The two most important women in my life
In my work with a new hospital north of Denver yesterday, one of the senior managers commented that one of the things that struck him most was the idea that people do not feel an authentic sense of accountability simply because we place on them demands that take away their freedom of choice. We feel this when people have faith in us.
Would you rather be accountable to a friend or a contract? Is it friendship or paper that binds two people’s integrity together?
My modus operandi in the world is working with friends. The vast majority of clients of mine quickly become friends and our working relationship almost always deepens beyond the “project outcomes” or “scope of work” laid out in our contracts. With many clients, including those with whom I work on large projects, there are no contracts whatsoever. Our working relationship is based on the trust that comes from the deep accounatbility of friends working together.
For sure there is a place for contracts and paper-based accountability in the world, but isn’t interesting note how much shorter those agreements get the closer the partners are? Isn’t it interesting to note the distaste most of us feel for “pre-nuptual agreements” which seem to reduce the commitment of marriage – a lifelong friendship – to a mere contract?
Contracts limit our freedom of choice, friendships open up freedom of choice. ANd the very best friendships, like the one I celebrated tonight, result in something emergent, something surprising and unexpected and new. It is out of those relationships that my best work comes.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Photo by Santa Rosa
“The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. They say that they say that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to walk the world”. The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities and for the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who is far away.”
A beautiful story of the Zapatista revolution in Mexico. In the 14 years since the Zapatistas pressed their claims in Chiapas, the architecture of the snail has become the way that the people talk about their revolution: it starts in the centre and spirals outward, and slowly and surely, it gets where it is going:
The United States and Mexico both have eagles as their emblems, predators which attack from above. The Zapatistas have chosen a snail in a spiral shell, a small creature, easy to overlook. It speaks of modesty, humility, closeness to the earth, and of the recognition that a revolution may start like lightning but is realized slowly, patiently, steadily. The old idea of revolution was that we would trade one government for another and somehow this new government would set us free and change everything. More and more of us now understand that change is a discipline lived every day, as those women standing before us testified; that revolution only secures the territory in which life can change. Launching a revolution is not easy, as the decade of planning before the 1994 Zapatista uprising demonstrated, and living one is hard too, a faith and discipline that must not falter until the threats and old habits are gone – if then. True revolution is slow.
Photo by Nathan Ward
Little elements that showed up lately:
- A beautiful periodic table of the elements by printmakers
- A reason why I love the web: Indian cooking on YouTube
- Johnnie brings it on with a great find on power. Bonus is that he also introduces me to Greater Good magazine.
- Dustin Rivers on unschooling as decolonizing liberation. Dude rocks my world.
- Jack Martin Leith, a fellow Open Space traveller, has been providing interesting resources on collective genius and innovation for years. This is his recent offering, an engaging power point presentation on world views and pathways to collective innovation.
- I’ve pointed to her before, but here again is Kavana Tree Bressen’s facilitation resources. Tree is a long time member of intentional communities and so these resources have especially useful application there. But I love her deep practice of consensus.
- “We come up the hard way, and blues is the way you feel…”
- The Mindmapping Software weblog
- Niyaz: new music for the 21st century.
- MungBeing magazine: worth a look and a listen.
If you would like a flavour of what happens at workshops on the Art of Hosting, here are some links to give you a sense of things.
- Audio from the Art of Hosting workshop in southern Indiana last fall. These files were made by Jeneal King, one of the participants who took an active role in harvesting the event. Lots to listen to here. Best I think to download and listen off line. Update: No longer up as of August 12, 2008.
- Ravi Tangri in Nova Scotia has been making a number of videos about Art of Hosting teachings on the chaordic stepping stones, harvesting, world cafe and the art of calling. Browse ArtOfHostingTV.net for more.
- A video from my mate Thomas Ufer of the meta harvest from a recent Art of Hosting workshop in Brazil. This path that he is walking on has notable quotes from the whole three days. Participants walked the path, reflecting on ther experience and then contributed a further thought on the meaning of the experience. THis is a really creative way of find higher and higher levels of collective meaning making.
- Andy Himes made a short video of a number of us playing with candles and music at last week’s gathering on Whidbey Island. In the evenings there is often creative play and chilling out that we get into. When the weather is nice we often build a fire outside and sit around telling stories of hosting. On Whidbey we did it inside.
This just gives you a sense of the diversity of the experience. If you are interested in attending an Art of Hosting workshop contact me, or check in at the website to see if there is one coming up near where you live.
A combination of quotes from two different emails today on certainty. First from Ashley Cooper, quoting Daniel Sielgel:
“When we are certain we don’t feel the need to pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion.”
And then this, from Tenneson Woolf, who currently has my copy of Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. From that books is this is a story of Keetsa, an Ahousaht whaling chief who runs into trouble when the space is no longer held for him:
Every protocol had been observed between the whaling chief and the spirit of the whale. Keesta had thrown the harpoon, and the whale had accepted it, had grabbed and held onto the harpoon according to the agreement they had made through prayers and petitions. Harmony prevailed, whaler and whale were one, heshook-ish tsawalk.
All of a sudden something went wrong, some disharmony arose, some disunity intruded, and the whale turned and began to tow Keesta and his paddlers straight off shore. Keesta took inventory. Everyone in the whaling canoe remained true to the protocols – cleansed, purified, and in harmony. Prayer songs intensified. Still, the great whale refused to turn toward the beach, heading straight off shore. Keesta and the paddlers had kept true to their agreements, and now there seemed nothing left to do except to cut the atlu, the rope attached to the whale.
Keesta took his knife, and as he moved to cut the rope, Ah-up-wha-eek (Wren) landed on the whale and spoke to Keesta: “Tell the whale to go back to where it was harpooned.” Keesta spoke to the whale, and immediately the great whale turned accourding to the word of Wren, the little brown bird, and returned to where it was first harpooned, and there it died.
After the whale had been towed ashore, Keesta discovered, as he had suspected, that the disharmony and disunity had intruded at home. When his wife had heard that the whale had taken the harpoon, she had roused herself and prematurely broken away from her ritual in order to make welcome preparations. At the point when she began to go about her life in disharmony from the rest was exactly when the great whale had begun to tow Keesta and his paddlers off shore.