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Category Archives "Being"

Gary Gygax has passed

March 9, 2008 By Chris Corrigan Being

Last week, Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons passed away.   When I was a kid, in the early eighties, you either played D&D and or you didn’t, and I did.   I went through a few years of playing a little, not as intensely as some, but a fair amount nonetheless.     In D&D I found an outlet for my imagination, and in an era when computer games got no more interesting than Pac-Man, it was a blessing to be engaged in play like that.

My seven year old son is a gamer.   I taught him the basics of D&D and we play computer generated campaigns from time to time, slaying piles of orcs and collecting bits and pieces of treasure.   He plays other games as well, and he has a fairly impressive Lord of the Rings Warhammer collection for one so young, specializing in Uruk-hai.

So it was with some sadness that I learned of Gygax’s death, and I spent a bit of time reading the reminiscences on Metafilter and feeling a sense of gratitude for the explosiove manifestation of this man’s imagination.   I even heard from my childhood mentor, Hanns Skoutajan, who was the minister at my church and who knew me when my gaming instinct was quite sharp.   I think at one point he and I were discussing some typical crises in the life of a teenage boy and he said it was a “character building experience.”   My reply was “I’d rather roll dice.”

Gygax was influential in many ways.   In my life he helped provide some small ground for relationships, between friends who had minds as active and insatiable as mine, between the adults that cared for me and now, between me and my son where we play together in the arena of the imagination.

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The synchronicity of old connections

March 4, 2008 By Chris Corrigan Being, CoHo, First Nations 5 Comments

I was listening to The Current on CBC Radio this morning and I caught an interview with Marlene Brant-Castellano on the newly announced Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools (hear the interview here).   Back in the mid 1980s when I was at Trent University, Marlene was a professor in the Native Studies Department.   She was a beautiful teacher – quiet and inviting and embodying tremendous dignity and powerful conviction all at the same time.   I connected with her quite deeply as I began to explore questions of culture and community.   It was in her classes that I was introduced to systems theory, feedback loops and dynamic living communities and cultures.   She intriduced me to indigenous philosophy and showed me that there was an incredibly deep a valid intrepretation of the world that had been born and nurtured in North America. Not every way of thinking about things needed to come from elsewhere.

In large part due to her unwavering commitment to this way of thinking, I wrote some amazing papers under her guidance and my learning opened up and expanded.   Three major papers stand out:   I wrote a paper on the dynamics of culture change in communities, I wrote one with   my friend Gary Heuval on hunting as a negotiating strategy for the James Bay Cree in the 1970s and I wrote one looking at themes of connection and interdependence in Native American and First Nations poetry. That last one included a meditation on Duan BigEagle’s poem “My Grandfather was a Quantum Physicist“, interestingly enough.   All of this led up to my developing a particular worldview that culminated in my honours thesis, a piece of original research under David Newhouse that developed a multi-disciplinary process for understanding organizational culture in Native organizations.   That was what was possible at the undergraduate level at Trent in the 1980s – I think things have changed now.   Marlene was an incredibly influential person on my life.

And so it was delightful to hear   her this morning, even if it was only out of the side of one ear.   What I did catch though was a short story she told about the phycisist David Bohm meeting with indigenous scientists in Banff in the early 1990s, shortly before his death.   I had no idea that Bohm had done this.   I knew of course of his meetings with Krishnamurti and his cross-cultural examinations of consciousness and dialogue, but I had no idea he had extended that inquiry into indigenous America.

So I Googled the event and came across a report from Dan Moonhawk Alford, a linguist who was at one of the meetings, and who subsequently participated in two other Bohmian dialogues.   He did some interviews with some of the partiicpants, including Sakej Henderson, who I have since worked with.   Here is a long quote from the report on the eight things everyone agreed on:

1. Everything that exists vibrates

    This point of agreement is important because it moves beyond our usual ‘thingy’ or particle notion of existence based on raw sensory impressions, which is favored in the indo-european language family, and allows a justification on the part of Native Americans for the existence of spirits.

