Toke Paludan Møller retires

Me and Toke in Montreal in 2013, on the back of a 120 person Art of Hosting.

Twenty three years ago, in November 2003, I sat next to Toke Paludan Møller in a circle called by Peggy Holman to discuss how we were going to carry on the work of practicing peace that we started in a remarkable gathering at the Whidbey Centre. It was the last day of the conference, which featured Harrison Owen discussing his book The Practice of Peace, and then a group of truly amazing practitioners working together to learn about opening space for peace. On the last day we were in Open Space and Peggy called a session around the topic of “what next?”

I knew Toke a little from the online world, but this was the first time we met in person. We passed the talking peace around the circle and when it came to Toke who was sitting to my left, he spoke words that I later invited him to turn into this poem:

it is time

the training time is over
for those of us who can hear the call
of the heart and the times

my real soul work
has begun on the next level
for me at least

courage is
to do what calls me
but I may be afraid

we need to work together
in a very deep sense
to open and hold spaces
fields
spheres of energy
in which our
and other people’s
transformation can occur

none of us can do it alone

the warriors of joy are gathering
to find each other
to train together
to do some good work
from the heart with no attachment
and throw it
in the river

no religion, no cult, no politics
just flow with life itself as it
unfolds in the now…

what is my Work?

That was my invitation to work, and when he passed the piece to me, I said “yes…I want to do THAT.”

The next year, Toke was coming to my island to teach an Art of Hosting, having previously met some of the stewards of Rivendell, a retreat centre here. It was there that I met Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and others who would go on to be some of my most influential work and learning partners for the next 20+ years. The work of the Art of Hosting was taking off in North America, supported by the Berkana Institute and it gelled so completely with what I was doing through working in Open Space that I jumped into the remerging community. I was invited the next year to be an alumni at the 2005 gathering at Rivendell, and then invited to be on the team for 2006 and beyond. We have held Art of Hosting trainings on Bowen Island or in Vancouver every year since (and lately twice a year, in the fall and in the spring). Toke and I ran a session for Indigenous youth in 2006, set up by Pawa Haiyupis.

That work led to me inviting Toke to be a part of the engagement work we did for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team (VIATT) an organization that was working on establishing a regional governance structure for Indigenous child and family services on Vancouver Island. Together we did two Art of Hosting trainings for folks working in that field, at Tsa-Kwa-Luten on Quadra Island and Hollyhock on Cortes Island. Those gatherings were profound. David Stevenson was our CEO and Kris Archie was the engagement specialist that I was working with at VIATT. Kyra Mason was the policy specialist. So many of my colleagues and friends that have developed this practice of the Art of Hosting were introduced to it at that time as we were using this practice and participatory methods to engage in some truly system changing work.

Toke invited me to join him and Monica teaching the Art of Hosting at the Shambhala Institute in Halifax the following year and I did that for several years as well including in Victoria and Columbus, teaching alongside a faculty of unbelievable quality and stature. I felt so privileged to by a part of that work.

In the mid-2010s we worked together in Estonia and Montreal, responding to calls for Art of Hostings in those places. We worked together with folks in Minnesota through the Bush Foundation in work led by Jerry Nagel and at the University of Minnesota where Jodi Sanford was leading a group of folks in exploring the practice in the public policy sphere. I dipped my toes in the work that Toke and Monica were supporting in Columbus with Phil Cass, trying to bootstrap a community-based health care network. That is work that I continue to do with Phil to this day, as a regular member of the Physicians Leadership Academy faculty. We worked together on a team with Monica, Phill, Tim Merry and Tuesday Rivera on the Food and Society conference for the Kellogg Foundation, hosting 550 people in a process that radically transformed that conference. We followed in his footsteps as he worked with a crew in Japan in 2017 and we followed up to support that community with a three-week intense visit in 2019.

We were at stewards gatherings in Slovenia, in Nova Scotia, Minnesota, Belgium, and on Bowen Island where we wrestled with questions of how a global community of practice could be held together without being controlled. Some of those gatherings included peak moments of my life, notably the night when we gathered on the rampart at Statenberg in Makola, Slovenia, where we sang into the grey, foggy, gloaming of dawn with Luke Concannon, gathered around a fire, joined in beautiful, present community.

Toke taught me about simplicity and clarity in the work of facilitation and hosting. He calls forth depth in everyone, and is a lovely facilitator. His commitment was always to practice. as a life long meditator, he knows the fruits of awareness of attending to the basic patterns of life – breath, movement, invitation, dancing together. With the Art of Hosting he and Monica distilled many years of professional practice into a framework that can hold this depth and that invites each of us to become better and better at what we do, more committed to dignity, to heart, to voice, to a commitment to what lies in the centre between us all, the desire for a more purposeful, life-giving and loving world.

Also Toke taught me to be a teacher, to always have mentors and always find apprentices who are hungry for the work. He models this by supporting young people in their journey as the learn to host and lead. He shares widely and deeply with those who hunger for the knowledge and wisdom he has acquired over the years. He models mastery – the humble learner, the humble teacher, confident in what he knows, open to what might happen, never knowing where the next thing will come from.

And he taught me to be a steward, to care for the lineage of what has been handed to me and to pass it to those who could also care for it. Not to preserve it unchanged, but to let it morph and respond and grow and be useful to the world.

Yesterday, Toke announced that he was retiring from this work. In a Facebook post, he wrote:

After 55 years practicing the art of organizing, hosting, process consultancy, and sustainable leadership training, I’m awakening into the next chapter of my life.

At 77, I’m retiring from professional work – to walk the path of gratitude – simply for being alive, and to live in deeper harmony with Life itself – as best I can in the last chapter of my lifetime.

I am focusing on deepening my practice of peace – regardless of circumstance.

Supporting other humans of the next generations – who choose to listen – to awaken to practice simplicity, to practice peace, and serve Life and humanity with courage & kindness – in our smaller and bigger contexts.

My journey continues with the co evolving Practicing for Peace Dojo, The Flow Game practice field – and the subtle Art of loving Life – in service of peaceful coexistence and wellbeing for All.

To all my clients, friends, and companions – thank you.

It’s been an honor and good fun to walk and work alongside so many of you in the fire of learning & what matters – striving to bring a bit of clarity, nowness, natural order, capacity – and peace into the fragmentation of our world – wherever invited and possible.

Listening for – and responding boldly to – sincere invitations from the heart is, I trust, a graceful way to live, walk and serve Life.

Learning in the right and wrong.

Now, tending a quieter flame.

Still, the Work goes on…..

The Work is in good hands. I am eternally grateful to this man for setting me on this path of devoting my own life to the deep practice of participatory work through the Art of Hosting. It is not easy, and it is not possible to do without a community of friends and colleagues and co-conspirators in the work. Toke’s greatest gift to the world through his work was perhaps that: tending to a community of “mates” who were willing to say yes to wild things and get in there and see what we could do.

When I met Toke he was two years younger than I am now. His example gives me a path of possibility for the next 20 years of my own life.

A bow to you, my friend.