Day three at Shambhala and I’m humming. The artists staged what I heard was an incredible improvisational performance today that took the idea of being together in a field to a whole new level. I was in a conversation with some Art of Hosting mates at the time that was alos about fields and we were cracking open some deep learning about the ways in which we work together as friends, but the upshot was the same.
At the faculty retreat last weekend I sat in with the artists and had a conversation that was about the kind of work that art makes possible. I posited the assumption that fields cannot be created without art, an assumption we explored both in conversation and with an improvisational piece. Today one of the artists in that conversation, Wendy Morris, told me that one of her takes on the rock balancing thing was that the rocks make visible the very fine lines of balance. In the same way, art can illuminate the fine and subtle dynamics in systems and in seeing them crystalized with beauty another level of awareness and possibility becomes visible. This is certainly true in my expereince using poetry and graphic recording to harvest meaning from conversational process.
I am learning this week to enter deeply into the practice of “process artist” and to invite other who might be deep practitioners of conversational arts to explore other forms as well and integrate it with their practice. It’s simply a way of seeing differently, and sense making in a way that invites collaborative beauty.
As a taste, my rock balancing student, Jean-Sebastien posted lovely video today which is worth a look – and yes this means you Thomas.
Jean-Sebastien is alive with rock balancing. He and his mates are decorating the whole campus with sculptures. He has become one of our rock balancing senseis here at the Institute and it’s very cool to see what he is learning from the practice. Today, just before our module started, he was sitting with me in the centre of the circle and he asked if here was something to knowing which kinds of edges would sit together, and as he took his mind off the task of balancing, in the act of asking the questions, the rocks he was working with came together. Very cool. It’s a strong metaphor for hosting practice too.
Our module today moved from the personal to the relational and we spent some time in appreciative interviews looking at the characteristics of conversations tat lead to shift. We used some integral quadrants to harvest the results of these conversations, and a harvest team went to work making some meaning for the group. We left them in a little chaos at lunch time, inviting them deeper into the practice of collective harvesting and we’ll see where it goes tomorrow.
This evening was a time for catching up with mates. David Stevenson is here with me, a guy I have worked with closely over the past five years with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team. He’s in my friend Tom Hurley’s module and is cracking some questions about the kinds of governance structures that serve agile organizations in living systems. Tonight we spent some time sitting on rocks overlooking the Bedford Basin and talked about what was at the living core of our work. Probably more to come on this, but the big insight today was in cracking the nature of what we have been talking about as “the fifth organizational paradigm.” We have long suspected that there is something that transcends the four organizational paradigms of circle (reflection), triangle (action), bureaucracy (resourcing) and network (informtion sharing, learning and collaborating). David has been speaking as the fifth paradigm as a living ecology where all four of these come to play, where all four exist in the service of what is alive. The fifth paradigm is the place where these four act in concert to serve the living core of an organization. I’m liking this a lot.
In closing, here is the poem I slammed out as the cafe harvest yesterday:
Time to be in it
Chris Corrigan
Time to reform, see our relations reborn
from the inside out watching repression die into clarity
wet in the eyes where
hope falls in
and old worlds shed their skins
and we sit in the raw light of the new.
This is what we’re going to do.
Hang on to each other through the chaos
of fucked up panic that plays us
like dupes into not knowing the truth
that everything we do is a choice.
I’m here to meet hearts
that choose authentic restarts.
Different is on its way, starting right now and later today
and tomorrow as we fly
from uplift to sorrow
we’re called into balance and focus,
hard work and hocus pocus where the magic meets the tragic
and challenge appears and our spines straighten
and urgency seers its invitation upon us.
Start here.
It’s getting late and the state of things
requires that sensitivity attention brings;
the precision of decision
the gift of the incision that cuts the bonds to the old –
something climbs…
These are the times.
We are served by our fear, present and here
and escaping the fantasy of skill
letting the messiness fill
the spaces that lie between us.
The flux between optimism and the cynicism that
paralyses our lives,
leaves us to foster the faster
speed of work and communicate the state of things:
listen to the planet’s song. It fills our structures
and brings along a new life that comes when we fall
into the possibility that the micro births the macro,
the large from the small.
Practice moving to courage from fear
letting go of what is no longer clear.
Back to your corners
find those of like mind and appear together
as good people, impatient but kind.
Everywhere it is time to collaborate
create and elaborate
containers of capacity that resonate.
Time to come home, switch it on
dance between poles, rest in centre,
this time of change is a mentor
teaching courage to
reach back to places where each
small effort is supported by this trembling field.
Our tools are not enough – the challenge remains:
connect to source and course through each other’s veins.
A poem harvested from participants’ reflections from a World Cafe at the Shambhala Institute for Authentice Leadership, June 2008.
