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Imagine a kitchen table, round. Pots of coffee and tea and hot chocolate sit steaming on the table next to some big mugs. You stand at the doorway, looking in. Someone rises from the table, smiles and beckons to you. You can smell cinnamon buns baking in the oven, and the chairs look comfortable.

Will you enter? Accept the invitation to stay awhile? If so, a conversation can begin, or continue. You can pick up the threads that are weaving a new cultural fabric, adding in your own, developing the pattern further. Or perhaps you'll just sit quietly for now, noticing how the pattern forms and changes, how the contrasts add complexity and depth.

Toward the end of Crow and Weasel, Barry Lopez's fable about a quest to a new land, the wise old Badger describes the power of life stories. Telling true stories of where you've been and what you've seen is the way that people care for each other, she explains.

Cultural Creatives need this kind of caring now. Making their way towards a new territory of values, they need to hear true stories of others who are also making this journey. It can be bread for the journey. Indeed, as Badger says, "sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive."

The new ideas, solutions, social inventions that you and your friends are developing; or that you're thinking about; or that you have seen and been inspired by in your neighborhood or workplace.

Q: How does this affect our schools? Why should this help violent kids?
A: Because anything that can help these kids deal with their high levels of pain and arousal and lack of focus, any way that can help them to manage their emotions other than leaving their bodies or taking it out on somebody else, is bound to be useful. And there's something more. As Professor James Garbarino puts it, "Only the person who is not fully alive, who is dead inside, can commit acts of violence. For anyone who loves life and is spiritually fulfilled, such acts are incomprehensible to them."

It is a beginning. With programs or inventions that are turning around what looked like intractable social problems. Or films, books, theatre pieces, music that points the way to a deeper understanding of what's important now.

How does something really new get started? Doesn't it always come from some kind of openness, a longing to make sense of something that doesn't make sense yet? It's from this place of not knowing that the most penetrating questions come, the ones we desperately need now in this era of massive changes. Something has to slice through the old frames of reference so we can see our way to a new clarity. That was Martin Luther King Jr.'s brilliance.

So whether your questions are brilliant or just pesky, if they are about creating a new culture and/or the personal issues that go with that, please think carefully about what we can all create together.