FootprintsintheWind.com

The trick is to not get caught up by your thoughts.

:- Doug.

Did something emerge which was unexpected?

:- Doug.

This (Find what matters to two or more persons, invite them to meet) is really Harrison’s Zen-like “open more space.”

:- Doug.

There is great correspondence between Buber and Alexander. My particular wondering is how to bring all this (centers and whole and the Whole; mutual action, meaning, and going out into the world) to the arena of persons. This is the relating that includes all relating, the whole of wholes, the Center of centers. How do the smaller centers and wholes support the larger and each other? How do the fifteen transformations relate to these three elements of mutual action, meaning and meaning in concrete action?

We are ever supporting and increasing the life of the other centers round about and in the whole. What Buber describes seems to be an endless circle or spiral: mutual action gives meaning gives action going out to meet in more mutual action and on.

Viewed as emergence (this is not so simple as it might seem at first; indeed it is complex—folded together): persons meet; they find-create meaning in their meeting (this starts as the inviting question and morphs into the persons they are changed into, and the persons they meet, and the persons between themselves and the persons they meet, and is then an integral part of them down to their guts); they carry this out into the world, not so much as words as action and more meeting. And the world turns again.

This is a micro view. The macro view is that this is how the whole world operates: by meeting. When enough persons meet, things get done, and when more meet, larger things get done. The large things might be built worlds, or they might be organic worlds, such as when social attitudes toward age, race, gender, or origin change.

So what is the work to make it happen, or open space for it to happen? Find what matters to two or more persons, invite them to meet.

It really seems to be as simple and as complex as that. It takes that much work and courage. It means meeting with them before they meet to find out who they are and why what matters matters.

:- Doug.

Ever more formative than normative.

:- Doug.

Maybe we can be paid for helping billions of poor.

:- Doug.

Purpose transcends goal as timeless transcends time.

:- Doug.

Like the boy with his hand stuck in the cookie jar, what you grasp has you.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 987

Some say
An eye for an eye
We invite
An I for a Thou

Please pass it on.

© c 2009, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

It is not about the meaning of the words; it is about how we live life.

:- Doug.

Goals are a grasping, purposes a leaning forward. Which attitude is better in life as we know it, in the fullness in which we know it?

:- Doug.

What we are after is to stir, to quicken the heart and hand, to find something which draws us ever on, not stopping, only resting as we need and as part of the ever onward going.

:- Doug.

Here is where the business concept of sustainability and the philosophical one meet: we both recoil at the word as a wish to stand still, to mark time, to grasp what we have and make it forever ours in just this form. This is contrary to life. Instead, we must look to invigorating life, to making it stronger, stirring.

:- Doug.

When it comes to goals, life does not permit of ends but only of continuing. There is a cycle to life: birth, aging, dying, decaying, feeding life, seeding, birth….

:- Doug.

If truth is a thing, then nothing cannot exist for it would not be true. Or is it possible that both exist, say as two sides of the same coin, two contraries that hold each other up?

:- Doug.

When we meet, worlds open out. This is emergence.

:- Doug.

“By virtue of this privilege [of pure relation] formative power belongs to the world of Thou: spirit can penetrate and transform the world of It.” (Martin Buber, I and Thou, p 100) Something emerges from relation: power which forms persons. It is this meeting which gives us the magic and non-magic of emergence. I use Meeting in a precise way: to mean that meeting of which Buber speaks: being to being, I to Thou. Intimacy is involved. Therefore, action is involved: at least acting upon each other: neither is left unchanged. But perhaps the action is upon the world: and the world is met. The world is seen as the whole of being (“the unbroken world of Thou…a life of world solidarity” Buber, same page).

Emergence then looks like magic to the world of It; but to the world of Thou it is not magic because it is what space is made for when relational space is opened.

:- Doug.

Meeting is where all the significant work gets done.

:- Doug.

What you mean when you say something is the “soft” stuff is precisely that it is difficult to do, impossible to get an easy handle for. You cannot manage it because it is not an “It:” this very event happens outside the world of use and control. So you nervously assign it an pejorative label, when you are the one who feels inadequate.

:- Doug.

Poetry is the language of meeting.

:- Doug.

What of emergence? Emergence is simply the work of meeting. We meet. You give up something (shields and holding back, mainly) of yourself, I something of me. We each are enlivened by meeting: that is, we are each changed and there arises something which is beyond us: a being if you will between, and this seems magic. It was inchoate in each of us, as if we had meeting tentacles with pods on the ends, and they became whole only when connected with another person’s pods. So it is something we almost bring to the meeting. It is something we find, create, face in meeting: it is a third entity between. So it is something which carries us out on the wings of that relating. There is something there, something going on. It is not so much noun as verb, not so much thing as movement.

:- Doug.

Life is expensive: in the end it demands all we’ve got.

:- Doug.

Can we carry all being that is in the world? “He who goes out with his whole being to meet his Thou and carries to it all being that is in the world, finds Him who cannot be sought.” (Martin Buber, I and Thou, p 79, italics in original.) When we strip away all desires to see Its and carry only the light-heavy burden of Thou, we meet transformation, life becomes for us alive. Around us those we meet risk coming alive.

:- Doug.