Little Pearls: Media That Matters
by Julie Parker

from Western North Carolina Woman magazine, April 2003

Women also mind "businesses" that are not-for-profit. A few weeks ago I was part of a brainstorming session with the creators of the non-profit Little Pearls*, Debra Roberts and Linda McLean, and the other members of the board. We were meeting in preparation for their gala fund raiser April 25th at Blue Ridge Motion Pictures.

Non-profits are faced with many of the same marketing issues as for-profit businesses. In this case we were brainstorming about our "elevator speech" to encapsulate what Little Pearls' "tiny films" are all about. In marketing a business, it is critical to be able to get your point across clearly and succinctly. It is especially challenging when your product is unique, and it is critical to do it well when you are about to ask a roomful of people at a fund raiser to open their hearts and their checkbooks.

The "Pearls" speak eloquently for themselves; they speak with immense power directly to the heart. (In fact, I was suggesting that each table at the benefit come equipped with a box of tissues so people don't have to wipe their noses on the sleeves of their fancy duds!) We were looking to describe these tiny films in advance (pre-Kleenex) and how to explain their significance and their impact.

Here's some of what we came up with. (Remember, in brainstorming you just put anything and everything on the table to see what coalesces from all that has popped out of our mouths.)

To feel good.
To raise consciousness.
To change the media’s affect.
To inspire.
To remind us of who we are and what we already have and what is right around us.
To feel connected in a deeper way.
To celebrate the life we have.
To provide alternatives models to what is on TV.
To wake us up;To reassure us.
To sooth our savage souls.
To empower; To enlighten.
To open hearts and minds.
To remember to celebrate the small things.
And my favorite: To fall more deeply in love with ourselves, each other, and all things.

Then we worked on answering the question: Why should I give you money? The point of the brainstorming was, after all, to prepare for a fund raiser to support this work.

Because you are tired of looking at the crap on TV and want media that matters, media that means something. So children, adults and teenagers can see the world differently one frame at time.
So you can be part of the process of change.
A pearl reminds children that they have an opportunity to see the world as a wonderful place.
Antidote to violence and despair in the media.
TV makes people want what they don’t have; LP reminds them to cherish what they already have.
LP provides models for living more fully.
Reminds us that we are loved.
Because LP speaks to possibility.
Reminds us of the juice of life and the possibility of daily celebration.
To plant seeds of hope and change.

You get the picture, yes? Not only is Little Pearls the reverse of much of what we experience in media, they also—get this—encourage you to copy and distribute their work freely! (It is available in CD, DVD, and video formats) Yes, they say, PLEASE copy it and give it to your local cable station, school, brownie troop, gardening club. Copy the CD and pop it in Aunt Minnie's birthday card. Consider making Little Pearls a part of all your gift giving. Take copies to your library. Leave a CD on a table at Beanstreets, along with a message to enjoy it. Hand one to the person who has just made your sandwich at your local bagel shop. Perhaps your child will want to take CDs to school for show-and-tell. There is a fascinating project called Book Crossings (see bookcrossings.com). From their web site: "You know the feeling you get after reading a book that speaks to you, that touches your life, a feeling that you want to share it with someone else? BookCrossing.com gives you a simple way to share books with the world, and follow their paths forever more!"

In the model of BookCrossing, the idea is to encourage a grass roots campaign to spread messages of compassion, of joy, and of acknowledgment that we have the power to make positive change in our lives and in our world.

There is a powerful metaphorical passage in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five that tells of a man who has spent his entire life strapped to the top of a train, his head anchored in one position, and a ten-foot pipe attached to his face so that his only perception of the world was what he could see out of the small space at the end of the pipe. That small window is all he knows of the world, his only experience of the nature of reality.

Many of us keep our eyes glued to a little box through which we receive our daily dose of "reality". We get it in doses of what passes for "entertainment" (our children are "entertained", as we mentioned in the last issue, with more than 8000 murders on television by the age of 12). We get it in the nightly news, which dishes up the latest mayhem, political obfuscation, wars, deaths, explosions, terrorist attacks, etc. in such massive doses (and to the exclusion of any events of a positive nature) that we begin to assume that the tiny picture we see in this box IS the nature of reality.

Little Pearls begs to differ. One of the first and most useful spiritual principles I learned as a young woman is that where you put your attention defines your life. To quote Geraldine (a bit out of context) "What you see is what you get". You have choice about where you put your attention, and your choices structure your reality. We at WNC WOMAN choose to put our attention on the power and dignity and accomplishments of women, rather than on woman-as-victim. If we only look at woman a victim, if we remain focused on that narrow slice of "reality", how can we conceive of something other than that?

If we focus only on what is going wrong, only on dissention, only on chaos, how will we ever see the beauty and the well-being that surrounds us all the time?

We invite you to put your attention on something else for a bit....for just a few moments, just long enough to see a few tiny films. . . . and watch them change your life.