Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice. These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history. Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch. Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea. Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a significant ruling for coastal First Nations in general but for the Nuu-Chah-Nulth in particular.
All of this leads to a time when participatory leadership is needed to seize the opportunity of building culture and community back and doing real, powerful and grounded marine use planning. So today was a good day to get to work.
We begun with 20 minutes of Warrior of the Heart practice, introducing the concept of irime, entering in, joining energies with an attacker and helping them lead a situation to peace. This check in this morning was a powerful reminder to some about the way their work as hosts needs to change, to be able to stand in the fire of aggressive energy and work with it. Fisheries and marine use planning is full of passion and the work these folks will be doing will not be easy. But the passion that drives the aggressive fight for rights and allocations can be used also to build and heal community, and if we enter into that space well, grounded and ready and knowing a little bit, we can do something with that energy.
So today we heard a little about the court case and then we spent some time learning about the seven helpers with this harvest as a result:
From this morning’s sessionshort piece on designing meetings: Four groups of questions to ask before conducting any meeting, to help you choose a good way to get what you need:
BE PRESENT* How will we bring people together in a way that invites them to be present? * How do we make people comfortable to share from their heart and listen together for wisdom and learning?
KNOW YOUR HARVEST * What do we want to take away from this meeting? In what form? (notes? graphics? photos? video? audio?) * How will we use what we gather from the meeting?
HAVE A GOOD QUESTION * What question(s) could we ask that would invite contributions from everyone?
LISTENING PIECE * What is a listening tool that helps us have enough time for people to make their contributions and hear each other? * What kinds of activities and exercises can we use for people to explore content together and provide their own thoughts on our question?
If you use this checklist as a way of organizing your thoughts before a meeting, it will help you to stay focused and to ensure that everything you do is tied to the purpose of the meeting.
Nice…a basic set of planning guidelines for any conversation that keeps us focused on the harvest, and keeps us conscious about process.
After lunch we took the advice of our Elder Levi and the participants went out on the land to think about their work going into the community. This was the time to do a little oosumich, connecting with themselves and presencing the future that starts next week when they return to their communities. When they returned, we went into a really beautiful World Cafe around two questions that Laura and Norinne cracked. The first question was an appreciative question about a time when community was truly engaged. The second question, which we did two rounds on, was on question we could ask to bring community together around marine use planning.
The harvest from this was great, a real set of tools and ideas for them to use when they go home to start the conversation.
And sweet practice this evening. Bruce Lucas put on a potlatch DVD and some of us played Scrabble while Nuu-chah-Nulth tunes echoed through our dining space. Two or three kids played while we feasted on chicken, salmon and some great vegetable dishes prepared by our local caterer. This groups is really gelling, and becoming fast friends. They are tooling up on facebook and Skype to stay together as they move into this work seperately.
Tonight I can hear some geese flying overhead, moving south on the warm winds that have come in. The rain has stopped and the surf still pounds, the ever present sound of sae and land meeting, creating one another out of their shared conversation.
Tsawalk indeed.
It’s 11:30 and I’m about ready to tuck into bed. Through my open window I can hear the roar of the surf rolling on the beaches a mile away. The surf report says that the swells are coming in at 9 feet but are going to rise to 17.5 feet by tomorrow. The roar is deafening, but it is a sound that has been heard on these beaches from time immemorial. The Nuu-Chah-Nulth, upon whose territory I am working, have lived here as long as the sound of the waves has been heard, and they’ll be here until those waves stop.
And that’s the reason for this Art of Hosting – to introduce participatory leadership to people who are working in Nuu-Cha-Nulth communities up and down the coast ostensibly on marine use planning. We are using the framework of a set of traditional values based in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth prime directive: heshook ish tsawalk or “everything is one.” This principle of interdependence acknowledges that everything has a common origin and that our work in the world is to live according to several principles – basics you might call them – to be in accord with this natural law. We have chosen three of these principles to explore these days: he-xwa (balance), isaak (respect) and aphey (kindness). Today’s activities explored balance and looked at:
- The principle of tsawalk and the methodology for knowing the interior life of the world, called oosumich.
- Connecting oosumich as a way of knowing, to participatory meeting design, using a new take on Ken Wilber’s qnuadrants and my model of sustainability in communities of practice.
- Visiting the carving shed of Joe Martin, a well known Tla-o-qui-aht carver who dropped some good teachings on us about making canoes. The one that stood out for me was “we know the tree this canoe came from” which is to say that in an structure you have to know the source. Joe will not make a canoe out of a tree he has not seen standing, because he needs to know how it grew, where it’s weak points might be, which side faced the sun, how it lived with other trees and slopes and rocks. Only once he has understood the tree in its context can he cut it down and make a canoe out of it. The lesson here, is knowing source is everything.
- Doing a little Warrior of the Heart practice to discover something about balance and what it means to move from ground.
- Appreciative inquiry to connect to ground work and purpose in stories of health and abundance in communities and marine environments. We did a good long deep dive interview process, surfaced some powerful values and then entered into a dream phase but asking “If our work was to make the difference we wanted it to, what would our communities look like?” People drew systems diagrams, connecting the human and natural environments, the state of health of people, communities, ecosystems and economies. By the end of the day we closed with a breathing exercise, full to the brim with the almost sacred nature of this work.
