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Posto Bello translates into Beautiful Place, and represents the "Best of Italy" with these two wines - Pinot Grigio and "Bambino"
Thinking back on our 3 years of blogging, from Ruarri’s First Post and all his amazing storytelling on wine as the elixir of life and a unifier of the world, to Jake’s wizard tech guides, to Brad’s millennial generation expose, to Meg’s wine-your-diet, to my rants on sustainability and spirituality, to all the other amazing content from our various contributors, we’ve created a dynamic vortex of ideas. What’s been greatest of all is having people find these ideas, some from 2 or 3 years ago and still give us feedback. With our first harvest experience this past fall in Italia, we brought all these ideas to life by finally connecting to the source and creating some amazing elixirs. And it’s not just the liquid that represents our ideas, but the sustainable environments from which it is produced. Thus, we find it natural to take our ideas, and our environments, and put them in a bottle… a bottle of GrapeThinking.
Today, I found this video by Ilana Yahav demonstrating her work – “Let’s Get Together”. This is a dynamic “painting” using sand as a medium. Reminds me of my creative “struggles” with the etch-a-sketch when I was a kid. The coolest thing about this, is that unlike painting, or drawing, this is a very eco-friendly / sustainable art form.
The question of what age we are in?, is important for us as marketers because it helps us understand our macro environment and informs our strategy and our decisions about the future.
There can be no doubt that we are seeing a transition at the moment – and I’m not talking about from capitalism to socialism, but rather something less tangible and equally pervasive. This change, I think, is from an age of objects into an age of ideas. Be it an iPod, a Blackberry or an iPhone, we as a society have come to depend on our objects, but the trend toward ‘one box solutions’ and centralising our PDAs, mobile phones, e-mail and music devices shows a longing to free ourselves of the objects, devices, countless power cables and the increasingly cluttered assortment of gadgetry churned out over the years. The inevitable movement towards cloud computingshows the urge of our society to become less dependent on material objects in favour of something more powerful and less immediately tangible. It is in this very transition from physical to ideological that we can see the beginnings of a permanent change.
Innately as human beings, we desire 2 things whether consciously aware of it or not: to feel a connection to something greater than ourselves and to be able to benefit other people and the world around us. This is the essence of spirituality. If you can achieve these 2 things in life, you can cultivate true happiness and peace.
Life will always be a mystery, but can’t we agree the point is to be truly happy and free of suffering? And yet pondering this as an intellectual ideal or meditating on a mountain in Tibet for the rest of your life won’t cut it. We have to somehow feel it and incorporate it into the reality of our lives, which for good or bad largely centers around making money to provide a means to function in society. To many, money is perceived as the root of all evil and focusing on making a lot of it couldn’t possibly allow you to connect to something greater than yourself or benefit other people. It’s too competitive and you have to focus only on yourself or else you’ll be exploited by those that do.
But what if this is all wrong? What if focusing on spiritual growth, connecting to the force that powers you beyond your ego, and cultivating a sense of importance in benefiting other people, will actually give you an edge? What if the world is going through a dramatic shift from a linear system to a cyclical system, a renewable system, where a more, more, me, me mentality will lose, and a holistic, spiritual mentality will win? What will help traditional capitalism transcend into a new form of governance we like to call ecolism?
Supposedly, nothing great lasts forever. The best democracies in history, Athens and Rome being two of the most successful, eventually came to an end. The United States may be the greatest civilization to date, but could it be possible that we’re reaching our end as well? Or are we reaching a threshold of transcendence into a new form of government?
