Finally settling into Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging. My partner has been hoarding it since it arrived a couple of months ago.
In the opening chapters, Block takes inspiration from the likes of John McKnight, Robert Putnam, Christopher Alexander and others to crate some basic patterns for collective transformation. These are beautiful and quite in line with the work I do and the things we teach through the Art of Hosting. In fact, I’ll probably add this list to our workshop workbook.
Here is the list, with my thoughts attached.
From John McKnight:
- Focus on gifts. Look at what people are willing to offer rather than what people are in need of.
- Associational life. There is great power in the associations that people form to come together to do good work
- Power in our hands. Who do you think is going to change things? In doing Open Space action planning, I sometimes make reference to the fact that there will not be an angel that parachutes in and saves us. It’s up to us to find the way to make things work.
From Werner Erhard:
- The power of language. What we say about things and people makes a huge difference. Speaking and listening (and therefore conversations) is the basis of changing things.
- The power of context. Contexts are the worldviews which we employ to see things. Powerful contexts enable powerful transformation. For example, in First Nations the context of self-government vs. Indian Act government represents a powerful context for community development.
- The power of possibility. Once a possibility is declared, it comes into being and with skillful invitation, work can organize around it.
From Robert Putnam:
- Work with bridging social capital. Social capital is the relatedness between citizens We express this through bonding social captial, which helps us find others like us, andbridging social capital which helps us find relations across groups. Bridging social capital is the holy grail that takes us from insular groups, to true communities.
From Christopher Alexander:
- Work with aliveness and wholeness. One of my favourite ways to think about work that changes minds is to ask “How does a forest change a mind?” How do you react in a forest? How does it happen so suddenly? Why do old growth forests leave a permanent mark on us? How can we transform minds like a forest does?
- Transformation as unfolding. What is known by the whole of a group or community cannot be exposed all at once. You have to journey to the centre of it, one small step at a time. As you go, you harvest more and more of it, and as it becomes visible, it accelerates the collective consciousness of itself.
From Peter Koestenbaum:
- Appreciating paradox. Paradoxes help us to see the creative tension that lies in complexity. Chaos and Order, Individual and collective, being and doing, work and relationships…all of these contribute to our understanding of the kinds of questions that take us to collective transformation.
- Choosing freedom and accountability. Freedom is not an escape from accountability. “the willigness to care for the whole occurs when we are confronted with our freedom, and when we choose to accepts and act on that freedom.”
- Accountability and committment. What I, and Harrison Owen, calls “passion and responsibility.” Don’t just ask what is important, ask what people are willing to do to make it come to pass.
- Learning from one another. Co-learning rather than experts preaching to students is the way to build the capacity for collective transformation.
- Bias towards the future. We leave the past where it is and focus on now, and the conditions that are arising to produce the futures we want.
- How we engage matters. Or, as we were fond of saying at VIATT, the system is the conversation. How we relate to each other in every instance IS the system.
From David Bornstein:
- Small scale, slow growth. Big things begin from very small ideas. Cultivating the Art of Calling, whereby we learn to issue and embody invitations, and find the people to work with who will bring these into being, is the key practice here.
From Allan Cohen:
- Emergent design. Everything is in flux, and constantly adapting. Ask why the organization hasn’t been moving naturally in the direction that it desires and convene conversations on what you discover. Feed those back to the whole and the course corrects. Cohen also says that he CAN herd cats…by tilting the floor. Deeper contexts often have more leverage.
I realize that I have just provide a precis of Peter’s first chapter, but it is such a cogent summary of all of these ideas, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to add thoughts and links to his synthesis.
I am lucky where I live. I have a house with a sleeping porch on the front of it, looking out over the ocean, free for the most part of bugs and deep and covered. Every summer I have slept outside there, and this summer, most of the rest of the family has joined me there. ince June 28, I haven’t slept inside and as the weather turns to fall, I can’t yet find a good reason for doing so. The rains have come and the winds are picking up, meaning that my sleeping bag and Thai cotton mattress gets a little wet, but nothing that can’t be dried in front of the fire in a half hour or so.
Sleeping outside brings us into intimate connection with the world. My house faces southeast, so I know which planets are up, when the dawn is and what kinds of winds are buffeting the inlet below us. I hear barred owls calling most nights, making a huge racket on full moons, and the deer prowl the slopes around me. In the morning the autumn dawn chorus consists of chickadees and steller’s jays looking for seed, while ravens towhees and flickers go about their business. From the lagoon a half mile from my house, Canada gees and gulls chatter in the morning air.
My friend Tenneson Woolf sent along a great article – nay a manifesto – on sleeping outside:
As our lives become more and more hectic, more “modern,” we spend less and less time outdoors – in nature’s clearinghouse.
It’s almost impossible to find the time. But given that we must sleep, sleeping outside – or at least next to an open window – helps us get a much-needed dose of nature every day. No, what I’m talking about can’t be added to grocery-store milk, like the essential “sunshine” vitamin, D. For us multitasker types, it’s the perfect solution, taking in the outdoors while sleeping. The outdoors is a lifeline. Our evolutionary molecules crave it. Children, especially, need it, and problem-solving adults can certainly benefit from it. It’s a simple solution to some of what ails us.
Summers are meant for sleeping outdoors, but the best way to adjust to your secret outdoor life in the dead of winter is to think of your bedroom as a sleeping room only. That way you can shut the door and let the temperature drop while you’re getting oxygenated without cooling off the rest of your house. A designated sleeping porch or loft is ideal. Pile on the bedding and get yourself as close to your window as you can. Let the snow, the wind and the rain spray you with nature’s sweepstakes. You’ll wake up a winner.
