A friend sent me a piece called “There has to be a Big Crises” by Michael Kane about what it will take for Americans (and I would say Canadians too) to wake up to Peak Oil. The article paints a disparaging picture about the ability of North American leadership to wake up to the creeping decline – James Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” – before it’s too late.
Having spent the past two weeks in the States, and the better part of next week there too, I agree that the signs are not good. In Maui the radio is filled with ads for loan companies and car dealerships aiming to finance or sell you the “sharpest looking trucks and SUV’s on this Island.” Even as Americans are dying for hegemony in the Middle East, as the country bankrupts itself for a war to secure oil, conservation seems the last thing on the minds of the mainstream. The American way of life keeps chugging along, hastening the decline rather than seeking to stave it off.
So perhaps it will take a crises to change minds, but if that’s the case, I don’t like America’s chances at the moment. Katrina was a wake up call, if ever there was one, for how America might handle a big crises, and it didn’t fare too well. One of the big things that was missing was an active community sector that was able to take care of itself. The centralization of FEMA, the States and the local government was a bottle neck for action, and eventually the stories of real help and coping came from people that took it into their own hands to steal buses, distribute food care for children and tend to the sick and elderly.
That was in contrast to the way in which parts of Sri Lanka survived the tsunami last year. In two talks (mp3s at audiodharma.org), Joanna Macy told the story of Sarvodaya, a Buddhist organization that cultivates a spiritual practice of giving and community building called Sharmadana. The lessons learned from how Sarvodaya dealt with the tsunami include the fact that biggest way they had prepared was simply but cultivating these practices over years and years of work. When the tsunami struck, they simply went to work as usual, able to cope with the massive demands on organizers because of their training and practice.
I have spoken with David Korten and others about this, and all agree that practice of community is the thing that will mitigate the inevitable emergency. As facilitators this can become our prime responsibility. After Katrina hit, Peggy Holman, Tom Atlee, Mark Jones and I convened a series of conversations with leaders in the dialogue and deliberation community to see what could be done about helping people in the Gulf Coast implement wise action. Since then, a larger group of people have done all kinds of work down there, using conversation cafes, appreciative inquiry and other processes to bring the community into a space where it can participate in rebuilding its own future.
America in particular has a grand tradition of helping in community. Traditionally Americans helped each other out when times were hard, raised barns together, shared food with one another, created great institutions of philanthropy, charity and care. But in the last century these quaint customs were sacrificed as the country became more urbanized and as a result, there is a loss of knowledge about what it’s like to live in community. Suburbs and exurbs and car and consumer culture do not contribute to this community. Mega churches and gated communities are examples of a “turning in” to help, not “turning out” to lend a hand. The fragmented and insular nature of American (and Canadian) urban and suburban life is the Achilles heel of dealing with crises that the leadership says is coming.
So let’s not wish for this crises before its time, and let’s not expect the leadership to be prepared. Anyone who works in community, be they helpers, facilitators, or others has a treasure to offer, and that is to seed and practice the art of community now. Whether you invite people to come together to build something, play music, feed people, improve things or just talk and muse upon things, these practices are the key to communities surviving. Cultivate intimate connections and community locally RIGHT NOW and then let us turn together to face the crises. By then, as the Sarvodaya teachers tell us, we’ll be able to handle it.
It’s been an age since I posted, mostly because I was on Maui over New Years, unplugged for the most part and not at all inclined to blog.
So I’ll ease back into it, with some music to start of your new year. While on Maui I bought a bunch of slack key guitar records by the likes of Sonny Lim and George Kahumoku Jr. Slack key guitar is a Hawai’ian style that originated with the Mexican paniolo cowboys that helped establish ranching in the early 20th century across the Hawai’ian islands. These dudes brought their Mexican cowboy guitar styles, and left them in the hands of Hawai’ians who started messing with the tuning by slacking keys and playing in open tunings. After that, stylistic innovations followed with a rhythm line kept on the lower three strings and the melody plucked out of the high strings.
As I was travelling with family, I didn’t get to hear much of this music live, but we did catch one performance at a hula in Ka’anapali with a great young slack key player whose name escapes me. To give you a sense of this laid back and lovely style of music, here’s an mp3 by slack key masters George Kuo and Barney Isaacs (who is playing slide) from their album Hawaiian Touch.
