Failure, fallure, and taking risks

Well, this is what I was going to post about yesterday before I got all distracted and all..

In the December 2003 issue of Fast Company, there was a tremendous article by rock-climber and management writer and thinker Jim Collins on the difference between failure and fallure and how we make mistakes in calculating risk. First on failure and fallure...

"Off!" I called down to Matt.
"No," he yelled back. "You're only three moves from the crystal. You can recover there."
"OFF!" I yelled.
And I let go, dropping onto the rope in a nicely controlled fall.
I hung on the rope for about 10 minutes, recovering, and then swung toward the rock, pulled myself back on to the holds, and climbed to the top. But of course, it didn't count. I hadn't done a clean on-sight. And even though later in the day, I managed to ascend the route from bottom to top in one shot--a success by most measures--I had nonetheless failed. Not failed on the climb, but failed in my mind. When confronted with the moment of commitment, the moment of decision, the moment of go-for-it on the on-sight, well, I let go. I went to failure, not
"fallure."

Failure and fallure. The difference is subtle, but it is all the difference in the world. In fallure, you still do not get up the route, but you never let go. In fallure you fall; in failure you let go. Going to fallure means full commitment to go up--even if the odds of success are less than 20%, 10%, or even 5%. You leave nothing in reserve, no mental or physical resource untapped. In fallure, you never give yourself a psychological out: "Well, I didn't really give it everything. . . . I might have made it with my best effort." In fallure, you always give your full best--despite the fear, pain, lactic acid, and uncertainty. To the outside observer, failure and fallure look similar (you fly through the air in both cases), but the inner experience of fallure is totally different from that of failure.

You'll only find your true limit when you go to fallure, not failure. Sure, I had less than a 20% chance of pulling through to the crystal ball, but because I let go, I'll never know for sure. Perhaps I would have had an extra reserve; perhaps I would have surprised myself and had an extra bit of power to hang on for one more move. Or perhaps--and this turned out to be true--the very next hold is better than it looks. And that's the rub. On an on-sight--as with life--you don't know what the next hold feels like. It's the ambiguity--about the holds, the moves, the ability to clip the rope--that makes 100% commitment on an on-sight so difficult.

One of my mentors in life, the design guru Sara Little Turnbull, gave me a wall hanging with a quote from her speech at the 1992 Corporate Design Foundation Conference:

If you don't Stretch

You don't know

Where the edge Is

I now see life as a series of choices between going to failure or fallure. As in an on-sight attempt, the next hold in life remains unclear, ambiguous. And that very ambiguity keeps us back from making a fully committed attempt. We fail mentally. We let go. We take a nice, controlled fall, rather than risking a bigger fall. But as with most hard sport climbs, going to fallure in life is scary, but not dangerous. Whether it be starting a business or publishing a book or trying an exciting new design, fallure rarely means doom. And most important, the only way to find your true limit is to go to fallure, not failure.

I find it interesting, as we contemplate going to fallure in our own lives, how often I end up in conversations about planning to avoid risk, about what more information we need, about how much knowlegde will make it okay or 'not stupid' to take a risk. Very seldom do we sink as much energy into talking about the risks we take by not committing to what matters--to what has heart and meaning. The fear of what is essentially unknowable has the power to keep us living smaller lives, to keep us hemmed in the safe, tame places away from our potential, our deepest joy, our most creative and fulfilled selves.

In North America, as compared to most of the rest of the world, we have belay lines, we have safety nets. I am wondering how this padding, this obssession with safety and control, has affected our capacity to commit to ourselves and our lives. We bleed our life energy out in exchange for cash to pay for safety--and even to pay for insurance on the safety. We are focused on risk and we pay almost no attention to consequence.

More from Jim Collins:

Separating probability from consequences is a key to leading an entrepreneurial life. When I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, many of my students failed to grasp this distinction, and it limited their options. One came to my office and said, "I'd really like to start my own company, but it
just seems so risky, so I'm going to take a job with IBM."
"What would happen if you give your startup the full try and failed?" I asked.
"I suppose I would go and get a job," she said.
"And how hard would that be?"
"Not very hard."
"So you're telling me that the worst-case scenario is that you'd be right back where you are now: looking at getting a regular job."
For a Stanford MBA, trying a startup was like going to fallure on a well-bolted sport route. Sure, the odds of success were low, but the consequences of falling were minimal. The rope would catch her. She went out on her own, gave it the full effort, and managed to climb through and build a successful startup. But she would never have known that if she had not separated probability from consequence.
The point here is to be clear on the difference between probability and consequence, and to act accordingly. On dangerous routes (or life situations that would destroy you or your company), you should avoid climbing to fallure, no matter how difficult or easy the terrain, unless you have no other choice. On sport routes with big, solid bolts (like Crystal Ball,
or the startup venture of my student), you can take on difficult challenges with a 5% chance of success and throw yourself into full fallure mode. It might be scary, but it's not dangerous.

I am wondering how many of us in North America can really even tell the difference between scary and dangerous. I had an Irish friend remark to me one day, "Hey there aren't any bullets flying...we're doing okay." And when I think of what we consider poverty and how depressed, isolated and frozen it can make us and then compare it to what is experienced by most of the rest of humanity--I get this energizing shock of perspective. I have begun to think that we are so insulated by our culture of entitlement that we have surrendered our basic human capacity--and desire even--to fend for ourselves. The urge to test, to see if we can measure up to what life throws at us--the inner urge to true maturity and adulthood. And there is something here too about a connection to the earth--about nature. I am thinking about the practice of walkabout and vision quest and how they are an essential part of becoming an adult. The exercise of self-reliance and the self-knowledge that arises from it. How many of us have had the conscious experience of holding our own lives in our hands--of knowing that we and we alone have the capacity to shape them into works of beauty and power?

A last word from Jim Collins:

And in perhaps the biggest failure, we allow today's frame of mind to limit our creativity and capabilities. What we perceive as limits today will simply be viewed as stepping-stones to the ultimate limits of the next generation. So, why not join the next generation now, and step right on past the limits of today? Why wait?
Daniel Boorstin argued in his classic book The Discoverers (Random House, 1985) that the primary barrier to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge and expertise. Discoverers see more clearly what can be done because they have less knowledge about the way things are supposed to work and are not trapped by the limits of their times. Similarly, climbing teaches that breakthroughs come not primarily by changing what we do, but by changing first and foremost how we think about what we do. And that is the toughest climb of all.

Love and G'night all...

Inclosure, failure, and other things

Inclosure

I'm reading more of Chellis Glendinning's, Off the Map and found an interesting link to my work with the Gabriola Commons project. At the workshop on Saturday some people were sharing where the concept of commons had come from and there were questions about its history and dates and such. Today, on page 53, I found:

Beginning in 1770, the English Parliament privatizes 6 million acres of previously commonly held fields, meadows, wetlands, and forests. Other arrangements, illegal, strip a near equal acreage from communal use. The upshot: 97 percent of all land in England comes to be owned by individuals and companies poised for the moneymaking promises of industrialism. A way of life dissolves. Traditional cottagers, freeholders, and tenants are forced off the land, are turned into hired hands, become factory wage slaves, deteriorate into welfare recipients and beggars. No more cutting fuel and furze, no more small-scale farming, no more pasturing, no more foraging, fishing, or hunting. "Inclosure," as one man tells...in 1804, "was worse
than ten wars."

Freedom is what draws me. I have always wanted to work in fostering more of it as widely as possible. It is interesting how in a society that considers itself free and open, working to increase individual and communal freedom is often seen as subversive and disruptive. Another quote from Chellis:

Back and forth, back and forth: control versus freedom, fascism against democracy, order fights nature, kings against natives, ideology challenging experience. In the context of the control required to maintain imperial order, the urge to freedom becomes irrepressible. It erupts; it is crushed. It erupts again; it is crushed again. You may hunch your shoulders in resignation. Such is human nature, you may sigh. And yet in our not-so-distant past, before the maps and the roads, before the kingdoms and the concentration camps, the urge to freedom is daily asked and daily answered. Only the iron clench of what social philosopher Lewis Mumford calls "the Megamachine," meaning imperial order and its attendant technologies, casts freedom as the losing proposition.

I was talking to Cheryl Honey (a sister Open Spacer) today about her program for weaving community and the possibility of piloting it here on Gabriola. It is an Open Space practice for growing grassroots community (villaging) that allows for freedom to emerge alongside the responsibility we take for each other. It works outside of all sanctioned systems, although many of the systems choose to join as active members. I am excited about it (and will keep blogging about how it goes). As the gaps in the system widen, it creates the necessary chaos for new patterns to emerge. Will freedom stick this time? We'll see...

The concept of inclosure and its links to our current sorry state was echoed by Dave Pollard in his post yesterday about the gigantic cattle feedlot in Coalinga, California (originally posted on Sprol). Here's an excerpt.

