For years Peter Levine, a moral/political philosopher who teaches at Tufts University, has been a must-read for me for his musings on civic engagement, democracy, policy, history and philosophy. Today he celebrates 20 years of blogging with the release of “Cuttings: a book about happiness” that is a collection of his collected blog posts on “Happiness” which is so much more than that title implies. The book is a set of reflections on philosophical texts, religious scriptures, and poetry, Buried in the text is a little observation that I suspect says something about who he is:
So we have a model of the humane and sensitive educated person as one who has been
— Peter Levine, Cuttings: A book about happiness v1.0, p. 20
habituated by the reading of moving stories to be empathetic and thus to show mercy or
otherwise depart from harsh decisions.
I have never met this person in real life, but his character shines through his deep and considered blog posts, and this collection is a lovely gift to savour.
Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week.
Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them.
The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at my best. And that’s added on top of the persistent and low level background radiation that comes from the feeling that the world is slowly coming apart on this part of the planet and we are collectively ill-equipped to deal with it.
It hasn’t left me pessimistic, but I have noticed that I’m sad at what we have lost, which most of all appears to be the collective capacity to DO SOMETHING about the long term prospects for our planet and the community of living things that occupy it. as irrational as that thought is, because truthfully, it has been that way for my whole life, nevertheless, there is a feeling of loss. I’ve always described myself as an optimist because I believe that there is always something better we can do or embody, but the general prognosis needs power and wealth to radically change directions, and increasingly, I’m not confident that will happen. And so we push on.
Work
My work is changing, and has done throughout the pandemic. In the past I did much more face to face and one off facilitation work and delivered teaching through Art of Hosting workshops, for which I travelled the world. As I get older, I am more interested in teaching and supporting younger facilitators and so there is much more teaching now and one-to-one coaching and we are also taking work that is larger in scope than facilitating single meetings, in which we are focused on longer term support for leaders and organizations who want to be more participatory and more engaged with meaningful work. I like this as it means we develop longer term relationships with a few clients and are able to see the results of our work together over time. Additionally most of this work continues to be online, which suits me well as I have become more of a homebody and more introverted in the last three years. I do love face to face work, but as I get older I find it much more tiring, and I appreciate the ability to deliver quality content to folks and then turn off my computer and go to the garden or play guitar for an hour.
In 2023 I will turn 55 and I have a strong commitment that on my 55 birthday we will begin the process to scaling back and only working four days a week. We have been planning on this for a while, and I’m really looking forward to this shift. I feel like I need it for all kinds of reasons. In my calendar starting June 13, every Friday for the rest of my life has a recurring event that says “Fridays off for the rest of my life.”
This year Harvest Moon which consists of Caitlin Frost and myself along with our stellar assistant Laura O’Neil, had 27 clients. Many of these were larger projects working within large organizations and involving a lot of teaching and capacity building to support leadership and organizational change. We do this with a set of tools and practices that include participatory facilitation methods from Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development approaches, Participatory Narrative Inquiry, complexity work and personal practices for rigorous inquiry on limiting beliefs. This year we packaged these into bespoke programs in complexity focused participatory leadership for the Executive levels and senior leadership of a major university, a Crown corporation, an Indigenous government, a national labour union and one or two smaller organizations. We embedded several three day Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership workshops in these settings, and also used our course material we have been developing around complexity and personal leadership practices to complement the strategic conversations that we hosted. We have written four extensive workbooks for these programs and this might well turn into something more formal in the years ahead.
We amplified all of this work with story collections primarily using NarraFirma to gather stories and PNI to design sense-making and strategic interventions. This last capacity has become key to our work now and I have now run upwards of 30 story collection and sense-making projects through NarraFirma since the pandemic began. Although we have become really good at working with this material online, this work is most powerful in person, and it is one of the things I am looking forward to doing more face to face.
Partners
Over the past year we have worked with many partners and it is my usual practice to name them. They live in five different countries (Canada, USA, Netherlands, Moldova and Australia) and working with them makes it possible for all of us to do amazing work together. My gratitude to them all.
