Off to Saskatchewan for a week, where last week a spot near Prince Albert recorded a temperature of -53.2C and was noted as the coldest place on earth that day. Blogging may be light. In Meadow Lake it got down to -60 with the wind chill.
Jesus. What the hell am I doing?
Anyway, to keep up to date while my teeth are cracking, why not subscribe to my handy RSS feed? I think at -60 light freezes, so the fibre optics may not be working, but if something does make it down the pipe, you’ll be the first to know.
[This post was updatde with the correct Atom RSS feed URL]
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Linkage:
- Large collection of books bay and about Gandhi online
- The Satir Change Model. Via ourhouse
- Ten traps for facilitators
- Math and physics visualizers. Via boing boing
- Joy Harjo blogs the passing of James Welch
- Explorations in Learning & Instruction: The Theory Into Practice Database
- The 1919 Molasses Disaster via Reinvented
- A collection of Balanced Scorecard Methodology links
- Digiquaria: a digital aquarium
- Lovely review of BBC Symphony Orchestra’s John Cage performance via Brian’s Culture Blog
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Quite a day of connecting in meatspace with cyber colleagues.
This morning it was a conversation with Marcelo Vieta at Bojangles on Denman Street in Vancouver. Marcelo is putting together a Master’s thesis on blogging using a phenomenological framework to look at the role of users and technology in the creation of online community. He’s doing research on bloggers and if you’re in Vancouver and you think about this stuff, you should get in touch with him so he can include you in his research. The conversations alone are worth it.
We talked for an hour about truth and why blogging allows us to finally embody the connections that the internet infrastructure promises. And most excitingly, we talked about why blogging is a healthy practice because, like journal writing, it causes us to be reflective of our experience, but unlike journal writing it also causes us to be attentive towards the intersubjective space in which we are projecting our thoughts. This is a rich vein of practice, it seems to me, for developing the capacity to engage in “living in truth” because it extends this practice of discerning truth within ourselves to creating shared understandings in community.
I was reflecting on the fact that my training for this happened in my community radio days at Trent Radio in Peterborough, Ontario. There, when one is putting together a late night improvisational jazz show, one is never sure if there is anyone actually listening to the broadcast. The act of radio then becomes a private performance in a potentially public space, and causes one to think carefully about what is being put out on the airwaves, even if absolutely no one is listening. It can be hairy (not to mention confusing) and was a good training ground for the kind of play between the individual and collective spheres that blogging encourages.
Following my conversation with Marcelo, I walked up the street and met Jon “Wirearchy” Husband for sushi. I haven’t seen him in a while and we talked at length about the process of making meaning in the world. It was a beautiful conversation. It made me realize that living in truth is actually an act of courage and it is so hard because we must differentiate ourselves from the culture that tries to interpret the world for us…the news anchors that cry, the pop musicians that embody emotion and trick us into believeing their version of coporate sanctioned dissent, the sports commentators that tell us how it feels to be a fan. All of this stuff is the current we swim against as we head upstream to find our own truth in the world.
Sometimes, as in the case of indigenous communities this struggle to legitimate one’s own take in the colonial world is fraught with the danger of actually bucking the power. To think that an Aboriginal story, an indigenous meaning, can actually have currency against the powers that be is a brave thought. To put it into action is even braver.
Today’s conversations brought me back to another Vaclav Havel quote, where he is describing what it feels like to suddenly have the experience of knowing your own truth:
Everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.”
— from Jonathan Schell The Unconquerable World, p. 199
This palpable sense of immediate transformation: it’s feeling a little like that these days.
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Michael Herman at GlobalChicago.NET has spruced up his collection of invitation resources, in support of Open Space Technology meetings. Michael is my own invitation inspiration.
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Good old whiskey river:
As we are already that which we seek, all that is needed is a 180 degree turn to look one’s self in the eye. But the courage needed to turn to face the Void or the ‘Faceless’ is far more than most of us possess. So we manufacture fantasy worlds of power, magic and the paranormal, and blissful flights to describe what we think enlightenment might be rather than truly facing its shattering nature.
It’s another way to talk about what happened to my friend Doug.
When I think about Emergent Democracy, and I confess that I’m not well schooled in the theory, I ask myself, from whence does democracy emerge? And that is really the nature of the question that leads me to this thinking I have been doing about decolonization. I think that democracy emerges deep within the person – everything emerges deep within the personal – and it flows from a truthful and honest engagement with oneself. Living in truth is just this: understanding where that “line of conflict” really is within us and developing the capacity to choose and act on it when we are called to.
Ken Wilber has written extensively on this stuff, and I offer a quote from his classic Sex Ecology and Spirituality where he quote G and R Blanck, authors of Ego Psychology:
“Evolution…is a process of progressive internalization, for, in the development of the species, the organism achieves increased independence from its environment, the result of which is that ‘reactions which originally occurred in relation to the external world are increasingly displaced into the interior of the organism.’ The more independent the organism becomes, the greater the independence from the stimulation of the immediate environment.”
— quoted in Wilber, Sex Ecology and Spirituality, p. 263.
That independence from the external environment includes freedom from the cultural stories that tell us that we can’t do things, like overthrow totalitarian regimes. Becoming independent as a person leads to new connections that ARE the emergence in “Emergent Democracy.” And it seems to me that once that force is unleashed, change is almost a done deal. Or as Schell puts it:
Individual hearts and minds change; those who have changed become aware of one another; still others are emboldened, in a contagion of boldness; the “impossible” becomes possible; immediately, it is done, surprising the actors almost as much as their opponents; and suddenly, almost with the swiftness of a thought – whose transformation has in fact set the whole process in motion – the old regime, a moment ago so impressive, vanishes like a mirage.
— Schell p. 166-67
Think about that. It starts with one thought, a thought that arises from a mind that has freed itself from the tangle of external “can’ts” and has jumped from mind to mind and heart to heart. That’s it. And so when the change comes, it seems like a dream, as Havel was fond of saying about his presidency. One day you are a pariah to the state, and the next moment you are president.
A comment left a Jon’s blog wirearchy illustrates the defeatist perspective that I’m talking about. The commenter writes:
With the Democratic primaries going on what I’ve noticed is the conflict that often makes true change impossible. The people who want a change talk about how much they want things to change, and then they begin to winnow out the candidates who are different, who would change things. The excuse is, “We need someone electable,” someone who is close enough to what we already have, someone who is not noticeably different from Bush. Someone sort of conservative. We want someone who is liberal and innovative, but who is fade, and will not rock the boat. Because… damnit, we like the boat.”
Those are the kinds of stories that we have to free ourselves from. I mean that the author of these comments has to free himself from them. Worried about what other people are doing. This is what Schell means when he says that before living in truth is opposition, it is affirmation. That’s what Doug discovered. Action is possible and even easy, but it’s a lot of work to get past the frame of impossibility that we construct around ourselves to become, what the Blancks call “independent.”
But really, what choice do we have if we are to live in truth?