[OSList] Boundaries

paul levy paul at cats3000.net
Sat Apr 12 05:11:00 PDT 2014


There's nothing dead at the boundary between skin and air. It brims with
possibility, tingles with restless emergence.

There's nothing dead about those cells. A shadow I cast with my body is not
dead, but a dancing with light. Those cells are yet another reflection in
materiality of potential in a state of pause, the silence of form in
transition.

The burned earth is not dead earth but earth refreshing, readying for
growth.

Boundaries are the silences of the spaces in between; all part of the
living flowing.

Warmly

Paul

On Friday, 11 April 2014, <chris.corrigan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Outside of my skin, my body can no longer be responsible for life.  That
> doesn't mean that I live in a vacuum or that everything outside of my skin
> is dead or that I am not a completely interdependent being.  It's just that
> my heart powers this body and the responsibility for an effectiveness of
> that heart doing tha work ends at this skin.
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> On Apr 11, 2014, at 7:40 AM, Harold Shinsato <harold at shinsato.com> wrote:
>
>  Interesting that the outer edge of the skin of our bodies skin is in
> fact, dead cells.
>
> On 4/11/14 8:01 AM, Harrison Owen wrote:
>
> Michael -- I do believe that the truth of the matter is that when, as, or if
> you ever discover a totally stable, unambiguous boundary that will be the
> edge of a Dead Zone. Life is always a mess. :-)
>
> ho
>
> Harrison Owen7808 River Falls Dr.
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>
> Phone 301-365-2093
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: oslist-bounces at lists. <oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org>openspacetech.org <oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org>
> [mailto:oslist-bounces at lists. <oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org>openspacetech.org <oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org>] On Behalf Of Michael Wood
> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 9:01 PM
> To: 'oslist at lists.openspacetech. <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>org <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>'
> Subject: [OSList] Boundaries
>
> Chris,
>
> Thanks for the clarity of your reflections Chris. What you said resonates
> with me and links, I think, to Harrison's proposition of the 'centripital'
> nature of self organisation - passion plus responsibility. In my case study
> that gave rise to this conversation, the 'boundaries' are related to many
> legal uncertainties which tend to impinge on conversations around
> 'responsibility'. For example,  'can we take responsibility for 'x' issue
> when the responsibility  for 'x', under the law,  is determined to lie
> elsewhere?  This seems to me to be a boundary issue which creates a lot of
> ambiguity in the centre of the circle. But I suppose that this is just the
> nature of life. Sometimes things (like the law) are unclear and we need to
> just get on with it and do the best we can under the conditions that present
> themselves, rather than the conditions that we'd ideally like. Similar to
> some recent conversations on this list about chaos in Syria and the Ukraine
> - which have much larger sta  kes than my little case study.
>
> Michael Wood
> Perth, WA
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 19:40:59 -0700
> From: chris.corrigan at gmail.com
> To: World wide Open Space Technology email list
> 	<oslist at lists.openspacetech. <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>org <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org>>
> Subject: Re: [OSList] Open Space and boundaries
> Message-ID: <A7C0C272-AACB-42F7-A36A- <A7C0C272-AACB-42F7-A36A-7F2116434E5E at gmail.com>7F2116434E5E at gmail.com <A7C0C272-AACB-42F7-A36A-7F2116434E5E at gmail.com>>
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>
> I?m a little late to this and see that other threads have spun out but I
> have a thought or two.
>
> Containers - social containers - are absolutely essential to any level of
> order.  Without something to contain the chaos you simply have chaos.  Order
> arises when there is coherence.  The coherence inside a container is
> different from the coherence or the chaos outside a container.  The place
> where this transition happens is the boundary.  The boundary may be
> permeable to various degrees but it is certainly real.
>
> As to how the boundary is created, I think my experience says that it is
> socially constructed.  It can be influenced by many actions - including
> intention, invitation, the nature of the shared culture within the
> container, and the action that is undertaken.  Open Space facilitators
> become helpful when we can work with this container.
>
> How do you do that?  In my experience, the most powerful and generative
> containers are those that gather around a centre, rather that those that are
> contained by a boundary.
>
> In practical terms what this looks like is simple: drop a powerful
> invitation into the centre of a group (passion and urgency) and a group will
> coalesce around that and ?fall in together.?  Your other option is to create
> a fence and gather people up and put them inside it.  This is much more work
> and rarely effective.  You have a container, but you also have
>
>
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