Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless put together their brilliant collection of participatory methodologies called “liberating structures” a few years ago. I had occasion to visit their website this week and notice that it is even more brilliant than before, containing detailed descriptions of the structures tools and processes and elegant minimal instructions for using them. For seasoned facilitators, this is a gold mine of reference, and I’ve added it to my Facilitation Resources page.
Home now from Ireland, with this marvellous extract from Flann O Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds” that somehow captures my experience of living a week in Ballyvaughn listening to the rush of na Gaeilige spoken from the mouths of scholars and poets and activists and to the floating tunes on the air of the night as I walked home from O Loclainn’s pub with the taste of Green Spot on my lips and my skin kissed by the breeze off the sea.
Of the musics you have ever got, asked Conan, which have you found the sweetest ?
I will relate, said Finn. When the se
ven companies of my warriors are gathered together on the one plain and the truant cleancold loudvoiced wind goes through them, too sweet to me is that. Echoblow of a gobletbase against the tables of the palace, sweet to me is that. I like gullcries and the twittering together of fine cranes. I like the surfroar at Tralee, the songs of the three sons of Meadhra and the whistle of Mac Lughaidh. These also please me, manshouts at a parting, cuckoocall in May. 1 incline to like pig grunting in Magh Eithne, the bellowing of the stag of Ceara, the whinging of fauns in Derrynish. The low warble of waterowls in Loch Barra also, sweeter than life that. I am fond of wingbeating in dark belfries, cowcries in pregnancy, troutspurt in a laketop. Also the whining of small otters in nettlebeds at evening, the croaking of smalljays behind a wall, these are heartpleasing. I am friend to the pilibeen, the red necked chough, the parsnip landrail, the pilibeen mona, the bottletailed tit, the common marshcoot, the speckletoed guillemot, the pilibeen sleibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine ploughgull, the long eared bushowl, the Wicklow smallfowl, the bevil beaked chough, the hooded tit, the pilibeen uisce, the common corby, the fishtailed mudpiper, the cruiskeen lawn, the carrion seacock, the green ridded parakeet, the brown bogmartin, the maritime wren, the dovetailed wheatcrake, the beaded daw, the Galway hillbantam and the pilibeen cathrach. A satisfying ululation is the contending of a river with the sea. Good to hear is the chirping of little red breasted men in bare winter and distant hounds giving tongue in the secrecy of fog. The lamenting of a wounded otter in a black hole, sweeter than harpstrings that. There is no torture so narrow as to be bound and beset in a dark cavern without food or music, without the bestowing of gold on bards. To be chained by night in a dark pit without company of chessmen-evil destiny! Soothing to my ear is the shout of a hidden blackbird, the squeal of a troubled mare, the complaining of wildhogs caught in snow.
Relate further for us, said Conan.
It is true that I will not, said Finn.
With that he rose to a full treehigh standing, the sable catguts which held his bogcloth drawers to the hems of his jacket of pleated fustian clanging together in melodious discourse. Too great was he for standing. The neck to him was as the bole of a great oak, knotted and seized together with musclehumps and carbuncles of tangled sinew, the better for good feasting and contending with the bards. The chest to him was wider than the poles of a good chariot, coming now out, now in, and pastured from chin to navel with meadows of black manhair and meated with layers of fine manmeat the better to hide his bones and fashion the semblance of his twin bubs. The arms to him were like the necks of beasts, ballswollen with their bunchedup brawnstrings and bloodveins, the better for harping and hunting and contending with the bards. Each thigh to him was to the thickness of a horse’s belly, narrowing to a greenveined calf to the thickness of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was wide enough to halt the march of warriors through a mountainpass.
I am a bark for buffeting, said Finn, I am a hound for thornypaws. I am a doe for swiftness. I am a tree for windsiege. I am a windmill. I am a hole in a wall.
On a bus at the moment travelling from Tartu to Tallinn, through the Estonian countryside. We pass by fields and forests that remind me deeply of the southern Ontario countryside I grew up, differing only in the occasional ruins of old Soviet collectivist farms and apartment blocks that housed their workers when this was part of the Soviet Union.
This is my second trip to Estonia and it is perhaps not my last one. There is some much that is interesting about this country and my friends here, including a close connection to land and culture and a strong sense of both contemporary identity and traditional practices. It somehow for me embodies the Art of Hosting.
This week we were running a Learning Village – a sort of training where we come together to work and co-create community for a week and share learning that deepens our practices of hosting and supporting authentic human being in community and organization, family and life. We were at that Sänna Kulturmoise, an old German manor that was bought by a group of families who are running it as an intentional community and a place of learning and co-creation. We lived half our time in Open Space, half our time hosted in beautiful process with a local team led Piret Jeedas and Ivika Nögel and Robert Oetjen along with Dianna, Kritsi, Kristina, Helina, Paavo and other AoH practctioners. James Ede, Luke Concannon, Anne Madsen and I represented the visiting contingent.
