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More living in truth in Kiev

November 25, 2004 By Uncategorized


Viktor Yuschenko

Here are the voices of protest from Kiev:


  • “I don’t realize I’m freezing and exhausted until I get home every night and collapse,” said Alexander Kmet, his hands shoved in his pockets and his shoulders hunched and shuddering as he spoke. “But this is an inspiring moment in the history of our country. We have to be here.”

  • “The truth makes us warm,” said Ala Babich, 38, a management student, before breaking into the protest song We Shall Overcome in English.

  • “At first we watched it on television because we’re not so young anymore, and we live on the edge of the city,” said Galina Kiyashko, 68, a retired engineer who came to the square with her husband, Grigory. “But our hearts called us out.”

  • “Our nation is finally awake,” said Yurig Shekurko, 28, a priest from from Staryy Sambir on the Polish border. “Before, we talked and complained, but now we’re actually doing something.”

  • “It’s hard,” said Shekurko, “but freedom is never easy.”

Space is opening in the Ukraine. It’s been four days now and the election has been called for the Victor Yanukovych, but the people know that the result is dubious. It seems inevitable that Viktor Yushchenko will eventually win. My hopes are that democracy wins the day peacefully. This photo is a good sign:

More at the BBC. And here’s a portal for information on the Orange Revolution.

Another velvet revolution?

November 23, 2004 By Uncategorized

When 200,000 people simply don’t believe it, look what can happen. The Ukraine may yet reverse the trend of many former Soviet republics and join Georgia in turning back creeping authoritarianism.

How can this be happening around the world and the 2000 election get stolen so easily in the USA? Where were the protests in the streets if people believed so strongly that George W. Bush stole the White House? Can you imagine 500,000 people gathered everyday outside the US Supreme Court to state their opposition to the fraud they believed was committed?

Look around. Masses of people who know the truth can change things, but it takes a little work and the courage of convictions to punch through the obfuscation of process and punditry. When the time is ripe, don’t blog it. Get out in the street and live it.

Idleness as revolutionary crucible

November 23, 2004 By Uncategorized

From a fantastic essay in the November issue of Harpers magazine called Quitting the Paint Factory: On the virtues of idleness:

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req�uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle�ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had “too much time on our hands.” They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, “Quick, look busy.”

Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir�ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: “There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav�ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”

Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a de�mocratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so am�ply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell’s leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.

Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.

I think that in totalitarian societies there must actually be a lot of sitting around waiting for someone to tell you what to do next. I can imagine Solidarity getting started in the ship building factor in Gdansk one afternoon when the supply chain broke again.

Building containers

November 22, 2004 By Uncategorized


Frog Feast Bowl by Dale Faustich

Recently on the OSLIST we have been discussing “givens” the boundairies within which group work happens.

Both Harrison Owen and Paul Everett, an American consultant, talked about the universal givens, like the laws of self-organization and gravity. Paul wrote about the boundary conditions that tip chaos into order:

Chaos Theory, et. al. deals with ‘bounded instability’. There is a container, an edge. OS is certainly Chaos Theory in action, imho, where something will emerge but you don’t know what or where, just that form will emerge from the primordial soup. A person I met once, name long gone from my memory, unfortunately, once said there are only two rules needed to build an ant hill.

1. When an ant carrying a stick comes to another stick, it puts its stick down.
2. When an ant not carrying a stick comes to a stick, it picks the stick up (and carries it until rule 1 occurs).

That will build an ant hill within the space of the travel abilities of the ants (the container) but you cannot say where it will emerge, but emerge it will.

IMHO, just so with OS, the minimum needed conditions having been set (by the structure Harrison developed), potentially useful form will emerge.

I concur with that statement. What strikes me here is Paul’s use of the word “container” and I resonate with that. When I hold space, I do often have a sense that I am holding a container. Some First Nations Elders here on the west coast of North America talk about it using the metaphor of the feast bowl, an ornately carved dish in which food is served at feasts. The expression “the common bowl” is often used to refer to the collection of people and resources available for a task at hand: “What is in the common bowl?”

I have recently been reading about Bohmian dialogue again, especially as it was explicated by Peter Senge et. al. in The Fifth Discipline and especially the new book, Presence. They use the term “container” as well. In Presence, there is a lovely quote from John Cottrell, the president of local 13 of the the United Steelworkers of America who used dialogue in labour relations. He likened dialogue to the craft of steelmaking:

“We work with energies that can kill you, The essence of our craft lies in containing these energies. If we fail, people die. The same is true for human beings: we generate energies that can kill one another. The question is, can we hold these energies, or will they destroy us? Just as the cauldron contains the energies of molten steel, dialogue involves creating a container that can hold human energy, so that it can be transformative rather than destructive.”

I think when we work with groups as facilitators we do hold these energies. Those of you in very conflicted parts of the world will know better than I the tremendous strength needed to create and sustain a container for these energies that is transformative. My father in law called us toxin handlers: those who held those energies in a way that allow groups of people to function in a healthy way.

Sometimes I think we need explicitly stated givens to do this. In most cases though I think that the universal givens of self-organization are the ones we need to invoke, invite and hold space for. This is huge, huge work. But when we fashion the containers well, the results speak for them selves. Peace, as Harrison has noted, requires space and self-organization to emerge. These are givens, and they are worth holding.

Supporting the youth

November 22, 2004 By Uncategorized

Taiaike Alfred is a Mohawk academic who teaches at the University of Victoria. He is an uncompromising champion of declonization here at home and in the wider world. Recently he took part in a two-part dialogue at the Musqueam First Nation with some guests, community members and Elders. A transcript of the dialogues can be found on his home page. Here is one of the many interesting quotes, from a conversatio between Taiaike and Sakej Ward from the Burnt Church First Nation:

Sakej Ward :…As colonized people, our typical reaction is to feel ashamed of ourselves. So we must bring back standards of what it means to be a warrior. Like, if you’re calling yourself a warrior, these are our standards� We take you in and help you decolonize and be who you were meant to be. People in warrior societies are all at different stages of this process of decolonization, but when they come in, we tell them, �This is what it means to be a warrior.� For example, no alcohol or drugs. We have to cleanse that out of our systems. We don’t need to deal these inner demons; we’re busy dealing with other things.

Taiaiake : It’s also important to remember that we as adults need to give our children a culture they can believe in. Rites of passage, ceremonies and so on are very important in this kind of movement. The youth need to have a culture they want to be part of . You know the Zapatistas in Mexico? A lot of people think of their struggle as the struggle against the Mexican government, but I think they’d say their main accomplishment was attacking violence against women and drug and alcohol abuse. And then they were strong enough to fight against the other things.

Sakej Ward : Before we talk about a political revolution we need a social revolution. We must bring back a value system that stresses community and people, because the Western value system is about the individual, greed and self-centredness. We have the ability to start thinking about building community again, and we have a social responsibility to do it too.

I will say it for as long as I live that the origins of true freedom and transformation, whether in the service of decolonization or healing or some other arena, lie within the personal and collective realms. Without this inner transformation of people and cultures, the external changes won’t occur. We remain complicit in our own imprisonment.