Join me in this discussion with Dr. Zachary Stein (Ed.D.). Zak is a Harvard-trained scholar with an extensive grounding in the philosophy of both education and psychology, and through his writ, wit, and word, has given great thought towards the notion of our human development and becoming; both individually and culturally – always contextually – considering where we have been, where we are now, and where we are heading... In this improvised dialogue, Zak turns his brilliant erudition and elocution towards the inferences and implications of our rapidly emerging cultural forms of hegemonic language (specifically) and sanctioned communication (broadly), and the inter-personal, inter-cultural, and inter-generational impoverishments and accomplishments that have happened as a consequence of this unprecedented and disconcerting change. In the course of our discourse, we wander far afield from the timeless-time of ephemeral story-telling, song, and dance, as expressed by our oldest cultures; refined and honed over millennia, then turning about, in an evolutionary instance, into the reified bytes of endless data and information in this meta-modern moment of “trans-media hyper-communication”, with all the uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk that such a change confers to our humanity and the world that birthed us. In our response, through a meta-modern movement, we reach back with the hope of moving forward into the archetypal station-hood of the Shaman; the holder of vibratory and ecstatic song and story that is felt first, and only then understood, secondarily (if at all) in a semantic sense. From this, we consider in this age the importance of the “Shamanoid” figure within the human body-politic, to act as a bridge between people, cultures, generations, our psyche, and the Wild, and to be a reinvigorator of language such that prose may find their poetry again in story, song, and science… For more information about Zak and his work, visit his website at http://www.zakstein.org/ As well, we encourage you to purchase and read his most recent book, Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. Yours In Health and Gratitude Dr. William Sutherland and artist Andrew McClure of the Complexity Medicine initiative