2. Everything is in flux

    (Sa’ke’j:) The only constant is change–constant change, transformations; everything naturally friendly, trying to reach a more stable state instead of bullying each other around. That kind of process the English language doesn’t allow you to talk about too much, but most Native American languages are based on capturing the motions of nature, the rhythms, the vibrations, the relationships, that you can form with all these elements, just like a periodic table in a different way: relationships rather than a game of billiards, where you only count the ones that go in–all of their motion doesn’t count.

3. The Part Enfolds the Whole:
(not just whole is more than the sum of its parts)

    (Sa’ke’j:) When we wear leathers and beads and eagle thongs and things like that, it’s not seen as totally ludicrous, as decoration – it’s seen as containing something you want to have a relationship with.

4. There is an implicate order to the universe

    (Sa’ke’j:) This implicate order holds everything together whether we want it to or not, and exists independently of our beliefs, our perceptions, or our linguistic categories. It exists totally independently of the methods or rules that people use to arrive at what it is, and David Bohm’s captured that with the great phrase the implicate order, versus the explicate order of things that they can explain quite concretely, such as a rock falling out of a window. This also agrees with the lakhota phrase ‘skan skan,’ which points to the motion behind the motion.

5. This ecosphere is basically friendly

    Sa’ke’j maintains that the planet, and especially the Americas as well as the physical universe, are basically gentle and friendly: You don’t have an electron jumping and bullying into other(s) unless it knows it’s missing a stable state and knows it can reach that stable state and increase its own stability.

6. Nature can be taught new tricks

    (Sa’ke’j:) We also agreed that that world out there that exists–that reality, not imaginality–can be taught new tricks with the cyclotron; and what was raised in the meeting was, are these new tricks beneficial, or will they create a hostile universe on their own, independent of scientists, once they teach electrons how to jump and how to amass the energy to jump, and it becomes a bullying, hostile biological world.Reminds me of Alan Watts talking about how the universe has had to learn how to get ever smaller and ever larger as we probe it with microscopes and telescopes, receding ever further in the distance as self observes itself.

7. Quantum Potential and Spirit

    After listening to the physicists and American Indians talk for a few days, it struck me that the way physicists use the term potential, or quantum potential, is nearly identical to the way Native Americans use the term spirit. They all agreed there was something similar going on.

8. The principle of complementarity

    Physicists for all this century have realized that our usual notion of bipolar or black & white opposites was insufficient when working with nature. The first clue came when they asked incoming light, ‘Are you particle?’ and it answered Yes; ‘Are you wave?’ and it answered Yes. This is equivalent to asking whether something is a noun or a verb and getting a yes answer to both–which is exactly how Native American language nouns are made up: as verbs with suffixes that make them temporarily into nouns for discussion sake. this yes-yes complementarity is foreign to Indo-European languages, but quite common in other language families (such as the Chinese notion of Yin-Yang), and represents a higher level of formal operations, in Piaget’s terms, referred to by some as post-formal operations–that which lies beyond normal Western Indo-European development.

There is much more at Alford’s archive of papers and notes.   This is really a rather remarkable find for me – all the more so in that it came to me from the mouth of my first academic teacher 22 years after I first met her.   I would love to be in touch with others who were at that meeting or who have more substantial artifacts of the gathering.

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What is in our centre

February 23, 2008 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Being, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, First Nations, Leadership, Practice 4 Comments

2008 091

Last wekk I was working with some good friends – Kyra Mason, Thomas Ufer, Ruth Lyall, Jennifer Charlesworth and Nanette Taylor. Together we designed and delivered a one day workshop on what we called “Chaordic Leadership in Changing Times.” The focus of the workshop was collaborative leadership practice and we were asking questions about collaborating around a movement in the child and family services sector in British Columbia.

Collaborative leadership practice has a couple of key capacities. First is the ability to be in and hold space for conversations that matter. The second is the practice of developing and holding a centre. Conversation practice is important because the nature of the systems we are a part of is entirely determined by the quality of the relationships between people in those systems. Quality relationships are important and central to those are quality conversations. That is why I put a lot of emphasis on helping people talk together creatively, generatively and with excitement and energy.

