Also, my week wasn’t entirely happy. One of the six meetings didn’t go as expected. My very slow researcher’s perspective/brain simply couldn’t keep up with one of the people I met with. I found myself struggling to keep up, to stay in the conversation, to understand what mattered most to this person, and at points, even to know what the heck was being talked about. Twenty-five minutes in I got a headache. I felt myself slipping out of my community self, out of my self-organizing group self, and into my individual self. And I witnessed my truth in the moment: that self was afraid. My mind darted around within itself, fretting, worrying, wondering:

• “Why am I not connecting with this person like I do with most people?”
• “What am I doing wrong?”
• “What if this person thinks I’m a complete idiot?”
• “What if I AM a complete idiot?”
• “What can I do differently?”
• “Do I have it in me to honor, capture, and tell this person’s story in our book?”

For me, this fear was a slippery slope and because of the slow speed at which I like to process things, I never fully recovered while we were together. I managed to get out less than half the questions we’ve been asking others for the book. More importantly to me, I didn’t fully connect with this person as a real human being. I moved away from learning and into judgment and from trust into distrust—first of my individual self and then out onto the person I was supposed to be there to learn with.

FAIL. “EPIC FAIL!” as my flash mob choreographer, Beth, sometimes shouts during rehearsals. Love you, Beth.

This failure hurt my heart in addition to my head, because from a distance I’d experienced that we were friends–and had imagined we may even work together–so it was a shock that in person I wasn’t fully feeling the same. I left the meeting, found a Starbucks (symbol of my Seattle home), and sat for an hour with a comforting green tea latte just thinking about the experience. Then I hiked up Powell Street to my hotel, got into bed, called Daniel, and cried. It took him 2 hours to convince me that I wasn’t the biggest loser ever to hit the streets of San Francisco. Love you, Daniel.

The next day I conducted my final San Francisco interview—an organization of 20-something bike couriers who built their business around a set of wishes that include riding their bikes every day, weaving work into a life of travel and adventure, paying their rent, and serving the people in their neighborhood. Wow. Our future truly is in amazing hands. My heart began to feel better. Thank you, Chas.

I also reconnected with the person I’d felt I’d completely failed and attempted to explain my experience of our time together. I received trust, kindness, and support. Thank you.

Across the past few days, more healing:

• Three community members shared their own difficulties with me, helping me more easily put mine into perspective  (thank you, Jeffrey, Kate, and Egan)
• Four others asked for my insights and/or my help, reminding me that I’m not quite the loser I’d imagined myself to be (thank you, Doug, Bas, California Doug, and Ali)
• One told me that he was a better person for our  time together (thank you, James)
• Four more jumped onto the sofa in my office and demonstrated that everything will be ok just by their comforting presence (thanks Grady, Joe, Ansel, and Bella)

Today, I’m almost fully restored to my community self—the open, learning, trusting self I’m becoming so fond of.

FAIL experiences are humbling, and, in hindsight, for me that’s a good thing. Hearts cracked more widely open can more deeply connect. This is good.

My faith-in-chaos way of working doesn’t work for everybody (duh), and some other people’s ways of working don’t work for me. Fantastic! Nothing wrong with that.

I just remembered why I first noticed that moving in the world as self-organizing work groups is more rewarding, fun, and effective than only moving in the world as an individual. Because when I show up as these groups, I can more easily find and connect with others who matter most to me right now and more fluidly say goodbye-for-now to others.

I learned something about my individual self. I know within minutes if I should work with a person this year or if we should wait, marinate, and become a future version of ourselves before we consider working together. I can also act on this awareness relatively quickly. That’s what happened to me this week. I’d imagined that I should be working with a person and within minutes I knew that wasn’t true. As we exist today, we would drain energy from each other instead of generating energy together. I’ve learned that it’s ok to trust myself about this. I don’t have to doubt my own ability to know who I should and shouldn’t be working with at any given time. This is big. For me this is HUGE, really. This is what working in the world as self-organizing groups and community has made possible for me. No wonder I feel grateful so much of the time.

Thank you, community, for helping me heal and for teaching me that I can more fully trust myself in the moment than I imagined I could. You rock.

The weather was sunny and warm almost the entire time.

We ate.

A lot.

Ribs. Cowboy Beans. Chicken Fried Steak. Potato salad. Meatloaf. Open-face Pot Roast Sandwiches. Chorizo Spinach Salad.

We found a place that sold fried pies, and which I’m pretty sure is where the expression “OMG!” came into existence. We also went to a bookstore, a hardware store, a feed store, and a coffee shop. We took drives around the beautiful countryside. They showed us the effects of the drought they’re in and effects of the summer wild fires. We played cards, watched football, and ate dinner with their friends. More pie—this time a delicious combination apple/pecan pie that I think only an inspired southerner could have invented. Daniel and his dad trimmed some trees while his mom and I curled up in the sunshine and read and played games. Life was good.

But for me, the best part is what I learned on this trip.

It wasn’t that many years ago that I wasn’t the biggest fan of Texas. I was 17 when I first visited Texas and the visit was to look at a prospective university. As we began the university tour—at the dormitories—the tour guide said “The girls’ dormitories have a curfew of midnight. The boys’ dormitories have no curfew. We’ve found that the boys don’t really want to stay out late once the girls have to come in.” My immediate, 17-year-old-self hit rage in less than one second. “Severe inequitable treatment of women and men! Arrgh! In this day and age! You have GOT to be kidding me!” I thought. All this must have shown on my face, because I remember looking at my mom and dad and sharing the collective thought: “We just flew all the way to Texas for nothing.” We stood quietly looking at each other as the tour began to move on. I think my dad was the first to speak. He sighed. Then said, “Well. I guess that’s it. Let’s go.”

My next visit to Texas wasn’t smooth either. I was 29 and meeting my boyfriend’s parents for the first time. I don’t remember all of that trip—I’m sure there were good times. However, I remember my fear. I remember being scared to go shopping. I’d heard that malls there were experiencing a lot of vehicle break-ins, because so many people in Texas carry guns under their car seats. I remember being scared to meet women. I’d heard a story that many women in Texas carry guns in their handbags. Guns scare me to death. I also remember several sets of people having momentary existential crises about whether they should give two rooms or one to their 29-year-old son and his girlfriend. I was so completely out of my element that when I called my own family to wish them a happy Thanksgiving, I cried. And that wasn’t the last time I cried on that trip. What in the world was I doing in a place so foreign and dangerous?!

