parts of them are unable to easily progress in a natural fashion.  Resources are tied to the trauma at the maturational stage they were in when the trauma occurred.  Therapy can unclench the individual from that stage.  Resources released, they can continue to grow.

Is it possible that early trauma can impact an individual to reproduce a neurological environment similar to that experienced by those naturally maturational delayed?  If so, can early trauma result in the exhibition of both the symptoms and the occasional remarkable intelligence and creativity exhibited by those individuals?

Those with Asperger’s, autism and other conditions exhibiting maturational delay, such as stuttering and phonetic dyslexia, often have unique brains, a predictable cluster of personality characteristics and behaviors featuring OCD, perfect pitch and other features.  Are there situations involving trauma where children without this familial predilection acquire features of these conditions as a result of the trauma?

What is the evidence that early trauma can result in a surge in creativity or intelligence?  Clearly, the opposite is often the case.  What might be the specific circumstances that parse out the two?  When unusual intelligence or creativity is exhibited, might accompanying features of the personality approximate those with familial maturational delay?  Might there be specific, unique features of cerebral lateralization characteristic of those traumatized exhibiting high intelligence and/or creativity that are similar or identical to the familial maturational delayed?

I’ve been cobbling together postings over the last year into an overview of how the various pieces inform an understanding of social change in contemporary times.  I’ve just begun the process of collating that content.

Listing features of my work that concentrate on societal transformation and global horizontalization:

• Myth, story and contemporary times
• Diet impacting pubertal timing, thus influencing the synthesizing capabilities of the brain
• The rise of autism and its connection to surges in matrifocal social structure
• Increases in innovation with rises in matrifocal social structure
• Youngest children immigrating and encouraging innovation
• High-fat diets encouraging matrifocal social structure
• The web is a reflection of surges in matrifocal social structure
• Neotenous features in males result in matrifocal social structures
• Aboriginal, poor, ethnic minorities and artists neotenizing society
• Online virtual realities suggest a return to primary process consciousness, a matrifocal feature
• Aspects of the Internet that encourage social change reflect matrifocal priorities
• The movement toward an aesthetic, stewardship, neotenous, sharing economy
• The two salesmen paradigms and the web (hard sell/limited area vs. soft sell/no boundaries)
• The unconscious nature of the societal transition (comparable to amnesia and hypnotherapy)
• The pluralist perspective vs. the fundamentalist frame
• The return of immanence and primary process (neoteny again)
• The connection of narcissism to creativity
• Culture as sexual selection gone wild, five-step evolution
• From the individual to the commons
• Redefining freedom from labor, environment, safety, consumer rights and taxes as free markets
• Shift in perception of time
• Shift from pyramidal to network frame
• Self awareness promotes change on a personal and societal level
• Differences between matri and patri male demonstration

It’s more than a little overwhelming how to make these related themes work together in a single narrative.  There are macro and micro relationships, large and small processes.

Those of you following the threads of the evolutionary theory being pitched in these digital pages may have noticed that the various balances propounded (balanced polymorphisms, hormonal balances, the heterochronic mirror processes of neoteny and acceleration, matrifocal/patrifocal balance) have all been discussed in the context of human evolution and social transformation.  I hypothesize that by singing and dancing we propelled ourselves into abstract thinking.  The journey was/is mediated by these four balances.  Regarding these various dynamics, I don’t discuss animals.

There are two reasons for this.  First, I’m pretty much totally ignorant of nonhuman biology.  My understanding of human biology is extremely narrow.  Still, I feel drawn to understand humans.  Animals, not so much.  Not that I don’t personally relate to animals.  My dog was easily the most significant being in my life until I was sixteen.  Perhaps that is why I don’t study animals.  I worship them.

Second, the various human balances that I presuppose exist and then explore operate in a social realm.  How I understand human evolution to unfold is a social process.  It is not about natural selection or sexual selection where a single feature is obsessively selected.  Human evolution is about the interplay of several balance-oriented dynamics revolving around society as a whole and the individual at the same time.  I don’t observe animals generating their own social ecologies.  Who they are cannot be differentiated from how they’re integrated with their surroundings.  Humans are both part of the world and separate from the world.  That separateness has a lot to do with the several balances just noted, balanced polymorphisms, hormonal balances, the heterochronic mirror processes of neoteny and acceleration and matrifocal/patrifocal balances.  Those processes encouraged us to split and explore the abstract.

Those four balances are all connecting the same dynamic.  At this point we don’t have the language to describe a single thing with so many manifestations.  We will with time.  Yet, from what I can tell, this is a peculiarly human dance.

Certain steps in the dance and particular passages of the balance music are inherent in the processes of our animal brethren.  This is what the evolutionary developmental biologists study, particularly the acolytes of Matsuda.  The patterns are far more static, and animals show less an ability to transform than humans.  For example, the hyena female is genitally organized to exhibit male-like features and behavior.  No surprise that female hyenas have high testosterone levels.  If we selected for neotenous features in the female, how many generations would it take for biology to reflect the selective impacts?  Elephants seem potentially evolutionarily flexible.  If the elephant is a neotenous mammoth, can the species be encouraged to accelerate back in that direction?  Though in nature these transformations are common over time, particularly during punctuated equilibriums, there is no evidence that I am aware of where species were morphing with anything like the speed featured by human beings. Wolves and foxes come close.

We are unique.  What makes us unique is how we evolve and transform.  David Brin’s brilliant fiction on how sentient species might encourage not quite sentient species to become fully conscious is a fascinating exploration of consciousness in transition.  Once we figure out how to achieve peaceful equilibrium, we might consider teaching another species to sing and dance.

Conversations at the dinner table when I was small revolved around money and psychodynamic motivation.  Freud was king in the mostly Jewish, northern Chicago suburbs in the 1950s and early 60s.  At least, among my family.  Fourth-generation German and Russian Jews, we had had no bar mitzvahs for more than 100 years.  I remembering telling my Christian friends that there were four kinds of Jews:  Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed and Commercial.  We were Commercial.

No member of my family had ever finished college, with the exception of some distant cousins.  Our family tree had been dramatically pruned by WWII.  My mother’s and father’s families would gather together on the two great holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving.  My father’s only brother died around 1950, not quite a college graduate from Northwestern.  He had spina bifida.  My mom’s sisters were children.  So, it was the identical group of people gathering every year.  There was no sibling competition to go other places.  Both sets of grandparents had only one set of grandchildren.  I was the first born.  I was male.  I was the cat’s pajamas.

Mental illness was a popular avocation amongst the adults I was in contact with.  My father’s mother had borderline personality disorder in an exaggerated form.  Mom was manic depressive, institutionalized periodically.  Dad displayed benign forms of OCD.  My mom’s dad killed himself shortly before I was born (upon hearing the news my mother was getting married).  He was manic depressive.  There is Asperger’s in my family.  I have a bi-polar sister.  I lived in a zoological menagerie of human mental derivations from the norm.

I started talking when I was three.  I was kept an additional year in nursery school before entering kindergarten.  There was no religion in our household.  There was little philosophy.  My memories emerge in a world with one powerful presupposition.  There was a belief that one’s unconscious informs all of one’s experience.  All behavior is created by hidden motivations.  What was discussed in my family was making money, and Freud.

I was fascinated by making money.  I was plagued by Freud.  That money bought stuff seemed far less relevant than all the ways that one could make money.  It was a game.  That people were compelled to behave in the ways that they did for good reasons, reasons often beyond our understanding, made the world make sense, even if the sense was inaccessible.  This was not so much a game.  There seemed constant repercussions resulting from the behaviors created by these invisible motivations.

I grew up in a household where both my mother and father were in psychoanalysis.  As they explored their own childhoods, they punctuated my sisters’ and my experiences with evaluations based upon Freudian dynamics.  Everything my sisters and I did was based upon unconscious compulsions.

