Five years ago, four planes were hijacked and crashed and three buildings were damaged and destroyed and upwards of 3000 people died. It was a big event. It has been said often this week that “911 changed everything.”
But did that event change everything, or was it our responses to that event that changed everything? If the first is true, then I believe we have already lost the “war on terror”, for if all it takes is for these acts to be committed and everything changes, then the power rests with those who commit the acts.
But if the responsibility for world-changing rests with us individually and collectively, then we are confronted with the thought that we must bear some responsibility for how the world has changed, and know that it is entirely within our capabilities to change it again.
What do you think?
[tags]911[/tags]
Been quiet here the last couple of weeks but not in my life. Two weeks ago I visited The Shire near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to teach with Toke Moeller, Sera Thompson and Tim Merry in the Art of Hosting. It was a beautiful time, working on the land, working with people from Yarmouth, Montreal and the eastern US who are doing deeply important work with youth, food and community. And it was great working with my mates.
A couple of pieces have showed up around the web about this training. Here is a post from Brian Hurlburt, a truly generous soul in Yarmouth who hosts web sites for community groups:
The Art of Hosting training is open to leaders, managers, teachers and pioneers from all walks of life who want to see and act from a new perspective on leadership that sets free one another’s creativity and intelligence. Helping those who want to learn to lead without being possessive, to help without taking credit, to let go in order to achieve more for the common good.
This practice may well require a shift in our thinking and ways of doing things, however since having left the Shire I’ve had more meaningful conversations with my family, friends, and associates! The exclamation point is purposely used because I’ve been to these types of things before; you know those leadership getaways where you get all fired up and then when you leave and return to reality your left with an empty useless feeling! This was totally different!
What I learned there, and what I experienced there was real, meaningful, and lasting! Easily applied in the real world and very affective and effective! In fact I find myself having more meaningful conversations without even trying!
No that’s powerful, when a way of doing things becomes a practice that becomes a natural way of doing things and can be applied in meaningful ways in daily life the course / conference becomes one that will benefit anyone who is open to it and makes themselves available to attend.
It was also great to see Rob Paterson there, who has been recently investigating the nature of “trusted space” on his blog and who found something in what we were talking about to animate those spaces. In the Art of Hosting, we use the term “fellowship” to describe our way of working together and we often refer to each other as “mates.” In talking with others, like Peggy Holman, the word “communitas” is another way of describing it, in perhaps a less gendered way. Regardless, this is a deep form of organizational structure and Toke, Tim, Sera, Rob and I along with others explored this deeply at The Shire.
Essentially, as Rob put it:
I am still amazed that I can know someone I have never met so well. I am not alone in going to work, as I did with Johnnie Moore, on a very dangerous piece of work with a person that I had never met before. There is some weird property of the web that enables Mates to notice the connection. Cyn has helped me overcome my fear of using my body and has put me on a path to keep healthy and fit. She lived only a mile away but we met for years online. Chris arrived at the Shire never having met Tim before. I came to the Shire because of Chris’ request knowing that it would be great. I have only met Chris once before. Many of you have similar stories about finding ‘Mates” in the ‘sphere. I find no separation in these relationships. Reputation is critical in this world…Fellowship is when Mates decide to do the world’s great work together. There is great work to be done that requires exceptional courage and often more than a lifetime to accomplish.
I think that is a lovely description, and it certainly validates my experience of working deeply with others, connected over long distances, engaged in the work of making good in the world. You probably have your own example of this type of organizing and working together. You work on a simple but mammoth task together, not tied to timelines or outcomes but simply knowing that one another are behind you. It is the shape of a circle moving outward from it’s centre, the essential shape of the expansion of the universe. We remain connected in our origins and our committment, and even over vast distances, we seem able to sense what the others are doing, and know when help is needed.
So, I’m curious, what is your mammoth task? And who are your mates? How is your fellowship working?
If you would like to explore more of this way of working, and the role that meaningful conversation plays in it, there are two Art of Hosting trainings coming up this fall. Here on Bowen Island, British Columbia, Tenneson Wolf, Brenda Chaddock, Teresa Posakony and me are hosting a gathering September 24-27, and there is still space. Sera Thompson will be hosting a gathering with Toke and Tim in Boulder Colorado.
[tags]Art of Hosting, Toke Moeller, Tim Merry, Sera Thompson, Rob Paterson[/tags}
From j a c k / z e n on the limits of seeing:
A typical example of zen practice. Put a flower on a table. Write down every word you can use to describe the flower with full analysis of it, your reactions to it, the history of the flower and flowers in general, comparisons with all other flowers and living things and speculations backed by scientifical data about the flower. Put the flower to poetry, do a drawing and sculpture on it, write a play and feature length film on it, write a song about it. Take a picture of it from every angle possible.
Now place all of this on the table next to the flower.
Look at your stack of what you’ve expressed about the flower.
Look at the flower.
Notice the difference.
Also in Peterbourgh I met with David Newhouse, perhaps my most influential university teacher and a good friend. David arrived at Trent in 1989 from the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He came to teach in the Native Management and Economic Development Program, which at that time was a fledgling effort, mostly focused on economic development and with no real management curriculum. I was hired in May of 1989 to help research the field of native management, and I spent the first month of my employment searching for one book – any book! – on the subject. There simply wasn’t one anywhere.
