Last night we arrived in Kona, on the dry side of the big island of Hawai’i.  We overnighted there and woke early in the morning for a swim in crystal clear waters at Hapuna Beach.  About 9am we hit the road, taking the Saddle Road over the island between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the twin 13,000+ volcanoes on this island.  As you crest the top of the pass between them, the clouds coming up from Hilo-side start flying overhead, and rain showers start.  We drove down to Hilo and then back up the south flank of Mauna Loa to Kilauea and Halema’uma’u, the active crater in Volcanoes National Park.  Kilauea is the home place of Pele, the goddess of creation and tonight Tim and Andrea – one of our colleagues – and I drove to the rim where, in the dark and drizzle, the plume of steam was clearly seen, illuminated from above by a bright quarter moon and below by the lava glowing in the crater.

Surrounded by earth, fire, air and water, all of the elements appeared.  A very powerful synthesis of the earth being born below our feet, beneath an ancient sky that in these parts of the world is the map for navigating.  We are wrapped in time, treated to a window on the liquid centre of our planet, standing on ground that is emergent and compelling.  The crater began to hold the archetype of the centre of our gathering – a purpose that burns regardless, that steams and smokes and is visible in its production but not in its source.  A purpose that defines the form that holds it.  It became clear to us tonight the way in which this gathering, this purpose and intention is to be hosted: in a deep container that can hold the fire of creation and let itself be moulded by whatever flows out.

This is not easy work and there are few roadmaps for doing it.  But to prepare by  sitting with Halema’uma’u is a great teaching, and we haven’t even begun hearing the Hawaiian perspective on all of this.

Work is afoot.  Tomorrow participants arrive and we begin to welcome them in, prepare our space and ready ourselves for ceremony and practice.  We are ambitiously pursuing the small openings that invite the transcendence of world views that have been at conflict for centuries.  To see what the next level of human consciousness could be if we married indigenous wisdom and wester wisdom.  If we understood each other and invited all to join in the space in the middle.  What would we learn about values?  What would our relationship to the earth be?  What IS a community of leadership based on a platform of reverence and what could such a community do?

Like the stea, plume

I’ve been trolling through Geoff’s harvest of our Open Space conference last month in Melbourne and just enjoying the memory of working with friends.  Our friend and conference cartoonist Simon Kneebone drew our hosting team.  We call ourselves The Slips.  The term is from the cricket world and has two purposes.  First it signals that this is an all-Commonwealth team, which is lovely, and second, it’s a large cordon and nothing gets past us.  From right to left, our members are Anne Pattillo from New Zealand who is our wicket keeper, Aussie Viv McWaters at first slip, Johnnie Moore from the UK at second slip, Geoff Brown also from Australia at third and me on the end, occasionally moving out to gully or silly point when needed.

At any rate I love this drawing.  It bring back some lovely memories and has me salivating when we join together again in Amsertdam in September for the Applied Improv Network Conference where we will play together mostly and probably end up opening space again.

Thanks to Benjamin Aaron Degenhart for pointing this out.

Geoff Brown put up a formidable blog post capturing the whole process of our recent designing, planning and facilitating a conference in Melbourne.  If you are interested in multiple ways of learning and understanding process as well as ways of telling a story, set aside some time and go dive into what he has written.  As one who was there, all I can say is, bang on, mate!

PS  there should be some sort of blog award for “most formidable blog post.”  This one would win it.

I think it’s important to note that there is no research on “the art of hosting” that we know of but that there is much research out there in the world on what it is that we are working with and trying to evoke. One of the problems, as we are seeing in this thread, is that we don’t have the language or the conceptual frameworks to handle the extreme interiorty of this inquiry. In general, people looking for “research” on collective intelligence, emergence and social fields are looking for objective evidence that if we use participatory methods, things will be better than if we use top-down and mechanistic modes of working. This is such an elusive inquiry, let alone an easy project to undertake.

Of course there are models for looking at the world that balance interior and exterior modes of seeing the world, including Ken Wilber’s integral models and others. But I’d like to invite us to look beyond the Western scientific methodologies for some other clues.

In many traditional indigenous North American cultures, there are well established methodologies for understanding the world and understanding the social context for individual action and collective dynamics. Specifically, some of us in teh Art of Hosting CoP have been learning about Nuu-Chah-Nulth concepts of “tsawalk” which is a view of the world that is as foundational to Nuu-Chah-Nulth science as Cartesian world views are to western science. Tsawalk means “oneness” or “interdependence” and the methodology for understanding this world views is called “oosumich” which is a methodology in teh same way that empiricism is a methodology for Cartersian world views. Oosumich is both an individual and collective practice of accessing and understanding the collective and individual spiritual worlds (or the deep interior worlds, from which all forms derive their basic organizing pattern). It is a way to tap what is often called “source” and is therefore a very useful methodology for understanding design of structures and processes. Oosumich is also an evaluation method, being used both in real time and in reflective learning to gauge the various effects of things against the principle of Tsawalk. If something is understood to be contrary to Tsawalk, it can be said to have “failed” – if that is the right term, although I think there are more nuanced ways of looking at this.

Tsawalk has been written about in a very valuable book called “Tsawalk” a Nuu Chah-Nulth worldview” by Richard Atleo, who is a friend of our work. I sometimes use it in indigenous communities as an alternative to Theory U. Last december we structured an entire workshop on participatory process based on Tsawalk, and the participants were given Atleo’s book as a text. I wrote a little about it here.

At least one of our list members, Pawa Haiyupis, has been in this inquiry with me for several years. I think what it points to is thinking about the valid epistemologies that can help us understand what is happening in collective intelligence. It makes sense to me that we look at models that have been employed for centuries by societies who are collective in nature and whose concepts of the world are less about the split between subject and object and more about exploring the connection between things and their context, and especially the “unseen” dynamics that are at play in social and other fields.

Those of us working in the Art of Hosting community with indigenous communities have had this conversation and are in this inquiry with Navajo, Hawaiian, Anishnaabe, Skwuxw7mesh, Kwa’kwa’kawakw and other indigenous cultures. It doesn’t necessarily help us in putting western science to work, but I think it provides perspectives on ways of knowing that could open the inquiry in ways that are helpful from a foundational and conceptual point of view.

PS: Here is a report from a few years ago about using Tsawalk as the primary view to see systemic breakdowns in the child welfare system in BC.