We're now 2/3 the way through the 12-week MOOC (online course) on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge.
Next week we get into the role of the teacher and the future of
education in an online, connected world, and I'll have a lot to say
about that. But while there has been some discussion about complexity
in this course, we have made little progress in dealing with the
ultimate question that I think this course raises:
In
a world with a billion people online, connected in multiple and
unfathomably complex ways, how do you find, and then connect, with just
the right people to do what you need to do?
Here's a summary of some of the ideas I've written about on this blog about how to do this:
Know yourself well,
so you really know what you're looking for in a partner (in enterprise,
in community, or whatever). You can't find the right people until you
know what you're looking for.
Get attention by saying or doing something important or interesting.
Articulate an unrecognized need or a creative idea or a provocative
possibility or an intriguing offer. Do something bold and imaginative.
Make something truly novel that the world needs (a prototype will do).
This is not easy, but if you can get people's attention, you are more
likely to have the people you need to find, seek you out and connect with you.
Craft an invitation.
Write up something compelling and send it out to as many people as
possible, asking them to forward it to others. The people who accept
your invitation will be the right people.
Get out there and have a lot of conversations and collaborations.
Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince. So
join groups that will expose you to people with common interests, and
converse and work with their members. The more people you talk with,
seriously, about things that matter to you, the more people you are
likely to find who share your passions and your purpose -- the people
you are meant to make a life or a living with, or just work together
with on an important project.
Be loving and generous.
Great collaborations and partnerships have great chemistry. Open
yourself up to that chemistry, and let others know you are open to it.
Be attentive.
The people who can make a difference in your life, on your project, and
in the world are often not the people you would expect. Listen, watch,
feel what's being felt but not said, draw people out.
Seek diversity.
The wisdom of crowds demands diverse perspectives, ideas, ways of
thinking. Echo chambers are terrible places to generate new ideas and
ways of thinking.
Draw on the strength of weak links.
The people you seek may well be two or three degrees of separation from
the people in your immediate networks. Ask the people you know who they
know that fit what you're looking for.
This is a big list, but
it's an unsatisfying one. A lot of people are doing these things, yet
finding people this way still seems very much a hit-and-miss
proposition.
What else do you know that works? How do you find the right people? Where do you look?
Cartoonist
Tom Toles shows us this year's scariest Hallowe'en costume. Thanks to
my daughter Tiffany for the link.
The Power of Place: My friend Amy Lenzo is working on a four-woman
project called The Power of Place with the Collective Wisdom Initiative
to discover 'transformational' meeting places, where collaborative work
just works better.
Bowen Island, which is the first such place that comes to mind for me,
is already on their map. Their plan is to identify the principles and
practices that make such space work (a kind of pattern language
exercise) and then see if they can be extended to create such places
virtually. Brilliant project! If you have thoughts on this, post your comments to CWI. Specifically they want to know:
Where are these meeting places
that have demonstrated their transformational influence?
What are the characteristics and qualities they demonstrate?
How do they contribute to experiences of transformation and
generativity?
What is the potential of transformational meeting places— if
made visible worldwide — collectively committed to service in
the world?
Silence Like Scouring Sand: Also from Orion, Kathleen Dean Moore writes a lovely article on the attempt to make some places free from all human noise. Just listen:
How
shall I describe the beauty of this place? It’s an open glade, like the
nave of a cathedral, carpeted in deep green moss and deer ferns. There
are huckleberry bushes, their bare green branches standing in the rosy
litter of their own fallen leaves. The bunchberry leaves have turned
red, but the wood sorrel is intensely green. From the forest floor, the
columns of the trees rise impossibly high, closing at last in a vaulted
green ceiling. Everything glitters with scattering rain. Even the air
twinkles, as if it were champagne.
And what do I hear? A tiny
lisp—a bushtit maybe. Tick, tap, pock of waterdrops, different sounds
for every surface they strike. I hear a drop of water pop when it hits
a maple leaf forty feet way. There is the faraway rustle of the river.
Time passes, unmeasured. Then the quiet is filled with the clatter of a
bald eagle, a sound like stones shaken in a tin pot. Sitting on his
heels in the damp moss, Gordon grins, but doesn’t speak.
Next to
him, almost hidden under the log, is a small metal canister. This is
the Jar of Quiet Thoughts. Gordon put it here, an invitation to people
who visit One Square Inch to record their responses to the silence. I
open the jar and pull out crumpled scraps of paper. Many wrote of love.