Aloha!
PS…for more great streaming island sounds, with a preponderance of “Jawaiian” reggae sounds combined with some hula, slack key and traditional stuff, tune into the Maui’s local radio station now online at KPOA.com. Make sure you tune in on Fridays especially to hear the repeated playings of “Aloha Friday (full mp3)” and dig the other novelty numbers such as Kupa’Aina’s “Overload on Automation (m3u clip)” and High Risk Factor’s too-serious-it’s-funny “Chillaxin’ (mp3 clip)” song.
Getting near Christmas, and I love the sacred music that gets sung at this time of year. Although this track isn’t Christmas music, it is from the Ukranian Orthodox Christian tradition, and is a haunting and meditative chant. This is from a fine site of russian orthodox music and information.
This is an Antiphon, chanted text that is sung in a servics, often in a planisong setting.
I just had lunch with Jessie Sutherland from Worldview Strategies. It was one of those encounters that was a long time in coming: we both seem to run in circles that intersect and I’ve known about her work for about a year but until today we had never met. I first became aware of Jessie’s work through an email inviting me to join a conference call on residential school reconciliation. Following the links, I found her website and her company, Worldview Strategies.
Jessie’s life and work is about reconciliation and peacemaking and it intersects with my work on a number of levels. We are both interested in the power of conversation and relationships to build robust and peaceful communities, we are interested and work in the realm of aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations and we are facilitators. But deeper than that, Jessie recognizes that social transformation comes through cultivating practices that support our ability to engage and catalyse transformation.
She has just written a book, Woldviewing Skills: Transforming conflict from the Inside Out, which is all about these practices. I recommend you pick it up from Jessie. In the conclusion to the book, she writes about “the stone in our shoe” the work we have to do on ourselves if we are to do transformational work in the world:
No matter how committed we are to social change, justice, and ultimately, reconciliation, if we don;t do our personal work we will likely, despite our best intentions, contribute to the problems we seek to change. While a conflict with a neighbour or dealing with the pain of our past may seem insignificant in comparison to resolving historical and contemporary injustices, it is precisely “these stones in our shoe” that ultimately prevents many peace-building strategies from reaching the goals many of us strive for.We need to start with who we are, what our personal history and legacy is, and how we contribute to conflict or reconciliation in our moment-by-moment choices. It is in the juice of our interactions with others – be it a baker, a colleague, a grocer, or our partner that we can learn these skills. Our challenge is where and how we meet the Other. When we use worldviewing skills, what arises is a great sense of respect because on some level the Other provides an opportunity to either climb our mountain or become stagnant.
Jessie’s book details a model of doing reconciliation work that starts with getting “in” to the personal, developing ways of seeing and sensing oneself in the world, and then moving out to the political and the social. In this way it mirrors a lot of the work I have been doing lately on practices that support Open Space. Essentially Jessie and I are saying the same thing: your practice in the outer world must mirror your inner being, and your inner being is as great a practice ground as the outer world. It is Gandhi’s call to be the change you want to see in the world; it is the Shambhala warrior’s mandate to do all things with heart, to do nothing without caring, to be a “warrior of joy” as my friend Toke Moeller puts it.
In some ways this is as simple as saying “practice what you preach” but the challenge is to live life as the practice of transformation and change that we want to see in the world, our organizations, communities and families. It means living life as a constant practice, seeing opportunity in every interaction to, as Vaclav Havel says “live in truth.” It is to bind our work in the world to our selves, and live with authenticity and integrity.
It’s always delightful to find another soul out there that lives this practice of opening and invitation. I’m already looking forward to places where we can play together.
It’s hard to get enough of Ricardo Semler, the CEO of Brazil’s Semco. In a new article from Strategy+Business he talks about participatory management:
Asked why true participative management is still such a rarity, Mr. Semler cites two elements that he says are in sadly short supply: “One, the people in charge wanting to give up control. This tends to eliminate some 80 percent of business people. Two, a profound belief that humankind will work toward its best version, given freedom; that would eliminate the other 20 percent,” he says.The only reason there aren’t more people like Ricardo Semler is simply that it takes overwhelming courage to buck the experts and prove them wrong. But for those of us that believe, like Semler, “that humankind will work towards its best version, given freedom,” he continues to be an inspiration.