Wicked fun day here today at the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Halifax. I’m here as faculty teaching a module on the Art of Hosting with Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen. Highlights of the day included being asked to create a slam poem harvest from a World Cafe with all of the participants today, running the first day of our module and then singing tonight on stage with Judy Brown, Tim Merry, Mark Durkee, Shauntay Grant and Mary Jane Lamond (whose music I have loved for 15 years) and others. We were up on stage tonight in a mixed spoken word and song cafe performance, the highlights of which were Basia Solarz’s version of “over the Rainbow” and Shauntay’s incredible spoken word reminiscences about her childhood. We finished the night with a sweet jam on Tim and Mark’s “Switch it On.”
I’m loving how much actual art is in my life these days, especially as it relates to hosting work. One participant shared with me that she felt my impromptu poem harvest was as vivid as a graphic facilitation, which is high praise indeed, but also points to the power of words to evoke a shared meaning, if they are put into a poem. I continue to play intensively with this form of harvest.
Our module is based on the journey of the practitioner from individual to systemic work, and it looks at things that are constant at every scale. Today we started with the journey of the practitioner, opening with a check in circle, going to the chaordic path teaching and then finishing with some aikido to capture the learning of what it’s like to move with ground and centre. There were rocks balancing in the centre of our circle, an activity which is a very fast teacher about artistic hosting practice. One of our module participants, Jean-Sebastien Bouchard came alive with this practice, and he’s been balancing rocks all over the campus.
So a great week so far, following on a really interesting faculty retreat and some time with friends down at Tim’s place in Carleton. It’s a long stretch to be on the road but I’m in heaven here, learning tons, making lots of friends and playing at the edges of my life, art and work.
Photo by Jaqian
What a sweet time in my life this is.
Still on the road for another couple of weeks, off to Nova Scotia to be with good friends in Yarmouth at the The Shire and then teaching at the Shambhala Institute.
In the meantime, I’m taking a few days at home to celebrate my birthday tomorrow, pick berries and have some fun.
Regular blogging will resume in a couple of weeks.
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission launches today (hooray that my friend Jane Morley was named as one of the commissioners last week!) and I’m here at Queen’s University in Kingston to run an Open Space as part of a conference of academics, policy makers and public servants from First Nations and non-Aboriginal governments and institutions on the topic.
In Canada, the process that is being embarked upon today is spurred by the residential school experience. The main brief of the TRC will be to write the history of that 150 year period in Canadian history when residential school did huge amounts of personal and collective damage to Aboriginal children, families and communities.
But as I’ve been thinking about this topic in preparation for tomorrow’s Open Space, I’ve been thinking about reconciliation from a broader perspective, and I’ve been thinking about it specifically in relation to the way reconciliation helps us to create generative relationships that can be the basis for paradigm shifts. Today I was in a conversation with the Mohawk artist and teacher Rick Hill who filled me in on his experience of the Haudenosaunee worldview about relationships. Rick said that for Mohawks, the primary form of relationship is the family. So in the thanksgiving address used by Haudenosaunee Elders for opening gatherings, the natural world is referred to by family relations: mother earth, grandmother moon, our brothers and sisters in the plant and animal kingdom. Likewise, for important relationships, the Haudenosaunee government gives names to politicians and senior public servants because by doing so the confederacy “extends the rafters” of the longhouse to include strangers. Once you are named, you are family and once you are family, you are able to be in relationship.
When I asked Rick the question “What are the purpose of relationships?” he answered me by saying that relationships are the places in which we find peace. It is most important in all indigenous cultures I know of that this search for peace be a communal experience. In contrast to the Buddhist path of individual enlightenment, the Haudenosaunee worldview holds that collective peace cannot be served by an individual seeking their own path. In fact, such an act is dangerous and hubristic and leads to a reprimand from the clan mothers. The purpose of relationships, Rick said, is to find ourselves in a peaceful place together.
So this had me thinking about my opening tomorrow and so I called my partner Caitlin to get her thoughts and she said similar things. Her take on reconciliation is that it is actually a means to an end. Only when we are reconciled to what is real, can we find new things to do and new ways to be. As long as we live with the energy of unresolved historical stories, we cannot be in a place of generative shift. So Caitlin suggested an appreciative exercise, which I intend to begin with tomorrow. She suggested that each person take a moment to notice for themselves what reconciliation feels like, and what it allows us to do. From there we can ask the question of what might then be possible in the public sector in Canadian society if we achieved the kind of peace and resourcefulness that comes with having reconciled with each other. If what is needed is a fundamentally different way of being with one another, reconciliation represents not an end state in itself, but rather a pre-condition to moving to the generative space of co-creating new paradigms.
I’m curious to see how this all plays out.
Update: Opened space this morning and had a lively agenda setting session. My favourite ones so far included a Kingston City police officer who convened a session called “Why do we support and adversarial justice system?” and a new federal public servant who asked how non-Aboriginal people cna become allies of Aboriginal peoples.