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

William James

So much of the mainstream media serves us the frontstory without a backstory. Absent context, we are tempted into generalizations.

One story on one dangerous dog leads to generalized fears about trends neither confirmed nor unconfirmed. With a backstory, the dog becomes just one dog, with a more finite future and innocent dogs for miles would be spared the misfortunate miscasting in the shadows of poor and unrepresentative media samples.

This is one of the potential values of blogs, their power in providing backstory contexts for more intelligent and often appreciative views of our worlds.

Tiny sparrows bounce and twitter,
along winter sidewalks,
clearly aware of more than they let on.

There is a difference between thinking together and thinking alike. The intention to think alike can get in the way of thinking together. Conflict lies in the domain of needing to think alike more than in thinking together because in thinking together our shared purpose is exploration, inquiry, and discovery. Thinking differently from each other is a possibility received because we’re equally open to even thinking differently from ourselves.

I had a beautiful reminder yesterday by friend Jack Hunt about the original meaning of sin. It wasn’t about the child’s disobedience, disloyalty, or disappointment with the parent.

The original notion of sin was despair. Despair is the intentional abandonment of attention to life-giving possibilities. To regain oneness with our infinite nature, to live without sin, is to reclaim our capacity for realizing life-giving possibilities.

G and I had a fabulous breakfast with friend and thought partner Ed Morrison this morning, chatting and plotting how to blend our models of building communities and economies at macro and micro scales. One of Ed’s quotes: “The capacity to innovate depends on the quality of our civic conversations.”

In the old model, we thought innovation was all about following the money. Look at where money is and where it’s heading and you had some sense, supposedly, of where the next new things were expected to emerge. In the new model, it’s about following the conversations. What’s interesting is that this is the way it’s always been. The innovations from the humble labs and garages of the Edison’s, Sony’s, Disney’s, Gates’, Jobs’, not to mention all great art and art movements came from conversations. In every case, currency follows conversation.