AFter a phenomenal trip across the country, featuring three back to back to back Art of Hosting workshops on water, I am taking it easy, relaxing for a couple of days in the Beaver Valley, beside Georgian Bay. Reconnecting here with family and friends, we’ve been watching crazy, crazy weather come through off the bay – hail and sleet and snow and wind, three foot waves crashing on the breakwater. Last night we lost power and four foot high snowdrifts appeared on the top of the valley sides. Down here at the valley bottom, it is just wet, but I have a long drive tomorrow across the top of the Oak Ridges moraine to get a morning flight home to Vancouver, and I’m giving myself lots of time to be surprised by what I encounter on the way.
So catching up on email, and on thinking about several issues including decision making processes, the character of local civic conversation, how to work with fear and division and deliberately diseased politics in our society and what role conversation plays in acute moments of small town/reserve/village negative community dynamics. Probably more to say about this later, but some more instant reflections are unfolding at my Bowen Island blog.
In the meantime, getting ready to go watch the Champions League semi-final match between Chelsea and Barcelona with a lovely Iraqi refugee family in the area. Even in small small towns, the world’s game connects diverse people!
On the plane to Minneapolis for 12 days of teaching, learning and co-creating with the Art of Hosting. While I’m there, I’ll be working with the Bush Foundation, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Foundation of Minnesota, and 100 people who will be coming to an Art of Hosting from all around the state. I’ll be deep in practice with my close friends and colleagues Jerry Nagel, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller and Ginny Belden-Charles among others. It’s a busy 12 days, with only 1 day off, and so I’m thinking a lot about what I’m doing.
And as I was wandering around the airport this morning, I came across the above mask, which sits in an alcove in the US Departures terminal at YVR. This is a transformation mask from the artist Stan Wamiss. If there was an active word to describe what is happening here it is “revealing.”
There is transformation that comes from outside, like a meteor strike or a tsunami. And there is transformation that comes from inside, like a seed sprouting, an egg hatching, or a butterfly emerging. The transformation comes from inside is revealed and in its revealing it has a powerful effect: it renders the transformed aware of the interior abundance of one’s self.
Transformation from outside can make us feel small and ineffective, unable to deal with what is coming or what has arrived. Indeed, this is so evident around us that it is almost too obvious to see. The products of colonization – whether in North America, Ireland, the middle east, Africa or elsewhere leave communities and people dispirited, dispossessed and disillusioned. In contrast, transformation that arises from within can have the opposite effect, leaving us in awe of the new levels of spirit and energy, ownership and mastery and vision and story that emerge. One of the reasons why “change management” fails is because a small group of people undergoes a transformative moment from their individual and collective interiors and they “roll it out” over everybody else with a – literally – missionary zeal. For the leaders, the mission is to give everyone the incredible experience of awe and wonder and creative energy. For the rest of us, we experience a meteor strike.
I once had a very good friend and teacher, Bob Wing, point this out to me. We were together in a small Open Space, and we were in different conversations. In my conversation a small group of us cracked a vexing problem by stumbling on a new map that seemed to make a great deal of sense in describing where we were. It was exciting and we were fired up. When we shared this map back with our colleagues, they listened politely to our exuberance and then Bob very calmly looked me in the eye and said “I like it. I like it a lot. But I don’t trust it, because I didn’t help create it.” Where we thought we had produced a solution, Bob reminded us that at best we had merely produced and invitation, and that our exuberance for our own experience of transformation had made that a very bad and incomplete invitation.
I think interior transformation is important, in fact I think it may be among the most important experiences that we can have as human beings. This is why such experiences are revered with masks and dances on the west coast of North America. It is what is fuelling the appetite for contemplative spiritual practices, for presence based leadership experiments, for all of the self-development and self-actualization process that goes on around us. And I think that it is important that we do not limit this experience to a chosen few.
Citizenship for example, is crying out for this kind of transformation. There is a tremendous poverty of beauty, intention, vision and soul in the public sphere right now. John O Donohue calls this “the evacuation of interiority.” There is a deficit of the kinds of qualities to public dialogue that are powered by listening, kindness, compassion and co-creation. The result is that we come to believe that it is a mean world out there and that if we don’t do things to others preemptively, they will do it to us. So we steel ourselves against vulnerability, wounding and hurt. Declare emotional intelligence “soft skills” and deride relationship building as “time wasting” or unpractical. So we end up in a cycle of terrible quality with a longing for something ineffable that seems further and further out of reach as we tie our actions to outcomes that can measured, funded and justified.
In Art of Hosting learning experiences I think we are trying to work against this cycle by, in a phrase, “serving wholeness.” This means working with the interior transformations that birth new stories and visions of possibility, as well as being skillful in dealing with the exterior transformations that we have no control over. We begin with provocative assumptions that somewhere within us, individually and collectively, is the resourcefulness we need to move from the stuck and unsatisfying places we are now in to places of possibility and resourcefulness. We might be wrong (and we need to get WAY better as a species in being wrong most of the time), but we serve the inkling that leads to individual and collective resilience. We are trying to teach and learn about a form of leadership and being together in organization and community that innovates with more diversity than we are comfortable with, to build relationships that can hold more confusion that we are comfortable with, so that we can develop solutions that will have effects that we can only imagine. I don’t know any other way to develop the capacity, person by person, to survive the external transformations that are upon us.
