Replies

Allen,Thanks for your introduction and thoughtful comments elsewhere on the Discussion Board.

I appreciate your passionate statement and, as Charles said, excellent, insightful points. Please feel free to share references and resources.

Evan,
I like how you moved from being stunned to being puzzled and into having compassion for a poor and distressed person, who you knew at some level. Thanks for sharing that one. I think it offers a great reflection on relational-process and practice, moving from judgment to puzzlement/curiosity to compassionate becoming.

Hello Charles,
As always, thanks for your comments and for suggesting another book. I have a few of the books you have suggested on my “to read” pile.

Thank you both Charles and Nicholas for the illuminating dialogue.

Hello Leslie,
I really appreciated this and I’m not affiliated with any church. I understand the role of propaganda in manipulating and shaping beliefs. I also think people as shaped by the stories told to them and those that they live into in the course of their lives. That’s where I like David Korten’s Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. He defines the struggle of our time as a struggle between corporate power and people power– a struggle between money and life. In other words, I think he offers some pointers in deconstructing the worldview language that surrounds your work in the PCUSA by offering a more life-centric perspective, as well as the hope for creating a new story.

Hello Zhenbao,
Thanks for your kind commentary. Please let me know if you ever travel to Portland again. As you know, there is a lot to explore.

Regarding Organic Marxism. Philip Clayton is the first author, and he is very much in the Whitehead tradition. I always had the sense that he wrote the book with a Chinese audience in mind. I appreciated the book because it aligns with my belief that all significant action is local; this stems from my bias for decentralizing as much as possible in ways that E. F. Schumacher and others have talked about for a long time.

Hope this is helpful in some way.

Thanks. These are wonderful.

Weidong, Thank you for your kind and generous reply. I feel the Maori greeting is a gift offered to help diverse folks coming together to recognized that we are all rooted somewhere– we are all indigenous in a place.

Your response about Chinese culture being indigenous connects me to the tai chi, and qi kung Sifu Fong Ha taught me years ago when I lived in Berkeley, CA. He did not lecture or talk much, he modeled and led us in an embodied Daoist practice. On occasion he would share connections to the Daoist roots, but in general, he was trying to help us see that all of our sitting, standing, and walking was a form of tai chi practice. The Dao is everywhere and chi flows throughout eternally.

This is beautiful. I’m always touched by recognizing the moment-to-moment beauty of it all perks up from ancient sources and, for us, practices that help us appreciate wild Earth.

I would add another book:

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Elvi, Thanks so much for these. It was the pluralism that struck me during Dr. Odin’s presentation/reflection.

Charles, Thanks for another illuminating article.

As always, thank you, Charles.

I love this conversation. I’ll add a couple of points:

1) How do we define lazy? My tai chi sifu (teacher) wrote a book about cultivating wu-wei: Ha, F., and Olsen, E. (1996). Yiquan and the nature of energy: The fine art of doing nothing and achieving everything. Berkeley, CA: Summerhouse Publications.

The practice involved letting go of all the busy thoughts and grounding oneself in breath and center.

2) Maslow and self-actualization. The self-actualization construct makes it sound like there is a point of arrival. Here I am self-actualized. In embracing the notion of creative acceptance, I see an understanding of continuous becoming. Accepting that we never arrive because we are always becoming. This is the situation now, but who knows? Things change. In other words, creative acceptance opens us to a radical fluidity where the world and our perceptions of it are in motion, flowing, and changing. Both the world and my thoughts about it will change.

As I play with the notion of creative acceptance, it seems to offer acceptance of what is and acceptance of eternal flow and change. Something to meditate upon.

David Hinton in Wild Mind, Wild Earth says, “To think about the world is to distance it. To analyze and understand the world is to possess and master it, and to devalue it as a detached object of our attention, stripping it of kinship. And that is our culture’s whole relationship to the planet: analysis and understanding, which facilitates manipulation and exploitation. This understanding is necessary for survival (our dependence on the instrumental), but it is also fundamental to our destruction of planetary life. Meditation, on the other hand, replaces all that displacement with emptiness and silence: consciousness, therefore, without instrumental and distancing thought. In this, it reveals the possibility of reorienting our relationship to earth in all aspect of our lives” (p. 85).

Creative acceptance opens up space for emptiness and silence. But then again, I might be way off base.