PM dynamics: January 2008 Archives

Mike reached up and patted this sign to remind me to slow down. :-) I'd asked the class why I'd gone off on a particular tangent....it related, but I had to pause for a moment, back up, where did I begin? How did I arrive where I was? What was the point?!

I came across the sign near the hallway trashcans on my way to class and I thought it was too perfect to pass up: not for them, for me! I've a good feeling about this group, based on how assertive they were during the first and subsequent activities. We laughed a fair amount. And - they took the material seriously. Minds at work. I like.

At some point, they'll be designing some webpages. In the meantime, I'm using the space to post lesson plans and track our progress.

Any day now, students will start to post their first self-analyses of a decision-making process. They've been asked to make a real decision - to attend or not attend a protest in Boston against the FARC who occupy part of Colombia. (FARC is the organization responsible for the kidnapping of friends of a friend - close enough to touch me. I decided to be affected; I decided to care, to act, to do the little that I can do.)

from Earthseed (Parable of the Sower):

God is Power --
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable --
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change.

I met David in the department computer lab yesterday. "So, you don't believe in authenticity, do you?"

Nice to meet you, too! :-)

Of course I do. Authenticity is, for me, an experience not a label, a lived moment of phenomenological alignment when the energies that compose "me" merge in concordance with the energies of a situation and other involved persons, ideas - the context. I think of "peak experiences" and the experience of "flow."

My authentic moments usually won't match anyone else's, in substance or in timing - everyone will experience their own authenticity distinctly. This is why shared moments are so powerful (hmmm, which is why I am so interested in them as events with the potential to change reality - see problematic moments - and so drawn to them personally as a source of incredible nurturance. I want more!)

As I muse on this, I think there may be two "categories" of phenomenological authenticity, one that is dialectically structured and one that is dialogically intentional. The former is reactive to social structure (see a negative example of coming into alignment based on a valence (intra/interpersonal attractive force) to soak up a certain strand of environmental and communicative dynamic interaction) and the latter is empowered, coming from a deliberate and conscious turning or utilization of recognized valences into a force that acts back on the dialectical conditioning.

(btw - I'm in a thick swamp attempting to distinguish dialogical from dialectical. Neither process has control over the outcome, but to subsume "dialogue" under "dialect" is to accept a singular structuration for all of human society. No, thanks.)

"Obama received Secret Service protection early in the campaign after unspecified threats. It is not a subject his wife likes to talk about. "She doesn't allow herself to go there," says Valerie Jarrett, Michelle Obama's close friend, who says Michelle has not raised the subject with her. "It would paralyze her to think like that." Michelle's brother, Craig Robinson, who is the head basketball coach at Brown University, says the potential danger was one of the things he discussed with her when Obama began his campaign. "That's always in the back of everybody's mind," he told NEWSWEEK. "There are a lot of crazy people out there. But you can't live your life worrying about them."

Some Words of Martin Luther KIng, Jr:

"Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men (sic) do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world… we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty… We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak…A few years ago…it seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty programs. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube…I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes necessary to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring…A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…We are now faced with the fact , my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now… We must move past indecision to action."