Harvesting things from the RSS fields:
Really interesting gig this week. Steven Wright and I are working together here in Vancouver at an international conference on restorative practices, the kinds of things that people do to bring relationship and community to the justice, education and community systems that more often than not drive us apart. There are some real heros here and leaders in the field including Howard Zehr, one of the founders of the restorative justice movement, and many leading practitioners from around the world.
The conference itself is a pretty standard set up with plenary discussions dotting a schedule of concurrent sessions. Steven and I are putting into practice an idea that a number of us have been playing with for a could of years, namely hosting a reflective conversation space in which the conference participants can help create the harvest and meaning making about the whole event.
We have a little conversation space set up in the foyer of the hotel, with table tops covered with flipchart paper on which we are writing questions for reflection. All of the insight is being harvested every day on two large murals that Steven is creating, based on a three panel image of a river emerging from the headwaters, travelling through fertile lands and emptying into the ocean. This metaphor is charting the learning journey of the 280 people here. Yesterday we were interested in the questions that were coming up, the droplets of water and insight that lie in the multiple headwaters of our mainstream of restorative practices. Our question for our space was “What are the questions you are hearing today?” From that question we harvest three main tributaries that flow into our mainstream: people are curious about conceptual questions (What are the values and deep practices of restorative community?), contextual questions (How do we do this in education/community/social services?) and individual practice questions (Where do I start? What are the essential capacities?). At the end of each day, Steven, Howard and I have been reporting what we have been hearing and seeing back to the whole.
Today our river is moving into the rich plains and fields of established practice and we are asking the question “What patterns give life to restorative practice?” Already people are engaged in questions of process, listening, showing up, facilitating and working that are suggesting a pattern language of restorative practice. That is our goal for today – to surface that learning for the community. Tomorrow we are looking at the ocean of possibility and the new ground that is created as we extend these practices into new places.
This is not a standard conference facilitation job for sure. Rather we are inviting people into a deeper reflective space, harvesting collective meaning and learning and giving a context for a shared learning journey. Lots to come.
Inspired by spending a bit of time with Keith Webb this past week at ALIA West, I’ve been looking deeply at the patterns of the natural world for teachings and illumination on questions that I’m working with. Wlakiong through a forest with Keith is a revelation, as Susan Szpakowski points out in this blog post from ALIA West. He helps you to see patterns that are instantly recognizable but which you may never have noticed before, even for someone who knows his way around the woods a little.
This week, along with Tennson Woolf and Esther Matte, I’m running an Art of Hosting with labour educators and union activists from the Canadian Labour Congress. Some of us were in a little conversation tonight about the relationship between invidual and collective, which is a topic that is of great interest to unions. There is special interest in what it means to be an individual leader working a whatever level WITHIN a union to help bring a union into an innovative space. Many of the people we work with feel this tension.
I thought of Keith today as we were talking about this topic and I spoke a little about what I know about the way the natural mixedwood plains hardwood forest of this part of the St’ Lawrence River valley reclaims a pasture, in a process known as ecological succession. The natural form of landscape here is mature hardwood forest, and that forest comes into being after a number of successive stages of reclamation by different species. First cedar tress move in, and it is not uncommon to see abandoned meadows and pastures with little stands of small cedars in them. A field with one cedar sapling in it is already on it’s way. After the cedars, nitrogen fixing species like poplars arrive and then later maples and oaks and ironwoods and so on.
The question I asked was, in the context of individual and collective, when does the FOREST arrive? Is it in the presence of one tree? Is it two? Is it more? What is the forest anyway, for it is not merely a collection of individual trees. It is a phenomenon itself, arising from many individuals, but possessing an emergent property. Undoubtedly, individuals have an importan role to play in this process, but when does the forest arrive?
Likewise I said in human history union is our natural way of being. The holy books that tell the creation stories that start with Adam and Eve mislead us into thinking that humans were ever alone. We have never as a species known lonliness – we have always been living in union with each other. When our structures lose life, it is individuals that reclaim our natural way of being within them. When, then, does union appear? Is it with the first relationship, or is it when the structure of the Union appears on the scene?
We’re playing in questions like these this week, all in service of the most powerful and compassionate work that unions do in this country – supporting the learning and survival of working families and communities and helping community to thrive in all times, not just good ones. Or bad ones.
Well, among other places, hosting and teaching at ALIA West this past week, and on my way to Cornwall Ontario this week to work with Tenneson Woolf and Esther Matte and a team at the Canadian Labour Congress as we explore the Art of Hosting Conversations with folks from many different unions.
In transit I have stumbled on some great links this week, so here’s what I am reading:
Back to a regular diet of RSS goodness:
