moon-lit desert yuletide

My friend Will Engelhardt is a medicine man whose healing ways include body work, exploration and transformation of mental and neural patterns, and the creation and sharing of beauty. Here is a Christmas offering from him:

strategic alchemy

A dedicated team representing staff, faculty, students, administration and Trustees of Bastyr University has been meeting and working for almost two years to shape input from the whole university community, including neighbors and patients and colleagues, into a strategic plan that will powerfully pull us forward into realizing our mission of "transforming the health of the human community."

I have gotten to work primarily on the first of the 6 strategic initiatives, all six of which were officially approved by the Board earlier this month. Now our bigger work begins, and we'll be looking for support and participation.

The first initiative, beginning with its preamble, is:
A university is defined by the power and beauty and reach of the ideas and perspectives that it gathers together in the spirit of open-minded inquiry. Bastyr University is committed to the work of transforming the health of the human community, and the daunting complexity of that work calls for us to think and talk and work together with many other people from many disciplines who share our commitment.

Because of our capacity for honoring the whole and all of its parts, and our unshakable trust that the parts are already threaded together even when the connections are as yet invisible, we are uniquely suited for hosting a confluence of rich and diverse explorations that lead to wise practice and action.

In the best academic tradition, Bastyr will welcome the meeting, meshing, and even the clashing of ideas that expand our understanding, seed our own programs and initiatives, connect us to effective work all over the world, and help us to accomplish our mission to transform the health of the human family.

Strategic Initiative #1:
Convene essential generative conversations that inform the cultivation of practitioners and influence policy decisions that contribute to restoring the world's intrinsic health.

There are objectives and goals and things to be measured, too, which I can tell about another time if you'd like, and another five initiatives which all have to do with creating or adopting, and living up to, standards of excellence in all our own particulars of who we are and what we do.

Many thanks to Bill Toliver and his team at The Matale Line for their deep careful listening and skillful alchemy, cooking us down to the real essence of what is ours to contribute to a healthier future.

drop your ballot

If you're from around here and haven't mailed in your ballot yet, King County has introduced ten ballot drop boxes throughout the county to provide absentee voters with another way to securely return their ballots without the cost of postage. Ballot drop boxes will close at 8 p.m. on Election Day, November 4.

The address links below open up cute little photos of each site! When we dropped ours off today in the University district, we saw a lot of other citizens approaching down the sidewalk with their ballot envelopes in hand, and watched as one of the staff inside opened the box and gathered up a big pile. Yay!

Locations

• Bellevue
  Library Connection @ Crossroads, 15600 NE 8th St., outside of Suite K-11, 98008
• Black Diamond
  Black Diamond Library, 24707 Roberts Dr., 98010
• Des Moines
  Des Moines Library, 21620 11th Avenue S., 98198
• Fall City
  Fall City Library, 33415 SE 42 Pl., 98024
• Lake Forest Park
  Lake Forest Park Library, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 98155 near the lower level mall entrance
• Algona Pacific
  Algona Pacific Library, 255 Ellingson Road, 98047
• Renton
  King County Elections, 919 SW Grady Way, 98057
• Seattle
  King County Administration Building, 500 Fourth Ave., 98104
  Delridge Neighborhood Service Center, 5405 Delridge Way SW, 98106
  University Neighborhood Service Center, 4534 University Way NE, 98105

microblogging (and my secret superpower)

Working at home, my head in the sunshine and my screen in the shade, I have an hour before my next phone meeting, and think, "maybe that's enough time to finally write that little blog post that's been percolating in my mind for a while, in the more-than-two-months since I've posted anything..."

And then, instead of writing, I glance through the new issue of Wired magazine that came in the mail yesterday and discover that they wrote my blog post for me. Click through to read it - it's really not very long! - it starts off, "Kill Your Blog. Still posting like it's 2004? Well, knock it off. There are chirpier ways to get your word out," and goes on to talk about how even (especially) early famous bloggers are putting more of their time and thoughts and photos and videos onto Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc. They're talking about me! Well, except for the early and famous parts. I started blogging in 2004! I've been neglecting my blog in favor of tweeting and facebooking and flickring!

(So, this is my secret superpower: I am almost unerringly right in the belly of the Zeitgeist - or, you might say, right in the middle of the road, right in the middle of bell curve, with the crowd on the cresting wave. Or maybe just the tiniest bit behind it. Not that I usually realize it, until after someone more insightful has pointed out where the herd is. My brother-in-law has pointed out to me that it is theoretically a valuable talent to be able to pick out the song on any album that should be released as a single, because everyone else is bound to like it the best, too. But in order for it to be valuable, someone would have to care...)

