Everywhere.
I’m at an Open Space conference in Grande Ronde, Oregon which is a summit of Tribal leaders and federal government agencies from around the Pacific Northwest of the USA, and Alaska. The subject of the meeting is improving relations around environmental issues.
As we were wrapping up our action planning session this morning, a young man walked into the room who I hadn’t yet met. He apologized for being late. He got delayed on the way in.
“No problem,” I said. “What was the delay all about?”
“Oh, I live near Nome Alaska and we were out hunting. Got a bearded seal and a walrus. They’re about 45 miles offshore on some ice floes and it took us a while to get them back. I’ve got to get back and get it dried and frozen and then go out and get a beluga. Some good open water now and the whales are only a mile off shore.”
I just looked at him. What can you say to that?
“Yeah, and on top of that, I’ve never been out of state before and I can’t believe how cheap things are down here. These sunglasses I just bought for 13 bucks would cost me 50 at home. I’m going to pick up a laptop and a necklace for my girl.”
Cool.
It happens on every scale. A community, a nation, a people becomes bitterly divided on an issue and the civic conversation deteriorates to become nasty, rhetorically or physically violent and entrenched. Suspicion arises on every side and distrust, camps, territory and accusations fly. Perhaps someone launches a lawsuit, someone else accuses someone of unethical behavior. People who come forward to help are shot down if they can’t be pinned down.
It feels like we are going through that on my little Island at the moment. Yes it is a #firstworldproblem, and in more ways than one, for what we are going through is happening all over the place at the moment.
Groups go through this kind of thing all the time. But this breakdown of the public conversation creates difficult problems and has real costs. When the public conversation is throttled by power or bullying or other non-dialogue behaviors we pay a real price.
So what to do? Well, for one I like Peter Block’s take on things: transform the conversation starting with how you meet and then what you talk about. You cannot have a new conversation in the old format, so let’s get rid of the talking heads and the power points and the raised tables. It’s time to all come to the same level and discuss declarations of possibility that would inspire us all towards some action.
We need to find common purpose together, to open ourselves to each other and to host our own stuff so that we can hear other people and offer advocacy of our positions and ideas that makes us easy to be heard in return. We need to start from a place of renewed trust and good faith, even in people that might take advantage of our naïveté in doing so. We need to do that because restoring quality relationships is the only way to reboot the democratic conversation so that we might engage in some truly beautiful community building, nation building.
So, what declaration of possibility for your community can you make that joule inspire us all? What opinion, attitude or behaviour do you commit to letting go of so that a little more space can be opened? The work of cultivating possibility starts with all of us, and the burden is on skeptics. Transform your doubt into clear and legitimate dissent but keep your hope strong. Find someone across the aisle with whom you can reboot this precious space of democratic engagement, and don’t let the cynics drive you apart. In the end, only they will gain.
It sometimes boggles my mind, how easy it actually is to cross an entire continent.
Yesterday I woke up at 6am in the Beaver Valley, on the shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario where a beautiful crisp spring day greeted me. I set off to Toronto, now knowing what condistions the roasd were in on the high country between Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. In between thos Great Lakes is the Niagara Escarpment and the oak Ridges Moraine, two incredible heights of land that received a lat winter beating this week from a cold front that scoured the whole area.
All was well with me though, on a good drive along Highway 26 which hugs to Bay from Thornbury to Collingwood and on to Wasaga Beach and Stayner. From there the road turns south becoming Airport Road and takes a bee line across the rolling countryside, up and down the esacarpment, and over the 700 foot high folds of glacial till that are now covered with farmland, pine forest and maple woods. For two hours, the bright sun, spring bird song and beautiful southern Onatrio countryside fill my senses.
Once through Caledon, the country changes radically. The land flattens out and all around are the sprawling McMansion suburbs that litter the edge of Toronto. Along Airport Road, whole sections of farmland have been converted to a monoculture of boring, treeless housing. Nothing is human scale. A small sidewalk is hardly ever used and the four lanes of road feeds commuters to the city and large transport trucks to the distribution centres, warehouses and factories of Malton and the other northwestern suburbs. A large Sikh community lives near the airport, and so the few commercial plazas in the area are devoted to saris, curries and Bollywood video rentals. Here and there, old Victorian famhouses stand surrounded by all of this development, a last echo of the previous wave of immigrants that lived there.
I dropped my rental car, boarded a plane for Vancouver and instantly fell asleep. I woke up over Kelowna just in time for our descent into Vancouver. The coast was grey and cold and pouring rain. Grabbed my bag, jumped on teh Canada Line, stopped long enough at Granville and Georgia Streets for a La Brasserie Chicken Sandwich and then caught the Express bus to Horseshoe Bay. The 330pm ferry delivered me back to Bowen Island.
It is odd standing on the deck of a ferry crossing a small channel in the Pacific Ocean having woken up a mere 12 hours earlier some 4300 kms away. This is a journey that until the last century would have taken years of my life. Instead, I walk off the ferry, shaking a little of the remaining Ontario rain from my suitcase, home before my kids arrive back from school.
Magic.
AFter a phenomenal trip across the country, featuring three back to back to back Art of Hosting workshops on water, I am taking it easy, relaxing for a couple of days in the Beaver Valley, beside Georgian Bay. Reconnecting here with family and friends, we’ve been watching crazy, crazy weather come through off the bay – hail and sleet and snow and wind, three foot waves crashing on the breakwater. Last night we lost power and four foot high snowdrifts appeared on the top of the valley sides. Down here at the valley bottom, it is just wet, but I have a long drive tomorrow across the top of the Oak Ridges moraine to get a morning flight home to Vancouver, and I’m giving myself lots of time to be surprised by what I encounter on the way.
So catching up on email, and on thinking about several issues including decision making processes, the character of local civic conversation, how to work with fear and division and deliberately diseased politics in our society and what role conversation plays in acute moments of small town/reserve/village negative community dynamics. Probably more to say about this later, but some more instant reflections are unfolding at my Bowen Island blog.
In the meantime, getting ready to go watch the Champions League semi-final match between Chelsea and Barcelona with a lovely Iraqi refugee family in the area. Even in small small towns, the world’s game connects diverse people!