Replying to LO28674 --
Hi John
Thanks so much for the honesty in your sharing, and the reaching out. I
guess we are in the personal mastery, dialogue and mental models territory
of organisational learning, which at least in New Zealand, where I live,
offered so much early promise for getting more of the depth of our
humanity onto the agenda in organisational settings. I remember the
manager of our local business bookstore calling me up to tell me that this
book called the 5th Discipline had been published and that I needed to
read it. It was a bit like a more organised version of the 60's in a way
;-). But, it did, and does still to some extent as I see it, provide a
vehicle to legitimise what we have known all along to be true, that
something is wrong at the roots, and that we need to learn to engage
together in ways that include the depths of our being if we are ever to
address it.
I can relate to the loneliness you write about as I sit here in my home
office on my own typing away on my keyboard, as the soft sound of the rain
just starts to patter down on the garden outside. And to the profound
effects of changing relationships. Sometimes I feel despair too.
Like changes in the weather they come and go.
Then I breath in and out again, recalling this quote I read the other day:
"The individual is going to be universalized, the universe is going to be
individualized, and thus from both directions the whole is going to be
enriched."
Jan Smuts
Isn't that beautiful :-)... and to think that he was a statesman as well!
What I'm feeling as I sit here listening to the rain getting a little
harder, and starting to wonder if I need to close the doors, is that you
and I are both somehow participating in this unimaginably vast unfolding
drama of individuality and universality, feeling what we are feeling,
thinking what we are thinking, doing what we are doing. We may have found
a better story about this drama in which we participate than the average
bear, one that seems to include more of what we inwardly know to be true
about it, regardless of what we may have been told by others. Standing for
this better story in our work seems nourish us in some way.
But somehow no story about what is happening here is enough. Something
remains unsatisfied. Something is still amiss at the roots
Perhaps it is ok to follow this disquiet to its source. To accept it as a
guide. Not to see it as necessarily only mine. What is mine seems more to
be how I respond/react to it.
And then I breath out and in again. Somehow the vastness breathes itself
out with my breath. I breath in and somehow I seem to bring something to
this vastness that was not here only a moment before.
I'm so much wishing John, to reach out of this vastness at the core of my
being, to say to you as another being of this same vastness, HELLO friend.
Please let us share this moment together, to dissolve into it until only
the smiles and love in our eyes remain. Loneliness and despair, will come
and go, but this vastness we share in with each breath will remain. So it
seems to me that I must learn to stand not for the stories we make up
about this great unfolding but that to which our stories refer, and in
which we ourselves are participating with each breath, in and out, in and
out, softly, like the rain.
Warm regards
Mark
Mark Feenstra
mark@practicefield.org
ph +64 9 5755166
--"Mark Feenstra" <mark@practicefield.org>
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