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Category Archives "Community"

Rise up you guilty ones!

July 27, 2011 By Chris Corrigan BC, Collaboration, Community, Leadership, Organization

What a pattern…all over the world police attacking citizens…it happened here in Canada too last year during the G20 talks (that probably had some bearing on what subsequently unfolded in Greece).  The most powerful line in that video is that one that welcomes us to the age where everyone is innocent except the people, who are guilty.  That is a stirring reminder of how this story is being told.

If you are not a part of the problem, you cannot be a part of the solution!  So, proud to stand with all those who identify as “guilty.”  Time for those who don’t declare any responsibility for the state of the world to move aside.

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Insights on the nature of the times

May 23, 2011 By Chris Corrigan Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Poetry, World Cafe 3 Comments

I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice.  We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of  “What time it is in the world?”  We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing.  We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging.  At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging.  I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:

 

You have to be ready to die on the hill  atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world

 

When you open the smallest space in your life,  passion can erode obligation.  You become more social, unable to be unaware.

 

You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train  but only for a second.  You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied,  a life examined.

 

What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?

 

Responsibility and courage are individual acts.  Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context,  they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.

 

Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view,  the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.

We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own,  living in lives and times beyond our own.  We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear  in relationship.

 

Our conversations touch every single other conversation.  The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity.  The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another.  In that small open space, influence takes root.  Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.

 

I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving?  No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying?  What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?

 

In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard.  The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite.  Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.

 

All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand.  You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of.  Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish.  You can find home by simply following the taste of it.

 

Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer.  Learn to listen to why people say the things they say.  To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.

 

Presence.  When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story.  And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.

 

We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing.  People are the agents for their own freedom.  But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go.  We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation.  With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new.  Honour and reverence.

 

We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.

 

Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life?  How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.

 

How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency?  We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.

 

We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity.  We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours?  Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air.  Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.

 

Like Meg says,

Notice what is going on.

Get started.

Learn as you go.

Stick together.

 

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Walk Out Walk On…the hit single!

May 4, 2011 By Chris Corrigan BC, Collaboration, Community, Emergence, Music

 

Hard on the heels of Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley’s new book Walk Out Walk On comes a commissioned single from my mates Tim Merry and Marc Durkee by the same name.  Tim and Marc have beenmaking poems and music for the past five years or so about the work we all do in the world.  THis is a great sounding track, and covers what it is we do in a beautiful and inspiring way.

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What it’s like to make change

May 2, 2011 By Chris Corrigan BC, Collaboration, Community, Emergence, First Nations, Leadership 6 Comments

Just off a call where we were discussing what it takes to shift paradigms in indigenous social development. We noted that we hear a lot from people that they are busy and challenged and they need clear paths forward otherwise they are wasting their time.

I have a response to that.

We don’t know what we are doing.  Everything we have been doing so far has resulted in what we have now.  The work of social change – paradigm shifting social innovation – is not easy, clear or efficient.  If you are up for it you will confront some of the the following, all of the time:

  • Confusion about what we are doing.
  • A temptation to blame others for where we are at.
  • Conflict with people that tell you you are wasting their time.
  • A feeling of being lost, overwhelmed or hopeless.
  • Fear that if you try something and it fails, you will be fired, excluded or removed.
  • Demands for accountability and reprimands if things don’t work out.
  • Worry that you are wasting your time and that things are not going according to plan.
  • A reluctance to pour yourself into something in case it fails.
  • A reticence to look at behaviours that are holding you back.

Social change is not easy.  Asking for it to be made easy is not fair.  Leadership in this field needs to be able to host all of these emotional states, and to help people hold each other through very trying times.  It is about  resilience, the kind that is needed both when things fall apart AND when things take too long to come back together.

Everyone needs to be a leader here, everyone needs to recognize these states in themselves and hold others in compassion when they see them arising in others.  Working with the emergent unknown requires pacing, a big heart, and a stout challenge.  To create the experiments that help us forward we need to be gentle with judgment, but fiercely committed to harvesting and learning.  We need to cultivate nuance, discernment, advocacy and inquiry rather than jumping to conclusions and demanding rational analytical responses to every situation.

You up for that?

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A new song in an old vein

April 29, 2011 By Chris Corrigan Community, Music, Poetry One Comment

As a traditional musician schooled primarily in the Celtic tradition, I am fond of traditional themes and devices for communicating messages.  On our home island right now there is a sometimes fierce debate occurring about the future of the Crown lands, that involves the possibility of creating a national park.  Today I was thinking about the complexities of the debate, and how it has seemed to me that those leading the opposition to the park are speaking on the one hand out of a concern for protecting something dear about our Island, but it has felt a little off to me.  Like a father who won’t let his daughter grow up.   That, it turns out is a a very old story, and so I made a little song today about our place, telling a little story that captures I think how I feel about the park, and the partnerships that we would enter into to make it possible.

the short answer is that, given everything, the option of establishing a national park on Bowen excites me.  While I have been carefully weighing the pros and cons, and while I could happily live with either option, I am increasingly finding many of the articulated reasons for voting no to such a future to be riddled with pessimism, fear and clingy attachment.  For me, a park offers Bowen a chance to be creative, interesting, beautiful and innovative in the way we move forward in the future.  And so, here is the song:

 

Come gather round you islanders, a story I will tell

About a gorgeous maiden within whose midst we dwell

Whose beauty and whose presence was coveted as well

By her negative and ever doting father.

 

“I raised you from a baby,” he was wont to say.

“I saved you when an evil man came to steal you away,

I preserved the beauty that is yours for you to wear today

And I’d do the same again in an instant.”

 

Now the maiden had her suitors, who came from far and near

And every one her father met left her home with fear.

They sought her hand in marriage but left her place in tears

And her father only ever issued no.

 

One day as she sat watching the latest suitor leave.

Her heart began to fail and her breath began to heave

She felt herself imprisoned and she began to grieve

For the fading of the promise of her beauty.

 

She went to search the country for a partner for her life

A stable man who loved her, and who would take her for his wife

Who would stay beside her through the victories and strife.

And she found him and she brought him back to father.

 

With deep suspicion in his heart he looked him up and down

He accused him of an evil plot to usurp his crown

He met the maiden’s one true love with a stony frown

And he issued forth a stern and solid no.

 

Now the maiden didn’t stand for this and she looked him in the eye.

Said she “it’s time you stood aside and hold your strident cries

This suitor will be with me long after you have died.

And I know I’ll finally come to life beside him.”

 

Her father had no answer for this surprising turn

He showed so little interest in what she’d come to learn

His anger boiled over and he became more stern

And demand that she prove to him she loved him.

 

She sat down by her father and took him by the hand

She broke it to him gently so he would understand

His overbearing attitude and selfish reprimands

No longer had a claim upon her choices

 

For if the maiden were to stay within her father’s range

Her future would be grim indeed for as the world changed

She would stay forever in her father’s gilded cage

And her life would wither down to nothing.

 

Islanders you’ve strongly heard the tales others tell

You’ve seen the paranoia of the coming living hell

But surely you must know that a maiden can live well

If her partner helps her build a life of beauty.

 

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