by gautsch
In a little conversation this morning on the art and practice of harvesting we got into a conversation about the pattern of distilling. We talked about what it takes to lay a table with a meal for a group of six friends. How no one can creat a meal from scratch, and that everything from the food to the table, to the machines that transported the food, to the people that sold the chairs and built the factory that created the plates all contributed to that meal. That a single meal with friends is a distillation of thousands of person years of work.
The whole field of the harvest is a field of potential. When we distill from that we make choices about what the highest and best use of that field might be, for that very moment, in the domain in which we have influence. This isn’t always easy, and sometimes people are attached to pieces of the harvest that are left behind in the distillation, feeling unappreciated or unseen. Eating mindfully means being aware of and honouring everything that goes in to the food, and being grateful that we can be present at the nourishing end of the process.
A lovely day of design with friends in Lindon Utah. In most Art of Hosting type events, the substantive design work happens in the days just before the event, when the hosting team can finally be physically together, when we can read over the “getting to know you” answers from participants and when we can sink into a deeper space of good working relationship and creative planning. We work until we get to a design that is good enough to hold the bones of what we are trying to do, and then we rest and let it sink in so that we can refine it further the next day. Beautiful designs emerge this way, especially when we have deep practitioners on the team who understand the DNA of the process. Often we are joined by friends and colleagues in the work who push us and inquire and help create from their perspectives. Today was no different, and in the process Erin Gilmore, one of our design team colleagues referred to a Neruda poem today which captures for me the spirit of the design processes that often produce really sweet results.
POETRY
And it was at that age…Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.— Pablo Neruda
Off to Salt Lake City Utah to work with Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony on another Art of Hosting. Taking an inquiry into this one about the dynamics and the work of co-hosting. I take for a given the relationships I have with my closest colleagues, and the ease with which we are able to work together. There is a magic to it born out of deep friendship for one another (we have a saying that friendship is the new organizational form). There is also something about sharing an inquiry together and living deeply in a community of practice where the language and ideas are shared and understood at an intuitive level. Within that we bring very different capacities and capabilities and inquiries, but there is a powerful centre that holds us together. It is not something we set out to work on…not a centre that arises from a deliberate scoping out…it is deeper, one that lives at the heart of all good teams, an ineffable and powerful but unspoken togetherness. Trying to do our best without this would be impossible, but it is also not something that, so far, I feel like I can bottle up and talk.
So as I go into this Art of Hosting, I’m going to do a little harvest on what working together is like, and try to take that to others. Chris Chapman – my Ireland based colleague – and I are looking to create something more descriptive about the practices of co-hosting, and so we have a little bit of a harvest plan going forward.
And if you are coming to Utah to be with us, you may well find yourself wrapped in this inquiry as well!
Beautiful.
“A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement – and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.”
– Alan Watts
via whiskey river.
A birth announcement that might interest you. I have been a small part of a project over the past couple of years (along with a few other Art of Hosting stalwarts) to help co-create a pattern language for group process. Over the years we have been working away at discerning, writing and publishing this pattern language. The idea is to capture a limited number of patterns that, if practiced in a group context, bring life to gatherings. After years of work, I think we really have something.
The project has now resulted in it’s first product: a deck of cards that are wickedly fun to play with. Last week, Caitlin Frost, Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf and I used these cards in working with a hosting team to design and hold the core of an Art of Hosting learning event. It was fantastic, and opened us up in so many ways to possibilities and potentials. As a co-creative design tool, these cards are wicked.
So attached is the birth announcement with information about where you can order the deck. I’ll always have them with me so next time we meet, ask me if you can play with them!
The Group Works card deck, the first product of the Group Pattern Language Project, is now out! You canorder copies of the deck, download a free PDF copy and learn about our upcoming mobile/phone app version of the deck on our website, groupworksdeck.org .
Image by Susan Stewart
The deck is designed to support your process as a group convenor, planner, facilitator, or participant. The developers spent several years pooling our knowledge of the best group events we have ever witnessed.
We looked at meetings, conferences, retreats, town halls, and other sessions that give organizations life, solve a longstanding dilemma, get stuck relationships flowing, result in clear decisions with wide support, and make a lasting difference. We also looked at routine, well-run meetings that simply bring people together and get lots of stuff done.
The deck consists of 91 full-colour cards (plus a few blanks to add your own patterns), a five-panel explanatory category/legend card, and an accompanying booklet explaining the purpose and history of the project and suggesting uses for the cards in group process work.
Each 3.5” x 5.5” card is laid out as follows:
These cards are yours, of course, to use in whatever ways make sense and work for you: in the workplace, in design and preparation of facilitated events, as a learning and teaching tool, for reflecting on how an event went, or just for fun. The website and booklet explain some of the ways they have been used by facilitators and students so far, to give you some ideas to get started with, and we invite users to share their experiences and stories with us.
Image by Ethan Honeywell
For more information on the deck, please visit our website: http://groupworksdeck.org