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!
My friend Norah Rendell is a traditional musician of the highest calibre. She is a beautiful singer and a gifted Irish flute player and a curious and lively human being. To be around her is a delight and to make music with her is to be carried away in a space of grace and beauty where we can find out what it means to be truly human. I’ve just spent the better part of last weekend visiting with her in St. Paul, Minnesota, making music and sharing lots of story.
For me the social production of music is a deeply important human activity. When we join our voices together we all contribute to a sound that is bigger than ourselves. We glimpse some transcendent possibility, the notion of a true community. We do so without living out of balance with the natural world at all. We simply make sound and all that is left behind is the echo of harmonies ringing in our ears and perhaps, if we are lucky , a flutter in our hearts that comes with the experience of fundamental harmony – the harmony of notes and of friendship and of purpose. Music does not leave waste behind. It leaves no dangerous or permanent residue at all. Just ephemeral beauty.
I reflect on this here in seat 10A of a United Airlines Airbus 319 flying over the sprawling suburbs of western Denver. My journey this week to the Twin Cities Minneapolis and St. Paul were largely about trying to do two things: support the longing in friends who cultivate a view that wants people and communities to experience possibilit, health and creative, and to design creative spaces for human beauty to emerge in this service. I did this by working with dear friends Jerry Nagel and David Cournoyer teaching some basic ways in which people can come together to talk to each other well. Jerry, David and I also met with Ginny and we co-created both a learning journey for people working in community health as well as a little team among ourselves that was rich and generative and fun.
And then Norah and I got together and we did the same thing with other Irish and traditional musicians, gathering in pubs and around kitchen tables to do what humans in our culture have done sustainably and beautifully for millenia: play music together.
That was my week in a nutshell but it isn’t the way I would have described it until I looked out over these suburbs from my seat, having departed a terminal in which CNN was blaring about Iranian missile tests, murder, pandemics and fear, punctuated every seven minutes by ads for the drugs and goods that would make all this panic easier to take. I’m not pessimistic about the world – rather the opposite, but I am realistic about what is possible for me to do to “fix” it. And in this moment it has become clear to me that my work now is to make beauty; beauty that is created in the endless present moment and that leaves only the trace of love in hearts. I have o idea if this work I do will save the world. But without people who remember the capacities that arise from collaborating and co-creating, there is no chance for anything.
Friends, this society is killing us by small acts and mammoth dysfunction. In fact the ways in which our world is changing seems evident everywhere except on the human scale. Forty percent if the ocean is covered in plastic and soils are dying because the antibiotics we use to keep ourselves thinking we are healthy are destroying microbial communities and making it impossible to feed ourselves without amending the earth with carcinogenic chemicals.
But we humans have no way of seeing things at these scales. If I go by what I have seen this morning at the airport, we seem to react most strongly to compromised business deals, flight delays and a forgotten napkin.
Our craving for permanence has led us to create material legacies that outlast our lives. This seems fundamentally unnatural to me. We take space far greater than that bequeathed to us by our descendants and in return we give them buildings and suburbs and devastated farmland and uranium. We also give them beautiful pieces of art and sculpture and music, don’t get me wrong. But we never question the mindset that leaves things for others to clean up, store or appreciate long after we have gone.
I zm coming to believe that the converstation about sustainability is flawed if it focuses on materials only. I think we have lived far beyond our means and that it is simply not possible for us to make our present impact on the earth sustainable. We have already extended our reach hundreds of thousands of years into the future. You cannot claw back the effect of spent uranium. We cannot put our impact back in the bottle
I think rather what is called is for us to develop and practice the gift of living in community and co-creating beauty together together. If there is one mark I wish to make in the world it is to be a vehicle for the continuation of all that human beings have learned about co-creating community. There is nothing I can do anymore to mitigate to material impact I have made on the world. It is up to us now to ensure that during the change to come in the generations that follow our descendents have the to knowledg e and practice to live, work and love each other well. The quality of my children’s future will depend on, both metaphorically and literally, their ability to make music with others.
Late last night as Norah and I were trading songs after our day of making music with others she told me that she worked for a time in a Jewish geriatric hospice in Montreal. Her job was to sing with dying people, people who had survived the holocaust, people who only spoke Polish or Yoddish or French, languges that Norah did not speak. She would visit them and just sing, sometimes songs she didn’t even understand. And what she noticed was that, even with people who were on the verge of death, they would come to life when they sang with her. The beauty of singing with another woke up their hearts an reminded them that inthe present moment, racked with pain perhaps and a little fear and doubt, they were nevertheless alive to the call of present beauty.
I think, somehow, this my deepest work now: to simply find spaces in which we can find beauty and combat the despair of change we cannot control.
Listening to a nice talk by Gil Fronsdel tonight on intention. THis is intention from a Buddhist perspective, not from a new age perspective. the difference for me is that the former is intention that informs action, the later is a passive state that somehow manifests things. I practice the former.
From his talk, a couple of useful observations…
First, many people when they are asked to state their intention actually come up withe a negative intention: “To not repeat the mistakes of my parents, to be alone, to leave my job.” Such intentions are valid by don’t lead to action. If you find yourself considering an intention like this, Fronsdel counsels to reframe this as a positive intention by asking “Fine, then what? What will that get you” The key here is to cultivate action that is rooted in intention. To do that you need to find a positive, generative intention.
Second, Fronsdel talks about reframing “intention” as “dedication.” I like this partly as a way of moving away from what is becoming an empty word: intention. Fronsdel asks “What is your life dedicated to?” This question helps to frame an inquiry into one’s intention as an inquiry into one’s life that exists for others.
So, to what is your life dedicated?
Check this quote:
Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971
IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us.
Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what happens when we induce groove and confusion using rhythm, stepping and voice, and I was really struck with an exploration of the polarity between planning and doing.
One of the questions we were playing with was “What do you do with space?” The rhythmic pattern we were working with had moments of lots of space, and moments where several movements happened all at once. It was a kind of sprung rhthym, all carried over a steady beat. What I noticed was that in the spacious moments, I took time to get myself ready for the next burst of activity instead of resting in that spaciousness. The result was that, to the extent that my mind was living in the future, my body went there as well and I ended up often doing things AHEAD of the beat.
In other words there was so much information I was taking in, including information about what to do next, what to sing, how the polyrhythms worked, what else was going on in the room, that my attention to the present moment was erased and I had a hard time just DOING.
This polarity between planning and doing is familiar to me. When I meditate, and when my thoughts drift, they almost always drift to the future, to things I need to do or should be doing. I notice that this keeps me away from being in the present and actually paying attention to what is happening all around me.
In group settings, this imbalance can lead to me missing a whole bunch of information about where a group is at, if my mind is fixed on where we are going, or where we need to go.
By contrast, when I focus on the present, and on doing rather than planning, I am in balance. Balance in this case means that every part of my mind and body is HERE. Imbalance is when some part of your mind or body shifts elsewhere, and you very often topple in that case – physically or otherwise. Being present opens up the spaciousness of the present moment (what Harrison Owen calls “Expanding our Now“) and ironically opens many more possibilities and pathways for action.
So my learning from all of this is that information overload obscures attention, fills space and limits possibilities.
Think about that the next time you need to do a comprehensive environmental scan!