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108132274976185312

April 7, 2004 By Chris Uncategorized

Reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow and soul and I came across this great quote which speaks to all this philanthropy I’ve been running across lately:

When you look at the pre-Christian version of “soul,” you see that what they meant wasn’t so much a soul that was a different substance infused or injected into the body. It referred to a quality in a person who was able to use surplus energy for the benefit of others, not needing to get it all for himself. I came to the conclusion that “soul” is really our way of thinking about not devoting all of one’s psychic energy to maximize oneself in any form, whether it’s getting comfortable, rich, famous, or wealthy. Some of that energy is also devoted to somebody else’s or something else’s well-being, or advantage, or goal. So that kind of thing is “soul” as far as I’m concerned. That’s the leading edge of evolution, where you don’t need to consume all your energy for your own purposes, but you can devote some of that energy for something that will benefit others, including the planet.

Working with Aboriginal youth, and with the Giving for Civil Society Open Space Conference in Chicago has me thinking along these lines too. Ginger Gosnell, one of the youth who was working with us in Open Space over the weekend pointed me to the project site for the Urban Native Youth Centre in Vancouver. That centre is being built be the Urban Native Youth Association, which is a group soaked in soul and passion and smarts. And they’ve just attracted a $1.2 million corporate donation to get things going.

These are the people I get to hang out with. Lucky me.

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108128800052381696

April 6, 2004 By Chris Uncategorized

This is too good not to quote extensively. From an artcle in The Tyee on eating contests:

How the Coast Salish squared off

Coast Salish eating contests were as personal as the ones Jacobs entered. The difference is that only one person or one team ate, and it was always the guests. The object was, literally, to eat the host out of house and home. Drop by my house at the right time, and this could take less than 15 minutes – which was of course, the point. The eater�s boast: �My power can consume everything you own.� The host�s implicit reply: �I am so rich, I have so much food, that I can feed your eating power until it can�t eat any more��which is a serious malfunction in an eating power.

�All of a man�s property and his wives and children might be forfeit if he lost in such a situation,� writes Marian Wesley Smith, in her 1940 ethnographic study The Puyallup-Nisqually. Smith notes that it was not just the amount of food eaten that was extraordinary, but the style with which it was eaten: �After consuming the food and while eating, the person showed no extra puffiness nor bunches on his body or under his clothes.�

So when three old men came to challenge one of Smith�s informants at a feast, they talked and joked among themselves as they ate four entire meals apiece. They stopped short when he still had a half a side of beef left, and blamed their defeat on the watermelon he�d served for dessert. Too much water. Three years later, they came back for a return match. After an entire yearling steer, potatoes, rice, beans, bread, and fruit, they conceded defeat. There is no record of what, if anything, they lost.

Then there�s the story of the old man who, in his youth, had boasted of his eating power around some white settlers. When challenged, he sat down and ate two sides of beef�a cow, in other words�and washed it down with a barrel of water. �They were satisfied,� Smith�s informant says.

I would have been more nervous than satisfied watching a man of normal size eat a cow�calmly, chewing well as he went, possibly making jokes and taking side bets, showing no signs of discomfort. The barrel of water I can accept, somehow. But where did the cow go? The Puyallup-Nisqually people who talked to Smith in the 1930s would have said that the man�s power ate the cow. That�s at least as reasonable as the idea that it all fit in his stomach. Of course, physics tells us that the cow and the man are both just collections of atoms, which is to say tiny bits of matter and a whole lot of empty space.

Maybe Coast Salish power eaters knew some way to restructure the food so it became immensely compact. Maybe not. But if a cow disappears into a man, and the man does not blow up, like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python�s The Meaning of Life, then I, for one, would like an explanation. If it isn�t the stomach, what gives?

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108126996179245480

April 6, 2004 By Chris Uncategorized

Eeleven pieces of assorted linkage for you today. This stuff is good.


  • Papers by Vivian Hutchinson on philanthropy, community governance and social entrepreneurs.