One couple came here to be married, a person came to pray, another
found deep connection here, in the call of a thrush. Others wrote of
wonder, to hear the voices of the deep quiet. I realize that One Square
Inch has become a sacred place—silence has made it so. Quiet is a kind
of reverence.
A small wind shakes a huckleberry bush. A crow
calls from the crown of an alder. A hemlock needle falls on my
shoulder, and I turn, astonished to have heard it land.
...But They Still Don't Get It: Bush economist Greg Mankiw admits that the IMF and other deniers of the possibility of another Great Depression on the horizon
are oblivious to the 1929 patterns forming, and the lessons of history.
I've asserted, for the record, that I think such a depression is still
a couple of decades off, though we're going to have some grim times
ahead before then. What astounds me are the dreamers who still expect
the economy to bottom out, turn around, and resume perpetual growth
imminently.
The Law, American Style: So
let me get this straight: The "tough on crime" Bush administration
supports "three strikes" laws allowing repeat offenders to be
imprisoned for life, and supports capital punishment for a host of
crimes, but if they, in their absolute discretion, decide that
something in the law (like a prohibition on torture or extraordinary
rendition) is not to their liking they just need to write a "signing
statement" exempting themselves from it. So the President, charged with
upholding the law, is above the law, and the constitution doesn't apply
to him. "The Bush administration has informed Congress that it is bypassing a
law intended to forbid political interference with reports to lawmakers
by the Department of Homeland Security." Can someone explain to me why for that reason alone this whole regime is not in jail?
Credit Default Swaps: 55 Trillion Dollar Time Bomb:
Even the head of the SEC says the completely unregulated CDS market has
played a big role in the collapse of financial markets, and could yet undo the trillion dollar patch we've placed on the wound,
unless it's properly regulated, and fast. And even Alan Greenspan is
now basically admitting that "self-regulated" markets are unregulated, rogue markets, a colossal failure of policy and political will, and a catastrophic mistake.
What
is Doubt? Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems
eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily
describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as
do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who's your
best friend? What do you want? Your answers are your current
topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that
face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being
moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation,
fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but
to give way.
I confess that my rambling post
on Monday was my way of thinking through what I wanted to say in this
one. Over the past couple of years, after transforming the way I lived
as a result of my serious illness, I have learned an enormous amount
about myself, and in the process, about other people, about the way the
world really works, and about how we might live and make a living
better. As a consequence, this is who I am, now:
I am, as I have
become fond of saying, a space through which stuff passes. Like all
animals, I am in substance a container, a water-filled bag of
self-organizing, self-managing, interdependent creatures that have
evolved this container as an effective means for their
survival, health, mobility, and comfort. This staggeringly-complex
container, including the brain and senses these creatures evolved as their
feature-detection system, is wonderful, and it brings them great joy. I
am happy for them, and honoured to represent them to the rest of the
world. They are very clever, these creatures who constantly tell 'me'
what to do. They have a million years of knowledge in their DNA, and
they are almost invariably right in the billions of decisions they make
for me. This despite the fact that the unnatural world that has evolved
in the last few millennia is utterly different from the world their
knowledge is adapted to, so they need to be improvisational as well as
instinctive. And they are.
What they tell me to do, most of the
time, is engage in nine activities that suit their purposes, allow me
to coexist with other humans in this terribly overcrowded and
overstressed world, and amuse me in the process. I told you they were
clever! These nine activities:
playing
learning
loving
conversing
giving (ideas, knowledge, competencies)
self-managing
being present
writing
reflecting
I
used to do these and other things with specific goals and intentions in
mind, but I've come to realize that I do best when I let go of outcomes
and just focus on practicing these nine things, making time and space
for them, getting a little better all the time -- and when I do, the
right outcomes seem to emerge automatically. So now I spend most of my
waking hours practicing these things. This is what I do.
In
spending my life doing these things, I have grown astonishingly and
almost continuously happy. After fifty years mostly filled with anxiety
and depression, I am lighter than air, filled with joy every day. I am
becoming, inexorably, what I was always meant to be, and it is a
wonderful journey. The grief I feel for Gaia is always with me, a part
of me, but now it is my strength, my connection, my understanding, and
it no longer saps me. I know I cannot save the world from the dreadful
extinction that's begun, yet I know that what I do, now, is making a
positive difference, and has made and will make the world a better
place. It's all I can do, and I'm proud of it, and of me.
