The vacation in Hawaii has ended for me and I’m now somewhere over the middle of the United States on the third leg of a four leg journey that sees me flying from Hilo to Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Johannesburg. I arrive in South Africa Monday morning in time to recover and help design and deliver and Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with friends from REOS Social Innovation. It’s exciting to be heading to South Africa, the birthplace of my wife, and therefore one of the ancestral homelands of my kids. Exciting to be working with Marianne Knuth and her team as well, and I’m interested in how the Art of Participatory Leadership and the art of harvesting unfolds in a multicultural African context. Expecting lots of learning as usual and I’ll blog and harvest as is possible.
So, inflight wireless, homeopathic letlag remedies and movies keep me going. Interested to see what recovery from a 12 hour time change will be like!
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.
Writing from Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island which is about as far west as you can go without leaving North America. I’m here this week to run an Art of Hosting training with a number of community coordinators for 14 Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities around Clayoquot, Barkley and Kyuquot Sounds. We’re going to be learning together about methods for community engagement and participatory leadership and all of it based very deeply in the concept of Tsawalk (from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “heshook ish tsawalk” meaning “everything is one.”)
Last night I drove out here across the spine of Vancouver Island, from Departure Bay on the east side, through Port Alberni and along the shore of Sproat Lake, through the pass and down to the west coast. It’s a landscape of high mountains, big trees, big clearcuts and huge beaches. Everything is scaled so big that you can’t help feel small and humbled in this landscape. And to beat it all, last night I chased the sun across the island and it beat me to the open Pacific. By the time I made the turn for Tofino it was pitch dark and the sky was ablaze with stars and the Geminid meteor showers littered the heavens with fireballs and frequent streaks of light.
The first time I ever cam to BC, in 1989, I came here, or more precisely, I stayed a week in Heshquiaht, on the north edge of Clayoquot Sound, visiting with my friend Sennen Charleson and his family. Sennen died a few years ago in a road accident in northern BC, and I can feel his presence here in land from which he spent many years in exile, but which always called him strongly. There is a riotous complexity to the rainforests of the west coast, and a presence unlike anywhere else on earth. Everything is quiet, knowing that you cannot make more noise than a storm from the ocean or the clatter of rain through the canopy. Human noises disappear here, like a the ripples from a pebble tossed into surf.
I’m excited to be designing a three day learning experience here with some apprenticing mates, Norinne Messer and Laura Loucks. We are using the framework of tsawalk for our work together, a concept that is deeply rooted in the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worldview and that influences everything from resource management to spiritual ceremony to the role of community. It is forming the basis of a unique partnership that will produce a marine use plan for Clayoquot and Barkley Sounds, and over the next few days, we will look at how tsawalk informs our work with communities, influences design choices for community engagement and self-development.
One of the processes we will be using is based on the Nuu-Cha-Nulth spiritual practice of “oosumich” which is a form of prayer and self-knowledge that helps us to access knowledge from the interior worlds of spiritual source, individual persoanlity and community. It is a form of investigative methodology that is complimentary to science, which examines and makes sense of the external world. Working together with these methods, we can come to a holistic understanding of the world, a practical expression of tsawalk. Oosumich is a spiritual practice, intended to connect with the spiritual aspects of the world that we can also understand materially. Oosumich itself is a secret and a scared practice, but what we know of it can be used to work in leadership learning and process design.
Some of the basic values that are involved in the expression of tsawalk are aphey (kindness), isaak (respect) and he-xwa (balance). As I sit here designing today, I am thinking very carefully about how these three basic show up in hosting work. Some of my preliminary thoughts are:
aphey
- being helpful for the common good (“hupee-ee-aulth”)
- paying attention to good relations and increasing more of them (an appreciative approach to growing community)
- ask for what you need, offer what you can (PeerSpirit Circle principles that apply to Nuu-Chah-Nulth life from the way in which people help each other with work, food gathering and preparation and ceremony)
isaak
- every voice has it’s place. When we hear a voice of dissent or confusion, it is not out place to judge it, but rather to figure out how it is related to the whole. If tsawalk is the principles, there can be nothing outside of that, and so all voices have a place.
- all creation has common origin and we pay respect to that common origin by acknowledging the relationships that are present in the world.
he-xwa
- balance comes from having a core, which can be a purpose or a solid centre or a ground
- the world is a constant balance between energies that create and those that destroy. Balance is not a static point in time, but a dynamic practice. We have to learn to be sensitive to imbalances both in the external world and in the internal world. Where there is too much red tide, people notice, and they know it means something is out of balance with the marine environment. When there is too much chaos in a meeting, it means that people are confused and more order and clarity has to be found.
All of these ideas form the basis for some teaching, for some play and learning. I’m thrilled to be here.
Leaving Tallinn this afternoon, we headed for Estonia’s west coast to a retreat centre on the edge of the Matsalu Nature Preserve. This is a lovely house, built by German Churches originally for young people to use for education, but it hosts conferences and nature retreats now and is a popular spot with birders who come in the fall and spring to watch the migrations along the Baltic flyway. We’re very close to the seashore here.
Estonia reminds me a lot of southern Ontario, even though we’re at 58 degrees north, almost as far north as the Yukon border. The land is flat out here, with stands of deciduous trees in the wetter parts and scrubby pine forests in the drier and sandier areas. The whole region seems like a big glacial sand deposit. You’d think you were anywhere in the southern Great Lakes basin except for the odd 400 year old church and stone barns or the more recent, and more run down former collectivist farms. We passed a big one just before arriving here near the town of Haapsalu that had its own power plant and barracks for the farm workers. While Tallinn seems to have built over the scars of the Soviet years, there are still structures that remind one of how recently the country was devoted to collectivist agricultural production and TV communications in service of the Communist dream.