Fast forward to this visit. Here’s a small sample of what I learned on this trip:

• My mother-in-law reads all of my blog posts—even the ridiculously long ones I write primarily for myself and other researchers. I strongly suspect that nobody on my own beloved side of the family could say the same (and I couldn’t blame them—the only person I expect to read every blog post is me). She said to me “It’s so much fun to watch you progress. You’re a person who has moved from seeing just THIS [hands held about a foot a part] to seeing all of THIS! [hands held as far out to her sides as they would go].” This made me feel lucky and special. Um, wow.
• A local sheriff is a woman, as is a local fire chief. The fire chief is seeking to know everyone in her entire district, because she believes it’ll make them all safer from, and safer fighting, fire. So smart, this woman. Go Texas women!
• Their friends have a dog that absolutely refuses to bark—even the time he was accidentally locked in a storage room overnight,
  and they thought he’d run away. We have a dog like that. These same friends give help, kindness, and work to a man who spent most of his adult life drunk. Here in our Seattle neighborhood, we do the same.
• There’s a nudist colony in the area where Daniel’s folks live. Nudists. In the Bible belt. I just find that cool.
• Several of Daniel’s parents’ friends have bravely battled back from life-threatening illnesses and beaten the odds to keep living and spending time with their family and friends. When friends and pets pass away, their grief is as deep as mine, and their generosity in helping others through grief appears to exceed my own. I have much to learn.
• In 1937, natural gas leaked at a nearby school, killing many children. Parents and other community members raced from all directions to help and kept on helping in the face of learning they may have lost their own children. I learned that the smell that is added to natural gas in the U.S.—to protect me and my family from similar explosions—came into being thanks to those people in Texas. Twice in my life I’ve lived in homes with old furnaces that started to leak, and we called in professionals immediately because
  of that smell. Those people in Texas in the 1930s saved our lives—70+ years later. Thank you brave and persistent people.

This time, I recognized so much of my own South Dakota childhood in the towns we visited. And just like in South Dakota, some small towns are pulling together as communities and restoring their downtowns into warm, welcoming, unique, and beautiful places. Other small towns seem almost to be fading into non-existence, and I felt the sadness of loss as we passed through their crumbling remains. One local diner reminded me of my own family’s former small-town diner, the Dakota Diner. Across our 6-day trip, every time we ventured out I found myself talking to warm, friendly, and curious people who started conversations with a smile, struck up conversations with me (a quiet stranger), and who gave me the benefit of the doubt even though I come from crazy progressive Seattle. People were telling me there life stories in the book store and twice while I stood in the line for the women’s restroom. Most were also funny—weaving jokes and kind teasing of themselves and each other into their stories. I found open people, willing to listen and learn. People frustrated by many of the same things that frustrate me.

If you’re from Texas, you might be asking yourself “Well, what did you expect girl? Texans are known for their welcoming nature and big hearts.” Where I’m from, though, that’s not exactly what Texas is known for anymore, and you Seattleites might even suspect that I’m sugar-coating my recent experience now that I know my mother-in-law will read this. No matter. This is my truth and my story.

There are still many differences between what I believe and what many in Texas believe. But it was also in Texas, not Seattle, where I learned for good how little that matters. It was in Texas that I came to fully trust myself to live in the moment with others. Where I learned to make my judgments (because I’m not the Dali Lama, folks, as an individual I do slip into judging people now and then) not on what we believe but on who we are together, in each others’ presence. Thanks to my community, I’ve experienced the pointlessness of judging others from a distance and how my individual fear really does hurt me the most.

As I sat in the airport, this is what I experienced and recognized:

• Gone is the individual who allowed her own fears to dominate and cloud her experience of different others.
• Gone is the individual willing to make snap judgments (and fly into rage) based on a single spoken sentence and without taking the time to learn the context, the all-important back story, and the differences there may even be in the words we use and what they mean to us.
• Gone is the individual who judged others based on the stories told about them—stories told by distant and fearful others.
• Gone is the person who allowed a single characteristic—such as political party affiliation or gun ownership—to stand in the way of friendship. And my favorite…
• Gone is the person who valued and told other people’s stories instead of her own. My story matters.

My community made this a possiblity for me and my community now includes the state of Texas. I learned that when I show up as community, there really aren’t distant others anymore. When I show up as community, I’m surrounded by the people I love and the people my community is helping me learn to love next. That’s it.

So it really wasn’t Texas that needed to change. It was me.

Lucky me.

Anyway, I can do this much. Please consider going to one or more of these sites and learning more about these two bills up for consideration by the U.S. Congress. These sites make it really easy to learn about these bills, to send a letter to a Congressperson if you’re so inspired, and, if you choose, to get involved further.

• Taking action to stop the Internet Blacklist Bills
• Stop American Censorship
• Electronic Frontier Foundation’s take action page
• Petition on Google
• Best anti-SOPA argument that I’ve found (The Oatmeal)

I knew that one of these days my technical ineptitude would bite me in the butt. Sigh. Today, apparently, is that day.

Thanks. See you soon,

Lori

• What is community?
• How do we create community?
• How do I know community when I see it? Especially
  when I’m with people who think, look, and act nothing like me/my groups?

I didn’t go looking for these questions. They found me somehow. Still not entirely certain why I’m so determined to have these conversations although I do know why I love them. These are questions that it’s impossible to be an individual expert at. Woo hoo! My favorite kind!

Here’s what you’ve taught me so far.

Community is:

• Showing up for someone and freely, gladly giving of yourself. Doesn’t appear to matter whether that person lives in your home (thank you, Daniel Gregory), hours away (thank you, Cathy Gregory), or on the other side of the planet (thank you, Ali Anani).
• Sharing your struggles, not just your joys, freeing others to do the same (thank you, Cathy Fromme, Bernie DeKoven, Lori Schilling, and Erik Bennion)
• Trying new things together that you wouldn’t have tried on your own (thank you, Doug Nathan and Bas de Baar)
• Listening a long time—until you can feel the other person’s perspective within you (thank you, Neil Baker)
• Moving together in the world, embracing and celebrating differences and commonalities (thank you, Jamal Rahman, Ted Falcon, and Don Mackenzie)
• A sense of abundance, welcome, and possibility (thank you, friends, neighbors, ancestors, and kind strangers)
• Certainty within uncertainty. I’m still not certain what will happen (or how or when or why things happen) most days. Yet I’ve learned to be certain about the people who show up to create community. I can trust you when my trust in my individual self fails me. That’s all the certainty I need.
• Receiving and creating:
• Love for who you are (thank you, mom, dad, Jen, and extended family)
• What the universe offers with gratitude and love, most days (thank you, Diane Moore and Lenelle Moise)
• Spontaneous acts of kindness. Too many to name these days, but off the top of my head, thank you for:
• Hugging Grady, Joe, Ansel, and Bella daily, Chris Abbas
• Texting me when cool stuff is happening, Tim Pritchard
• Our new garden path, Annie Dunne and Steve VanDyke
• An unexpected birthday gift, Bob Petruska
• An unexpected holiday card, Kare Anderson
• Kind words and advice, lovely stranger at the grocery store yesterday

How do we create community?

