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Category Archives "Poetry"

The poetry of sense-making

June 1, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Complexity, Evaluation, Poetry, Uncategorized One Comment

The difference between what's whole
and what's held, what's withheld
or revealed, what's real and what's
revelation - that's what I seek,
rest of my life spent in search
of little epiphanies, tiny sparks surging
out of the brain during the clumsiest speech.
 - Allison Joseph
from Little Epiphanies

It feels like that, combing through stories, looking through graphs and charts and frameworks to find the little insights that spark the little actions that spark the little changes that might topple the biggest dragons. 

(Poem published today at whiskey river)

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Wet weather and the non-duality of water

May 12, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Being, Bowen, Featured, Poetry, Practice

This morning the wind and rain continue here in the islands of the south coast of British Columbia. It has been a wet fall and winter – perhaps the wettest since the time of the Flood stories – and this is the coldest May we’ve had for a long time, which brings its own hazards. It’s all down to an extended La Nina event that pipes cool water into the north Pacific and keeps the air masses cold and turbulent, resulting in reliable patterns of convection, instability and therefore precipitation and windy weather weather.

I live in a very rainy part of the world, and so to really love living here, one has to love the rain. This morning as I took my coffee to sit by the sea, I was struck by just how immersed I was in water. The sea of course, which bathes the shoreline and brings all kind of nutrients into our inlet. The creek beside me, channelling the rain from the mountain into the bay, delivering different nutrients back to the shore line. The rain that was falling into my coffee cup, spattering against my hood. And my breath, precipitating in small clouds that echoed their larger cousins across the channel, covering the mountains on the mainland. An entire symphony of sound all played on the same instrument.

For me, actually, water is my favourite image of God. If you are a spiritual or religious person, your engagement with the Divine is of course fraught with reductionist peril. As Lao Tzu wrote in the very first line of a book about the Tao, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” It’s a disclaimer. He says, “look, everything I am about to write here isn’t the things I am actually writing about, so take that under advisement.” One must be very cautious talking about images of God, the Creator, the Divine. Every name severly limits your experience of that which you are trying to talk about. Whatever name or image you have is like trying to watch Barcelona FC play through a tiny keyhole, in the outside door of the Camp Nou.

And yet, the image that works best for me is “water.” It brings life, and it can sweep it away. It can induce terror and soothe the soul. One can go for a hair raising boat trip from which you barely escape alive and then heal yourself with a soothing cup of tea and a bath. Water also has a characteristic of non-duality which gives it an important characteristic as it relates to my spiritual practice. As our atmosphere is made of water vapour, and so are we, it is true to say that “I am in the water and the water is in me.”

To end, here is a poem by William Stafford that I used in our fifth Complexity from the Inside Out course this morning, borrowed from a blog post by my buddy Tenneson. It points towards this non-dual whole I am talking about.

Being a Person
William Stafford

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

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Recon —

June 3, 2021 By Chris Corrigan Featured, First Nations, Poetry 5 Comments

215 orange and red ribbons hang at Bowen Island United Church

I can barely say the word. I don’t use it much anymore. So much needs to be done before we can contemplate it. So much truth, so much restoration of lands and people and communities. But today I came across this poem by Anishinaabe (Wasauksing First Nation) poet Rebeka Tabobondung who is the founder of MUSKRAT Magazine. She published this in 2013 and I will let her say it, because at some deep level this is what I am always working towards:

Reconciliation

We are waking up to our history
from a forced slumber
We are breathing it into our lungs
so it will be a part of us again
It will make us angry at first
because we will see how much you
stole from us
and for how long you watched us suffer
we will see how you see us
and how when we copied your ways
we killed our own.

We will cry and cry and cry
because we can never be the same again
But we will go home to cry
and we will see ourselves in this huge mess
and we will gently whisper the circle back
and it will be old and it will be new.

