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Crossroads: Past, Present & Future
 Past, present and future converged in our week's window on Jordan. It was a fast forward ride of ancient sites, current realities, and visionary ideas. As ancient Petra was a crossroad for trade, so is Jordan a cross-point, a bridge between East and West and a bridge between the Past and the Future.Emblematic of this is Queen Rania's innovative use of YouTube. The Internet is the crossroad of our time, as Petra was in its time. She creatively uses today's technology, reaching to the world in a virtual one on one conversation, addressing stereotyping and explaining cultural roots. In doing this she gives clarifying information in open discussion, which is possibly the most important commodity needed in today's world of tensions.
The exchange of ideas multiplied in the opportunities open to our group, as we met Ministers and Muslim women, Ambassadors and journalists, filmmakers and ceramic artists. We visited women Ministers whose minds crackled with new ideas. We met an elderly woman whose life turned around by a micro-loan, an amount small enough to buy five goats and large enough to give her financial independence. We saw schools that were in poor condition now responded to by partnerships with civic and business resources. And Kings Academy, the prep school in its first year, is a model not only for Jordan, but for the new global human. It welcomes a mix of economic and cultural backgrounds, emphasizes mutual respect, and teaches through open discussion. The rote memorization of traditional learning shifts to self responsibility and opens to multiple ways of understanding. This models the possibility of a world shift from single fixed stories to an enlarged understanding that many stories from many cultures can reveal a common universal tale.
The peak moment for our group was our night in Petra, enveloped by a star encrusted sky, wandering candle lit canyons, surprised by a sound and light show, finding a table set for us to dine within nature and history's splendor. What happened in that setting was more than the blending of ancient carvings and technology's light show, it was the melding of humans, of cultures, of time. The experience sparked connections that wove us to each other, to the magic of the place, and to our freest selves. We danced in the moonlight as humans have done for millenniums, for the same purpose that tribal bands danced, to strengthen their links and open their possibilities. In that evening bonded on the desert floor, we felt in the larger scale that this is why we had come - to strengthen links and open possibilities for all people under this single sky.
By Lois Stark, April 2008
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