To me it appears that we don’t create community as individuals. We receive community as individuals and create  community as community. Does that sound weird? Trying again…

In my experience, time spent within self-organizing groups opened my heart, and made it possible for me to wake up and start my days with a sense of community, and eventually come to recognize it within myself and others, instead of feeling empty, not good enough, and searching to find community like I used to. So I suppose my advice would be this: spend more time with the people who open your heart and doing the things that open your heart. Allow yourself to become what you love, do what you suspect you are here to do, and lean strongly on your self-organizing groups—they can handle it. As an individual today, each time a community member shows up, I feel lucky, honored, and blessed to have that person in my life. But I don’t think I create community. We create community together.

Community surrounds and supports us as individuals and creates itself. Become community to create community.

How do I know community when I see it? Especially when I’m with people who think, act, or look nothing like me and my groups?

In every moment I allow myself and support others in feeling this way, we’re in community:

“Friend, our closeness is this: anywhere you
put your foot, feel me in the firmness under you.” – Rumi

When I move in the world on my own, fear is an issue for me and those around me. When we feel the firmness of community—our ground—under our feet, we can move and speak through our fears and move with them and past them as needed. In most moments now, I’m conscious of the question: “Are we sharing our fears, moving through them together, and at times, moving past them?” Each moment the answer becomes yes, it becomes a snap to recognize community. Oh yeah, there we are! It always seems to be an individual fear hiding community from me like a blindfold before my eyes.

You’ve taught me that community actually isn’t something I can lose or that I need to search for. We are community. And when I forget this, you remind me. Lucky me!

1. When we’re tired after work, we often plop down onto the couch and mindlessly watch TV for no other reason than that it’s the easiest thing to do. Sometimes for hours.
2. We don’t even like the programming on about 190 of the 200 channels, and we spend a ridiculous amount of time flipping around for something better to watch. Flipping through all the crap TV makes me feel worse about human kind, and myself, not better.
3. The satellite makes mindless couch plopping/TV watching far too easy. During these cold winter months, we’ve started spending more time in front of the TV each evening than we do with our friends and neighbors and family. This is not ok with us.

The final straw for me came when I noticed that I’ve started sitting with a book or laptop in my lap while I watch TV. Wow. Just how many signs did I need that I’m not getting the best humanity has to offer most nights by sitting in front of the TV for hours on end?

In Seattle we regularly run into people who don’t watch TV at all as a choice. Often something that feels like self-righteousness to me seems to ooze out of these people. I think it’s the horrified eyes combined with the whispered “Oh dear! We’d NEVER watch TV!” Bleh. It’s as if the rest of their planet is populated by couch potato zombies that they’d kill off if the zombies ever got off their couches and actually left the house (which, fortunately, they don’t, apparently as long as you whisper).

Given these two choices—horrified self-righteous TV denier or couch potato zombie—we’ve stayed firmly in the couch potato camp to date, because we a) generally like our fellow human beings, b) have never actually met a zombie, and c) have a really comfortable couch. But this fall, we finally figured out that we have more choices than just these two extreme ends. As the Buddhists would say, we have found our middle way. For us, this is it:

1. We can require mindfulness of ourselves. By giving up the satellite and moving to a hodge-podge combination of Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Smart TV, we will make it so that watching TV programming requires much more conscious effort and a conscious choice every single time.
2. We can ensure that we consistently prioritize real human interactions over TV entertainment by making real human interactions the easier of the two choices. Removing the satellite removes the after-work mindless couch plop as an option. This automatically frees up 10 hours of our time/week by my calculations. With all this new free time, I suspect it’ll feel much easier to invite friends and neighbors over more often, to schedule myself into that martial arts class I’ve been meaning to take, and so on. The bottom line for us is that we want spending time with people we love and meeting new people to be easier than watching TV. We can make that so for ourselves.
3. We can save money. A bonus perk is that Daniel figured out we’ll save $80/month. Wow.

It’s interesting the amount of fear there has been within me behind a simple decision to switch off the satellite. Will we still be able to find and watch the things we really want to find and watch? Will we still be able to have our household’s beloved “SciFi Friday” tradition? Will we be able to translate this action into improving our lives or will we just become some new sort of hybrid self-righteous couch zombie that just pisses EVERYBODY off around us?

I strongly suspect that we’ll be ok. For one, the more real human beings we surround ourselves with, the less self-righteous we tend to become. Also, despite all my years of TV watching, I still don’t actually believe in zombies.

Holiday elves (aka, mom and dad)

Lori’s Top 5

These are my favorite. The first four are my favorite because of what I learned in the group discussions. I suggest skipping past the blog post itself and just reading the discussion that follows it. Lots of “Ah ha!” and “Wow.” moments for me. The 5th one I love just because it is nice to be able to write about my own self-organizing work groups again.

1. Learning about myself through the doorway of self-organizing groups

2. What do community, self-organizing groups, and individuals do for our planet?

3. The space between our individual, self-organizing group, and community selves

4. Graceful receiving and letting go: lessons from a self-organizing group

5. 12 tips for fostering self-organizing work groups: from the very beginning

Collective Self core community members’ Top 5

These are the posts that received the most comments and fostered the deepest subsequent discussions and learning within core community members. Thank you peeps!

1. What do community, self-organizing groups, and individuals do for our planet?

2. A two-way tie between:

• Learning about myself through the doorway of self-organizing groups and
• The space between our individual, self-organizing group, and community selves

3. What is a self-organizing group?

4. Graceful receiving and letting go: lessons from a self-organizing group

5. Sustaining a self-reflection practice in a chaotic world (2 of 2)

Top 5 most popular posts by volume

This list is based on the sheer number of people who showed up to read Collective Self blog posts in 2011. Thank you community members I haven’t met yet!