As beautiful as the Art of Hosting Learning Village was, for me the journey was also about exploring something deeper here in Estonia. I have noticed in my practice lately that it is hard to sustain the kind of energy, interest and creativity that I have always tried to bring to my work. I have been reflecting on this and why it is and what it all means. So the Art of Hosting gave me a chance to work with new and old friends, and to host in a radically different context where I had to be sensitive to language and culture. But it also took place in a part of the world that has something to teach me.
Travel of course, always does this…gets us out of our patterns and ruts. I have had very little opportunity to reflect on my work this year, and so I have been treating this journey to Europe (which includes a leg in Turkey and one in Ireland as well) to be a time to discover something new.
Here in Estonia, it has felt like I have gone through several gates. Arriving in Europe, arriving in Estonia, spending one night in the capital Tallinn, travelling to the rural and traditional south to work at Sänna, and then a journey with friends deep into the heart of Setomaa, the region of Estonia that is home to the Seto people, a small Finno-Ugric tribe that I have come to love. Our friend Piret has a piece of land she is working on in the village of Harma, very near to the summer home of our friend Margus, who works for the Seto Nation. Eight of us packed down to Setomaa the other night to spend the night at Margus’s house, to practice sauna together, eat at a traditional Seto guest house, sing songs from our traditions, take part in local traditional social protocols of sharing a local moonshine called hanza which is used kind of as a talking piece by Seto hosts and to rest on the land. Yesterday morning we woke up and went walking and harvesting in the forest, picking many mushrooms, blueberries and lingonberries, visiting Piret’s land, and a new local chapel called a tsässons, which is a traditional worship place of Seto people. It was a journey that seemed to go every deeper into an ancient landscape of human activity, human community, deep friendship and powerful connection. We were hosted by the land and each other and we were blessed with a quality of time and space that seems rare.
Yesterday as we were leaving, across the fields behind Margus’ place, we witnessed what I think was the teaching that this container held. James and I stood and looked across a field at two women, a man and a horse who were taking hay from a field by hand. The women were cutting it and carrying it to the man who was pitching it into a horse drawn hay wagon. It was an incredibly powerful scene of continuity and tradition and also sustainability, practicality, simplicity and clarity. We remarked that perhaps if we could simply undertake to practice these kinds of ancient human practices with such clean volition, it would be our ideal.
I am leaving Estonia for Turkey this afternoon with the thought that this simplicity of practice is what will renew me. We humans are in love with our brains, and in making things complicated and confusing. Sometimes harvesting the hay is so simple that we can do it the way we have always done it. I think much of our work in hosting is the same. We may be facing novel situiations and mproblems in the world, but there is very little that is different about how we as humans can deal with them. To practice the ancient arts of conversations, meaning making, connection and community in the service of meeting needs, and to do that simply is the lesson.
And in some small but not insignificant way, Esotina works the obvious into my tired spirit, and the close friendships and colleagueships I share here along with a land I somehow know in my bones have hosted a little insight around simplicity that may unfold more in Turkey or Ireland.
I’m staying tuned.
A very useful list from Dave Snowden which can be used to describe good tactics for dealing with complex situations:
- The whole success of social computing is because it conforms to the three heuristics of complex systems: finely grained objects, distributed cognition & disintermediation
- In an uncertain world we need fast, real time feedbacks not linear processes and criticism includes short cycle experimental processes which remain linear.
- The real dangers are retrospective coherence and premature convergence
- Narrative is vital, but story-telling is at best ambiguous
- Need to shift from thinking about drivers to modulators
- You can’t eliminate cognitive bias, you work with it
- Extrinsic rewards destroy intrinsic motivation
- Messy coherence is the essence of managing complexity
Another beautiful SUP Sunday afternoon out from Tunstall Bay, into a small headwind and down to Cape Roger Curtis. We are having the most amazing summer, as evidenced by the water restrictions in place and the fire ban. It’s dry and hot – most days the temperature reaches 25 and the ocean is in the low 20s.
I like that I practice a water sport that requires me to take a stand. It’s a hell of a way to think about things.
There is a lot happening at the Cape. Monster houses are going in there – the biggest is said to be 17,000 square feet, which is about ten times the size of mine. And the docks have started to be built, with the first one on Lot 13 about 100 meters north of the Cape now featuring three sets of piles, two of which have been driven into the sea bed. It is creeping out to sea and is now probably a hundred feet out from the foreshore, and growing. There is a current application for another dock BETWEEN that one and the Cape. The view is already ruined, the iconic view of the Cape with a gnarled and sweeping arbutus tree, is forever overwhelmed by a two story set of pilings soon to be topped by a pier. A second dock going in between that one and the lighthouse will simply make the whole place seem crowded and cluttered.
