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Category Archives "Learning"

Alan Watts

February 11, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Being, Learning, Practice, Unschooling


Alan Watts

Listening to some wonderful podcasts from Alan Watts. In the current series, Images of God, which is made up from talks given during his lifetime, he is delivering all kinds of angles on the divine.

In the third installment of this series, he was talking about school, journeys and the dance. The point of a dance or a piece of music, is not the end, says Watts. If it was, then we would only have composers that wrote finales and audiences would only go to hear great final chords, or see people in their final positions.

No, the point of a piece of music is the way one experiences time. It’s all about the journey, the movement from here to there, the texture of moments that music or dances imparts.

From this he draws a parallel with schooling. We school in this society as if there is an end in sight, a point at which we are heading. In so doing, we teach people to sacrifice the moment for the delayed gratification of the end. And of course the end never comes. One grade finishes and the next begins. High school ends and university begins. University ends and work begins and work is simply more of the same, chasing promotions, until at some point one wakes up and realizes that one has arrived. And in fact one has always arrived and always been arriving, but we miss it constantly, and we school our children and ourselves into missing it completely as well.

Life as dance. Life as the middle phrase of the middle movement of a violin concerto, moving right on to the next one..

[tags] alan watts, unschooling[/tags]

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Storytelling, reflection and learning in real time

February 5, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Learning, Stories

Thanks to a link at plep, I stumbled today upon the journals of the Apollo 11 astronauts. There is a mass of material at this site, but what I have been finding most interesting is the transcriptions of the debriefing sessions that the astronauts went through when they returned to earth. A lot of the details are technical and full of acronyms and other jargon, but certain sections stand out. For example, here is a section from the debrief where Armstrong and Aldrin, the first two men on the moon, are talking about learning to walk:

Aldrin
I don’t think there is such a thing as running. It’s a lope and it’s very hard to just walk. You break into this lope very soon as you begin to speed up.Armstrong
I can best describe a lope as having both feet off the ground at the same time, as opposed to walking where you have one foot on the ground at all times. In loping, you leave the ground with both feet and come down with one foot in a normal running fashion. It’s not like an earth run here, because you are taking advantage of the low gravity.

Aldrin
The difference there is that in a run, you think in terms of moving your feet rapidly to move fast, and you can’t move your feet any more rapidly than the next time you come in contact with the surface. In general, you have to wait for that to occur.

Armstrong
And you are waiting to come down. So the foot motion is actually fairly slow, but both feet are off the ground simultaneously. You can cover ground pretty well that way. It was fairly comfortable, but at the end of this trip, going out there and back, I was already feeling like I wanted to stop and rest a little. After about 500 feet of this loping with a 1-minute stop out there in the middle to take pictures, I was ready to slow down and rest.

The transcript is full of these kinds of reflective learnings. Reading through, one comes away with the sense of how important story is in reinforcing learnings. There was much that the astronauts had to do for the first time during their mission, things that they couldn’t practice on Earth or things that were different under the conditions of being in space. It’s these things that make the best storytelling, and you can see them trying to make meaning of their experiences.

Here’s another section. This time Aldrin and Armstrong are talking about the colour of the moon’s surface:

Armstrong
Probably the most surprising thing to me, even though I guess we suspected a certain amount of this, was the light and color observations of the surface. The down-Sun area was extremely bright. It appeared to be a light tan in color, and you could see into the washout region reasonably well. Detail was obscured somewhat by the washout, but not badly. As you proceeded back toward cross-Sun, brightness diminished, and the color started to fade, and it began to be more gray. As we looked back as far as we could from the LM windows, the color on the surface was actually a darker gray. I’d say not completely without color, but most of the tan had disappeared as we got back into that area, and we were looking at relatively dark gray. In the shadow, it was very dark. We could see into the shadows, but it was difficult.Aldrin
We could see very small gradations in color that were the result of very small topographical changes.

Armstrong
Of course, when we actually looked at the material, particularly the silt, up close it did, in fact, turn out to be sort of charcoal gray or the color of a graded lead pencil. When you’re actually faced with trying to interpret this kind of color and that light reflectivity, it is amazing.

