Yesterday I spent an hour sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River near Albertville, Minnesota. We were deep in a design day, and I’m feeling a little run down and tired. I needed to go and sit, and rest and fill my lungs with air and my mouth with silence.
One of the tried and true things I know about sitting in nature is that it takes about 20 minutes in stillness and quiet before the system you have entered has absorbed you. Humans are clumsy at being in the natural world and we stumble and make noise. All the little birds around us stop singing, the mammels stand stock still and everything waits for us to move away or become still.
After 20 minutes of sitting in the same spot, bird song starts to return, little animals start moving around, and my own inner chatter has quieted enough that I can experience being a part of something bigger. It’s always at those moment that the possibility to learn something, however small, becomes real.
It was really windy yesterday as I sat on a little staircase that leads down to the river. The cottonwoods were clacking their big branches in the wind and last years bullrushes and milkweed, dried stalks, whistled as the wind passed over them. Little birds were flitting about – juncos, chickadees and song sparrows. the little things were chattery and noisy.
And in front of me, the river was flowing fast and deep. And as huge as it is, with all that water going through it, it was silent. It slid by, a massive quiet anchor in the scene. Several times bald eagles took off from the trees across the water and soared in the wind, stillness in motion, also completely silent.
And it just struck me then about how the biggest things are so quiet, and how our attention is drawn to the small and the flittery and the chirpy. Something about coming home to a large omnipresence. Something about the way the land hosts, the way the river hosts the scene, hosts the valley, and in this case, hosts half a continent.
Silent, large, present and in quiet collusion with the flow of water and wind.
A harvest of the second day of our 118 person Art of Hosting last week in Minneapolis. Incredibly energy, terrific diversity and powerful learning for all of us.
Sitting in a Caribou coffee shop in a nondescript sprawl of outlet malls and suburban detritus somewhere northwest of the Twin Cities.
We begin two days of work tomorrow with a cohort of community health coalitions working to improve child health around the state. It is the second residential retreat in a centre in the banks if the Mississippi and it will be great. But noticing in this moment a tired longing for spring at home.
There were many leanings for me this week here in St. Paul, Minnesota. Foremost among these I think is a deep recommitment to the essential nature of the Art of Hosting: what we call the Four Fold Practice.
I admit that I haven’t always given this particular model the attention it deserves, so if you have been in an Art of Hosting learning event with me at some point and you are scratching your head about it, let me explain.
In brief the four fold practice is this:
- Be Present and cultivate a strong practice of hosting yourself.
- Participate in conversations with deep listening and contributing from the heart
- Host others with good process
- Co-create a way forward together
it is simple, and it is meant to be simple. But like any real practice, it opens up a life time of learning.
When the Art of Hosting was named it was out of a sense that a new world of participatory methodologies needed a new set of deep practices for facilitators if we were to use them well. The four fold practice (or as I have been thinking of it, the four folded practice) gives us a practice ground to improve our abilities to host powerful conversations and move to wise action. I have noticed in my own life that when I act in this work without having attention to all four folds of this practice, I fall short of the abilities I know I have to host well. This practice explains how hosting is a leadership style as well, one suited for the complex questions and complex situations that we deal with as humans.
So I invite a re-engagement in the four fold practice, for all of us who are in this work.
A busy first day in the Twin Cities. We met today with friends and partners in the InCommons network, an initiative supported by the Bush Foundation. InCommons is the primary sponsor of much of the flourishing of the Art of Hosting here in the Minnesota and Dakotas region. In a very short time, we estimate that there will be upwards of 1000 people in this state alone who have come through an Art of Hosting training, in cohorts and individually, as a result of InCommons’ intention to support new forms of leadership. This week we will turn our attention to hosting another 100 people in a three day Art of Hosting.
But today we spent time talking about worldviews and what the Art of Hosting is and how those of us who are practitioners see the world. As part of my own preparation for this conversation, I tried to whittle down the elevator speech about what it is, and one version of it now goes like this:
The most pressing challenges we are in are challenges thrown at us by complexity. Complexity produce emergent effects in our societies and requires emergent practices in order for us to find our way forward. The Art of Hosting supports wholeness by bringing together a loose set of tools, maps, models and practices that serve wholeness. We use dialogue to work with diversity to create emergent solutions, to hold groups and communities in the uncertainty and fear of not knowing, and to converge, prototype and design wise action. When we are telling the story about why this work matters, these touchstones seem to be essential to touch upon. From there we can go deeper into the worldview that embraces complexity (thank you Cynefin and the chaordic models of Dee Hock) or into the practices that support individual and collective leadership and resilience in times of change, uncertainty and fear.