Then we will breathe our history back to you
you will feel how strong and alive it is
and you will feel yourself become a part of it
And it will shock you at first
because it is too big to see all at once
and you won’t want to believe it
you will see how you see us
and all the disaster in your ways
how much we lost.

And you will cry and cry and cry
because we can never be the same again
but we will cry with you
and we will see ourselves in this huge mess
and we will gently whisper the circle back
and it will be old and it will be new.

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Why it’s hard to talk about dialogic containers in English

March 14, 2019 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Organization, Poetry 14 Comments

On the Art of Hosting list today there has been a very interesting conversation about some of the Japanese words that are used to describe space and container. As I will be working this spring in Japan with these very concepts, I thought it would be interesting to hear from my colleagues Yurie Makihara and Kazuhiko Nakamura about these ideas of “wa,” “ma,” “ba,” and “tokoro.” Yurie shared her thoughts, on some of these words, including noting that the word “ba” is often cited by foreigners as an example of a word describing the quality of dialogic container that exists in Japanese and not English. I learned today that all of these words are similar, and include not just ideas about the quality of space but time as well. Anyone who engages in dialogue will know that there is a time and a place for everything.

Over my career I’ve had the gift of working extensively in indigenous communities in North America and one of the features of many (but not all) indigenous languages is the fact that they are verb-based as opposed to English which is very noun-based. Indigenous languages here contain many words and ideas that are similar to the ones Yurie described, and I have experienced language speaking Elders and others cautioning me that “this time isn’t right” or “the space is wrong” in a way that is hard to put into English. When they say those things, the English ear hears the word “time” or “space” (the nouns in the sentence), but the words the Elders use are pointing to the qualities of the relationships between things in the container of time or space.

In English we lack relational language. We have to use metaphors like “safe space” or “brave space” or “juicy” or “a ripe time” that point a bit at the feel, but use words as metaphors and not direct. Over the years, teaching about containers to people who speak these languages I have begun to learn a few concepts. In Diné there is a word – “k’e” – which describes the quality of connection between an individual and their clan and family that is critical for survival and sustainability. In Nuu-Chah-Nulth, the word “tsawalk” meaning “oneness” really is a word that points to the presence of a texture in a container that helps us see the connection between things (people, animals, land…) and the relationship between the spiritual and physical world. Without tsawalk we are not doing good work, because we are not doing work that attends to the many relational fields that are necessary to create space that is fully alive. More of my reflections here.

Ove the years I’ve learned of similar words and ideas in other languages an cultures: in fact this seems to be a feature of human language in a way that isn’t quite available to unilingual English speakers like myself. Its the reason we find these other languages and concepts attractive. They fill a need we have.

In some ways it’s too bad that we use English in the Art of Hosting community as our global language! The most important thing for us as a community – the quality of a container – is the one thing that is difficult to explain properly in English. The word itself is actually a metaphor and used in indigenous-settler contexts, as my friend Jerry Nagel pointed out in an email this morning, it can be taken to mean the very core act of colonization: to contain a group of people. So be careful!

Perhaps this is why for the most part, people I work with in English are interested in tools and processes, and why we have a hard time explaining the “art” of the Art of Hosting. It’s easier to talk about the nouns we use because we have language for them. It’s hard to talk about what happens when we approach space and container as artists, with an eye to hosting the quality of relationships and interactions that create generative action. In English there is no satisfying way to talk about this, at least not that I’ve found. We have to default to poetry, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Or, we default to using words from other languages, but we use these too as metaphors: “we don’t have a word in English, but the Nuu-Cha-Nulth word is…” as if these give the ideas some weight. My learning over the years is to be very careful when using words and concepts from other languages, because as an English speaker I can only use them as metaphors and not with the realness with which a fluent speaker of a language uses their own words. Helpful, but never the whole story…

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This morning’s dialogue poem