  • Lessons from the Land: A cultural journey through the Northwest Territories via wood s lot

  • A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life also via wood s lot

  • A Time for Letting Go – on organizational consulting via Jon Husband at Wirearchy

  • Good article on the launch of Maori TV and the preservation of Maori language in New Zealand

  • The Machine in our Heads by Glenn Parton via Dave Pollard

  • riley dog back in the saddle, from Old Crow, Yukon. Furthest north Canadian blogger?

  • Textz, because text wants to be free. Via if…

  • George Por’s thoughts on the Emergence of Collective Intellegence

  • Contrasting leadership styles in the US and the UK
  • Flow with Soul: an interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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108120813103341498

April 5, 2004 By Chris Uncategorized


Mikk Sarv

I wonder what it would be like to live in Estonia?

From Mikk Sarv, an Open Space facilitator living there, comes this interesting tidbit of news posted in response to Harrison’s invitation to describe more ways of opening space:

Next week we are celibrating this day, 14th of April as Outdoor Learning Day. The day is opened by our Minister of Education and Minister of Environment. For the period from 14th of April till 14th of October all schools, kindergardens and universities try to run as much as possible of the curriculum outdoors. All buds, sprouting seeds, bird fleddglings etc., are opening up to learn the world around. To learn together with them and open up ourselves for it is the best we can do for the time.

Mikk maintains an Open Space wiki web in Estonian, if you’re interested.

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108119782091907

April 5, 2004 By Chris Uncategorized


Photo courtesy of Harrison Owen

My friend and mentor Harrison Owen has provided periodic doses of inspiration for me for years now. Today he posted something on the OSLIST that invited a long response from me. Harrison wrote:

The morning newspaper comes with all sorts of stores about space closing. Israel is building a fence, the Marines have closed off Falujah, we in the US struggle with the Patriot Act, folks in Spain are wondering when the next
terrorists will strike, and how to keep them out . . . It is getting pretty close. And the closer it gets the more our possibilities are limited, and the human Spirit withers. In an odd way, the more we try to preserve that Spirit, the more it seems in jeopardy. Some wise soul remarked that after studying history for a long time he had concluded that the telling end-stage of any country or civilization showed up when they spent more time trying to protect what they had than growing what they might become (my words, but his thought). Definite closure of space.

So I thought to myself, thought I, how to open some more space – anywhere, anyhow, with anyone???? Doing an OS is cool, but surely that represents but a tiny fraction of the opportunities available. So come on Folks (Lurkers
included) how do we open up some more space? And how are we doing right now. Perhaps if we shared we cold give each other some really good ideas.

Here is my response:

When I first started consulting, I took my business model from the model of the Elder’s helper in Ojibway society. That role basically sees a person working with an Elder to support her (or him) in any way possible to ensure that the wisdom in there gets out into the world. This means everything from bringing the Elder water, to arranging the teaching space in a way that is conducive to learning. It means preparing medicines, prayers, food and ceremony when we are doing things that work with Spirit, or invite “manidoo” (Ojibway for both “Spirit” and “Mystery”) into the mix. I found that “helping” in this sense was an opening activity, and it set the stage for me to look for other opportunities to “open” through a consulting practice.

I soon found that in spades when I stumbled upon Open Space in a very large conference facilitated by Anne Stadler and Chris Carter and Angeles Arrien in 1995 in Whistler, Canada. Since then I have been struck by what Open Space means beyond the facilitation of the OST meeting.

I started by wondering what it meant to invite more stories into our lives and our relationships and my first learning was that it extended connections between me and others. I discovered by telling my stories and listening to stories of others, that it never took long for me and someone else to arrive at a place in which we were connected. Stories became an almost magical medicine for me, weaving together people in my life and extending my connections in the world to many far flung corners.

