OTTY Check-In #7: Home, Boundaries and Agreements
What is home? And does it differ from other places we spend time in and help craft?
In this Check-In,
returns to discuss his experience working, attending and making new connections at various events across the world and what he learnt from those experiences. contrasts this to his experience in falling ill while in the process of establishing a permanent base in Costa Rica. They share differences on how their visions and understanding of home varies.This evolves into a conversation on how our internal world allows us to create the world that exists around us externally - and how unresolved tensions in our psyche can cause disruptions in the world around us. Both Tom and Lluvias share tools that have worked for them on how they have resolved internal tensions, including the importance of establishing ‘agreements’ as opposed to ‘rules.’
We’d love to hear from all of you: what is your current quest in life, and how are you showing up to the challenges that pursuing that quest is bringing?
Are you here to wage a battle or are you here to help me build? Did you bring your sharpest weapons or tools to forge and gold to gild? Did you come to compete with me, or did you come to collaborate? For I do not want to fight against you, instead unite as we head to our fate. See, there are bigger threats in life than my character assassinating yours. Food is poison, medicine is death, neighbours are strangers and work is chores. Nature is withered, living is robotic, the news is lying and the lies are truth. Right now, all’s the wrong way round. So what use is giving me a missing tooth? I’m not here to wage a battle, I am here to help you build. I choose to put my axe to wood and hoe to earth so fields are tilled. I plant my seeds with ample space and feed them water, not the blood of all the foes I wished to slay who could have been my closest bud. Then I watch the flowers bloom – flourish in to being their own. I make the space I want to inhabit and somewhere you can say you’ve known. So are you here to wage a battle, or are you here to help me build?
Battle or Build? ~ A Poem by Tom Shaw
How do I show up?
In part,
I remind people that legal and illegal are not the same as lawful and unlawful.
Likewise, legal and illegal are not the same as right and wrong.
Christian perspective:
What you render unto Caesar is not the same as what you render unto God. To one, coinage, to the other, loving devotion and moral responsibility. One common truth is to be a member of the animal kingdom, which we are, but the higher truth and higher value is to be a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven.
(Phil 3:20-21)
Natural law
aka common sense, Nature's god, or else discoverable testable pre-existing moral principles...
While there are many authorities, small "a", there is one "higher power," one Authority, big "A". There is one of each ideal, the highest Good, the Truth, the Right.
Ahoy fellow
Freedom lovers &
Wisdom lovers,
mark spark
PS
Kindness, even the most beautiful loving kindness is free. But please, don't drop any wooden nickels in my tip jar, OK?
[ :-)
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Tom & Lluvias,
Internal... Let's see...
Internal conflict? (aka fragmentation?; self-destructive internal dialogue?; a proclivity of left brain hemisphere isolation from right brain hemisphere attention?) For an explanation of left brain attention, see: Iain McGilchrist "The Master And His Emissary" (2009)
Also,
"Attention is a moral act and attention changes the world"...
https://youtu.be/3V3_Y_FuMYk?si=5PBhuNdBS-PLGXrC
Christian perspective:
Shall we each "take the beam from our own eye first"?
Mt 3:5-7
Among other things...
We need to avoid outsourcing our reasoning to experts and authorities. Let's remember our soul, our inner child, our teason, our creative reason, our sovereignty, our empathy, our inclination about "being the change."
Grokking in fullness
[For "grok" context...
See Robert Heinlein "Stranger In A Strange Land"]
I'd say...
I might endeavor to give you the moon. I will seem to indicate I'm giving you the moon. I am. But from a different perspective, I'm only gesturing with my hands and making mouth sounds. Truly I speak. I speak truly.
Yet my true efforts are like the shadows of a tin can, sometimes a circle, sometimes a rectangle, but still, with the right perspective, true.
[See also:
Tao te Ching (道德經) chapter one: "the name that can be named is not the eternal name"]
Or Rene Magritte:
https://www.renemagritte.org/the-treachery-of-images.jsp
Love & Laughter,
mark spark
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