March 10, 2015 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Poetry

The four fold practice meeting the Diné healthy communities framework

The four fold practice meets the Diné healthy communities framework

Harvest from a three hour check in circle this morning, building a social field among 40 health promotion practitioners from across the Navajo Nation.  The circle was at times tender and wickedly funny.  It built a beautiful field to begin our three day training.  Here’s the poem:

Yá’a tééh! It’s a good day.
I am here for the wellness of our nations;
we have stationed ourselves inside our families
where we teach and learn
reach each parent and turn around
their minds to a kind of space
that is safe to face
what flies over our heads
as we sit on our sheepskins
and keep the teachings in the home.
It’s a warm feeling, healing even
to be basking in being hosted
with a ticker that ticks and keeps on giving
and my Converse laced up and I’m ready for living
I love growing the food my family is eating
preventing cancer and diabetes
whispering the secret of healthy people
teaching through recreation and schools
reaching youth so they don’t act like fools
and see peace and respect as cool.
I work in recovery which is a kind of discovery
for the men coming back to us from the pen
bringing them back to the traditional life
to be in harmony, connected to family
receiving the gifts of community and ceremony
to counter the drama of trauma
“Lying in the road hurt” means that my work is about healing
getting up and feeling the body
feeling the advocacy that I speak
fixed by the gaze of a grazing sheep
that reminds me of my grandmother’s teaching:
this is the way that it has to be
to spread my wings and see
how I can develop me and then how we can move forward
to see possibility and leave our conversations happy.
I start with myself, and build out from there
circles of care that come from the sheepskin,
the ancient wisdom, and tools that help us weave
the stories that leave us tightly bound.
Tighten up your buns, there’s work to be done,
Doesn’t matter if it’s your hair or your derriere.
And take a look and make sure your corn beef is cooked.
I am a believer in hope and change
for a positive exchange of the art of the heart
grounding in respect so we can expect
to find out why place matters.
I help to bring wholeness with a focus on food
a wholesome and fullsome way to collude
with kids and youth who pick up the positive attitude
that comes from our culture
harmonize our bodies and our eyes.
I’m a traveller, an unraveller of
unhealthy ways, weaving teachings about how to raise
communities, raise gardens and harvest our best
bring our heart to everything we do
deal with our fears so we can be here
present to what wants to appear
with minds clear.
I’m a first generation relocation baby
thinking maybe I have a giftedness that will lift the people
bring them to fitness
and give back what I have learned on this ride
to see pride inside everyone in our tribes.
It all comes down to helping others
coaching kids, approaching mothers and grandmothers
who share their respect with us
I’m from the beach boys
and a blond haired grandma and traditional speakers
who infused in me a possibility
to change the dysfunction I see, conversationally,
for the benefit of the community, to support the wellness that starts from me.
We know our own patterns and carry them in our blood
transport them everywhere flood of memories
leaving this world better than how we found it
better harmony, better family.
I might be out of words.
Overwhelmed at everything I’ve heard
and here to hear with my ears and heart
to get a head start on addressing the fears
Here, I can see where my prayers are going,
and what has come to my knowing,
my leadership is calling me back
and I can see that I stack up.
The talking happens at the rug,
drawing people into the snug corner of the home
where we share the honest lessons we have learned
pray the prayers that burn in our hearts.
All over the world, we understand weaving
(even though our sweater doesn’t meet five days from leaving)
each one of us is teaching in this room
each one bringing our strands to the loom.
I work in the struggle
creating the space where families can face their challenges
with something as simple as reading
or as powerful as seeking out the strengths
or going to great lengths
to build leaders who feed their own learning
turning back to the language and values.
I am related to the world my relations unfurled
like a ball of yarn that leads us to our tools
a school of weaving leaving us loved and moved
coming back to what was lost
as we chased a living across the south
now I’m getting the language in my mouth
and find myself at a junction
where I support functional community
and do the work of spirit.
Yá’a tééh! It’s a good day.
and good to start in a beautiful way.

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