A beautiful photograph of a beautiful sculpture made of paper, by artist Peter Callesen. I love this because it is about flow and it required the same for its production. And it’s quite something to see where that little canoe is going! PS. This is my 1000th post here at Parking Lot, give or take a few. Thanks for reading along!
Serendipity. Nancy White posted yesterday about why we seem to be suffering from a lack of innovation in the world, and whether it was all about the culture of control and fear. To which I replied – in several hundred words now – look at schools. And then today, AKMA has a nice post on a talk he is due to give to some Christian anarchists about his family’s experiences with homeschooling, and it’s lovely and concise and carefully thought through and all that stuff that I love about AKMA’s writing. Something’s in the air, eh?
Pema Chodron, a well known Buddhist teacher, is one of my favourite teachers on facilitation practice. She has enhanced my understanding of dealing with tricky situations and scary places with practices, advice and stories which are beautifully rendered. In this article, “The Answer to Anger and Agression is Patience” she writes about her own struggle to cultivate a practice of patience as the antidote to anger and aggression: Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the …
From j a c k / z e n on the limits of seeing: A typical example of zen practice. Put a flower on a table. Write down every word you can use to describe the flower with full analysis of it, your reactions to it, the history of the flower and flowers in general, comparisons with all other flowers and living things and speculations backed by scientifical data about the flower. Put the flower to poetry, do a drawing and sculpture on it, write a play and feature length film on it, write a song about it. Take a …
Ten new bits and pieces for your surfing pleasure: Grupthink: “GrÅ«pthink is a new way to ask and explore open-ended questions with the rest of the world. Anyone can ask a question or post a topic at GrÅ«pthink, and everyone can respond. Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Anyone can respond with new answers, and those answers can be voted on by everyone else.” At the moment it seems to be fixated on rather superficial questions, but that could change. via The Big Here: “You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined …