Just back from an amazing Art of Hosting in rural Pennsylvania. Found this in my email box upon my return, send to me by my friend Toke:
Not just any talk is conversation
Not any talk raises consciousness
good conversation has an edge
It opens your eyes to something
It quickens your earsAnd good conversation reverberates
It keeps on talking in your mind later in the day;
The next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said
The reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness
Your mind and heart have been moved
Your are at another level with your reflections.— James Hillman
This is what it is all about.
Photo by Hamid Masoumi
This question of the responsibility of love continues to live in me. I wrote a comment at Dave Pollard’s blog that captures another facet of it:
Love IS a social issue and engaging in the world with love is a bit of a trick. It not only accelerates innovation and “better”, it is a double edged sword too. I think there is such a thing as “the responsibility of love” which refers to the way we wield the weapons of the heart in the world when we are working in the territory of open heartedness. When we choose to love, we choose to elevate and commit to certain things above other things – people, paths, choices, directions. There is pain associated with this choosing, made all the more stinging by the fact that we choose and exclude out of heart-felt action, which is action we are fully committed too. It results in pain, and so much of the world that is created by love is also full of grief.
Love and pain, bliss and grief are siblings in this world. If we choose to work with love, we enter this polarity. We may also choose to work with complete dispassion and equanimity, which is what the Buddha invited us to do. My path is not that refined yet. I still choose the path with heart, and that means the path of pain also.
Otto Scharmer’s keynote was yesterday evening and here is our harvest of that…
Otto began by talking about The Blind Spot of Leadership…missing the deeper way we human beings relate to one another in the social field. What is missed here is the deeper dimension that is always there but usually not attended to.
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Why can’t we see this blind spot, that is the source of all of our doing?
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What can we do about being blind to this source?
We are blind to this because we focus on results and process, and not the sources of these two things. Organizational development has not yet moved to understanding the spot.
We just watched a short video of Zuben Mehta conducting an orchestra with Placido Domingo. Mehta plays the orchestra as an instrument, Domingo and him are actually engaged in a duet. There is this scene at the end of the piece where the two of them join seamlessly and become a duet. Mehta is playing his instrument and responding directly to Domingo’s timing. To do this, the orchestra has to be completely selfless, submerging its identity into the whole, and the players (Mehta and Domingo have to hold space, for each other and responding to the whole instead of to a disconnected set of objects.
Scharmer is giving a very visceral demonstration of holding space, seeing that we have moved from perceiving objects, to perceiving the whole, to holding space. It’s the move from Downloading to factual analysis to empathy to generative listening.
Sources of learning, learning cycles
One model is learning by reflecting: act, observe, reflect, plan, act. Another model is learning from the future as it emerges, and this is based on feeling, not mind, because mind is only capable of seeing now. Presencing is about connecting to future possibility and connect to the now.
While Otto is talking about the way the Open Mind, Open Heart, Open Will version of the U theory at our table we are having a little back chat about how to move to empathic learning and then on through to acting into and then out of a field. Mark Moir, Tenneson Woolf and I are throwing a pad around with several questions that are flowing as we explore presencing in a field. Here are some of the questions that have emerged since we had a little table conversation on the Mehta/Domingo video:
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How do we develop courage to stay in the empty space? Trusting in the integrity and reality of the field?
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How does one (how do we) sustain the position with the source in the face of (unhealthy) systemic forces? And what if we are unhealthy? How do I set aside my interests even if being perceived as being beneficial to the whole?
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Creating a field of trust, experiencing emergence? We don’t submerge, and don’t disappear – we empathize and create a field. We need each other to be there so we can step into each other’s fields.
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How would life, relationships, work be different if we committed to the simple even temporary experiment to welcome all life in learning and all learning as life?
I’ve been in this inquiry lately about the responsibility of love, by which I mean that the work of supporting open heartedness comes at a cost. It;s not that we need to stop supporting open heartedness, just that we have to do it with a degree of care and consciousness.
Rob Paterson today posted a photo that captures this dilemma, along with a post about NGOs in a messy world.
Battle Creek, Michigan, USA
I’m reading a marvellous little book called “Dispatches from the Global Village” by my friend Derek Evans. Derek is a remarkable individual, having most notable served two terms as the Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International. He now lives in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and is the spouse of my long time homeopath, Pat Deacon.
What I really like about Derek is that he embodies a certain tempered optimism that the human species is capable of great things despite it also being capable of unimaginable acts. Derek has assembled a book out of a series of columns he wrote for his neighbours in Naramata, BC. THe column are the musings and reflections of an internationally important peacemaker. There are many gems in the book, which I’ll share over the next couple of days, but I offer this one tonight to those who are despairing at the moment that we might just have it all wrong.
This is a poem that Derek spotted on the London Underground several years ago by Sheenagh Pugh:
Sometimes things don’t go after all,
from bad to worse. Some years muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives;the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
This poem reminds me of a line that escaped my lips earlier this year when I was juggling with friends Tenneson Woolf and Roq Garreau. I said that I though juggling is so compelling because “there is always the possibility that a ball might not drop.”
[tags]derek evans, sheehangh pugh, hope[/tags]