A nation wired for everything except the truth. If we were exposed to truths like this, and truths like what is happening today in Darfur, and what is happening in our own neighbourhoods where children and spouses are trapped and endlessly victimized by heartless abusers, and if we were unable to turn our heads away until we really paid attention, it would all end tomorrow.

I'm not sure about that. I have blogged before about what usually happens when we are overwhelmed by evil. Dave sees it too, we turn away. If we could only shift that turning away to a turning inward. I am beginning to wonder about a combination of inner softening and acceptance that allows for space to open and compassion to arise. When compassion arises, we can turn back and look at what horrified us before--because we are now capable of experiencing our interconnectedness. I am wondering about the combination of this capacity with positivity. Stories, myths, dreams, designs of positive futures, ways of being, cultural practices and supports. What if we hold the space for this to emerge into, while learning and sharing practices of opening with each other?

Failure:
Chris Corrigan had an interesting post today. He was up a ten-metre pole on a rickety platform contemplating a leap into space (really). Here's the bit that is sticking with me:

I wanted to know how it would feel to miss, and how it would feel to actually leap, safety net be damned.

This is going an interesting place for me. About twelve years ago, I went caving at Riverbend Cave, Horne Lake, and purposely pushed at my edges. About two years after that, I survived a Model Mugging course (awesome, do it women if you haven't yet) and pushed beyond what I thought was my breaking point. A couple of years later, I sat my first 10-day silent meditation retreat...a marathon of intense mental and physical pain if there ever was one...and pushed more edges and opened even more deeply to myself and the world. I was going to say it had been a while since I had engaged deliberately in a physically and mentally challenging activity, but now I am remembering childbirth.

I was going to say I was thinking about what purpose it might serve to deliberately plan an activity that I thought I would fail at...just to see "how it would feel to miss". But I remember now that I have been to that edge. With the twins, I almost died from complications after undergoing intra-uterine surgery to save their lives. With Gareth, I pushed for four hours, unsuccessfully. Who knew all 9-1/2 pounds of him were sideways? So I know what it's like to have tried your hardest, to have gone to edge of physical and mental exhaustion, and to have been unable to achieve the goal--even with death staring me in the face.

These experiences have stripped me down. I was never big on social convention to start with...but living through all this has left me with a desire for a deeper communion with kindred beings--to go beyond the acceptable to the unknowable possiblity on the other side of risking essential self. It has left me with a need and a drive to experiment and test and push through my weaknesses to serve a larger emergent vision.

I'll blog about failure and business tomorrow...maybe...

Other things

Something was niggling in the back of my mind about T.C. McLuhan. After a bit of bouldering to get to the unending chaos of our library shelves, I did indeed manage to find my copy of her first book, Touch the Earth. I read it a bit more than twenty years ago and treasured it so much it was one of the few that made the move west with me. In it I found some of the first voices that echoed my sense of the world. Here is a little excerpt from Chief Luther Standing Bear:

The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.

The book is beautiful, filled with the vivid photographic record created by Edward S. Curtis in the early years of the 20th century.

Tim Bray has little reflection on time at his blog, ongoing today:

Its extent is fixed, inelastic. Some of the time you spend leaves a mark on the world, some not. Some is pleasurable, some not. Some is necessary, some not. The waste of time is the only waste that is irrecoverable, even in principle. But you gotta slack off sometimes or you’ll go nuts.

The wild folks over at Key23 have been talking about a lot of the same things as everybody else I know...impending armageddon and all that...or perhaps I should say the immanentizing of the eschaton...but from the perspective of ceremonial technomages...recent topics...working with ancestors and the Christian-Right's rabid response to the Burning Man Festival.

Serendipity strikes at the library

Took the whole family over to the big island today. Dropped the little ones and Daddy off at Gran-Gran and Grampy's and headed over to the printer to double check the pantone and sign-off the bluelines on the latest newsletter project--then--motored down to the library to spend the whole day researching, reading, and writing for a variety of projects. For me, this is like going to the candy store...anticipation, planning, with all day in front of me to just wallow in knowledge and learning--bliss. And it has been more than two years since I have been able to do this...

So...(do you hear the tip-tapping of Murphy's little feet sneaking up behind me?)...I have about eight different writers I want to look for something--anything--by. I sit down at the incredibly slooooooow online catalogue and start looking stuff up. Checked out. Lost. Missing. Locked for transit. Port Hardy. On the shelving cart--back on Gabriola--Argggh! Not one--I'm serious here--not one book is available.

Okay, I take a deep breath, I can handle this...I'm good (and very experienced) at doing serendipity in the library. Books have always been one of Spirit's favourite ways of dropping in and saying hi to me. So I start browsing...and decide to start at 0 in the dewey decimal side of things...

Cool, look a book on XML. I could use that...pick it up, check it out...and what catches my eye nary but a shelf away??? Two big fat hardcover copies--not one, mind you, but TWO--of T.C. McLuhan's, The Way of the Earth: Encounters with Nature in Ancient and Contemporary Thought. Ah now, you may not immediately see the significance of this, but this is a book that my dear buddy Chris Corrigan is currently reading and had recommended to me. I guess I just got a cosmic nudge to reorder my reading list :).

And wait...it's not over yet...just as I get this in my hands...the power goes off. All the power. I mean...how may hints does a grrl need? The Harbourfront branch has awesome natural light and we're all civilized bookish types, so we settle down, get comfy and start reading our current finds. I figure, this is the library...they'll have it back up in no time...I'll just wait, the power will come back on and I can keep researching periodicals at least...besides--I paid for 4 hours of parking.

Thirty minutes later, the librarian has to ask us to leave, because the emergency power is running out and they won't be able to work anymore. The power has never been off that long before. So we all check our books out manually and I head over to Perkins for a cuppa and manage to draft out my workshop. I even got a chance to crack open The Way of the Earth and fell into rapture...

The task at hand is to re-ignite that spark of holiness that is associated with all of human life and which may contribute to the refinement of the heart. It behooves us to become more attentive to the potential of spiritual and cultural alchemy in the retrieval of what has always been ours--the living experience of the ultimate unity of the human spirit, the biosphere and the cosmos.

Yummy. I'm gonna love this book...
Thanks Spirit! Thanks Chris!

Four practices of open space

Back from the community meeting and how I wish it had been in open space. We spent so much time working out how we would have conversations that we hardly had time for conversations. Once you have been in open space, it really is the only place you want to work/live.

Following up from yesterday...I want to talk a bit about the four practices of open space--opening, inviting, holding and grounding--in terms of my inner experience of them at the moment. For me, at this point in time, opening means softening into the harsh places. It is not about pushing out, but more about non-resistance. For example, if I am feeling fear, opening to it means acknowlegding it, experiencing it, allowing it to be, learning from it, and not engaging with it until it dissolves and something new arises in a more spacious me.

Inviting is about willingness--an openness to possibility and paradox. There are two sides to inviting (at least)--the extending of invitations to others and the world and the engaging or accepting of invitations from others and the world. Willingness seems to flow from the attitude of openness. The impulse to generousity (invitation making) arises and can be seen in the newly spacious interior of the psyche. And through the principle of non-attachment the invitation can be manifested whereas before it may have been suppressed. The impulse to humility? (invitation acceptance) arises as the opening of the heart eases the constriction of the ego and the opening of the soul allows access to the promptings of Spirit.

Holding is about faith. Faith in others, self and Spirit. Faith allows for the development of the virtues of courage, vulnerability, and patience. It is about full-heartedness and strong heartedness. Holding is the continuum of being willing (inviting self) to remain open. The faith is possibility.

Grounding is about acting. It is about taking all the open space and the invitations and the holding out into the world. It is about making the leap of faith across the void from incoherence into manifestation. Without a net. It is experience--experience that will loop back as it pushes against the next harsh place and challenges me to open more space.

A little insight from Rumi...

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Ouch and The Bell of Open Space has Struck

Today was the day I had set aside the morning (rather optimistically, I see now) to do my financial statements. And not just the regular update, mind you, but the putting-it-all-in-the-fancy-new-program update. I had not realized that my psyche had double booked me by deciding that today was the day for internal psychic hemorrhaging. Now normally that isn't the kind of thing i'd share, but as the hemorrhaging was directly related to my growth in Open Space and my quest for the inner collaborator (with external colonialist/empirical culture) I feel some obligation to let you in on it.

Getting deeper into Open Space, for me, has meant opening. And not just opening to the outer world, but more essentially opening to the inner world. Today I opened a door and discovered a pit of roiling fear. (I believe in Open Space jargon, this is known as an Oh Shit! day...In which the main goal is to keep breathing. )

To keep this as short and simple as I can...I am painfully shy (I know, I know, it's hard to tell most of the time...it hits hardest when I don't have a role) and just realized that living in open space means having real conversations with STRANGERS ALL THE TIME--and here's the good bit--and being skillful at it. I often use knowledge to offset fear so off I trotted to the bookshelf and lo and behold--help is at hand--I find Brian Stanfield's, The Art of Focused Conversation, within a metre of my desk. Hurrah! I open it up and start reading...get to the bit about what's wrong with the way most of us converse and bang! there goes another door and who's behind it...you guessed it...the collaborator.