Tomorrow we will dive into meeting and process design based on the principles of isaak meaning respect. The waves will get stronger, the new moon is coming, and something is feeling like it wants to be unleashed,
As the inner climate villages unfold here and in Copenhagen, the Europeans have cracked a simple set of practices. An email from Toke Moeller in Copenhagen this weekend:
Toke, Ulrik, Lisa and I were part of a workshop at yourclimate.tv today on inner climate. A great experience! The young people were excellent facilitators. They asked us to brainstorm guidelines (Toke reframed this into practices) that could immediately help people to clear the inner climate. First we were asked to brainstorm onto the whiteboard table in silence, then to walk around in silence and make additions and then to talk about what we saw. Also in our group was Lisette, a healer from Holland connected to the MeshWork and Amanji, a Hindi nun who said she had been a monk for 20 years. We were of fundamental agreement, but still had a very rich and deep conversation. We were then asked to boil down what we’d discussed into three salient points.
3 practices that if practiced
by any person on the planet
will help to clear
your inner climate–
Our knowing: There’s enough if we share
Practice: SHARE IT
Our knowing: We all have a choice
Practice: CHOOSE ON BEHALF ON THE PLANET
Our knowing: We are nature
Practice: FIND YOUR NATURAL RHYTHM
&
BREATHE – MOVE – LAUGH – REST
The foundation for these we suggest is an ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE
Simple practices that bring us to the presence needed to host the conversations and shifts that are needed in these days.
My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa. He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building. He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim it’s relationship to the west. But like all good improvisers, he allowed the climate to change him, and he began deeply intimate with Estonian culture and language, married and Estonian woman and moved into becoming a steward of Estonian natural places. He speaks the language fluently and beautifully and Estonians, who are normally wary of outsiders, embrace him and respect him, and always forget that he wasn’t born of this land. I can imagine, after being here for only a week, how it must have happened that he became so quickly embraced here. The land and the people are reserved but when they open to you and you open to them, the embrace is deep and multi-layered.
Robert brought this consciousness to the beginning of our third day, leading us in a check in exercise on the land that taught so many things on so many levels. We simply stood for a while in the cold gloom of an early Estonian autumn morning. The air was very still, but an occasional light breeze reminded one that one still has bones. Robert invited us to first of all become aware of the extent of our vision, noticing how wide it extended on either side of us, and how high and low a soft gaze can perceive. From there we closed our eyes and let our ears open to the subtle soundscape around us. For me this was wonderful because this is my morning practice at home. here the soundscape is similar, but the sounds are totally different. Many birds were quietly moving in the trees and shrubs around us, among them bullfinches, bushtits, creepers and hooded crows. A raven called far away and a dog barked softly across the fields. Deepening into this sense of place, Robert invited us to smell the mud, and the leaves on the ground, the apples that had fallen from nearby trees and were slowly decaying, turning sweet and pungent on the ground. Our senses fully awakened, Robert then taught us how to walk again.
One foot softly in front of the other, gaze open, like a hunter becoming aware of every sound and movement around us. Each foot develops eyes of its own, feel its way on the land, so sensitive to what is underfoot that it’s is possible to walk without making a sound . You become a part of the landscape, joining it completely, becoming enmeshed within it, so that everything that happens happens WITH you rather than as a RESULT of you being there. This is a huge and important teaching about harvesting. As you learn to walk in this way – Robert called it “foxwalking” – you become a little quicker, a little more sure footed, you are able to move deliberately and yet not disturb anything around you. It was a powerful way to experience hosting and being hosted, joining the field and harvesting in the moment, becoming fully present.
And it was just the first of two morning acts. Following a walk on the land in this way, Robert invited us inside and proceeded to make a fire, using his tools of a fireboard, a firestick, a bow, a handhold and some dry moss tinder. He gave a beautiful teaching about the archetypal elements of this practice, the fundamental unity of male and female with the firestick and fireboard, the notch that allows dust to come into the space that is created by the friction to birth the spark, the notch is the womb and the spark emerges from the union, the bow that turns the stick through the four directions, gathering the energy of the circle to create powerful life. Such a rich practice, such a beautiful fundamental teaching about application. It continued to resonate through our final day. As I left Estonia this morning, Robert gifted me a set of these tools for my own, a deep invitation into practice and learning this ancient art, the first act of survival to build a fire out of nothing, and the primal act of community building. the spark begins the possibility of coming together.
The rest of the day flowed. Toke and I gave very simple teachings on application. I talked a little about the improv principle of “notice more and change less” speaking about the fact that what we had experienced is a more profound way to open to possibility than feeling that we need to change all the time. the world changes enough as it is. If we can simply stay still long enough in one place, everything we need will flow past, timing will present itself and pass away, the possibilities for action become expansive.
The group went into Open Space to work through their design questions for projects that they are deep within. We rolled and flowed and talked and drew and at the end of the day, ran a little intention grounding exercise that involved milling around and collecting questions on our next steps, and then we checked out with voices of appreciation and gratitude and an eager commitment to meet again in February when this cohort of learners will assemble for their final co-learning journey.
It has been a great pleasure to spend time with this group, to make many new friends who are cracking good work in Estonia, exploring the leading edges of participatory leadership in a country that is slowly coming back to life, and to remembering its deepest gifts and resources. Many stories, practices and inspiring thoughts are coming home with me, right into work with First Nations on the west coast of Vancouver who are reclaiming their own resources of cultural strength and the renewed use and management of the marine ecosystems on which they depend. My big learning is that the skills and practices of participatory leadership are all around us, deep in the ground of the cultural legacies we have inherited as humans on this planet. And when we can talk and learn and share between traditional indigenous peoples, we discover so many modalities that are from the same root.
Sad to be leaving, but happy to be coming home from four days of teaching, fuller than when I left.
From Alex Kjerulf’s Friday Spoing. Behaviour change at it’s best!