- Harvest Moon partners Caitlin Frost and Laura O’Neil
- Tatiana Glad
- Meribeth Deen
- Bhav Patel
- Kris Archie
- Kelly Foxcroft Poirier
- Tiaré Jung
- Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions
- Phill Cass
- Ciaran Camman
- Amanda Fenton
- Quin Buck
- Corrina Keeling
- Jodi Sanford
- Kinwa Bluesky
- Chad Foulks
- Geoff Brown
- Teresa Posakony.
Teaching
This year I offered several open enrolment courses with colleagues.
- Hosting Powerful Conversations: Introduction to World Cafe and Open Space Technology through teh Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, a course I have offered annually since 2009.
- Complexity from the Inside Out. A course that Caitlin and I have put together and that combines our joint bodies of work assembled over the past 20 years of working with complex systems and challenges. We ran two cohorts in 2021.
- The Art of Hosting. Every year since 2004 we have offered this program on Bowen Island, and in 2020 we offered it online. After missing 2021, this past year we offered it in person in Vancouver with Kris Archie and Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier (who sadly couldn’t be with us for the actually program days). We’ll repeat that again in 2023.
- Kelly and I did do a course together though, which was really magic. Transforming Power, offered alongside our friends at Beehive Productions, used Nuu-Chah-Nulth lenses to look at the power we have and how we wield it. I loved this course.
- Also through Beehive I offer courses on Chaordic Design, Harvesting and Sense-making and Hosting in Complexity all of which are available to take on demand.
Learning
In addition to everything I learned from teaching these courses I also enrolled in two important programs myself to deepen my own practice.
- Weaving It In: Making evaluation part of your work. This was an inaugural offering from my close colleague Ciaran Camman and combined their decades of evaluation experience with solid complexity and participatory practice. A nice combination of theory and practice and experiential learning.
- Co-Resolve introduction to Deep Democracy with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson. After about 20 years of Sera challenging me to become friends with conflict, I finally came to study with her and this was a great course. The biggest shift in me is seeing how my conflict-averse tendencies have shifted from conflict resolution to what I’m calling “conflict preservation.”
- This next year I have signed up for Cynthia Kurtz’s deep dive into Participatory Narrative Inquiry which is a 20 week long practicum during which my colleague Augusto Cuginotti and I will be running a PNI project with a client. I haven’t done any learning like this at this sort of scale since University. I’m looking forward to it.
Living on the web
My first website was a collaborative writing project with my old friend Chris Heald called Stereotype back in 1995. It was a proto-blog in the style of suck.com, which even 25 years later is a remarkable documentation of the shift of life from physical to online. So I’ve lived through a lot of iterations of web life. This past year I started a long wean away from the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and began writing again on my blog with more frequency. I started a Mastodon account and have used that as an opportunity to rethink how I have compartmentalized my life online to suit various audiences. For the most part I have maintained a professional kind of look here and on my @chriscorrigan twitter account and I have devoted hours and hours of time to soccer life through my @salishsea86 twitter account. That is all changing slowly. I maintain some twitter accounts for the supporters group of the soccer team I co-own, but otherwise, I think everything will eventually be centralized back here with micro-posts on Mastodon. I will republish links to these posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter as usual.
I’m slightly looking at LinkedIn again as there is some interesting professional content there that used to be published on blogs, but as much as possible I am integrating interesting content into my feeds at NetNewsWire. That is where I will be doing most of my reading, as the endless scroll of twitter and facebook are no long giving much value and Instagram is useless for my life, other than keeping up with our footballers who are half my age who only post there!
Avocations
This year has had three big commitments outside of family and work. As a founding member of the TSS Rovers Supporters’ Trust, I have spent the year selling shares to 351 co-owners of Canada’s first community-owned semi-pro soccer team. We have done some remarkable things this year including winning a League Cup on the men’s side and qualifying us for Canada’s national championship, the Voyageurs Cup, which is, mindbogglingly, the pathway to the FIFA Club World Cup. We will play a meaningful match in the first round of that competition in April against a Canadian Premier League professional team and the only thing better than actually getting this far would be effecting a giant killing in April. It has bee a remarkable journey all it’s own.
Another responsibility that I have devoted myself too is chairing the Board of the Rivendell retreat centre, a contemplative centre on Bowen Island. We have come through a pandemic and stayed afloat and are now beginning to engage in active fundraising for our longer term sustainability. This role is part of the way I live out my contemplative spiritual practice alongside a commitment to leading worship once a month at our little United Church on Bowen Island. I love that job. It helps us to afford our part time Minister and I get to dive deep into topics and scripture readings that are close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll post my sermon notes here in the new year if that’s of interest to you.
