What is Global Mindshift?

I’ve found a new, or new-to-me, magazine recently called Ode Magazine. Its tagline reads: for intelligent optimists. That’s what sold me. It was begun in The Netherlands in 1995, began English and Portuguese versions in 2003, and their subscription quotient just passed 100,000, and growing.

A full-page ad in the May 2007 edition made me laugh out loud. I looked at the picture—a rarity for me being a word person—for a long time before I read the headline or the words beneath it. The picture is Earth in a velvet wing chair.

The headline reads:

Your
Mother
would like to have
a word with you.

I bet she would. With all of us. It’s an ad for a website called Global-Mindshift, and I like both its intent and its message. Mother Earth in a chair is an invitation to sit down at our computers and connect with the site. They promise:

Your mother will be pleased you did.

I think she would.

Here’s who the site is for: This site is for you, individuals and organizations alike, who, from a broadening base of thinking, are interested in exploring, connecting and acting on behalf of a better future for all life.

The mission of the site is: Global MindShift's mission is to help bring about a new era of cooperation and creativity on the planet.

The only way I know of to facilitate this is to make space for gathering and thinking both outside and inside our collective boxes together. Global MindShift is an internet Think Tank to which everyone is invited. Everyone with a mother, that is.

One of the things it says on the site is that whilst conversation is important, it’s not the final step in change. The final step is action.

In my careful reading of Ode, I noticed an email address for the Editor-in-Chief, so in the spirit of intelligent optimism, I wrote to him about his website. Why, I asked, aren’t there any bloggers? And would you consider me to be one on Ode’s site? My very own global mind shift. What did I have to lose?

It took three days and I got an astonishing answer. The web editor invited me to be a Charter Member of their Readers’ Blog which debuts on or near June 10th this year. There are only a few of us, and we’re invited to contribute as often or seldom as we choose.

Global mind shift and action, my friend. One email. Think of it. Just one email opened a whole new world to me simply because I sat down and wrote it. My biological mother was a marketing wizard when she was alive; I’m sure she was pleased at my email.