We were a nonreligious house filled with talk of forces deeply involved with our inner lives, forces often beyond our ability to impact, but forces nonetheless influencing our every move and utterance.  Clearly, the lives of those around me were being buffeted by gale force winds beyond their conscious control.  I wanted to know what made the winds blow.

Until The Enlightenment and Modernity, we worshipped the gods as the hidden forces that made our world move.  With Freud and the 20th century, many of us shifted focus to the unconscious.  I suspect a synthesis is in our future that integrates the two.  Either concept by itself leaves a half world out.  Believing in only one or the other still places wisdom somewhere other than the self.

We can’t afford to continue to assign wisdom and responsibility to an inaccessible source.

To live in an integrated, transparent, horizontal world, we need immanent access to those forces that inform our lives.  It’s time for god to stop being somewhere else, be it in the world or in our heads.  It might be useful if we redefine god as being here and now.

I grew up with suburban gods.  I look forward to the new gods on the way.

As an amateur theorist without recourse to experimentation, surveys or studies to prove a hypothesis, I find myself relying upon several paths of exploration.  First, without an ability to prove step by step the various conjectures I come up with, I keep running “as if” frames, seeking the implications of a hypothesis if true.  A rather hefty disadvantage to this way of thinking is that I’m usually several assumptions or presuppositions away from conventional theory, several steps away from orthodoxy down a logic chain to a particular conclusion.  Though I may feel I have arrived at a particularly elegant or powerful solution to the various anomalies that have emerged during the journey, others may not have even gotten to the point where an anomaly was even noted.

For example, confused for years by the anomaly of Asian male neoteny in a patrifocal society, I came to a resolution of the anomaly by integrating estrogen into an evolutionary equation that formerly only noted the effects of testosterone.  My paying close attention to testosterone itself was based upon the resolution of an anomaly that emerged in Norman Geschwind’s work that explained a gap in Stephen Gould’s hypothesis of how neoteny unfolds in humans.  Gould’s work, noting the influence of heterochrony in human evolution, is not considered relevant to sexual selection advocates like Geoffrey Miller, whose work is more or less where that logic pathway started.

In other words, for human sexual selection to work, it required heterochronic theory, which required endocrine system insights revolving around testosterone, which created social structure anomalies, resolved by integrating estrogen into the equation.

Why someone with a year of biology and a year of chemistry in high school, no science or math taken in college, would walk this particular pathway mostly, I think, has to do with training in art, psychology, hypnotherapy, meditation and practical mysticism.  The exact same internal experience of feeling led, characteristic of participation in a work of art, compels me to theorize.  Whereas in art I use features of my experience to draw a conclusion in the form of pictures and/or words, in science I use features of the existing science literature and my experience to draw conclusions in the form of theories.  In both cases, I mostly work at getting out of the way of my unconscious.  My unconscious tosses me integrations of experiences, experiences I have had because my unconscious suggested it would be fun or interesting to read or do those things.  How do I know my unconscious wants me to have a certain experience?  I feel attracted.  If I feel attracted to something, I figure my unconscious wants me to have that experience.

Second, unable to perform experiments, I constantly look for opportunities in my life that support or don’t support my conjectures.  For example, I use my own body as a laboratory to explore the effects or symptoms of the various foods that I ingest.  I hypothesize diet is very influential on our hormonal levels.  I observe those effects where I can.  Observing closely the relationships of couples around me, I draw conclusions based upon what I observe are their body types, personalities, physical health and symptoms, handedness and the features of their relatives.  As an amateur, I gather information where I can.

Complicating the whole process, I have not been trained in science conventions.  It’s not like my observations can be codified in a form that can be statistically parsed out for more or less robust conclusions.  There are no percentages when one is informing by experiences.  If I’m ignoring data in my life that do not conform with my conclusions, there is no peer-reviewed vehicle to keep me honest.

I’m extremely lucky that I feel loved.  Earlier in my life this tendency to feel led was complicated by an introverted, narcissistic personality with self-aggrandizing tendencies, difficulties communicating and a vivid imagination.  I often felt alone and not understood.

I still often don’t feel understood.  Yet, at 56 I feel part of a community.  Being out on a limb doesn’t mean you have to be there by yourself.

I often keep a post-it note pad with me when I’m out and about. During meetings, I often doodle. Mostly I draw faces, experimenting with expression and line quality. I store those images that feel unique. A little stack of faces are collecting at the right side of my desk.

I took a couple years off of college between my junior and senior years. The reason I chose to leave college for a time was because I adored it. I didn’t want my education to end. I felt that at the point that I graduated I would need to start drifting toward a career. I did not look forward to never having my summers off again. I did not look forward to a life focused on something other than learning.

A good chunk of the two years I took off was spent as a waiter in a resort on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico near St. Petersburg. I was living by myself in a garage apartment. My landlord, whose house I lived behind, was a young author writing a movie script for a movie to be called Conan the Barbarian.

I was experiencing a lot of anguish, feeling alone a lot of the time. It was autumn 1974.

As the months rolled on, the pictures I would draw on my waiter pad began to collect, forming a little gallery in my apartment. My work was tending toward the surrealistic. During this time I was putting a lot of attention into lucid dreaming. My dreams were often feeling more real than the afternoons and evenings spent serving sun-burned Canadians. Those dreams were influencing my waking and my art.

While the images proliferated, my buddies Bill and Jim invited me to hang out with them in their rented house a couple miles away. Bill had been majoring in political science with a passion for 18th and early 19th century Austria-Hungary. Jim was an armaments fiend, familiar with a vast array of military jets and rockets, fascinated by 18th century Prussia. I was mostly exploring aboriginal mystic paths, Castaneda and humanistic psychology.

To be able to participate in Bill and Jim’s arcane history discussions, I picked late 18th century France and proceeded to make myself the household expert on grass roots revolutions. It was an odd complement to my studies of shamanistic practices.

A friend offered me a massive billboard heavyweight piece of paper, a cigarette ad, which I unfolded in the living room of the house. Bill and I both had a passion for maps. We began a multimonth adventure designing a planet with countless societies on the back of the giant cigarette advertisement.

We quit our jobs to collaborate full time on the making of the map world.

Whereas Bill was inclined to develop riffs based on personalities and situations that we were attracted to in hippie counterculture, I was drawn to developing cultures based upon psychological models and individual and group dynamics. We developed intricate island nations and continents with robust histories illustrated by the many surrealistic images that had appeared on my waiter pads.

Bill’s contributions evolved to an appendix three-ring binder filled with arcane details about the cultures along with clippings from newspapers and magazines that illustrated their specifics.

I concentrated on small but elaborate illustrations. I created maps showing the dotted paths that explorers had taken to discover the various amenities of this planet. Developing a hieroglyphic language with lots of suns and moons, Bill and I occasionally yammered at each other in the nonsense syllables that the hieroglyphic symbols theoretically represented.

While we were lying on the floor drawing images, Bill mostly composing text, one of us would start a story describing something happening at some point, somewhere at sometime in the history of this world, and the other would pick up the narrative thread, adding to the tale. Back and forth we’d go, deep into the St. Petersburg Spring and then into the summer of 1975.

I remember a particularly stormy day with wind gusts over 50 miles per hour. Bill and I withdrew from the map to go outside to observe those robust gusts. Two friends, Ken and Linda, joined us from down the street. A shopping cart lay on its side along the parkway, rattling from the gales. I got an idea.

Running back into the house, I tore the tie-dyed sheet from my bed and yelled to everyone to gather around the shopping cart. I put the cart in the street, climbed aboard, tied the two bottom corners to the starboard and aft sides and prepared to lift the sheet. I would be the mast and yardarms. I asked Ken and Linda to steady the ship, one I imagined was sailing across the Map World seas, and I told Bill and Jim to catch me where I was having Ken and Linda point.

There was no traffic on our sleepy boulevard. But there were parked cars. Ken and Linda let go of the cart. I steadied myself, stood and let out the sail. The wind blasted against my backside, and I took off like one of Jim’s rockets. I picked up speed while careening down the street. I could not see a thing because there was a sail in my face.

