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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m off to Estonia on Saturday to run an Art of Hosting workshop with Toke Moeller and Piret Jeedas. To say I’m excited is an understatement.
First, this is only the second trip to Europe I have made since I left the UK in 1981 after living there for three years. It’s interesting to see how things have changed in Europe over 30 years. On this trip I am intending to connect in London, during a brief stopover at Heathrow, with one of my school buddies from those days, who I last saw when I was just 13 years old.
But the real highlight of the trip will be the time spent in Estonia, a nation that has one of the largest traditional repertoires of folk songs. Only a million people live there but there are tens of thousands of songs that are shared and sung by everyone. So important are these songs that it was through music that a cultural movement was born in the 1980s that led to Estonian independence from the Soviet Union without a single drop of blood being shed. There is a terrific new eponymous movie about The Singing Revolution which we watched last night as a family. The essence of the film was that Estonian culture, language and tradition formed the basis for a slow and patient awakening of cultural sovereignty and pride that led to mass meetings and gatherings, and the singing of traditional songs of affection for the nation. From that current flowed the courage and will to establish political sovereignty that resulted in the self-liberation of Estonia from more that 50 years of occupation by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
To offer a workshop on the Art of Hosting powerful conversations in a nation that has done that seems a trifle hubristic. But the Estonian story is one that lauds the power of vision, courageous commitment and self-government and it provides both a tremendous ground for our work and inspiring lessons for those of us whose nations are still labouring under colonial administrations. With so many First Nations in Canada clinging to language, culture and music, what I am about to learn in Estonia can provide me with some important lessons about how cultural expression, skillful dialogue and courageous participatory leadership can result in profound social and community transformation.
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A long flight necessitated by a late date travel change, had my flying through Chicago yesterday, getting a quick connection and beating my bags to Minneapolis. MPL is the second nicest airport in North America after Vancouver. Lovely layout, good food options and easy to get around. Also friendly United ground crew who got my bag to me with no problems.
I’m staying downtown, reached easily by the LRT from the airport. Downtown cores never give you the pure sense of a place, but I’ll be here a week, moving over to St. Paul tomorrow for a couple of nights in a hotel and then staying with a friend this weekend, during which we’ll play some music and hang out.
Three little gigs on tap here this week, and one meeting. Tomorrow I’m working at a conference presenting some experiences to grantmakers who fund child and family services on what it is like to work in Native communities. Following that a two day mini Art of Hosting for some people associated with Native Americans in Philanthropy, working with my friends Jerry Nagel and David Cournoyer. On the weekend, Jerry and I will do some design work for a state wide leadership initiative he is involved in. I’ll round out the weekend with music with my friend Norah Rendell, a great musician who I have played with for years, and who moved down here to play and teach with her partner Brian Miller.
So good work and good fun in a city new to me.