We quickly realized that if we wanted to teach the subject, we had to create it. David, being an MBA graduate of Western University, felt strongly that we should be using the Western/Harvard case study method, which meant that I, as the researcher, needed to produce some cases. And thus began a three year collaboration during which I wrote or co-wrote something like 24 case studies for teaching management in Aboriginal communities and organizations.
My opus magnum of case studies was a set of four I did on the National Association of Friendship Centre’s process to negotiation with the federal government for their funding program. It was a large set, with many documents and many conversations detailed from notes taken by NAFC staff. Working on that case set introduced me to the NAFC, and when I subsequently moved to Ottawa in 1991, I started working there. They very much started my career, and my connection to them was facilitated by David and the cases I put together.
In my final year I undertook an honours thesis with David as my supervisor. I produced an 80 page piece of original research, developing a model that might be useful for looking at Aboriginal organizational culture. It was a rich learning experience writing that paper – the richest of my entire academic career – and on its completion (receiving the only A+ of my entire academic career) I felt no need to pursue academic studies further.
David is not a character without controversy, and this is why I love him. He needles around the edges of things, finding the questions that change everything. He is uncompromising, but curious and he quietly holds ground where he feels that truth is at stake. Here’s what he says on his profile page for the Department of Indigenous Studies:
“My interest is in examining the ideas that are forming the basis of collective, i.e. societal or institutional action within contemporary Aboriginal society. I want to try and counter the idea that we laid in front of the bulldozer of western civilization and waited for it to flatten us. The historical and contemporary record indicates that we have always understood the world around us, knew what was happening and tried to affect the world to make it more hospitable and amicable to us. For the most part, our agency as living, thinking human beings has been erased. I want to show how we used our imaginations to live in the world we found ourselves in.“
I love that…it sums up much I know about this man.
The ideas that I was exposed to working with David have constantly resurfaced in my life over the past 15 years. Like all good teachers, he teaches by being. He offers much in his stance towards a world obsessed with the pre, post- and present day modernity of indigenous peoples by simply refusing to allow anyone to pin it all down. Indigenous life is a slippery every changing world of transformation, conversation and change, and that is what David is too. There are no easy answers, only an invitation to converse together thereby discover together who and where we are.
The road trip continues with visits this week to two teachers in Peterborough who have deeply influenced my life: John Muir and David Newhouse.
John Muir was one of the founders of Trent Radio in Peterborough, and is the current general manager. He has been a fixture in Peterborough for 25 years or more and is an inspiriing teacher in many ways. First, he is all about making technology accessible. He was a great teacher of Caitlin’s when she was introduced to the medium of radio and Tuesday he worked patiently with our kids as they recorded promos for Trent Radio.
Second, John has created a unique institution in Trent Radio, and one which has influenced my thinking about community ever since I was a programmer and Board member there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Trent Radio is an organization that supports and then stays out of the way of the self-expression of programmers and producers. When I was a producer there, the station management made a big deal about the fact that there was no “brand” to Trent Radio. The call letters, CFFF, were really hard to say on the fly. No easy to remember acronym, no name for the station. When you produced a program at Trent Radio the station was yours, and you were the producer, prgrammer and host. It was a profound example of passion bounded by responsibility, self-expression within the boundaires of a community definition of standards. If you programmed something completely irresponsible, the station might lose its license and everyone would suffer. So people took great care to both push the boundaries and preserve the viability of the station.
Third, John’s thinking about the nature of community radio – and you could spend a week with him and it would never be enough – contributed to how I think about various media like blogging. Many people have used the frame of publishing to understand blogging, but I am perhaps more heavily influenced by community radio. Blogs are like channels and the small audience that would follow your work often deeply engage with your thoughts. Community radio is both peer-to-peer and one-to-many. It’s no surprise perhaps that the ‘zine scene in North America was closely aligned with campus/community radio. Anyone could pick up your ‘zine, but it was intended for a small audience, who formed a community around the ideas, the scene, or the story. Same with the shows I hosted on Trent Radio, dealing with jazz, blues and improvisational music. Interesting.
For John – and for me – the advent of podcasting was a beautiful marriage of two media that, far from being opposites, are actually mates occupying a spectrum of expression. It is no surprise then that some of us, including Rob Paterson, consider John something of a godfather of podcasting, a notion that dates back to a conference called Zap your PRAM hosted by Peter Rukavina (another Trent Radio alumn) on Prince Edward Island during which Dave Winer and John had a conversation about John’s ideas on radio, the internet, audience and community.
John continues to be an inspiration for the way he holds space in community. He recently formed a consortium to buy some Saldier House, a wonderful old building that Trent University liquidated when it closed my old college, Peter Robinson. The non-profit that bought the building uses it to support arts and culture events in a space that can host performances, workshops, studios and other cultural infrastructure. My experience of John’s role in the ever changing community of Peterborough is to quietly hold principles and values that serve a culture of invitation, flow, and connection and in this sense, having grown up in many ways within the communities John formed, I see myself very much as a grateful product of his work.
[tags]John Muir, Trent Radio, podcasting, Peterborough, Peter Rukavina[/tags]