Everybody started yelling. I dropped my hands and allowed the sail to furl so that I could see what all the commotion was about. I saw the parked car at about the same moment I slammed into it. The owner of the car was sitting on his stoop.

When the police arrived, the owner of the car wanted to make sure his insurance covered the damages. The officer decided to call the damage vandalism. He told me that he couldn’t exactly give me a moving violation ticket, there not being an easy way that he could make that stick, it being a shopping cart that I was driving. The officer seemed amused. The owner of the vehicle agreed not to press charges. He was less amused.

The time came to pack up the giant billboard map. I went back to finish up school, reveling in one last year of academics. Bill continued celebrating Florida’s endless summer. Jim quit his job as a pith-helmeted guide on the jungle cruise at Disney World and went into the armed forces to become a translator and career officer. We never heard from Jim again.

Looking at the post-it note images that are stacking up, 35 years later, I’m wondering how to best combine them. I’m not into exploring the surreal anymore. Now I find “waking life” fascinating and attractive.

With the pictures I’m making now, I am seeking to make a face as fascinating as a doodle can be, and I am lingering over each line like tiny features in a map. I’m curious as to what they will eventually combine to become. All I need is a brisk wind behind me, a couple collaborators and some imagination.

What evidence is there that aboriginal dream consciousness is re-emerging into modern global culture?  In what ways might our society be taking the ship of state below the surface to deep waters mostly familiar to the artist, the mystic and child?

As society becomes more horizontal, exhibiting neoteny, there will be a prolonging of features of the infant into the adult, the aboriginal into modern society, with those that are on the fringes, such as people in poverty, ethnic minorities, artists, musicians and the Left, moving toward the conventional center.

There are the perhaps obvious signs of societal transformation seen in the dramatic increases in transparency, vast horizontal communications through new technologies via our youth and an astonishing surge in diversity as people across the world meet and communicate online.  We are observing Scandinavian economic and social support models heavily influencing the American economic transformation.  Scandinavians, both sexes, exhibit neoteny.  I don’t note any enhancement of dream consciousness or the influence of dream on their everyday.  But I am observing something very similar.

If features of dream were to emerge into waking, not unlike the vision quests of American aboriginals or aboriginal Australians, how exactly would they manifest?

Alternative online worlds such as Second Life offer not exactly dream, but a shared alternative reality.  There are now several different massive multiplayer virtual worlds, including Entropia Universe, IMVU, There, Active Worlds, Kaneva, Moove and Red Light Center.  (See Wikipedia for details.)

One of the most robust of these online communities, Entropia Universe, was developed by a Swedish firm.  It is free, maintains its own currency pegged against the dollar, is profitable and growing.  Its number of registered participants is approaching one million.

Consider that the aboriginalization of modern society involves the integration of virtual realities into waking life.  I would also expect a dramatic diminution in reading (reading during dreaming is almost impossible) with a surge in computers with no keyboards but with an ability to interpret what you speak.  With a drop in literacy, there will be an increase in articulateness, with those with gifts in spoken word achieving a prominence impossible in a world where the written word was necessary to achieve status.

Signage will evolve to mostly imagery with a future global written language featuring mostly iconic images instead of written speech.  In China, many different languages share the same exact iconic writing system, allowing people to communicate in symbols with no ability to exchange spoken words.  Two generations from now, I expect there will be a universal written iconic language with many children growing up without an ability to read or write their own nation’s language.  Technology will make illiteracy chic.  Oralacy, as opposed to literacy will be in demand.

Applying the effects of ontogeny’s neoteny to a different scale, society, one can make predictions on how the future will transform.  Noting that dream or dream consciousness is a feature of the very young and of ancient matrifocal aboriginal societies, consider that dream is in the process of becoming integrated with current waking life.

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily….

If I’m not mistaken, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh came up with her “Theory of Mind” to explore differences in great ape behavior and other species that seemed not capable of estimating that another individual retained separate consciousness.  Simon Baron-Cohen applied this principle to autism, calling it “mindblindness,” to offer an explanatory paradigm that parsed out differences between the autistic and the nonautistic mind.

Last week, I was exploring some unique language structures of two matrifocal societies, the Hopi and the Trobriand Islanders.  The languages display a unique attitude toward tenses, reminding me of Gregory Bateson’s interpretations of Freud’s description of primary process.  It seems that aspects of dream consciousness and primary process thinking are characteristic of these two languages.  This included only one time or tense (you can’t imagine another time without being there), one place (you can’t imagine another place without being there) and no negatives (you can’t image what something is not without imagining the something).

Stephen J. Gould would sometimes write of three-fold and four-fold parallelisms.  He was alluding to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century hypotheses that there are equivalencies between different scales of experience:  biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience.  Regarding Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s “Theory of Mind,” Simon Baron-Cohen’s mindblindness, Hopi/Trobriand present tense orientation, and conventional Western dream consciousness, we possibly have an example of a pathway that evolution uses to travel across time and space.

Biology:  Great ape behavior
Society:  Hopi/Trobriand Islander language structure
Ontogeny:  The autistic
Personal Experience:  Dream

The reason that the autistic are assigned to the ontological level of this four-fold parallelism is because  those with autism often feature extreme maturational delay, by definition an ontological experience resulting in the prolongation of infant or young features or characteristics into later developmental ages.

The American philosopher Ken Wilber has explored in detail a hierarchy of individual and societal developmental stages, equivalencies that he believes inform each other.  The works of Jean Gebser and Jurgen Habermas were influential in guiding Wilber to his conclusions.  Wilber proposes that evolution naturally unfolds through seven stages on its way toward achieving a Pierre de Chardin-like Omega Point fruition.

In other places on this website, I have detailed why Omega Point teleological interpretations of evolution seem unnecessary if heterochronic (neoteny and acceleration) processes are presumed to unfold on societal scales.  Let me make an addition to that sense-based rather than religious interpretation of history.  Consider that the near future will be characterized by a return of dream time to society, the proliferation of matrifocal aboriginal primary process thinking and the integration of autistic associational present moment thinking with conventional consciousness.

I’ve been experiencing a powerful feeling that we’ve re-entered the mythological age.  In ways that an individual can have a dream that powerfully informs that person’s life, we have entered a period in our societal unfolding that will serve as both cautionary tale and heroic cycle for perhaps the time that remains to our species.  In the way that an unconscious informs an individual life, the collective unconscious is molding the zeitgeist.  I feel like we are living in a story, a mythic story, with the future chapters not impossible to intuit.

Having hierarchialized for several thousand years, informed by patrifocal social structures, we are now quickly horizontalizing, neotenizing, with society prolonging the features of youth and the aboriginal into society writ large.  Along with surges of creativity, narcissism, associative thinking and cooperation on massive scales with the advent of the web and global commerce, we are also seeing changes in neurology with the maturational-delayed emerging more and more often as the neurology of choice.  In addition to our society reflecting features of our youth, dream consciousness in the everyday is being prolonged into the adult of our species.  Primary process is appearing in waking life; aboriginal intuitions are manifesting in the way our teenagers think.

In other words, the past is becoming the present, dream is bleeding into waking, biology is emerging in society and the natal is manifesting in the adult.

The future is also the past.  The tenses are blending.

What we are becoming is also what we were and always have been

I was living a rather odd life on Monday, October 19, 1987, when the market crashed, with the Dow dropping over 22%.  I was 34, working 70-hour weeks running a sales firm specializing in gifts, calendars and greeting cards.  Fully invested in gold, using a trigger system to catch frequent upticks, I was doing well enough that all the profits from my thriving repping business were being used to pay the taxes on the investment gains.

It was an odd life I was living in that I was painting when I could, looking forward to being able to retire from business to paint full time.  So, I was working myself sick, saving like a maniac to become a full time artist.  After three years of this routine, I felt I’d saved enough to get myself halfway there.

