Friends Juanita Brown, Tom Atlee, Peggy Holman and others have started a new blog called Conversation as a co-evolutionary force which is looking at the underlying patterns of conversation as a pathway to conscious evolution. It’s worth a look and will be well worth a read.
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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]
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My friend Jon Husband is alive for the signs that new organizational forms are upon us. He found one today that really rang out for me. It seems that Amerian bloggers having been using distributed networks of readers to find the patterns of organization in a government conspiracy.
This is not tin-foil hat stuff. It’s the real deal, with an alarming plan to engineer the firing a number of United States Attorneys for political reasons. The bigest challenge for the bloggers who are following the story is to stay on top of the thousands of documents a day that are being released, almost in an effort to flood the public with disclosure. How do you find the gems? Well, if every reader of these well read blogs were to pick a couple of pages and harvets the nuggets, they could almost discover the actual plan pretty quickly, in theory anyway. And in practice, that is what’s happening. Within hours, the bloggers had begun to make some serious findings.
I’m quite interested in this, and thinking about how it might be a model for building things as well as taking them down. For example, I’m wondering how we might use a community of stakeholders/readers to sift through harvests from an engagement process to find the meaning that points the way forward. It would be a collective harvest of people’s own work, fed back into the system so that it may be developed further. From that, an emergent, collective set of patterns can be made visible, upon which something new can be designed.
As I think about this, and how the process would work both for uncovering a gpovernment conspiracy and building a new approach to social services for example, I am left with the following principles of practice:
- Agree collectively as to the purpose of the joint inquiry (uncover a government plan, build a new community-based approach to child and youth mental health, etc.)
- Conduct getherings to collect a lot of diverse wisdom and thinking about the inquiry.
- Harvest detailed notes from initial conversations, but don’t make meaning from them right away.
- Invite anyone to read whatever they want of the documents and select the pieces that seem to have the most relvance and benefit to the inquiry at hand. It would seem to be a good idea to have a large and diverse number of people to do this, especially if you had a substantial and complex inquiry and body of thought.
- Make this second level harvest visible and begin pattern finding within what is emerging, all the while feeding that back to the system to both show progress and te help people go back and find additional meaning and wisdom to support what is emerging.
- Have a further inquiry to tap creativity to fill the gaps that are being noticed.
Just a sketch at this point, but I have a place where I might be able to try it on a smaller scale. One could use this anywhere one had a large number of people that were contributing to a project that affected them. Wirearchy changes public engagement and makes it more democratic.
Very cool indeed. Thanks for the heads up Jon!
[tags]wirearchy, governance, public engagement[/tags]
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This is what happens when you travel the world with a question: you find teachings in all kinds of unexpected places. There’s a spoiler in here, if you haven’t seen the movie.
Last night my family all enjoyed a night in Vancouver, dinner and a movie. We went to see Bridge to Terabithia, which is a pretty good film about two pre-teen outcasts, Jess and Leslie, who find meaning in each other’s imagination. Together they ease each other into opening minds and hearts to create a fantasy world, and it’s neve clear whether or not the world is becoming real as the movie unfolds. Towards the end of the film Leslie dies – a strange enough occurrance in a children’s movie – and Jess is left alone with the fantasy world he created with his friend.
It’s a strong film with many themes, but as I’ve been carrying around the questions of what it means to harvest in the world, I found it interesting that the movie resonated for me on that level.
One way to think about harvesting is to see it as putting imaginations to use to create meaning in one world so that another world may come into being. In social change efforts, harvesting is most powerful not when it simply documents the shift from one state to another, but when the harvest itself becomes the catalyst for the coming into being of the new world.
In Bridge to Terabithia, Leslie is a storyteller whose words can invoke physical realities. Jess is a talented visual artist who draws the worlds he sees. Together they create their new world, tentatively at first, but later with so much energy that they inhabit it with wild abandon. In the end, after Leslie dies, Jess shares this world with his little sister, who is introduced to the world by crossing a bridge that Jess has built over the creek in which Leslie has died. When they reach the other side, Jess’s sister utters “Terabithia!” and her ability to see and live in the world begins immediately. Her own profound imaginary engagement with Terabithia is a testament to the power of what Jess and Leslie harvested from their creation and experience of the world. It ‘s fascinating to look at the film from this angle, at how the power of Leslie’s imagination, and Jess’s harvest of it literally creates a bridge for Jess’s sister to cross so that she may be fully invited into Terabithia.
I’m quite interested how a multimedia, multimodal harvest of meaning from an experience can facilitate and sustain new levels of consciousness and awareness. In this film, the continuation of the world requires a harvest that envelopes Jess’s sister so that she immediately opens to the power of her own imagination. It’s what every good meeting should be about.
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This is not about connectivity or the web, but about being so open that your whole life is a full on sensual conversation with the whole world. For those of us who use the language of words, we usually refer to this as “autism.” But find about ten minutes where you can have some quiet and reflective time to yourself and watch this video: In My Language
This is perhaps the most profound elucidation I have ever experienced of what sensing is. When you have finished watching the video go to Amanda’s blog where you can read her further thoughts on autistic liberation. And while you are there, copy the definition of freedom in the top left hand corner, print it out and post it on your refrigerator:
free ·dom /fre ´edÉ™m/ n. release or rescue from being physically bound, or from being confined, enslaved, captured, or imprisoned [Old English freo. Ultimately from an Indo-European word meaning “dear, beloved,” which is also the ancestor of English friend.]
I am moved deeply by this.
Update: Amanda – who goes by the nickname silentmiaow – has joined the incredible discussion at MetaFilter
[tags]autism, freedom, autistic liberation[/tags]