Marc W Ross, Pride - Powered by pechakucha, iddp, December 3rd, 2013

Marc Ross: So what is pride? Where does it come from? And what are we? And where do we come from? Are we proud of who we are? Are we proud of where we come from? Throughout history, creation stories have been imagined and told, in different cultures and civilizations around the world, to explain and give answers to questions like these. Origin stories. Why we're here. Today we live in a time of integration when many of these stories and world rues and religions and culture are coming together. Sometimes with great beauty, sometimes with great difficulty, we are meeting one another face to face, over the airwaves. And we have to come to grips with a heck of a lot of information, a heck of a lot of ideas, and many different ways of being and seeing the world. How can we make sense of all this? Is there one story that we share together? One origin story that's common to us all? I'm going to describe to you what scientists are calling the universe story or the big story, that includes all stories. And it looks something like this... It begins with the beginning and ends... Who knows when? So as I go through, imagine yourself as this perhaps being your story. So once upon a time the only problem by starting this story is once upon a time, is time didn't exist before. Neither did space. Only a big mystery. Suddenly, out of that mystery, a big ***. The eruption of everything that we see around us and that we are was created in a magical moment. Many forces and strange things were happening at the beginning of time and space. And as this space moved and formed into what we call stars and galaxies and started morphing into these very interesting life forms or light forms, here we have the beginning, the birth of incredible numbers of stars and beautiful twinklings that we still see outside, around us. And as these stars are born and explode and die, they give birth to new chemical elements. So the iron floating in your blood right now comes from the explosion of stars. We are literally stardust here, having a conversation, considering what it is to be proud. And as these particles move and shape and the stars are born and explode, they create planets around them through the forces of gravity. And these planets are sometimes hospitable to life, and oftentimes not. Depending how close they are to the star. We being very lucky people, living on this extraordinary planet, in the Goldilocks region not too close and not too far. We're given the opportunity to have this conversation and to share many interesting stories together. 3.8 billion years ago the first forms of life, our ancestors, bacteria, evolved out of the oceans and began multiplying in great numbers and moving around and swimming around, and multiplying more, and connecting. And eventually as these bacteria, these single celled organisms connected with others, they began forming a whole array of life that we know as multicellular life forms. We've seen all these and there have been many species that have come into existence and gone out of existence over time. And a vast array of incredible creatures that we can see in the museums. And we focus on particularly on a strange bi PEDal creature, meaning two legged that evolve several million years ago and gave rise to a very complicated social system, one that involved language and sharing stories, speaking about what was most important in life. And soon gave rise to major connections and what we call civilization. Babylonians, Egyptians, Mayans, trying to understand what they're doing here on earth, and understand their relationship to the cosmos, to each other. And as we move forward in time, we are in an amazing period, seven billion human beings on the planet, connecting, sharing ideas, bumping into one another, exchanging stories, ideas, discoveries. Sometimes beautifully, sometimes with great difficulty. Here we are today, sharing more about what it means to be disabled. Or not. And it's accelerating. Our phones are getting faster. Our phones are allowing for deaf blind communication and sometimes the pace seems a little incredible. But it's rather exciting if we start to see ourselves as participants in a vast cosmic process that seems to be going somewhere. Where are we going? What's the future going to be for us? For our children? And for generations down in the future? Very exciting stuff. Our choices matter. Are we proud of where we come from? Are we proud of what we're looking at, what we're seeing? Who we're becoming? Do you know who you are? Do you know where you come from? These answers continue, and the questions carry on. And the questions and answers dance together, with more questions. Always more questions. Never fully answered. Are you proud of where you come from? Are you proud of who you are? Are we proud of our relationship to the natural world? Are we proud of our relationship to the stars? Are we proud? Thank you. [ Applause ]