1. What is a self-organizing group?

2. 10 signs you might be part of a self-organizing community

3. Learning about myself through the doorway of self-organizing groups

4. The space between our individual, self-organizing group, and community selves

5. Top 10 personal benefits of being part of self-organizing groups

Top 5 countries learning here together

Thank you to the people in all 120 countries who showed up here to learn together this year. It’s an honor just to know that you’re here!

1. United States

2. Jordan

3. United Kingdom

4. The Netherlands

5. Canada (just edging out Austrailia this year)

Top 5 best things that happened to Lori in 2011 thanks to this community

1. New friends who are growing dearer to my heart by the day. Ali, Bas, Cathy, Diane, Doug, Kare, Neil, and Tim, you are the greatest gifts.

2. Getting to work with Bas and Ali (in distant lands) and with Doug, Cathy, Neil, Tim, and Diane (here at home).

3. Learning to listen more and to receive everything with gratitude. I’m still working on that “gratitude the very moment it happens” part.

4. A tie between co-publishing my first ever eBook with Doug and visiting the Occupy Seattle tent city with Doug.

5. Daniel and I receiving the idea to transform our back rental cottage into a community meeting and learning space. Woo hoo!

So thank you, thank you, and thank you. My family receives so much from this community that it’s almost unbelievable to me as an individual. Thanks to this community I am more content with who I am and what I do (Daniel’s observation), I have become a believer in the impossible, and I have a deep faith in humanity as a whole. I wish for you all the best in 2012 or whatever year it’s becoming for you this year!

sunny skys and Christmas lights in Arizona

A quick Google search reveals courage as:

1. The ability to do something that frightens one.
2. Strength in the face of pain or grief.

Thanks to my groups, I get to do Part 1 of courage every single day now. I:

• Work for myself (scary to intentionally move from a 6-figure salary to a zero figure salary)
• Blog my experiences each week (scary to share personal experiences of myself and others and scary to try to put words to experiences that transcend language)
• Study community and self-organizing groups to a depth that only a handful of others may ever care about or value (scary to follow my own experience and intuition)
• Prioritize work that I deeply love and believe in over work that will make my family a lot of money (scary that it’s our future I’m gambling, not just my own)
• No longer plan what I will write next (for a planner like me, this may well be the most scary! At some point I apparently “decided” to trust that my community and self-organizing groups are amazing enough that planning isn’t necessary. I now write about what is happening right now. I assume that “right now” will always be enough. Am I 100% certain it will be? Um, yeah, ah, almost there…)

What frightens one as an individual, I’ve found, is not so frightening as small groups.

But when we hit Part 2 of courage—strength in the face of pain or grief—my community is teaching me that my own individual claim to courage isn’t real.  Tough to describe this, so I’m going to use one of my favorite quotes:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding… And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy. – Khalil Gibran

This is my experience now. I spend so much time in community as self-organizing groups—my deepest joy—that my heart remains in wonder most of the time at the daily miracles of life. Pain is often (not always) a flicker of its former self, usually moved through together, and often appreciated for the opening of hearts and minds that comes with it. Most days, now, my pain is not less wondrous than my joy. It’s not easy to explain with words, and it seems weird to the logical, linear part of me, but there it is. So, nope, I don’t have courage most days. I have wonder, gratitude, and joy most days, and they are enough.

This came to me yesterday, when I was standing in Doug’s kitchen, suddenly aware that I was in the presence of true courage, and the power of the experience nearly knocked me off my feet. Fortunately, as it happened I wasn’t actually standing, I was sitting on a tall stool. Anyway, during our meeting Cathy demonstrated tremendous courage—sharing the pain of following her desire to do deep, meaningful work. Showing all of us what true courage is. Cathy, your courage took my breath away and left me speechless in the moment. Here’s what I now know. True courage is:

• Working for yourself, and trusting yourself, when you don’t have others helping share the load and pay the bills
• Sharing your worst, not just your best, experiences with others
• Learning about and sharing what you deeply love with the world on top of periodically taking on work you’re not thrilled about so that you can eat, pay the mortgage, and go to the doctor when needed
• Some days, prioritizing work that you deeply love and believe in over work that means a secure future for your physical body (with a roof over your head, food in your mouth, and professional health care an actual possibility)
• Trusting your world and self enough to throw out your “plans” and your “organization” and following your intuition, even when you’re being pulled down a path you yourself are unfamiliar with, when there appears to be little evidence that our world is a trustworthy place, and ample evidence that our world is one of scarcity

In the Lori Kane dictionary, Cathy, your picture has just been placed along side the word courage.

My wish for you comes from my favorite poet Lenelle Moïse. Please just replace “homeboy” with “homegirl” within it, as appropriate.

cuz i dream
a home
for you
in a safe & spacious country
where your very own
laughter
can sprout
from joy
homeboy
from joy

Cathy, there is no experience and intuition more trustworthy than yours, my friend. Trust your crazy, winding, imperfect yet perfect-for-you path. And if you ever find yourself without a roof over your head, I hope you will come stay with us under ours. Our roof would be so very grateful for your presence.

My family just keeps getting more fun as the years pass

This post is for my friend Ali who asks questions that keep me young at heart. Today Ali asked “Does familiarity decrease the generated happiness?” [within a group]

I’d like to start by saying that I have zero interest in putting up barriers to human happiness. So if you disagree with what I say here, please be happy about it. I will be.

An easy way to answer this is to ask yourself, Ali, to honestly answer this question:

• Does receiving and reading the comments that strangers made on your last slide deck (http://www.slideshare.net/hudali15/ads-dispersal) make you happier than receiving and reading the comments that Bas and I (intimate group members) made?

The answer to that question is your answer.

Here’s mine. In my experience, happiness is a collective phenomenon, even while we feel some elements—such as wonder, awe, and delight—also as individuals. I’ve experienced and observed that happiness happens in clusters and that it spreads following “paths of most acceptance” when we open ourselves up and let others in. Self-organizing groups make this spreading easier, in part because members within them become progressively more open and happy, and less fearful, and it’s simply easier for people around them to see this and experience this with them. At the community level, happiness appears to spread even more simply, but I’m way too early in my understanding to say much from that perspective yet. I’m not sure that words are even the best way to demonstrate that.

