Blog
Reflections by Walk Outs
Updates, Observations and Questions
We've heard from many of you that you'd like to know what's happening now in the communities whose stories we share in Walk Out Walk On. So we've asked Walk Outs from each of these communities to share their updates, reflections and questions. We encourage you to offer questions and reflections of your own at the end of each blog entry.
by Community Blog on September 21, 2013
Author: Sarah Zoutewelle-Morris
Walk Out Walk On is not just about communities in poor countries. The issues arising on these journeys are hyper relevant to anyone wanting to live and act more consciously in these times. I’ve read the book, and studied it in detail because so many points resonated for me. In order to digest as well as share the material I’ve also written fairly extensively about several topics (leadership, start anywhere follow it everywhere) on my blog. But the acid test comes not from writing about it, but living it. I got my chance when asked to join a small group of neighbours to try to remedy a dangerous traffic situation locally.
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by Community Blog on September 12, 2013
Author: Murtaza M Bootwala
After walking out from my corporate job as a steward from Hilton Towers Mumbai, I had the question: What next? And what’s the purpose of my life?
With these questions, I travelled different parts of India to meet people who are working towards a better world which gave me hope that Yes! a better world is definitely possible. Now, my vision of my life is: “Catalyzing the co-creation of a thriving, just and a sustainable world.”
by Community Blog on September 12, 2013
Author: Gerardo Vergara
My decision to walk out of a regular employment was sort of an awakening that I did not belong there because I am a free thinker who loves doing and learning about anything that interested me on my own.
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by Aerin Dunford on July 24, 2013
These last months have been strange—at least if I look through the conventional lens of busyness. Until recently, I measured success according to how productive I was, how much I could accomplish. But now I’m beginning to realize I’ve been addicted to busyness.
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by Deborah Frieze on July 24, 2013
Every morning I wake up and watch life and death outside my bedroom window. We have two beehives perched on the roof of a first floor sunroom. As I watch the hive come alive with the morning sun, most of the bees begin their very full workday, zipping in and out, hovering as they await return entry. But a few of the bees have a different task: Their job is to pull the dead and dying out of the hive and deposit them on the roof, where some lay lifeless and others tremble with their last breaths.
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by Community Blog on June 25, 2013
Author: Veena Vasista
(Reprinted from Veena’s blog: See & Connect)
My name is Veena Vasista. I’m a Yank who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, went to university in upstate New York and left the States at age 23 to live in Europe – first Germany and then England, which – more or less – has been where I have lived for the last twenty years. My parents migrated to the US from India in the 60s.
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by Community Blog on June 11, 2013
Author: Sarah Zoutewelle-Morris
Dear people,
I would like to tell an inspiring story, but I find myself in the uncomfortable in-between state of having walked out of the old, and not yet having hit solid ground in the new. And perhaps this story needs to be told as well for others who are in a similar position.
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by Filiz Telek on May 15, 2013
Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
“You owe me.”
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.
– Hafiz
Five of us have been in a passionate conversation for over a year now about gift consciousness and how it is manifesting in our world right now. We are Manish Jain from Shikshantar, India; Filiz Telek and Ayşegül Güzel from Zumbara, Turkey; Lina Cramer and Richard Durning from Wisdom Exchange, USA. As a result of this ongoing dialogue, GIFTIVAL was born! We are sensing that it is a crucial time to bring together visionaries and practitioners of the Gift in a peer-to-peer, playful, collective inquiry to share our ideas, experiments, practices and burning questions. We envision activating our collective intelligence & heart by being in this inquiry and celebration together.
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by Deborah Frieze on April 16, 2013
A little over a year ago, I made my first visit to Järna, Sweden, home of the Youth Initiative Program (YIP), a one-year social entrepreneur learning program for 18-25 year olds. As I was preparing to depart, one of the YIPpies stopped by my room to ask me how I felt about my visit. It was then that I spoke the lyrics to what would become the first song I ever wrote when I said, “I feel like I’m packing to leave utopia.”
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by Aerin Dunford on February 25, 2013
“Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life…”
– Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
Last summer, I thought myself quite witty when I came up with the phrase “experimentation with a longing to fail.” I was at an international gathering exploring “oneness.” I noticed how quick we were to use words like ‘experimentation’ and ‘laboratory’, but when we were truly on the edge of pioneering something new, organizers would often default to the predetermined plan. Since then, I’ve wondered if this longing for failure could be a way of working more intentionally with emergence—rather than an unfortunate side effect of being courageous enough to try new things.
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