Chicago - The Bean
On the evening of January 18, 2012, I drove south on Yonge Street in Toronto, Canada towards the 401 highway. I noticed an intriguing slogan on a billboard for a high rise condominium development. The words on the billboard read:
“Where will your storey take you?”
The use of the word “storey” is what linguists might label as a “homophone”. In Wikipedia, a homophone is defined as:
“A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning.”
I wondered if people in the 21st century are asking:
“Where will your story take you?”
The power of our stories to determine our reality is a theme of David Korten’s book, “The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. The final chapter in that inspiring book is titled: “Change the story, change the future”.
On his website, David Korten presents a matrix that compares and contrasts the “Empire Story” with the “Earth Community Story.” It can be found at: http://www.davidkorten.org/story-matrix
When we first arrived at Newtonbrook United Church, Shari and I did a workshop on the topic of Korten’s book, contrasting the “old story”of Empire and domination with the “new story” of an inter-dependent earth community. The current controversy about the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines is an example of two stories being in conflict with each other. When I reflect on these controversies, I think that the question for rational people is:
“Where will this story take you?”
and
“Where will this story take your children and grandchildren?”
allanbaker 