Human to Human • Tenneson Woolf

March 27, 2017

Unity, Diversity, and Choice

My friend and colleague Amanda Fenton has been writing about love, power, and choice. One of the things I appreciate in Amanda is her thoughtfulness, and her keen perception that welcomes multiple perspectives and insights. She shares some background, some story, and her evolution of thinking in this excerpt from her blog:

I’ve been reflecting on my experience in a session I co-hosted and the connection with philosopher Paul Tillich’s concept of power and love:

Power: The drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity, to achieve one’s purpose and grow. It isn’t “power over” but about achieving “the whole in itself”.

Love: The drive to unite the separated, to recognize and make whole, with a focus on relationship and connection. It is unity of the larger whole.

Adam Kahane describes power and love not as an either/or, but a polarity or dilemma, and the way through is by cycling between them. Like walking – moving one foot then the other – they are never in static balance. And it is also fractal – there is the “whole in itself” and at the same time, the whole is “part of a larger whole” that reveals and enacts a similar pattern.

Go here for the full post.

March 23, 2017

On Beauty and Distance Between

One of my friends calls it a “Tulip Tree” because the blossoms resemble tulips. I think it is more properly a “Magnolia Tree.” This one above is on the walk that I most often take with my dog, along Heritage Trail in Lindon, UT. The blossoms are gorgeous, and as you can see plentiful. They are delicate too. A good spring windy day can quite immediately move the bulk of those petals to the ground.

In response to my post yesterday on choice, friendship, and welcome, another friend sent me this from Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet and mystic of the early 1900s.

“Once the realization is accepted
that even between the closet human beings
infinite distances continue to exists,
a wonderful living side by side can grow up.
If they succeed in loving the distance between them
which makes it possible
for each to see the other
whole and against the wide sky”!

Here’s to the beauty of space between that comes with choice, friendship, and welcome. And to good friends — like the one currently in Maui, Hawaii, who sent me this Rilke passage.

March 22, 2017

Choice, Friendship, and Welcome

Today, a friend that watches out for me sent me this.

“Love is the ability and willingness
to allow those that you care for
to be what they choose for themselves
without any insistence that they satisfy you.”

It is from Wayne Dyer, the American philosopher and self-help author, who died in 2015.

Yesterday, I was being interviewed about relational dynamics in leadership, by a PhD candidate working on his dissertation. I remembered this, from one of my closest pals, Chris Corrigan.

“Friendship is our business model.”

I’ve modified Dyer’s statement.

“Friendship [Love] is the ability and willingness
to welcome [allow] those that you care for
to be what they choose for themselves
without any insistence that thy satisfy you.”

Choice, and friendship, and welcome — they make all of the difference.

March 21, 2017

Dependent Origination

I met Bob Thompson a couple of years ago when planning an event for the World Parliament of Religions being held in Salt Lake City. Bob was helping myself and a few others imagine a two day event prior to the Parliament. I loved his open, playful, and endearing personality. Ever ready to share a story. I found him kind, gracious, and real.

One of Bob’s books is called, A Voluptuous God: A Christian Heretic Speaks. It’s loaded with rich references and stories told in such human ways. In that book, Bob speaks of the concept of dependent origination:

Dependent origination teaches that everything that exists is dependent on something else. Every part of life is dependent upon other parts of life. The universe is a living organism in which each cell works in balance and cooperation with every other cell in order to sustain the whole.

Good, right. Familiar too, right.

I’m grateful for the many people I’ve met, like Bob, and from many walks of life — theologians, biologists, school teachers, health care professionals, and the like — that feed this narrative arc of an undeniable connectedness. Most of us, in most systems, are trying to relearn this amidst the 300 year wave of industrialization and mechanism that has engrained a cultural story of separateness.