Out here in the country though, history takes on a decidedly geological flavour, and the history of humans coming and going over the land seems to disappear into the drizzle and the forest and the call of little winter birds in the bush and gulls on the beach.
Our Art of Participatory Leadership workshop begins tomorrow.
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is cool and quiet this morning. There is a stiff breeze off the Baltic Sea and the sky is grey and overcast. I’m ensconced in a cozy cafe on the Old Town Square that bears a striking resemblance to a hobbit hole, drinking strong coffee nibbling chocolate and eating a late breakfast of a spiced meat pastry that is like a cross between a croissant and a samoza.
It’s a lot of travelling to get here from Vancouver. My adventure began with a bracing water taxi ride from Bowen Island to Granville Island in Vancouver, lumping through a southeasterly wind on Saturday evening. I hopped a British Airways 747 bound for Heathrow and populated largely by old Sikh men and women. Turns out 180 of us on the YVR-LHR flight were heading on to Delhi. It was a good flight, watching the surprisingly good remake of the taking of Pelham 1-2-3 and the surprisingly drawn out Australia. I managed to sleep in all the right places and stay awake in all the right places, and the jetlag was almost completely taken care of.
In London we landed in a bad squall which set the plane into a quiet desperate prayer session, but once we pulled up at the gate, the storm had moved on and an incredible rainbow graced the new Terminal 5. I ran for a connection, got stuck behind a huge group of Japanese travellers going through security and made my connection as the door was closing. The Finnair flight to Helsinki was fun; the video screen showed a shot from the nose of the aircraft on take off and landing, so it was like watching a real time live flight simulator. Not much to see in the dark, but perhaps the flight home will reveal more.
In Helsinki I had a bit of a layover, so I wandered around the airport. It was after 9:00pm when we got in and the late hop to Tallinn didn’t leave until 11:45, so I caught up on Skype – Estonia’s most famous high tech export! – with friends in North America who were beginning their Sundays. Helsinki airport is a lot like Ottawa’s airport. Everywhere I go, northern cities strike a home chord with me.
Noting that the further away I got from Canada, the more English was spoken on planes, I boarded a Finnair commuter flight to Tallinn, which is a short 35 minute jump over the Gulf of Finland. The two cities are only 85 km apart, almost as close as Vancouver is to Victoria. During the Soviet era, Estonians tuned into Finnish TV and radio all the time and were constantly exposed to western culture over the air.
Arriving in Tallinn at 12:30 I was met by my friends Piret Jeedas and Robert Oetjen, with whom Toke Moeller and I are running an Art of Participatory Leadership workshop this week. We drove through town, which in the dark reminded me a little of Winnipeg, and I arrived at my hostel accomodation in the old town. We woke up the landlady who hadn’t been told of my arrival. She was sweet and got me settled in and I quickly fell asleep.
I’m pretty good at dealing with jetlag, but today was a masterful triumph. I awoke at 8am refreshed and ready to go. Today is my day to explore Tallinn a little and hang out and relax. I have spent the morning walking around the old town, seeing some of the places that featured prominently in Estonian history, especially the Toompea, which is the Estonian Parliament. In 1991, a Russian minority protest against Estonian independence outside the Toompea almost became violent when the group broke into the castle and caused alarm amongst the Estonian politicians who were besieged inside. The political leaders called for Estonian citizens to come to their aid and a huge crowd showed up to barricade the Russians inside the castle courtyard. When it came time to let them go, the crownd simply parted and the Russians left. Anger and the threat of violence had been met with non-violence and song, and the singing revolution continued to work its remarkable magic. Here is a video of that day.
This morning I walked around the area that is shown in that video, the parking lot outside the Toompea where the Estonians rallied after the Russians broke in. Just knowing the recent history of that place deeply tuned me in to the sense of Estonia. For a long time I have been drawn to this place, sensing a connection both in the northern nature of the country and the indigenous struggle for freedom from hundreds of years of colonization from Danes, Swedes, Germans and Russians. Estonians I think have always craved their own self-government and cultural sovereignty and it’s clear being here that given the chance to take hold of their country, they have chosen an identity that is fiercely national without being nationalistic, and open minded to the rest of the world and especially the west.
Walking around here it is hard to imagine what it was like when Tallinn was a Soviet city on the Baltic. Near to where I am staying is the old KGB headquarters, a building that is still held in contempt by Estonians. When the Soviet Union was in control here tens of thousands of people were exiled to Siberia, imprisoned or killed, and the KGB and its predecessors took care of all of that. The fact that a mere 25 years ago, writing this blog post would be a dangerous prospect for a Canadian visitor is a testament to how far Estonia has come in embracing democratic freedoms and human rights.
One morning of walking around obviously does not make for a complete picture, and for sure there are lots of complex questions and conditions here with the economy, questions of European union, dynamics between ethnic minorities and relations to Russia, poverty, exploitation and all of the problems that come with capitalism, but the overall sense here is that Estonia has struck a balance that reminds me a lot of Canada. Estonians have lived on this coast as long as Skwxwu7mesh people have lived in Howe Sound – for 9000 years. Language and culture is intact, thriving even amongst the ruins of castles and TV towers built by those who have sought control of this country. Hanging out here, in a hobbit hole coffee shop on the old town square, it is clear that despite it all, they have survived.