Dig it, from my comments: thank, chris, for this beautiful description of ‘a life of invitation’! maybe the space of ‘authentic presence’ exerts both great magnetism (drawing towards, inviting) and great radiance (pouring forth, offering) because it’s the space where ‘we’ are ‘not-two’– going through the doors that open we find our self in a place we’ve always known (you know this rumi verse?: “I have lived on the lip/of insanity, wanting to know reasons,/knocking on a door. It opens./I’ve been knocking from the inside!”) and even when we are not yet ‘in that same space or entering it,’ not …
Someone could probably write a whole book on tree metaphors. Here is another, from William Isaacs’ amazing book on Dialogue. This is Peter Senge talking about David Bohm’s ideas of dialogue: David Bohm used to say that the tree does not grow from the seed. It is ludicrous to say the tiny seed produces the immense oak tree. Rather, Bohm suggested, the seed is a kind of aperture through which the tree gradually emerges. IN a sense, it organizes the processes of growth which eventually create the tree. Just so, our conversations organize the processes and structures which shape our …
My friend (and one time guest blogger here) Alex Kjerulf is ploughing ahead with his Happy At Work Project and he now has a website up and an international conference in the offing for next month. In his inaugural English newsletter, he quotes from this article about Southwest Airlines and reiterates the following story: [One] time, a senior executive spent a day working at the ticket counter and with the ground crew to have a better understanding of their roles. While she was helping direct a plane to the gate using those long orange directional devises, one of the seasoned …
This is from “Synchronicity” by Joseph Jaworski. It is from a conversation he had with Francisco Varela in which Varela tells him about the power of being open: When we are in touch with our ‘open nature,’ our emptiness, we exert an enormous attraction to other human beings. There is great magnetism in that state of being which has been called by Trungpa ‘authentic presence.” Varela leaned back and smiled. ‘Isn’t that beautiful? And if others are in that same space or entering it, they resonate with us and immediately doors are open to us. It is not strange or …
I learned something at OSonOS which applies to unconferencing. Blogging DURING a conference is not good unconferencing behaviour. Unconferencing dialogue requires attention and you can’t do that while you are writing. And so, my thoughts about OSonOS will trickle out here in the next little while. I start with this one, from Masud Sheik. Masud said something in the closing circle that sent me thinking…he began his comments by saying “most of us are dead” by which I think he meant most of the people who have been alive in human history. This immediately made a picture of a tree …