All week we’ve been treated to sunrises like this. Red sky and pink sea. Warm and stormless January continues.
Finn playing with the ice on a frozen Killarney Lake. We have had cool temperatures and no wind or rain the last week or so and our lakes have frozen over. Folks have been skating on Josephine Lake as well.
Just in from an hour SUPping around Mannion Bay and Miller’s Landing. It is sunny and warm today – 5 degrees C – and there is not a breath of wind out. The water is so calm there isn’t even any swell in the Queen Charlotte Channel. Everything is flat and calm and quiet, like a long sigh.
I started out from Pebbly Beach and rounded the north point. Headed out towards Miller’s Landing for 20 minutes, and then sat on my board, bobbing on the sea. Out in the channel, a seal was splashing. No sign of the huge pod of hundreds of dolphins that had been spotted earlier this week of Cowan Point. Utter calm. Utter, utter calm.
It could have been a summer evening on the water except that there were no boats around. I had the whole of Howe Sound to myself.
Coming up from the beach I ran into Norma Dallas who owns the Bowen island Marina and we talked about what it feels like to be out on the water all alone on days like this. We agreed that the words to describe it are “humility” and “gratitude.” That we are alive to experience this is simply a gift. To have snow capped mountains and a calm ocean to hold me, is an incredible thing. To feel my smallness in all of that timeless beauty is a fine teaching.
There is no way you can learn the art of facilitation, the art of hosting, by simply coming to a workshop. It happens from time to time that people show up for a three day workshop and expect that at the end they will be competent hosts of groups process in any situation. To get good at arts you have to practice.
Last week in Montreal, I saw 120 people come to an Art of Hosting with an overwhelming desire to practice. The invitation to them was to attend if they were wanting to develop and improve their practice. It made for an incredible experience. When people are invited to come to learn because they are ready to host, they are open wide to what is offered, not only by us as teachers, but more importantly by the group itself. This is an excellent ground from which to develop a practice of hosting, and the relationships that are formed are the critical supports for competency in that practice to unfold.
Somehow, the view of learning in the world has been confused with the kinds of quality control that is attached to manufacturing. We imagine that a learning experience will have specific achievable outcomes and that upon completing a course, we can be certified in the competency in which we have been trained. While this can be true for technical training, such as how to operate equipment, with things like art and strategy and leadership and communications and other practice based arts, the opposite is actually true. When I leave practice based learning events I recognize that I am a baby, just starting out, and with a lifetime of practice ahead of me. I can’t be certified to be competent, because there is no way to guarantee that I will be perfect. When we first begin to practice, we always make mistakes. Over a lifetime we develop our own styles and we get better at it.
Hosting is practice. The willingness to embrace it this way is the biggest indicator to me as to whether someone will eventually develop a competency in this art. Expertise is developed, not given or bought.
I used to be a huge fan of Anthony Braxton back in the day. Braxton is an unapologetic free music practitioner, a brilliant composer and improviser and a disruptive influence in the world of American music, and jazz in particular.
Here is a a lovely piece from him talking about the difference in perception between white men and black men striving to express an individual voice in contemporary America. Beyond race, this also speaks to the marginalization of creative work in a world dominated by a mercantile world view:
FJ: Why is it that a white man striving for individuality is perceived as being liberal, but a Black man is termed radical or revolutionary?
ANTHONY BRAXTON: You put your finger right on it, Fred. I turn on the television set sometimes and they are talking about Silicon Valley. The guys are saying that they have these sessions where they just kind of get together and push ideas around and we’re changing these models, we’re doing this and we’re doing that. Suddenly they switch to Bill Gates or any of the visionaries who’ve become very successful. They talk about whatever they’ve come up with. Yes, it is always received on the level that it is intended in the sense that this is something that can be considered, accepted or rejected, but it is something that can be considered. For instance, when Lee Konitz in Wire magazine went to put me down, he didn’t say, “I don’t like what Braxton’s doing.” No, the first thing he made sure to do was undermine my credentials. “Oh, he isn’t qualified.” “Oh, he made a technical mistake.” So the question then is not what Braxton is doing, but suddenly I am operating from this deficit. This has been the game that has been played against guys like me from every sector. The Lincoln Center sector says, “Oh, well, he doesn’t play the blues.” What they are really saying is the he doesn’t have the kind of idiomatic psychology that we can see as playing ball in a way where this guy doesn’t have to be challenged, not to mention, what we have here is a profound myth understanding in my opinion of the whole blues tradition. I trace these understandings to Mr. Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch.