Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns

Cultural confusion is the healthy recognition that there is more than one way to think about something.

The alternative to trust is not doubt, but rigid control.

Complexity does not divide itself, and therefore life requires calibration within multiple streams of information and interaction.

The skin of my body provides what looks like a boundary around me, but ‘I’ extend well beyond the container of my flesh, both biologically and socially.

It seems to me the ultimate act of love is to allow ourselves and others to be complex. In affection and respect, I try never to pin down, sum up, pigeon-hole, label, or otherwise reduce myself or any other living system to a singular tag.

Learning in symmathesy is the perpetual processes of positioning and repositioning, calibrating, shifting, and responding to responses within contexts of multiple, simultaneous interactions.

Defining life in terms of ‘parts and wholes’ quickly slips into thinking in terms of arrangement and mechanistic function.

So often the word for something or someone is a box, an outline, a set of limits—a tightness that isolates the ‘subject’ from its context.

Looking ahead we must ask: Who do we want to be in this transforming world? Who are we, now? … And what of Humanity?