Music is my love and my third commitment. I have been singing with a renaissance choir doing medieval liturgical music and madrigals and studying jazz guitar on my own. My guitar teacher sadly died in April, and I miss him dearly. We had only a few lessons this year as he grew sicker. Learning jazz alone with only you tube videos and fake books is incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding and I’m hoping this year I might be able to study with another teacher and finally get a chance to play with folks.
Life on an island
I have lived on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) now for 21 years and seen many changes over that time. I have blogged about living here for most of that time. These days we are facing a huge population turnover and some rapid growth which has introduced lots of new folks to the place and radically changed the culture. Community events are returning which is essential if we are to repair the cohesion as a community that has been lost through the pandemic. I feel that we are fragmented in many ways, and we are being confronted with some very challenging situations including a ferry system that is crumbling under global staffing shortages, strains on our little island infrastructure, economic pressures from living in one of the most expensive places on earth with no level of government committed to radical change, tourism pressures and mindset that sees the places increasingly as an under served and under resourced suburb rather than a rural community. These changes have been steadily occurring over the past number of decades but social media and a lack of face to face contact has made them more pressing.
In the natural world, the big news is the tremendous numbers of humpback whales and orcas that have returned to our seas, and there are almost daily sightings of these mega-fauna. Ten years ago that was unimaginable. While that is happening, we have also witnessed some extreme weather, including long hot droughts in the summer which are the biggest threats to the place. Things change here and being grounded in place means that one can be a long-eyed witness of it all.
So that is the state of play on Christmas Eve 2023. At the end of a year in which I was not at my best, after three years of living in a strange new world, entering the half way point of my 50s. Thank you for sharing this year with me. Say hi. I hope we can cross paths next year.
In the Art of Hosting world we have a few shared core teachings that show up in nearly all the learning workshops that happen. At some point we talk about complexity – we usually explore the Chaordic Path as a simple introduction into complexity – and we always touch on the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting.
Back in 2014 I was doing a project with the United Church of Canada looking at the different levels of their structure in British Columbia and imagining what they could also be. If there is one thing that Churches have consistently done from the beginning it is that they adopt new forms. At the moment the United Church, and many other mainline progressive Christian denominations, are going through a massive shift, probably the biggest one since the Reformation. And it’s affecting everything.
So as I was doing this consulting work I started meeting communities of people who were asking how could they live through these transitions. Not survive them necessarily, but go with the transformation that was happening. As a part of the work I was doing I started offering talks and workshops based in the Art of Hosting, but wrapped in the theology of the United Church, becasue it turns out that having a way to understand complexity and to host life community is both necessary in struggling churches AND is pretty much the basis of Christian practice.
Now for those who don’t know, the United Church of Canada is a progressive, liberal Protestant denomination committed to radical inclusion and social justice. I was raised in that Church and at one point had my heart set on becoming a minister in that Church. My own spiritual practice is grounded in contemplative Christianity and I am an active member of the Bowen Island United Church where I help lead worship and preach one Sunday a month so we can give our paid minister a break.
That is just context to help you understand the theology behind this talk.
This talk was a keynote for the Northern Presbytery of British Columbia annual meeting from 2014. That year the churches of northern BC were gathering in Prince George to be together and practice being a bigger community. They invited me to come and speak on the work I was doing around community building and I chose to share the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice and I relished the chance to share these ideas using stories and teachings from scripture.
So if you work with Churches or Christian religious communities and you are interested in the way the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice basically help us use the teachings of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel in practice to build community, click here and have a listen.
“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.”
— from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros
I love writing born of direct experience, born of the insight of a moment, or generated from the passing inspiration of the glint of sunlight on the sea seen through an open window. I love writing that arises from the quiet encounter with spirit or the contemplation of a mind that finally slows down and stretches out. That is writing of authentic voice or even the super-voice that all writers know, the voice we chase for its clarity and ease. It sometimes takes a long pounding away at the keyboard or days of scribbled lines before that voice arises somewhere below consciousness. In that moment you become merely a vehicle for it, in service to something. Your word choice become less ham-fisted, the cadence of the words more natural, like a jazz musician, you become open, trading fours with the muse, offering a lick of style or form and being rewarded with an image or a connection that you could never see before.
