I was in Haiti during the coup d’etat in 1991 when an estimated 500 civilians were killed in one day in Port au Prince. The horrific violence that U.S. viewers might be seeing on the television is about a three to four hour drive away from Port au Prince. While the rebels are threatening to come to the capital, we don’t anticipate this anytime soon.

The conflict is incredibly complex. The rebels for the most part, are baddies. In my opinion, Aristide and his regime are also baddies. True, he was democratically elected twice and I had hope like millions others that he was going to bring about vast improvements. The reality is that he has not and that his government is very corrupt. And, unfortunately, there is not the necessary structures in place to impeach him.

The legitimate opposition, who are not aligned with the armed rebels, is committed to using peaceful means to push Aristide to resign: demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, etc. There are a lot of good people in the opposition but, they do not have significant support from the grassroots sector.

And, in the midst of all the uncertainty and strife, my Haitian colleagues who practice Open Space and Reflection Circles push onward. Yesterday I received an invitation from Fremy Cesar and several other colleagues for an Open Space meeting March 15 on: Creating a Haiti Open Space Institute: challenges and opportunities.

Good words Chris. I have been thinking about your word for a couple of days. I want to response, with entheos. Subjectivity and subjective truth is in some ways a late arrival, therefore so too is inter subjectivity, these in themselves are fictions, myths we live by. The task of the “cultural creative” (pardon the buzz word) is a sort of hermeneutical immersion into Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty call the phenomenological world from whence the subject emerges, and not cleanly but pulling the mess of the world, the other with him, into him/her.

The individual truths “integrity, sincerity and trustworthiness” and collective truth as cultural fit, mutual understanding and rightness…a shared sense of justice are born out of that “hermeneutical immersion”. What we find there may not be “me” or the collective, but the stuff around which a “me” and a collective emerge.
Wallace Stevens wrote, “the absence of the imagination has itself to be imagined”. This is a core story of poetry and maybe metaphor. Shelly in the Defense of Poetry said that ‘the secret of morality is the imagination’. If the imagination is impaired we can’t image ourselves in the life of the other, we would have no sympathy, no way of truthing neither ours or the others being in the world.

And being in the world is a creative enterprise, as you say, not gathering facts, but living at the origin of truth, i.e. inhabited experience. Again that is not the Cartesian retreat to my subjectivity, but rather the soup of the phenomenological world out of which such things as collectivity and individuality arise, for that matter the phenomenological world itself. Again turtles. Democratic truths are meaningful to the extent that we inhabit them and are inhabited by them, as a mutually creative force, mythic energy, metaphoric.

It may be that transformation and spiritual health of the nation or the individual, comes from the capacity to sustain anxiety, instability and allow new forms to emerge. And to be able to do that, we may not need a ultimate myth, but the ability to ask the ultimate questions, say the final question Einstein asked, the one he thought was the ultimate question….”Is the universe a friendly place?” and following the Jewish theme here maybe the old Yiddish saying “man thinks god laughs” is a good response, a good creative expression to live by.

Maybe the heart of democracy is a collective laugh, free of any maliciousness, the blindfolded and the scales intact, deeply personal, unlimited in its capacity to create collective cultural fit. The myth of love is always an inclusive myth. That then would be the democratic myth, that we can include, and if Wilber is right, without compromise but as mutual transcendence. That way Mounties with turbans is about Transformation and development and gay marriage is a remembering, not only of those who are societies others, but of the wager that is the constitution.

My experience with Open Space and an architect/design project is actually from a project I worked on with BP in Scotland. The 60 person business unit I was working with was moving from one part of the building complex to another (most would agree the space they were moving into was the worst space in the building). I started with an Open Space Visioning meeting where in addition to the usual markers and paper for Open Space I added magazines (design, nature, home furnishings, etc.) a big roll of paper, scissors, and glue. I invited the group to talk about what they envisioned the ideal work space to be and to cut out pictures from the magazines, use words, and pictures to create a collage of what the new space might feel like.

We took this collage, along with the results from the Open Space and shared this with the architects and designers (the designers/architects were invited to be at the visioning Open Space) assigned to the project. Some incredible ideas that I could never have thought of on my own, along with the many concerns about moving to “the worst space in the building” were folded into the design process which also took into account budget constraints and site needs/requests.

The design team then came back with a design for the new work space (which included skylights and a “yellow brick road” gleaned from the first Open Space). We took these sketches/blue prints and went back into Open Space with cut out furniture options and pencil and paper. Each team then looked at the areas available and filled in the design details specific to their needs. Conversation and negotiation took place between the different teams and a consensus design was reached.

The final result was an exceptional work space that was loved by the business unit and the “worst space” in the building is now considered the best place to be.

Along the way, I worked with individuals and teams around learning how to create places that work for them instead of trying to fit into someone else’s design. I gave them, tools and a language to find the best mix between personal and team needs.