Replies

Kent, Isn’t wonderful that you are able to join us in your own way, share your insights and wisdom, and engage in celebrating your wife’s birthday, etc. Looking forward to your participation.

Eric, Elegant and effective. Thank you.

Benjamin,
Thank you so much for posting on the cohort site. You have much to offer the learning community and judging from the conversations I have seen, I am deeply moved to witness how you will cultivate and integrate process-relational thought and practice.

Hello Zhenbao,

We are so lucky to have you in the cohort. You have a remarkable life story that illustrates how Daoism is an embodied practice that begins with focusing on the flow of Qi. Working with Qi and practicing Qikung are powerful examples that you have connected to your own healing.

Thanks for sharing your paper you wrote for Jay. I appreciate how you think process thought and Daoism can be connected. I’d love to see more ways Chinese concepts like Dao, Qi, Li, and others can be linked to process thought or even to the unique Whiteheadian language. I wouldn’t know how to go about that but I have to wonder if there are connections.

I love your focus on the practical and useful– that your teaching emerges from your own healing process. My own sifu, Fong Ha, always said, “You sit, you stand, you walk. Everything else is commentary.” We would always practice Qikung before moving into any tai chi chuan.

I’m excited to hear you are enrolled in a doctoral program. There are some remarkable people at CIIS who draw from a variety of traditions. I hope you maintain your embodied practice as you move into through and beyond the program. Process needs ways to share, teach, and model embodied practices.

You are correct! You posted your introduction on your course page for both Dr. McDaniel and Dr. Davis. Posting on the cohort page simply enables the certificate cohort members to have their own page.

Thanks for taking the extra step and posting again.

I love this conversation. It’s helpful.

Thom, I have not read Ames and Hall’s translation. It’s on my list.

Zhenbao, I hope you will continue to add your insights regarding Daoism and Whitehead. I have often wondered if any terms in John Cobb’s Whitehead Word Book can be related to existing Chinese terms or expressions…

Hello Thom,
We hope to offer a one cohort per year. We had one in 2023 and now 2024. We believe in the relational and learning power that emerges in cohort learning communities.

At the same time, we also understand some folks just want to take a series of courses, have no desire for a certificate, and define their own path. We’re open to whatever possibility emerges for each person.

Keep us in mind. Our electives have shifted each year. It’s important to understand that both faculty and elective course offerings could shift. That means, if you see an elective that you really want to take. Enroll while it is offered. If all the electives look good, take them all.

My purpose is to help you deepen your understanding of process relational thought and practice.

Hope this helps.

In process, Rolla

Talk about creating space to nurture and deepen the learning community. Hope you will post your meeting dates and link on the cohort page.

Brian and Chris,
Thanks for the conversation and the resource. I look forward to reading Shih-Ying Yang’s “A Process View of Wisdom” (Journal of Adult Development, 15: 62-75, 2008.

In researching professional practice with colleagues, I developed “mindful wonderment” to help the group actively practice avoiding static answers, jumping to conclusions, closure, and frankly, judgment. I continue to practice mindful wonderment when it comes to cultivating the four sources of wisdom: aesthetic, moral/ethical, religious, and scientific. It keeps me humble.

Thanks for cultivating a vibrant learning community.

Charles, as always, thank you very much. You point me in directions that open new possibilities for understanding and seeing.

Charles, I’m wondering if you have any resources or citations for a “green” Marx.

Thank you for your kind comment, Leslie. That last sentence is really about keeping ourselves grounded in the immediate world where we dwell…. This might not be on topic but it came to mind. I’m conducting lifescaping action research with co-researchers in different parts of the world about how each of us is cultivating a relationship with a tree in the area were we live. The research is still ongoing and moving in directions I never anticipated. Here’s what is constant: we are are being hit very deeply by each of our tree’s commitment to place……

I love to go to places where they are living the practice. For instance, the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley, CA has been open for years. They have great products, excellent pizza, and a very local customer base. When I’m in Berkeley, I go there just to lean into the possibilities and to see the work embodied in an everyday setting.

Again, thank you to Charles. This is great.

Charles, I appreciate you extending this thread. I read Anne Fairchild Pomeroy’s Marx and Whitehead, as you suggested. It’s a lovely book, and one that promoted me to write the author to let her know how much I appreciated her work and to find out if she had moved deeper into the work. When I looked her up, I found a note that she had passed away on Feburary 24, 2023, and that there was a memorial that was going to be streamed. I attended it last Monday 3/20, and was deeply moved because her scholarship was integrated into music, labor activism, teaching, and living. What a soul. It made me appreciate how she brought together Marx and Whitehead even more.

Touching on my “Marx as an ally” comment and Anne’s death also made me pause to think about Mike Davis and his loss last year. His Ecology of Fear, Prisoners of the American Dream, The Monster Enters, etc. have informed and deepened my appreciation of Marx. So has John Clark, the dialectical social ecologist, who was very close to Murray Bookchin until being declared a heretic for his embrace of Buddhism. John’s The Impossible Community and Between Earth and Empire are informed by Marx but embrace the anarchist path of dialectical social ecology, which frees theory and practice from falling into dogmatism. I appreciate John also for endeavoring to put his work into practice, like at La Terre Institute http://www.laterreinstitute.org/. It’s a small but concrete example of a place that could be part of a network of communities within communities.