From our self-organizing group example (you, me, and Bas), I’d say, for us, familiarity increases happiness. Yet our familiarity is a living, growing, evolving familiarity. There are levels of vulnerability and intimacy and learning within us as a group that we have moved through together and many, many more yet to move through. At this point, I honestly don’t believe there is a limit unless we want there to be one—certainly not one that can be achieved in a single human lifetime. My experience within my own family has taught me this as well. My husband, sister, parents, and extended family are more enjoyable to be with and interesting to me now than ever before! (most days)

That said, if you, for example, decided in the future that there were other bloggers you’d rather be talking with than me, and you began to show up here once/month out of a sense of obligation—not out of a genuine interest in connecting and learning together—at that point you might start asking half-hearted questions or stop asking questions entirely. If that happened, then my happiness would go down (as I suspect yours would too). At that point, happiness would decrease.

But that’s not what’s happening with us. We are continuing to evolve and change and grow together. Your questions cause me to think. You bring ideas out of my head and put them squarely before my eyes where I can get a decent look at them. We come up with collective ideas as well—ideas that don’t fully exist within us as individuals but that we find together as a group.

I’ve also experienced and witnessed self-organizing groups help members recognize when what matters most has changed to them as an individual and that its time for them to move on. So I am pretty certain in my own life today that a decrease in happiness due to non-evolving (aka dead) familiarity will not happen. Because I wish only the best for you, Ali, and this includes when the best for you means less, or even no more, time with me. When familiarity stops evolving can it be called familiarity anymore? I’m thinking here of two miserable individuals trapped in an unhappy marriage and allowing all sense of connection and intimacy to die. They still know each other, technically, I suppose, but I’d argue that they really don’t. They’re moving ever farther apart, and as they get farther apart, so grows their anger, resentment, and apathy. We have an old saying here: “familiarity breeds contempt.” That saying is out of date. We know better now. Apathy breeds contempt. And apathy comes from lack of intimacy and connection.

That won’t happen with us, Ali. You and I can’t settle for less. Because here, our group always gets a vote. Self-organizing groups push and pull us toward happiness even at the expense of the group itself. If you begin showing up here out of obligation, or asking rote questions out of an “I should” sense of duty instead of a genuine desire to be here learning together, I will notice. I will begin to suggest to you that what matters most to you has changed and that you need to explore what has changed and, possibly, consider moving on. You will do the same for me. As a researcher, I cannot be certain of much. But I am 110% certain of that.

A remarkable new community member, Anthony Lawlor, got me thinking about transitions this morning. In August I blogged about the experience of consciously moving from four different perspectives: individual, self-organizing group, community, and planet perspectives. He’s curious about what the transitions between these places look like. I am too, which may be why, although we’ve only just met, I’m already pretty sure that he’s a genius.

Community ask:

If you have a talent for drawing (and reading between the lines), and would like to draw images for future transition-related posts, will you let me know? Please don’t make me draw these images on my own, my friends. It might break my brain.

Three stories of individual and self-organizing group transitions follow. The three stories together are also a story of community. In upcoming posts, I’d love to add drawn images to further illuminate one or more of these transitions. Creative friends, what does the transition look like between and among:

• Our individual selves and our self-organizing group selves?
• Self-organizing groups and self-organizing work groups?
• These self-org group selves and my community?
• Our individual selves, self-organizing groups, and our community?
• Our communities and our planet? (You’ll need to rely fully on your own imagination for this one.)

The story of Doug and Lori

In the fall of 2010, Doug emailed me when he recognized something of himself in the Collective Self blog. We met for coffee and learned we’d both left Microsoft several years back. We immediately liked one another and believed that we could be better together than on our own, in part because our areas of focus are very different from each other. At that first meeting, I invited Doug to join the Seattle Consultants Grotto group I was part of, and we began to meet monthly as part of the group. By January 2011, we were talking weekly, as friends, and decided we’d like to work together somehow. Here are the highlights of what we’ve become and done together this year:

1. Across the spring:

• We created and submitted several conference workshop proposals together. The first was unsuccessful, the second one was accepted. Although still not fun, being rejected together felt considerably better than being rejected as an individual, and I spent less than 5 minutes feeling sorry for us before moving on.
• Doug found new, paid consulting work thanks to the Seattle Consultants Grotto group.
• Lori found a new group to study thanks to Doug’s recommendations and spent time with that group.
• Doug invited Lori to lunch with his friend Greg, who brought along his friend Cathy. Cathy and I connected immediately.

2. Across the summer:

• We facilitated a workshop at the Organizational Systems Renewal conference at Seattle University. We had a great time, even though I was recovering from food poisoning the day of the workshop. Had I been facilitating this workshop on my own, I would have cancelled because I couldn’t have done it alone. Doug’s friend Neil attended the workshop. Neil is now my friend and we recently started talking about working together as well.
• I invited Cathy to join the Seattle Consultant’s Grotto group.
• In our spare time, Doug and I wrote an eBook together—a first for both of us. I met Doug’s family and learned about a great group his wife Wendy is a part of, which I talked about a little bit in this blog post. During one meeting with Doug, I started to cry because I was so thankful to be learning with him and not on my own. This blog post, one of my personal favorites today, is a result of that meeting. Doug learned that sometimes my gratitude bathtub runs over and spills out my eyes. I learned that my best work is improved by my tears, not hindered by it. We planned to finish the book in June (ambitious since we started in May) but Doug had a lot of commitments in June and July. There was one day, one moment, when as an individual I worried that Doug wouldn’t or couldn’t finish the book. I decided that the experience writing it with him was more valuable than the finished book itself and let go of that worry. We finished and published the eBook to our Web sites in August.
• In July, Doug, Cathy, Doug’s friend Neil, and I together created a speaking proposal for a 2012 conference that none of us has ever spoken at before.
• From his boat one sunny day in July, Doug called me and told me about another person/group he thought I should study.

3. Across this fall:

• We haven’t been working together as much, each moving on to new work. However, we did manage to create another workshop proposal for a conference that Doug has spoken at in the past. Feels like it takes us almost no time to throw proposals together now.
• I met with the new group that Doug recommended to me this summer: a group I intend to feature in the new Different Work eBook I’m writing with Bas. Learned so much!
• We continue to meet monthly via our Seattle Consultants Grotto group. I love hearing about what Doug is working on now.
• Later this month I’ll be interviewing Doug to include his story in the Different Work eBook I’m writing with Bas.