Then, as I started working with OST, I discovered something very profound: Elders kept coming to me and saying that this process is the way our ancestors met. I knew what they were saying was not about the circle exclusively, but rather about the quality of the experience and they way in which OST calls forth the inherent resources we have available to us RIGHT NOW and invites us to use them well. That got me thinking about what has happened to us, both indigenous and others, over the years that created a situation whereby we had forgotten how to rely on our own resources. And I discovered a powerful truth about colonization as a result: colonization was not only about the imposition of structure and behaviour on our lives; it was rather about the way our inner lives were stripped away, be it the inherent truths that come from our own personal ways of connecting with Spirit and intention, or the cultural stories and frameworks that supported and continued to invite this knowledge.

In short, colonization is by definition a closing, and decolonization is about opening.

Michael Herman
then gave me the language to describe the process of facilitating decolonization, when he used the word “invitation” to describe a whole practice and approach to facilitation, organizational development, community development and living. And since then I have shamelessly appropriated his mantra and said to people that my work is a practice of invitation. Invitation for us to know our own truths, create and honour our own story, organize our own responses to the world around us and take responsibility for making the change we want to see.

This is all about opening.

At the same time as all this was happening, I developed my website and early on integrated my personal life with my professional life and decided to share all of it, or as much as I was able to. So I made my weblogs public in the hope that sharing my thinking and learning would lead me towards others who were engaged in similar things.

Again, it’s about opening up the boundaries between us. Sharing instead of taking, extending instead of retracting, blurring lines instead of creating them.

I was in New Zealand recently and while I was there I spent a delightful evening talking in a hotel lobby over a bottle of Shiraz with two Maori musicians, Elena who is a classically trained violinist and Howard McGuire, a classically trained opera singer. Both blur boundaries in a way that means that classical music is now Maori music. Instead of retreating into a closed and static traditional culture, they have included and transcended Maori culture and see what they are doing as building an inclusive identity, an inclusive form of cultural expression, wider and living, while all the while being Maori.

Elena’s artistic statement says this:

“Just listen to the music on my new CD, Elena. It’s a unique combination of evocative Maori waiata, stirring European and sensual Latin influences. I hope it will inspire Maori to get involved with classical music and encourage mainstream classical fans to value the whole musical heritage of Aotearoa.

I’m working on projects to combine Kapa Haka and classical music with arrangements that will appeal to young people and encourage them to extend their musical knowledge and abilities. I plan to visit schools, Kohanga and marae to perform stories using the violin to express characters and emotions, and to give concerts in classical and modern music.

It’s also in my game plan to provide quality musical material for Maori radio stations, shops and the media. That’s all part of encouraging young to perform in Te reo Maori and to support and sustain the Maori culture in an ever-changing world.”

That is opening (and you HAVE to get a copy of the CD!) It invites us to see the world through new eyes and it encourages us to extend ourselves beyond the stories and “realities” that limit us. If Elena and Howard are out there doing what they are doing, what does that say about what the rest of us are capable of? Isn’t their work an invitation to extend ourselves so that we ultimately dwell in the same sphere?

Harrison talks about opening space to help ease conflict. Michael uses the great line that “conflict is simply passion that has not yet extended to include the whole.” By looking for opportunities in my own life to extend, open and invite, I feel like space is opening all around me and people show up in my life who move me immensely and give me the hope we all need to take on the stuff that is trying to close us down.

Vaclav Havel called it “living in truth.” Gandhi called it “Satyagraha” which means close to the same thing. It’s understanding the quality of small daily acts and asking ourselves, whether this one is a life affirming moment, or a life denying moment. Am I opening or closing?

We choose opening by offering ourselves, by understanding our gifts and talents and inviting those out in others, by giving each other new ways of seeing the world, by making connections, by providing comfort and relief, by bringing our Elders water, and preparing the space for the wisdom to pour forth.

If it sounds trite and soft and well-meaning, then you need to read about the history of India, the history of the demise of the Soviet Empire, the history of the peaceful struggles for change that have propelled human history on an evolutionary path rather than a regressive one. You need to sit in with me when I have the privilege of working with Aboriginal youth in this part of Canada, who are channeling their minds, bodies, spirits, and hearts into a promising future.

You need to know that, despite everything, it really works.

And then, you need to steal back Nike’s marketing slogan, and just go do it

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