I’m stranded in San Fransico, sitting on standby for a flight home after narrowly missing my flight yesterday evening due to a big accident on the Golden Gate bridge. So sitting the lounge, guiltily hoping every two hours that someone has some minor misfortune or change of plans that will open up one seat on a day when every flight home is full.
Found a poem by Denise Levertov at the excellent Panhala:
A Gift
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.~ Denise Levertov ~
This Christmas might be the first white Christmas for all of Canada since 1971. To celebrate, I’d like to point you to my friend Jeremy Hiebert’s stunning collection of photos of ice from Lake Okanagan. This is not a photo collection, it is a poem of the highest order. Sit still and watch the slideshow fill your eyes with the wonder of this earth.
And to accent it here is a poem from me, using the wonderful language of ice:
Crawl to the edge of the fast ice
where the ice front holds still
as the pancakes form up.
Not from the breakdown of nilas or ice rind
this pancake forms under the swell that tossess
slush ice, shuga and grease around in the bay.
This morning a lump of anchor ice rose
honeycombed and rotten and washed ashore
stranded on the beach.
Out in the open sea, ice sky glistens
with ice blink where the multiyear floes
nip each other, calve and tumble and raft.
crowding the polynya with brash
turning up bummocks
on the growlers and bergy bits
tonight I head inland across the rime
home to a warm room
and an old book on navigation and hazards
The leads will open in spring
and the water sky returns, dark and hopeful
icefeet slowly retreating to the beach.
Winter is here.
Jean-Sebastien is alive with rock balancing. He and his mates are decorating the whole campus with sculptures. He has become one of our rock balancing senseis here at the Institute and it’s very cool to see what he is learning from the practice. Today, just before our module started, he was sitting with me in the centre of the circle and he asked if here was something to knowing which kinds of edges would sit together, and as he took his mind off the task of balancing, in the act of asking the questions, the rocks he was working with came together. Very cool. It’s a strong metaphor for hosting practice too.
Our module today moved from the personal to the relational and we spent some time in appreciative interviews looking at the characteristics of conversations tat lead to shift. We used some integral quadrants to harvest the results of these conversations, and a harvest team went to work making some meaning for the group. We left them in a little chaos at lunch time, inviting them deeper into the practice of collective harvesting and we’ll see where it goes tomorrow.
This evening was a time for catching up with mates. David Stevenson is here with me, a guy I have worked with closely over the past five years with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team. He’s in my friend Tom Hurley’s module and is cracking some questions about the kinds of governance structures that serve agile organizations in living systems. Tonight we spent some time sitting on rocks overlooking the Bedford Basin and talked about what was at the living core of our work. Probably more to come on this, but the big insight today was in cracking the nature of what we have been talking about as “the fifth organizational paradigm.” We have long suspected that there is something that transcends the four organizational paradigms of circle (reflection), triangle (action), bureaucracy (resourcing) and network (informtion sharing, learning and collaborating). David has been speaking as the fifth paradigm as a living ecology where all four of these come to play, where all four exist in the service of what is alive. The fifth paradigm is the place where these four act in concert to serve the living core of an organization. I’m liking this a lot.
In closing, here is the poem I slammed out as the cafe harvest yesterday:
Time to be in it
Chris Corrigan
Time to reform, see our relations reborn
from the inside out watching repression die into clarity
wet in the eyes where
hope falls in
and old worlds shed their skins
and we sit in the raw light of the new.
This is what we’re going to do.
Hang on to each other through the chaos
of fucked up panic that plays us
like dupes into not knowing the truth
that everything we do is a choice.
I’m here to meet hearts
that choose authentic restarts.
Different is on its way, starting right now and later today
and tomorrow as we fly
from uplift to sorrow
we’re called into balance and focus,
hard work and hocus pocus where the magic meets the tragic
and challenge appears and our spines straighten
and urgency seers its invitation upon us.
Start here.
It’s getting late and the state of things
requires that sensitivity attention brings;
the precision of decision
the gift of the incision that cuts the bonds to the old –
something climbs…
These are the times.
We are served by our fear, present and here
and escaping the fantasy of skill
letting the messiness fill
the spaces that lie between us.
