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Category Archives "Being"

The delightful chaord of freedom

September 29, 2009 By Chris Corrigan BC, Being, Leadership 5 Comments

A couple of men with megaphones tilt at artificial order to reveal the beauty of free humans.  Sometimes free speech can be annoying or not what you expect.  It can seem a little uncomfortable or a little strange.  When I watched this for the first time I have to admit that I felt a little stressed, but I realized that in simply talking through a megaphone, peacefully and standing in the chaos they were creating, these two guys are revealing an edge inside me, a limiting belief that, when I let it go, makes it possible for me to experience delight.

Enjoy it.

via Mark Groen.

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Living the indigenous life is about the questions we ask

September 29, 2009 By Chris Corrigan BC, Being, First Nations

My friend Dustin Rivers is locked in a perpetually generative inquiry:

…what are the next steps to become liberated?

The best questions are the ones we ask ourselves, and require us to act differently once we come to an answer.   “How do I contribute to the things I complain about in my community?” is an example of that.   I speak of liberation; the action of becoming free from constrain or oppression or control.   Most Settlers will not think of Indigenous peoples in Canada as ‘needing’ oppression.   That’s mostly due to the discourse on indigenous issues moving away from the root of the cause, into more a  colonial mentality direction.   I seek to look deeply into the root of the problem, and to see the 55”²000 ft level of awareness of our context as Indigenous people.

If we do live a truly indigenous life, it is in spite of the temptations, the desires, and the allure of colonial model of existence.   The truth of the matter is, indigenous way of life is beautiful.   It is not savage, it is not backwards, it is not ‘stuck in the past’.   It is something we as Indigenous peoples must identify as a great thing, despite the systemic racism society that says our ancestors are inferior to modern day society.

via Still A Need To Ask The Question at Liberated Yet?.

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Beauty in the midst of impermanence

September 28, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Being, Flow, Music, Practice 2 Comments

My friend Norah Rendell is a traditional musician of the highest calibre. She is a beautiful singer and a gifted Irish flute player and a curious and lively human being. To be around her is a delight and to make music with her is to be carried away in a space of grace and beauty where we can find out what it means to be truly human.  I’ve just spent the better part of last weekend visiting with her in St. Paul, Minnesota, making music and sharing lots of story.

For me the social production of music is a deeply important human activity. When we join our voices together we all contribute to a sound that is bigger than ourselves. We glimpse some transcendent possibility, the notion of a true community. We do so without living out of balance with the natural world at all. We simply make sound and all that is left behind is the echo of harmonies ringing in our ears and perhaps, if we are lucky , a flutter in  our hearts that comes with the experience of fundamental harmony – the harmony of notes and of friendship and of purpose. Music does not leave waste behind. It leaves no dangerous or permanent residue at all. Just ephemeral beauty.

I reflect on this here in seat 10A of a United Airlines Airbus 319 flying over the sprawling suburbs of western Denver. My journey this week to the Twin Cities Minneapolis and St. Paul were largely about trying to do two things: support the longing in friends who cultivate a view that wants people and communities to experience possibilit, health and creative, and to design creative spaces for human beauty to emerge in this service. I did this by working with dear friends Jerry Nagel and David Cournoyer teaching some basic ways in which people can come together to talk to each other well. Jerry, David and I also met with Ginny and we co-created both a learning journey for people working in community health as well as a little team among ourselves that was rich and generative and fun.

And then Norah and I got together and we did the same thing with other Irish and traditional musicians, gathering in pubs and around kitchen tables to do what humans in our culture have done sustainably and beautifully for millenia: play music together.

That was my week in a nutshell but it isn’t the way I would have described it until I looked out over these suburbs from my seat, having departed a terminal in which CNN was blaring about Iranian missile tests, murder, pandemics and fear, punctuated every seven minutes by ads for the drugs and goods that would make all this panic easier to take. I’m not pessimistic about the world – rather the opposite, but I am realistic about what is possible for me to do to “fix” it.  And in this moment it has become clear to me that my work now is to make beauty; beauty that is created in the endless present moment and that leaves only the trace of love in hearts.  I have o idea if this work I do will save the world.  But without people who remember the capacities that arise from collaborating and co-creating, there is no chance for anything.

