And speaking of 100bloggers, the chapter I am in will also feature Michael Herman and Andy Borrows, both of whom met the other day in London and blogged about each other.

Ain’t that cool?

Folks, I need some advice, and I feel a little sheepish, not wanting this to turn into some kind of cheesy vanity post.

I’ve been invited to participate in the 100bloggers book project, and I’ve scoured my archives for what I think have been the most interesting posts. I count them this way largely because of the comments I have received on them. I have settled on eight posts and I’d be most grateful, if you are so inclined, for your advice on which to include.

So here they are:

• Blogging as dreaming
• Creation stories
• Process and results
• Living in truth
• Consultation philosophy
• Opening as a practice
• Sonny’s teachings
• A new way to strike

I have a chance to revise the one I pick, so I’ll do that. If there are others that strike you as interesting, send them along. In the meantime, have a read through some of the other bloggers that are involved in the project. There is some amazing writing out there.

Technorati Tags: 100bloggers

Prince George, BC

Peter Lindberg blogs Elliot Eisner’s types of creativity:/eisner

Over the past couple of days I have been working here in Prince George conducting a 1.5 day Open Space meeting with literally hundreds of people from the Prince George urban Aboriginal community. We have had upwards of 275 people coming and going over two days and all four of these forms of creativity have shown up.

The theme of this event is “Planting the Seeds of Change” and the idea is to invite the community to create the projects that are needed here right now. With a pretty good media campaign behind them, the organizing committee attracted 275 folks to help be part of the answer.

The process began yesterday as we opened space and 55 topics were posted. From there, 42 groups met and produced reports on a huge range of topics. There were agencies, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal here, tons of regular citizens and a couple of dozen Elders. The dialogues were spirited and engaging and the proceedings book, written by the participants themselves, was 80 pages long. Topics covered ranged from holistic healing, media presence of Aboriginal people and stories, recreation, political struggles and community safety. The conversations were spread all over these four types.

Today, in the morning, the group reconvened and we invited people to come forward to turn their dialogue into action and to take an hour and half to find their mates and create project teams. Twenty one action groups emerged, led mostly be regular citizens with the support of some of the service agencies in town. Most of these project teams have action plans that involve at least one meeting in the next two weeks. I’ll be back here again on the 15th of February to work with the project champions to find an emergent way of coordinating all of this work and holding open a container of conversation so that the projects, agencies and funders can continue to talk to each other.

The great response we got was due largely to the fact that federal government is putting up $250,000 a year for two years to support this process as the Urban Aboriginal Strategy. Because that funding is largely to be used at the discretion and direction of the community and also because there was very little naysaying here, the four types of creativity bloomed in the dialogues and project planning conversations.

It’s all about loosening up I think. People freed themselves up to connect with others, to extend existing projects into new areas, to reconfigure partnerships to serve better, to bring together previously unmet companions around an issue of passion. I think a healthy and vibrant community or organization has these forms of creativity thriving because they grow out of nutrient ground of passion and responsibility and no one saying “you can’t do that.” The creativity that flowed created all kinds of work arounds for existing constraints and helped to bring together conversations that will leave a lasting and robust set of relationships that can deal with barriers and obstacles and challenges as they arise.

Technorati Tags: creativity, openspace, PrinceGeorge

The other night I was joined by a couple of old friends of mine – Randy Vic and Dave Marshall – and together we played jigs and reels for a room full of contradancers here on Bowen Island. I have played with these guys for coming on ten years now and we know each other so well that we hardly need to speak to one another when we’re playing. Tune names are called out with a couple of syllables – “priest” for The Musical Priest, “dingle” for the Humours of Dingle – and we manage to switch tunes or end sets with a simple glance, or a tow raised a little from the floor. When we play we are very much in the groove, locked into flow with one another.

It is this ability, to get into a groove, that makes someone a musician. One can have perfect technique on an instrument but what distinguishes a technician from a musician is that ability to surrender oneself to the flow of the music Music is not about making notes, it is about marking time, and to mark time one needs to have an intimate connection with its passing.

