Forest Pool, by Frances and Mary Allen

If you know the Chronicles of Narnia at all, you will of course know about the world between worlds. In C.S. Lewis’ series, characters must travel to a bizarre middle world between the one they live in and the one they might travel too. This world is a comfortable purgatory, an emerald green forest full of pools into which one jumps to travel between worlds. It’s a lovely place to stay and there is always a danger that the enchantment of that place will leave you there.

I like this image because as an autodidact, it sums up a particular mood or time when I am between learnings. For the last little while I’ve been studying and prototyping conversational processes. More recently, I have been looking again at the natural world and seeing what various people have been saying over time about nature, in an effort to draw those learnings into my practice. This has taken me away from explicitly reading and writing about facilitation and more about nature itself. And my reading has been very far away from my usual work, back into the realms of Thoreau, T.C. McLuhan and Barry Lopez.

In this transition between areas of interest, I find myself reading very shallowly, skimming blogs and books and not coming to rest on anything. I’ve noticed a reaction to this blog as well. I’ve had fewer posts, and I’m not really saying anything new. Instead I’ve been just reporting on stuff I’m doing. My hits have been down almost 40 percent in the last month, which I find fascinating. I have been looking at the stats for this blog over the past couple of years and see a heavy correlation with my engagement with ideas and my readers willingness to visit, link and spend time here. I noticed the same thing when I first started taking this blog seriously, when I spent a lot of time reading poetry a few years ago, when I turned my attention towards beauty and finally where I integrated my old Open Space weblog and this one became more about business, organizations, and facilitation.

So my thinking is that a lot more of what you’ll read here over the next little while will involve looking at the natural world and figuring out what it teaches us about our natural ways of being with each other. I’m looking for principles and lessons that can help me ground my life and facilitation practice in the way in which we really are.

So this is just a note…a bookmark to hold space to notice a subtle shift. I’ll hang out in the forest for a while before diving into a pool.

Ther were a few references on the web to the re-discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker last month, but today I cam across this reference (scroll down a little) quoted by Joy Harjo, as her cousin wrote about the meaning of the birds to the Muskogee people:

That admonition to never give up is an essential practice of holding space. In fact holding space, and the faith and dedication it demands, may be the most trusting thing one can do: imagining that the one who you are holding will eventually flourish, or return. If that wildlife refuge had never existed, a space held for the unconditional use of these animals, it’s likely the woodpecker would be gone from North America for good and the Muskogee songs and healing processes that go with it would have slowly disappeared too.

This is a lovely story about what it means to be connected to the world and what that connection demands of us.

Here’s another call out to the global water cooler…

I live in a small community, on an island with about 4000 other people. Folks know each other pretty well and the community is fairly well connected to itself. We have to deal with a number of issues related to development, including impacts on limited water resources, encroachments on wild areas, pollution and impacts from cars and other transportation issues such as ferry marshalling and public transit. We are also in the middle of a long term process to develop vision and planning for the island as a whole and the small commercial centre.

There are a number of facilitators on our island who are fluent in Open Space, appreciative inquiry, world cafe and so on, and we use these processes from time to time to do community dialogue.

In November we have a municipal election coming up. It is a custom in these parts that elections are preceded by one or more all-candidates meetings, in which candidates typically are asked their position on a variety of issues and sometimes invited to debate with one another. I find these kinds of events intolerable, and useless for making up my mind on who to vote for. I think that complex issues require more than just a position and an ability to score points in a debate. I think a critical skill for people running for public office is the ability to work well with others, to refine and create ideas together that are greater than those retained by just one person. But how are we supposed to know which of our candidates for office has this capacity to learn and contribute in conversation with others if we are only exposed to a position-based debate?

My proposal is to host an all-candidates meeting in which candidates are given an issue to work on together and asked to come to a solution that incorporates as many positives from each person as possible. I envision this happening perhaps fish bowl style, whereby we have a round table with five or six candidates and an empty chair which can be occupied by a member of the public. People have half an hour at the table to think through and discuss solutions, ideas, and thoughts. Members of the public can wander between tables and see how people work together, and can even occupy the empty seat for a few minutes to add something to the discussion.

If we did this for two hours or so, we could have small groups dealing up to three issues. It would give us a chance to see how well candidates work with one another, and ideas that come forth from the public. It is the opposite of a debate format, with the emphasis on co-creating solutions, using the skills of listening and thinking bigger than one person’s position. I would feel more confident voting for people that performed well in this environment, because that reflects the nature of the collegial environment of municipal government here in British Columbia, and environment that can easily become dysfunctional when people simply entrench themselves in positions and refuse to budge.

So my friends, what do you think of this proposal? What would you add to this, or how might you do it differently? You can feel free to email me, Skype or leave a comment.

The Guzheng is a Chinese zither traditionally played by women. Originally it was used for vocal accompaniment, but it’s now often played solo.

This piece is a traditional solo piece. Listen for the bluesiness of it, the bent notes and the pentatonic scale, which is shared between Chinese music and blues. Also, the guzheng player is using another technique commonly found in the blues: plucking two strings on the same note together and then flattening one to give a kind of mournful wail. For those of you with even more sensitive attention, you will also notice that the chord progression of the piece is very bluesy to: moving from a root note to a fourth, a fifth and then back to the root. The structure is different, but the harmony is very similar.

The other thing I love about this little piece is the way it ends, on a low fundamental note with a cheeky little shimmy. Enjoy!

More on the Guzheng, along with more tunes.

Thoreau’s Journal has become a daily must-read. Here he is on his failure to liberate friends in the woods: