Aung San Suu Kyiback in 1999: “We cannot drift along in any imaginary world. There will have to be great sacrifices, tremendous hard work and effort . We will have to wrestle with all our might to catch up with those countries that are ahead of us. Look at the two countries that lost the war – Germany and Japan. How they suffered and sacrificed the war. We have read about the hardship they went through. Because they made those sacrifices, they are the two leading countries in the world today. Similarly we will have to go through the same …
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Last month I was blogging about stories and I mentioned sitting in on a teaching with Nuu-Chah-Nulth Elder Julia Lucas who was using traditional stories to talk about contemporary sexual awareness with First Nations youth. This happened at an Open Space meeting I facilitated last year. My friend Crystal Sutherland, who was in that session, just phoned me to talk about an idea coming out of that gathering. She is musing about finding someone to produce these stories on video and use them to reach street kids and other kids at risk. We kicked around the idea of animating these …
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Rebecca Ryan notes that thought is not the most productive form of work. She has spent a day playing with her family… And an amazing thing happened: I returned to work this morning with more energy than I’ve had in months. I had a clear idea of what was important (clients and partners) and what wasn’t (reading back issues of newspapers.) I finally took action on creating the office space I really want, instead of settling for the one I have. I’m renewed. It was like someone hit CTRL ALT DEL on my creative cortex. Of course this is known …
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I’ve talked a little about teachings as gifts and recently corresponded with folks about the authenticity of various “Native American” teachers. For the real deal, check out Wisdom of the Elders, an archive of stories and teachings from Native American life that is being broadcast on public radio in the States and American Indian Radio on Satellite (which you can listen to online).
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Now we get into the juicy stuff, as if the book hasn’t been juicy so far. Chapter four of “The Gift” is called simply “The Bond” and it is this chapter that took Susan Kerr’s interest by storm at the Giving Conference. The essential point of this chapter is that gifts create bonds and commodities create boundaries. It is characteristic of market exchange that commodities move between two independent spheres. We might best picture the difference between gifts and commodities in this regard by imagining two territories separated by a boundary. A gift, when it moves across this boundary, either …