After we played we were having a beer in our local pub and we struck up a conversation with friends Brad and Julie Ovenell-Carter. Julie is writer and comes from a family of talented classical musicians. Brad is a chef and a teacher and has taught himself bodhran and god knows how many other instruments. At one point, as we talked about how important flow experiences were, and the social benefits of making music together, Julie asked the question “how do we teach children music?”

My own response was to recoil from the question. I am a self-taught musician. The two instruments I did take lessons on – oboe and clarinet – are not instruments I play to this day. Instead I play Irish flute, tin whistle, guitar, didgeridoo and a little piano. I also sing. All of these instruments I have learned traditionally, that is from teaching myself and having others show me a few things. What drove me to learn these instruments was not a desire to master them, but rather a strong need to express myself musically.

In the main, when we “teach” music, we are actually drilling technique into learners. Practice your scales, learn your theory, rehearse your pieces. The standard model drives a desire to perfect the instrument after which you can then make music. But this leads to a tight, tight corner. At what point do you actually get perfect? When can you start to make music?

When I was being taught how to play clarinet, the incessant practice and denial of music making was dreary. After working for 15 minutes I would so tire of scales, that I would switch to guitar and PLAY. Twenty years later, I picked up a clarinet at a friend’s house one night and started playing, and found that I could have fun with it, but only because I had forgotten all that technical stuff and learned in the interim the emotional language of music.

I am never going to be the world’s best flute player. But I play well enough that I derive great pleasure from being able to make music with others, and I can play all night without getting tired. I never practice – I am always playing. If I pick up the flute, it’s because there is a new tune to learn or something I want to try. If it’s not fun, it doesn’t happen.

I think there are parallels with this medium, with blogging. We can teach kids to write, but where do we teach them to play with narrative, to put words together and invent new kinds of sentences, to try out ideas in the public eye by crafting them into essays and sharing them with others? Where in the lives of our kids, and ourselves, do we learn how to invite conversation and create the mistakes from which we learn?

For me it is not the skill of stringing together sentences that will propel us forward, but a competency in the art of conversation. We need more and more venues in which to practice the inner arts of thinking, writing and conversing with one another. People spend 12 or 13 years in school “learning to write” and so few of them come out of it with any inclination to do so or deriving any pleasure from the activity. Why? It is because we demean playing.

Blogging and more real forms of conversation like Open Space Technology meetings, World Cafes and dialogues (not top mention the serendipity of third places – bars and cafes and other places) invite us to develop that capacity of getting in the groove with one another. We trip on each other’s mistakes, learn from surprising insights, deeply connect with each other’s ideas. It is like a jazz musician who finds a new direction in an error just made, who learns licks and riffs from her friends on the fly and who explores the powerful sense of marking time closely and meaningfully with her mates.

Let us not worry about grammar and proper punctuation. Since we were babies we have always had the capacity to acquire the tools we need to express ourselves. No one sat down and taught us how to speak or to walk. We learned it because we had a powerful drive to speak and move. Now we can write and dance and run and speak with one another. The wisdom of babies is that they do exactly what they need to to become connected with others.

Let us instead practice playing together with what we have right now – the imperfect, the blemished, the half understood. Let’s turn to that deeply human ability to experience flow with one another. Let us celebrate the invitation of media like music and writing and conversation to connect us together in the service of evolution and humanity.

I think if we can do this and let go of our fears, the real innovation springs up around us. We cannot ignore it. Passion for life unfolds from our engagement and our participation in the emerging conversation becomes irrepressible.

I don’t pretend that I know the answer, but that’s my best guess right now. Of course, I’m open to your thoughts and notions on this too, because who knows where that takes us?

Technorati Tags: learning, blogging, writing, flow

I’m trying out a new post for technorati tags, using a twek on my blogger template and the technorati tag bookmarklet.

Technorati Tags: technorati, tags