Menu

Noticing fields

February 15, 2006 By Facilitation, Organization

Submitted for your consideration, as they used to say on The Twilight Zone…

I am a newcomer to the notion of “morphogenetic fields” – basically fields that contain information whereby social or biological structures take shape (see more at Wikipedia)- but whether they exist or not I’m keenly aware of something like that happening in working with groups.

Yesterday I was working with a small group and we saw something happen that surprised me. The field within which we are working is philanthropy and we are designing a program that will help Aboriginal non-profits develop capacity. This work is supported by foundations and other funding and has a great deal of goodwill associated with it. Our work has taken us into designing a program that is based on sharing, free exchange of materials and learning and funding. Our language is full of the language of gifting, sharing and capacity building.

The participants in our design consultation groups were given an honorarium for being in attendance, and yesterday several of those participants donated their honorarium to one organization that provides meals to homeless folks. The gesture was out of the blue, and had no connection to what we were talking about when the first person volunteered their money. That made me curious about where the volition for doing so had sprung from.

I think that as a facilitator, a lot had to do with how we were shaping space, or shaping the field. The conversations throughout the day were about this very thing, and then to have the behaviour manifest so clearly and so out of the blue made me wonder about the power of shaping space, awakening moments, and working with morphogenetic fields. Several folks have been commenting here recently about this idea of shaping space and awakening moments. Here is a concrete example of how doing so creates emergent phenomena like the sudden donation of $500 to a mobile soup kitchen.

Categories: , , ,

Free speech, responsible listening

February 12, 2006 By Facilitation, Learning

From Jack Ricchiuto’s blog:

I want to riff off the comment on the ‘Free Speech’ post by zenmaenad: In my experience, when the issue seems to be free speech, the deeper issue usually has to do with responsible *listening*.It surfaces a significant distinction between free speech disconnected from listening and free speech that flows from listening.

I’ve been thinking about this in a variety of contexts, but the one that comes to mind is the kind of listening we do when we are receiving a teaching. Traditionally, in First Nations communities and in other traditional settings, when Elders are teaching, listeners engage in a kind of deliberate discernment. The point is to hear the underlying truth of the story being told, to believe not the truth of the story’s “facts” but the truth of the myth itself.

This came up elsewhere this week with a post at Anecdote as well, about the truth contained in narratives. I think this arises largely because in the west we have forgotten these practices of listening to stories and observing the world as interpretational acts, in which we see everything around us as a teaching. The history of the past 500 years has been the history of trying to figure out how to reach an objective consensus about things. This weighty cultural thread has created a situation where conversations about stories, if they are conversations at all, seem to be about clarifying the facts.

The deeper truths, the embedded teachings, are lost if we put too much weight on this. That’s important because if you are setting out into the world to learn something, whether it is a personal quest, or with a group, on behalf of an organization or as a member of an inquiry team, simply getting at the facts does nothing to propel your trajectory to a new level. Instead, you are left solely with the facts and very little else to suggest how one might transcend the situation that gave rise to those facts. Developing the capacity to hear all stories as teachings is an incredibly valuable practice.

Categories: ,

Alan Watts

February 11, 2006 By Being, Learning, Practice, Unschooling


Alan Watts

Listening to some wonderful podcasts from Alan Watts. In the current series, Images of God, which is made up from talks given during his lifetime, he is delivering all kinds of angles on the divine.

In the third installment of this series, he was talking about school, journeys and the dance. The point of a dance or a piece of music, is not the end, says Watts. If it was, then we would only have composers that wrote finales and audiences would only go to hear great final chords, or see people in their final positions.

No, the point of a piece of music is the way one experiences time. It’s all about the journey, the movement from here to there, the texture of moments that music or dances imparts.

From this he draws a parallel with schooling. We school in this society as if there is an end in sight, a point at which we are heading. In so doing, we teach people to sacrifice the moment for the delayed gratification of the end. And of course the end never comes. One grade finishes and the next begins. High school ends and university begins. University ends and work begins and work is simply more of the same, chasing promotions, until at some point one wakes up and realizes that one has arrived. And in fact one has always arrived and always been arriving, but we miss it constantly, and we school our children and ourselves into missing it completely as well.

Life as dance. Life as the middle phrase of the middle movement of a violin concerto, moving right on to the next one..

[tags] alan watts, unschooling[/tags]

Republished piece on First Nations and the perfect economic storm

February 10, 2006 By First Nations, Uncategorized

I piece I wrote here after the BALLE conference in June was republished on the Sustainable Review website.

Nice of them to re-publish my work. Would have been nicer if they had contacted me and asked me to fix the typos. Ah well…the price of glory!

Categories: , , , ,

Maori voice with humback

February 7, 2006 By Music, Uncategorized 3 Comments

From the logs of The Whalesong Project, located in Kihei on Maui:

We witnessed a beautiful and unusual, from a modern western perspective, event this week. Raina Ferris visited us from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and we took her out on the ocean to support her cultural interest and connection to the whales. Raina is a Maori kai-karanga tahuna (spiritual chanter) and professor of Maori studies at Te Wanganga O Raukawa in Otaki. She came to Maui to share Maori tradition, and to further research on ancient ties between Maui and Aotearoa – alluded to in the ancestral chants of her clan. Those of us who saw the movie Whalerider witnessed Maori chanting and belief systems that connect the Maori to Hawai’i, and to the whales. Paikea, the young woman who inherited the name of the Maori ‘prophet’ who came to Aotearoa on the back of a whale, from Hawai’i, chanted – and the whales came. We witnessed this in real life when Raina performed her Haka – prayers in a chanting format. We cut the engines and drifted in the wind and waves as Raina chanted from the bow and we were followed by a mother and calf on the surface. And a male with a powerful voice stayed below the boat and sang a beautiful, powerful, soulful song. Those of us who have been listening closely to the songs of these whales for over five years now were surprised to hear the characteristics of the song change rapidly and dramatically. There was a strong impression that there was an unexplainable interaction between Raina and the whales…

I think this is not a haka, but a powhiri, if I’m not mistaken. Hakas are war chants, and this sounds like a powhiri, the kind of song sung on the marae to welcome vistors. Please correct me if I’m wrong. The song is haunting, and especially the way the humpback seems to respond. While I was in Maui last month, we went whalewatching and saw 20 humpbacks and sat transfixed listening to them sing as well. You can find more about Maori whale songs at folksong.org.nz

By the way, the Parking Lot soundtrack, a list of all the mp3’s I have been collecting here over the past year is hosted at Webjay. You can go visit and stream the whole thing. It’s a pretty good listen, if I do say so myself.