FootprintsintheWind.com

To our good friends–

I have been wondering: Is there a role for OS in helping a community adopt a complementary currency? Is this too much of an education project, at least at the start?

We are working on this in our South Bend–Michiana–St. Joseph and Marshall County areas in Indiana, and I keep asking myself these questions.

In a big way, there are a lot of questions and a lot of information needs to be assimilated and transferred. On the other hand, there is so much complexity that we could be forever in the What are the possibilities stage and never get to implementation. Implementation is what OST is good at. Also, our committee seems to have decided on a certain model out of many, and it feels a little top-down, a little like there could be more creativity brought to bear if we got more heads and hearts actively involved. OST would bring us that.

Maybe Ted Ernst or Michael Herman would have some experience or ideas that would help.

:- Doug.

How can you live passionately while
filling out your income tax return?
Why do we not live deeply when
driving to work?
Where is real life
if not here?

:- Doug.

We have come to transform
Ourselves!

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

Open Space is a half-way technology. So says Harrison Owen. Half-way to what?

Open Space Technology, The World Café, and the dozens of other meeting formats that have been appearing among humans the last few decades are harbingers of a growing shoot. The growing edge is to see what can be done to improve humanity in a fundamental way. The direction is toward collaboration, or more precisely toward growing us from the fact that there is something larger afoot. That something larger suggests that we are an intricate interwoven pulsating and throbbing one. Or can be.

So we are half-way, perhaps, to developing technologies and sciences that bring us together, foster and grow from conflict, increase diversity and passion, and ensure that each generation following ours is more human than the one before it.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 656

We need to seek a larger vision. We need to take on a larger task. Working to get our food and a fancy new car is not worthy of you. Working to help another is. Working together to help people who are suffering is more so.

What is the largest, most urgent task you see to take care of our humanity? Tell me and I will share it with others.

Please pass it on.

© c 2006, 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

Not will people pay money, but will people find a way to support the central work of humanity?

:- Doug.

Not Whether but How,
Not How but Why.

:- Doug.

At the age we have attained, dare we take a new name for ourselves?

:- Doug

More than the Mystery of Being
is the Mystery of Being Alive.

:- Doug.

What if we spent as much effort and resources as we have spent on conquering space and conquering nature and conquering each other on learning and developing our capacity to interrelate? What advances could we make? What difficulties could we obviate? Whom could we be? What could we learn from life and the true living of it?

What if we saw career as a life of personal and societal development through work? What is our stake in the lives of others? How do we already reassure each other?

:- Doug.

In the midst of all this–
Stillness.

:- Doug.