Not a whiff of the usual seals and sea lions that hang around there. Before the construction I would see one every single time I was out there, whether on land or sea. Perhaps they will return, but for the moment they have fled the pile driving and the rumbling engines of the work barge for quieter waters.
Something has changed forever on Bowen and these docks are the physical manifestation of it. There is an irreversibility to it all. We no longer talk about the land in terms of reverence; instead the public sphere is full of words that describe our island as if you would sell it to tourists. The way I used to know this community of Bowen Island is now just an idea, and we collectively serve that idea, but the idea is made up and talked about only. It is marketed, discussed as an economic advantage, but discarded in practice. In practice we seem to be able to simply take or leave the beauty and the power of the place. Hardly anyone with any power at all is working to preserve anything. Instead folks like the Cape developers talk about Bowen’s charms while daily depleting them. Since the National Park vote I think we have lost the public will to steward the natural world of Bowen and instead are focused on the built environment and the economy. Those two things go hand in hand because the IDEA of the natural beauty of the place is what drives our primary economic activity – land values. To the extent that development DOESN’T impact MY land values, I’m okay with it, says this worldview. It’s a kind of every-one-in-it for themselves mentality. IN that respect we aren’t really an island anymore, we are just like everywhere else. Where we come together now as a community is around things like Steamship Days which was fabulous, but which was targeted at commerce. Bowfest, which this year has been reclaimed by community, and Remembrance Day continue to be two of the only things left that everyone gets involved in that have no outcomes other than community building.
We are retreating into the realm of the private. There are few activities anymore that serve the public interest and few places in which the public can gather and simply be together. Our municipal Council, who were so gung-ho on building a proper community hall – to the cheers from all of us – have instead re-envisoned it as a municipal campus, as a place that serves their needs. The last true commons – the sea – now has a large phallic structure asserted across its surface in the most beautiful part of our coastline, with possibly five more to follow. This was done despite nobody other than the owner wanting it. Public debate is not about our place; it is angry people yelling at each other, naming each other, projecting themselves into each other’s words and deeds. It is a disgusting display of rudeness coming from all sides. We are ungenerous with our words, ungrateful for our neighbours, and we bathe in a narcissistic intolerance for small differences, That is how decisions are made now on Bowen. Go to a public meeting (not that we even have those anymore) and you will be shocked by the behaviour of grown adults discussing important issues. Any attempt at reasonable dissent is met with paternalistic carping on all sides. It’s embarrassing.
This is becoming Dubai with fir trees. It is made beautiful by friendship and the land itself but the heart and soul of community is now held by private effort, and we no longer speak the language of community like we used to. The community builders are the ones with money, not ideas. You gain influence here by being accepted by certain groups, not on merit. Things like “parks” and “nature” and “community centres” are fraught with politics. I used to write folk songs about this place, because it used to be a place that deserved a folk tradition. At one time those songs were sung at Council meetings, and artists joined local governors to express and care for the soul of Bowen. But singing those songs seem quaint now, just another piece of history to celebrate during steamship days. The poets are quieter, the painters and musicians of Bowen don’t celebrate the community like we used to. We are in hiding.
But I am not going anywhere. We have just finished repairing and updating the shingles on our house and three years ago we put on a new roof. We didn’t do it so we could sell it. We did it so that it would shelter and care for us until we are too old to climb the back steps. Committing to things in the long term makes a guy sanguine and reflective. It makes you pick your battles.
For me, my battleground has been respect and decorum in public affairs, but I’m starting to think I lost that war. The loud and angry voices have won, and this is the way we do things for now. I’ve been called a “revisionist” as if my desire for a community-minded conversation was somehow tantamount to criminally rewriting history. Small cabals of people accuse other people of being in small cabals. The word “conspiracy” is tossed around by people who sit and conspire about what the other group is doing. It’s all very grade five, very much like ten year olds pointing fingers and calling names. Last week I made peace with my accuser, shook his hand, slapped him on the back, and drew a line under it. We exchanged no words until a couple of days later when we made awkward fumbling conversation that was nonetheless a relief. I still live here and so does he. Perhaps he’ll draw a line under it too rather than holding a grudge for all time against his idea of who I am and what I do. But maybe not. He can choose to carry the stress of mistrust and suspicion as long as he wants.
The only suffering I can take care of is my own. So this is me greeting the new Bowen. It’s not the one I wanted, or the one I celebrated or the one I voted for, but here it is and here I am. I’ll offer my gifts and appreciate others and get on with things and stop expecting it to be different than it is. And when the wheel turns again, when the docks have been smashed by the sea and wind, when the real estate values collapse, when we remember that we need each other in community, I’ll be here to dust off a few old songs that remind us of who we could still be.
In the meantime, that man out there standing on the sea? That’s me.
Posted by Chris Corriganat 5:51 PM