FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 769

All we have is slight changes. From here we move worlds. If you change your trajectory by one ten-billionth of a degree, you land upon a different star.

Please pass it on.

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We are admonished, and rightly, to get beyond dualism: them/us; good/bad; war/peace; rich/poor; and on. Less recognized are the dualisms inner/outer, subjective/objective, inside me/out in the world; even me/you. If we get beyond, what then? What if there were not just in here and out there, but in between? What if there were only in between, and the rest just aspects of the between?

:- Doug.

In conversation we discover other people. Sometimes they are us.

:- Doug.

What distinguishes debate and selling from conversation is people choosing to stretch and be stretched.

:- Doug.

This morning I read something about the truth and reconciliation commissions around the world and wondered if that might be an alternative in Iraq. We think we have two options: more guns or leave. Truth and reconciliation might require something that is not present: a desire for reconciliation, but the thought of how that has worked in other tough places might give us pause to consider third alternatives. Another: how about if we get someone from Northern Ireland to go to Iraq to talk with the dissidents? Might there be some reason brought into the mix? How about instead of either going in with guns blazing or running away, we walked into the fire with some other approach? If we see the options as only these two, we have a failure of imagination. We have also given up…whatever is our real power and opportunity. Who are we: the jack-boots? Or inviters of something higher and better?

Could truth and reconciliation commissions work in Iraq? The specific answer matters little. What the question suggests is that our approach puts blinders on us for other approaches. Let us open our eyes. Let us try something else, since this is not working. There is hope.

:- Doug.