My friend Kathy Jourdain out in Halifax recently published a nice set of thoughts on inclusion prompted by an experience she had at a leadership network meeting:
…we need to stop patting ourselves on the back about how inclusive we think we are being and begin to look at our own assumptions and beliefs and look into where the tension resides within each of us around this topic.
When asked, how will we know we are being inclusive there were quite a range of responses. To me, it’s becoming very simple. We will know we are better at being inclusive when we stop responding to the statement we are not being inclusive with all the reasons why we are and begin to ask – with honest curiosity – why that question is being asked so we can learn from the perspective of the person who made the statement who may be someone who is feeling excluded.
This is hard for most of us to do because it requires us to challenge our own assumptions about we are and how we really respond when confronted with what we consider to be accusations about not being inclusive. We want to believe we are inclusive and welcoming and it is hard to face a reality where that might not be the case.
A big question to confront when one makes a true commitment to inclusion is “Am I willing to live in a world that includes what I think I hate?”
I had a great conversation with a young activist at a recent gathering. She was talking about the need to have a world free of war and that is what she works for. She was objecting to the idea that warriorship could be a practice or that any kind of agreesiveness or violenece was acceptable in her world view. Her world view was one of peace and inclusion, except for warriors and racists. I challenged her on that and appealed to her obvious warriorship (she is festooned in tattoos and is a strong powerful woman who fights for her beliefs – what else would I call her? Midwife seemed a little off the mark! 🙂 ). I asked her “Would you rather have this fantasy world of yours, or this real world right here, the one that includes war and racism and hate and fear?” She thought for a moment and smiled and replied “this one.” And that’s a good thing because it means she is living here with us and her energy can be put to use in this world, and more importantly, she can grow to accept the fact that war is a part of this world and it can also be a shameless part of her repertoire as well. How can you fight for a world of peace, unless you admit that such a world does indeed include warriors? (And what do most warriors fight for ultimately anyway?).
All of us have shadow sides, and those sides show up in the system, as the MLA in Kathy’s article points out. But because they are shadows, we don’t notice them…we can’t see that these are us. And if we hold dear this idea of inclusion, then we need to be able to include those parts of ourselves in the world in which we live, because without bringing them into play we can’t work with them. Ignorance of difference and hate is not inclusion. Inclusion makes things messy, which is just the world we process artists love to work within, eh?
I don’t care what your talent is, just do something like this whenever you can and the world becomes that much more livable.
I wasn’t at the Nexus for Change conference although I was there in spirit. I had a few lovely long design talks with Peggy Holman, Gabriel Shirley and Tracy Robinson who were hosting various parts of it. I also followed it online a little and even from a distance it was possible to pick up a thread and extend it a little into my own learning. What stood out for me was this emerging identity as a process artist.
John Abbe brought this to my attention with an update to his weblog in which he announced a Nexus project involving creating a wiki around process arts. It’s a great thought and a lovely enterprise, and it has given me some inspiration for talking about my work and what I try to bring to groups, organizations and communities.
I am certainly an artist in the traditional sense of the world, especially in the modality of music where I have practiced consciously since 1979. I am a martial artist, and I do rock balancing more as a meditation than as an art, but still. I have also spent times in my life working artistically with words, writing novels, poetry and other pieces from a place of deep artistic practice. I still practice that somewhat, although I wouldn’t count weblogging necessarily in that field. Blogging for me falls into another category, which I can now name as ProcessArts.
My practice as a process artist includes the following:
- open source learning here at the Parking Lot
- surfing with eyes, ears and fingers for ideas, inspiration and beauty
- parenting and living in a creative set of family relationships (which have their expression in the world in various ways!)
- the art of hosting, designing and convening conversations that matter.
- the art of harvesting learning from questions and learning journeys that I am on.
- Inspiring, creating and supporting change in a way that feeds evolution, life and peace at the many levels of social organization on this planet, from friendships to public service, in response to deep and heartfelt invitations to co-create and collaborate.
I’m going to give this some more thought, but I’d like to ask you two questions, dear reader(s):
- Where do you practice ProcessArts in your life?
- What experience of my ProcessArt practice have you seen that I’m missing in this broad list?
Curious…thanks to John, a little learning journey has begun.
[tags]processarts, john abbe, nexusforchange[/tags]
“The bird does not sing because it has answers. It sings because it has a song.”
— Chinese proverb quoted by Margaret Somerville in the first of her lectures on The Ethical Imagination.
CBC Ideas is rebroadcasting the 2006 Massey Lectures given by ethicist Margaret Somerville entitle “The Ethical Imagination.” I lay in bed last night battling a fever and a six hour flu listening to her wonderful cadence as she delivered her argument that finding and conversing about a human ethics has much to do with imagination, story and poetry. It’s a wonderful listen, on all week on CBC Radio (which you can stream) and you can catch the first part on the Massey Lectures webpage.
As they do with all the lectures in the series, the CBC and House of Anasi Press has published Somerville’s five talks. If last night’s lecture was any indication, the book will make an excellent addition to my library.
[tags]CBC, Ideas, Margaret Somerville, ethics[/tags]
Christy Lee Engle has posted a beautiful pair of quotes on sacred conversation. There is so much goodness in it that i republish it here for your edification.:
Peggy Holman recently posted a beautiful article called “Evolution, Process and Conversation: A Foundation for Conscious Evolutionary Agency” to the Open Space listserv, originally written for the Evolutionary Life e-magazine.
In it, she wonders/suggests:
“Could it be that consciousness is the latest evolutionary innovation that, when applied to conversation, catalyzes a new form of social system, the conscious co-creative collective, the radiant network of deep community? I believe that conscious conversation is the path to what Thich Nhat Hanh imagined when he said: “It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.” [Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha” in Inquiring Mind, Vol 10, No.2, Spring 1994]
which reminds me of a teaching I read a couple of years ago — a similar co-evolutionary idea in a different costume:
“‘Messiah’ in the original Hebrew is understood by the Kabbalists, quite astoundingly, to mean ‘conversation’. Master Nachum of Chernobyl, mystic and philosopher, points out that the Hebrew word for messiah, Mashiach, can be understood as the Hebrew word Ma-siach — Messiah, meaning ‘from dialogue’ or ‘of conversation.’ [Me’or Enayim, Parashat Pinchas] His assertion radically implies that the Messiah is potentially present in every human conversation — every mutual act of voice-giving.
All conversation is sacred. The ability to have an honest face-to-face talk in whihch both sides are true to themselves, vulnerable and powerful at the same time, is messianic. Simply put, sacred conversation is the vessel that receives the light of Messiah.”