Sitting in the circle on the last day of our learning village here in Castle Statenberg in Slovenia. These are my initial impressions I am leaving her with.
I came to this place with this community to spend deep time with friends face to face. I came to make art, to sing, and to be a participant in the experience. I craved the freedom of being able to spend long periods of time with old friends and long periods of time investing in new friends as well. For me nothing replaces the power of spending personal time with another human. It allows me to draw on a well of relationship even as we stay connected over time and distance.
When I arrived I was asked from the heart if I would step into to the hosting team, to fill the space left by two of the hosts who couldn’t make it. I agreed, without knowing really what would be involved. Of course there was the role of sensing and holding the centre of the gathering, but this was difficult for me as I had prepared myself to come with my own purpose, and I wasn’t a part of the planning or the hosting team. It was hard to find a way into the culture of the team, and that combined with being drawn away to tend to my partner Caitlin who was sick and the needs of my kids who were craving good family time meant that I couldn’t be full time devoted to the centre.
These journeys away from the centre however opened my eyes to what was happening around the margins of the gathering. There were all kinds of experiences unfolding and all kinds of desires being met quite apart from what was being formally hosted. So I spent a lot of time with people on the edge of the circle, recognizing of course that they weren’t at all on an edge but rather right at the centre of something different.
What emerged here was what emerges in any village. Many circles of activities happen, each the centre of it’s own little world, each feeling important in it’s own right. No circle was more important than any other, not even the core hosting circle. The circle that was the most important was the one of the land and the building and the local community. It was here that the real hosting was going on.
Slovenia is a magical little country. If you look for it on a map you will sometimes see it and sometimes you can’t see it at all. If you were to travel the coast from Italy to Croatia, you would pass through Slovenia only for a few minutes. It seems to appear when it is needed and recede into the distance when it is not. Of course it was a part of the former Yugoslavia, but I can’t recall ever hearing about it during the Balkan Wars. It seemed to quietly disappear during that time only to emerge later in it’s own right.
Slovenia was the real host for this gathering, and more precisely, the sharply rolling hills and valleys of Terra Parzival, the land of Parcival, the knight who undertook the quest for the Holy Grail. The Grail castle, Castle Borl was the place at which, in a gathering more than 10 years ago, the Art of Hosting community was really born. Borl is currently in a dangerous state of disrepair, but I visited there two days ago and got a sense of the reason why that castle was able to hold such magical energy. it is situated on a high bench over looking a big river and the plains of the territory. The view extends for many miles all around. It is a places that hosts the long coming and going of quests and journeys. THat is one of the qualities of this place.
Stantenberg itself, the castle we have been at this week, os another story. Formerly the summer house of a wealthy Austrian family, it is seeing a rebirth under the heartfelt guidance of Franc and a team of local people who have begun to restore the building so it can be used to host concerts and art shows and gatherings like ours. to improve the accommodations, village families sponsored a room and came to paint and repair and stock them with furniture so that we could stay here during our time. Each room was lovely restored by a person or a family and we hosted by that.
This spirit of giving permeated our gathering. Because the task for getting Statenberg ready was so huge, Franc ran out of time to restore and old chapel in the building that had been the victim of many fires and many decades of neglect. The chapel walls were rotting and falling apart and the floor was covered with 50 cms of dirt and debris. Franc began to clean it by taking 148 wheelbarrows of dirt out, but he had hardly made a dent. On our first day one of our participants had the idea that working together we could clean that chapel in a week. It truly seemed impossible, even with 100 of us helping out.
But Bertram filled the 149th wheelbarrow and many joined him. At some point early on the kids and youth here got it in their minds that this is where they would practice. They had tired easily of the adults precious talk of changing the world and the gathered through the week to lead us all in doing hours and hours of work to get the chapel cleaned. My daughter Aine and her friends carried hundreds of wheelbarrows of dirt and stone out and by yesterday morning, the chapel floor was clean and people were beginning to beautify it. Last night we had a little ceremony to honour the building. We invited the villagers from Makole to join us and we all took little candles and stood in the chapel, bringing a gentle health fire back to the building. A thunderstorm passed outside while local people sang traditional Slovenian songs. We gave thanks to the hands that that did the work and my heart was fully tuned to the reality that these young people had done the work. The whole building had been cleaned and beautified without any struggle at all. Everyone who worked on was tired and joyful. And impossible situation had been transformed and a gift had been revealed which we as a temporary community could give back to the villagers of Makole who had given so much to host us.