I lost a lot of money that week in 1987, but the market came back.  I didn’t.  Expecting the market to fall, I’d become emotionally committed to societal catastrophe.  I couldn’t believe our economy could continue with anything like health while committed to the Reagan/Bush doctrine of no transparency, no regulation and little accountability.  I expected repercussions.  Then they came.  When the world reflected my expectations, I felt terrified.

Following the crash, I was rocked by a succession of panic attacks.  I visited my doctor to find out what I could do.  He recommended changes in diet, more sleep, less work, exercise.  I hired two more employees to bring my hours down.  I started eating right.  I exercised and slept regularly.

I started to feel good.  Then my life began to change.  Then life changed.

The economy has not yet hit bottom.  I say that because I think I know what bottom feels like.  Having been there and having accepted my doctor’s evaluation of what was necessary to achieve health, and having acted on that evaluation, I am now wondering what the doctor should be telling our economy.

Yet, with no universal experience of panic, I’m not getting the feeling we’re ready to realize how much has changed.

We are deep into the transition to a wholly new consciousness characterized by attention to one another and our environment.  New communications technologies embraced by youth are channeling our ways of thinking into community consciousness.  American independence is being quickly redefined into an experience of global interdependence.  Online gaming with partners across the planet has become a daily, familiar experience to youth with access to a laptop or a cell phone.  The number of contacts with an immediate group of friends has exponentially increased from perhaps a dozen to over a hundred in one day’s contacts.

We are building both a safety net and new social infrastructure with ourselves, our cell phones and our laptops in this new, vast, horizontal world.  When the economy hits bottom, it won’t be a cement sidewalk but a vast webbing or net that cushions the impact.  The nature of what we are building now will inform the directions we choose as our economy re-emerges.  The new economy will be characterized by connection.

It can take a crash to appreciate the present.  Vast resources are available in the now.  The United States and world economies are in transition.  It is the young people that are leading the way.

I thought for a while that we’d come to the end of cult of personality politics.  I was hoping our species had grown past the point of projecting the ideal parent onto our political leaders.  The world has grown so complex and subtle that no leader seemed capable of manifesting the mythology of the Good Dad or Good Mom.  It has been my hope that we were taking responsibility for own lives, our own futures, by not making politics about some person that would make things better.

Then came Bush II.  Evidently, we still require powerful stories to make the hard choices.  Bush chose to make himself society’s Judas to whichever Democrat got elected after his second term.  Just as Hitler was the personality that resulted in the uniting of 27 countries, almost 15% of the world’s nations, into a single unit, Bush is serving as the mythic focus compelling the horizontalization of the planet.  Obama is the UnBush.  Bush, like Hitler, will be haunting us, guiding us for generations.  (I am not suggesting Bush is like Hitler in other aspects.)

And so Obama is obliged to propel us forward while dragging our projections that he is special.  Yet, he is unable to legislate the future without it being obvious to a large number of us that massive transformation is required.  Again, Hitler comes to mind.  After WWII, the European nations almost immediately began the process of unification, integrating universal health care and social security into their rebuilding solutions.  Free university education and free child care followed.  For Americans to be willing to shift to a sustainable lifestyle that respects the individual while revering the community will require a deep humbling of our reflexive, entitled perspective.

When the American psyche is lying on the ground, beat to insensibility, then it will accept the value of a society that guides and nurtures those that are lying on the ground, beat to insensibility.

I used to get severe migraine headaches and anxiety attacks.  Deep in pain and/or emotional distress, I’d find myself negotiating with whatever the forces were that set up the situation where I was having the painful or terrifying experience.  I assumed I did something to make it happen.  I assumed that there was something different I could do to make the experience go away.  Migraine internal conversations were often made up of pleas for information on what I should do differently.  I felt willing to do anything to make the pain and the anxiety go away.

Over time, I changed my diet, slept regular hours, exercised, stopped working nights and weekends, meditated regularly and looked to be with people that brought me joy.  It slowly dawned on me that the pair and terror were not about what I had to do differently to have the pain and terror go away.  What the pain and terror were encouraging me to experience was feeling joy.

Along with our adulation, Obama gets our expectation, an expectation that he will behave in a way that will get us what we had.  When we realize there is no going back, legislation will reflect the new horizontal perspective, the view acquired while lying on the ground.  To experience the societal version of joy we have to behave like lives have value.  I’m figuring that we will have to be almost insensible with pain and fear before we will walk that path.  The fact that we are still making believe the Good Leader will be the one to change things suggests we have chosen to go about this the hard way.

The hard way is making the changes on our own.

There is really no other path to joy.

Like most people I know, I had a somewhat odd childhood.  I started talking when I was three.  I remember spending a lot of time confused by adult communication.  Speech therapy accompanied my schooling until college.

I recall struggling to understand what made people laugh.  I could be amused, but I was often uncertain what it was that people were finding funny.

Sometime around sixth grade it’s as if my brain achieved traction and stuff started to make sense.  My closest friend was Paul Jean.  Paul died last year.  It was only recently I realized Paul had Asperger’s.

As a child, the peculiarity of Paul’s communication felt familiar and somehow consoling.  Paul was brilliant at mathematics and an effortless musician.  His affect was affable yet often strange.  I liked strange.  It was a communication style not unlike my mother’s.

I have friends and relatives with Asperger’s.  There are the obvious, unique aspects to their characters that are outlined by the diagnostic tools.  There is another facet of the Asperger’s personality which interests me as I think back to my early childhood when I exhibited some Asperger’s-like features.  Of course, all of us when moving through early stages of development displayed features of Asperger’s.  Remembering early childhood may give you, the reader, some insight on what I want to explore, which is the nature of humor.

My “Theory of Waves” outlined in this website explores human evolution in a context of species evolution, social transformation, individual ontogeny and individual personal experience.  I hypothesize that humans evolved from matrifocal, random-handed individuals with two cerebral hemispheres that were the same size to our present patrifocal, right-handed prototype with a right hemisphere smaller than the left.  I’m playing with the notion that just as a small child or an adult with Asperger’s has a sense of humor markedly different from the conventional right-handed adult, there is a way to measure degrees of cerebral lateralization and their affiliation with either matrifocal or patrifocal social structure by what a person finds funny.  Not incidentally, their hormonal constellation, relative levels of testosterone and estrogen, might be revealed at the same time.

Freud wrote of the structure of jokes and humor, breaking down the various word plays that we find funny into a number of categories.  Freud seemed to be describing a number of different ways two meanings can be fashioned at the same time to compel a physical response, laughter, when the two things, formerly separate, become integrated or at least related in an unexpected way.

It strikes me that this may have something to do with varying degrees of cerebral lateralization.  Perhaps, the more split one’s brain, the more compelling the idea of two separate things becoming united.  There are studies that conclude that those on the autism spectrum often have two cerebral hemispheres that are the same size.  Small children have not fully differentiated.  At some point in our evolutionary past, our species had two hemispheres the same size.  I’ve hypothesized that matrilineal societies will exhibit less cerebral lateralization just as those who are left-handed are often not as split-brained as most right-handers.

Freud suggested that when people get drunk they regress to an earlier, childlike stage, a state represented by a shift in humor whereby after becoming drunk, subtle humor is replaced by a different, more obvious humor.

The patterns we’re exploring are in a group of people with two cerebral hemispheres that same size, people not finding conventional jokes and humor amusing, jokes that have to do with the integration or relationship of two different meanings.

I’ve had more than one close friend with Asperger’s in my life.  We all choose friends that share our sense of humor.  Consider that we are all conducting unconscious evaluations of each other’s brain structures, estimating hormonal constellations and social structure proclivity by what we find funny.  Perhaps humor is an extremely refined diagnostic tool used to determine those we can feel close to and who would make complementary mates.

I believe that by studying humor we learn about nuances of being human.  Different kinds of humor will associate with different degrees of cerebral lateralization.  I have proposed that lateralization is associated with social structure, handedness and developmental stages.  I’m also thinking that what we find funny provides a window into who we are.

