Inspired by spending a bit of time with Keith Webb this past week at ALIA West, I’ve been looking deeply at the patterns of the natural world for teachings and illumination on questions that I’m working with. Wlakiong through a forest with Keith is a revelation, as Susan Szpakowski points out in this blog post from ALIA West. He helps you to see patterns that are instantly recognizable but which you may never have noticed before, even for someone who knows his way around the woods a little.
This week, along with Tennson Woolf and Esther Matte, I’m running an Art of Hosting with labour educators and union activists from the Canadian Labour Congress. Some of us were in a little conversation tonight about the relationship between invidual and collective, which is a topic that is of great interest to unions. There is special interest in what it means to be an individual leader working a whatever level WITHIN a union to help bring a union into an innovative space. Many of the people we work with feel this tension.
I thought of Keith today as we were talking about this topic and I spoke a little about what I know about the way the natural mixedwood plains hardwood forest of this part of the St’ Lawrence River valley reclaims a pasture, in a process known as ecological succession. The natural form of landscape here is mature hardwood forest, and that forest comes into being after a number of successive stages of reclamation by different species. First cedar tress move in, and it is not uncommon to see abandoned meadows and pastures with little stands of small cedars in them. A field with one cedar sapling in it is already on it’s way. After the cedars, nitrogen fixing species like poplars arrive and then later maples and oaks and ironwoods and so on.
The question I asked was, in the context of individual and collective, when does the FOREST arrive? Is it in the presence of one tree? Is it two? Is it more? What is the forest anyway, for it is not merely a collection of individual trees. It is a phenomenon itself, arising from many individuals, but possessing an emergent property. Undoubtedly, individuals have an importan role to play in this process, but when does the forest arrive?
Likewise I said in human history union is our natural way of being. The holy books that tell the creation stories that start with Adam and Eve mislead us into thinking that humans were ever alone. We have never as a species known lonliness – we have always been living in union with each other. When our structures lose life, it is individuals that reclaim our natural way of being within them. When, then, does union appear? Is it with the first relationship, or is it when the structure of the Union appears on the scene?
We’re playing in questions like these this week, all in service of the most powerful and compassionate work that unions do in this country – supporting the learning and survival of working families and communities and helping community to thrive in all times, not just good ones. Or bad ones.
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Well, among other places, hosting and teaching at ALIA West this past week, and on my way to Cornwall Ontario this week to work with Tenneson Woolf and Esther Matte and a team at the Canadian Labour Congress as we explore the Art of Hosting Conversations with folks from many different unions.
In transit I have stumbled on some great links this week, so here’s what I am reading:
- Dave Snowdon has an important post on measuring impact rather than outcomes.
- Drawball is worth a look for the way it takes chaos to community with art.
- Myriam Laberge on helpful interventions for tricky group dynamics
- Ashley Cooper shares the film she and Thomas Arthur made as a harvest from Leadership in a Self-Organizing World.
- Wendy Farmer-O`Neil says change is dead in a lovely provocative way.
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Facts from the longest business trip of my life
- Number of days on the road this trip: 20
- Number of seperate projects worked on: 5
- Total number of people hosted: 835
- Customs officials spoken to: 4
- Number of those officials who wished me a good flight: 1
- Number who welcomed me to their country: 3
- Number who have said “Welcome back to the United States, sir” to me in the past ten years: 0
- Number who did on Sunday: 2
- Aircraft flown on: 12
- Airports landed at: 8
- Number of these I visited on more than one separate occasion: 3
- Number of Kazakh pickerels eaten in Manitoba: 1
- Estimated distance travelled in kilometers by that fish: 8771
- Distance between my plate and the Red River, where pickerel can be found, in meters: 200
- Colleagues I collaborated with: 26
- Gray whales seen: 5
- Porpoises seen: 1
- Minutes it took to fly over the flood waters south of Winnipeg: 10
- Number of times pulled over for running a red light: 1
- Number of tickets received: 0
- Hours I played a talking drum and got paid for it: 2
- Number of passengers who snarked rudely at an Air Canada flight attendant when the captain of the plane was an hour late due to HIS flight being delayed: 7
- Minutes by which the delay was reduced thanks to these interventions: 0
- Approximate number of rock balancing sculptures set up by a group of us on the Pembroke, Ontario riverfront: 30.