I have developed a consistent approach to doing all of these things, that seems to make me a better practitioner of them:
Sense:
Observe, listen,
pay attention, focus, open up your senses, perceive everything that has
a bearing on the issue at hand. Connect.
Self-control:
Don't prejudge or jump to conclusions. Don't lose your cool. Focus.
Understand:
Make sure you have
the facts and appreciate the context. Things are the way they are for a
reason. Know what that reason is. Sympathize.
Question:
Ask, don't tell. Challenge. Think critically.
Imagine:
Picture, hear, feel what could be. Be visionary. Every problem is an opportunity. Anything is possible.
Offer:
Consider. Give something away. Create options, new avenues to explore. Suggest possibilities. Lend a hand. Help.
Collaborate:
Create something
together. Solve a problem with a collective answer better than any set
of individual answers. Learn to yield, to build on, to bridge, to adapt
your thinking.
My
"sweet spot", what I do uniquely well and love doing which is of use to
others, is to facilitate self-understanding and self-change, in myself
and others, by imagining possibilities. Imagining possibilities greatly
enriches the quality and pleasure of all nine of the things I do. What
is then done with those possibilities is not of great concern to me --
I'm an idealist, not a realist, and I'm not very practical, coordinated
or good with details. I'm a dreamer, which can be a problem. I've been
known to walk into trees.
I'm also somewhat self-preoccupied. I
love to love, and be in love, and give things to people, and play, and
converse, and these are very social activities, but I confess they're
very selfish. Being loved, being understood, having the things I give
to people appreciated, are not really important to me at all. If the
people I love and converse with and play with don't get what they want
from interaction with me, then that's fine, I will find others to be
with, no problem, and I hope they find what they seek from others, too.
I'm like a child, impatient, easily distracted. Love (all five types of
it) is the addiction the creatures who make up 'me' have chosen to give
me -- there is never too much of that exquisite chemical rush of
arousal, euphoria, bliss, affection, delight, pleasure and
appreciation. Yet strangely, for reasons that I can't fathom, I don't
really like people that much
-- given a choice, I generally and consistently prefer the company of
wilder creatures. The truth is I love the people I imagine those I love
to be, not who they really are (if I could ever know who they really
are). Yet those I love rarely disappoint me as I learn more about them
-- my ability to imagine them as more lovable still is limitless and
incorrigible.
I do have a problem with neediness. Although no
one believes me when I say it, I don't think I have any (one-on-one
social) needs myself. And for whatever reason, I tend to disengage when
I am with others who profess or appear to need something from me
personally. Call it a fear of intimacy or commitment or responsibility,
it is what it is. I don't want to be needed; it makes me feel trapped.
I have to be free. Perhaps it's because I'm working hard to become more
authentically myself, to be nobody-but-myself, so that when someone
needs or expects something from me I fear they'll make me
everybody-else in the process of being what they need or expect me to
be. I try to warn people about this (I tell them I am polyamorous, and
lazy, explain about compersion, and warn them of my selfishness and
insensitivity and intolerance of neediness and expectation) but I still
end up hurting people, which does make me unhappy. I try to be
absolutely honest and yet gentle with others, and I have no tolerance
for dishonest or cruel people. Maybe I need to wear a sign.
That's
not to say that I don't need other people in order to be healthy and
happy and to do many of the nine things I do. I just don't need any specific
person to do these things. The more people I love, talk with, and am in
community with, the happier and more social I become. I like to spread
myself around, probably too thin for others' benefit, but then I
already admitted I'm selfish. That doesn't prevent me from being
generous, but only if you don't need or expect it of me. Let's play,
talk, learn, share, love together, but then let me go and I'll let you
go. I'll see you again when our paths next cross, and we can do it all
again. And I need time alone, too, to reflect and recharge, and time in
nature, away from the cities and suburbs and farms that become each day
more alien and atrocious to me.
Last month I wrote:
I am just the space through which stuff passes, a part of the unfathomably complex dance of all-life-on-Earth. A part of that dance, it seems to me, is learning to improvise which of that passing-through stuff to touch, and which to just let go.
It's not a choice, so much as a knowing, a collective and connected
knowing, an instinctive and sensual knowing. "Ah, I know how I can make
this better, or clearer, or more interesting, or more useful, or more innovative, or more fun -- there!" Like the expert who just knows, from practice, where the puck or ball is going to be, I'm learning, perpetually, to be there, to do that stuff I do that helps just a little bit, to know what to do and to have fun doing it.
