Foreword by Shields Bialasik

January 1, 2023

We’ve now been running the Resilienza Project for 138 weeks. With a new positive message mural being created every week by a local artist, I am inspired to continue to push forward into the future. A future in which we choose to proactively move towards positive solutions and outcomes. This is an act of conscious resilience – resilience not based on root survival for the sake of self alone, but resilience based on the awareness of collective survival and planetary preservation. An intentional preservation and creative choice made by humanity to grow forward into the best possible version of itself and the planet.  

Currently one of the biggest challenges currently facing humanity is an eclipse of negative engagement with media, social and economic systems, community, and even ourselves. This negative engagement exists with predatory demand for human attention, entrapping our potential, curiosity, and vision from truly seeing the full and majestic creative capacity at hand. 

With so much to pay attention to in our modern lives, how do we choose to center, move towards, and maintain a positive perspective even in the most difficult and trying of situations? 

How do we outgrow the confines and cultural programming of negative engagement? 

How do we as a species step into our full capacity to enact extraordinary change upon our planet that is both positive and meaningful? 

What will it take for us to learn to pay attention differently so that we can see the positive opportunity at hand, and then claim it?

These are just some of the questions behind Resilienza, an art-activist project which has been designed as a practice of paying attention to positive outcomes, proactive thinking, and collaborative problem-solving.

As we move further into the 21st century, we will move into a new era of choice and creative power. Our individual and collective powers will no longer be preoccupied with what they can do, but rather will focus on why we must do what we do. As a collective, humanity will begin to consciously choose how it can and will deploy radical change upon our world that will determine our fate.

My vision as a part of the Resilienza Project is to help alleviate suffering through the sharing of positive messaging. Messages are a necessary food for all people. They have the power to tear us down or to rise beyond.

I am inspired to move forward with our 2023 Positive Messages, a framework of creative resiliency to help inspire, move and change all who choose to embrace a new direction. I am grateful to my lovely partner Carla Willoughby for helping and taking the lead in the creation of this guide to bring the language and explanations of the practice of positive messaging to all those who participate in this project. 

Shields Bialasik

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