THE ROOTS AND FLUTES of humankind Werner John's FLUTEWALKER performances begin with a musical story of humanity's journey around the globe, starting from our roots in Africa. This tale, our modern "origin myth", is based on the ongoing research of National Geographic's Genographic project. Words of indigenous tribal members inform the narrative, and live sounds of ancient flutes evoke primal human feelings.
UNEXPECTED HARMONIES within the human family Simple wood flutes are said to be a "universal human instrument". The flutes and their music form a banquet of human cultural flavors and become evidence of our ingenuity, our sense of beauty, our quirkiness, and feelings and rhythms we all share. Meet some identical instruments that evolved long ago on opposite sides of the globe! And the flutes of widely differing cultures played in harmony can evoke the ancient unity at the core of diversity.
FACING THE MUSIC of a world full of people The human experience has now evolved into one of the biggest experiments in the history of life on Earth. Out of millions of species, just ONE has become dominant! In the whole vast evolutionary sweep of life on Earth this is an unprecedented event.
At present, though, this species' massive wave of accomplishment is starting to curl and crash on the shoreline of Earth's physical limits. This is not an "issue". This is epochal. One possible scenario, a catastrophic cascading collapse of life systems around the planet, continues to gather momentum each year as population and resource use soar.
At the same time, this species has been gifted with a crown jewel of evolution: consciousness. It is able to learn from its past, to imagine its future, and to probe vast worlds of intuition and inspiration. Its science provides an extension of physical senses in time and space, monitoring elements of global health. Its arts move whole cultures. Its web of communication quickens cultural evolution. Therefore it may still have some chance of forestalling the inevitability of relentless growth all the way to massive exhaustion of resources.
The experiment will soon be over. The accelerating contest between humans' collective appetite and our collective consciousness seems likely to break one way or the other over the next decade or two. Each of us now alive is becoming more and more aware of the epic life and death story unfolding just outside our everyday experience, even as some of us struggle to turn the precious key life has given us to assist in its own preservation.
BECOMING AN INSTRUMENT of evolution As the magnitude of Earth's increasing imbalance slowly dawns on us, humanity is entering a period of intense soul-searching to discern our true and lasting place in this world. Evolution is said to be the means by which the fittest organisms survive, but in our time biological evolution has become secondary. It is humanity's cultural evolution which will determine what our planet will look like after the human maximum. And our cultural evolution will in turn depend largely on individual leaders' personal or soul evolution. These FLUTEWALKER programs are designed to help inspire the personal evolution of future leaders.
A COUNTERPOINT to the clueless-hopeless continuum As many have realized, a successful path through the next few decades will be dependent on two main things: transforming our old tribal-based urge to magnify the existing differences between groups, leading to conflict; and minimizing, then reversing our degradation of the biosphere. These challenges both stem directly from our incredible success as a species. Perhaps no one is at fault! Perhaps there was no way to avoid this moment, and the global situation simply shines more and more dramatic light on some tendencies in human nature which have outlived their usefulness.
This period can then be seen as nothing less than a time of initiation into a new paradigm of successful human life, with each individual's power to both join and initiate change magnified by the cultural web. It's almost like being inside a save-the-world video game, an epic trilogy, or an exciting apocalyptic movie... playing out in slow motion but very real. The mission of the FLUTEWALKER programs is to catalyze individuals in this pivotal time (through education and example) to develop their own best tools and help us all advance toward the win we need: a future in balance... dynamic long-term balance between evolving human groups and the ancient home we share.
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"Werner wove commentary on the fragility of our planet with beautiful soaring, sometimes haunting, sometimes playful original melodies performed on flutes made from his own hand. Werner John is a gently persuasive troubador bringing a powerful message of responsible stewardship to the human community." -Al De Salvo, Albany, NY