Tonight, gather up your dreams and head out – to the wilds of your own backyard and beyond, where the vast expanse of the universe awaits you.
The truth, for sure.
I am heading out on a mammoth trip today. My itinerary looks like this:Monday – drive to Port MacNeil on northern Vancouver Island
Tuesday – Facilitate community to community forum with North Island First Nations and local governments. When finished, drive back to Campbell River and jump on a plane. Fly to Vancouver, then Toronto then Ottawa.
Wednesday – Facilitate workshop in Ottawa with the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
Friday – Finish workshop and return to Vancouver
Saturday – Facilitate one day Open Space for the Ministry of the Attorney-General Family Court Committee. Return home Saturday night.
This is a little unusual for me, in that I usually don’t do a red eye flight across two thirds of the country. I know I will be tired, and I know I need to stay focused on these three jobs and what I am doing. And believe it or not, I woke up this morning deliciously anticipating the journey ahead.
For me, this kind of travel and work is a mindfulness practice. I use these journeys to be very mindful about where I am and what I am doing. Often, when I am en route, I don’t speak to other people at all, preferring to travel in silence, reading, listening to music or podcasts or writing. If I do speak it is only to be politie, get where I am going or ask for help. As a silent meditation I find travelling in this way to be incredible practice, and it brings me to the work I have to do with as much presence as I can. In general I don’t check my emails when I am on the road, preferring instead to give as much attention as I can to the work I have at hand. Fortunately I have my partner Caitlin Frost is back in our office, answering phone calls, sorting logistics with clients and flagging important emails for me. This is an incredible gift as it allows me to be on the road, safe, undivided and present for my clients.
Seeing travel as a meditation retreat for me shows up in many ways. For example I have a few practices I cultivate on a daily basis and being mindful means focusing on doing them in unfamiliar places with limited access to tools. I try to exercise everyday, and have developed several “hotel room” workouts, that can be done between queen sized beds in small roadside motels. These are 20-30 workouts focusing on strength, flexibility and cardio fitness. Of course, access to a weight room or a gym makes this easier, but it isn’t necessary. Sometimes, if I’m driving and I get tired I pull over and go through a circuit of push ups, sit ups and squats or I run through some of my taekwondo patterns to get the blood flowing and energize my body.
Eating is another area that becomes a mindfulness practice. Because it’s so hard to find good and healthy food on the road, I think carefully about everything that enters my body. Instead of defaulting to restaurants, I’ll often stop in to grocery stores and stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables, pre-mixed salads or healthy instant soups that can be made with only boiling water. Travelling does not have to mean bread, oil and potatoes.
Travelling offers several benefits to the emotional side of mindfulness practice as well. It is a rare trip when everything goes according to plan and delays, changes and inconveniences force me to be mindful of my emotional states and to practice equanimity with people, machines and other pieces of reality that are out of my control. Some of my favourite trips have been those which have gone horribly wrong, with missed connections, bad weather and few options. If I come through those with a minimum of anxiety, the journey and the return home seems sweeter for it.
Travel can be stressful because it breaks our routines and rhythms. We need to become completely dependant on our own resources, carrying everything we need with us. It forces us to make careful choices about what we take and what we do on the road. We have to live differently than we do at home and that forces us to pay more attention to what we are doing. THAT alone is a gift, for if we can use the opportunity to focus ourselves and work with our mind, we can not only travel better, but understand ourselves better as well.
Slow down, be careful and attentive and see what you learn about yourself.
As Marc’s conversation has unfolded at teh OSLIST, he dropped this lovely analogy about holding space into the mix today. Here’s what he does when people ask him why they pay him:
Usually I then refer to my memories living in West Africa. We mostly had a night watchman in our garden (in many ways the reason was also to give another person a job). They were always there, sitting under a tree, brewing tea and they were great to have a chat with – they knew everything that happened in the neighbourhood! But they never actually did something. And that was the point: you have a night watchmen BECAUSE YOU WANT THEM NOT HAVING ANYTHING TO DO and you have the great desire that they never ever will need to do anything – that was precisely the reason why you have (and paid!) them! They are “holding the night” – and your space to sleep free from worries. And you assume that their mere presence creates this safe space.That’s always how I understood – and explained – my role and the space that I hold as a facilitator. People (who have experienced African night watchmen) always understood…
Day three at Shambhala and I’m humming. The artists staged what I heard was an incredible improvisational performance today that took the idea of being together in a field to a whole new level. I was in a conversation with some Art of Hosting mates at the time that was alos about fields and we were cracking open some deep learning about the ways in which we work together as friends, but the upshot was the same.
At the faculty retreat last weekend I sat in with the artists and had a conversation that was about the kind of work that art makes possible. I posited the assumption that fields cannot be created without art, an assumption we explored both in conversation and with an improvisational piece. Today one of the artists in that conversation, Wendy Morris, told me that one of her takes on the rock balancing thing was that the rocks make visible the very fine lines of balance. In the same way, art can illuminate the fine and subtle dynamics in systems and in seeing them crystalized with beauty another level of awareness and possibility becomes visible. This is certainly true in my expereince using poetry and graphic recording to harvest meaning from conversational process.
I am learning this week to enter deeply into the practice of “process artist” and to invite other who might be deep practitioners of conversational arts to explore other forms as well and integrate it with their practice. It’s simply a way of seeing differently, and sense making in a way that invites collaborative beauty.
As a taste, my rock balancing student, Jean-Sebastien posted lovely video today which is worth a look – and yes this means you Thomas.