The story of Cathy and Lori

Cathy and I met on May 19, 2011, at a lunch arranged by my friend Doug and Doug and Cathy’s mutual friend Greg. Doug thought there might be an opportunity for connection, since we all do consulting work. I liked Cathy immediately. She’s so open, welcoming, and warm. She has an amazing smile. She also has a very different life and work history than me—having spent most of her career working for and within the school system (my background was within business and several non-profits). She reminds me of my sister—another person who has spent her career within the school system. Cathy and I both have doctorate degrees (Yea, another book nerd to hang with!). She received hers studying trust. Here are the highlights of what we’ve become and done together this year:

1.Later that same day (that we met):

• Cathy sent me a list of questions about self-organizing groups.
• I invited Cathy to join our Seattle Consultants Grotto group.
• Cathy and I began discussing self-organizing groups and trust—a discussion, from my perspective, that is unlikely to ever end, because I’ve believed from the beginning that Cathy and I will be friends. Some of our earliest learning is in this blog post.

2. Across the summer:

• We continued to exchange ideas (our own and others) about trust and self-organizing groups. We got to know each other better as Cathy went through a medical crisis with a family member and I talked to her about my own experiences with medical emergencies and chronic illnesses within my family. I was pretty surprised to be sharing this much with someone I’d just met, but I trusted my trust in Cathy (after all, I’d trusted Doug from the very beginning and that turned out pretty well, plus, isn’t someone who spends years devoted to studying trust likely to be among the most trustworthy people on the planet?).
• We created a proposal, together with Doug and Doug’s long-time friend Neil, to speak at a conference together next year as a panel.
• Cathy joined our monthly Seattle Consultants Grotto group. I continue to be amazed by this because she lives more than an hour away (more than 2 during rush hour).

3. Across this fall:

• When I expressed my desire to start working with some of the Grotto group members, Cathy was supportive and the first person who volunteered.
• We’re now writing a paper (or maybe eBook) together titled, at the moment, Coming to Trust as Self-Organizing Groups. We chose an informal dialogue format so that our collective learning, vulnerability, and growing trust—as a group—is documented. We decided that the outcome of the work, whatever it is, is pretty much icing on the cake. The cake is our friendship, which will outlast this and any other work we do.

The story of Bas and Lori

I’m not entirely sure how Bas and I met—that is, which events came first. It might be that our mutual friend Ali (in Jordan) told Bas (in The Netherlands) about the Collective Self blog and Bas then showed up as a contributor to it. Or it might be that Ali told me about Bas’ The Project Shrink blog, and I showed up as a contributor there first. Or maybe we found each others’ blogs on our own and our mutual friend Ali had little to do with it. Can’t remember and it makes little difference to me now (although thank you Ali, if it was you). Here are the highlights of what we’ve become and done together this year:

1. Across this summer:

• Bas and I began reading each others’ blogs and regularly contributing to them.
• We began recommending each other within our respective online communities.
• I learned where Zandvoort, The Netherlands is (had to Google it) and decided to add it to my travel “bucket list”.
• I read Bas and Ali’s eBook.
• I remembered my experiences working with the best project managers at Microsoft (hi Josh and Maura) and decided it’d be really fun to work with a project manager again.
• Bas spoke so highly of the Collective Self blog in his blog that I offered to do his laundry for him the next time he’s in Seattle.
• We began speaking regularly and reviewed some work for each other. I learned that I can be my whole self with Bas.
• I included a picture of Bas in one of my first posts about community.
• We started following and supporting each other via Twitter and Facebook as well.

2. In early fall:

• We had a couple of Skype conversations, which is a little challenging but mostly fun given our 9-hour time difference. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest to meet at midnight my time so that some of our conversations can be morning conversations for him. This is a very different experience from my days at Microsoft, where I was at times resentful for having 10 p.m. conference calls. Heck, I’d meet at 3 a.m. if Bas wanted to meet then.
• I asked Bas if he’d like to work together and he replied YES roughly 10 times. We decided to work together.
• Two weeks later, we’d begun research for an upcoming eBook, tentatively titled Different Work.
• We enjoy working together enough that at some point we decided to consider this the first book in a series. Telling people I’m writing “an eBook series” is just a cool thing to get to do. Makes me feel fancy.
• I told Bas that I’d learned with Doug that it’s not a successful work group for me until I cry–in gratitude for collective learning–as least once. This didn’t scare him off. In that moment I decided that I really like The Netherlands–yes, the whole country–as a result. Any country that could produce Bas must be pretty great.
• I learned that Frau Shrink (Bas’ significant other) is an amazing photographer. So is my husband. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

3. This past month:

• Bas took on another large job on top of his current work. He feared he wasn’t working on our book to the extent that I was. I said I don’t care if I do 100% of the research work, I’m just happy to be working with him, which is true. That momentary pang of “Yikes, will he finish this?” that I had with Doug back in July taught me that no momentary pang of this nature is needed. We’ll finish eventually. Staying connected matters more now than finishing one particular project.
• We’ve found ~20 groups to include in the book and are plugging away on story gathering right now. Bas, who feared he wouldn’t have time, appears to have found ample time. As a researcher, I’m in heaven getting to talk to new groups almost every week between now and February.
• I’ve recommended Bas’ site to several project manager friends and people in my Seattle Consultants Grotto group—people who thought they might need my help. I think his work is more likely to help some of them than mine is, given what they need right now. Mine can be a bit long-winded for busy folks working within large organizations.
• Bas learned what the Seattle skyline looks like, thanks to the lovely image Daniel recently created and added to the Collective Self blog.
• I’ve begun sending Project Status reports to Bas periodically. He doesn’t seem to need them. Who is this magical project manager who feels no need for status reports?! Another score for The Netherlands.

ali anani says:

November 11, 2011 at 1:55 pm

Lori Vs. Lori [Referring to my November 11, 2011 blog post in which I discuss interviewing another Lori] and the outcome is significant as it turns around to Lori with Lori.

I loved this post because it reflects real life experiences from the mouths of the emotionally involved. In particular, I was shaken with this statement and I quote from above “Bring our individual vulnerabilities* out into the open, experience and move with/through them together, and transform them into learning, power, and action”. Trust, cooperation and shelving off shyness are among the fruits of this significantly self-organized group

Salute to Lori and Lori

Lori says:

November 11, 2011 at 3:13 pm

Hi Ali, thanks for the comment.