Here's a little sample that resounded for me:

"In his book on Aboriginal culture, Ross speaks of the huge weight that is lifted off his shoulders when he is submerged for some time in a group of Aboriginal people, knowing that he is not expected to judge everything that everybody says or does (much less declare his judgements as quickly as he can come to them). He speaks of this weight that so many English speakers carry--'the weight of this obligation to form and express opinions at all times and about almost everything'"

A vast sense of self-betrayal arose in me as well as the roiling, painful, devasting emptiness/unknowableness that precedes transformation. I quoted Sappho in my other blog recently:

If you are sqeamish,
Don't prod the beach rubble.

And how! Although I wouldn't have it any other way. Now that the main event has moved back in time a bit, I am, as always, grateful for the new sight and for the opportunity it represents. I now have the insight and opportunity to decolonize my conversation and thereby my relationships with others and with myself. Our language, and how we use it, forms a major piece of our frames. Shift the language or its use and you shift the frame.

Change of topic...
Open Space is bursting out everywhere...from this very useful article from Dave Pollard, with a handy chart on the difference between complicated and complex systems and responses--to the use of the words the Open Society to describe a vision of Canada by Stephen Downes. To paraphrase my Vipassana teacher...the bell of Open Space has struck.

Tomorrow I am attending a workshop put on by the Amazing Grace Ecological Society (AGES) to discuss the community process, mission statement and work plan for the Gabriola Commons project. I will also be meeting with the organizers beforehand to introduce the process and concept of Open Space and how it might support the work they are doing.

Love and some silliness

Way back in the beginning, about eight weeks ago actually, I posted a bit on the conspiracy of love and started wondering about what it would mean to breathe together with love. This got me wondering about love in general--and our experience of it within colonial culture in particular.

I have only made a start and have only more questions (a good thing). What has been more colonized than our human hearts? What would be the condition of an uncolonized heart--a free and open heart? What would be the nature and quality of our relationships? What would our family structures and social structures evolve to?

My friend K. Louise Vincent has spent many years working on the concepts and practices of disarmament. How we begin to see the defendness of our hearts and learn to disarm into vulnerability. We talked about how this concept is evolving for her into one of undressing. As I understand it, the now undefended heart begins to have the capacity to release the coverings, to strip away the layers between self, world and other.

This reminded me of the work I did in University on the Descent of Inanna. A sacred story from the ancient near east, where the goddess Inanna descends to the underworld and at each gate or challenge must leave something behind. Eventually she leaves even her skin behind and passes through as pure spirit. She is recalled to Heaven by the efforts of a beloved friend.

The idea of the beloved friend had me turning to Rumi. Rumi had a series of beloved friends, beginning with Shams of Tabriz, who inspired his spiritual quest and work. To quote Coleman Barks in his translation, "Their friendship is one of the mysteries. They spent months together without any human needs, transported to a region of pure conversation." It seems as if the role of the beloved friend is at least twofold--to challenge us and prompt us to dive deep into our relationship with Spirit and to call us home to our true natures when we have journeyed far out into the darkness.

Adding to this is the work of Angeles Arrien--particularly the Four-Chambered Heart (see her Four-Fold Way, pg 50). We examine the heart to see where it is full-hearted or half-hearted, where we are open-hearted or close-hearted, where we are clear-hearted or doubting-hearted, and where we are strong-hearted or weak-hearted. The mature person is seen as one whose heart is full, open, clear and strong.

In conversation with my friend, Chris Corrigan, he shared that the nature of colonization is closing. So, if colonization acts to close our hearts, we cannot be fully mature beings until we heal from the viral effects of colonization. If my thinking is correct, most of our culturally sanctioned love-relationships are stunted and constrained to remain in a state of juvenility until we deal directly with the legacy of colonization at the heart level.

Adding to the complexity--in Joanna Macy's recent memoir, Widening Circles, she details her marriage as well as several love-relationships with others. Joanna Macy is someone who I respect immensely and whose work has been influential for me. So I am left with good deep questions when I read that one of these loves is a monk and that she chooses to respect his vows of celibacy. I am left wondering...what is the difference between his vows and hers? Or rather what is the mattering difference? I find this question compelling and I think there is an informative depth here. Don't know where it will lead...it's just interesting...

I have read some interesting recent creative work by Dave Pollard (advisory: some sexual content) that is beginning to push the boundaries in interesting ways and is at least fresh.

And bell hooks work has been recommended and is going on the list.

And if you've got this far you deserve a treat...so here's some silliness:

For those of you who have ever survived a renovation, or who are in the midst of one, you have to check out this blog...

And for those of you who love Led Zeppelin, kitties, and Vikings...you know who you are...check out this bit of nuttiness...

One more hero

john-jeavons-a
Originally uploaded by the view from in here.John Jeavons, Executive Director of Ecology Action is a radical agriculturalist. He has been one of my heroes for many years. His simple approach to saving the planet--Feed yourself. Feed the soil. Conserve resources. If you have 1200 square feet you can turn to garden, you can feed a family of four with some left over for sharing or sale. (Remember you can garden up, along and in containers too!)

Another statistic that may surprise you...except for a couple of times in the year (spring planting and fall harvesting) the average workday for an agriculturalist is four hours...how many hours will you work tomorrow? And can you take your kids? We can slow down. We can step away from the unsanity and return to the natural rhythms we were evolved to thrive in. If only we can open our hearts enough...if only we can let go into the vulnerability...if only we can keep breathing through the fear and embrace the possibilities beyond it.

Reading vs Listening

Just a quick one...Neil Gaiman posted a great response on listening to written works versus reading them...

So, audio books. And once again, Harold Bloom demonstrates his twerphood to the world. "Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear," said Harold Bloom, the literary critic. "You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you." From this we learn that art and wisdom only go in at the eyes. What comes in by the ear is manifestly a lesser experience. The corollary, of course, is that real writing gets written down by the hand, and only inferior, wisdom-less writing gets dictated by the mouth, which is why Paradise Lost must have been rubbish...

Again, it's just snobbery and foolishness.

Yes, and much more than that. It is another symptom of colonialist culture raising its ugly head again. What is another characteristic of many of the cultures crushed and suppressed by colonial activity? They were cultures with strong oral traditions. Their history and cultural knowledge base was held in sacred oral teachings passed from one generation to the next. Even bagpiping was taught using a special language. When individuals have learned their history, ancestry, and culture by heart...when they carry it with them everywhere...it is hard to deny, erase and replace it. When we have to go to books to find out who we are and to remember what we knew...oh, how easy it is to rewrite it all.

And I am coming to believe that we have lost something vital. When we stopped thinking of storytelling, poetry, and minstrelry as essential components of healthy culture and community, I think we turned our backs on a part of our common human heritage that adds immense joy, depth and continuity to our experience of living. Gaiman again:

I don't believe there are books I've never "read" because I have only heard them, or poems I've not experienced because I've only heard the poets read them. Actually, I believe that, if the writer is someone who can communicate well aloud (some writers can't) you often get much more insight into a story or poem by hearing it.

Bravo! I have a little pet project I am slowly working towards acheiving. I want to get my friend Tim Landers, one of Canada's best living street poets to record some of his poems for this very reason. Because nobody can read them like Tim...and it would be a terrible loss not to have this record. And Tim would also like to record Chaucer--and I'm sure there are few who could read it like he would--who styles himself after Longshanks Will of Ludgate Hill.

Okay, I said quick and it's got longish...

Flowers of Fear

Went for a walk this afternoon and the bees drew my attention again. The air was full of the buzz and hum of them--it was like being near a busy thoroughfare. One place where they were particularly loud was a magnificent broom bush.
broom bush
Originally uploaded by the view from in here.
I stopped and listened for a while to the bees buzzing and whizzing around. The blossoms were thick, profuse.


broom flowers
Originally uploaded by the view from in here.
I began to get an uneasy feeling. I looked around more. The arbutus trees, also weighted down with blossom. The Ocean Spray, the Salal, the Dogwood, the Maples. I have never seen anything like the blossom this year--on native plants...

Sure, I've seen years where the cultivated blossom trees were fairly breaking under the weight. But never the native plants. And the ones responding most are the tough ones, the drought resistant ones...the cockroaches of the plant world...and the bees--absolutely pre-industrial around here.

