Friday, March 11, 2005

why word gravity?

Well, I had to call it something...and this was a phrase that came to me while listening to Stephen Downes talk about community blogging at the Northern Voice conference last month. He was talking about how words actually distort meaning--that words pull the pattern (idea/context) into themselves. I sort of spun off on my own little reverie at that point seeing words as planets or suns exerting a field of gravity on our ideas and on our ability to communicate them to each other--each of us having our own galaxy of word systems, whose gravity pulls and warps the ideas we hear and the ideas we wish to express.

So this blog...for now...will be about words and ideas and conversations, about community and freedom and courage, about compassion and mindfulness and creativity, about the big ideas that excite and uplift us and the minutiae of daily experience that grounds us and brings us joy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm so glad you've begun! And look forward to posts that spider-web out from Downes' talk. "There is no centralized place that constitutes community, there are only people, and resources, that are distributed, that are all acting on their own behalf and in their own interests." Stephen Downes, Community Blogging

I'm so struck at how close this is to what we were groping towards 20 years ago in our talks on "community" vs. "commune". (Though expressed a little less philosophically...)

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