It seems often that I am asked by clients to create a safe space, by which I think they mean a safe emotional space (and I’m never REALLY sure what they mean). As a facilitator I bristle at this request for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that there is no way I can guarantee that a space will be safe. The problem has always been how to tell this to a client.
Yesterday, reading Christina Baldwin’s excellent “Calling the Circle” I got some good language around this question:
No group can prove itself “safe” by the definition of one member, it can only prove itself healthy and responsive to the needs of different people over time.”
That’s a brilliant encapsulation of what a functional group is doing.
I’m very much enjoying this book by the way, and I’ll try to post a few more thoughts triggered by her writing before I take off for Halifax next week. If you want to learn more about Christina’s work, visit her site, PeerSpirit.
You are no doubt aware of the varities of Asian throat singing whereby musicians produce overtones with their voices giving haunting and eerie sounds (see this mp3 for example).
Today I stumbled on a couple of tracks from an American cowboy singer called Arthur Miles who seemed to have developed this style of singing all on his own. These two tracks are from the late 1920s and come from an excellent page of throat singing links.
Colin Morley
I’ve returned from my break to find the confirmation of Colin Morley’s death. Colin was an Open Space facilitator and although I never met him, I had several email conversations with him about Open Space, blogging and empowerment. His weblog is Empowerment Illustrated, and he was active in London with an initiative called Be The Change. If you visit there, you will find a memorial page for him.
Colin died in the July 7 bombings in London.
… be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try
to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
— Rilke
I’m taking off for a while, unplugged, unwired, undone. I’m going to spend time snorkelling with my son, reading Shakespeare with my daughter and eating local food with my partner and her mum. In short, enjoying the short summer we are blessed with here on the west coast.
See you at month’s end.
Now at least the moon is full, and I walk alone, which is best by night, if not by day always. Your companion must sympathize with the present mood. The conversation must be located where the walkers are, and vary exactly with the scene and events and the contour of the ground. Farewell to those who will talk of nature unnaturally, whose presence is an interruption. I know but one with whom I can walk. I might as well be sitting in a bar-room with them as walk and talk with most. We are never side by side in our thoughts, and we cannot hear each other�s silence. Indeed, we cannot be silent. We are forever breaking silence, that is all, and mending nothing. How can they keep together who are going different ways!
— Thoreau