Harvest from a three hour check in circle this morning, building a social field among 40 health promotion practitioners from across the Navajo Nation. The circle was at times tender and wickedly funny. It built a beautiful field to begin our three day training. Here’s the poem:
Yá’a tééh! It’s a good day.I am here for the wellness of our nations;we have stationed ourselves inside our familieswhere we teach and learnreach each parent and turn aroundtheir minds to a kind of spacethat is safe to facewhat flies over our headsas we sit on our sheepskinsand keep the teachings in the home.It’s a warm feeling, healing evento be basking in being hostedwith a ticker that ticks and keeps on givingand my Converse laced up and I’m ready for livingI love growing the food my family is eatingpreventing cancer and diabeteswhispering the secret of healthy peopleteaching through recreation and schoolsreaching youth so they don’t act like foolsand see peace and respect as cool.I work in recovery which is a kind of discoveryfor the men coming back to us from the penbringing them back to the traditional lifeto be in harmony, connected to familyreceiving the gifts of community and ceremonyto counter the drama of trauma“Lying in the road hurt” means that my work is about healinggetting up and feeling the bodyfeeling the advocacy that I speakfixed by the gaze of a grazing sheepthat reminds me of my grandmother’s teaching:this is the way that it has to beto spread my wings and seehow I can develop me and then how we can move forwardto see possibility and leave our conversations happy.I start with myself, and build out from therecircles of care that come from the sheepskin,the ancient wisdom, and tools that help us weavethe stories that leave us tightly bound.Tighten up your buns, there’s work to be done,Doesn’t matter if it’s your hair or your derriere.And take a look and make sure your corn beef is cooked.I am a believer in hope and changefor a positive exchange of the art of the heartgrounding in respect so we can expectto find out why place matters.I help to bring wholeness with a focus on fooda wholesome and fullsome way to colludewith kids and youth who pick up the positive attitudethat comes from our cultureharmonize our bodies and our eyes.I’m a traveller, an unraveller ofunhealthy ways, weaving teachings about how to raisecommunities, raise gardens and harvest our bestbring our heart to everything we dodeal with our fears so we can be herepresent to what wants to appearwith minds clear.I’m a first generation relocation babythinking maybe I have a giftedness that will lift the peoplebring them to fitnessand give back what I have learned on this rideto see pride inside everyone in our tribes.It all comes down to helping otherscoaching kids, approaching mothers and grandmotherswho share their respect with usI’m from the beach boysand a blond haired grandma and traditional speakerswho infused in me a possibilityto change the dysfunction I see, conversationally,for the benefit of the community, to support the wellness that starts from me.We know our own patterns and carry them in our bloodtransport them everywhere flood of memoriesleaving this world better than how we found itbetter harmony, better family.I might be out of words.Overwhelmed at everything I’ve heardand here to hear with my ears and heartto get a head start on addressing the fearsHere, I can see where my prayers are going,and what has come to my knowing,my leadership is calling me backand I can see that I stack up.The talking happens at the rug,drawing people into the snug corner of the homewhere we share the honest lessons we have learnedpray the prayers that burn in our hearts.All over the world, we understand weaving(even though our sweater doesn’t meet five days from leaving)each one of us is teaching in this roomeach one bringing our strands to the loom.I work in the strugglecreating the space where families can face their challengeswith something as simple as readingor as powerful as seeking out the strengthsor going to great lengthsto build leaders who feed their own learningturning back to the language and values.I am related to the world my relations unfurledlike a ball of yarn that leads us to our toolsa school of weaving leaving us loved and movedcoming back to what was lostas we chased a living across the southnow I’m getting the language in my mouthand find myself at a junctionwhere I support functional communityand do the work of spirit.Yá’a tééh! It’s a good day.and good to start in a beautiful way.
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Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and I are snuggled into the attic rooms at the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B in downtown Denver, listening to some jazz, eating some pasta and salad and finishing up a productive design day together. We are preparing to teach the Art of Hosting to 60 leaders from the community at St. John’s in the Wilderness Cathedral in Denver. St. John’s is a high Anglican Gothic Episcopalian cathedral in the heart of Denver. We have been working with the cathedral community over the past couple of years to build the capacity among the 1700 members to be able to host and engage in conversations that matter.
As we’ve done this work, I’m struck at once by how simple it really is and how little space we make for it in our lives. People are busy, rushed and worried about deadlines and results and as a collective society we tend to defer the slow and clear attention to the quality of how we are together. Quality gets sacrificed at the alter of timely outcomes.
And of course this is no more ironic than in the myriad church communities we have been working with over the years, which, at their best, host a place to slow down and consider the nature of the relationship between peoples and to attend to the sacred quality of the spaces in between.
For me there is something in the richness of returning to the simplest way we know of to slow down and host good conversations. This evening as I write by the fire, Caitlin and Tenneson are preparing a simple teaching of Circle practice. Earlier we were thinking about the simplest way we know of to discuss the relationship of our traditional notions of chaos and order.
While I have been diving deep into the nuanced explorations of the Cynefin framework, it is becoming necessary to find ways to invite people easily into the mind shift that complexity requires. In the Art of Hosting community we have, for a long time, been inspired by Dee Hock’s work on chaordic organization. At the simplest level noticing the polarity of chaos and order, and noticing how our reactions to chaos and uncertainty often take us to high levels of control becomes an entry way into a different way to think about strategies for achieving goals in the complex domain.
So tomorrow, I’m looking forward to Tenneson’s leading on the chaordic path, a simple teaching worth returning to.
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