Today in our planning for the 2009 Food and Society gathering, one of our young core team members made a bold declaration. She agreed to step up to be a target for any blame that might be generated during our work. When I later asked her out of which practice her commitment came, she said it was from the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong mind training, in which one of the slogans is “Drive all blames into one.”
Trungpa Rinpoche comments on that slogan:
The text says “drive all blames into one”. the reason you have to do that is because you have been cherishing yourself so much… Although sometimes you might say that you don’t like yourself, even then in your heart of hearts you know that you like yourself so much that you’re willing to throw everybody else down the drain, down the gutter. You are really willing to do that. You are really willing to let somebody else sacrifice his life, give himself away for you. And who are you, anyway?
It was remarkable to hear my young friend utter that line with such clarity and conviction in a room of power and experience which was tasked with designing this incredibly important gathering. Remarkable, but not at all out of character for the six young (20 somethings) people that are working with us on the core team. We are lucky to have them.
John Dumbrille on our recent efforts here on Bowen Island:
That self governance will be better enabled using web tools is probable. After all, there are economic drivers (‘more for less’) propelling it. But probable success factors are all about money and efficiency and intention, spirit and design. Thinking the litmus test is – does this BOWEGOV etc help people come home to themselves. How to measure this may be ‘happy’ indices, or, put another way – ‘spirit of giving/sharing’ indices.
I am dedicated to the face to face. Inasmuch as these tools bring us into generous relationship with each other, I say yay! And they do that in spades.
Tenneson Woolf from a harvest poem called How Are You Navigating in the Time of Dramatic Change?:
I sound like I don’t know what I am doing, but I do know.
I find my way in the immediately infront, the next simple elegant step.
The next simple elegant step describes my approach to action. Recently, in our little consulting firm we have adopted a project status process that involves writing down only the next step for each of our projects. When you take the to do list and write it as one thing to do only, one elegant next step, it invites consciousness and beauty and elegance and simplicity to the work. So I am becoming more conscious about filling in the little box that says “Next step” and taking a moment each time to find the clarity that is needed for that next step to invite more.
Navigating this drama with intention, consciousnes and invitation. Creating more of all three.
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.