Laugher may not only be the best medicine.  Laughter might be useful in diagnosing the human condition.  Laughter may offer insight into the nature of what caused our dis-ease.

As the U.S. and other governments nationalize more and more corporate assets, decisions will be made on whom to tax, what projects get cut and which new projects get funded.  At the same time, deep attention will need to be offered to voting integrity, grassroots media and high quality education.

The ancient forces of top-down hierarchical control will seek to take back management of these massive changes from the top where they are being legislated.  Controlling media, tainting elections while convincing people they are tainted so they won’t vote and preventing people from getting high quality information from a high quality education all serve to keep hierarchies intact.

Changes underway have to address process:  media reform, voting integrity and education.  Changes also have to address basic human needs here and overseas:  food, universal health care, reasonably priced housing, public transportation and child care.

Subsidies to American farmers and factories that discourage Third World participation in the world economy need to disappear.  Subsidies to the more than 100 countries around the world that supply American military bases have to be ended.  Close those bases.  With the nationalized GM, Ford and Chrysler, build small, light cars, hybrid vehicles, electric cars and public transportation.  Heavily fund public transportation.

The money to make sure everyone is fed and their health is cared for, to make sure that there is decent housing, very cheap public transportation and very cheap child care will come from the ending of the funding that keeps assets congregated in the hands of the very few.  That includes industry subsidies, military spending and corporate tax breaks.

The money to make sure people feel empowered with high quality information requires impeccable voting procedures, media that serve the community and not the corporations, and universal high quality education.  The federal government, not state or local governments, needs to be creating quality schools.

What will encourage change in this direction?  As people feel more empowered, the people will make more demands.  Young people will be expecting to get what they want.  Online social networking driving masses of people to take specific positions will result in a government taking seriously those needs.

Consider that the young in Egypt, unable to organize under permanent martial law, are using Facebook to drive citizens into the streets.

In Moldova Twitter is ballooning the numbers participating in protests.

Imagine a revolution not led by fiery-tongued males making general demands, but a revolution led by a long succession of amateurs creating extremely specific date-based calls for action through their social networking pages.  Like a tidal wave in a swimming pool, our society will be rocked by a series of grass roots demands having nothing to do with the way money has been allocated by the former conventional wisdom.

The transition will be ugly.  It will be necessary.  The transformation of a society that reveres the community, not just the individual that achieves success, will take an almost complete reversal of priorities.  The horizontalization of society has begun.

Observing the government’s interventions to address the changes that the economy is experiencing, I often see the individual as a metaphor for society and think of an intervention in the context of how an individual could be assisted.

I frequently shift back and forth between the scales of biology, society and individual growth and transformation.  I observe how stories operate on the level of the individual, society and even our species.  The dynamics of evolution evidence themselves at these different planes.  This website often focuses on how understanding evolution at one scale informs the others.

Thinking of what our society requires to achieve health often has me thinking in terms of an individual human.  Reading what other people are observing about the crisis, I note that others are often doing the same thing, seeking to understand a society by achieving insight into a self, using individual as metaphor.

In other essays I’ve explained what is happening by describing the crash and the coming depression as part of a process of a major social structure transition from mostly patrifocal to mostly matrifocal.  Across generations people are transforming as parents birth children with different hormonal constellations and neurological propensities from what their parents and grandparents had.  The changes are occurring at the levels of the individual, society and our species.  Perhaps by thinking of society as an individual we might derive some insight on how to assist the transition.

A problem with the frame I observe the media using to understand the predicament we’re in is that the frame assumes something bad happened and if we can make the bad thing go away, health will return.  First, health did not characterize society and the economy the last few generations.  Second, what is happening now is not bad, it is difficult.  What is happening now is a stage in our transition.

Life on earth this last century has been characterized by a massive destruction of natural infrastructure while most of the human species suffered dramatic deficits in health and basic necessities.  I would not characterize that state as one we would want to return to.  The premise that we need to fix the economy and get back to where we were is insane.  If world society were an individual, friends and family would have been calling for an intervention long before the 2008 Crash.

So, using this premise, that society can be looked at as an individual, what would be useful interventions?

Society is exhibiting schizophrenic, addictive, obsessive compulsive, narcissistic, borderline and traumatized behaviors.  Where do we begin?

First, think in terms of the whole and the part.

Use our imaginations.  I observe the administration creating programs with little understanding of the bigger picture.  By bigger, I mean worldwide.  Each law, each allocation needs to be examined for its repercussion on people here and people overseas.  National security and U.S. interests are frames of reference rapidly fading in a world whose people are shifting identity to the planet.  What we do influences the world.

Engage our compassion.  There is no better place to assign resources than to individual health and basic needs.  Provide food, health care and a place to live, inexpensive public transportation, child care and an education.  Encourage this across the world.  Then watch the kind of economy that imagination and compassion can construct.

Nurture the individual in the context of an integrated whole.  Encourage societal change by embracing the individual.  Reframe independence as interdependence, liberty as community, freedom as a commitment to the commons.

Vision is more than trusting that problems can be solved and imagining what the world will look like when that time comes.  Vision at this time of transition requires being able to see around the corner to what we are soon to become.  The human adolescence is over.  The stage of acting out is coming to an end.  We’re beginning to understand that it’s not all about us as individuals or all about us as society.  It’s not even all about us as a species.  It’s all about all those things and about the planet as a whole.

“Events and objects are self-contained points in another respect; there is a series of beings, but no becoming.  There is no temporal connection between objects.  The taytu always remains itself; it does not become over-ripe; over-ripeness is an ingredient of another, a different being.  At some point, the taytu turns into a yowana, which contains over-ripeness, and the yowana, over-ripe as it is, does not put forth shoots, does not become a sprouting yowana.  When sprouts appear, it ceases to be itself; in its place appears a silasata.  Neither is there a temporal connection made–or, according to our own premises, perceived–between events; in fact, temporality is meaningless.  There is no tenses, no linguistic distinction between past or present.  There is no arrangement of activities or events into means and ends, no causal or teleologic relationships.  What we consider a casual relationship in a sequence of connected events, is to the Trobriander an ingredient of a patterned whole.  He names this ingredient u’ula.” (Lee, D (1968) “Codifications of reality: Lineal and non-lineal,” in Every Man His Way: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, Dundes, A., Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs. p. 334)

Wandering through my notes looking for patterns, I came across this passage about the Trobriand Islanders.  The description of their language seemed a lot like Benjamin Whorf’s words on the Hopi (see Hopi Patterns).  I jumped to Google to see if this might be a matrilineal society.  Indeed, that is the case.  When a boy becomes a man, he goes to live in the village of his mother’s brother.  “Mother-right… .  Is the most important and the most comprehensive principle of law, underlying all customs and institutions” (Malinowski 1922: 107).

Continuing our earlier posting on Hopi society and Freud’s primary process, would the Trobriand Islanders also exhibit a tendency toward an experience of a single time, a single place and reduced use of negatives?  In other words, would the way that dreams are experienced approximate in some way waking consciousness among the Trobriand Islanders?

Bouncing around Google looking for patterns.  There doesn’t seem to be much information on twinning rates and the Trobriand Islanders (a possible marker for matrifocal societies).  I’m not seeing anything on rates of left-handedness.  Pub Med provides almost nothing on disease tendencies among that society.

I would estimate that the females are high testosterone, males low testosterone.  The Trobriand Islands are now sometimes called the Kiriwina Islands.  Perhaps I should be conducting research using that name.

I was raised in Glencoe, Illinois, in the 50s and 60s.  Perhaps half of the students in my grammar school classes were Jewish, the rest Protestant and Catholic.  My father was “agnostic” though not a deep thinker on the subject.  My mom was vaguely religious.  We lit Hanukkah candles every second or third year, attending her stepfather’s Passover some years.  Every year we celebrated Christmas with a tree, opening presents on the 25th.

