Allison Lirish Dean has a podcast series called "Ear to the Pavement," organized in cooperation with Progressive City. We talked about my book, Main Street: How a City's Heart Connects Us All, in episode #20. Allison talks to lots of people and is an astute observer of the city. She poses questions that I find profound. In the course of our Main Street conversation, we talked about the deep fragmentation in the American scene and the need to find solidarity. In that quest, Main Street plays an important role. Main Street is organized as a crossroads of all of us. It offers the opportunity for us to know one another without being acquainted.
It is a koan, one might say, that this setting in which strangers pass one another on street has the capacity for us to come together as a nation. Buddhist teacher, Dr. Marisela Gomez, explained koans as short statements or stories that wake us up because we cannot follow them in our usual linear thinking. The most famous, perhaps, is "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" I add my Main Street koan to this genre.
Because Main Streets DO bring us together, they offer us a path to the emerging consciousness in which the importance of the collective takes center stage and we will be able to think our way to sustainability. At the very end of the podcast, I explained to Allison about "oori consciousness," borrowing the Korean word for "WE" to name this emerging way of thinking. As someone raised deep in American individualism, I can't say I understand the sense of WE that I can glimpse in K-Drama. That doesn't mean I can't see that the path forward runs straight thought oori consciousness -- that is, if there is to be a path forward, that's how it has to go.
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