For those who don't know, I spent a couple of years studying horticulture...have a diploma in it, in fact...and do you know why plants blossom? Yeah...to reproduce. And do you know what it means when a plant drives all of its energy into flowering? (Getting scared yet?) It means that the plant is under significant stress and believes this is its last chance to contribute to the gene pool.

The display is staggeringly beautiful and deeply frightening. The whole of nature is turned up to maximum. "Reproduce before you die", is the message going round. Are we listening? Do we hear what they're saying?--these flowers of fear?

Even this far north, the sun feels scorching on the skin--not healthy and life-giving. The young deer that came to our window yesterday (little antlers just budding out of its head) had black pendulous lesions all over its body. Looks like skin cancer to me...tho' I'm no expert.

The blossom delights the eye, the scent intoxicates, the warm green airs are buoyant with a symphony of birdsong, the blue sky calls forth the soul to rejoice. But my heart misgives me. Is this just one last glimpse of Paradise before we begin the journey into Hell?

Bees and Open Space?

I was walking in the garden today, thinking about some deep and difficult things and once again noticed the bees. There seem to have been lots of bees around lately. Or is it just that there have been lots of bees around me lately. Anyway they seem to be buzzing incessantly wherever I am these days.

So today, I took some time to slow down and watch them and wonder about what I might learn from them.

The hive has been getting bad press these days. Seen as mechanistic, rigid, and suffocating to all we hold near and dear about human nature. I saw something different today.

I saw individuals each carrying the responsibility for the care and feeding of the hive. I saw unique, creative, adaptive, responsive flights--each as individual as the bee who flew it. I saw each bee share its discoveries (in dance) with its hive mates. I saw some bees respond to the dance and join the dancer in its knowing until the resource was consumed. I saw other bees continuing with their own explorations...returning again to share...in an unceasing, reiterative flow. I saw a way of being in the world that had been successful for at least an hundred million years.

Wondered if we adopted a human version of bee behaviour, what would it look like? Each individual, as he/she reached maturity, took on responsibility for the care and feeding of his/her community. Each individual pursued her/his own quest and returned regularly to the community circle to share in song and dance and art and oral story what she/he had discovered. Some individuals joined together to further explore the discovery until all were satisfied it had been thoroughly understood. Other individuals continued with their own quests, coming back each evening to share and learn together.

Each unique being necessary, each valued for her/his contribution. Sounds interesting...

Then I found an interesting article studying bees and the evolution of rationality. Seems like we're not so different after all...

The link to this and Open Space may not be immediately apparent. But in order to live with this kind of deep co-operation, flow and connection, a practice like Open Space is necessary to bring us out of juvenility and into true mature freedom.

George Galloway's For the Record Statement

Take slightly less than three of your Earth minutes to listen to George Galloway's For the Record Statement to the US Senate Committee. This is true Highland "I can wear a kilt and run through a field of thistles" guts. If hearing a real Scottish Badger chew the hind legs off a US Sentor sounds like your cuppa tea...check out CBC Newsworld's page here. The audio files are near the top of the right-hand sidebar. The full transcript of his statement is available from the London Times. Go George Go!

Consciousness, mind, soul and meditation

I read Dr. Susan Blackmore's interesting presentation paper on "There is no stream of consciousness." In it, Blackmore promotes self-experience and self-experimentation, to generate new ideas about the nature of consciousness. She details the history and most recent research on the stream of consciousness and challenges our acceptance of the concept. She combines this with the hypothesis that the world we generally experience as 'in' our consciousness is a grand illusion. Finally she presents the following as her current best model:

I want to replace our familiar idea of a stream of consciousness with that of illusory backwards streams. At any time in the brain a whole lot of different things are going on. None of these is either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness, so we don't need to explain the ‘difference’ between conscious and unconscious processing. Every so often something happens to create what seems to have been a stream. For example, we ask “Am I conscious now?”. At this point a retrospective story is concocted about what was in the stream of consciousness a moment before, together with a self who was apparently experiencing it. Of course there was neither a conscious self nor a stream, but it now seems as though there was. This process goes on all the time with new stories being concocted whenever required. At any time that we bother to look, or ask ourselves about it, it seems as though there is a stream of consciousness going on. When we don't bother to ask, or to look, it doesn't, but then we don't notice so it doesn't matter. This way the grand illusion is concocted.

Following her suggestion of self-experimentation and experience, I compared this with my experiences of the stream of sound and the stream of consciousness during intense, silent meditation retreats. After about eight days (80-90 hours of meditation) I found it possible to experience sound as merely the vibration of the ear drum. This vibration initiated a chain of brain activity (that could be observed and stopped) including the recognition that 'a sound' had been heard, followed by a probe for identification of the 'sound', then by a judgement (pleasant or unpleasant) and/or request for reference (associations with past experiences and other information). There was no constant stream of sound recognition. The experience of 'sound' arose in response to the stimulation of the physical sense organ. There were perceptible gaps in this arising.

Likewise with my experience of the mind's contents. My first observation was that there was mind and something other than mind, 'overmind' if you will that was capable of observing and remaining apart and continuously present--I will call this 'soul' as that is where my thinking is at right now. The mind's content's were experienced as a jumble of disconnected, discontinuous, meaningless stories, emotions, and judgements. Over a number of retreats, and at the 80 + hour mark, the mind was calmed and emptied sufficiently (and the soul's attention adequately honed) to clearly experience the gaps between 'thoughts'. So, I find my experience generally supporting Blackmore's hypothesis--no stream of consciousness. The experience of what we usually mean by consciousness (the contents of the active mind) arises as sensation stimulates a physical receptor. Soul, on the other hand, I have experienced thus far to be continuous--unaffected by the sensations of the physical body. More experiential data required....

How does it seem to you?

Back from technical difficulties and more Open Space

Apologies for being away for so long. My internet access went bye-bye again. Finally got it properly fixed last night. One of the few downsides to living the rural life...

I just finished my first Open Space. It was just a short 1/2 day of a 1-1/2 day workshop that K. Louise Vincent and I put together, but it was amazing. There is nothing like proving to yourself that something really works the way you think it will. It was a remarkable experience in trust, humility, humour and Spirit. And I will blog about it more, but right now I am just too full and too damn tired.

Some of the many things that came up...the role of the Fool and the Void; the presence of Spirit; imagination, dream, and inspiration; naming the ghosts; trusting the group (and the process); the necessity of the political (or at least an underpinning analysis); the virtues of vulnerability; Joanna Macy; Angeles Arrien; Martin Buber; Thomas Merton; bell hooks; the colonization of love.

Okay, there's a taste of what's on the menu for the near future...taking self off to rest...

Before I trot off...Two more incredible posts from Dave Pollard--one on 12 ways to think differently and one on the end of civilization...

A journey of 10,000 steps

In my journey towards living in Open Space, I have begun the practice of noticing invitation when it arises in my life--and attempting to accept as often as I can.

This evening, as we all piled off the ferry, tired and ready to head for home, one of my little guys, Beric, stated that he wanted to walk home. Now, home is a little over 3.5 kms (about 2 miles) from the ferry. And that distance begins with a very steep hill that goes on for about the first km, which is then followed by two more hills a bit farther on. We have never walked home from the ferry before.

If I hadn't been watching out for invitation, I probably would have engaged in some sort of negotiation to get us all packed in the van and outta there. Instead, I heard the invitation and found the space to accept. So it ended up with Beric and Rowan and I pushing Gareth up Ferry Hill in the stroller while George followed along with the van.

Rowan and Gareth decided to opt out of the trek about half-way up. Beric, however, was determined that he would walk all the way home. And we did.

Somewhere along the way, he asked how far it was to home...he noticed how long it was taking and how much farther it seemed on foot. I replied that it was about 3.5 kms. And then I started to do some math, to help him get an idea of that distance...a metre is about as long as my arm, I said. There are one thousand of them in a kilometer. I came up a bit short at that point, because I remembered having my stride measured at one point (for snowshoeing, I think) and it is about a metre long...so that is 3,500 steps for me...then I noticed that Beric was taking about three steps to each of mine. This was a journey of over 10,000 steps for him...

I am so glad I accepted his invitation to accompany him on this little pilgrimage. I loved watching him revel in getting to make all the decisions. I received the gift of his non-stop conversation, sprinkled with about 100 why's, little songs, reflections about what he loved, insights into his world. I learned a lot about invitation, a lot about slowing down and lot about my precious son.

Thanks, Beric.

Beric
Originally uploaded by the view from in here.

In deep, shapeshifting, and surfing uncertainty

Well, as Chris Corrigan has remarked, I am in deep. I have fallen in love with Open Space...and much like falling in love in general, it is leaving me sleepless, pre-occupied, and roaming about with an evangelical zeal telling anyone who will listen about my new beloved. Thank you, thank you, to those whose ears I have been bending.

