I am about to engage with DanceArts Vancouver on a three year global project called the Earth Project. It is an international collaboration that will bring together all kinds of people involved in the arts, sustainability, community development and activism and social justice to look at how the arts can facilitate conversations and dialogue on these issues, especially with youth.
I’ll be attending an Open Space meeting on Monday with Bill Cleveland from the Center for the Study of Art and Community in Minneapolis who wrote a fantastic paper called Mapping the Field: Arts-Based Community Development. I will be learning a lot more about this over the next little while, but right now I am struck by the above diagram (another quadrants model!) and this description of the field of arts-based community development:
Much of our work at the Center for the Study of Art and Community is about documenting, describing and learning from the ABCD field. We have also challenged the field to consider some hard questions about the efficacy of their work in and with communities. The information, ideas and opinions we have gathered show a field that is new and growing rapidly. It reflects a field that is hungry to learn from itself and eager to make collegial connections. It also portrays a field largely unaware of its history, driven by a diverse pastiche of philosophies, practices, motivations and intents. The mix is complex and intriguing and some through lines and patterns have emerged.
Read the paper to find out about some of these lines and directions. I’ll report more from the Open Space.
Rock Balancing art from Oasis Design, Photo by Art Ludwig
Robert Brady, writing in his blog Pure Land Mountain about the lessons learned from working with stones:
If you want a wall that is a stone poem in stone syntax, you have to learn the bit-by-bit stones teach until at last you have a stone wall, not a book wall, not a you wall. The finest mortar for a stone wall, therefore, is patience in the builder, blended with integrity. No integrity in the builder, no integrity in the wall.
But the bigger lesson comes later, when the wall is standing at last and you go out into the world alight with the knowledge that this dialectic pertains to EVERYTHING you do: that any worthy activity is a dialog, that wisdom is a living thing, not frozen in time, not a doctrine or a dogma, not a monument, not a library, not a printed book, and that you are filled with wisdom, ready and waiting to be known to you.
What does living wisdom tell us? Among other things, that the solution is where the problem is: in ourselves. Loss of beauty, living beauty, within and without our lives, is the sign, the lesson, the marker, the measure, of our deviation from living wisdom. Lack of affinity with living wisdom lies at the heart of our problems, and if we continue this way we are ended: the real thing won’t stand for it. Existence must be a dialog with the moment, as the living, thinking person is taught by any art, any worthy endeavor. You are instructed and guided by the very task, by the very ongoing. You are taught the true way most truly only by traveling it, not just by standing still and listening to others tell you about it, or by merely looking at an old map others have made. The way is vast, greater far than we, and it will prevail, no matter how we treat it or perceive it. We either go as it goes or the walls we have built will collapse upon us.
I carry stones around with me everywhere I go, and one of my favourite things to do is to balance rocks and stones on the beach. It’s a form of meditation to connect with the bigger fundamental forces and logic that Brady writes about, using the stones and rocks as vehicles and brutal teachers. When balancing two large rocks, there is only one way to get it right. Get it wrong, and the rocks will fall and implore you to better understand them and their connections to their environment.
Stockholm, New York, Santiago.
Maybe we should just skip September 11 altogether and go straight from 9/10 to 9/12 instead.
I’m reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and it’s totally engroosing. In the middle of the dozen or so stories that swirl around between the covers of the book are gems of writing like these:
Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu experiements on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of getting bounced of the grille of a shreiking Buick once when he chased a roughly shopping-cart-sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into the centre of it. He knew they were both fragile and tenacious. You could just stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot, or swirl around iot, and keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch one in your hands, it would vansih — but then you’d look up and see another one just like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and yet indisputably self-perpetuating and failry robust systems sort of gave Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
I’m not the only one taken with this piece of writing either. Others have quoted it too.
More on the physics of dust devils.
How not to run a democracy. This article, sarcastically titled Grassroots Democracy in Iraq, American Style tells the story of a local leader in a Baghdad neighbourhood who, despite his gut instincts, decided to stand for local office in a new local council. The military convened the council, supervised the elections and gave the orders – representatives would not be paid, but would receive US military assistance in making local improvements.
The first job was to do a detailed assessment of the neighbourhood’s needs. The five member council undertook the assignment diligently and in nine days produced a thick report based on door to door interviews, grassroots consultation.
When the report was presented to the military, the council was dismissed and disbanded and no follow-up ensued.
Our hero, Majid, concluded that the process was a sham:
“Perhaps we made too many suggestions. Perhaps they didn’t like our suggestions,” said Majid, struggling to find an explanation. “Or perhaps this is democracy, American-style. In any case, what can we do? They are the occupiers and we are the occupied.”
Now this could be read as a story of the sideways effort to rebuild Iraqi civil society, but the fact is that this is a parable for our times. In an age where people feel cut off from the systems of power, authority and control that seem to dominate lives, great cynicism takes root. When people like Majid, display passion for improving their lives, it is common to see governments, management or other structural homes for power and authority quashing that passion.
I’m sure everyone can think of examples where this kind of thing has happened here too. People are given some power to go out an make a difference and then their orders change and it all falls through. This is why I am hard on clients about sincere support for work done around community consultations, workplace evaluations and in Open Space.
The passion that people bring to tasks is a gift. To squander it or treat it contemptuously drives cynicism that undermines trust and healthy working relationships. That is true in communities, organizations and families.