- Number of local senior citizens who said they were going to go home and try that: 3
- Age, in years, of Highland Park Orkney whiskey served to me by Allistair Hain: 25
- Minutes it took me to drink it: 30
- Number of juggling balls I left home with: 7
- Number I returned home with: 1
- Indigenous languages heard spoken: 4
- Number of these I understood enough to talk to the Elder about it: 1
- Different guitars played: 3
- People spotted wcearing paper face masks during a three hour wait in San Francisco: 7
- Number of poems I wrote and read out as part of my professional duties: 2
- Number of pieces of olive and sundried tomato pesto stuffed calamari that come served on a roasted cauliflower and fennel salad at RauDZ in Kelowna: 6
- Number of beds slept in: 9
- Percent of annual rainfall that fell in Hoopa, CA during the two days I was there: 4
- Number of elk heads on the walls at Cinnebar Joe’s in Willow Creek, CA: 7
- Number of hockey sticks on the walls: 1
- Number of times my credit card was returned to me by a cab driver who drove 20 minutes out of his way to do so: 1
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Anchored down in San Francisco awaiting a delayed hop to Eureka California, from where we will drive to the Hoopa Valley and work there for a couple of days. On leg five of the epic journey.
So a little time to breathe and reflect on a couple of harvests. First from Geoff Selig who was at the Pembroke Art of Hosting, and who collected the tablecloths from a final day World Cafe on what we have learned about the power of conversation.
Second, a harvest poem from the Open Space I ran yesterday in Kelowna. This was an afternoon session for the 30th anniversary of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils and 18 conversations took place that reflected the place of these volunteers and staff people who support the arts in towns, cities, islands and villages across our province. With Open Space these days I am trying as much as possible to have a place in which a meta harvest can be collected and created. Most often this looks like a graphic recorder who gathers materials and snippets from the sessions and co-creates a harvest with session conveners and participants. This gives a high level framework upon which the individual sessions can hang, and it invites another level of coherence and pattern noticing. Yesterday. we had no graphic recorder available, so I substituted with this poem that I created partly from the titles of the 18 sessions and partly from what I was seeing emerging in the conversations. As we only had 15 minutes for a closing, I presented this in lieu of a closing circle, and it made for a nice cap on the day:
The assembly of those who host space
by Chris Corrigan
Who are we? What do we do?
How do we face change while staying true
to the art that is the heart of community unity?
What body serves the life that comes to us?
Here we pause and reflect:
Youth are the truth of growing inclusivity.
Dialogue, funding, engagement are our tools
and it’s what we create with them that fuels
the passion for change
and well-ordered offerings that welcome the stranger,
the small connections that bring us into relationship
with land, citizen, government and institution.
So how to begin to offer form
that invites the spirit of the arts to warm
the cold spaces of urban waste
and rural forgetting, arts-based, human-paced
endeavours that bring us home?
How do we step up to govern and guide
theatres, galleries, facilities, the sides
of desks off of which our best work is done?
And how do we cultivate the source of our energy,
the money and bodies that make smooth
the skid roads and rip rap that brings this enterprise alive,
delivers the promise which grows and thrives?
We host space.
The spaces between people that light up with the spark of connection
recognition, a shared story, historical succession,
the tending of the coming soon that arises
from the done before rooted in the best of now.
The space of social media
both digital and tactile that expedites
the meeting of needs,
the speaking of deeds
into the record of our collective story.
The spaces of creation and illumination
like so many star-birthing clouds
spaces that resound with the colour of the voices that sound
the melodies and harmonies of our becoming.
Spaces in which we re-create, in which we see
what we could be with the power of free
expression coursing through the veins
that carry the pulse of life – the arts beat.
And here we confront our souls,
navigate the narrow channels, reefs and shoals
that want to gobble us down,
sink us in work, overwhelm and drown
our efforts in the skookumchuk
where scarcity and demand
suck and boil together and we move uncomfortably with outstretched hand.
Only and finally in THIS space,
do we recognize friends, companions
that also walk our path between elation
and struggle, who know the million details that support creation.
Thirty years we have sat in assembly
hosting a resonance that trembles
up the coast, valleys and rivers
like so many shivers
through the spine of beauty,
a reverent bass line, upon which rests
the deep song of who we are.
A deep bow to you all –
for the boards that lead
for the boards that are tread,
for the boards that are hammered together,
the music of spruce and pine and fir
forming the floor from which we stage our flight,
take wing and soar.
This poem was composed in honour of the 30th anniversary gathering of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils. It is a reflection of the issues that were articulated in 18 Open Space dialogue sessions held on the afternoon of May 2, 2009 in Kelowna, when Assembly members gathered to find wisdom in the stories and questions that were held within their community of practice.
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