Thinking today about the challenge of engaging community for real change, and I am playing around with two simple on the surface, but difficult to execute ideas. I think though that if these ideas are executed, it creates the best possible conditions for sustained action and transformative change.
The ideas, expressed as patterns, are: operate from a clear centre, and embody your future now.
I was riding the ferry with my friend Patti DeSante who is at the moment in deep Zen training with Roshi Joan Halifax and exploring many aspects of embodied practice in the world. We were discussing what it takes to act fearlessly and enter into transformative work in the world. She shared a story with me that was simple but important. She told me about her days as an energy broker and how the sole reason her company existed was to make money. It was a simple and powerful centre around which the company organized itself. It provided an easy way to evaluate what kind of action was worth pursuing. It allowed the company, and the people in the company, to be out in the world fearlessly, knowing clearly why they are there.
In other words, the company had a centre. To me the idea of centre is more than a mission statement or a vision statement. It is instead an assailable reason for being. Something you can feel, that is core to who you are, out of which you act. As Brian Arthur has said, in martial arts, if you think, you are dead. So to with any fearless action: if you need to think about why you are doing it, you are not operating from your centre. When you drink water you are acting out of an unstated need, a powerful and compelling centre that makes drinking a natural act. In martial arts we train in acting from that place as well. Developing a centre means developing clarity. If you haven’t got it, you move in the world from a position of confusion, and that kind of moving creates lots of problems: unnecessary effort, poor choices, emotional stress.
Developing a shared centre is not something one does overnight, or in a weekend retreat. In involves much work and diligent attention to being in relationship with each other, discovering what is true and powerful for us and exploring the way that centre can unfold into the world. Otto Scharmer provides an excellent map for the work that is required to do this, and most of the facilitation and dialogue processes I use are designed explicitly to, with enough time, connect to that source and act from it.
The second pattern is the pattern of embodiment. This is also about operating with clarity and it requires a deep discernment process. Embodiment simply means to bring into practice the principles of the world you are seeking to create. For example in the work we did on Vancouver Island with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team, we chose “Children at the Centre” as our primary centre from which we operated. In practice this meant all kinds of things, including meeting whenever possible with children present, or placing their pictures in the centre when we met. It meant making a practice of thinking first about how children would live with the decisions we were making. It meant taking inspiration from children for the work we were doing. When planning our engagement process, we asked ourselves “How do children inspire us to engage with them?”
Embodying these beliefs and centres in the world is a kind of deep practice. It makes daily work a spiritual practice, and results in tremendous emotional power and momentum. Taken to the broadest level. It finds it’s practical expression in Gandhi’s quest to transform Indian society by implementing his beliefs in peace, non-violence and equality at every turn, even being sure to clean toilets as a mark of solidarity with the lower castes..
Creating a centre, and finding its creative expression in the world. Sounds easy!
Friends who fed me this week:
- Ashley Cooper on a piece by Parker palmer on teaching with heart and soul.
- Rob Bailey writes the owner’s manual on the coconut.
- Tenneson Woolf uses Wordle to produce a harvest
- whiskey river on the emotional mechanics of inspiration
- Mark Woods celebrates Edward Abbey’s passing with some excerpts from his work and meditations on deserts
- Peter Rukavina‘s unorthodox diary of his day without digital technology.
- Peter Rawsthorne on the ways we are shaping citizen eGovernment on Bowen Island.
This is Peter Reinhart, a master baker, a theologian and a story teller who has written a great book on baking called The Baker’s Apprentice. In this talk he discusses the science of baking, but puts it in the context of the meaning of bread as an act of transformation from living components to new forms.
Reinhart speaks from the four levels of the literal, metaphoric/poetic, political/ethical and mystical level. As a novice bread baker, I have to say that my exploration of the literal level is just beginning, and although I make some pretty good breads now, this dive into the deeper meaning of baking bread is fascinating, and takes my mixing, kneading, forming and baking to new levels.
After being registered for a year and using it actively for a few months I now get twitter. Two recent uses have twigged me to twitter’s terrificness.
