FootprintsintheWind.com

We are seeking what will work, not what is optimal. We are in a supermarket with thousands of choices, thousands of right choices. We are tinkering, making bricolage out of each other. We are finding the raw materials not in me and not in you but between us, and the more people and the more diverse the people, the more betweens. And then the betweens the betweens react, and here may be where we get the unexpected, because we could not see that far. Once-removed interacting.

That might be why it feels uncontrollable, because we cannot control the interacting interactions. That might be why it seems unpredictable in specific result, but why we can predict something will squish out.

:- Doug.

Groundlessness ↔ Vertigo, but also Emergence ↔ Groundlessness.

:- Doug.

So the leader has to be willing to fall into the experience of vertigo when all are engaged.

:- Doug.

Contrast conversation-based meetings to a slide show put on by an expert. In the slide show the interaction is primarily with the expert and her material; any that occurs with a diversity of people is happenstance. The engagement is with one person who by definition goes away after the presentation. Any change introduced into the people is likely to be short-lived because the sand is removed from the oyster.

If we want longer lasting effects, we have to get people together in study groups or task forces and seek to apply it to our real world. Thus we come full circle to actually getting people engaged.

Except there is a difference: we are getting them engaged on something that may have little meaning and impetus in them. Pareto rides again: 20% might be truly excited by the new direction; 80% will not be. But if we have people work on what engages them, then we have the positive side of Pareto.

:- Doug.

With life

:- Doug.

In groups you are forming a larger system—a system of systems. That forces mutual adaptation and emergence of something else as this new system faces outward to its environment.

These systems (people) are forced to adapt to each other and their environment (which is tickled in them as the inviting question). They are turned outward by the inviting question to face their environment and with it react together, interact together, enact together. Little wonder that much innovation “happens” here.

But it does not just happen. It has at least a weak purpose, such as to alleviate an itch or a thorn. It could have a strong purpose, such as to change this aspect of the world. There is intention activated.

So we are bringing systems together to form a larger system to interact with their environmental systems. We are concentrating the experience of contact. Like squeezing an overstuffed sandwich, something is bound to come out. Except that here the things that come out are new, not predictable. We put pickles and ketchup and mustard and tomatoes on, and when we squish we get computers and grass and oinks!

:- Doug.

We’re people creating life creating people creating….

:- Doug.

Self-organizing webs and flows….

:- Doug.

Open Space is time compression—compressing months’ and years’ worth of work into a few days.

:- Doug.

Meet people—make life.

:- Doug.

We do not know how to make emergence happen other than get us together around a live question; but we do make it happen; we draw it forth, with some little purpose.

We want a world of significance; more than that, we want to be significant, to be heard and felt.

We want to mean something. This is our purpose—to mean life, to create life, and we do that by meeting. So meeting is the key to emergence, for we know something is there in the meeting and that something is living roads coming up to meet living feet—people meeting people making life.

:- Doug.

Emergence is not simply a matter of drawing forth worlds, but of drawing forth persons, life a-living, and that is an infinitely larger thing because each of these can draw forth additional living.

:- Doug.

What is emergence? It can be seen as part of this flow and wave. What is emerging is not just what life is or was or had in store for us, but it is a choice, and more than that it is something we bring up to meet us. Our presence is part of the emergence. The road rises up to meet our feet: this is a statement of both physics and cosmology.

:- Doug.

We live the world, the world lives us.

:- Doug.

Walk off a cliff or into a propeller:
The world merely tells us what we cannot do;
What we can do is up to us

:- Doug.

What is the middle way between the chicken and the egg? A chicken omelet?

:- Doug.

It is not about remembering where I was a week or two ago, but going where I need to go today, this moment. Friend, you are where I need to go. You seek my flesh and my flash. Why? For loving, for meeting, for living. We touch. This is the meaning of each by the other. What kind of world do we dare enact? One in which our breath on the gossamer is felt.

This touch changes all.

:- Doug.

What if G*d were the fluid in which we find ourselves, touching us all, and also needing us all—body and spirit, flesh and flash?

:- Doug.

Let live, and live!

:- Doug.

Greediness for life:
The more life the more love
The more life the more there is to love
G*d must be greedy for life
Craving each one of us
& together
The fluid between
Desiring the touch of bodies
As they find each other
The splash

:- Doug.

Our world now seems to be made of particles and waves, depending upon how we look at it in any moment, but given the increase in the rate of change, waves are where to place our bets and attention for the future.

If we see the world as waves in flux, actions rather than things, then we are more able to act within it. We do not control but we do touch.

Then Buber’s Thou is seen as verb in action: no It that is defined once for all and acted upon; rather one to meet who can also meet us, and we become not Its, but Thous acting upon and enacting the world.

What we are after is to make sense of the world, so that we might make sense of our role and our desire to make the world better, so that we do make the world better.

We create the stream by paddling in it.

:- Doug.

The things which are solid—walls and stadiums and trees—are made of atoms, atoms which are shown to be of little whirling incomprehensibles and lots and lots of space. So what we walk upon is like a lattice work, where the lattices are constantly moving, moving like the waves in fluorescent bulbs—too fast for us to catch it.

:- Doug.

Mind acts not so much upon representations of the outside world as upon itself. The work of the brain is to work on the brain. The work of the mind uses mind as the raw material and as product, so it is constantly changing itself. So also: conversation’s raw material and product is conversation; meeting’s is meeting; persons are persons. We are self-organizing systems all, it seems.

So we are not describing worlds as they exist, but creating them as we look. The paths in a college campus are best laid out not by the architects but by the students and professors by using them. So too, the village grows by people putting up buildings, opening marketplaces, inviting people, and the people coming and putting up buildings, opening marketplaces, inviting people, ad infinitum.

Can we then see our task in this?

Can we then see the things we are already doing—insights, glimpses and inklings—less as descriptions and more as invitations?

Could this also apply to all the other things we are doing—taking a shower, getting the mail from the mailbox, chatting about the latest bizarre news?

What are you doing? We are creating new worlds. We are creating new people. How so? The world and its people are less immovable objects and more irresistible forces, and we are all setting those forces into motion each moment. How so? Conversation is the action, the raw material, and the product of this conversation and all the others. When we see what is possible and that we are responsible for what is possible, then we can. Then, hopefully, we do.

:- Doug.