The Jewish population of Chicago’s northern suburbs had not yet polarized in favor of reflexive support of Israel.  The 1967 war had not yet happened.  There was a sadness associated with the occupation of Palestine.  The grief around WWII was still in people’s minds.  Among my family and friends, no one talked of Israel except the old folks.  They did not talk of it often.  My family on both sides was deeply Americanized.  I wasn’t aware of which of my friends were Jewish and which weren’t.  Glencoe in the 50s and early 60s was about making money and buying stuff.

My father’s parents lived about four blocks from us on the street across from Lake Michigan.  Both my parents were raised with live-in help, usually African Americans, sometimes Eastern Europeans.  I was raised in a smaller house than those my parents were raised in, but my parents felt compelled to either have live-in assistance (folks that cooked and cleaned) or Southsiders that would come in for the day.  When my mother grew mentally ill and was institutionalized, this occurred almost half my years between 10 and 18, a nonstop succession of black and Eastern European women came into my life.

So, I came across folks from several European countries and many African Americans by my having close contact with them at my two grandparents’ houses and the house that I grew up in.  My father’s mother’s behavior toward the help was over-the-top inappropriately verbally abusive.  My sisters and I polarized in the opposite direction, treating almost all the visitors from outside our suburban world with temerity and respect.  A parade of people from the Caribbean, Europe and Chicago’s South Side came in and out of the three houses.  We were exposed to countless dialects, unique cuisines and attitudes toward children.

Over the years, black people began to populate my dreams.  Usually they did not speak.  They were often there to experience and suffer the confusion and violations that characterized my dream world, accompanying me through these experiences.  Whereas most of the white women in my real world felt frightening and threatening, in dream the black women and men were silent partners in my distress.

Black felt and feels familiar.

On the Fourth of July in 2004 the politicians and their assistants assembled in the Highland Park parking lot in preparation for the big parade.  This was about three blocks from where I lived the first five years of my life.  My job was to pass out stickers to children for Lee Goodman, who was running for Congress.  We would be following Barack Obama by about 20 feet.  Standing around the parking lot for maybe 40 minutes, I stood and observed Obama as folks walked up one by one to say a word.  Mostly he stood there by himself.  Occasionally he’d watch me watching him.  I sought to get a feel for who he was by watching the way he talked and acted.  It seemed he would be our senator in four months.  He had not yet given the convention speech.  There was no talk of the presidency.

I was neither impressed nor not impressed.  I was just struck by the fact that he was not acting like a politician.  He seemed relaxed.  No fake smiles.

Now that he is president, I feel that the familiar has entered into my life from a direction I would least expect.  Emerging from my childhood, from my dreams, from my brief contact with a man that felt present and unaffected, is a black man that represents what people seek.  As a Leftist organizer, I reflexively note the many incongruities between his words and his behaviors.  As a child of the suburbs raised by black women, with a stepson that is black, with dreams populated by black people that understand with wisdom the difficulties of life, I am deeply relieved that Obama is president.  When I see him on the screen, I feel blessed that this man from deep within me has manifested in the real world.

I continue to be astonished that he is president.  For me, he is dream come true.

The Basque culture has the last surviving pre Indo European language in Western Europe.

Marija Gimbutas in her The Living Goddesses describes the Basques as a society with several matrilineal traits still intact.  “Basque law codes give the woman high status as inheritor, arbitrator, and judge, in both ancient and modern times.” (p. 122).  In Gimbutas’s The Civilization of the Goddess she notes, “Brothers are given away in marriage by their sisters.  In all their usages, their social condition is one of gynaecocracy. ” (p. 348)

John Grinder, a founder of neurolinguistic programming, described a Basque child rearing practice that encouraged ambidexterity and cooperation.  Pairs of children were sent to the top of hills with two-handed tea cups.  They were then required to descend the mount without spilling any water, each holding one handle the whole descent.

Gimbutas notes that the Basques retained a lunar calendar and matrilineal laws of inheritance into the 20th century.  Equality of the sexes was the historical norm.

The Goddess Mari headed Basque pre-Christian religion.

A cursory review of what I can find on the web in an hour is not giving me much support for an ambidextrous or left leaning culture.  One odd entry suggests neotenous features.  I don’t see any disease anomalies though blood type and genetic results show a unique culture.

Visitors, if you have any leads to Basque individual or societal features suggesting any of the hypotheses of this website, comment below.

Imagine that ten years from now autism and Asperger’s are still on the rise.  It is discovered that aboriginal matrifocal societies often exhibit what Gregory Bateson described as primary process.

“Primary process is characterized (e.g., by Fenichel) as lacking negatives, lacking tense, lacking in any identification of linguistic mood (i.e., no identification of indicative, subjunctive, optative, etc.) and metaphoric.  These characterizations are based upon the experience of psychoanalysts, who must interpret dreams and the patterns of free associations.” (Bateson G (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind.  Balantine: New York, p. 139)

In other words, some ancient matrilineal societies may exhibit a less robust “theory of mind” than moderns.  Connections between matrifocal aboriginals and modern autistics are made.

The recapitulationists of the early twentieth century that emphasized three-fold and four-fold parallelisms make a new kind of sense.  In other words, there emerges a connection between the scales of human societal evolution and individual ontogeny insofar as aboriginal society child rearing practices inform how modern society can raise the children of its high testosterone women.  (I hypothesize that the women in early matrifocal societies are high testosterone and high estrogen.)

Imagine that ten years from now these connections are being made.  High testosterone mothers (and perhaps high testosterone, high estrogen mothers) are provided specific guidance on how to raise their children using aboriginal techniques.  The web becomes filled with the various ways children are guided into adulthood within an environment suited to their unique bodies, minds and brains.  Autism rates plummet but fully functional, socialized children with autistic (matrilineal aboriginal) bodies, minds and spirits are discovered to be making unique and profound contributions to society.

World culture drifts in the direction of raising children using aboriginal conventions.

The result two generations from now is a dramatic drop in commercial innovation and industrial production but a skyrocketing in aesthetics, programming and mathematics.  Art and the abstract sciences burn up the planet’s online bandwidth with an amateurization of professions formerly available to the very few.

Our consumer economy is crashing.  What will take its place?  Consider this just-so story as one alternative direction.

I’m shocked at the conclusion come to at the end of yesterday’s piece.  It is often the case that I begin an essay with only a vague idea of where we’re headed.  Sometimes the conclusion reveals possibilities that were nowhere on my radar when I began.

It seems from the work of Benjamin Whorf and other scientists and theorists that the Hopi manifest features suggesting ties to the left end of our left/right, matrifocal/patrifocal, anomalous dominant/conventional cerebral organization arc of features.  Exploring these kinds of societies, I’ve expected to see increased percentages of left-handedness along with a higher numbers of patients with diseases featuring specific hormonal constellations (see Introduction to the “Theory of Waves”).  What struck me yesterday is the possibility that those cultures have developed child rearing practices that decrease the likelihood of further drift in a matrifocal, male maturational-delayed, female maturational-accelerated direction.  Increased left-handedness and diseases and conditions we are hypothesizing are associated with matrifocal society, but they may only emerge when traditional child rearing practices are abandoned or there is an embracing of Western testosterone-influencing and estrogen-influencing societal practices such as high fat diets, alcohol consumption, drug use, lack of exercise, etc.

Two things are implied.  First, the point at which an aboriginal, pre Indo-European (such as the Basque) or traditional matrifocal society is evaluated may heavily impact the results.  It has a lot to do with whether there are child rearing practices that mitigate drift further to the left.  A left leaning society little impacted by Western contact will likely evidence far fewer of the specific diseases predicted by this model, including conditions like autism.

The second thing implied is that aboriginal societies, or perhaps societies like the Polynesians or the Basques, may offer specific ways that children are raised that Western women with high testosterone levels might utilize to prevent autistic disengagement.  I’ve suggested that constant touch, rhythmic music and a “caveman” diet might positively affect the child of a woman with high testosterone and provide the kinds of bridges that the child’s neurology demands.

