The chapel at the Statenberg Manor, when we finished cleaning it out in 2013, and after it has been restored.
The global Art of Hosting community is an eclectic group of people from all over the world who share an inquiry about how to bring more participatory processes to a massive variety of challenges they face with their communities and organizations. There is no formal organization, but the community is a network loosely connected through a website, animated through Zoom calls, an active Facebook group and face-to-face gatherings of practitioners who occasionally meet to forge connections and share practices. One such important gathering happens next week.
As an approach to dialogue and leadership, the Art of Hosting itself is very simple: it is a framework that connects the practices of self-hosting and presence, hosting others, fostering participation, and enabling co-creation. This simple framework has formed the basis of an inquiry and practice that has evolved over the past 25 years or so in many places all over the world. To hold together the essence of this approach, a group of experienced practitioners evolved to steward the Art of Hosting and ensure that there was some consistency in how we talk about the practice and how we connect practitioners so that the global community can thrive, share learnings and be a resource to each other. SInce about 2008 I have been one of those stewards, responding to an invitation from my friend Toke Møller to do so after a stewards gathering in Nova Scotia.
As my friends and colleagues begin to gather in Slovenia for a larger global gathering next week, I took a few minutes to write about some key lessons I have taken from my work as a steward of this practice over the past couple of decades. This letter reflects on lessons from a similar gathering ten years ago at the Statenberg Manor, where the present gathering will be held, and I share it here for posterity.
Hello, colleagues, friends and fellow practitioners.
I want to send my greetings from the traditional territory of the Squamish people off the west coast of Canada from the island of Nexwlelexw, also known as Bowen Island, nestled in the waters of Howe Sound. Since 2004 we have hosted dozens of Art of Hosting gatherings on our Island or in the nearby City of Vancouver, or, during the pandemic, online. We have built a deep community of practice in this part of the world and the Art of Hosting has found its way into many aspects of civil society, local government, Indigenous Nations, and community. we have a number of local stewards in this region who offer training and use these practices for good in the world.
I was at Statenberg in 2013 and I fondly remember visiting with friends, connecting with other practitioners and learning a little bit about how the Art of Hosting community was spreading its wings across the world. I co-hosted a smaller steward’s gathering in 2010 here on our Island, where we engaged with the same kinds of questions about stewardship, leadership and essence under the watchful gaze of a thousand-year-old Douglas fir tree and with the visit of a bear who reminded us of the powerful effect that a well-hosted conversation can have in a world full of uncertainty.
I reflected on the biggest lesson I took away ten years ago at the gathering of 2013. When we arrived on the site we saw that the chapel had close to a meter of dust and dirt and rubble covering the stone floor. it seems that for more than 250 years nobody had bothered to sweep it out, and our children, who got very bored at the important conversations their parents were having, began a competition to see who could remove the most wheelbarrows full of debris from that Chapel. Over the course of the week, they set up a scoreboard on a flip chart at the entrance to the chapel and every time somebody shovelled out another wheelbarrow of debris they put a point next to their name. I don’t remember the actual scores but I do remember that hundreds of wheelbarrows of debris got moved from the chapel and dumped elsewhere on the grounds. The chapel was so clean by the end of the week that the priest came up from Makole with a number of villagers and reconsecrated the chapel. In this space of five or six days, many small human beings and a few big ones came together to reclaim and restore a sacred space and leave a legacy in place as a gift of return to the community that had hosted us.
I will always remember that particular act as the defining moment of stewardship. leave what you have found better than when you found it and return it to those who gifted it to you in the first place, your descendants and those who are yet to come. when you visit the chapel in that space make sure that Franc tells you the story and the photos of what it looked like before, and reflect on your role as a steward of a practice that supports life-giving spaces and conversations to make our world a better place.
When people ask me what it is I’m stewarding within the Art of Hosting community, it’s very simple. it’s that I hold the memory that a global community of us discovered value in a framework that connects presence, participation, hosting and co-creation. we all have many different ways of doing that but the idea that these four approaches to life and facilitation and learning and leadership are connected and interdependent is the essence that forms the basis of the art we practice. it’s that simple ground upon which we meet and it’s that simple ground that provides us a context for conversations that will enliven you and challenge you, cause you to find new mates and reignite the love and friendship you share with old ones.
There are two key lessons I have taken from this practice over the past 20 years of stewardship. The first is a quote from my friend Thomas Arthur, who spoke these words at the beginning of a Shambhala Institute faculty retreat years ago. Speaking as an artist, he channelled the urgency of the times and said: “If you have a gift, give it now.” This is not the time for any of us to hoard or hold on to things that can benefit all of us so give your gifts with energy and unconditional love.
The second lesson I’ve learned Is one that served me well in my life at every stage of my work. and that is “Support is Life.” None of us exist without the support of others and we must do everything we can to support the people building the world we want to see.