Who or what is really doing the hosting?
Those of us that create processes for people to get work done sometimes fall into the trap that we are the hosts – I made this mistake in a bad way in Hawaii. The truth is we are only the catalysts for hosting to happen, for a field of people to move together because of the bigger things that are hosting them. My journey at the edges of our hosting teams work showed me that no matter what we think is at our centre, no matter what intention and expectation we carry, real transformation can never be known. It emerges from the margins. If we don’t take the time to lift our eyes from what we think is important we fail to see the truly significant emerging around us. And when we can exercise the wisdom to bring that back into the centre, then we align ourselves with the true hosts of our world – timing and place.
I will be grateful to this place for a long time for the insight it gave me about the art of commitment. The authentic joining with friends, the full commitment to shared effort and action, and the sensitivity to know that I am merely a small part of what is really going on.
This is Elias. He was the captain of our little 8 cabin Turkish guillet for four days last week as we travelled from Fethiye to Demre. Elias is a terrific guy. He is one with the sea, having grown up in Demre and worked all his life on boats. Captaining the Alaturka for tourist cruises is hard work but for him it is a labour of love. Elias was one of the original Blue Cruise captains who got together around 15 years ago to discuss sharing the south coast of Turkey with visitors from around the world. Until he and his mates put together the idea of four day cruises, this part of the country was remote, consisting of ancient ruins and fishing villages interspersed with some tourist beach resorts like Kas and Kalkan.
Elias has a deep love of this land and sea, and knows it like the back of his hand, He took us off the beaten path to hidden caves and secluded spring fed inlets, to the best places to see dolphins and the best anchorages, where the morning sun was shaded behind towering cliffs. On our trip he kept talking about how he and his friends basically created this tourist industry from scratch, and when you ride with him it definitely has the quality of being hosted rather than being sold. He talked about the stories of intrigue and audaciousness it took to get things going, but when we stopped in the various little villages and twons along the way, you could see the deep affection he had for the men who joined us on the boat, to share a beer and a chat while the visitors were off exploring.
On trip Elias regaled us with stories of a bar that he and his friends built on a little island near Demre called “The Smuggler’s Inn.” On the last night all of the Blue Cruise boats stop here nestled on calm waters surrounded by little islands populated by Roman ruins and feral goats. A little wooden tender came out to our boat and delivered us to the bar which was a tropical beach tavern crossed with a Turkish cafe, with lots of cushions and chill out spaces, a modest light show and pumping good dance music for all ages. Elias was so excited to arrive here, back at his home base, to chill with his mates, tell some stories, drink some beer and sleep under the stars.
When friends work together like this, the experience one has is of being truly hosted. It is what I aspire to in my work, to welcome people to the warm nest of powerful conversation the same way Elias welcomes you to his coast. And this morning we are leaving Turkey for Slovenia where we will join some of my closes mates in the world to sip beer and share stories and make music and exchange our learnings.
To really see a guy like Elias, it takes one to know one. I’m glad I met him and travelled with him and his crew. And looking forward to being among my own mates this evening.
This is a photo i took of the bust of the Emperor Augustus in the Ephasus Museaum this afternoon. He was quite a guy.
He ruled during the time that Jesus Christ was born but he died before Jesus got really going. At Ephesus, he was the subject of a cult, which transferred love and affection from the official state gods to heads of state. You can see how that can happen.