While conducting our overview of ethnicities across the planet, looking for matrifocal societies that evidence the particular cluster of features that support our theory, we’ll have to take into consideration how much contact there has been with modern Western conventional societal practices.  I’m expecting that how we raise our children has a big effect on societal stability and a society’s ability to maintain its hormonal balance status quo.

Bouncing around Pub Med looking for patterns connecting handedness, ethnicity, disease, conditions characterized by maturational delay and social structure, it seems pretty clear that many cultures offer poor information on the details of their structure and conditions.  Benjamin Whorf explored Hopi language, forming conclusions that have since become controversial.  There have been brain studies.  Little seems available regarding the prevalence of diseases and conditions.  So far, I find nothing on handedness distributions.  There is high quality information on social structure.

“The Hopi thought-world had no imaginary space.  The corollary to this is that it may not locate thought dealing with real space anywhere but in real space, nor insulate real space from the effects of thought.  A Hopi would naturally suppose that his thought (or he himself) traffics with the actual rosebush—or more likely, corn plant—that he is thinking about.  The thought then should leave some trace of itself with the plant in the field.  If it is a good thought, one about health and growth, it is good for the plant; if a bad thought, the reverse.” (Whorf, B. L. (1956) Language, Thought & Reality.  MIT Press: Cambridge p. 150)

I wonder first if these conclusions are still true or are the close ties between imagination and reality growing in a conventional direction with newer generations. If the experience of space is this unique, I would expect time to be influenced…

“The Hopi conceive time and motion in the objective realm in a purely operational sense—a matter of the complexity and magnitude of operations connecting events—so that the element of time is not separated from whatever element of space enters into the operations.” (Whorf, B. L. (1956) Language, Thought & Reality.  MIT Press: Cambridge p. 63)

Which suggests anomalous lateralization…

“There is some very limited evidence that lateralization for language in the Native American Hopi differs more dramatically than would be expected {13}.  Using an analysis of EEG ratios, these investigators found a significant right cerebral hemisphere specialization for language processing in Hopi Indian children.” (Scott, S., Hynd, G. W., Hunt, L. & Weed, W. (1979) Cerebral speech lateralization in the American Navajo.  Neuropsychologia 17: 89)

The study below suggests that the Hopi language is itself closely tied to the unique experiences of time and space…

“Electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were obtained from electrode placements over the left and right frontal and parietal lobes of the brain in sixteen Hopi Indian children listening to tape recorded children’s stories in the Hopi and English languages.  Spectral analysis of the EEG data revealed that, for the parietal leads, alpha desynchronization was relatively greater over the right hemisphere for listening to Hopi than for listening to English, which indicates a greater right hemisphere participation in the processing of the Hopi speech.  The results of the experiment are directionally consistent with our hypothesis, and imply that linguistic relativity may exist on a neurolinguistic level, such that languages can differ in the relative degree to which they serve as instruments of thought in a propositional, left hemisphere mode, or in an appositional, right hemisphere mode.” (Rogers, L., TenHouten, W., Kaplan, C. D., Gardiner, M. (1977) Hemispheric specialization of language: an EEG study of bilingual Hopi Indian children.  Int J. Neuroscience 8(1): 1-6

Gregory Bateson discusses primary process as the way that very small children, animals and the adult unconscious think.  This might also be the case among the autistic.  Features include one time, one space and no negatives.  In primary process, you can’t image what a thing is not, only the thing itself.

There is a suggestion in Whorf’s work above of Hopi waking consciousness featuring aspects of primary process.  The Scott study above might suggest that right hemisphere specialization for language, which is characteristic of many left-handers, might also display increased aspects of primary process.  A question emerges on whether primary process is close to an autistic experience with those embedded in primary process exhibiting low degrees of a theory of mind, having difficulty identifying with another person.

This begs the question of whether there are higher rates of autism in the Hopi community.  With what we’ve noted so far, we’d expect this to be the case.  We’d also expect that the Hopi would exhibit features of a matrifocal society…

“The Western Pueblo, including the Hano, Zuñi, Acoma, Laguna, and, the best known, the Hopi, have exogamous clans with a matrilineal emphasis and matrilocal residence, and the houses and gardens are owned by women” (http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0860577.html)

Also, Social Organization of the Western Pueblos (1950) describes in detail the matrifocal foundations of Hopi society.  So, we note unique attitudes toward time and space, a right hemisphere emphasis on language and a matrifocal society.  We’d expect to see a higher number of left-handers than is the convention and perhaps an increase in conditions characterized by maturational delay such as autism and Asperger’s.  We’d also predict females with high testosterone and estrogen, males with low testosterone and estrogen.  Information is spotty.  Studies are few and far between.  Still, I would predict that in the Hopi society there are higher rates of autism and left-handedness.

Yet, consider that if indeed in Hopi society there are no elevated rates of autism, then maybe there are unique ways that the Hopi are raising children that engage them in ways that they don’t veer off into a unconventional condition.  If there are normal rates of autism among the Hopi, perhaps diet, touch and rhythm are being applied in a fashion that we in the West could learn from.

“Nonright-handedness (NRH) has been attributed to hypoxia-induced brain changes in the fetus and associated pregnancy and birth complications (PBCs). Maternal smoking during pregnancy is known to produce prenatal hypoxia for the fetus, which may result in low birth weight and other PBCs. It was hypothesized that maternal smoking during pregnancy results in a leftward shift of handedness in the offspring. This study compared the distribution of handedness in the offspring of mothers who did and did not smoke cigarettes during pregnancy. Information on maternal smoking, handedness, and PBCs was analyzed for 803 university students. There was a significant shift to the left in the distribution of handedness scores for the offspring of smoking mothers (N = 216), as compared to those of nonsmoking mothers (N = 587). Offspring of smoking mothers also reported significantly more PBCs. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that NRH is associated with pathological neurodevelopment.” (Bakan P. (1991) Handedness and maternal smoking during pregnancy. Int J Neurosci 56 (1-4): 161)

There’s about a three-month lag from the time these pieces are written until they post. It is January 16, 2009, today and Simon Baron-Cohen is releasing another study emphasizing that high mother uterine testosterone levels influence the likelihood of autism in her children.

I’m starting to see pieces on the web suggesting that lowering a mother’s testosterone levels might mitigate the chances of autism. A piece by Baron-Cohen suggested that it would be a very bad idea to approach autism as a disease that can be prevented via foeticide. (See Autism Is Not Cancer)
I’ve outlined in essays on this website a number of different ways that testosterone is managed or manipulated by the various circumstances in our life. In 1998, I noted the connection between a mother’s uterine testosterone levels and conditions informed by maturational delay and acceleration that included autism. Then, as now, I maintain a respect and reverence for the humans that experience the world through this condition.

“The fundamental pattern of the brain thus appears to be asymmetrical, with the same pattern of asymmetries found in most adults. There are, however, influences in pregnancy that tend to diminish the extent of left-sided predominance, at least in the regions involved in handedness and language, and thus secondarily to result in larger regions on the right side. As noted earlier, our hypothesis is that some factor related to male sex, perhaps testosterone or some closely related factor, is the most likely candidate. The net effect of these intrauterine influences is to produce a shift from left predominance to symmetry, and in a smaller number of cases to modest right predominance.” (Geschwind & Galaburda 1987: 46, Cerebral Lateralization)
A discussion has not yet begun that addresses how life style changes influence hormone levels that may influence autism. I’m feeling more than a little uncomfortable with the notion that women will seek either to lower testosterone rates or abort potential autistic children. I would expect that the neurodiversity movement will violently oppose foeticide and hormone manipulation interventions. I foresee major struggles regarding these issues.