The
wild creatures whose world I increasingly share understand this well,
and it will take a lifetime of practice to become half as wise as they
are in the arts of living, and making a living, and being of use, and
being happy, without even trying. Just being the space, and touching
the right stuff in just the right way as it passes through.
Last year I wrote a 2-part article on The Chemistry of Love.
It describes (a) the four self-reinforcing chemicals that make us "fall
in love" emotionally (phenylethylamine, dopamine, norepinephrine* and
oxytocin), (b) the chemicals that produce erotic feelings (testosterone
and estrogens), and (c) the "attachment" chemicals that keep us
attracted to love partners after the "falling in love" chemicals wear
off (endorphins).
For most creatures, including humans, nature
cycles us through these chemicals to encourage us to procreate
regularly, responsibly, and (to encourage diversity of the gene pool)
polyamorously. The cycle lasts approximately four years:
the
"falling in love" hormones are secreted at the start of this cycle, and
they endure only long enough to maximize the probability of procreation
(any longer than that and they would detract from our paying attention
to the needs of the community)
the erotic hormones are synchronized to the reproductive cycle of the lovers, to maximize the probability of conception
as
the effect of the "falling in love" hormones naturally wears off,
endorphins (opiates) are produced to replace them, as the ecstasy of
early love is replaced by the attachment drug, to encourage temporary
pair-bonding for the benefit of the young offspring
for the
normal four-year breast-feeding cycle of the young, the mother produces
hormones that prevent pregnancy and increase attachment to the child
at
the end of the four-year cycle, as the young are weaned and able to
walk on their own, the endorphins wear off, and the cycle begins again,
with attraction to new and different lovers (this is probably why four
years after marriage is when divorce peaks)
In other words, we
are "programmed" by our bodies to fall hopelessly in love approximately
every four years, with multiple and diverse partners, and, if that
falling in love produces offspring, to hone in on a partner-bond (not
necessarily between the parents of the child, which indigenous humans
would not be able to identify in any case) until the end of that
four-year cycle, and then to break that partner-bond and start over
again with a new round of falling in love.
Our bodies do this
"programming" to us because this is the most successful formula for
creating healthy and enduring communities, in balance with
all-life-on-Earth. It has taken them a long time to evolve this
formula. Living organisms, humans included (as Stewart & Cohen have
explained),
are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies
organized for their mutual benefit. And our brains, our intelligence,
awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an
evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise
these creatures' actions for their
mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our
neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
Our
bodies self-manage (or, if you prefer, control 'us') through two
complex networks: nervous (electromagnetic) and endocrine (hormonal).
The two networks have co-evolved to deal with different challenges and
needs. Both networks are excellent learners. Throughout the body,
especially in the brain and digestive system, the two have learned to
work together very effectively. As a consequence of mutually-beneficial
communication and collaboration, most species have developed cultures -- sets of agreed-upon shared beliefs and behaviours.
If you think erotic love is all about sex, you're mistaken. The term is
taken from the god Eros, and he wasn't (originally) the god of sensual
love. He was the god of playful
love. This past weekend, as I went for a long walk in the woods in the
autumn sunshine, the love I felt for Gaia was pure eroticism. Watching
the wild birds soar, feeling the bark of the trees and the wind,
running through the leaves and into a strand of forest so thick that no
sun reached its floor. I've had the same feeling flirting, or playing
outside in the rain, or in clever, playful banter with dear friends of
both genders. No question in my mind that the rush of testosterone
imbues each of these arousing experiences with love and delight. And
the best sex (whether with or without a partner) is likewise, I think,
joyful, light, unhurried and playful. So much of the sex that is
depicted in stories and films strikes me by contrast as desperate,
cathartic, escapist, even violent. Not playful, or erotic, at all. Like
the difference between a sip of a fine wine and the addict's quivering
injection of enough narcotic to stem the pain and anxiety of withdrawal.
As
I teased out the subtlety of erotic love, and realized it was more (and
more complex) than I had thought, I began to think about whether
intellectual, sensual and aesthetic love might, similarly, be more
complex. Can they be teased apart from the emotional love that the
potent chemical cocktail I described earlier provokes?
