It’s a beautiful spring day on the south coast of British Columbia. Today I flew to Victoria for some meetings with friends and partners. I sat in the co-pilot’s seat on the Beaver floatplanes on both trips and had a great conversation with the pilot on the way home about the coastline below us, alternative power generation, near misses and whales.
I am so grateful that partners becomes mates, clients become friends and strangers become great conversation partners. I just feel like expressing some gratitude and giving thanks to all who touch my life in big and small ways.
Chi meegwetch!
Rob Paterson posted a link to a great short documentary about a Sudbury Valley type school in Maryland called Fairhaven. Sudbury Valley schools are democratically run and non-coercive. In our Supported Homelaerning Program here on Bowen Island, we use many of the same principles and we operate under many of the same assumptions that these kids are expressing in the video.
I love the last comment, that this kind of learning prepares a kid for living and learning within a worldof chaos, which is what the real world is actually like.
Sun and clouds above the Strait of Georgia
I was listening to this podcast this morning, a conversation between Krista Tippet and John Polkinghorne regarding the marriage of quantum physics and religion (which incidently is a subject Ken Wilber has also taken on recently in a podcast). It is an excellent conversation and I found myself grooving along with the theme of the universe as both predictable to some extent and unpredictable at the same time. Polkinhorne makes the analogy with clocks and clouds, saying that the sun rises and sets and we can predict when that will happen using Newtonian physics (and clocks), and also there is much uncertainly in the world, which he calls “clouds:” unpredictable possibility, structure on the edge of chaos and order.
My mind got busy and I started thinking about how peering into the sky, one can see this all the time. The sun, stars, moon and planets that we see in the sky can be predicted and clocked. The clouds that move across them are full of potential and beauty and complexity and there is no way we can account for or predict the specific form of any of them.
And then I began to notcie the sky itself – clear, transparent, irrelevent to both the objects and the clouds and yet the medium in which both exist, and I began to think that this is a good model for thinking about facilitation. As facilitators we hold space for both order and chaos to play at the same time. We are barely noticable when we are working well, and when people gaze into our container they see only the play of clouds or the precise edges of stars and moon, and forget that they are also looking at the sky itself.
Facilitating as sky means opening THAT big and inviting both clouds and sun to play with one another and to admit the possibility for amazing and astonishing beauty to arise from their coexistence. It is the essence of holding space in chaordic process.
Keeping a flame lit here for the people of the Six Nations territories in Ontario, and hoping for a peaceful resolution to the standoff there.
When Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were locked in the most critical period of the Cold War in 1986 they arranged for a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. Reagan had been developing the “Star Wars” project and the ante was upped on the nuclear game. Gorbachev, for his part, knew that fighting the Cold War was costing him the opportunity to make economic reforms at home. Gorbachev came to Iceland wanting to go deep into the relationships between the two superpowers and he was prepared to make Reykjavik a watershed event. To the surprise of many, apparently Reagan got on board with that intention too.
The summit had all the makings of the typical Cold War summit, with some kind of arms reduction treaty at the end of the day. But Regan’s advisors were worried that the USA would give up ground just for appearances. Indeed, a treaty did come out of the summit, and it was a treaty that was further in scope and range than anything either side had been prepared for. It saw the elimination of all short and intermediate range nuclear weapons, and it began to address the deeper implications of fundamental change to the strategic relationship between the United States and the USSR.
Gorbachev later said that the Reykjavik was the turning point in the Cold War. And when asked why, he said it was because the two leaders had a real conversation, and not just talk about stuff they had been told to talk about, but about the core things, the things that mattered.
This morning I ws listening to an excellent little podcast from The American Experience about this story, and I was reminded of a post at Doug Germann’s blog earlier in the week where he simply asked “When have you even got anything significant done without a conversation?”
It is not just that significant things require conversations, but that significant things can also arise from conversations. We need to be open and listen deeply into that space, but we can nonetheless find generative dialogue to be the thing that unlocks even the tighest knots we tie ourselves into.