This month when the roads on Bowen Island were slippery and dangerous a group of us worked over twitter to create a road status tool that uses crowdsourcing to report on road conditions on our island. Road conditions are incredibly variable depending on the altitude of the road (from sea level to 500 feet and more) and so it’s not enough to say “Grafton Road is clear” because it might be snowchoked up the hill from you. So twitter was the way we connected and did real time updates to the tool.
Then today, I read a quick entry on Rob Paterson’s blog about Iceland’s government collapsing and I went to search for more. I checked Google first, but it’s a firehose of content, tried searching for blogs on Google, but that isn’t satisfying. Finally went to twitter, searched for “iceland” and got a slew of great articles and even a timely podcast.
So hooray for twitter.
Back from Maui and here are the things that you need to know about that amazing island.
This was our fourth trip there and we’re very much in the flow of Maui as an almost second home. If there was a theme to this trip it was LOCAL. We stayed close to our living quarters for the most part, ate local food, consumed local media and tapped in to local issues.
When we are in Maui we rent a little condo at a place called Hale Kamaole, which is an older condo complex in Kihei on the sunny south side of the island. It lies right across the street from Kamaole Beach III which is a great beach for kids and about a half mile from our favourite beach, Keawakupu, a huge stretch of sand with a variety of surf breaks, snorkeling reefs and swimming waters. If the surf is up, the boogie boarding and short boarding is good here. If not, there is some decent snorkeling around the Mana Kai hotel front. Att all times of the day, there is a good view of the flying humpback whales that were incredibly active this year out in the whale refuge. The other local beach we camped out at was Ulua which is renowned for it’s snorkeling and diving, and although the water wasn’t crystal clear, swimming with sea turtles was pretty fricking amazing. Other beaches we got to on this trip included Makena Landing beach in Makena, Ka’anapali in West Maui and D.T. Baldwin Park in Pa’ia which is the boogie coarding capital of Maui, but not for the novice sponger.
On the local food front, we bought most of our fresh veggies from the farmers market in north Kihei, which is now open every week day and sells mostly locla food. Our groceries were purchased at Hawaiian Moons in Kihei and the odd piece of fresh fish (a nice piece of Mahi Mahi for the grill) came from Star Market. One of the highlights of the trip was a visit upcountry to O’o Farm, which provides food to two local restaurants in Lahaina. We got a tour of the farm and a lunch prepared on the spot. Nice crew of people working there and great to be eating off the land like that.
Local media, easy. Maui Time for news and commentary, KPOA for na mele Hawai’i, and I came back with another crapload of slack key, hula, and mele chanting CDs, almost all of them from local artists.
In terms of local issues, perhaps the biggest one was the inauguration of a Hawaiian in the White House. That played well across the whole state, and it was fun talking with folks about what Obama means to Hawaii. We got a look at some of the development being done at Makena, which is a hugely sensitive issue right now and I chatted a little with my friend Luana Busby-Neff who lives on the Big Island, but who is deeply involved in the restoration of Kaho’olawe, the island off Maui that was used for 60 years by the US military for target practice.
Sustainability is a big issue on the Hawaiian islands and lots of people are asking the question what would happen if the boast stopped coming? Lana’i has built a huge solar collector and is set to become power self-sufficient in 2013 and the windmills keep turning on the West Maui Mountain.
Highlight of the trip for me though was actually not a local thing at all. It was seeing the zodiacal light again, for the second time in my life, and this time I photographed it. Hawaii is one of the best inhabited places in the world to see this wedge of glow extending from where the sun set up into the sky, and it never ceases to amaze me. This is the dust in the plane of our solar system glowing in the sun’s light and in Hawaii, it stands straight up and down. On this trip, Venus was floating in the top of the light. It gives me this spine tingling feeling to see this, to recognize that we are simply small beings on a small planet that floats like an island in a sea of space. And that pattern is enhanced by being fractal in the Islands, where your whole world is limited to a few pieces of lava sticking up out of an ocean that goeas on forever in all directions.
Mahalo a nui to the Kanaka Maoli keepers of the land who hold us while we are there, even if people don’t see them much. We are so privilaged to be guests on their islands.