In deep is not a comfortable place. My ship has sailed, compass lost, and I am headed out into the thick of the storm--no going back--only a faith-filled surfing on the leading edge of change. As Rumi says, there is a window in the center of my chest that has been opened. To close it would be a betrayal of self. To leave it open invites all sorts of discomfort.

Change is not a comfortable process. Deep transformative change, where we push ourselves to the edge of chaos, can only be navigated by an engagement of soul that manifests as faith and love in action. My dear friend and colleague K. Louise, calls the energy of this experience, shapeshifting energy. For me that phrase really captures the uncertainty and discomfort of the process. It can feel like peeling off one's skin and walking raw and exposed into an unknown future. In transformative change, the goal is inherently unknowable; to proceed we must engage our faith, be willing to soften into the harsh places, and move forward in our boldest truth with presence and non-attachment.

And so I sit, like a pea on a saucepan, as Kipling would say, while the whirlwind of what I have invited transforms me into someone new and unexpected.

Change of topic here....a bit...
Chris Corrigan has posted an excerpt from his report on the Appreciative Summit he facilitated in Prince Rupert last week. I urge any of you who care about Aboriginal Youth or deep community change process to go read it. It is a remarkable piece of work.

I posted a comment, which I will excerpt a bit here, because I found some pieces in other blogs that relate to what I was trying to say and I want to capture the connections...

... connections to the radical environmental reading that Dave Pollard has been blogging about...about how colonial culture and much of what we currently consider civilization, has robbed us of our capacity for personal responsibility. I am hearing a resonance between what the youth are saying/wanting about their communities and what is emergent in the world in general--that we are experiencing a tryannical narrowing of latitude of personal response--that our natural capacities for resilience have been stolen/repressed/oppressed to the extent where personal and/or social/cultural destruction has become an epidemic and endemic behaviour reaction. An opening of the space between us--a revolutionary mutuality of respect and care--feels like one of the few healthy responses available. Opening space--for individuals to reclaim their personal power through responsibility and then share it as mature beings--feels like an evolutionary step that will lead to, as you say, a possibility larger than our fear. The voice, the wisdom and the fearlessness of youth are calling us home to our own true natures.

From Stephen Downes at half-an-hour:

Nietzsche, writing at the height of this society, recalls a similar age:
"Socrates guessed even more. He saw through the noble Athenians; he saw that his own case, his idiosyncrasy, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was quietly developing everywhere: old Athens was coming to an end.
And Socrates understood that the world needed him--his method, his cure, his personal artifice of self-preservation. Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy, everywhere one was within sight of excess: monstrum in animo was the common danger."
"The impulses want to play the tyrant," wrote Socrates, and we, today, see no shortage of the manifestations of such impulses...

From a comment by John King on Stephen's post:

...this is a good and timely piece that reminds me to re-read Doris Lessing's "Prisons We Choose to Live Inside". You may recall that these Massey Lectures from the mid 1980's ('85 or '86?)were written with exceptional clarity and quiet alarm about an increasing return to barbarism enabled by apathy.

And from Dave Pollard on Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water":

Teaching anything, even writing, is fundamentally about teaching people to be free, and then teaching them to be responsible -- both lessons are revolutionary and counter to everything the education system stands for, so if you dare do
this, be prepared for push-back from The Man.

The job of words is to direct us toward experience, to round out experience, to facilitate experience, and to give us ways to share at least pale shadows of that experience with those we love. And the job of words is to help us learn to be -- and act -- human.

Caught in the act!

noseprint deer
Originally uploaded by the view from in here.

One of my very early posts to this blog was about a little deer that came up to my office window and left it's nose prints. Well, I hadn't seen it for a while and then yesterday it showed up again, a bit bigger, but still very attracted to my roses.
I took this picture sitting in my office chair...you can see the camera reflection on the glass...

Nose to nose once more.

my new blog & synchronicity

Hi all,

Just to let you know I have started a new blog called one place most sacred. It's a photoblog and an experiment and a proving ground for an idea I have had perking for a long time. I have wanted to do something like a visual haiku...this isn't the full-blown idea, but is a first step. I am committing to take a picture a day, somewhere on our half-acre on Gabriola that exemplifies the beauty of plain ol' unadorned nature. I am adding a quote of poetry or other inspirational thought...mostly at random...you know, wherever the page falls open...hoping to engage synchronicity.

I met a new friend, Toni Crawford, at the Open Space event last week. She shared with me her definition of synchronicity and I find it rather compelling. She said, "Synchronicity is Spirit acting anonymously." Cool, eh?

Whisper Campaign

Here is a wonderful idea from Dave Pollard. I just love this....

So I have a proposal. I want to start a Whisper Campaign. Sometime in the next 30 days, identify someone you genuinely admire, and when the opportunity presents itself, whisper, or say in a low voice, when no one else is paying attention: You're amazing. And then just smile, pat them on the shoulder or
shake their hand, and walk away.

Now I can hear you saying to yourself this won't possibly work. Worse, it might get you charged with sexual harassment, pandering, or even infidelity. That's why it's important not to say it loud and not when anyone else can eavesdrop. It is less likely to be startling or embarrassing if it's said quietly. The smile is to let them know you're sincere and not being sarcastic (and don't tell me people won't assume you were being sarcastic -- without the smile and the pat they might just stay awake all night fretting about what you really meant). And by just walking away you make it clear that you're not expecting, or waiting for, a response. But make absolutely sure it's sincere -- if your motive for saying it is to get anything in return don't say it (if you do, and it backfires, you deserve it -- you're cheapening the compliment and spoiling the Campaign for the rest of us).

What do you think will happen? At the very least, you will make that person feel better. It's very possible they will ask you, when you next meet, what motivated you to say it, and why you did it that way. Just be honest, tell them you said it because you meant it, tell them that we are all too shy about complimenting people who deserve it, and if you like, tell them that some guy on the Internet is trying to start a Whisper Campaign to get everyone who receives such a compliment to pass it on to someone they really admire and from whom they want and expect nothing in return. Don't be specific and don't try to justify it in more detail than that. If they even try to return the compliment, politely stop them and explain that the Whisper Campaign is like Tag or Pay It Forward -- no tag-backs are allowed.

If you try it, please let me know how it works for you. We may not start a meme, but maybe in a small way we'll make the world a little better, a little happier, a little more honest.

Chaos, learning, Open Space and other goodies

Trying out some raw stuff on you again...
My friend Chris Corrigan has been wondering about the wonderful mystery that is Open Space and the depth that he feels functioning there. He has asked his community to think about it...so here I go...pulling some threads...

I am currently reading Harrison Owen's, The Power of Spirit. In it he pulls out this interesting tidbit from Gregory Bateson, "the perception of difference is the essence of learning...learning occurs when we notice 'differences that make a difference'." I guess I'd probably say differences that matter--assuming there is a quality of attention here. Harrison then spins it out by combining it with the attributes of chaos..."chaos creates the differences that make a difference, through which we learn."

Chaos draws the attention of the soul (rather than merely mind). Mattering is the quality of attention that drives the self-organising principle. So what is 'mattering'? The recognition/mirroring of the soul's purpose?/passion? in another being/object/idea...from which connection, the chain of action/arising unfolds...thought, action, and so on...

Add to that this interesting quote from Dave Pollard's site yesterday (talking about John Livingston's 1994, Rogue Primate)...

He argues that, far from being less conscious than civilized man, wild animals and wild human cultures actually have a greater 'participatory collective' consciousness beyond...our primitive individual consciousness, that extends to their ecological community and to the entire Gaia organism of
the planet, an interconnectedness to which we, and other domesticates, have become numb, have lost from disuse or ideological counter-programming.

So, maybe, Open Space with its manifest chaos acts to un-numb us, as it were, and reconnect us with our wild soul-mind...

I am also pulling in thinking from Eric Maisel (Fearless Creating), who talks about the necessity within the creative process of feeding and nurturing the "wild mind" (chaotic, original, deep) versus the "tame mind" (structured, known, prosaic).

Phew...that's enough of that...

Some more goodies...

Bryan Alexander at infocult posted a link to this great resource for Non-Profits wanting to enter the blogging world. (Thanks Brian L. and Keira for pointing me there too!)

Bryan has also just started a very cool project blogging Dracula in 'real time'.

Jeremy at lifestylism pointed folks to a recent post by Stephen Downes about leadership, power, and people. More good, gutsy thinking--Thanks, Stephen--you contribute so much to our community!

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Santa Maria
Originally uploaded by the view from in here.

On my way in to the second day of Open Space, I discovered this relic in the parking lot. Yes, it's the Santa Maria...courtesy of the Society for Creative Anachronism...ooops...I mean the Knights of Columbus...

There was a small movement to adorn the ship with warning signs "Go Home","Land contains only fierce natives, vicious bugs, and EXTREMELY large snakes." However, a latent streak of maturity emerged...and we left the old guys alone...