So in closing, I wish you to have a beautiful gathering in that incredibly powerful place. I hope you will learn, I hope you will make deep, lasting friendships, I hope you will be challenged, and I hope you leave there with a strong sense of what your gifts are to give away and how you can support others to host a better world into being.
Thank you for gathering and being a part of this community of practice and practitioners. Have a great time.
Funeral urn by Charles LaFond.
My friend Charles LaFond is a potter. He is also a man who understands how to make space sacred, whether it is the space inside of which life unfolds or a space between two people deepening into friendship and ever-generative mutual blessing. He is also cheeky while being earnest, and his work plays constantly with the dance of the sacred and the profane. His funeral urns, for example, come with his own cookie recipe, and he encourages you to use them as cookie jars until you expire, after which your body, which by that time will be composed of the most amazing cookies, can be stored within.
Today I was in a local gallery here on Bowen Island talking to one our local artists, Kathleen Ainscough whose work explores liminality, and especially the space where the natural world encounters the built environment. We dove deep into the subject of containers. I brought up Charles because we discussed how containers impart meaning to the things they contain. This is true of both the physical world and the social world. Kathleen noted that we carry french fries in disposable containers, making our meal meaningless. It’s a different story if you were to eat those same french fries out of your own funeral urn!
The point here, of course, is that life is enriched by meaningful experiences, and those experiences can often be induced with the emergence of a powerful and thoughtful container and a set of practices that helps us move from one world to another. Even in the example of eating french fries, there is something different, if only marginally, in eating fish and chips from a container made from one’s own local newspaper, than it is eating one from a piece of waxed paper with a fake newspaper printed on it. The same meal becomes a little different, a little bit more meaningful.
Containers induce meaning. If we meet in disposable settings, the contents of those meetings are likely to be just as disposable. If we don’t have time to build a thoughtful social container at work, then we can’t expect thoughtful responses to important challenges. No, you cannot do the same quality of work in a one-hour meeting as you can in a four-hour meeting. The emergence of rich social containers does not happen in a short stand-up meeting. Similarly, if our conversations happen on meaning-depleted social media pages, they are likely to be thin on relationality and thoughtfulness. Many of us prefer the slower conversations that happen in places like this blog, or in physical life, than on the endlessly scrolling field of social media sites.
The container itself is intimately connected to the meaningfulness of what happens within. Even in the play of sacred and profane, it is about the attention we give to what surrounds things and experiences that builds the importance of what takes (its) place within.
In my early thirties, a small group of us were studying education theory and self-directed learning as we built a supported homeschooling program. We worked with a guy for a while who was an NLP practitioner, and I have mixed memories from our time with him, but one thing that stood out was a novel take on an NLP exercise called “Timeline.”
Essentially this exercise has you walk on a large diagram on the floor, laid out in one-foot intervals, with each foot representing a year of your life. In this case, the novelty was that the timeline was laid out in a parking lot on a Fibonacci spiral. I think the reasoning here is that the Fibonacci sequence shows up in all forms of growth, and so representing it as a way of reflecting on one’s life can be a powerful metaphor.
The spiral was laid out according to a series of squares made from 1 foot x1 foot, 2×2, 3×3, 5×5, 8×8…etc. grids. Where the line crossed from one box into another was a number corresponding to one’s age.
I was 32, so I started just before 34 and worked my way backwards, and I remember how tight the spiral got. When I got to the centre, that was my beginning. I thought the first 1 was my gestation, and the second 1 was my first year, from birth to sitting up and crawling. Years 2-3 were walking and becoming a toddler and welcoming my brother into my life. Years 3-5 were my pre-school years when I began to talk and when my father taught me to start reading. Years 5-8 were a kind of early innocence, where my sensitivity was intact, the patterns of my life were not yet set, and my sister arrived. Years 8-13 encompassed a coming of age, as I moved to the UK at that time, experienced bullying and loneliness and also had a tight connection to my family. At that time, I lost my childhood friends, and when I got home to Canada at age 13, I had to start all over again at high school with new friends. From 13-21, I grew through my teenage years and went to university, and grew through a series of challenges that formed me as an adult. I met Caitlin when we were both 22, and so from 21-34 was my early adulthood and the birth of both of our children.
By the time I had walked the timeline out to 34, I could see that everything that had happened in my early years was compressed into a tight spiral a long way away, and the road to 55 was starting to straighten out. On a scale of one foot per year, I experienced that time period as moving more quickly away from the centre. Whereas the previous phases had all had the sensation of turning around and around the centre, this is where the long arc began. I remember walking quietly and slowly to the 32 point and then past it to gaze ahead at 55. That number seemed impossibly far away. The Timeline felt like a slow cruise over a distant horizon that was going to require me to be okay with leaving everything behind in that tight inner solar system of my early life.
I eventually reached 55 and looked down the line to 89. My enduring impression was that this last turn was going to be a different kind of journey. Whatever I had learned in the first 55 years of my life was only now the fuel that would carry me out towards the edges of the system into whatever “89” is. At the time, I couldn’t relate. Still not sure I can. This next trip is a long arc toward mystery.
