A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes:
Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over the past several years as the work the community had done to set up and govern the education system had gone sideways. They expressed frustration at the lack of communication and transparency and a perceived lack of respect for the community’s voice and the hard work that the community had done over the years. They talked about having more meetings, and more process to include people deep in the work of building support for the education system.
When people are stuck, you cannot move forward without acknowledging where they hurt. You cannot sweep pain and feelings of injustice under the carpet. People who are willing to stand for principles and stand for their beliefs need to be heard and acknowledged. No amount of defending or apologizing for the past will always do the trick either. In fact defending leads to more stuckness and no one ends up getting what they want. Concerns need to be heard as interests and as rooted in deeply held views about how things should work. The Elders in this gathering are talking about a process that they can be involved in and an education system that they can be involved in. It’s clear and to avoid that or design a system that does not makes space for their voice or passion does not transcend the pain and bad feelings that are the residue of the catastrophic collapse of the education board in years past.
To get through messes, simply listen, acknowledge, suspend beliefs and assumptions and make sure you hear people clearly and that they are heard clearly.
What do we want for education in this community?
We began with this question. The first two rounds of conversation focused on it. From there we asked: In a perfect world, how would our community be involved in education? We then finished in a circle again.
Part of the art of hosting is dealing with fear. I am so sure of the importance of a strong field being in place that when I work in a place where the field is weak or wobbly I fear that nothing will take root. But good questions are like weed seeds. The can thrive in some of the most depleted environments. And those first seeds that fall and sprout in depleted or barren ground make plants that make more soil. Lichens and mosses break down rock and create mineral soils that larger plants can grow in. Likewise, sometimes you just need to work with what you’ve got – design a question that assumes the best intentions of a community and drop it in and see what happens. People choose their engagement in cafe, they make decisions all the time about who to be with. In many subtle ways those decisions actually work towards optimal. During the evening, the law of two feet took over in this cafe. Many people were visiting with the Elders to hear what they have to say and the Elders were strategically visiting with others to make sure people understood their perspective. This is the field of good soil that is created by a good question and the freedom for people to engage. It’s by no means a garden of rare and wonderous plants, but with careful tending, the meager harvest from tonight could at least represent a change in the life of the community around this issue.
Share:
Check this quote:
Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971
IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us.
Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what happens when we induce groove and confusion using rhythm, stepping and voice, and I was really struck with an exploration of the polarity between planning and doing.
One of the questions we were playing with was “What do you do with space?” The rhythmic pattern we were working with had moments of lots of space, and moments where several movements happened all at once. It was a kind of sprung rhthym, all carried over a steady beat. What I noticed was that in the spacious moments, I took time to get myself ready for the next burst of activity instead of resting in that spaciousness. The result was that, to the extent that my mind was living in the future, my body went there as well and I ended up often doing things AHEAD of the beat.
In other words there was so much information I was taking in, including information about what to do next, what to sing, how the polyrhythms worked, what else was going on in the room, that my attention to the present moment was erased and I had a hard time just DOING.
This polarity between planning and doing is familiar to me. When I meditate, and when my thoughts drift, they almost always drift to the future, to things I need to do or should be doing. I notice that this keeps me away from being in the present and actually paying attention to what is happening all around me.
In group settings, this imbalance can lead to me missing a whole bunch of information about where a group is at, if my mind is fixed on where we are going, or where we need to go.
By contrast, when I focus on the present, and on doing rather than planning, I am in balance. Balance in this case means that every part of my mind and body is HERE. Imbalance is when some part of your mind or body shifts elsewhere, and you very often topple in that case – physically or otherwise. Being present opens up the spaciousness of the present moment (what Harrison Owen calls “Expanding our Now“) and ironically opens many more possibilities and pathways for action.
So my learning from all of this is that information overload obscures attention, fills space and limits possibilities.
Think about that the next time you need to do a comprehensive environmental scan!
Share:
This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.
Share:
My friend Adam Yukelson wrote and asked me about how I hold questions instead of goals:
I was speaking with Gabe Donnelly last night and she was sharing a conversation the two of you had last year in which you said you don’t set goals, but rather, live in a question or questions. We were both drawn to this idea, and curious how it works for you. Do these questions tend to be broad and existential? Short-term and specific? Both? Neither? Are there subsets of questions? How do you know when a new question has emerged? I’d love to hear a little more….
They tend to be both…for a while now I’ve been carying these questions with me…they are varied and they take different forms and they even come and go, but they lead me into fascinating places: Sometimes they appear as research projects, other times they are direct and specific, and sometimes they float, nebulous and seem to inform everything I do.
- What is the role of community in organizations?
- What are the essential practices of hosting that can be taught?
- How do we build relational fields between people?
- What are the ways I can express myself in song?
- How can I use body practice more in my work and life?
- What can my daughter and I do to co-create a shared learning journey?
The community question seems to be the most broad and pervasive in my work right now and I’ve held that for over a year. It helps me to see things the same way, for example, as when you buy a new car and then notice that everyone else seems to be driving the same car as you. The second and third questions relate to learning new ways to teach and communicate what people want to learn from me about hosting. The last three questions are about my life and practice as an artist and a father. I don’t have these questions written down anywhere, I just sort of hold them lightly and they focus my attention.
What are the questions you hold?
Share:
That is one of the principles of wayfinding, which is simply to say that if you don’t know what to do, start anywhere and follow it somewhere. Each step will reveal the next thing to do.
For a beautiful, beautiful exercise in doing this, go here and play for a while with the ToneMatrix.