orchestrating collaboration; highway home

global weirding and peak everything

I can always count on Steve to forward a cheery observation by James Kunstler:

A catastrophe for Iowa farmers will not be just a catastrophe for Midwestern Americans. In the Iowa floods, we’ll see more evidence of how the problems of weird weather (climate change) combine and ramify the problems associated with peak oil. In this particular case they lead to an inflection point sometime around the 2008 harvest season, which will also be our time of political harvest.
These are not your daddy’s or granddaddy’s floods. These are 500-year floods, events not seen before non-Indian people starting living out on that stretch of the North American prairie.

There is much to blog about, and talk with neighbors, if I can keep my nose out of facebook…

“same-sex ‘I do’s’ heard around the state”

While committed couples now have June weddings in California that they have dreamed about for years, it’s again time to ask why some people justify homophobia because of a desire to be good Christians. What is the Biblical source of this misunderstanding?

For the second time this year, I offer Rabbi Gershon’s response to those who fear that homosexuality is a sin according to the Bible. From his website (see under “Pumbedissa”):

(M)ost Jews today know their scriptures mainly through the out-of-context renditions by the Church or as innocently misrepresented to them by well-meaning Christians… 

The Jewish scriptural prohibition against homosexuality appears in the context of laws concerning cultic rites performed by seven specific nations whose religious worship rites we were instructed not to emulate in our own worship (Leviticus 18:3 and 22; 20:13 and 23; Deuteronomy 23:18). Therefore the wording is: “to lay with a man as with a woman,” something a true homosexual man does not do.

The prohibition is against a horny heterosexual man using another man for sex, which ritually occurred in ancient religious worship among some of those seven nations our ancestors were warned against emulating. To translate that prohibition, therefore, as applying to any homosexual relationship context is to translate it in such a way that it leaves the realm of any divine ordination and enters instead the realm of subjective mortal homophobia.

The ancient rabbis must have had some sense of this problem when they ruled 2100 years ago that any homosexual sex short of anal intercourse was NOT included in the biblical prohibition (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 54a-56a; Sotah 26b; Nidah 13a; see Maimonides’ Perush L’Mishnayot on Sanhedrin 54a). Why did they bother to offer that qualification if it was so clear to them that homosexuality was forbidden?

Also, lesbianism, according to Jewish law, was never prohibited. And though a single third century rabbi attempted to legislate against it, he was overruled by the majority of the sages (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 76a). Writing about lesbianism, Maimonides rules: “It is neither a biblical nor a rabbinic prohibition” (Perush L’Mishnayot on Sanhedrin 54a).

thirty days learning journey

chris invited his readers into a thirty day learning journey this month. tho i make the public commitment today, i began the journey over the weekend, and in some ways a few weeks ago when i completed the Personal Compass workbook by Grove consulting here in the city.

i am thinking of maybe 10 friends or acquaintances with whom i’ve felt mutual support and a broad shared vision, and i’m curious what new spark of creative expression might emerge in each of these relationships when i meet with them carrying a box of matches and a large fan. it’s a huge stretch for me (and yet the easiest thing in the world) to extend myself into conversations for possibility and generativity.

the friends are tarra, howie, catherine, michael, maki, shirley, steve, edina, monty, and adriana. i don’t know that i’ll meet with all of them this month, but at least five and over time all. i’m most curious about what i learn about the process of extension, generativity, and manifestation.

tarra and i had a fabulous meeting and committed to reconnect in a week. her dissertation is and will be amazing. she seeks an existing project in social transformation with whom to work for a year.

howie and i are birthing two projects: a conceptual art piece (i bought spray paint on sunday) and an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary open space event at our alma mater. the latter may involve shirley as well.

catherine and i are going to collaborate around the author evening and perhaps fan a spark around diversity in higher education.

i sent an email to monty promising a quick bit of research toward a generative notion, and completed the research today.

fb

The online energy that was devoted to blogging more often is now more devoted to facebook. I’m fascinated by the possibilities and limitations of the site. every new friend introduces me to new features and some features get old quickly while others open new worlds.

Sharing youtube videos of musical performances has me delving deeper into archived memories (like joni mitchell’s “shadows and light” tour, with pat metheny and jaco pastorius) as well as wonderful and weird gems like terence mckenna’s cosmic rants of symbiosis with the vegetable mind of the planet, and dave chappelle’s hilarious standup set in the basement of a london club, and the entire “big mind” process led by dennis genpo roshi.