For those interested in the real Society for Creative Anachronism, here is their website. Unbeknownst to me, I apparently live in the Kingdom of An Tir...

Back from Open Space

Back from Open Space. Wow. I can’t get specific yet…it’s too fresh…I need some distance to integrate it…I can say that I feel about as blessed as a person can feel. It was an extraordinary environment to be in. I learned an immense amount about Open Space and many other things thanks to the generous spirit and genius of Chris Corrigan. I don’t think I know of a word to describe the working relationship—there was mutuality, fun, an intensity of focus and presence unlike anything I have known outside of serving at silent retreats, respect, space, and an amazing ease of flow from task to task…and freedom.

I did a lot of reading/studying/thinking/meditating in preparation for attending the event. Harrison Owen, who discovered OST, and many other OST practioners talk about grief work often playing a role in the aftermath of an OST event. And I am certainly experiencing something like grief that started almost immediately after I left the space. I think that my heart and soul know that Open Space is the possibility realized…a way we can be together in truth and freedom…that it brings out the best of who we are—when we are willing to give ourselves fully to the process. And I am in withdrawal, feeling the pain of not being in that space anymore…I want to live in Open Space… always… Fortunately I know that this is possible—and so a new journey begins…

Here is a picture of a lot of people working hard in Open Space (Yes, that’s a pool).

Working in Open Space
Originally uploaded by the view from in here.
Don’t believe me? Well, these 53 people self-organized 29 working groups, produced a 30-page report, and left by 1:00 p.m. on the second day with eight working committees with action plans and schedules to meet/connect again. (Yes, that’s a day-and-a-half!) In the process, they had fun, made new friends and connections, and generated a sense of renewal, hope, and faith. That’s Open Space. That’s what happens when you invite people to work with passion and responsibility. (in other words---mature freedom)

Away for a few days

I am going to be away for a few days. I will be participating in an Open Space event in Vancouver and then taking some family time away from the digital world. So I'm not expecting to post again until Monday. Although, Brian has volunteered to teach me about some of the cooler blogging tools, so you may see some changes as we practice what he preaches!

BTW for those of you who really want to know...Rowan chose the Dandelion, Beric chose the Stellar's Jay, Gareth picked Duck Duck...species yet to be determined. I decided not to go for the dragonfly and went back to my old friends the Snakes (and didn't Gareth and I see one the very next day...I have dreams of building an hibernaculum in the backyard...). Initially George picked Fleas and Ticks, which would have introduced an interesting level of moral complexity to the game...but he is now coming around to choosing either Praying Mantis, Crickets, or June Bug larva...which probably tells you more about George than you really wanted to know...

See you next week...unless I'm dying to blog about Open Space and Brian or Keira let me use their machine...

homesickness and how to save the planet

Reading Dave Pollard's recent post had me feeling homesick. Dave lives on the Oak Ridge morraine which is very close to Newmarket, where I grew up in Southern Ontario. The photos posted were like having memories pulled out of my head and pasted up on the screen--especially the sunsets and those remarkable wild turkeys.

The post was about a neighbourhood getting together to learn more about the ecosystem in which they lived, how it had been damaged and what it might take to start repairing and renaturalizing it. A worthy endeavour.

Dave recounts well the kind of resistance that we encounter when we try to make even minor concessions/accomodations to the other inhabitants of the biospere. Concern for property values. Judgement about beauty/ugliness. Loss of status. Which made me wonder yet again how we are ever going to get on with the work of saving the planet and ourselves.

I'm feeling the pressure...the pressure of someone who's airtank is showing three minutes and who is still one hundred feet down...not feeling any pain right now, but when those three minutes are up a whole lot of bad things are going to start happening.

I guess Dave was feeling kind of the same, because a day later he posted this interesting creative piece...

I think maybe we all just need to start thinking about consumer culture as an addiction...I mean a real addiction...like booze or drugs or smoking. What if we took it that seriously? What if we created warning labels...like the surgeon general puts on cigarette packs? Imagine a trip to the store...you reach for a chocolate bar and see the faces of children forced or sold into slave labour camps in Ivory Coast who picked the beans...You go to a fast-food restaurant and find the food wrappers covered with pictures of species driven to extinction because of clear-cutting in the Brazilian rainforest...you go to gas up and see pictures of oil spills in Alaska or of broken and bleeding bodies, casualties of (take your pick) the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria....

I don't know...do you think we would take it seriously then? Do you think we would get it and start making some real efforts at change? Or would we just get more numb and start using them as trading cards?....

indigenous genius

The problem with not posting for a couple of days is that a backlog of insistent ideas develops...ah well...I'll get to them all eventually...or not...

Two more wonderful offerings from Chris Corrigan at Parking Lot. The first is from a seminar he attended given by Dr. Martin Brokenleg. There are a lot of powerful ideas in these notes. Here is an excerpt that is resonating powerfully for me right now:

"People need four experiences to create strong spirit and these have been corrupted in Western mainstream society:

• Know you are significant. You can’t communicate this in words, only in experiences. In western culture we substitute individualism for significance.
• Know that we are competent. We substitute winning for competence.
• Know we are personally powerful. We substitute domination for power.
• Know our own goodness. We substitute affluence for goodness.

In First Nations cultures we capture these with Belonging, Mastery, Independence and Generosity."

Significance...well, if you've ever read any Roland Barthes you know how deep this word goes...originally from the Latin significantia "meaning, force, energy". As opposed to individual, again from the Latin, in- "not" + dividuus "divisible The question immediately arises in my mind...Not divisible by what? Or from what? This is an untenable proposition from any angle. No matter how you dice me...I am utterly divisible...I am frequently of at least two minds...I meditate...believe me..you ought to hear the outrageous racket that goes on in here... My individual atoms and their constituent gluons, muons, leptons and quarks are flowing in and out all the time...even my skeleton replaces itself frequently on a quantum level...A society based on in-divisible beings...hard, solid, single...kind of like billiard balls...oh. I see. Now I understand all the bruises...

Significance...meaning and energy. That sounds like something I can live for. Meaning is established in connection...with others, with world. Meaning is only possible when others matter--it grows from interdependence. And energy...energy flows from an inner spaciousness--a spaciousness that grows from a still centre--a centre that connects heart, soul and action. No-mind, to use the Zen phrase.

Competence from the Latin competere-to coincide, agree. The Old English form is dohtig -- doughty, which disappears from usage around the 17th century. Just before the Industrial Revolution...interesting hmmm? Ultimately the Old English root means, "to be of use". Which interestingly is my business model and motto... So that gives us, to be of use, to coincide, to agree...sounds like choosing competence is to choose to live a congruent life of benefit to others. Winning is such a fragile and temporary state in comparison...hard to define and producing a path marked by pain, unease, anxiety, dissatisfaction, fear, and isolation...oh. I see.

Power with or power over. That's the choice. Make it. I can't do this justice here. For a great treatment of it see Starhawk's "Truth or Dare".

Goodness or Affluence. Originally affluence meant flowing--as in plentiful flow...the gifts of fortune. Now it has become inextricably entwined with effluence...the garbage and waste of rampant consumer culture. Interestingly, the first use of affluence to mean "wealth" was in 1603. Hmmm. Goodness, as in worth, as in fitness, usefulness. To know in your soul that you are of worth is priceless. To know that the world is in some way better by your thoughts and actions is a path to happiness and fulfillment. To live in harmless loving connection or heart-and-soul-clogging greed...Our choice...

The second gem from Chris...

"Here is a powerful idea from Australian Aboriginal playwright Jack Davis about how to reconnect kids with nature:

It's quite simple...give us love of country whether white or black. Give every kid at school something to protect of our flora and fauna. "OK,you look after the beetles...the quokka, the ladybugs...that's your totem."

I love this idea. It has immense appeal on so many levels. I immediately started thinking...what animals would our family choose...One of my sons is named Rowan, so we could adopt the Rowan tree. Another son has Peregrin in his name, so we could adopt the Peregrine Falcon. But what about the rest of us...I know that when I ask I will get any number of suggestions...mostly dinosaurs if I'm not way off the mark. I thought at first that could pose a problem...Dinosaurs are already extinct and beyond our capacity to help or injure them...Then I thought again and maybe dinosaurs would be good to add to the mix. They could represent the spirit of the ancestors...lessons from history and pre-history. My personal favourite would be dragons. I know...I can't save them...but they can represent imagination, energy and strength, qualities we need to nurture too. I could adopt dragonflies...they've been around for about 300 million years...gotta be some lessons there!

I want to express my gratitude to Chris for making these ideas available to a wider audience. You take amazing notes!

I also want to express my gratitude to another benefactor. Over ten years ago, Celeste George, an indigenous woman, took time out of her own struggle to teach a group of us white folk about power and privilege and how we could unlearn racism. Her lessons went deep and I will be forever grateful to her for her generousity of spirit, courage and patience.