Friends, this society is killing us by small acts and mammoth dysfunction. In fact the ways in which our world is changing seems evident everywhere except on the human scale. Forty percent if the ocean is covered in plastic and soils are dying because the antibiotics we use to keep ourselves thinking we are healthy are destroying microbial communities and making it impossible to feed ourselves without amending the earth with carcinogenic chemicals.

But we humans have no way of seeing things at these scales. If I go by what I have seen this morning at the airport, we seem to react most strongly to compromised business deals, flight delays and a forgotten napkin.

Our craving for permanence has led us to create material legacies that outlast our lives. This seems fundamentally unnatural to me. We take space far greater than that bequeathed to us by our descendants and in return we give them buildings and suburbs and devastated farmland and uranium. We also give them beautiful pieces of art and sculpture and music, don’t get me wrong. But we never question the mindset that leaves things for others to clean up, store or appreciate long after we have gone.

I zm coming to believe that the converstation about sustainability is flawed if it focuses on materials only. I think we have lived far beyond our means and that it is simply not possible for us to make our present impact on the earth sustainable. We have already extended our reach hundreds of thousands of years into the future. You cannot claw back the effect of spent uranium. We cannot put our impact back in the bottle

I think rather what is called is for us to develop and practice the gift of living in community and co-creating beauty together together. If there is one mark I wish to make in the world it is to be a vehicle for the continuation of all that human beings have learned about co-creating community. There is nothing I can do anymore to mitigate to material impact I have made on the world. It is up to us now to ensure that during the change to come in the generations that follow our descendents have the to knowledg e and practice to live, work and love each other well. The quality of my children’s future will depend on, both metaphorically and literally, their ability to make music with others.

Late last night as Norah and I were trading songs after our day of making music with others she told me that she worked for a time in a Jewish geriatric hospice in Montreal. Her job was to sing with dying people, people who had survived the holocaust, people who only spoke Polish or Yoddish or French, languges that Norah did not speak. She would visit them and just sing, sometimes songs she didn’t even understand. And what she noticed was that, even with people who were on the verge of death, they would come to life when they sang with her. The beauty of singing with another woke up their hearts an reminded them that inthe present moment, racked with pain perhaps and a little fear and doubt, they were nevertheless alive to the call of present beauty.

I think, somehow, this my deepest work now: to simply find spaces in which we can find beauty and combat the despair of change we cannot control.

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Sacrificing vision for sight

September 6, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Being, CoHo, Leadership 9 Comments

Beware a rant.

I was in a conversation today with a friend of mine who is a true visionary.  He is an artist who works with metal, rocks and even entire landscapes.  He is a project manager and has overseen some of the biggest developments on our island, and some of the biggest ones in the Lower Mainland.  He cares deeply about our shared home and sees all kinds of potential for Bowen Island to become a true innovative leader in the world.  he knows the municipal tools inside an out, and looks at our official community plan and sees a joke.   As an artist he sees our island in three dimensions, he sees our social landscape in terms of centuries, he sees possibility oozing out of every patch pf land, and every land use decision and every corner of the landscape, possibility that includes food production and long term restoration of old growth habitat and community cultural creativity and the chance to make a good, but modest living here.

Yet he isn’t bitter – on the contrary he is full of possibility AND he has a pretty good idea of how to get there.  He understands chaos and complexity and living systems and how to create change without succumbing to control.  As I listened to him speak about the small but very very deep shifts it would take to make our island truly self-sufficient, it occurred to me that without my friends visionary thinking and novel way of seeing, we are doomed as a culture.  And the problem is that the kinds of tools that are available to us to plan and govern our futures are not about vision, they are about seeing.

