Craig

[Harrison Owen]

"You can't be this open. After all, even the river has to have banks to keep the water in."  

There is a marvelous systems group in the UK that has spent a lot of time thinking about the biology and ecology of rivers. Your friend seems to be saying -- when you reach the banks, you reach the river.  But do you? Where does the river begin, where does it end, and how is it bounded? Conventional wisdom would place the beginnings in the headwaters -- but when you get there, you never quite find that first drop dropping -- the genesis of the river. Could the genesis be the clouds and the rain? The complex and unending weather systems ? The whole world? The cosmos itself. As for the banks -- they are a sometime thing. Here today and gone tomorrow. And as a matter of fact they don't really hold the water in -- for there is a constant flow between the river and the ground water of which it is a contiguous part. So how broad is the river? As for ending where is that? At the mouth?? But when you fly over a river as it runs into the sea it becomes obvious that the flow of fresh water and sediment extends far out -- until it blends with the surrounding sea. But no sharp line -- So what is the river anyhow? And if you can't contain it, how do you define it -- and without definition control is a phantasm. Or so my british friends say.

Harrison 


Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD  20854
USA
301-365-2093
207-763-3261 (summer)
website www.openspaceworld.com


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Craig Gilliam 
  To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU 
  Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 8:36 AM
  Subject: Craig


  Harrison:

  I meant to tell you an experience that was sombering for me.  The other day,
  I was speaking with a group of professional clergy about donig OS.  I
  mentioned the Law of Two Feet.  One minister's eyes became large and he/she
  said, "We do not want our people to learn this one.  If they did, what would
  it mean for Sunday morning homilies?  Would anybody be left insdie." I
  sensed in the air that this was an existential moment for the group.  There
  was a deep gasp in the room as if something was deeply threatened, and I
  guess it was.  In the collective psyche, I felt the earth shook.

  This stuff is quiet frightening to a culture that is permeated with control.
    And we often describe control in words like order, organizing.  As we
  talked about the process, someone else mentioned, "You can't be this open.
  After all, even the river has to have banks to keep the water in."  In the
  conversation and metaphor was the pervasive issue of fear of lossing
  control.   We haven't learned, it seems to me, that we never can keep the
  river in with all of our levee systems, etc.  It will find its way to where
  it needs to go.  And even if we could keep it in, and New Orleans struggles
  with this issue regularly, what destruction does that create to the land
  around it?

  Control, in my experience, is so pervasive in our culture and many of our
  institutions.  In some institutions, it seems to have been there for
  thousands of years, so their is a lot of multigenerational
  energy/reinforcement attached to it.  Still, I came back to open questions
  about possibilities.  Of course, in that conversation, I had to be aware of
  the parallel process going on within myself that maybe they were mirroring.

  I am open to any thoughts or reflections?

  Thanks!
  Craig

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