Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.
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Beautiful.
“A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement – and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.”
– Alan Watts
via whiskey river.
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“If you really knew how beautiful you are, you would fall at your own feet” – Byron Katie
Working with some organizations, people and communities these days that are going through hard times. Not everyone is dealing with it very well. There is sniping and infighting and distrust and alarm. The narcissism of small difference.
But as a consultant that comes and goes with these organizations, I am continually struck by the latent resourcefulness and beauty that lies within the people and the groups I work with. Sometimes I think that my job is just to help groups see themselves, see their raw beauty, their power and potential in a way that is useful.
The quote above is on my partner’s website. I used it today with a client who holds the deep architecture of her organization, and who does her work in an atmosphere that doesn’t often see what it offers. It’s a gift to be seen, and a gift to have the perspective to see.
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Heading to Columbus Ohio today to teach at the 2011 Authentic Leadership in Action Institute with my friends Pawa Haiyupis and Tim Merry. We’re teaching a module on indigenous wisdom, ancient wisdom, universal wisdom. It’s new for me to be doing this, kind of a chance to sum up my last 20 years of learning, living and growing as a human being. I’m nervous and mindful of elder Herb Joe’s name for us: “poor weak human beings.”
I always feel humble coming to ALIA and this year I feel maybe more humble than ever. Our module is fully subscribed and many friends and colleagues will be with us. On the eve of the work I find myself far more curious about what I am about to learn rather than what I have to teach. And immediately that frame of mind brings me back in a deep and powerful way to the first steps I took learning about Anishinaabe culture and practice back in 1987.
So I sit here waiting to depart on a delayed flight to Toronto, grateful for all of the indigenous teachers in my life. Remembering Tom Little, Paul Bourgeois, Edna Manitowabi, Jake Thomas, Manny Boyd, Art Soloman, Marlene Castellano, Eddie Benton-Banai, Shirley Williams, Wayne Kaboni, Fred Wheatley, Bruce Elijah, William Commanda, Sylvia Maracle, George Cook, Umeek, Fred Johnson, Lila Brown, Cease Wyss, Dustin Rivers, Grace Nielsen, Willie Charlie, Leonard George, Pawa Haiyupis, Wally Samuel, Herb Joe, Satsan, Luana Busby-Neff, Taupouri Tangaro, Michael Elkington, Orlando Pioche, Mikk Sarv, Mick Dodson, Peter DuBois, David Newhouse and Sonny Diabo.
All of these men and women, some older, and some younger than me, are my teachers. they have shared some deep kindness with me, some important teaching that has brought me to a place of belonging either in myself or in the place in which I live, and I am grateful to them all, and many more besides.
As I head out on this trip, this quote seems important:
“The circle is one of the strongest shapes in nature. When we see the world from a Native American perspective, that circle shapes our vision. We find circles and the idea of the circle everywhere, from the shapes of most Native dwellings to the view of the world as a series of continual, repeating cycles. Human life, itself, is seen as a circle, as we come from our mother, the Earth, when we are born and return to that same earth when we die” . Lesson stories keep the Native people of each generation from repeating errors which their ancestors made. And today, because (as Sitting Bull is reputed to have said) “there are no longer just Indians here,” that circle of stories is desperately needed…”
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Pema Chodron:
When we talk about hopelessness and death, we’re talking about facing facts. No escapism. Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, not to run away, to return to the bare bones, no matter whats going on. If we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.