All Talk, All Action

"One of the most important shifts required in [a] new way of viewing conversation is to re-evaluate our traditional view that talk and action are separate activities. We... [suggest] that we consider revising our traditional views of talk and action, seeing them as a single integrated whole rather than as separate activities. What if, when conversations are highly energized and relevant, you are already in the action phase? What if it's not talking and discovery followed by action planning and implementation in the linear way we in the West think about it?"


....


"Perhaps the whole process is part of a single action cycle - reflection/insight/harvesting/action planning/implementation/feedback - in which conversation is a lively core process every step of the way. We're discovering that when people care about the questions they are working on and when their conversations are truly alive, participants naturally want to organize themselves to do whatever has to done, discovering who cares about what and who will take accountability for next steps. Perhaps my eighty-four-year-old mom said it best when she shared a fundamental insight from her lifetime of organizational work... "You see," she mused, "conversation is action. You can think things and you can feel things but it doesn't become 'real' until you express it. Then it begins to germinate. Other people hear it, other people begin to feel it, you share ideas together - and if it's important enough, relevant action becomes just a natural thing that happens.'"

- Juanita Brown w/ David Isaacs,
from World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter, pg 37, 38

A Sketch of an Interview project

So.

It seems a lot of blog posts, in general, are monological: They involve the voice of one writer who paraphrases, or summarises things that they've read.
I'm interested in the sense of meaning-making that comes from dialogical accounts. Conversations that happen between people. "Interviews," would be one format, but the other is the sense of the voice of two or more people involved in generating topical ideas.

The proposal:
To dialogue with friends here in Australia about issues/topics we find interesting. Time limit our conversations to 45 minutes. Record the conversations. Transcribe the conversations. And then put them up online so that there is an availability of English-language primary documents from Australia on a variety of different ideas/discourses that are usually more North-American / European-dominated.

Some ideas of topics I'd like to cover:
Integral Theory
Gender/Sexuality
Race, Racism, and Whiteness
Aboriginal issues
Disability and Theology
Futures Studies
Environmental issues and Climate Change
Queer futures

I'd likely publish these dialogues on a separate site... Details to come!

Act First...

A great blog post:
The "Do Something" Principle

The author describes that we typically imagine that, in order to begin with Action, we need to start with Inspiration, and then Motivation...:
Emotional Inspiration –> Motivation –> Desirable Action


However, he is proposing that it's actually more like a chain:
Inspiration –> Motivation –> Action –> Inspiration –> Motivation –> Action –> Etc.


In other words, one can BEGIN with Action, which can allow for the arising of Inspiration, then Motivation, and then FURTHER Action (which, in turn, generates further Inspiration, etc.)

In other words, we can "re-orient our mindset," beginning anywhere in this chain...:
Action –> Inspiration –> Motivation


This is an especially helpful reorientation if my tendency is toward Stuckness, or lethargy... I cannot claw around 'searching' for inspiration or motivation... Sometimes it really is just about just "Doing Something"... Getting off my bum, rather than hoping that inspiration will spontaneously kick in.

Particularly important if the other tendency is also to rest on my laurels and call that meditation...

postglobal manifesto (version 0.1)

in the tradition of art movement manifestos, but with the intent to more broadly transform tradition.

the making of culture is an activity that has so far survived the liberations and catastrophes of globalization.

questions about the meaning of cultural origins are relevant because the irreversible interaction of the world’s peoples is spreading, deepening, and perhaps poised to develop into a globally connected culture, the character of which we are now determining.

do we defend and preserve our origins? do we exchange origins? do we give them up?

new creators of culture must face tradition and identity from the holarchic perspective of our epoch, the anthropocene: we have already co-created a physical and spiritual condition on the planetary scale.

we engage this rapidly changing condition by creating culture in synergy with technology.

basic materials (sound, word, image, narrative, etc.) are free to interact without taboo, passing through the unbroken lines of canonical cultural identities (national, generational, ethnic, etc.).

cultural frames of reference cannot be assumed, but a basis for communication is necessary.

the integrity of established cultural origins is not necessarily at stake, but is also not necessarily protected or morally defensible.

we must take the moral position of addressing all people as the new origins.


a collaborative document. version 0.1, 02011-01-01.