What is common between all humans? The appreciation of beauty, the ability to create, the ability to imagine, the ability to love, to hold something precious, to be inspired, to put inspiration into a form of understanding, to gather knowledge and stretch our intellectual relationship with the world, to extend loving kindness, to experience passion and compassion, to feel connection to other human beings and our world, to be curious, to wonder….. to want to share.

It is this last aspect — wanting to share — that ties together what is most true. We are, innately, beings who seek companionship. We have developed communication at so many levels of articulation because we want to reach toward one another and share what we experience, what we have discovered, what we have made. Or we want to share a journey into our curiosity, our exploration and our wonder.

This is the basis which moved us to develop spoken, written and visual language celebrated through art, theatre, literature, music, culinary cuisine. It is the foundation of how we articulate our understanding of G-d or Universal Spirit which brings our temples, churches, synagogues, mosques and meeting halls to life.

From this shining crystal of what each of us carry throughout our lifetimes and pass on to the next generation we evolve a prism of social behaviors and norms, beliefs and customs which define us as individuals, groups, and nations.

These articulations of our commonality have enormous power. The power to bind us as a human family celebrating the richness of our creative and intellectual capacities or the power to divide us with a focus only on our differences, unable to recognize the common basis of our shared expressions.

And this is where we have choice. Where we not only have choice, but where one must be made. Human beings are creative at our core. From nothing, we can literally imagine something into being. Every single one of us can do this. And this gift, this power that we all both contain and can access is something to celebrate. When we consciously acknowledge this capacity in ourselves as we equally do in others, we are, at that moment, able to cross the borders of norms, beliefs and customs and see what is being shared by our fellow human beings. To connect through love of beauty, of inspiration, of curiosity, passion. . . When we choose to do this we become more fully realized in our individual wholeness. And we become participants in transforming our collectively-held experience of life on this planet into a reflection of that wholeness. This is not only an imperative for our collective survival, but it is a fulfillment of the heritage of our precious birth.

This is Common Culture of the New Global Village.