My rhizomatic thoughts have twisted and turned in multiple directions in the past two weeks. Sometimes, skimming the surface and gazing fancifully at the sky. Other times, they have gone deep into ideas, burrowing down into the dark, with no light to help focus. So, today, I sit back, reflect and ramble through the thoughts from others to see how these random bits of thread can be woven into something colourful and creative.
What is content?
This image for content, after collecting random quotes from Rhizo15 participants’ blog posts (done here), shows the importance of several key words – conversation, words, people, use, more, end, create, develop, look, think, makes, mean, kind, itself, idea.
I loved Ron Samul’s image of content as the coffee in a cup, or was that the cup? As my contentment spreads with capturing key words and ideas, just as the warmth from my morning coffee, the tangled web of that I was trying to pull apart re-forms and becomes a colourful fabric with warp and weft of meaning. Content is not the coffee or the cup, but the infusion of aromas and flavour consumed. Content is not the rhizome or the mychorrhizae, but the gentle reciprocity of giving and taking. Content is not the weave or the weaver, but the image created from the task of weaving. Content is not the stuff we use to create learning events or the words we exhale to entice thoughts out of darkness.
Content is the elusive thought itself, nestled within. Within the word, within the image, within our containers of a mind, where each of us individually can make it meaningful.
Content is created, developed, shaped and connected to each of us as individuals.
Content becomes clearer as we share and talk about ‘that which lies within’.
Dave has it right – content is people! I am content! You are content. Your content connects to mine, together we create content within ideas, metaphors, images, containers to show, share and connect to others.
To see the collection of quotes and an interactive image of the coffee cup, visit http://www.hjdewaard.com/counting–content.html
Five Flames 4 Learning 
Helen, what a lovely post. In a similar way, I think that I am a human being, not a body with a mind: “…I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity”. (Descartes, Meditation VI)