To take
an example from public consciousness, I will confess to a certain
infatuation with the artistry of both Sarah Polley and Johnny Depp. I
find both actors beautiful. I am irresistibly drawn to people who are
very intelligent (without being arrogant about it), people who are very
talented, and people who are very passionate (in an un-needy,
independent way). Both actors strike me as having these qualities, and
both have a huge fan base who would probably say they 'love' them.
What
is the chemistry here? I think the aesthetic love, the love of beauty,
is the same, and probably stems from the same chemical stirrings, as
the love one feels for one's favourite music, poetry or other works of
art. Being emotionally "in love" certainly intensifies aesthetic
appreciation (when it doesn't completely distract from it), but I
believe they are two different types of love with different chemical
catalysts.
Intellectual love, likewise, I think, is something
apart from these other loves. The spark of imagining, creating,
appreciating an idea or argument or learning or having an aha!
realization creates a delight that is quite different from that of
falling in love or appreciating beauty. It is, I think, a form of
pattern creation or pattern recognition that fires the synapses of the
brain, and hence might be more a chemistry of the nervous system than
the endocrine. Learning brings joy and a chemical reward for the same
reason we feel elation when we fall in love or recognize beauty --
because our bodies want to reinforce that behaviour for Darwinian,
survival advantage. We love learning and ideas because they are good
for us.
And finally, I suspect that sensual love, teased apart
from the aesthetic, emotional, intellectual and erotic, is also
chemically induced and a reward for behaviour our bodies want to
reinforce. Pleasant tastes and smells, especially, tickle our 'taste
buds' but I am sure also provoke a neural message that says "yes,
please, more of this".
No question that, in this chemical
soup, the different forms of love are conflated, merge into one in our
romantic consciousness, and reinforce each other. But they are,
nevertheless, the result of different chemical reactions and can exist
in isolation.
The reason for our catastrophic population explosion is simply that (1)
we acquired technology that allowed us to keep babies alive without
mother's milk (and hence accelerate the renewed fertility of mothers
after childbirth), and (2) we acquired technology that allowed us to
kill off our natural predators and diseases, which would in a healthy
system kill off enough of us, mostly painlessly, to keep our numbers in
balance and cull out the weak. In so doing, we screwed up a million
years of effective evolutionary development in a mere thirty thousand
years, and as a consequence have precipitated the sixth great
extinction event in our planet's known history, including our own
extinction. Oops.
Unfortunately, as our species began to overpopulate and desolate the Earth, we had to evolve a new
culture, the stress-responsive, hierarchical, constraining,
passive-consumer culture we call 'civilization'. Without these cultural
constraints -- this obedience to hierarchy, this managed scarcity, and
this becoming-everybody-else conformity -- we could not live together
under such horrifically crowded, constantly struggling, unhappy
circumstances. There is now a war of wills going on inside us --
between the will of our body, to do what it has been programmed to do
over a million years of constant learning, and the will of our culture,
to do what we must do just to survive in our terrible modern and
unsustainable world. There is no reconciling the two, which is why we
are so ill with the symptoms of this war -- chronic diseases caused by
chronic modern stress our body is not equipped to cope with, and the
mental illness that plagues every creature denied the freedom to be
nobody-but-herself.
This is who we are -- a joyous complicity of
the creatures in our bodies, now wracked with the stress of having to
be everybody-else, of having forgotten who we are and where we belong
and how we are a part of all-life-on-Earth, connected.
And still
we are driven by the beat of that ancient drum to fall in love, anew,
every four years a new beginning, a new ecstasy, that bliss, that
desire, that spasm of pure joy that eclipses so briefly all the grief
and loss and sorrow and anger and shame we feel.
It is all we can do.
* incorrectly spelled as neopinephrine in the earlier articles
Photo: Colleen's dog, just because just looking at him makes me smile.
What Moves the Artist: Most of my circles, and my readers, are artists in one way or another, so I was intrigued by Malcolm Gladwell's portrait of two forms of artistic genius -- the conceptual prodigy (e.g. Picasso), who peaks early, and cares about outcome, versus the experimenting slogger (e.g. Cézanne), who peaks late, and is preoccupied by learning and process. TS Eliot, my favourite poet, made the transition, and though Prufrock (written at age 23) is his most loved work, the Four Quartets (written a quarter century later) is, in my opinion, far more accomplished. In a piece a couple of weeks ago PS Pirro wrote
"I visualize the end product, but not the daily process. That's my
error. Because one page at a time, one sentence at a time, it's the
doing that matters. What's done is just... done." I am like her -- I
have tried to make the transition from the flashes of brilliance in my young writing (with much inactivity and some ghastly and embarrassing stuff in between) to the more careful, studied work I do today. My great learning from Bowen Island was: There is only the practice.
