Unconditioned Love
It’s not unconditional love i yearn for, it’s unconditioned love. Love without objects. Love that arises sublimely from the very process of being alive. While we may strive for unconditional love, it is an ideal we can no more than aspire to until we have faced our own conditioning. And that can be the work of a lifetime. Finding and then facing our conditioning takes courage and devotion. How can i love you unconditionally, without projecting any of my shadows or demons or angels onto you unless i have become intimate with them? Unless i know them in every dimension? Until i...
Read MoreWork and Meaning
There is an awful lot being written about how to make a living doing what you love. There appears, in fact, to be an entire industry being spawned around facilitating, teaching, and coaching the depressed and often despairing masses how to do just that. (And yes, I too have my own offering around it.), Now, I’m all for spending the time and effort to discern what our gifts are and then figuring out how we can ensure we are giving them to world in the best way we can. But I feel I need to speak up and put out a slightly dissenting viewpoint. I’m going to state my position, and...
Read MoreThe Edge
Early morning walk by the sea. In the footprints of those who went down to the water before me. A young deer, raccoons—mother and child, a man—by the size and depth of the print.Following the deer track; a wandering sine wave over sand and shingle. Crab tracks. Tiny paired pinches over the ripples made by waves. The surf flowing over and swirling around my calves. I feel the tug and pull of the sea. A gentle lure, here at the shallow edge of vastness. My mind bites the bait, swallowing down more than I want. Imagination diving far out—whales move out there, the unspeakable depths of the...
Read MoreVital skill for leading into our future
(Originally posted June 2009 on wordgravity) I am a long time member of the Open Space Listserve. There are a lot of amazing folks and deep thinkers over there. Today my dear friend and OS colleague, Doug Germann, posted this quote: It is their presence in the whole, and the fact that they are helping the life of the whole, which gives them their individual life….Italics in original. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life, p 431 Doug followed that up with his own observations and one...
Read MoreChange is Dead
What?!? I hear you say. Change is dead? But isn’t everybody talking about the pace of change, change management, how to be more resilient in the face of change? And the Buddhists in the group are going, but, everything is change, change is all. Yep. And that’s the point actually. The problem, as i see it, is that the word, change, has gathered to itself a terrible gravity and that is creating a damaging and painful illusion. Many people, if we’re being honest about it, see change as what happens between the disruption of one status quo state and the emergence of...
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