Goodness that came my way this past week:
This story about Britain’s last WW1 soldier has a key them: reconciliation is possible:
To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I living in this country.
Pallbearers carried the coffin of Harry Patch from Wells Cathedral on Thursday in Wells, England.
Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of people lined the streets in densely-packed rows and applauded as his coffin passed by, draped in the red, white and blue Union flag.
Soldiers from Britain, Belgium, France and Germany marched alongside the coffin in a token of Mr. Patch’s increasing desire as he aged for reconciliation both with his own memories of the trenches and with his erstwhile enemies.
“Too many died,” he said, late in life, of the estimated 900,000 Britons killed in the conflict. “War isn’t worth one life.” He called war “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,”
To have soldiers of the former enemy marching at his funeral! Imagine Afghanis marching at the funeral of Canadian veterans in 80 years. And vice versa.
That is the world we certainly would wish for, no? And what if we were to work back from that premise to the near future? What does it say about how we will end this endless debacle?
Obama has a birthday, and here are some wishes for him:
Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable–indeed he will refuse–to seize the radical moment at hand.
Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.
via Links (Harper’s Magazine).
Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity.
At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes:
Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the appropriate pattern for that design is more important than understanding all the details of the elements in the system.
That is a good summary of why I work so hard at teaching and hosting important conversations in organizations and communities. Very often the problems that people experience in organizations and communities are complex ones and the correction of these complex problems is best done at the level of simple systemic actions. Conversations are a very powerful simple systemic action, and serve to be a very important foundation for all manner of activities and capacities needed to tackle the increasing scale of issues in a system. Collaboration, dialogue, visioning, possibility and choice creating, innovation, letting go of limiting beliefs, learning, and creative implementation are all dependant on good conversational practice. If we use debate as the primary mode of communicating, we do not come to any of these key capacities; in fact debate may be the reason for these capacities breaking down.
Conversation between people is a simple system that is relatively easy to implement and has massive implications for scaling up to more and more complicated and complex challenges. The ability to sense, converse, harvest and act together depends on good hosting and good conversation.
I love Bobby McFerrin, and I love what he does with music. Watch in this video how he pulls out of an audience their inherent collective talent. Beautiful!
Thanks to Thomas Arthur for the link.
