Serious Fun: Ingenious Improvisations on
by Carolyn North
Money, Food, Waste, Water and Home WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS …A DOSE OF SERIOUS FUN!
If you ask Carolyn North why she wrote her new book Serious Fun: Ingenious Improvisations on Money, Food, Waste, Water and Home (Findhorn Press, April 2011, $16.95) here’s what she would probably say:
“It’s time to change how we understand this gorgeous miracle of a world we are born into, and enjoy it to its full extent while using it well and consciously. Our celebrity culture of profit and endless growth, rugged
individualism, competition, and muscle-bound superheroes doesn’t work for most of us, really. It especially doesn’t work for the planet.
Our waters are polluted, children are going hungry, and half of us are on antidepressants.”
So, as an antidote to what she describes as the fear and despair she palpably senses around her, North is advocating creativity and joy. Serious Fun is a practical guidebook offering low-tech ideas, anecdotes and cunning innovations, along with a compendium of stories, facts and figures that are designed to “tickle your imaginations” into dreaming up ideas and solutions to the challenges before us. In essence, North wants nothing more than to solve the world’s problems and have fun doing it!
The renowned futurist and systems theorist, Ervin Laszlo, who has long predicted the “Worldshift” North believes we’re now experiencing, has written the forward for the book. He believes our world community is mired in an ongoing “convenient complacency and facile skepticism” and he writes that Serious Fun is “destined to become a classic textbook” because it is a call to action to tackle the difficult challenges of our time in new and joyful ways. North focuses on five of the basic issues we have to deal with; money, food, water, waste and home.
click the book to purchase
In Serious Fun she argues for each one of us to turn to our innovative imaginations, to stay connected and to act, work and PLAY together. She is full of ideas and uses the book to point to the many successful creative solutions she admires that are currently in practice in the world. In each case the common factors are that they are easy to do, they bring people together and create and sustain beauty and a good time can be had while putting them into practice. Carolyn North knows how to do it. As the founder of The Daily Bread project, she has been supplying food to food banks for almost 30 years without a penny changing hands.
No doubt, North is playful; her chapter on money is both witty and startling in many instances, including the revelation that “if we all pay our debts tomorrow, the whole economic system would collapse in a day.” Another section of the book is titled “A Brief History of Shit”! One thing is for sure, readers of Serious Fun will all agree that Carolyn North delivers her ideas without a hint of worthiness. Instead, she uses huge dollops of joy- filled panache to motivate and inspire readers into rolling up their sleeves and living ingeniously.
omtimes.com March 2011 Edition
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