To Be of Use By Marge Piercy The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who …
I’ve had a Toshiba laptop for a could of months now running a 64 bit version of Vista. Loved it until last week, when it suddenly started crashing and freezing up for no reason. Restore doesn’t work. All the fixes I’ve tried have only staved off the annoyance, but it still keeps happening. I have tio hard reboot several times a day. They must have called it Vista because you get to gaze out your window so much while it crashes and reboots. Sucks. I’ve finally gone off Microsoft. The OS was the last …
Apropos of the fact that Tim Merry, Monica Nissen and I are hosting a module on the Art of Intergernational Hosting at this year’s Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Action, comes this quote from Jack Ricchiuto: Every aging generation questions whether the generation coming of age has what it takes to learn into maturity as defined by the aging generation. Easy for each to think it knows better than the other. The fact is that they will always know more together than they could in isolation or competition. Hierarchy has the relevance of fossils. In an age of wisdom, …
I’m here in Battle Creek, Michigan working with 17 very interesting people who together are planning the 2009 Food and Society Gathering, sponsored by the WK Kellogg Foundation. This is a repeat gig for Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry and I, although last year we worked with Phill Cass, Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen as well. Tuesday and I have been working over the design of this gathering all day today, preparing and chaging and shifting things, going over and over everything, making allowances for shifts in time, for different arrivals and so on, and tonight we’re set. …
Some useful observaions from Clark Williams-Derry at WorldChanging about the current financial crises: 1. Unlikely events are common 2. Markets don’t know much 3. Unsustainable things stop I especially like the last one. It doesn’t really matter if people believe things are unsustainable or not. If something is unsustainable it will stop, and that’s that.