Ta-Nehisi Coates writing to his son, in the book, Between the World and Me:
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren.
h/t to the Centre for Action and Contemplation, from today’s Daily Meditation.
Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world.
Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there.
(PS…the headlines are links! Click for more)
John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.”
I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that Bach created (it is the season of the Passions, after all) and it so perfectly captures Coltrane’s theology and perhaps every artist’s theology. This article is worth a look for how Coltrane thought about the work and the way he used form as prayer.
Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences
An interesting paper about the contrast between The Golden Rule and the idea and practice of what Eric Schweitzgebel calls “extension.” In the paper, Schweitzgebel writes:
“A different approach [to The Golden Rule] treats concern for nearby others as a given and as the seed from which care for more distant others might grow. If you’d care for a nearby child, so also should you care for more distant children. If you’d want something for your sister, so also should you want something similar for other women. This approach to moral expansion differs substantially from others’ shoes / Golden Rule thinking, both in its ethical shape and in its empirical implications.”
This reminds me of the Buddhist practice of Metta, and is food for thought for someone like me who places stock in The Golden Rule.
Every Dr. Johnny Fever DJ break woven into a single show.
If you were a music fan and maybe also if you were involved in radio in the 1970s and 1980s (both of which are true for me), then WKRP in Cincinnati was a must-listen to show. And you had to see the original versions, because the music they played was great but the producers couldn’t afford to syndicate it all, so in re-runs, all the original tracks are just filler tunes and not the originals.
But here is some genius. Someone has taken all of Dr. Johnny Fever’s DJ breaks and announcements and cut them into a three hour show. It contains the live audience laugh track, but it is otherwise a BRILLIANT project and elicits much loving nostalgia for me.
The Implosion of the Retirement Contract
I love a good policy discussion. I admit to being at a loss about how to address inequality and inaccessibility to basics like food, housing and education in a country that thinks of itself as “an advanced economy” and has no political party that is willing or able to make fundamental changes. But policy choices dictate the constraints that create outcomes like unaffordable good food, inaccessible housing and clipping student debt. This paper talks about an interesting underlying assumption that keep property prices high (and therefore also rents).
In nearly all liberal democracies, it is quite normal to treat “property” as “the ideal retirement asset for homeowners, with high house price growth helping downsizers release cash to fund their golden years.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto was a gamechanger for the early web. Those of us that were blogging back at the beginning of the century all knew about it and if your work extended into the organizational world, reading Cluetrain just laid bare how poorly prepared your company or agency or government was to deal with the oncoming onslaught of conversation, creation and disruption to the ways communications, marketing and organizations worked. Cluetrain is 25 years old now and it’s interesting to think about what is different now. Community is largely gone, for one thing.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ritual
Ted Gioia should be a must-read on everyone’s list. He writes on music and culture, and everything he says is thoughtful, skillfully economical, and insightful. He points you to pieces of music you would have never found. He provides takes on culture that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. This piece is so insightful about what it takes to live with boundaries that make our lives meaningful in an era where our attention has been nearly completely colonized.
The Origin of Last Summer’s Maui Wildfire
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the fire that destroyed Lahaina on Maui last summer. Having been there in February and witnessed the destruction myself, it is profoundly sad. To make matters worse, the fires ripped open a wound on Maui that private interests have rushed in to heal. The community is now in serious danger of being lost to outside owners and investment companies who have predatory designs on the land and property that was destroyed by the fire. Locals are in danger of forever losing their home places because there is no public support that can compete with what the wealthy interests are offering. It’s a shit show. In this article, Cliff Mass undertakes an analysis of the causes of the wildfire.
Raise energy and reduce ‘meeting fatigue’ by making meetings optional
My mate Mark McKergow has a research-supported idea for lowering cognitive fatigue for online meetings. It’s simple enough, but it requires managers to let go of control and let the work speak for itself. And it requires organizations to loosen up on the samara of accountability culture that is killing many of the workplaces I am working with.
Evaluation is one of those things that become a massively problematic constraint on a project if one doesn’t understand it, or worse, fears it. My friend Ciaran Camman is offering his course on Evaluation called “Weaving it In” and you should go to that. To get ready for that though, let this whimsical discussion whet your palate.
It’s Advent right now.
Although everyone talks about this being the “Christmas season,” liturgically speaking, the Christmas season begins on Christmas Day and lasts 12 days until Epiphany. In the Christian year, Christmas represents the incarnation of God into the world, and Epiphany represents the physical manifestation of Christ to humans.
These are times of joy and release that correspond with the return of light to the northern hemisphere and which come after a period of deepening darkness, which is Advent.
When you live on a small dark island in the North Pacific, this season, Advent, becomes meaningful. It is a time of rain and sometimes snow and a time of cloud and fog and the deepest darkness of the year. The sun is gone by 4:15 and doesn’t return until after 8 in the morning and because there are miles and miles of cloud stacked atop us, there are some days when it never really gets light at all. Everything that is not water is still and quiet. Creeks and rivers flow in torrents and the moody sea swings between calm and agitation at will.
It is a season of lingering. What lingers are the odd creature that should have left for warmer climes by now. A humpback whale that has decided to stay for the winter. A sea lion barking every night from its haul-out in the bay below my house is definitely out of time and place. The odd tourist who has wisely chosen to travel during a period in which they will have a whole mountain full of trails to themselves.
