Got this great little piece from Killing the Buddha by way of wood s lot:
“I got a job pushing monks into the ocean. The monks don’t seem to mind, and the abbot says that my threat promotes awareness. So I’m sitting here on my observation chair, watching the mainland recede, working on my peripheral vision. Not that the monks are fast. They are at peace in walking meditation, so I don’t want to interrupt the cadence so much as divert it, shuffle out into the hot sand, barefoot and cringing, and see if the monk notices my presence. If he turns and nods, I back away. But if he is lost in thought? Whoosh. Most of them surface facing up, smiling. Sometimes — and this is part of their beatific appeal — they gurgle. ‘To drift is to return,’ as the abbot would say.”
There is a difference between being lost in thought and meditating that opens one’s awareness. In meditation, as in other activities in which the flow state is so important, one must remain in contact with the environment, in fact the purpose of the activity is to enhance connections with the environment, both inner and outer.
To do this, to have this luxury of developing a practice that expands our awareness, it is necessary to embrace the external reminders of the real world, for those are ultimately the things that seed our practice.
For more on Buddhist perspectives on working with our own reactions to disturbances outside of us, have a look at the practice of lojong mind training, a practice of working with the messiness in the world by developing our own compassion. Especially useful in this respect is Pema Chodron’s book, Start Where You Are.
For a while in the mid nineties, CBC ran a satire called “The Great Eastern” which billed itself as “Newfoundland’s Cultural Magazine,” aired by arrangement with the fictitious Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland. While looking for something else, I stumbled over their website, featuring a bunch of episodes:
“The Great Eastern–Newfoundland’s Cultural Magazine, started as an hour-long summer replacement on CBC Radio in 1994 and since 1996 was a half-hour program on the regular Saturday morning schedule. Despite critical acclaim and a dedicated fan base, the CBC effectively cancelled the show after the 1998-99 season, further alienating the thousands of listeners out there looking for something intelligent, well-written, and above-all funny on the radio dial.”
This was one of the best shows ever to air on the CBC in the mid nineties. Absolutely brilliant writing, and very subtle humour. Very much in the British tradition (see People Like Us, for example). Rumours are that the GE crew will be back in some guise in the summer, but not as The Great Eastern.
Another installment of linkage for your perusal:
- A Guide to Formal Consensus decisionmaking
- Peter Denning on Building a Culture of Innovation via EMERGIC.org
- Entomology: Invasion of the brood. “The 17-year cicadas are about to emerge in force” Watch out!
- Full text of DESCHOOLING SOCIETY by Ivan Illich
- Creating a Culture of Gift (.pdf) via Wealth Bondage
- Krishnamurti Information Network – Krishnamurti Biography via Whiskey River
- Anne Cameron on the bears of Tahsis and the morons that hunt them for fun, with a great discussion in the comments.
- Movement As Network(.pdf) via GiftHub
- You Can Choose To Be Happy, an online book by Tom Stevens with a nice chapter on self-observation. Via Curt Rosengren
- AWARENESS: The instrument and aim of experiential resarch which looks at how to ask questions that heighten our awareness
Just got a phone call from my friend Mike Mearns, who is the Executive Director of the Aboriginal Financial Officers Association of BC, an organization that supports First Nations financial and management capacity through training and workshops. They are looking for an Executive Assistant, but don’t let the job title fool you. The main duties are developing training materials and organizing workshops for First Nations administrators working “at the coal face” as it were:
“The Aboriginal Financial Officers Association of B.C. (AFOA-BC) requires an Executive Assistant to provide support to the General Manager and Board of Directors. Our association is established to represent the interests of its membership in areas of First Nations financial management and administration. Duties of this position will include office administration, education and training event coordination, membership communication and coordination.
As a large percentage of job duties include support in adult financial/administration training and education we require you to have a degree or diploma in business administration or education. As well, we require 3-5 years experience in providing assistance to a manager and board of directors in areas of training conference/seminar management and adult learning. Suitable candidates must have excellent computers abilities including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Access. Accounting knowledge and skills will also be an asset in providing support to the association. Knowledge of and previous work experience with a First Nations organization is preferred.”
There may be those of you out there who have an interest in facilitation. adult learning, management and administration training and First Nations issues that might want to consider this one. The competition is closing very soon, and they are still looking to fill out their candidate field.
Contact Mike through the AFOA website and let him know I sent you.
I was facilitating a very difficult process last week with a complex group. Over three days, my plan for the work changed constantly, responding to the internal and external pressures that were flowing all around us. At the end of the second day, I felt slain, as if anything I tried to do had the opposite of its intended effect. It was a tough day for all of us.
On the third day, during which some remarkable transformations came forward from the group, one group member told me a story in a break. He was a commercial fisherman, who has fished salmon his whole life out in the Georgia Strait and around the mouth of the Fraser River. He described a time once when he cast his net and it got taken by the current and hung up around the jetty at the mouth of the Fraser. Thinking he was going to lose his net (or worse, capsize his boat), he carefully began to bring it in and was relieved to find that the net was not only intact, but it was also full of ling cod.
He was thankful for his good fortune, and has always had half a mind to try and do it again, but worried that he would lose his net. In short, it’s not the kind of good luck that can be easily repeated without major risks.
It took me close to a week to fully understand the reason for this story (sometimes Elders teach so subtly, THEY aren’t even aware they are doing so! And sometimes, the students are so preoccupied that we’re plain THICK…not sure which was the case here!)). So sometimes we make mistakes and once we realize them, a little attention and care can save our basic tools, and perhaps, even gather in a completely unexpected catch. It’s all about being open to the situation you are in RIGHT NOW, and not getting cocky when you pull out of it with a hold full of cod. For it is not always US that controls these things…sometimnes it is just the flow of the currents and the group mind of the ling cod.