Today I turn 55, and I have been waiting for this day since I was 32 years old. One more turn and a long arc outwards. Pretty much at a place where I can be grateful for everything that has happened down the line and almost ready to meet this next long stretch with curiosity, knowing that it still holds a generative, life-filled journey that can be met with love and friendship and support and curiosity. From here, it looks pretty much as I experienced it back in that parking lot.
To celebrate this point in my life, this is also the day on which I will cut back my work to four days a week. Mostly that is going to look like taking Fridays off work or at least being super conscious about accepting paid work on that day and taking another day in its stead. I’ve been ready for this for a while. The past three years have been more tiring than I expected. My aging body needs attention, my brain needs to move slower than it used to, and my little soul has become more introverted, and it takes longer to be comfortable in the mad rush of working and socializing with large groups of people. Now is the time for harvest, for writing and supporting others doing this work in the world that moves me so much. It means time devoted to things I love doing, spending time with my beloved, making music (continuing to learn jazz guitar), writing, spiritual practice, putting energy into my football club and supporting and mentoring the many, many younger folks in my life who are developing fierce practices of hosting, complexity work, and positive world-building.
The next arc on the journey is going to be held within a world I feel increasingly ill-equipped for. One in which the bio-physical and socio-political climate is changing in ways that are alarming. I don’t know what life holds – never did – but if I’m lucky, there are 34 more summers of sunshine and football and gardens, 34 more winters of rain and wind and hot chocolate, and 34 more chances to see the universe from just this particular angle. So I keep living with as much joy as possible and certainly soaked in the gratitude of getting to be alive in this place and time, in each moment.
I treasure my friends, my family and the people I get to support. I have a brain that never stops learning, and a group of humans around me who tolerate my quirks and rabbit hole dives and help me turn that scattered attention into, on the whole, a beneficial contribution to the world. Come back in 2057, and we’ll see what the trip across the 55-square-foot box was all about.
Most mornings, when I’m at home, I stroll down to a local rocky beach, coffee in hand, to begin my day in meditation. The beach is a pleasant 15-minute walk from my house. When I reach the water, I step from the asphalt onto a gravel path that meanders through trees, past thickets of blackberry bushes, and ends in a secluded cove facing east, towards the rising sun that crests over the 1200 meter ridges of the Brittania Range, the mountains that make up the eastern edge of the inlet in which I live.
I began visiting this spot regularly the day after my father died. This beach, in all its varying weather and seasons, became my sanctuary for healing and introspection. Whether on a sunny summer morning or during a dark, rainy winter day, it offers a place to simply be. It’s a space where I am held in the vastness of the east wall of Atl’kat7tsem/Howe Sound, where I sit still, observing the ever-changing dance of the waves, wind, sky, and sea. This spot is undeniably a container, but it is one that’s vast and overwhelming, akin to entering a cathedral. It’s a space so grand that my presence doesn’t alter it, inviting me instead to enter and surrender.
There are containers in our lives that we create with intent and control. There are emergent containers, birthed from many small collaborative actions. Then, there are containers like this one, pre-existing, ancient even, that hold us and are accessed by deliberately crossing a threshold that ushers us into a different state of being, thinking, and feeling.
Having a space like this in one’s life is beneficial, as many of the containers in which we work, live, shape, and co-create are embedded within much larger ones, over which we have little control or influence. The practice of surrendering to a larger context helps us fully immerse ourselves in a place and moment, to quiet our minds, rest, observe, and experience. In doing so, we also discover our inner reactions to our surroundings.
Maybe you have a place like this, or you can find a place like this. It might not be the mountains of a fijord, but it could be a forest, a park, a lake, a field, or the heart of a bustling city. Go there, observe, listen, and notice how little your presence in that space changes it, but how much you are influenced by it. Consider the audacity of imagining how you could affect or change it. Familiarize yourself with your humility and insignificance.
Our work in the world requires us to dance between the spaces we make and the spaces we inhabit. We can dance between these spaces and we can witness the dance of these spaces with each other. And all the while, we inhabit our own little containers of thoughts and feelings and intentions and motivations, every so subtly shaping and being shaped by dancing space.
I’ve known Tenneson Woolf for 20 years, and we have worked together, offering learning, facilitation and organizational support in various settings all over the place.
Tenn is a global Art of Hosting steward and was amongst the first people to bring the Art of Hosting practice to North America in 2003, back when he worked with the Berkana Institute, and we all saw a need to bring a set of deep dialogic and participatory leadership practices into the world.
Tenneson has a great blog, and devoted writing practice. He has extended his creativity engagement into the world of podcasting, where he brings on some great guests to talk about human-to-human connection.
We sat down last week to have a conversation. We touched on joy-seeking, the need for micro-dosing appreciation and gratitude, curiosity, generosity and support. It was lovely, and really just the same kind of conversation we always have when we are together.
Have a listen.