But there is something really interesting about this bust. Carved into the Emperors forehead is a cross. It is a result of the Christians getting their comeuppance on the Roman emperors that did nasty things to them…reportedly Nero used burning crucified Christians as street lights from time to time. Paul the apostle preached from a stage I stood on today in ancient Epesus against pagan worship and was jeered with heckles of “Artemis is great!” from the 24000 people who were rooting for the home team. It eventually took the clerk of the city three hours to calm people down enough that he could be safely run out of town. Once Christianity was made okay by Constantine in the 400s, Christians got to finally get their revenge. And they did it in impressive style, including carving a cross in the emperor’s head.
Of course their hegemony didn’t last long. Tonight is the last night of Ramadan, and everyone is celebrating the holidays tomorrow. So even Christianity had its time around here, but was replaced when the Ottomans took over, and the churches were wrecked,
Wandering around Turkish antiquities has been an education in “getting the last word.”. In Capadocia, we saw incredible frescos in cave Churches that had the eyes scratched out of them by the anti-icon brigades while the debate about worshipping pictures was going on. And on some of the ancient caves around the region there is so much modern day graffiti that there is nothing left of the original ornamentation.
On a larger scale this whole region is all about getting the last word. From colonization to empire building to invasions to the switch from pagan to Christian to Moslem, and into the contemporary political debates about Armenian genocide and Kurdish independence everyone is selling you on the latest and greatest last word about how right they are.
But when it comes to history, there is never a final word. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s museum curiosity.
We’ve moved from the splendour and imperial regency of Istanbul to the remote and incredible Cappadocia. This is a place of unreal geography and living history. I love the way ruins here aren’t preserved, but rather used as the basis for building new things. The region is known for the thousands of ancient cave settlements, built as long as 4000 years ago from the soft volcanic rock. Nowadays parts of those ancient caves are incorporated into modern buildings, and form the basis for themed hotels like the beautiful Esbeli Evi, in which we are staying.
Cappadocia is also a cradle of Christian community, with people from this region documented as having been present at the resurrection of Christ and at the Pentecost. Cappadocian Christianity took root in communal living in these small remote valleys, occupied by small Christian communities that came together to practice and live. The photo above is the entrance to one of the hundreds of small early churches here.
While reading up on the early Christians, I came across this paragraph:
The hidden valleys constituted a refuge for the early Christians who fled from oppression and death. When the emperor Constantine granted religious freedom to Christians, Cappadocia had to a great degree become Christianized. The tufa rocks that were used as a shelter throughout history by those who fled hostile enemies or who withdrew from the world were ideal as places to hide and leave the world behind. Because the volcanic ter rain in the region was to a great extent unsuitable for agricultural cultivation, it was not sought out as a place of habitation; therefore, its being distant from major settlements and its favorable conditions for seclusion attracted settlement by Christians. It permitted them to remove themselves from the evils of the world and devote their lives to worship. For the early Christians who lived in groups based on the principle of communal life, poverty was a source of pride and wealth cause for shame. But, the increase in the numbers of Christians and the growth in the communities led to division in the views, and after the third century, we observe that Christianity was turning away from this early philosophy and way of life.It was no longer centered on communal life and brotherhood. Some sources reveal that monks remained constant to the concepts of commonality and broth- erhood and that they suffered great renunciation for the sake of these goals; but, in time, as the monks became more worldly, the religious functionaries gradually assumed special powers and privileges and formed a sacred caste. The Church itself undertook broad efforts to organize economically and politically, so Christianity conformed to the economic and political institutions of the Roman empire. This led to the ioss of the power and meaning of the early years of Christianity.We are unable to determine precisely hen the ecclesiastical organization began to undergo transformation and bow long these early concepts were viable.
The original occupy movement! And perhaps with clues about the evolution of subsequent ones. Why do humans seem so pre-destined towards hierarchy?
Good piece on knowing oneself…
I am more and more compelled by my friend Carol Sanford’s notion that those of us who strive to be “helpers” are most of service when we see ourselves as “re-sources,” agents of helping others re-connect and return to themselves more fully and deeply. Our tools for this are not “best practices” and expert advice, as Carol notes, but observation, inquiry and developmentally-oriented questions, and care-full listening. These are what help to create more space for discovery. Our gain is very much mutual.