(Actually, I have many other genius superpowers, but I managed to forget what they were, some months ago, and haven't recalled them yet.)

So, what I was going to write, even before I read that little article in Wired, was that I haven't been spending any time thinking about my own blog (and not a lot of time reading other people's blogs, not even my favorite ones) because the scant amount of time I have for online connecting is all being used up by what I'm thinking of as microblogging, which only takes a couple of minutes at a time. Twitter's 140-character limit per post is an opportunity to compress the infinite moment into one intensified droplet - or to simply pull a single thread from the fabric of experience as it passes through us, unremarkable except for having been caught in words.

At this moment, it feels just right, and enough, to do that. I like that my tiny haiku blogettes (Thomas and I were talking on Saturday about Twitter as fertile haiku practice) criss-cross with those of the people whose tweets I follow or who are fb friends. I originally started blogging in order to have one place where I could store all the inspiring words and thoughts and images I encounter, and I think I will still use it for that - though I use del.icio.us for some of the same purpose, and have that linked to my Facebook page! (and if you are on Facebook, would you "validate," or maybe it is "confirm," my blog there? I'm not sure what that does, but I am curious)

And: now that I'm at the end of this post - well, I didn't finish it before my phone meeting, the sun set before I had a chance to get back to it, and it took more than a few minutes to write it all down and set all the links. I'm going over to the other playgrounds now, for 5 minutes max, and hope to see you there sometime soon.

tenderness only breaks open the earth

Another beautiful offering from Panhala's daily listserv.

Poet and translator Jane Hirshfield will be in Seattle on March 12 as part of the Seattle Arts and Lectures 2008-2009 Poetry Series (which will also feature W.S. Merwin and Gary Snyder)

Standing Deer

As the house of a person
in age sometimes grows cluttered
with what is
too loved or too heavy to part with,
the heart may grow cluttered.
And still the house will be emptied,
and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer;
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,
will be taken from us.
I have disappointed.
I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.
Tenderness only breaks open the earth.
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.

~ Jane Hirschfield ~

(The Lives of the Heart)

party favors

Last year when my brother-in-law Eric turned 40, he took some friends out to dinner and also gave them each a bag containing his Top 5 Favorite things (special cashmere socks, his favorite wine, a CD of his favorite drum solos, Sugar hand lotion, and I forget the 5th thing but maybe it had to do with donuts or bagels).

That inspired me to think, if I were turning 50 today, what favorite things would I give to the friends I'm having dinner with tonight?

For a party favor bag, a sturdy, snazzy and re-usable one like the ones they give customers at Lululemon (and which they might give you without charge when you go in and ask how much they cost to buy without having made a purchase). Then I'd put inside a magazine or a book. Some flowers, and some color. And some oolong tea from the Teahouse Kuan Yin in the Wallingford neighborhood (my favorites are the flowery ones like the High Mountain Jin Xuan and the Wen Shan Bao Zhong) (and now the Shan Lin Xi Green, too, thank you to teahouse owner Marcus!)

I also thought about adding some of my favorite Maple Pecan cereal, but without the soy milk and spoonful of peanut butter it is an incomplete experience so I left it out this time.

wosonos 2008 day three

I'm full! And haven't had sufficient time to digest yet. Luckily, Chris Corrigan has been his reliably and deeply thoughtful self and has posted a lot of fresh insights already.

Usually when I participate in any Open Space, there always seem to be some time slots when there isn't anything being offered that I prefer to the pleasure of just hanging out for a while, but this one has had too many that I didn't want to miss. Yesterday I went to sessions in all four time slots (oh, and see - yesterday already seems so long ago that I can't remember what those sessions were, without looking at my notes): Our feelings (not thinking) about the future and open space (convened by Brian Bainbridge); The possibilities for advancing the open space technosphere (Kaliya Hamlin); An open space arts building, what would it be like (Phelim McDermott); Living in open space as a family (Chris, Caitlin, Aine and Finn). Today though, I didn't go to any, but flapped around a bit and then had a lovely standing-up chat with Chris talking about the characteristics of what space is like when it's deep, his ongoing exploration of the twin dynamics of love & power, and playing with the beginnings of "a pattern language of faith."

More than working on things and getting things done (though that happened, too), open space is for me primarily about being with the people who've showed up and sometimes it doesn't really matter to me what we talk about. Participating in convened sessions, sitting on the lawn at lunch, talking while doing very little aikido/tai qi movements, going for dinner with Jeff and Raffi and new friends Heidi, Michael, Brendan, Susan and James: all the same, all about little-by-little (but very quickly, actually) finding our common place in the group heart.

OK, I think that's all I can put into words right now - more after I've had some sleep!