From Negotiation to Dialogue

From negotiation to dialogue we move from scarcity to gift. Quantities are not affected, at least not over short spans – in the long run scarcity negotiations drive us to collapse and the Gift maintains and develops creation while filling innumerable niches to bring forth abundance. Technology is firmly within the realm of negotiation. Craft

Compassion, the distance between Dialogue and Negotiation

Dialogue, negotiation, both sound reasonable enough! We can glaze over any differences and use them as synonyms, right? That’s how power insinuates its way into every relationship. In the wink and nod, in a silent conspiracy to agree not to say what we mean, to hide away our agendas and bask in the glow of

A Ramble on Negotiations with the Self

Wholeheartedness: Bohm’s Creativity is the process by which we engage with our selves and the world.

Investing in Trust

Investment is generally taken to mean following a strategy that allows us to siphon off value. A way of taking value from a living system and turning it into a quantity of abstract financial counters that we can then hold so as to use these at will to gain advantage. We strip a living web

Navigating Quality

We’re inundated with arguments and counterarguments over what are considered facts and counter-facts. There is a scramble to create ever-larger data-farms to handle…, well, all the data. There’s also been a curious turn of phrase used by one buffoon, George Will to describe another, Donald Trump. Will has claimed that “Trump doesn’t know how to

On Isolation

Isolation. I wrote about it here. * Lewis Lapham has had a seminal influence on me. he’s always been a writer pursuing what lies beyond the superficial. I read Harper’s religiously when I was young, amazed at how anyone could see so clearly, write so well…. His recent remarks remind us of the birth of

Learning how to see

If we have relatively good eyesight it’s easy to think that’s all we need, “I know how to see! Just open my eyes and look!” One of the first lessons from learning to draw and paint was that I had no idea what was involved in seeing. Not just that I was lacking techniques useful

Out of the Depth of Our Numbness

Once we begin to recognize what it feels like to be alive it can still be a shock to acknowledge how much of our lives is spent in circumstances that are dead and threaten to engulf us once again in the numbness we’ve just begun to leave behind. But, if we fail to let this

On Form

There’s a connection and relationship between the way we internalize honesty/deception and how we relate to form. Form is the means by which error is recognized and the means by which correctness is recognized. There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of

What is at the root of our crisis of leadership?

We expect a leader to “play the part.” Anyone caught-up in roles has nothing to offer us in our predicament. Facing our predicament requires that we embrace uncertainty and set-aside the doing-things-twice role playing forces upon us. Someone acting in this way just does not, “Look like a leader.”

Approaching Conscience?

Perhaps a way to shed light on where this track is heading is to introduce conscience. We think of conscience as the internal touchstone for an externally directed morality. There is a superstructure of Good & Evil and conscience is where this battle is joined inside each of us. This conception of conscience covers any

It’s Learning…

It is learning! Once we stop thinking of learning as the product of teaching, as an accumulation of knowledge, data, information; we can begin to look at what it is. Learning is how we remain open in the face of conditioning. It involves deciding without making judgments – to mangle Alan Watts.