Category: Edited

OK, so this entire email from Tom Atlee has been sitting in my inbox for a bit — I keep coming back to it and forwarding it to others.

Check these out — just because they are brilliant. Thanks again, Tom.

This is, for me, the most inspiring TED Talk I’ve ever seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CLJwYW6-Ao
Silver Donald Cameron – Bhutan: The Pursuit of Gross National Happiness

And here are a film and a book that expand and deepen the view that economics can and should be about generating good lives in a good society in a good world – in ways that speak to the cultures, realities and daily lives that most of us live in.

The film is the upcoming movie “Money and Life”
http://moneyandlifemovie.com/wp/
– see especially the “extended trailer”, clip #2 at the bottom of the page

The book is “Sacred Economics” by Charles Eisenstein,
http://charleseisenstein.com/
for me the most significant book I’ve read in a decade,
about which I’ll have more to say later
but you can read a preview article at
http://www.countercurrents.org/eisenstein250410.htm

Finally, I offer this as a good closing poem for this email:
http://drewdellinger.org/pages/video/282/drew-dellinger-poem-planetize-the-movement.

Appreciating some learning stirred by my friend Jerry Nagel in Minnesota. Ever since meeting Jerry four or fives years ago, I’ve appreciated his commitment to understanding worldviews. He has a great intellectual curiosity, an ability to apply with practicality, and a realness that makes him really approachable.

Jerry is doing a TEDx Talk on world views. He offers some thoughts that I appreciate on when we get into trouble with world views: 1) when we make assumptions about others without being aware of why we make those assumptions, and 2) when we try to impose our worldview on others.

Jerry helps me to imagine an exercise that I’d like to create and try. It would be inviting, perhaps in the form of a cafe, some understanding on what our world views are. I can imagine it starting with some introduction. And then this doorway into world views: “What is it that you believe that we all know about leadership?” What “we all know,” along with the stories that go with it, would tease out some of that awareness and imposition aha that Jerry speaks of.

Could be on leadership. Could be on the broader concept of being human. Or about a specific project depending on the group of people.

I realize I come at it from this perspective of curiosity:
-Wow, another human — what kind of human are you?
-I bet as a human you have a few interesting experiences and world views?
-Here’s the kicker, sometimes it is only in the context of social interaction that we can become more aware of those views.

Cools stuff that has me excited. Thanks Jerry.

 

I received an email from my friend Tom Atlee this morning. As he often does, he included several valuable and helpful resources. This time, focused on economics.

I watched this TED Talk featuring Silver Donald Cameron. He is speaking about Bhutan: The Pursuit of Gross National Happiness. Tome describes it as the best TED Talk he has ever seen.

There is much in this for me. It has me thinking of another friend and colleague, Linda Wheatley, who offers a lot of her attention to GNH. And the story itself is inspiring. Much on what is possible from premises not so absorbed in growth.

Enjoy.

More on clear principles that my friend Helen Titchen Beeth shared recently on the Art of Hosting list-serve.

My experiences is that when these kind of principles are created together in a well-held social process, they transition from just words to activated energetic centers. A difference that comes to mind is that “just words” (though usually very lovely maxims) need a lot of push behind them to keep them alive. A kind of rote memorization to perpetuate more of their life. Whereas, “activated energetic centers” have a sustaining life of there own. A kind of imprinting and embodiment in the gut. I suppose in older terms, the activated energy is a deep level of buy-in.

In a very different context, here are the principles developed by the Elise core team that hosted Interinstitutional Workshops for translators to raise awareness of a communication tool for translators, in the context of translating EU legislation into 23 languages – a mammoth task that involves the European Commission, the EU Council and the European Parliament, and more thousands of translators than I care to contemplate…

“Our principles speak of the way we wish to work together.

•Our relationship is based on trust
•We sense, then we act, then we sense, then we act… When we don’t know what to do, we stop and sense until the next step becomes clear (OK, we might have a little panic, first… )
•Awareness is important: we pay attention to each other and to the process
•We trust each other to act when needed
•We pay attention to what is in the centre
•We have fun together, doing challenging, meaningful work
•Our mandate is to succeed, and we do whatever it takes
•We have a clear goal that makes sense to us
•We interact: we work together, we take each other’s advice, we are peers
•We are flexible and we support each other to become ever more flexible”