Yes, meeting with Lori S was a significant learning experience for me. Because my own adult life experience involved first seeing myself as an individual, then seeing myself as small self-organizing groups, and only recently seeing myself as community. This progression worked but it’s taken many years for me to get to thinking from the perspective of community. Lori S found and joined a community that is already conscious that community creating/building is what matters most and an organization that sees small, self-organizing groups as the creators of strong community–where lasting connections form. It’s not about a few individuals at the “top” even for those at the “top” if there is such a thing. You can hear it in their motto “People becoming the church.” Very cool. From my perspective, her way seems like a pretty efficient way to move yourself into thinking from the perspective of community and into thriving as community.

I first typed “non-traditional” to describe their experience but that didn’t seem to honor their experience enough, so I changed it to “new-traditional” because that’s what it feels like to me. People rebuilding tradition. Makes me smile just thinking about it.

I love your words “real life experiences from the mouths of the emotionally involved.” While you were typing that I was at my Seattle Consultant’s Grotto meeting saying the same thing. I was saying that I don’t believe community and self-organizing groups can be studied from a distance. You have to be there and close enough to speak with and learn from the people themselves. I’ve found that I can still call myself a “self-orgizing groups researcher” because as an individual I can see the boundaries of small self-organizing groups. However, the term “researcher” doesn’t feel right when I’m learning within/about communities. In part, because I can’t, as an individual, see the edges of community. So “community member” is the title that feels most true. If I can imagine and feel myself as part of your community and you can imagine and feel yourself as part of mine, only then can I learn as community. It’s not research. It’s community creation/building. And you don’t need a PhD to do it! Quite the opposite. You lay down your individual title to do it.

Bas says:

November 13, 2011 at 9:52 am

“I first typed “non-traditional” to describe their experience but that didn’t seem to honor their experience enough, so I changed it to “new-traditional” because that’s what it feels like to me. People rebuilding tradition.”

This. Is. Fantastic. Moving forward respecting the legacy. Change not as a counteract from the old. But as a conscious revealing of the old (or the stuff that always is/was) in the new context. Hmmm. Sounding like Eckhard Tolle

I agree with writing from the personal perspective/experience. I always have. But only “recently” I make this explicit. Other times I wrote an abstract form about things I was experiencing myself. Or expert like. If I ever make a top 10 of “What Was I Thinking” this one makes it in the top 5: http://www.projectshrink.com/marketing-tech-people-hate-it-640.html

Oh my. Anyway.

It takes time to get that comfortable talking about it But practice makes .. well something.

I do need my title as Project Shrink though. And a cape.

  Lori says:

November 13, 2011 at 2:15 pm

Bas, agree its fantastic. Haven’t read Eckhard Tolle but then again I gave up learning from experts a couple of years ago when I figured out that I learn more as/from/with groups of learners. I am actually going to go back and interview another person before I write the story of this particular new traditional organization. This is “different work” on an organizational level and it’s just fascinating to me. A pastor in t-shirt and blue jeans. This I’ve got to see! I’m so glad my work has allowed me to evolve and find self-org groups and community fascinating everywhere I encounter them, since it wasn’t that many years ago that I would have avoided a religious organization like the plague.

I still need my title some days too. May be a cape or a hat (or in my case more like a security blanket like some little kids take to bed with them), but I also like to think that the capital R Researcher me is the me that some people will connect with and there’s really nothing wrong with that.

I like that blog entry you point out. You sound like a total bad ass! Not a side of you I’ve seen. Nice.

Love Havi’s latest blog about wearing a colorful stuffed snake and carrying a floppy stuffed cow through the airport and on the airplane. Now there’s a cape!

ali anani says:

November 11, 2011 at 5:06 pm

Lori,
Self-organizing groups make a new world, new landscapes that keep growing. They expand and as there are always emerging ideas they are limitless by scope, space or time. Their boundaries, if any, are elastic and shock-resistant. These groups survive. You write Lori on a noble groups that are expansive creatively. So is my respect and attentive care to read your posts

ali anani says:

November 11, 2011 at 9:58 pm

Lori, I forgot to comment on your last paragraph, which is so lovely that it can not be left unattended.

If I can imagine and feel myself as part of your community and you can imagine and feel yourself as part of mine, only then can I learn as community. It’s not research. It’s community creation/building. And you don’t need a PhD to do it! Quite the opposite. You lay down your individual title to do it.

This is a great explanation of your logo or motto “share the knowledge”. Sharing must flow to have meaning. Titles are blockages to the flow and I agree with you. If we are truly learners we realize progressively that we grow more ignorant and less learned because we discover how little we know. Topping ignorance with ice-cream titles doesn’t change the fact.
I may add that the connectedness is extensible to knowledge. We have networks of interacting networks of sciences and sciences and art. No more arts and sciences are distant subjects from each other. We need to have basic knowledge of many more fields that was not evident in the past. Networks of sharing knowledge play an important role in satisfying these demands

Lori says:

November 12, 2011 at 9:11 am

Ice-cream titles, i like it! Agree that the older I get the more I learn I don’t know. its very freeing. One of my favorite parts of studying the groups is that the goal is no longer to become an individual expert, the goal is to find and become groups of co-learners and communities, which is really more rewarding and even fun.

Disciplines and fields are overlapping. That comes so clear for me as I study these groups in business, education, churches, community-based organizations, online, and so on. If our higher education system evolved a tiny bit faster that is where I’d already be. I just couldn’t bring myself to publish in a system that limits who has acess to information and severely limits who gets to judge what has value. My community (whose voices i carry in my head) just wouldn’t hear of it! So for now, I work in my home based office so that I can be available and move quickly when emergent groups appear to learn with and i speak/guest lecture when asked. And I’m so greatful I do, because, for one thing, by doing this i found you.

Bas says:

November 13, 2011 at 9:59 am

The more I study these topics, the more I have the feeling I don’t know anything And even that I’m not sure of. At the moment it doesn’t always feel like freeing, but I think I am getting there.

I recently wrote

“It feels I am repeating myself. I think I brought my ideas as far as I can, on my own.” I said.
“Well. That is because you’re not supposed to do this on your own.” Someone replied.

So. Yeah.

