John Moore responds to my Dalai Lama posting with this gem:
I remember a teacher holding his hand out before me in a fist. “This is not a heart,” he said. Then he opened it fully. “And this is not a heart.”. Then he started to move it open-and-closed, to and fro. “This is a heart”.
Ken Wilber’s quadrants from Developing Leadership Capacity: Searching for the Integral
Those familiar with my work will know that a lot of what I do is informed by the models designed by Ken Wilber which explain an integrated approach to, well, everything. Wilber’s classic four quadrants model inspired Michael Herman’s quadrants which underpin his book Inviting Organization, and that book has informed a great deal of my own work.
So that’s the lineage.
I found an excellent paper today, Developing Leadership Capacity: Searching for the Integral, which translates Wilber’s work into some very useful questions and then describes leadership styles according to Spiral Dynamics, a system for characterizing cultural memes and styles.
All very esoteric, but if you are at all interested in using Wilber’s work in an organizational or community development context, I suggest you look at this paper and specifically the lists of questions which are designed to uncover the depth of leadership practice in all four quadrants. It is the most comprehensive list of these kinds of questions I have yet seen, and a nice compliment to a number of other questioning approaches I have worked with over the years, such as those Michael and I offer in our Open Space practice workshops.
Just spent a delightful afternoon with Rob Patterson and his wife Robin here on Bowen Island. Rob is from Prince Edward Island and is a friend of my old pal from Peterborough, Peter Rukavina.
We had a great afternoon wandering around Bowen and talking about a number of the subjects we have both been blogging recently, including a very cool conversation over lunch about transformation stories including Beowulf, the crucifixion story and the Ojibway creation story. We were struck by how many cultures use the image of water and a journey into water as a metaphor for the psychological journey towards transformation. It is striking how the image of fighting through a body of water, holding one’s breath and stopping yourself from drowning is so a propos to the work it takes to understand one’s truth in order to live one’s live with, as Robin put it “grace and ease.”
It’s always great to meet fellow webloggers face to face, and today was a real treat.
From whiskey river:
I thank God for most this
…..amazing
day; for the leaping greenly
…..spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
…..and for everything
which is natural, which is
…..infinite, which is yes.
— e.e. cummings
…..amazing
day; for the leaping greenly
…..spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
…..and for everything
which is natural, which is
…..infinite, which is yes.
— e.e. cummings
…continuing the theme of opening as an affirmation and connection to reality…
Dave Pollard on recovering our sensuousness:
So here we are, unable to remember the way home, unable to escape the prison, the solitary confinement into which our minds have been so seductively and systematically lured by the culture and language of civilization that now forms and informs the very neural structures of our brain. Only in art, in poetry, in wilderness, in music, and in the rare book that attempts to liberate us with those very abstract words and text-images that carried us away in the first place, those clumsy tools that are simply not up to the task, can we even hear the echoes of the world we have left behind.