Dorrier Underwood

My 27 year old nephew is staying with us for a few days, in between one chapter of his life and the next. Last night, the house was quiet, and for the first time in a long time, we flowed into a conversation about Life that was simply exploration -- seeing, sharing, and wondering about things together. We talked about the evolution of technology, about artificial intelligence and virtual reality and how they might affect humanity in the years to come. And somehow we started laughing about how all the hoo-ha, the running around and busyness human beings create, starts to seem like what gives meaning to our existence. When really, even though we’re the only self-aware beings on the planet, what we need is simple: we need to eat, be safe and sheltered, and be in community. We love the hoo-ha, but it’s easy to forget that it’s not actually Everything. And then I told him about how, at work, we're re-designing a course we call "Advanced Mastery." Amidst all the h...

I’m one of those “shower singers.” I sing along in the car to songs that I love and don’t want others to hear, for fear of scaring them off.  Singing creates something in my body that matches my thoughts and emotions – all of it coming together. When I heard Elise Witt was performing at Oakhurst Baptist, I knew Liz and I had to go.  Elise has a reputation for creating singing communities. What makes her so special is the way she engages the audience to join in so that everyone comes together as one voice. Liz and I stumbled into her a couple of years ago at a concert where she was co-performing with another musician. I can’t remember the other performer’s name, but I sure remember Elise.  Singing with Elise made Liz and me want to get up and dance.   And so it was again.  We danced to her new song, My Salsa Garden. There was a young schoolgirl who led us, quite spontaneously.  Hopping off her father’s lap, she took her place in the ai...

I am so used to looking at life as a mechanistic process, that the notion of life as “a complex adaptive system” requires me to give up thinking my usual way. It’s not that I find complex adaptive systems hard to understand or even illogical. I just notice that, left to my own automatic devices, I can be counted on to regard phenomena of all kinds in a linear, mechanistic fashion, whether or not the phenomenon in question is living or inert. Most of what we care about is in the realm of life (family, social systems, stock market) rather than the realm of machines (bridges, levers and dials).   We all went to college for levers and dials—even me, in the College of Education. As a student teacher in a classroom with 25 college-track seniors who just wanted the formula for getting A’s in English and were quite peeved I didn’t provide it, I was on my own when Miss Mallory, my supervising teacher, was out sick the last day of school. I had graded their compositions, and one...

Nancy Dorrier talks about Strategy as a Verb from Dorrier Underwood on Vimeo .