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]
I’m back home after a long seven days of travelling to Alert Bay, Courtenay, Victoria, Seattle, Quinault and home again. I have been doing some fun work with great people, but I’m pretty tired now, and resting here in the warm heart space of home and reflecting on how lucky I am to get to do what I do. It brought to mind a quote from Aristotle that my mate Tim Merry has put into a recent Art of Hosting journal:
Where the needs of the world meet our passion and gifts, there lies our vocation.
I’m lucky to be home, in so many ways…
Thanks to my mates Kris Archie, David Stevenson, Sono Hashisaki, and the folks at the Quinault Indian Nation for a fascinating week.
Last week Dave Pollard, author of How to Save the World interviewed me for his first podcast. We had a lovely conversation about essential human capacities, Open Space, unschooling and leadership. Head over to Dave’s quite excellent and prolific blog and have a listen. You can also download the podcast here.
And thanks to Dave for inviting me in.
Tom Hurley and George Por enjoy a laugh in Belgium
George Por is a friend and an occaisional co-conspirator and colleague. What I appreciate about George is that he has been in this game a long time. He has been ahead of the curve for years – decades in some cases – with respect to the web, social networking and evolutionary consciousness and as such he has an uncanny perspective on things.
For a few years now he has been working with a number of thinkers in looking at Otto Scharmer’s Presencing ideas. Today I read a long and interesting piece from George about one aspect of Presencing practice: social presencing theatre. It’s worth a read, if only to see what George is thinking about these days. He blogs far too infrequently for such a curious and delighted soul.
[tags]George por, presencing, social presencing theatre[/tags]
One session in Camden last week that really grabbed my interest was hosted by my dear friend and colleague Father Brian Bainbridge from Australia. Brian is another remarkable man, generous, dry in his humour and open hearted. He has been working on a little book for a while about brining Open Space to parish life, which documents his stories of working with the parishoners of St. Scholastica’s in Melbourne. In a little over two years, Brian has been exploring the transformation that comes about from shifting from the managerial worldview to the open space worldview. What he has found is a renewal in the life of the parish, and in the spiritual life of the parishioners. What interests me about this transformation is how it relates to the spiritual teachings that lie at the heart of the parish. In other words, is an Open Space worldview compatible with Christian teachings?
Brian was good enough to host a session on this topic which was attended by folks from many faith traditions. For me, it became very clear that Open Space invites us as individuals to connect with the deeper sources of creation in our world. Almost all major religions teach both a path for individual spiritual practice and a path for collective spiritual community building. Whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, Baha’i, Jew, Taoist, Muslim, Hindu or you practice a traditional spirituality, there are precepts for the life of spiritual communities that, I think, invite us to notice the source of creative energy as it flows between us. Living in community is a spiritual practice. Open Space, it seems to me, offers us a chance to connect with one another in a deeper way by connecting with the source of creativity in the universe. We call this by many names. Religious people migt call it Spirit, secular folks will see it as self-organization, Taoists call it the Tao. Whatever it is named, it is possible to experience it, and Open Space seems to create the conditions for that experience. This explains to me why many people report a much deeper experience in Open Space than in many other process I work with.
This theme surfaced at the Art of Hosting workshop I took part in later in the week in Indiana, where there was a large contingent of participants who were exploring the roots of their leadership practice and discovering that at a certain point they converged with their spiritual paths as well. This continues to be interesting for me, and I wonder what your experience of leadership, Open Space in particular and spirituality is?