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Not Knowing

|Photo by Sam Ilic|http://www.flickr.com/photos/stage88/3650502444|

I shared the following Wislawa Szymborska poem with faculty in an academic department at a university with whom I was working this week.  We read it as we were about to launch our final day of discussions about collaborative leadership and team building.

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Staying to Create Change

|World of Oddy|http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldofoddy/146446352/sizes/s/|

I wanted to share this link to a short discussion by Pema Chödrön about the importance of staying with the hard stuff – not the story we create about a situation, but the underlying feeling itself – to create change. This follows along with previous posts I’ve made about the importance of “staying” – with conflict, in situations of privilege. The message being the same – the importance of learning to stay!  And so I wonder how this applies to organizations and movements.  I hear it this way – rather than trying to fix a situation too quickly, stay with it, learn about it, learn to live with the tension while we look for ways to create change.  What do you think?

Is Social Media a Responsibility?

Are you amazing?  Are you one of those people who are working to define the next phase of movement?  Are you connected to a crew of local organizers, activists, innovators, dreamers?  If you are an amazing movement builder then I want to be able to follow you on Twitter and I want to be your Facebook friend.

I find myself travelling from place to place and meeting some truly amazing people, I keep getting hip to really interesting projects and innovative approaches to the work of social change.  I’m connecting to my tribe; I’m getting to know the people who are actively redefining the way we do social change.  Here is the problem though – I can’t keep up with all of them!  And here is where I notice an important distinction.  When these people are using social media tools I can at least have a sense of what they are up to, I can get a glimpse of how their work evolves – but if they are not, then I’m left with hearsay. Read More

Man Up for Change

With Father’s Day around the corner, my thoughts are focused on what it means to be a good father and a good man in this world.  For those who have not yet heard, The Good Men Project has created a rich forum for these questions and has just launched a magazine delving into issues such as men’s health, relationships, sexuality, ethics, and boys/adolescence.  From what I’ve seen so far, I appreciate the initiative’s willingness to go broad in eliciting a diversity of stories and perspectives.  Furthermore, The Good Men Foundation has dedicated itself to helping organizations and efforts that provide educational, social, financial, and legal support to men and boys at risk.

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Sufficiency

There’s something about the word and notion of “sufficiency” that I love.  Years ago, while living in France, I learned to enjoy the way the words “ça suffit” roll off the tongue.  The term and idea resurfaced for me recently when I learned about the Third Annual Global Sufficiency Summit that was held here in Cambridge, MA in April.  It has come up again while reading the newest book by Wayne Muller, whose writings were a helpful guide to me during my time in graduate school.  Muller’s A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough focuses squarely on the question of how we go about determining what is sufficient in different areas of our lives.   He suggests that our failure to consider or know how to address this question has contributed to putting us in individual and collective dire straits.

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