Think about it.  Most municipal governments are reluctant to say “let’s set aside that 200 acres of land for 300 years so that there will be old growth forest there in the future.”  It seems pollyanna-ish.  It seems like the kind of thing that is a good intention, but how could you ever do it, and what about the pressing needs of our people now?  Never mind that it is actually easy and possible and wise, it is simply easier to look at what is around you now and manage what you have.

What does it take for organizations, communities and societies to recognize that a worldview based on vision is the way to secure a future, whereas one based on seeing is simply the one that got us to this mess in the first place.  I note that the Liberal leader, positioning himself for an election victory, has chosen to make his campaign about restoring economic growth.  With everything happening in the world right now, with the demand for leadership that takes us beyond the worldview that has mired us on the brink of economic and environmental catastrophe, Michael Ignatieff’s postion is that he will restore something that is bound to come around sooner or later in a cyclical capitalist society.

The reason he does this is because the mind set of measurable, observable short term results is king in this society.  No one is going to get elected talking about stopping rampant economic growth and stopping the more is better mindset.   Even if we are engaged in long term projects, someone always wants an indicator to know that we are on the right path.  The management mindset has trapped us in the ever present short term.  We are like a cigarette smoker dying of lung cancer who keeps having one last butt.

What does it take to do something with no expectation for gain, recognition or results?  Just to do it because it restores more life to the future than we have now.  A basic principle: leave more for the future than you took for the present.  Could we be that mature?  How much longer with this childish obsession with consumption and instant gratification go on?

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A decade of living and learning, hosting and harvesting

August 31, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Being 7 Comments

As summer begins to close here on the west coast of Canada, I’m starting to head back to work, digging into to 20 or so projects that will unfold in the next nine months, which will take me across Canada, the US, Hawaii, Estonia, Denmark and Australia.  And as I look ahead to my work year that is restarting, I notice that this is the tenth time that I have done this.

Indeed ten years ago this day, as a precocious 31 year old fed up with travel (ironically) and the various despairs of working for the federal government, I quit my job and hung out a shingle.  August 31 was my last day of employment.  My first contract was a retainer with the BC Assembly of First Nations, working with Chris Robertson and the then vice-chief Satsan (Herb George).  Chris and Herb were (and still are) both enamoured with Open Space Technology and were wondering how we could use it for various organizing around Aboriginial rights and title.  That retainer – for which I will always be grateful – gave me a start in the freelance world that was all I needed to build a pretty solid little practice.  Since then, I have facilitated literally hundreds of gatherings from two person retreats to international conferences using a variety of participatory methodologies.

In the ten years since I went out on my own, I have been anything but lonely.  I have worked with people from various communities of practice, including Open Space, World Cafe, Genuine Contact and most deeply, the Art of Hosting.  I have, in the words of song writer Dougie MacLean “moved and kept on moving, proved the points that needed proving, lost the friends that needed losing and found others on the way.”  It has mostly been an incredibly rich journey,working with tiny communities and huge coporations, young and radical youth and wise Elders.  I have friends and colleagues in dozens of countries on every continent, and count myself lucky to be in their embrace.

There is no way there was a strategic plan in place when I left my job ten years agao.  I have mostly survived by holding questions, opening myself to learning, and reminding myself that I don’t have to be the expert all the time.  I could never have said that where I started ten years ago would leave me here, typing a blog post outside my favourite cafe on my home island.

I have met and worked with literally tens of thousands of people over the past ten years and as I sit here and picture many of them, I feel immense gratitude for their patience, trust, support and deep friendship.  Thank you to you all (and please leave a comment here saying “you’re welcome!”).  My partner Caitlin and our two kids are foremost among them, for it was to spend more time with them that I originally left my job, and if there is to be one regret, it’s that travel takes me away from them too much these days.  So that’s my edge to work on for the future.

And who can know what I’ll be writing about on August 31, 2019, in my 51st year, as I catch myself surprised at all that has happened.

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