I am indebted to Marissa Carlisle and to Anna Taglieri and to Peter
Stanford and to Richard Cutttler and to Alexandra Platt and to Arthur
Pufford and to Tamara Saitowitz and to Katryn Jehane Price and to
Paula Zolezzi and to Elizabeth Russell and to Christine Mercado and to
Brandon Platt and to Daniel McAlpine and to Victoria Hamilton-Rivers
and to Lawrence Williams and to Father Avram Brown and to Digne
Mellor‑Menkowicz and to Carl Monroe Cheney and to Andee Platt
and to Claudette Crump and to Karen Donovan and to Joshua Platt and to
Peter Ashken and to Elize Naudé Greeff and to Michael Schropp
and to David Asher Platt who inspired this conversation.
Many of the photographs of me in this photo album appear in the same
order, left to right, top to bottom, as they appeared at the end of the
Conversations For
Transformation
website home page. Others which appear in essays rather than on the
home page, don't.
These photographs show my appearance. But, not shown in these
photographs, it's
my speaking
which brings forth transformation. Transformation shows up
in my mouth and, with my profound gratitude to you for
what you make possible simply by the act of listening,
in your ears
(as Werner Erhard may have said).
It's often been noted how futile it is to hunt butterflies. Once you've
captured them, they've lost the very quality they had which made you
want to own them in the first place: their freedom.
So it is with these
Conversations For
Transformation.
By writing them down I've taken them out of the domain of
transformation ie out of the domain of the spoken word, out of the
domain of speaking and listening, and put them into
a mere close approximation to transformation ie into the
domain of the written word, into the domain of writing and
reading. When I write them down they lose some of the very
quality which made them noteworthy in the first place.
What I write as these
Conversations For
Transformation
may leave you with an experience of transformation. Indeed, it's my
intention they will. What I look like is only secondary to
this process - in all likelihood it plays very little part in it at
all.