The genius of the prodigy is electric, inspiring, lyrical,
transformative, but the genius of the patient and present practitioner
is ultimately more connective, recognizable, and even (I suppose I
should say this with an apologetic shrug) -- useful.
The Real Battle for American Hearts and Minds: The anonymous political pundit who guest-posts on Joe Bageant's blog has another brilliant analysis of what's happening in the 'heartland'. Excerpts:
The primary motivating factor in the development of the religious right
is a defensive response to the challenges posed by the power of popular
consumer and entertainment culture and not a backlash against
progressive or liberal ideas and social movements...
When it comes to predicting the outcome of this struggle, there
should be no doubt which side will ultimately prevail in this fight.
Religious fundamentalism here and abroad is no match for the powers
of popular, consumer and entertainment culture. The reason for that is
very simple: popular consumer culture is the most powerful and
attractive ideology in human history.[Unlike all other religions and ideologies] it demands no sacrifice from its
faithful. It demands only that you purchase and consume and that you become
passively entertained...
If progressives are serious about winning victories that can realign
our politics, they must find a way to marry the legitimate criticism of
the decadence of popular culture with criticism of the decadence of an
economic system that creates the savage inequalities we see in America
today. Once that is done, the entire project of the right collapses
under the weight of its own contradictions.
Winged Pilgrimage: Cassandra writes rhapsodically about the annual migration of the snow geese and asks whether our pilgrimages might have been inspired by our observation of birds,
the dinosaurs' flying descendants. I think it is entirely possible.
Having made two pilgrimages this year, on the heels of saying I would
trade places with a chickadee in a heartbeat, I think what we must
realize is that for most birds migration is not an automatic instinct,
it is a choice, a decision that flight to another climate is worth the
many dangers that flight brings with it. Migration is a conscious
movement, one dictated by necessity and the drive to survive. Our own
pilgrimages are no less so. Excerpt:
My
own inarticulateness, in the face of the emotions the geese arouse in
me, tells me I'm in the place that contains fire and the great
waterfalls; the sound of the hermit thrush and the flash of a school of
bright minnows; a silent shaft of sun on moss in a dark woodland. The
snow geese fly in that space of porosity between myself and the rest of
nature, following a map imprinted in my own marrow, a route stretching
forward beyond language, and back to a time before tongues.
And Wheeled Pilgrimage:
Cheryl is chronicling her amazing pilgrimage around the perimeter of
Australia with pictures and stories of the people she's meeting and the
astonishingly beautiful places she's discovering. If you've never been
to Australia, reading this blog will give you a flavour for life "down under".
Stories of Transformation: Jen points us to a remarkable TED talk about Stories of Transformation, by Chris Abani,
that shows us why stories are so powerful and illuminating. In one
story he explains how his mother broke down when a Portuguese woman at
an airport where Chris' family was fleeing the horrors and atrocities
of the Biafran war, emptied her suitcase to give her and her family
everything she had packed, to help them begin to rebuild their lives.
Her explanation for this breakdown after stoically coping with all the
outrages and terrors of war:
You
can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror,
but a simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you.
Just for Fun:Taller Than Trees, a delightful stop motion animation short by Joseph Mann. Thanks to Our Descent for the link. And in a sillier vein, Beth Patterson points us to Palin as President (click on the items in the oval office and make sure you have sound on).
Thought for the Week: Forget
What "Is" (and What Is Wrong) Now and What/Who Caused It, and Just
Start Over: From Jack Martin Leith, commenting to Geoff Brown and
expanding upon Peter Block's argument that we need to stop looking at
things as problems to be 'fixed' (and people as their 'cause') and start over with a fresh sheet of paper looking at what we want to create now (not solutions, not future state, not incremental approaches):
Solutions imply problems, in the way that yes implies no and day
implies night. It’s not a shift from problems to solutions we need, but from
problem solving to creating what we want - and making what we want
not our desired future, but our desired present.
People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I connect with in real time, f2f, via IM, Skype or SL chat.]
- original research,surveys etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
- benchmarks,quantitative analysis
- personal stories,experiences,lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight:leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant "aha" graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content
Blog writers
want to see more:
- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs
We're now 2/3 the way through the 12-week 
My book is available to US buyers
from the 
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
