I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. \u00a0We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of \u00a0“What time it is in the world?” \u00a0We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. \u00a0We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging. \u00a0At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging. \u00a0I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:<\/p>\n
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You have to be ready to die on the hill \u00a0atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world<\/p>\n
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When you open the smallest space in your life, \u00a0passion can erode obligation. \u00a0You become more social, unable to be unaware.<\/p>\n
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You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train \u00a0but only for a second. \u00a0You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied, \u00a0a life examined.<\/p>\n
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What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?<\/p>\n
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Responsibility and courage are individual acts. \u00a0Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context, \u00a0they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.<\/p>\n
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Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view, \u00a0the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.<\/p>\n
We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own, \u00a0living in lives and times beyond our own. \u00a0We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear \u00a0in relationship.<\/p>\n
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Our conversations touch every single other conversation. \u00a0The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity. \u00a0The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another. \u00a0In that small open space, influence takes root. \u00a0Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.<\/p>\n
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I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving? \u00a0No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying? \u00a0What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?<\/p>\n
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In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard. \u00a0The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite. \u00a0Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.<\/p>\n
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All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand. \u00a0You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of. \u00a0Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish. \u00a0You can find home by simply following the taste of it.<\/p>\n
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Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer. \u00a0Learn to listen to why people say the things they say. \u00a0To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.<\/p>\n
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Presence. \u00a0When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story. \u00a0And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.<\/p>\n
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We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing. \u00a0People are the agents for their own freedom. \u00a0But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go. \u00a0We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation. \u00a0With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new. \u00a0Honour and reverence.<\/p>\n
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We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.<\/p>\n
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Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life? \u00a0How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.<\/p>\n
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How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency? \u00a0We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.<\/p>\n
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We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity. \u00a0We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours? \u00a0Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air. \u00a0Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.<\/p>\n
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Like Meg says,<\/p>\n
Notice what is going on.<\/p>\n
Get started.<\/p>\n
Learn as you go.<\/p>\n
Stick together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. \u00a0We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of \u00a0“What time it is in the world?” \u00a0We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. \u00a0We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[28,29,49,22,48,19,6,16,24,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-of-harvesting","category-art-of-hosting","category-bc","category-collaboration","category-community","category-conversation","category-facilitation","category-leadership","category-poetry","category-world-cafe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piBp1-QX","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3283"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3296,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283\/revisions\/3296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}