By Paul Davenport 
I am writing a WordPress Blog because I realized that I’ve never written our philosophy down for the general perusal of the community. I think that in this year of marketing It is imperative that we learn how to communicate just what the magic of FSM is. In the very near future everyone on the staff will have blogs and links to inform and educate the world about what we do built right into our community web page so this also a learning process about how to communicate in a new an exciting way. I’m hoping that this and other blogs will become a forum for discussion and a mechanism for meaningful dialogue that affects our community. In a recent marketing survey, we learned that the thing our students most identified with and benefited from was our faculty and administrative staff. They value the years of experience and knowledge that our instructors hold, as well as the general attitude of friendliness, warmth, and an overall willingness to help students overcome life’s interferences. I could go on, but I’ve come to learn that this is not the only way the school represents itself to the greater community. “The place with the hands holding the sign” is what the community also identifies with – right down to the magic of the natural environment held by human hands. I’ve chosen to use a picture of our sign as a header for my blog. This sign contains many, if not most of the elements of what we represent to the larger community. About every week or two, I hope to get a blog out that tells something of what the story of the school is and what it means. I hope the blog serves as a template to expound and dialogue about anything that juices our lives and makes our world a richer place. I’ve even been given some guidelines that will at least make our private blogs more fun and interesting. Limiting individual posts to somewhere between 300-600 words, a picture every 300-400 words, and most importantly, making our communication centered on information and dialogue. If you would like to have a look at what my efforts look like, the link that will get you there is: Interbeing.com/blog. I’ve already experimented with bringing a number of posts into the mix: “The Somali Pirates and FSM”, “An Economics Lesson from a Biological Perspective”, “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead”, “An Interim Post”, “Enter the “Bear” (in which the reason why an information based economy works best), and “Enlightened Selfishness and Truth Through Lying”. Of course the final word on all that is “much more on that later”. I hope it turns out to be a fun adventure that opens the magic of this incredible space to the world.