But to build a movement, it’s important to share a centre. That centre is both an individual centre as well as a collective one. In our workshop we were playing a lot with the idea of building a centre, especially as it related to children. We began by learning that the Kwa’kwa’la word for child is “Gwaliyu” which means something like “precious one” or “treasure of my heart.” It implies a treasure that you would give your life for. We began our day by asking people to imagine what it must be like to have that definition of a child in mind every time your used the word “child.” In our workshop no one in the room could describe the etymology of the English word “child.” We had devoted our lives to a word and we weren’t even sure what that word meant. So to find our own centre, the place to which we could always return, we began the workshop with an exercise. We asked people to first write on a piece of paper what the treasure about the children in their lives. We next asked them to write, on another piece, what those treasures expect of them. The first piece of paper then became a definition of child that we could really sink into “curious, innocent and playful” and the second sheet of paer contained our mission statement in the child and family services world: “to make safe space for children to grow and flourish.” It’s simple but what it does is to help us find a centre that we can return to especially when things are pushing us around. From this centre it is a simple matter to come to a conversational space in which we invite a similar set of principles to be at our centre.

This is how, over the past year we have settled on “Children at the centre” as a basic organizing principles for the work we are doing with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transistion Team as we build a new system for Aboriginal child and family services. What would a system look like that put children in the centre?

The founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba was famously quoted as saying that his advantage in a fight was his ability to return to his centre faster than that of his opponent. In the body, the centre lies just below the navel, in the area the Japanese call the hara, or what Koreans called “tan jun” or “tan tien “ in Chinese. This is both a pivot point for the body’s centre of gravity – a fact well known to martial artists and athletes – as well as the central point from which one’s life force – “ki” or “chi” is projected. Likewise in a group, which is just a body operating at another level, the centre is the pivot point around which we act – our purpose or intention – and the source to which we always return.

Today I am on board a plane heading down to the Navajo Nation to work with a wonderful community of Navajo facilitators involved in health promotion. We are looking at, among other things, these concepts and I have much to consider about the notion of centr ein Navajo thought and practice. I am most curious about how this can be brought to the simplest form of knowing, in the body, heart and mind, to be useful for leadership and hosting practice.

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Notes

February 21, 2008 By Chris Corrigan Being, Collaboration, Links, Music, Organization, Philanthropy 2 Comments

  • Crystal glass water music
  • Indivisible oneness: a gorgeous essay by Evelyn Rodriguez
  • Rheingold on the coming age of cooperation
  • Go fill your ears with music: The mammoth list of mp3 blogs
  • The Grand Plan to get the US onto to solar energy.
  • Some fine organizational tools for non-profits and philanthropic endeavours
  • An amazing conversation on the collective Buddha

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On Authentic accountability

February 14, 2008 By Chris Corrigan Being, Collaboration, Leadership

Aine and Caitlin at Wailea

The two most important women in my life

Jack Ricchiuto:

In my work with a new hospital north of Denver yesterday, one of the senior managers commented that one of the things that struck him most was the idea that people do not feel an authentic sense of accountability simply because we place on them demands that take away their freedom of choice. We feel this when people have faith in us.

Would you rather be accountable to a friend or a contract? Is it friendship or paper that binds two people’s integrity together?

My modus operandi in the world is working with friends. The vast majority of clients of mine quickly become friends and our working relationship almost always deepens beyond the “project outcomes” or “scope of work” laid out in our contracts. With many clients, including those with whom I work on large projects, there are no contracts whatsoever. Our working relationship is based on the trust that comes from the deep accounatbility of friends working together.

For sure there is a place for contracts and paper-based accountability in the world, but isn’t interesting note how much shorter those agreements get the closer the partners are? Isn’t it interesting to note the distaste most of us feel for “pre-nuptual agreements” which seem to reduce the commitment of marriage – a lifelong friendship – to a mere contract?

Contracts limit our freedom of choice, friendships open up freedom of choice. ANd the very best friendships, like the one I celebrated tonight, result in something emergent, something surprising and unexpected and new. It is out of those relationships that my best work comes.
Happy Valentine’s Day!

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