Following Our Rules

In our Sharing Circles we have a ground rule to share a one speaker at a time floor and unitarian silent listening support And rules to not share uninvited commentary suggestions verbal agreements or disagreements during, and after, this formalized Circle. Speakers are invited to share from experience only, not from someone else's story, experiential and/or theoretical, parental and/or academic, personal and/or professional. This is a Closed Circle of verbal communications, a rhetorically autonomous inside job only silently noting our egalitarian nonjudgmental side by sideness of authority responsibility compassion for satisfaction and impatience; Help, Thanks, Wow!; Truth, Beauty, Silent Passion... If we are a composition, we enter an historic symphony of solo voices implicitly singing our universality experiencing time's nurturing and severing qualities and relentlessly insufficient quantity, except when anyone else is speaking business as too coldly or too warmly usual. In our Reading Circles our implicit ground rule culture differs more in favor of the spontaneous spoken word, this good news, extemporaneous, and bad fake news, distemper-odious gospel we scribe together, Usually one voice leading a sustained melodic theme, sometimes harmonic and splendid, sometimes dissonant and diminished, inviting in compassionate responses, major and minor, listening for counter-melodies, for analogies metaphors curious oxymorons, outrageous internal pun fun, rhymes and maybe the occasional reason, held with soft determination and not hard determinism. Participants are invited to share harmonic voices of MeToo and to gently question why my own dissonantly deviant choice traps me in feeling detached, uncertain, less certain, more certain we must be missing some counter-balancing dirge of risk and full-circle opportunities for evolving peaceful revolutions. We sing in Open Circle rounds of theory meets experience greets political philosophy and primal attachment theory applications to all relationships ego logical and unlogical and anti-logical and dis-passionate, conscious and unconscious and suppressed consciousness and more dispassion, and ecological and ecosystemic and healthy climate logical for growing reading circles into speaking and listening communion rounds of timeless symphonic conversation, dia-logos about favored/unflavored mythos. Cooperative conveners encourage each other to speak from felt experience of belief and disbelief in some published teacher's expression of experience with timeless patience and time-heavy impatience, of joy and sorrow, courage and curiosity, compassion and dispassion, intimacy and repulsion, about some subject's story, Where it does and does not meet our own time chosen and not chosen political and personal economic and ecological natural and spiritual secular and sacred regressive and progressive inhaled and exhaled patriarchal and matriarchal competitive and cooperative vulnerable and transparent longing and belonging New yet old wealthy when healthy, democratic when not kleptocratic, integral when not fragmenting, unitarian when not too universally closed to further sacred gospel co-inspirations, co-passion, co-presence, Timeless unity yet eternal open university, Secure rounds yet within freeing surrounds, Cultural sweet spots within historic raw plots.