I have been amazed and humbled over and over again by the spirit of indigenous people. It brings to mind the quote by Martin Luther King Jr.

"To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you.

But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.’"

Peace to you all,

Goodnight.

thinking and walking

My friend Brian Lamb, over at Abject Learning, had an interesting post about his mid-day walk in the woods and thinking about too much...like most of us these days. He poses some interesting questions about the nature of information overload and the status of intellectual 'objects' in the digital age.

Had my own little thinking walk today... I was humming with excitement about some good news and was floating around about six inches off the ground and feeling a bit jittery. Now, anybody who knows me well will tell you that this is not a common state for me. I am usually pretty well planted. Our dear friend John, who is embarking on a co-living experiment with us, took note and took action. "Go for a walk. You've got 15 minutes."

(For those of you who don't have three children under five...that's a LOT of time--and opportunities like this don't present themselves very often--oh the burgeoning joy of co-living! ) So off I went, so glad I live within steps of wild places. I came back to earth so literally. The minute my feet went from tarmac to soil. I felt all the jitters just drain away...

I am one of those people who gets sick in cities. About two weeks is the max I can handle--less if I have to eat restaurant food--that lasts about two days...

I have always considered the earth my third parent. I don't mean this in any new-age kind of way. As a child I grew up in nature, spent most of my days exploring her infinite variety and beauty...learning her ways and lessons--respecting her power. My year was a constellation of buddings, bloomings and foldings. I knew the progression of spring flowers...where to find the fiddleheads, the first blood root, violet and mayapple, where the jack-in-the-pulpit grew and the ladyslipper...where the snakes first emerged to sun and glide on the still pools, watched the litters of fox grow up and the groundhog pups, when to gather puffballs for frying and wild grapes for juice and jelly, where the wild cucumber vine would be twining...where the crayfish lurked and when the suckers ran...and endless days lying stretched out on the ground feeling the pulse of the planet run through me...hearing her voice in my veins...I knew her as a physical and spiritual presence. The land where I came from is a huge part of who I am. Losing that land has cut me adrift in so many ways.

I have made what peace I can with it. And I know that a lot of my adult searching is to reconnect once again to a place in that deep and essential way...like breathing.

As I walked back down the greenway, the sun was backlighting the leaves of the maples making them glow, and the hundreds of little flying creatures bobbed and wove about like a host of fairies--pale silver lights dancing spring in once more.

In the beginning...

Yesterday I was reciting a couple of the very few lines of Anglo-Saxon and Old English that I know and it just reminded me how much I love the sound of that ancestor of my mother tongue. I love the round feel of the sounds in my mouth and the earthiness of it.

The lines I was reciting were from Cynewulf's Crist:

Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast
Ofer middangeard monnum sended.

Hail Earendel brightest of angels,
Over Middle Earth sent to men.

These are the lines that inspired Tolkien to write Lord of the Rings and played a role in the choosing of one of my son's middle names.

The other snippet I know is Caedmon's Hymn--probably the oldest known English poem:

Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
eci dryctin or astelidæ.
he ærist scop ældu barnum
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
tha middingard moncynn&ealig;s uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmehtig

Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,
The might of the Creator, and his thought,
The work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders
The Eternal Lord established in the beginning.
He first created for the sons of men
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,
Then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,
The Eternal Lord, afterwards made,
The earth for men, the Almighty Lord.

There is a beautiful modern sung rendition of it here and a spoken version here (the Sarah Higley version is better).

gratitude and pain

I am feeling so grateful tonight.

I had the blessing of another wonderful conversation with Chris Corrigan.

I am grateful the weather has finally turned mild and sunny in this most wonderful corner of the world. (I do love the gentle 'soft' days of rain as the Irish say...but, reptile that I am (Year of the Snake and all) I do crave the sun. ;))

I am grateful that my children are healthy and that I got to stand in the doorway and watch them luxuriate in the golden beams coming through window--stretching like cats--and remember what it felt like to do that. Do you remember that feeling?

I am grateful for the technology that is letting me connect to a remarkable community of people--and to experience for the first time what it feels like to be understood. Belonging is an exquisite feeling.

I am grateful for the community of friends and family who surround me daily with their love and support and who gift me with the opportunity to love and support them.

I am grateful for the circumstances (as painful as they were) that allowed me to start down a path of work that I love, that excites, challenges and renews me.

Alongside all of this...

I am reading Chellis Glendinning's book "Off The Map: An expedition deep into Empire and the Global Economy". She dives down into the depths of colonialism/imperialism and looks at it from the colonizer's perspective. In her own words:

"I am here to speak about the journeys of those of us who are riding in the coach...I am here to talk about the relentless mappings that isolate us from our own humanity. I am here to talk about empire.

"...the problem of locating ourselves is a problem caused by trauma and dislocation: in our case, millenia-old dislocations of sight and care that are impressed upon us as children, that are validated by the daily ways of our world, that we carry like secret burdens every day of our lives. When called upon to locate our place on the map of empire, we immediately spill over with all the reasons why not to locate ourselves on the map. It would hurt, we protest. The iron-heavy veils are too ponderous to lift. The histories are too long forgotten to excavate, the confessions too excruciating to make, the revelations too disembodied to draw forth.

"...if we are to become fully human, to embark upon these liftings and these excavations, these confessions and these revelations, is to lay the ground for meeting the other people of this Earth and together, at last, to join in charting a future for us all."

Chellis writes with gentleness punctuated by moments of stunning pain. She is writing about my people. The daily fodder of Empire that not only consumes everything in its view, but also its own.

My grandmother is old enough to remember (fondly) being "in service". My father remembers losing his father at a young age to the poisons that were a daily part of his job--and the legacy of bleak poverty that his death left.

As I read of the daily horrors that industrialization/empire birthed, I experience deep pain. It is the pain, and the threadlike path of that pain, that I have been following in my pursuit of the deep roots of colonialism in my own psyche.

So I am grateful to that pain. And as Pema Chodron advises, I am leaning into it. I am grateful to Chellis Glendinning for helping me to feel it and for pushing the darkness back ahead of me.

All Hail Eris!

Yippee! Just found out the Principia Discordia has a home on the web! For those of you who have never encountered Discordianism before...go have a peek....just make sure no one near you is trying to sleep....

I have been reading about conversation and Open Space Technology and the Inviting Organization and Chaordic Organizations. The role of chaos continues to be a topic of intense interest as it relates to all of these ideas, so it is not too surprising, I guess, that I should think back to my old love affair with Eris and the Discordians.

A quick google had me jumping up and down for joy, because not only is the entire text of the Principia now easily accessible for me to torment all my friends with, but there is new material! In the introduction to the 5th edition (I have a dog-eared 4th edition), Kerry Thornley writes:
"An imposition of order creates a chaos deficit, which compounds until it is paid off (by enduring all the outstanding chaos)."

I was excited to read this, because my thinking earlier in the day was following these lines...
In attempting to understand how Open Space Technology works, there are a number of pre-conditions whose presence seems important to its success (also in biological systems) (see the User's non-guide to follow this thinking better) Two of which are high levels of diversity and high levels of complexity--qualities that tend to push systems towards chaos. Combined with this is the idea that the more chaos existing in a system's initial conditions, the higher the order of organization/information/function that emerges. In thinking about why OST works, I began to wonder if it has to do with injecting more chaos into the system...functioning to disrupt/free up existing connections/bonds so that new forms/ways of working/being can emerge. Kerry Thornley's comment seems to support the utililty of this possibility, by linking a deficit of chaos to stasis/stuckness within organizations. This deficit is harmful to the life of the organization as it must ultimately be balanced one way or another--exploding/imploding in unpleasant ways (War) or engaging/inviting (OS practices).

Anyway...still grappling with the basics here, but it sure is fun!

"I tell you: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star." Nietzsche

picnics and poetry

I was outside today enjoying the wonderful spring sunshine with Beric and Rowan, my four-year-old sons. We had a picnic together in our wild front yard, under the cedars and Douglas Fir--sitting on a bright yellow table cloth watching the bees, the moss, the Oregon Grape flowers, the fiddleheads uncurling...

I wish I had a digital camera so I could give you pictures...instead I will give you one of my favourite poems by Ryokan.

First Days of Spring

First days of spring--the sky
is bright blue, the sun huge and warm.
Everything's turning green.
Carrying my monk's bowl, I walk to the village
to beg for my daily meal.
The children spot me at the temple gate
and happily crowd around,
dragging at my arms till I stop.
I put my bowl on a white rock,
hang my bag on a branch.
First we braid grasses and play tug-of-war,
then we take turns singing and keeping a kick-ball
in the air:
I kick the ball and they sing, they kick and I sing.
Time is forgotten, the hours fly.
People passing by point at me and laugh:
"Why are you acting like such a fool?"
I nod my head and don't answer.
I could say something, but why?
Do you know what's in my heart?
From the beginning of time: just this! just this!

