Alan Watts Listening to some wonderful podcasts from Alan Watts. In the current series, Images of God, which is made up from talks given during his lifetime, he is delivering all kinds of angles on the divine. In the third installment of this series, he was talking about school, journeys and the dance. The point of a dance or a piece of music, is not the end, says Watts. If it was, then we would only have composers that wrote finales and audiences would only go to hear great final chords, or see people in their final positions. No, the …
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Thanks to a link at plep, I stumbled today upon the journals of the Apollo 11 astronauts. There is a mass of material at this site, but what I have been finding most interesting is the transcriptions of the debriefing sessions that the astronauts went through when they returned to earth. A lot of the details are technical and full of acronyms and other jargon, but certain sections stand out. For example, here is a section from the debrief where Armstrong and Aldrin, the first two men on the moon, are talking about learning to walk: Aldrin I don’t think …
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Good old whiskey river: Mindful Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for – to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant – but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but …
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Some upcoming learning opportunities in the British Columbia and Washington state areas… News from my dear friend Peggy Holman that she and Steve Cato are offering their Appreiciative Inquiry facilitation training on February 1-3, and it’s not too late to register. Toke Moeller is hosting a FlowGame at Aldermarsh on Whidbey Island in the middle of March, after which we are penciling in an Art of Hosting primarily with Aboriginal youth, but open to the public as well on Vancouver Island. Michael Herman and I will be offering a retreat to support practices for Open Space faiclitation in April, during …
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Last night in the closing circle, my friend Pauline LeBel offered an observation that so much of our conversation, informed as it is by the great cosmological story, is very human- centric. She asked “What can we learn from the great love affair between the sun and earth?” It is a love affair in which the Sun asks for nothing in return. A group of us today took a walk on the land as a response to that observation. I posted a session in the Open Space today called “How does a forest change a mind?” We walked into the …