Playing music rather than talking about it
I’m coming back from Hahopa with simplicity ringing in my ears. I think the mantra is “put something in your hands.”
At Hahopa we cooked together, wove cedar together, trained with swords together, played lahal and sang songs. We DID a lot. And in our doing we could reflect on our being. And from our being we can create a view of what else we might do.
I spend a lot of time helping people plan things. But I am noticing that people want plans that promise a great future, but are afriad to start doing things. Heading into a set of meetings this week with some Chruches here in BC, I think I’m curious mto ask “What do you want to be doing that you aren’t doing now?” And by this question I don’t mean “What do you want other people to do?” I mean, what are you willing to start now that would help us become something that we wanted to become. Let’s do more of that and THEN we can see what we have learned.
Visioning and creating a common purpose is cool but it often assumes that we know what the future will hold or that we can guess what will be useful. We need to be more adaptable. We need to look at what is stopping us from DOING the things we want to do, and focusing on removing the barriers to that, whether those are resources or fears or time.
There are conversations I don’t want to have and there are conversations I show up in and where I don’t like how I show up there. How to change these?
We are always inside the conversations we don’t want to have. We cannot leave them. We always have to host from inside this place.
At some level you can never leave earth. You belong here and to every conversation that is happening here. You are invited to host it all. That is your obligation for being given the gift of life.
Martin Luther King Jr., writing from teh Birmingham City jail in April of 1963, mused a little on time:
I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of goodwill. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
I was thinking on this as I approach my 45th birthday and as I was thinking about my beautiful 16 year old daughter and my spirited 12 year old son. Coming back today from a glorious gathering of leaders from the new world of community, one might say “rock stars of the new consciousness” in Petaluma California, I was thinking about the way I want my children to use their time on this earth. What came to mind was the Mary Oliver quote: “Tell me what you will do with your one wild and precious life.”
And of course they can’t tell me what they will do, because the work my children will do hasn’t been invented yet. But if there was some advice for them lurking out in the ether, it would probably be in that King quote.
This is a good time to do right..
I hate bombs.
In my 45 years I have had six friends and colleagues killed by bombs both on the Air India bombing in 1985 and in the London bombings in 2005. As a 10 year old kid living in England during the IRA letter bombing campaigns of Christmas 1978 I remember being completely terrified whenever letter came through our mail slot.
I hate bombs.
And this afternnon I am sitting at a Starbucks in West Vancouver, BC and the man sitting nthree tables over from me is proclaiming in one of those know it all not quite stage whispers about what should be done about the Boston marathon bomber. He declares that this is what the death penalty is for. The man should be killed and his ilk should be eliminated, he just said.
And my experience of hearing that just now was literally chilling. To hear the hate in his voice, a man sitting here absolutely materially unaffected by the bombings in Boston, declaring in public a vaguely murderous intent as a way of expressing outrage was chilling.
When I heard about the bombings in Boston I treated them as news. Sad of course, but nothing I could do about it. They seemed just as distant as all of the other bombing stories we hear on a daily basis expect that of course I’ve been to Boston and American cities don’t get bombed like that a lot, so it’s unusual and disconcerting. But I never felt an iota of fear, until just now, sitting in a peaceful distant Starbucks in West Vancouver. I am warily watching this man, although by now he seems to have calmed down.
How we talk matters. How we choose to model a response to events in the world can contribute to make us more resilient or more fearful. Bombs go off every day, literally and figuratively. They don’t scare me anymore. People responding to that news with a powerful need to make a public declaration about killing someone worry me more. This is exactly what bombers are trying to do, to create violent and chaotic responses to their actions and to spread fear far beyond their immediate sphere of influence.
Interesting how we help them do that.
Today was a day of hosting on webinars, with a group looking at the emerging edges of the non-profit sector in BC and with a group od UNited Church ministers and lay leaders who are hosting transformation and learning together in a community of practice. At the end of our second call, this Thomas Merton quote was shared with us:
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
This resonates strongly with the tack Meg Wheatley takes in her no book, So Far From Home, which is a call to spiritual warriorship, despite everything.
Several really stunning insights fell at me feet today, from this five hours of online discovery. Forexample, a friend working with victims of sexual abuse in northern BC talked about how people who do this work are not burnt out by the work – humans have been caring resliiently for each other for eons. What burns them out is maintaining the systems that formalize that work of community. As humans we are easy in relationship, but our energy and lives are sapped by turning away from what nurtures us and tending nto a system of professional practice, regulations, administrative accountabilities and resource deployment that leaves us tapped out.
Or another insight today that the real practice of making change is making space for dissent so that there can be an authentic yes from the centre of the work. Or that evolution is a difficult metaphor for change work, because so much of what we are aiming to change has been put in place intentionally and which purpose.
We are one learning journeys with these groups, and these little insights trickle in like sunlight when you are listening openly and sharing in each other’s discovery. Nice way to end the week.