Fear is a subtle way of living less. When we act from fear, no matter how rational or well intended, we invite more fear and push away our dreams in the meantime. To love life is to live fearlessly.

In the deficiency perspective, we fear a life without fear. We fear certain recklessness but in fact, fearlessness give us a clarity and openness of heart that only makes us more alive and more caring than ever.

Virgina Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies suggests that people interact along a continuum between dynamism and stasism - people who thrive on change and learning and people who thrive on predictability and repetition.

I’m now seeing a new hybrid in the civic space, pseudo-dynamists. These are people calling for new projects and changes that further strengthen the status quo. Examples: industrial age convention centers, agrarian public hearing events, and stone age economic protectionist policies.

Michael commented on my recent post where I suggested that we see most clearly what we are most happy with.

My comment comes from the zen perspective that the essential nature of all things is happiness and that to see clearly is to see just that. As my zen teachers would say, we think we’re seeing clearly when we’re unhappy, but we’re not. Unhappiness is always a lie. Unclear seeing, in this sense, is to see the world otherwise, which is the source of unhappiness. Happiness is the evidence of clear seeing.

Love, allowing the other to be a legitimate other, is the only emotion that expands intelligence. / Humerto Maturana

We see most clearly what we are most happy with.

For some people here in the states, today is the best holiday because it’s simply about gathering, feasting, and storytelling. It’s the celebration of this sacred trinity that sustains us.

This was in the signature from an email I got today: What does your “way” move you towards? It’s a brilliantly inspiring question.

The majority the US now believes the new administration will further divide the country. It’s a call for healers and facilitators to get mobilized. We need to start visualizing the kind of dialogue that joins people in common purpose at local levels under the radar of greatest political divisiveness.

In a meeting last week someone recanted the phrase suggesting that we’re only as strong as our weakest link.

I was not present at the conception of this wearisome saw, but suspect it was in the context of linear heirarchies where in fact single “weak” links can break chains the size of the planet’s diameter. That was before the advent of social network wisdom reminding us that in non-linear networks, redundant and complex interdependencies make weaknesses less relevant and impactful. In distributed networks, we’re as strong as our strongest links!

I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny invisible loving human forces that work from the individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride. / William James