Lori says:

November 13, 2011 at 2:23 pm

The freeing part for me isn’t just in recognizing how much there is to know and how little I can actually know. The freeing part is that I’ve begun to behave the opposite of my former self and really cool people are showing up as a result. Deep individual expertise is part of my nature and how I’ve made it in the past involved striving for individual expertise and then sharing it and helping others in a fairly one-sided way (rarely needing help myself). Now when studying community, becoming community, every time I listen, seek to learn, or confess that I’m clueless, a whole circle of people show up around me to join the discussion. It’s freeing not to have to always be the expert anymore. Still scary. But freeing to know that there is value within me that is secure and not dependent on my expertise. Could see that in others before but not in myself.

ali anani says:

November 12, 2011 at 10:43 am

Hi Lori,
Let me start by quoting your last line and half “And I’m so greatful I do, because, for one thing, by doing this i found you”. Grateful is spelled as greatful. Allow me to call this an emergent feeling. We have feelings that overwhelm our writing and our real inner feelings surface out. For this reason, I am doubly happy that I found such a great human. That is you.

Lori says:

November 12, 2011 at 4:01 pm

Thanks Ali. Maybe we’ll just call “greatful” our newly invented word that means full of gratitude plus feeling great! I was typing on my husband’s iPad this morning and typing directly on a small screen instead of a keyboard is tricky!

Emergent feelings. Yep. Just remembered I was beginning to write about this back when I was studying only self-organizing work groups and focusing on how to recognize these groups at work:
http://www.collectiveself.com/recognizing-self-organizing-work-groups/recognizing-self-organization-at-work-4-of-9/

I called it “sharing more of myself than expected or planned” instead of emergent feelings. I think I did this mostly because I wasn’t yet ready to use a word like “feelings” when related to work and business. But its there between the lines.

ali anani says:

November 12, 2011 at 7:38 pm

Hi Lori,
Yes, it is there between the lines. I liked the explanation of the “Greatful” word.
I use iPad and find it convenient to carry around.
I am surprised that you are not involved in some “windy and woundy” discussions on Bas Blog. I invented the word woundy, meaning causing wounds
http://www.projectshrink.com/group-interaction-using-rules-or-by-self-organization-5691.html

Lori says:

November 12, 2011 at 8:17 pm

Considered joining but decided to stay out of that one. I appreciate what you’re doing there and the depth of conversation. Lovely! Sometimes I just prefer to listen and watch groups and don’t feel the need to add my 2 cents. Besides, with both you and Bas in that conversation, I feel that my perspective is already there.

ali anani says:

November 12, 2011 at 9:09 pm

Lori,
If self-organizing groups involve being 100% yourself by expressing self-feelings and interests then I do not qualify to be a member. You are yourself, and I feel I am not always. My two cents go for you

Lori says:

November 12, 2011 at 9:51 pm

Just meant that I would be there in spirt if you and Bas—both of whom have read almost as much of the Collective Self blog as I have—were there. But I did just offer my 2 cents to that discussion on Bas’ blog, because I thought that the very smart and interesting Jon was not being as respectful and kind to my friends Bas and Ali as I’d like community members to be. :-)

ali anani says:

November 13, 2011 at 1:29 am

Lori,
I have just responded to your comment on Bas blog. I do appreciate your taking the time to write a response that is honest and straight without being brutal or hard.
Every day I discover the wealth of having known you. You are a unique person. I mean it.

Bas says:

November 13, 2011 at 10:12 am

Can’t wait to read the interview with Lori. Lori. This truly sounds inspiring.

Lori says:

November 13, 2011 at 2:31 pm

Contacting her pastor as well to more fully write the story, because the small groups she’s part of are intentionally not work groups. Their purpose is connection making and community building–book groups, activity groups, cooking groups, business groups, scripture groups—all within the church itself. To make it into the Different Work book, I hope to head back and talk to the pastor who started the church 9 years ago, because in this case the “different work” appears to be at the organization and community level. Conscious use of self-organizing groups to get things done. Consciousness that community creation/building is the organization’s purpose and that small groups, not a handful of individual leaders, are leading on that front is not something I’ve encountered studying within businesses. Lots to learn from them!

ali anani says:

November 13, 2011 at 11:30 pm

It is this quality of response that prompted me with peace in mind and heart to nominate you and your blog as the best on Bas’ blog. Lori, you have been an exceptional person at all times.

Lori says:

November 14, 2011 at 7:16 pm

Thank you Ali, I appreciate that. I think we’re part of an exceptional community together. There isn’t a single Collective Self blog post written that is more useful or insightful than the discussions we have together. On my own, it’s just words. It’s when you show up that together we become the change we wish to see in our world. Still so nice to be nominated. Thank you!!

ali anani says:

November 14, 2011 at 11:18 pm

Lori,
Even though I have to rush for a meeting with a very influential business man; yet I find it more propelling to respond to you.
First, I remember that you wrote once you do not respond to comments on Saturday-Monday. I find you responding. That is a rule that is not. Eagerness and engagement override rules.

Yes, together is the name of the self-organizing group. But there must be always an initiator. It is you in this case and I am proud to be a member of your groups.

Sometimes, I fail to find the words to express myself. This time I am.

Lori says:

November 15, 2011 at 10:51 am

Hey Ali, yep, you remind me of talking about this back in February. I said “Actually, if I’m deeply convinced that someone is a self-organizing work group member, I’ll toss out any rule—including all those I created for myself—just to open the chance to work with that person.”. (near the end of this post: http://www.collectiveself.com/fostering-self-organizing-work-groups/find-your-next-self-organizing-work-group-using-these-four-indicators/).

From my perspective, you’re the initiator of our group. I was out here reflecting and writing and talking to myself. We became a group when you found me and started talking. You’re the initiator! I think Bas found me because of you. Now I’m working with Bas on an eBook. Gratitude back to you!

ali anani says:

November 16, 2011 at 1:05 am

Lori, answering a question opens door for another one. I am surprised how our thinking is similar sometimes. Does this lead to familiarity? I know that total familiarity is not possible, but partial familiarity may even help.

Lori says:

November 16, 2011 at 10:55 am

Ali, good question. What do you think? I’m not sure. From my perspective, it’s similar feeling, not similar thinking, that leads to greater closeness and familiarity. Similar sense of feeling listened to and welcome.

Based on what I’ve learned from the groups I’ve studied, I aspire to diversity of thinking and diversity of ways of being in my groups and in being open to difference and doing what I can think of to pull diversity in and help myself and others feel welcome in our difference. So yes, I suppose I think it’s the feeling where unity lies–feeling welcome, feeling needed, feeling listened to.

Wow, that’s not something I’ve consciously thought about before. Very cool.

Lori says:

Ali, this conversation is too good. I’m going to turn it into a blog post so more people can see it!