Aldrin
When illuminated, it did have a gray appearance, very light gray.

Armstrong
Wouldn’t you say it is something like the color of that wall? It isn’t very far away from what it looked like. Yet when you look at it close, it’s a very peculiar phenomenon.

It actually feels like a privilege to be sitting in on this conversation. It inspires me into a similar practice with facilitation events, debriefing with clients and partners as well in a way that is story-based learning.

Categories: learning, storytelling, astronauts

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Mindful of teachers all around

January 30, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Being, Featured, Learning

Good old whiskey river:

Mindful
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
– Mary Oliver

Yesterday my five year old son and I went for a walk in a remote and wild part of our island to a point where the waves riding the southeasterlies up the Strait of Georgia break on a basalt reef littered with driftwood. And in that place, in that moment, with rain washing our faces and wind lashing at our ears, we talked about seeing with the close-seeing eye that watches where we step and seeing with the long-seeing eye that knows where we are in the forest. So turning, we made our way back through the trees with our close-seeing eyes and long-seeing eyes both tuned. We learned that it is important to stay aware of our feet below us and the turns in the forest path ahead of us, and that getting lost is a result of losing the manner of both modalities.

Such a trove of teachings in a simple, slippery path on a rainy day.

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Facilitation learning opportunities coming up

January 19, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Featured, Learning

Some upcoming learning opportunities in the British Columbia and Washington state areas…

News from my dear friend Peggy Holman that she and Steve Cato are offering their Appreiciative Inquiry facilitation training on February 1-3, and it’s not too late to register.

Toke Moeller is hosting a FlowGame at Aldermarsh on Whidbey Island in the middle of March, after which we are penciling in an Art of Hosting primarily with Aboriginal youth, but open to the public as well on Vancouver Island.

Michael Herman and I will be offering a retreat to support practices for Open Space faiclitation in April, during the week of April 17th here on Bowen Island. We’re almost ready to make a formal announcement and invitation, but if you’d like more details leve a comment or send me and email.

And tonight, Christina Baldwin is reading from her new book Storycatcher: Making Sense of our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story at Ayurveda in Vancouver at 3636 West 4th Ave. from 6-8pm. That event is free, so if you’re in the area you shouldn’t miss the chance to hear Christina read. I might get down to that if I get a chance.

So with all this good hosting learning going on, here is a great hosting song to add to the playlist:

mp3: Reid Jamieson – Common Problems

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Learning from the land at the Evolutionary Salon

January 16, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Being, Learning, Practice

Last night in the closing circle, my friend Pauline LeBel offered an observation that so much of our conversation, informed as it is by the great cosmological story, is very human- centric. She asked “What can we learn from the great love affair between the sun and earth?” It is a love affair in which the Sun asks for nothing in return.

A group of us today took a walk on the land as a response to that observation. I posted a session in the Open Space today called “How does a forest change a mind?” We walked into the forest and spent time reflecting on what the forest was doing to have an impact on our minds, spirits and hearts.

As we continue to engage with the story the universe is telling us, my invitation extends to us to take time with other parts of the universe that are not human and inquire into how they teach us and shape us. I suspect that wise action may be embedded the way the universe self-organizes and teaches us about itself.

While we were on the land we had some wonderful conversation and perspectives shared with one another. One which made me smile broadly came from Tesa Sylvestre who noted that for the apparent stillness in the forest, there is a whole lot of growth and activity going on. Kenoli Oleari then asked us to imagine what that would look like if it was all taking place in one tree in front of us, how all the growth happening in the forest in that moment would send a tree rocketing skyward in front of our eyes and the heat and sound would be immense. Someone then noted that this was the energy of the stars, and how true that is.

As the Salon progresses I find myself more and more curious about this relationship between cultivating the growing edge for people and shaping the quality of the moment. In the forest the quality of the moment was markedly different from here in the hall, with the buzz of people and voices all around. The growing edge that appears in both of those environments are very different, but they invite my to find learnings in th emoment that bring my perspective more towards wholeness, in an every evolving journey to see what I know and who I am as whole and part of a bigger whole all at the same time.

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