The flux between optimism and the cynicism that
paralyses our lives,
leaves us to foster the faster
speed of work and communicate the state of things:
listen to the planet’s song. It fills our structures
and brings along a new life that comes when we fall
into the possibility that the micro births the macro,
the large from the small.
Practice moving to courage from fear
letting go of what is no longer clear.
Back to your corners
find those of like mind and appear together
as good people, impatient but kind.
Everywhere it is time to collaborate
create and elaborate
containers of capacity that resonate.
Time to come home, switch it on
dance between poles, rest in centre,
this time of change is a mentor
teaching courage to
reach back to places where each
small effort is supported by this trembling field.
Our tools are not enough – the challenge remains:
connect to source and course through each other’s veins.
A poem harvested from participants’ reflections from a World Cafe at the Shambhala Institute for Authentice Leadership, June 2008.
Two good friends of mine, Roq Gareau who works for the Canadian Border Services Agency and Orlando Pioche who works for the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, NM. Men doing serious work who work together as deep friends.
From Wendel Berry:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health.
It heals with grace.It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no ear hears it except in fragments.
Sent out to all my friends, especially Steven, Kathryn, Tenneson and Beverley, with whom I did some good work this week. And to those good friends I will be working with this coming week in Phoenix at the Good Food Gathering – Toke, Monica, Tim, Phil and Tuesday.
Working with friends is perhaps the wisest thing one can do in pursuing larcge scale change. Only with the ears and hearts of friends tuned to one another’s needs can we hear more of the wholeness of the music that only comes to us in fragments.
I’m in some big work these days, whether it is in the child and family services system here in British Columbia, or hosting a 500 person World Cafe and Open Space at the Good Food Gathering to help the good food movement find it’s way with renewed leadership and vigour. None of this is remotley possible alone. I am working with close friends.
While it may be true that one person can make a difference in the world, I believe that the difference one person makes is choosing to work with others. We have long since exited the age of heros, and I wonder if we were ever in that age.
I once sat with Tenneson Woolf on a beach on my home island and we gazed across the Strait of Georgia. We talked about how huge everything is, how small we are in relation to the vast world. And we asked this question: if we are born of this world, knowing deeply the scale in which we live in relation to everything else, why do we feel like we can make an impact? What put that impulse there? We are the only creatures that entertain the delusion that we can shift things, and yet, we persist. AND, it’s true, to the extent that we can even shift the climate of our home world. There is almost a drive to do it.
There is nothing around you right now that is not the result of a group of people working together. No structure, no machine, no community, no idea exists because one person thought of it. Everything is born in relationship, and to the extent that our relationships are filled with quality, the work we do will be filled with quality. I choose first of all to work with friends, and from there to find the work that we can do together. When we attend to this quality of relationship, everything else becomes possible. Nothing around you has ever emerged otherwise.
So thank you to my friends who make it possible for me to satisfy my personal version of the human drive to make an impact. Together, as we tune to one another and reach into possibility, we can find the holy chords of that fragmented music, and sing.
One of my favourite lines of poetry ever written is contained in this surreal poem from Frederico Garcia Lorca. I remember reading the final stanza for the first time maybe ten years ago and it shook me.
Intermission
Those eyes of mine from 1910
saw no dead man buried,
no ashen fairs of mourners at dawn,
no heart quivering in its corner like a sea horse.Those eyes of mine from 1910
saw only the pale wall where the girls tinkled,
the snout of the bull, the poisonous mushroom,
and the incomprehensible moon that illuminated dried lemon rinds
under the hard black bottles in the corners.Those eyes of mine on the neck of the pony,
on the pierced breast of the sleeping Saint Rosa,
on the tiled rooftops of love, with moans and fresh hands,
on a garden where cats ate the frogs.Attic where the ancient dust congregates statues and mosses,
boxes that keep the silence of devoured crabs
in the place where the dream squabbled with its reality.
My small eyes are there.Don’t ask me any questions. I have seen how things
that seek their way find the void instead.
There are spaces that ache in the uninhabited air
and in my eyes only children dressed without their nakedness!