“To determine whether ethanol per se affects testosterone metabolism, alcohol was administered to normal male volunteers for periods up to four weeks, resulting in an initial dampening of the episodic bursts of testosterone secretion followed by decreases in both the mean plasma concentration and the production rate of testosterone. The volunteers received adequate nutrition and none lost weight during the study, which tended to exclude a nutritional disturbance as the cause of the decreased testosterone levels. The changes in plasma luteinizing hormone suggested both a central (hypothalamus-pituitary) and gonadal effect of alcohol. In addition, alcohol consumption increased the metabolic clearance rate of testosterone in most subjects studied, probably owing to the combined effects of a decreased plasma binding capacity for the androgen and increased hepatic testosterone A-ring reductase activity. These results indicate that alcohol markedly affects testosterone metabolism independently of cirrhosis or nutritional factors.” (Gordon, G. G., Altman, K., Southren, A. L., Rubin, E. and Lieber, C. S. (1976) Effect of alcohol (ethanol) administration on sex-hormone metabolism in normal men. N Engl J Med 295 (15): 793)

I’ve hypothesized that diet, touch and rhythm are the foundation of what is required for a child born of a mother with high testosterone levels. I estimate that the classic pre-agricultural Neolithic diet is right for the male maturational delayed, female maturational accelerated body. Constant touch keeps these unique children in constant contact. Rhythm is the lifeblood of these pattern-compulsive personalities. The rhythm ties them to the others that are engaged in the rhythms in their lives.

The idea is not to make the autistic child normal. We can seek to make it possible for the autistic child to become what they are naturally inclined to be. The evolutionary theory that this website promotes has its foundation in an understanding that the autistic are emerging in a society behaving in deeply inappropriate ways for autistic health. Our society is changing. It is my belief that it is changing in the direction of becoming a healthier environment for the autistic and the rest of us. Still, it is necessary to understand the context of autism, the ways that humans have evolved, to understand the ways the world would best nourish the autistic. The rest of us may profit handsomely from these insights. Understanding health for an autistic child is to understand foundations for human health.

“Theoretical speculation in humans (S. F Witelson, Psychoneuroendocrinology 16 (1991) 131-153) and empirical findings in animals (R. H. Fitch, P. E. Cowell, L. M. Schrott, V. H. Denenberg, Int. J. Dev. Neurosci. 9 (1991) 35-38) suggest that testosterone (T) may play a significant role in the development of the corpus callosum (CC). However, there are currently no empirical studies directly relating T concentrations to callosal morphology in humans. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between free T concentrations as determined by radioimmunoassay, and the mid-sagittal area of the corpus callosum, as determined by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Subjects were 68 young adult (20-35 years), neurologically normal, right-handed males. All subjects underwent MRI and provided two samples of saliva for radioimmunoassay of T and cortisol. Anatomical regions of interest included total brain volume, left and right hemisphere volume and regional areas of the CC. CC regions were defined using two different measurement techniques, each dividing the CC into six sub-sections. Anatomical measurements were performed blind with respect to the hormone levels of subjects. A significant positive correlation between T concentration and cross-sectional area of the posterior body of the CC was found. This finding was consistent across the two measurement techniques and was not attributable to individual differences in total brain volume. All correlations between cortisol and CC sub-regions were non-significant. The results of this study are consistent with the notion that T, at an earlier stage in development, may play a significant role in modulating cortical/callosal architecture in humans.” (Moffat, S. D, Hampson, E., Wickett, J. C., Vernon, P. A., Lee, D. H. (1997) Testosterone is correlated with regional morphology of the human corpus callosum. Brain Res 767 (2):297)

There is a canary in this coal mine, a signal to society as we navigate the passageways of society’s Vast Depression and the toppling of our hierarchical conventions. That singing bird is our autistic. Understanding autism, we understand ourselves. Not only are we notified of dangerous paths by those environments deleterious to our autistic, but maybe we can allow ourselves to be guided forward by what we learn about ourselves learning about our autistic.

As Baron-Cohen noted, autism is not a cancer. Autism is not a disease. Autism is quite possibly an integral part of human illumination. Understanding our origins, we understand ourselves. In autism is an understanding of how we came to be.

Marcia and I were in the gift business for almost twenty years.  She was a retailer.  I was a rep.  We saw the world from two totally different points of view.

In the late 1970s, I took a shot at making a living as a commercial artist serving local businesses, creating my own paintings on the side.  I worked part time as a vegetarian chef, as an assistant teacher working with handicapped children (Down’s, autistic, brain damaged, schizophrenic) and in a day care center.  I collected my illustrations of maps of states of consciousness and published the images as a greeting card line called Maplands.

The greeting card company morphed into a repping firm that carried small greeting card lines from publishers and artists across the country.  I found I could make a living representing the wide variety of images emerging on the scene.  I lugged samples to small, new, local stores specializing in a new industry calling itself the contemporary greeting card business.  Gibson, Hallmark and American Greetings were being challenged by Recycled Paper.  With Recycled Paper’s success, a host of smaller competitors appeared.  These were the kinds of companies I was working with.

My sister Terry joined me, followed by others until we were a small firm of four reps.  With time, I called on the larger chains such as Osco, Walgreens, Montgomery Wards and Sears.  My staff and I served the many shops around the city and state, hauling around samples, taking orders and helping retailers make a living.  My best line was Andrews & McMeel, which provided me The Far Side by Gary Larson and Calvin & Hobbes.  Far Side calendars pretty much paid my bills for several years.  That allowed me time to start several other businesses related to my comic illustration.  I published comic monthlies, syndicated a dozen cartoonists to the alternative media and produced my own strip, placing it in almost 200 publications.

Nineteen years I participated in three trade shows a year, eating and breathing the concerns of small, local businesses.  Year after year Christmas came in August at the Chicago Gift Show.  By the time the holiday season arrived, it felt like an anticlimax.  Whenever I received a greeting card, I’d reflexively turn it over to view the publisher.  Most cards I received I knew by sight.  I was an expert in an arcane side business of the American gift industry.  I’d been a manufacturer of greeting cards, a distributor, a rep, an illustrator of greeting cards and casual consultant to hundreds of stores on how to best make money selling greeting cards.

During this same period, the woman that was to become my wife started a toy store in 1981 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, a shop called Saturday’s Child.  I walked in to sell her greeting cards.  When our marriages ended, we became attracted to each other and started dating ten years later.

Whereas I was deeply enmeshed in the world of retailer needs and product availability, Marcia was seeking an evocative product and sharing it with discriminating customers.  We maintained two remarkably different frames.

I was raised with no religion in a Jewish household that revered Freud and work.  Filling stores up with product for Christmastime and keeping them stocked with greeting cards throughout the year was a way to make a living.  Gift giving became this constant background patter like air conditioners humming in summer time.  My apartments were crammed with samples.  I had thousands of dollars of gift samples at any time that I would be giving away.  My friends and family were amused by my never having to engage in holiday shopping.  For me, gift giving had become unconscious, nonsacred and almost mundane.

Twenty-two years Marcia kept her toy store open, making gift giving as sacred as is possible in a society filled with the compulsion to make money.  Though she housed over 400 vendors, Marcia knew every product in her store.  She observed closely what sold and listened to her customers when they told her how a present was received.  Hundreds of thousands of children received toys from Marcia’s store, toys that she made sure had a chance of evoking joy.

When we married, my closets full of samples met her basement full of toys.  I changed my profession first.  It was years before all the samples were finally gone.  Then Marcia let go of the toy store.  That was maybe five years ago.  Though the toys are gone, several displays still linger in the basement.

Marcia conducted a sacred business.  Such a thing cannot easily exist.  She sought to bring happiness to children in the form of products that could be purchased that evoke wonder.  I was in it for the money.  There were things I loved to do that I could not do without a way to pay the bills.  I represented over 100 vendors in those nineteen years, some with stunningly beautiful products.  Still, my focus was making stores money so I could make money.

Complementary opposites match up in an almost infinite variety of ways.  It’s fascinating how by shifting scales and widening perspective, two seemingly nonrelating features can fit well together.  Indeed, opposites can attract.