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    Marilynne Robinson - Author; her wonderful gift of language

    31/12/2020

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    Quote from her novel 'Jack'
    “I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don’t do that. In your own way, you’re kind of—pure.”

    Quote from her novel 'Gilead'
    “The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.”

    Quote from her novel 'Lila'
    “It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”

    Quote from her novel 'Housekeeping'
    “I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.”


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    Lessons in Life and Climbing the El Capitan Dawn Wall, Yosemite                                         'The Push' by Tommy Caldwell

    13/3/2020

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    "After you have one pitch figured out, you work on another. Eventually you put together a complete series of pitches to make a collective, massive whole"

    "The discovery of a mole-sized nubbin of rock and a barely visible hairline fracture had filled me with so much energy that I knew  that I had seen a path forward for the next year. If the secret to happiness was the ability to find joy in small things that have been in front of you the entire time, then the Dawn Wall was truly the Zen-master teacher"

    "Alex simply doesn't waste any energy worrying about things he can't control. Some might call this delusion, or false optimism. Some might go so far to call it reckless. Alex is the only person who I have climbed with who just calls it reality. We analysed the situations as we encountered them. Start at the beginning; see what happens. And, while we are at it we might as well have some fun"

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    Leading Change and Transformation

    3/2/2020

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    Go For the Gap

    "Momentum swings faster than we think. One moment we're on top of the world, the next falling off the other side. The role of a leader is to know when to reinvent, and how to do it. . . . . sustainable competitive advantage is achieved by development of a continuously self-adjusting culture. Adaption is not a reaction, but continual action, so plan to respond."

    James Kerr - Legacy



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    Our eternal connectedness!

    17/11/2019

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    'Every time you breathe, you exhale 25 sextillion molecules of oxygen - so many that with a day's breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And everyone who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe a bit of you.'

    Bill Bryson - The Body A Guide for Occupants
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    Joy and Gratitude

    1/10/2019

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    “Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.”

    Olive Kitteridge Quote - Elizabeth Strout

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    Reflection and Gratitude

    8/5/2019

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    ​“We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.” 

    ― Wendell Berry (quote from Jayber Crow)
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    Sorting Our Troubles and Conflicts

    19/5/2018

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    Quote from Jeanette Winterson "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal"

    'That there might be a level that we can reach above the ordinary conflict is a seductive one. Yung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises - at that level there is only a winner and loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above, like seeing a storm from higher ground...... how absurd it all is - the things that mean so much, the feuds we carry, the irreconcilables'
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    A view of the Future - John Williams author of  "Stoner"

    17/2/2018

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    "Two weeks after Stoner received his Bachelor of Arts Degree, Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist; and before autumn war was all over Europe.  ..............

    But for Stoner the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that waited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new  wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn while its true nature remained essentially unchanged. He saw the future in the institution to which he had committed himself and which so imperfectly understood; he conceived himself changing in that future, but he saw the future itself as the instrument of change rather than its object."
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    Our Lives as Artists

    15/11/2017

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    ​Excerpt (1953 in New York remembered); Diane di Prima
     
    "Do you see? It wasn't just the work, though the work was clearly blessed. Nor the rewards, which were none, as far as I knew. It was the life itself - a vocation, like being a hermit or a samurai. A calling. The holiest life that was offered in our world: artist. One that required the purest flame, clear lines of demarcation. Renunciation. 'Sacrifice everything" we would write on apartment walls. "Sacrifice everything to the clean line". Continual offering of our minds and our hearts. Offering impersonally our most personal passion. Most secret vision. What comfort we could give, and give each other. The beauty."
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    Karma Repair Kit - by Richard Brautigan

    10/3/2017

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    ​Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4
     
    1. Get enough food to eat,
        and eat it.
    2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
        and sleep there.
    3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
        until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
        and listen to it.
    4. 
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      Hamish Ott. I am the Managing Director of Gotham Universal Limited (established 1998).

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    Gotham Universal Ltd are based in Christchurch, New Zealand. We provide business services such as organisation development and HR consulting to national and local clients in the private, public and not for profit business sectors. 

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    We have over 20 years experience working in business management, organisation development and assisting organisations with their strategies, structures and people. ​

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