"I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, but which we now seek to counter through the actual radiance of colour vibrations." Vincent Van Gogh

"How are we going to cope with this?" or "What on earth can we do about that?" is so often the starting point for a relevant and exciting piece of theological work, even though it begins on a negative and worrying note..... It is a fact that good theology is more likely to derive from a problem rather than a statement, more likely to arise in a prison than a palace.
Laurie Green

"Home is the place, where when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
Robert Frost

Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee."
St Augustine

The whole team are leaders

Leadership is not the personal responsibility of the team leader. It is to be exercised by all both collectively and individually. So the role of the team leader is to encourage growth in leadership in your colleagues. Just as a cricket captain seeks to bring out the best in bowler or batsman, so the team leader encourages, motivates.
Geoffrey Cornell - How to become a Creative Church Leader

People deprived of self-organisation and self-governance are inherently ungovernable.
Dee Hock - Birth of the Chaordic Age

Nature

The striking of a match is every bit as wonderful as the working of a brain; the union of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen in a molecule of water isevery bit as wonderful as the growth of a child. nature does not class her works in order of merit; everything is just as easy to her as everything else: she puts her wholemind into all that she does ... she lives through all life, extends throaugh all extent, spreads undivided, operates unspent.
Stephen Paget

from Dee Hock

Without an abundance of nonmaterial values and an equal abundance of nonmonetary exchange of material value, no true community ever existed or ever will. ... When we attempt to monetise all value, we methodically disconnect people and destroy community.

True community requires proximity; continual, direct contact and interaction between the people, place, and things of which it is composed. Throughout history, the fundamental building block, the quintessential community, has always been the family. It is there that the greatest nonmonetary exchange of value takes place. It is there that the most powerful nonmaterial values are created and exchanged. It is from that community, for better or worse, that all others are formed. The nonmonetary exchange of value is the vary heart and soul of community, and community is the inescapable, essential element of civil society.

Birth of the Chaordic Order - page 43

from R S Thomas

"It's a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on;
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It's a long way off but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf."(Later Poems: 1983. p35)

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful implanted in the human soul.” --Johann Wolfgang Goethe