Simplicity and Living an Extraordinary Life

I have been reading Jim Merkel's book, "Radical Simplicity" (New Society, 2003. ISBN 0-86571-473-8), because our family wants to begin bringing our living and daily actions much more into line with our values. We are also hoping for a spin-off of less work time and more "us" time while our children are still young.

Reading the book has made me think more about what makes me really happy. I love making things with my hands--sewing my own clothes, making jewellery, crafts, decorating with natural and found objects, painting, fixing stuff, landscaping--and these are exactly the things I am starting to pay other people to do--because I don't have time anymore. This also made me think of Kelee Katillac and her book "House of Belief" (Kelee's Site seems to be down for reno's, but I've include the link anyway.). In the book, she promotes the idea of a "hand-made life" and encourages her readers and clients to not only include their own values and beliefs in the design and decoration of their homes, but to also make as many of the items as possible. Her philosophy grows from the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800/early 1900's. A quote from William Henry Channing, 1898, sums it up:

"To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To listen to stars and birds and babes and sages with an open heart. To study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions. Never hurry.In a word, to let the spiritual, the unbidden and the unconscious rise up through the common. This is my symphony."

And I guess this links back to my chat with K. Louise and the necessity of balancing mind, spirit and body--grounding theory in practices of wholeness, connection, and simplicity. The concept of practice has been ghosting around with me for the past two months. I am looking at everything through the lens of practice--for if we do not have the skills, the ways/means/competencies for living the way we long to, how can we achieve it? Simply defining problems or even approaches is now inadequate. We need practitioners. And we need to create cultures of practice that support, teach, and promote the skills for living peacefully and sanely on a finite earth. I guess it's what Buddhists call the sangha--the community of practice...

A quote from Deena Metzger has been repeating itself in my head for the past couple of weeks:

"The world is on fire.
We are in danger.
There is only time to move slowly.
There is only time to love."

I think this may capture the essence of our current challenge. All our conditioning tells us we must move faster, more efficiently, work harder, do more with less. But that is the way of war culture...it is an inner violence...the internalized oppressor. The way of peace is about slowing, deepening, opening. We need to support each other in learning to release our addictions to scarcity, fear, consumption, defendedness...even self...to support each other in healing and recovery from war culture--in the transformation to nonviolent/peace culture.

For those who don't have the good fortune to have access to K. Louise's book, (Transforming Abuse, contact me if you would like access to the author's secret stash of last available copies.), I want to excerpt a small section:

"...I know there is a way of seeing, speaking and acting too long held in check. For myself, its recovery is a process of regaining a politic that does not refuse the poetic--seometimes defined as soul; sometimes as many systems working together, or synergy; sometimea as a celebration of diversity, pluralism or our interconnectedness; and sometimes, simply as harmless love.

"Binary or dualistic logic sees the world in either/or terms: good or bad, strong or weak. Especially through the development of machanized and scientific approaches to life, it has distilled human experience and voice into separate, compartmentalized units. Qualities that are considered male or female (such as assertiveness vs. co-operation) are polarized, the male given higher rank. When binary thinking places the differences between people within a paradigm for human relations of supremacy and subordination, the result is alienation and violence. Most of all I see this causes the human heart to harden or become machine-like--making it difficult for the heart to open and respond to suffering, unable to see and respect self as a changeable, exploratory and vulnerable being. Such a heart resists healing. We have been taught instead to guard our hearts and voices with an inner police state, an internal government based on dictatorship, strategy and tyranny. We live with a rigid, ungiving heart, a false democracy of self and language. We have been given life-depleting defence systems of many kinds to guard our lives, all sorts of arsenals to reproduce on an emotional level of existence a consciousness of warfare.

"A non-binary logic is one that refuses to follow that which splits our body from our soul. ...It is the logic of the open heart--not the way of opposition or alienation...but the way of interdependence. It is what Buddhist thought describes in the doctrine of paticca samuppada as dependent co-arising or deep relationship with the world through awareness of mutual causality. It os about love that is not born out of commerce or control but of relatedness, responsibility and respect.

"Descartes and all the other great colonizers of land, psyche, the cosmos, of race and women have shown us their fear of the unknown, out of which has developed conquests of catastrophic destruction including an insane attempt to conquer time and life itself. The sickness of conquest is a patriarchal mindset that shows us, terribly, where we need to go. We need to build an ethic of living that is decolonized, which refuses exploitative ownership and control of any kind. We need to approach the unknown places, the foreign places in ourselves and our culture with a willingness to bring safety, understanding and healing. We need to find a way of seeing and hearing and speaking that does not dispossess a person of their reality, feelings, words or dreams."

Does this resonate with you? I know in my life I keep spiralling into this understanding of the legacy of war culture--of how it alters my internal landscape without my permission. This spiral has taken me deeper than than before...I am still shaken by how deep the cult of colonialism is sunk into my psyche. I have not found the bottom yet--but at least I am swimming into it with determination, power and some good tools this time. And with a hope I have not had before--at the same time I am seeking a positive core--beginning the project of creating a culture and practice of nonviolence for myself, my family, my community--that feels equal to the task of replacing the old.

I have been thinking--because I encounter a lot of resistance and censure when I talk about my newly radicalized state--no big surprize I suppose--that if we want to live an exceptional or extraordinary life, we must make exceptional and extraordinary choices and act on them. Ordinary choices, ordinary risks, ordinary actions--just produce more of the same...nothing new or...extraordinary...

So, for the few brave souls interested in the extraordinay, the radical, the simple...

I guess this post has also spiralled around too...so I'll circle it back to the beginning again by ending with some links to a few good resources from Radical Simplicity...

The Global Living Project
Redefining Progress

Anybody interested in joining in the simplicity challenge, the intentional community design, or the culture creation projects?

"There is a place
between dreaming and living,
a third way.
Guess it."

Antonio Machado

big ideas, little time

Sorry to be away so long. My connection to the internet (always troublesome) has been down again. I will squeak in a short one tonight, as one of my dear little ones is waiting for me...

Had a wonderful chat with K. Louise Schmidt today. (See previous post...)Have an update on her book, "Transforming Abuse: Nonviolent resistance and recovery"--there is a small secret stash of copies available. If you would like one, email me or leave a comment and I will hook you up with one.

We talked about so many good things. About evil being the absence of love; about the importance of balancing mind, body and spirit; about being called in our work; about colonialism, how deep it runs, how much work there is to be done, how we are so often still stuck in reactivity let alone recovery; about the necessity of dreams; about there not being time to wait for governments to lead us--how we need to take individual responsibility and action; about the need to find the positive core; about establishing healing centres and schools; about the importance of spirituality in education; about culture creation, co-intelligence and conscious evolution....and so much more!

I will write more soon. Promise. G'night for now...

PS: One of my four-year-olds said to me this morning, "I love you Mommy. You are the best Mommy." He paused then added, "I made a good choice." How cool is that?!

memes or genes

Keep tossing the thought back and forth--what made human beings so bloody successful. Was it something that happened in their genes?--That's what all the anthrop/archaeologists are out there looking for. Or was it a new meme instead? I'm starting to lean toward the meme thing...just for fun...
Maybe that's what the Cain and Abel story is really all about. An ancient collective memory of that ultimate pre-historic betrayal when one member of the happy proto-human collective reasoned out, while scraping the hide off the latest Mammoth kill, that hey, these tool things work out pretty good against animals. My other proto-humans are a lot smaller/slower/blunter than most of the things I kill. Maybe if I bashed a few of them about I wouldn't have to do so much of the washing up. Pick up jaw bone of wild proto-ass cunningly decked out with the lastest in pressure-flaked technology and start wailing on the bro's. A new cave bear robe and a fine helping of roasted Mammoth testes later, our new despot experiences some remorse. Maybe he shouldn't have pounded his relatives around like that--they were family after all...but what about those hairy low brow guys they'd seen sneaking through the bushes just over the ridge? A few beneficent pats on the bruises and they take the whole show on the road. A million-and-a-half years or so later...take a look around...see anything familiar???

Okay, I've had my fun, and I probably need to start getting more sleep--but it has seemed to me for a long time, that as a species we have largely removed ourselves from the normal processes of evolutionary selection and adaptation. Our evolution seems to be mostly about cultural practices, beliefs, systems, thoughts--memes. So does this imply that cultural diversity is as essential as genetic diversity to our survival as a species? If yes, then we need to direct far greater resources and attention to preserving it....(Somebody has probably written a thesis or a book on culture creation and conscious evolution, but it's new to me...if anyone knows of a good link or two, please let me know...)

mundaniety

Hi
Been working on the tech side of the blog--notice permalinks are now visible and a blogroll has started...she says feeling rather proud of herself...

Many interesting threads weaving about...will explore tomorrow....