From Jack Ricchiuto’s blog:
I’ve been thinking about this in a variety of contexts, but the one that comes to mind is the kind of listening we do when we are receiving a teaching. Traditionally, in First Nations communities and in other traditional settings, when Elders are teaching, listeners engage in a kind of deliberate discernment. The point is to hear the underlying truth of the story being told, to believe not the truth of the story’s “facts” but the truth of the myth itself.
This came up elsewhere this week with a post at Anecdote as well, about the truth contained in narratives. I think this arises largely because in the west we have forgotten these practices of listening to stories and observing the world as interpretational acts, in which we see everything around us as a teaching. The history of the past 500 years has been the history of trying to figure out how to reach an objective consensus about things. This weighty cultural thread has created a situation where conversations about stories, if they are conversations at all, seem to be about clarifying the facts.
The deeper truths, the embedded teachings, are lost if we put too much weight on this. That’s important because if you are setting out into the world to learn something, whether it is a personal quest, or with a group, on behalf of an organization or as a member of an inquiry team, simply getting at the facts does nothing to propel your trajectory to a new level. Instead, you are left solely with the facts and very little else to suggest how one might transcend the situation that gave rise to those facts. Developing the capacity to hear all stories as teachings is an incredibly valuable practice.
Categories: facilitation, dialogue
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Alan Watts
Listening to some wonderful podcasts from Alan Watts. In the current series, Images of God, which is made up from talks given during his lifetime, he is delivering all kinds of angles on the divine.
In the third installment of this series, he was talking about school, journeys and the dance. The point of a dance or a piece of music, is not the end, says Watts. If it was, then we would only have composers that wrote finales and audiences would only go to hear great final chords, or see people in their final positions.
No, the point of a piece of music is the way one experiences time. It’s all about the journey, the movement from here to there, the texture of moments that music or dances imparts.
From this he draws a parallel with schooling. We school in this society as if there is an end in sight, a point at which we are heading. In so doing, we teach people to sacrifice the moment for the delayed gratification of the end. And of course the end never comes. One grade finishes and the next begins. High school ends and university begins. University ends and work begins and work is simply more of the same, chasing promotions, until at some point one wakes up and realizes that one has arrived. And in fact one has always arrived and always been arriving, but we miss it constantly, and we school our children and ourselves into missing it completely as well.
Life as dance. Life as the middle phrase of the middle movement of a violin concerto, moving right on to the next one..
[tags] alan watts, unschooling[/tags]
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I piece I wrote here after the BALLE conference in June was republished on the Sustainable Review website.
Nice of them to re-publish my work. Would have been nicer if they had contacted me and asked me to fix the typos. Ah well…the price of glory!
Categories: firstnations, sustainability, local, economy, BALLE
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From the logs of The Whalesong Project, located in Kihei on Maui:
I think this is not a haka, but a powhiri, if I’m not mistaken. Hakas are war chants, and this sounds like a powhiri, the kind of song sung on the marae to welcome vistors. Please correct me if I’m wrong. The song is haunting, and especially the way the humpback seems to respond. While I was in Maui last month, we went whalewatching and saw 20 humpbacks and sat transfixed listening to them sing as well. You can find more about Maori whale songs at folksong.org.nz
By the way, the Parking Lot soundtrack, a list of all the mp3’s I have been collecting here over the past year is hosted at Webjay. You can go visit and stream the whole thing. It’s a pretty good listen, if I do say so myself.
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As a facilitator, there are days when a well planned process gets derailed by a million little unexpected things. It’s at those times that a little calm serenity and well timed ducking comes in handy. You do your best to hang on, and harvest whatever lands in your boat.
This video captures that feeling perfectly.
Categories: facilitation