But what also lingers is the warmth of community. During the deep darkness of the Advent weeks, we move from event to event, experiencing light and warmth around the fires of other’s homes. We sing together, we visit and drink and eat and tell stories about our year and make plans for the future, and then we head out into the dark and rainy nights, flashlights in hand, careful with our steps, to make our way home. We travel between islands of light and warmth in a sea of darkness and cold. We linger on the memories of summer, or the impressions made by friends that we love. We linger on the memories of those who are no longer with us, who have died or who have moved away and who leave a little hole in our lives once occupied by the delight of a random encounter or intentional co-creation.
This is also the season in which traditions linger, in which a rhythm of community helps guide us and hold us through the dark season. The stringing of lights in Snug Cove and the annual lighting up of the village. The choir concerts and recitals. The reading of A Christmas Carol or A Child’s Christmas in Wales, performed yearly, as it was again last night, by the inimitable Martin Clark.
In the four Sundays of Advent, we reflect on the values and practices of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. We do so in the darkest month, mindful of a world full of darkness. We reflect on Joy and Hope in its absence, and we practice waiting for it to return. I think one of the reasons why December is so full of contradictory emotions for people is that this is the time of year when we most deeply feel the loss of hope and joy and peace and love. And yet all around us, the market has seized on hope and joy as the reason for the season and exhorts us to buy and give and fill the hole of longing.
But that is not the purpose of Advent. Advent is the season in which we deeply feel the possibility of a world WITHOUT these things. And we acknowledge the pain and anguish of a world absent of light and love and peace and hope and joy. It is perfectly timed in the north to be a season of four weeks when we reflect on and embrace the darkness in anticipation of the return of the light.
We can be together in darkness if we hold each other there. We can have faith that moments of light will return, that love and peace will come back to the world. To people, to families, to whole nations. The liturgical seasons are both a symbolic representation of the reality of the heart’s topography and a container for practice. It is a aberration brought on by commerce that we are denied a chance to rest in sadness and despair together for a while. It is good medicine to do so.
As we approach the Solstice, I wish you days of subtle turning. That the fleeting moments of light that come into your life are grasped and held. That the sadness and despair you may feel at this time of year, in this time in history, can be acknowledged and held. And that joy and hope and peace and love may return to you and your beloveds.
Most mornings, when I’m at home, I stroll down to a local rocky beach, coffee in hand, to begin my day in meditation. The beach is a pleasant 15-minute walk from my house. When I reach the water, I step from the asphalt onto a gravel path that meanders through trees, past thickets of blackberry bushes, and ends in a secluded cove facing east, towards the rising sun that crests over the 1200 meter ridges of the Brittania Range, the mountains that make up the eastern edge of the inlet in which I live.
I began visiting this spot regularly the day after my father died. This beach, in all its varying weather and seasons, became my sanctuary for healing and introspection. Whether on a sunny summer morning or during a dark, rainy winter day, it offers a place to simply be. It’s a space where I am held in the vastness of the east wall of Atl’kat7tsem/Howe Sound, where I sit still, observing the ever-changing dance of the waves, wind, sky, and sea. This spot is undeniably a container, but it is one that’s vast and overwhelming, akin to entering a cathedral. It’s a space so grand that my presence doesn’t alter it, inviting me instead to enter and surrender.
There are containers in our lives that we create with intent and control. There are emergent containers, birthed from many small collaborative actions. Then, there are containers like this one, pre-existing, ancient even, that hold us and are accessed by deliberately crossing a threshold that ushers us into a different state of being, thinking, and feeling.
Having a space like this in one’s life is beneficial, as many of the containers in which we work, live, shape, and co-create are embedded within much larger ones, over which we have little control or influence. The practice of surrendering to a larger context helps us fully immerse ourselves in a place and moment, to quiet our minds, rest, observe, and experience. In doing so, we also discover our inner reactions to our surroundings.
Maybe you have a place like this, or you can find a place like this. It might not be the mountains of a fijord, but it could be a forest, a park, a lake, a field, or the heart of a bustling city. Go there, observe, listen, and notice how little your presence in that space changes it, but how much you are influenced by it. Consider the audacity of imagining how you could affect or change it. Familiarize yourself with your humility and insignificance.
Our work in the world requires us to dance between the spaces we make and the spaces we inhabit. We can dance between these spaces and we can witness the dance of these spaces with each other. And all the while, we inhabit our own little containers of thoughts and feelings and intentions and motivations, every so subtly shaping and being shaped by dancing space.
I’ve known Tenneson Woolf for 20 years, and we have worked together, offering learning, facilitation and organizational support in various settings all over the place.
Tenn is a global Art of Hosting steward and was amongst the first people to bring the Art of Hosting practice to North America in 2003, back when he worked with the Berkana Institute, and we all saw a need to bring a set of deep dialogic and participatory leadership practices into the world.
Tenneson has a great blog, and devoted writing practice. He has extended his creativity engagement into the world of podcasting, where he brings on some great guests to talk about human-to-human connection.
We sat down last week to have a conversation. We touched on joy-seeking, the need for micro-dosing appreciation and gratitude, curiosity, generosity and support. It was lovely, and really just the same kind of conversation we always have when we are together.
Have a listen.