I get that high school and college students dump their class email lists into fb and start with a couple hundred friends. this makes it so much easier to stay connected in post-school years if the will remains to do so. for those of us way past school, fb helps us find old friends from different chapters of life; and my friends who work with youth use it to enhance their work (”wow, ms. emden’s here, how cool!”) and i was touched when christy told me her son won’t be her fb friend, him telling her there are some things that are private.

may these sites enhance the connectivity that enables planetary mind and heart.

the end game continued

There are other factors besides US public opinion, and the views and powers of US politicians, to influence the end date of the US occupation. Juan Cole at Salon:

Now that al-Maliki’s campaign has gone so badly, it raises the question of whether there will be a sympathy vote for al-Sadr in October. The Iraqis, a majority of whom say they want a short timetable for U.S. withdrawal, may well have an opportunity to elect provincial governments that, practically speaking, want the same thing, in October. If that happens, it is hard to see how the U.S. presence can last, since the U.S. needs bases in Shiite provinces like Baghdad so as to function.

Using the Moyer model of social movement stages, the “end game process” of this seventh stage of the successful social movement to end the occupation has been slow attrition, rather than rapid policy change (despite the mandate of 2006.) Cheney/Bush seem to have figured out how to make their policy last until they leave office.

We don’t need large public demonstrations to awaken the public to the problem; that already happened. The moral case for withdrawal is the last step. The Iraq and US elections in October and November may represent the final necessary public statements on the matter.

feeling the turn

Easter was very early this year and I feel the quickening, blood rising at this seasonal turn, equinox of spring, sun in Aries. At school’s spring break I find myself enjoying solitude, gathering energy, but not expressing thru movement quite yet. For Passover is that time, the next full moon, and Beltane follows soon after. Baseball is starting but I just looked at the Giants’ schedule for the first time yesterday, and have not turned my body toward the park downtown, nor taken Dave up on a few his season tickets. April is the Masters golf tournament among the blooming magnolias of Georgia. The coming month will be time.

From Rabbi Lerner’s email about Passover:

A note on Passover preparation and observance for those into the ritual practice: many traditional families spend lots of time getting their homes kosher, switching to a new set of dishes, and ridding their house of all chametz (wheat, spelt, oats, barley and things made from chametz like wheat in vinegar, soy, mayonnaise, cookies and crackers, etc.)

Unfortunately, this often occupies so much time that the far more important spiritual preparation is forgotten: getting ourselves ready to liberate ourselves from the self-inflated egos and the stuck places in our lives that make it hard for us to fully commit to the struggle for human liberation that Passover teaches us is possible and necessary. So this year, plan in advance how to give that spiritual preparation a bigger time commitment.

I feel another life change coming.

antonio and the daemon

is it cheating to post a snip from a post of a long time ago? hell, i’m just posting this for me.

remembering my old friend and teacher antonio nunez. antonio used to piss us off in class, because we not-even-green consultants would ask him, antonio, what do you do with clients? and he would say, i love them. no really, antonio, what do you do with clients? and he would say, no, really, i love them. it took lots of open space to learn how simply this could be operationalized…

i was reading james hillman last night and contemplating my daemon. what’s the connection, i mused, between gatekeeping and spaceholding? i had recently hung a touching art piece made for me by zephyr madrone, back when i was admissions officer at CIIS. the piece is called “gatekeeper” and it hung below the plexiglas placard Admissions next to my office door. it’s a dancing serpent, which i later recognized as Journey of the Spirit in harrison’s first book, and sometime later was able to call Torah.

ah, the connection is this: WELCOME. welcome to this place, and anything is possible, and i honor you; and i will soon step out of the way and applaud from the sidelines. my favorite day at CIIS was graduation day; it felt like watching birds take flight who were once in eggs i had sat on awhile. it’s the same feeling after the closing circle of an open space, if it’s the end of our work together. it’s love.

the oslist poem contest

I blogged a bit about the poem I sent to the OSLIST contest, then withdrew, then sent again.

Well, it won. So I get to put on my resume that I’ve twice been elected poet laureate of this international listserv. I look forward to someday talking with a prospective employer about what that means to me, as this list has been a silvery web of support across the planet for so many of us in the open space community.

The sweetest treat was to receive this gift: Diane Cline, whom I have never met, made a beautiful graphic rendering of my poem. This gesture is a taste of the generosity and creativity of the community. I won’t forget it.

Diane Cline’s artwork

thickening the plot

Catherine has decided to blog in detail about the economic news of the past week. And she links to a new article by Greg Palast:

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.