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of working with the tireless staffs of various Neighbourhood Houses in Vancouver. Most of these people are involved in the work of Welcoming Comunities Initiatives, working with refugees and migrants to Vancouver.
Yesterday we were in some learning about engagement design using the chaordic stepping stones and the collective story harvest tool, both developed by the Art of Hosting community of practice. In the collective story harvest, the group of about two dozen listened and witnessed the story of two prominent members of our community who left Guatemala in the early 1990s and came to Vancouver. Their story was profound and powerful, divided into two parts. In the first part they spoke about growing up in rural Guatemala, in the shadow of two beautiful volcanoes. Then, the civil war came on the heels of US subversion of Guatemalan democracy in 1954. Farms that were previously owned by indigenous farmers were given over to American corporations. Our protagonists left for the city to get educated and quickly became involved in social activism and revolutionary politics. One of the storytellers recounted many many tales of friends and colleagues being kidnapped and disappeared, tortured and killed before he finally made the decision to leave his country. After kicking around a little hea and his wife moved to Vancouver, intending to stay for only a year.
The second part of the story picks up in Vancouver. When this couple arrived the met up with a beautiful activist in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, Amalia Dorigoni. Amalia worked with the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society, an organization that was at the forefront of Vancouver’s harm reduction practices in the 1990s. Our storytellers worked with her picking up condoms and needles from the neighbourhood, focusing especially on the area around Strathcona Elementary School. They later went on to found several initiatives in the Downtown Eastside, especially focusing on Latino men, who move the area as refugees and have a hard time establishing themselves.
There was much in the story that was powerful, but this image of two newly arrived refugees, one of whom was pregnant, picking up needles and used condoms so that children would not be exposed to the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS is just remarkable. I have no doubt that the scores of people who hold anti-immigration views have never done this work. It just filled me with gratitude that these two, motivated by their powerfully honed sense of social justice, undertook this volunteer work as one of their first contributions to Canadian society.
Later in the day, another man came to me to remind me of something. He had fled Argentina in the 1980s as a refugee, fleeing many of the same experiences that our storytellers had. He works now as a community organizer and he reminded me that he is getting paid now to do work that in Argentina he would be killed for. We can complain about government, he said, but the fact is that they fund this work rather than sending out death squads to kill the people doing it. So yes, gratitude for that also.
And also, this current federal government is taking a dim view of refugees and immigrants. This is the most oppressive and anti-immigrant government we have had in Canada in recent memory. A new legislative initiative is especially hard on refugee claimants who have not yet been granted Canadian citizenship. Opponents fear that refugees could be returned to their countries of origin if the political conditions change or if Canada reaches a trade agreement or other alliance with the country. This is a problem because many refugees who come here have a hard time feeling welcomed to Canada. As a result, many of them are reluctant to obtain Canadian citizenship, opting instead to remain landed immigrants or permanent residents, as indeed do many capitalist immigrants to Canada.
However in the case of refugees, if the political situation in their country changes, and the country becomes democratic for example, and they are able to go back and visit their families, the fear is that they may be denied entry back to Canada. Obviously if the country of origin is safe to return to, then you are no longer a refugee, right?
Wrong. When refugees arrive in Canada, they are required to give testimony about what danger they are in. Naming people or institutions can mean that for the rest of your life you are in danger from those you have named. If you come to Canada because you are gay, a simple political change in your home country does not mean it is safe for you to be out there, even if you manage to travel back to visit your family. This must not be allowed to happen. Simple justice declares it so.
It is important that refugees who arrive in Canada are welcomed and that we do everything we can, through our governments and in our communities to embrace what people bring. As a friend of mine – an immigrant himself – has written on the issue of the transformative capacity of the stranger: “What if the alien holds the key to unlocking our own alienation?” That is a worthy question for a world in which we are increasingly intermingled with one another.
Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.
A review of things that caught my eye this week:
- In #Occupy news, three articles of note: The Good (an #Occupy Wall Street Open Space), The Bad (an #Occupy LA arrest and torture) and The Ugly (Republican messaging regarding #Occupy).
- And The Helpful. A story about the choices cities make in dealing with #Occupy camps
- And in related news, a beautiful story about Pancho Ramos Stierle and his commitment to generosity.
- Two fantastic TED talks: Louie Schwartzberg on Gratitude and Luis von Ahn on how to make good use of useless tasks.
- MIT reports that improvisation may be the key to managing change (duh!)
- And finally, Jay Nolly who was the much loved starting goalkeeper for our Vancouver Whitecaps for three and a half years, was traded this week to Chicago. My favourite memory of him was in the 2010 season at Swangard Stadium when he made this crucial save.