I’m enjoying A Philosophy of Walking. It is a testament to obliquity in the arts and philosophy, about the way a walk frees the mind and opens the heart. Today I’m heading out on y first work trip since February 15 2020 and I’m appreciating the way my thinking slows down even as my body is in the stop and go rhythm of ferry travel. There is spaciousness, time to kill, time to read or write or just peer out at the sea and look for whales or sea lions. Travelling on the coast means moving at the speed of the ferry, and the best way to do that is to travel on foot, at a human pace, free of the frustrations of being confined to a car, presented with options at every turn; a crossword, a book, an album, a blog post, a nap.
Have a read this weekend of some cool things I’ve found on the web. I’ll see what ideas and thoughts bubble up from this little trip to Vancouver Island.
- The Limitations of “Performance.” With a great quote from Tim Galloway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”
- Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis. An account of a radically open community development approach from Tunisia called Tamkeen. Lots in this piece to think about. Ht: Marcus Jenal, whose newsletter always delivers fantastic stuff.
- The Northern Ireland Assembly met, this time with simultaneous interpretation of the languages of English, Irish and Ulster Scots. More on these languages and dialects in Ulster on this beautiful video playlist from the Open University
- The Sultans of String record “The Power of the Land,” a poem by Duke Redbird set to some great music and visuals of some pretty impressive landscapes, including, at 1:36, a view of Nexlelexwem/Bowen Island and the south end of At’lka7tsem/Howe Sound, which I live.
- A discussion of Orthodox Christianity and theosis within the natural world, courtesy of Dave Pollard’s monthly link post.
- A fantastic list of mostly books on encountering silence in the Christian Contemplative tradition from Carl McColman’s blog.
- Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith on the history and practice of Loving Accountability
Enjoy your weekend as we move towards midsummer. I heard my first Swainson’s Thrush today, which means the better part of the season has begun.
This morning the wind and rain continue here in the islands of the south coast of British Columbia. It has been a wet fall and winter – perhaps the wettest since the time of the Flood stories – and this is the coldest May we’ve had for a long time, which brings its own hazards. It’s all down to an extended La Nina event that pipes cool water into the north Pacific and keeps the air masses cold and turbulent, resulting in reliable patterns of convection, instability and therefore precipitation and windy weather weather.
I live in a very rainy part of the world, and so to really love living here, one has to love the rain. This morning as I took my coffee to sit by the sea, I was struck by just how immersed I was in water. The sea of course, which bathes the shoreline and brings all kind of nutrients into our inlet. The creek beside me, channelling the rain from the mountain into the bay, delivering different nutrients back to the shore line. The rain that was falling into my coffee cup, spattering against my hood. And my breath, precipitating in small clouds that echoed their larger cousins across the channel, covering the mountains on the mainland. An entire symphony of sound all played on the same instrument.
For me, actually, water is my favourite image of God. If you are a spiritual or religious person, your engagement with the Divine is of course fraught with reductionist peril. As Lao Tzu wrote in the very first line of a book about the Tao, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” It’s a disclaimer. He says, “look, everything I am about to write here isn’t the things I am actually writing about, so take that under advisement.” One must be very cautious talking about images of God, the Creator, the Divine. Every name severly limits your experience of that which you are trying to talk about. Whatever name or image you have is like trying to watch Barcelona FC play through a tiny keyhole, in the outside door of the Camp Nou.
And yet, the image that works best for me is “water.” It brings life, and it can sweep it away. It can induce terror and soothe the soul. One can go for a hair raising boat trip from which you barely escape alive and then heal yourself with a soothing cup of tea and a bath. Water also has a characteristic of non-duality which gives it an important characteristic as it relates to my spiritual practice. As our atmosphere is made of water vapour, and so are we, it is true to say that “I am in the water and the water is in me.”
To end, here is a poem by William Stafford that I used in our fifth Complexity from the Inside Out course this morning, borrowed from a blog post by my buddy Tenneson. It points towards this non-dual whole I am talking about.
Being a Person
William Stafford
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.