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Archive for Community – Page 2

Love and Conversation

Inspired by our work at the Systems Thinking conference in Seattle earlier this month, popular blogger Dave Pollard posted a thoughtful piece on Love, Conversation and Community in his How to Save the World blog this week. In it, he talks about feminine and masculine world views and corresponding models of conversation:

"When there is love, conversation has purpose, context, engagement, trust (while, without love, conversation is sterile and selfish). The best conversations are in fact a form of play … a form of ‘making love’ — empathetic, collaborative, even erotic. One could even argue that sex is a form of wordless conversation.

The best conversations are also polyamorous (all participants love and trust each other) — this provides safety from hurt and cruelty, and this safety encourages openness, honesty, courage, and true innovation."

Click here to read his whole article.

My Neighbor’s Garden

My retired neighbor Grover’s house on the corner is graced by an abundant vegetable garden. This modest city-sized plot is a scene of endless transformation as he rotates his beds, alternately unloading bags of composted manure, tilling nutrients into the soil, planting seeds, and harvesting their fruit. What an invaluable community resource for gardeners, beauty-lovers, and all those children (and adults!) who don’t yet know the miracle of where food comes from.

Here’s what captured my eye in Grover’s garden on this morning’s beauty walk:

Squash

GiGis in Mill Valley

The GiGis meet again, in Mill Valley this time, to support the world cafe’s emerging online presence.

The GiGis are meeting again, in Mill Valley this time, to nurture and support The World Cafe‘s emerging online presence. As part of our own personal nurturance & support, which we all agree is crucial to our external effectiveness, we created this manada as soon as we woke up this morning…

Gigigoddess

Forgiveness

This is an example of a particularly ‘feminine’ use of technology… taking a ubiquitous marketing tool and through a personal connection with grace & beauty, transforming it into a carrier of light and forgiveness.

A friend of mine’s father just died.

She’d been caring for him for a long time now, and when he passed, she did something beautiful. She transformed her personal grief into collective grace by creating a blessing, an inspired gift (click here for yours – make sure your computer’s sound is on), and sending it out into the world.

This is an example of what I mean when I talk about a particularly
‘feminine’ use of technology…

She’s taken one of those ubiquitous ‘auto-responders’, the latest craze in marketing, and through her own connection with grace &
beauty transformed this mundane tool into a carrier of light, love and forgiveness. Now that seems like something worth marketing.