The individual and the collective and natural patterns of union

Inspired by spending a bit of time with Keith Webb this past week at ALIA West, I’ve been looking deeply at the patterns of the natural world for teachings and illumination on questions that I’m working with.  Wlakiong through a forest with Keith is a revelation, as Susan Szpakowski points out in this blog post from ALIA West.  He helps you to see patterns  that are instantly recognizable but which you may never have noticed before, even for someone who knows his way around the woods a little.  

This week, along with Tennson Woolf and Esther Matte, I’m running an Art of Hosting with labour educators and union activists from the Canadian Labour Congress.  Some of us were in a little conversation tonight about the relationship between invidual and collective, which is a topic that is of great interest to unions.  There is special interest in what it means to be an individual leader working a whatever level WITHIN a union to help bring a union into an innovative space.  Many of the people we work with feel this tension.

I thought of Keith today as we were talking about this topic and I spoke a little about what I know about the way the natural mixedwood plains hardwood forest of this part of the St’ Lawrence River valley reclaims a pasture, in a process known as ecological succession.  The natural form of landscape here is mature hardwood forest, and that forest comes into being after a number of successive stages of reclamation by different species.  First cedar tress move in, and it is not uncommon to see abandoned meadows and pastures with little stands of small cedars in them.  A field with one cedar sapling in it is already on it’s way.  After the cedars, nitrogen fixing species like poplars arrive and then later maples and oaks and ironwoods and so on.  

The question I asked was, in the context of individual and collective, when does the FOREST arrive?  Is it in the presence of one tree?  Is it two?  Is it more?  What is the forest anyway, for it is not merely a collection of individual trees.  It is a phenomenon itself, arising from many individuals, but possessing an emergent property.  Undoubtedly, individuals have an importan role to play in this process, but when does the forest arrive?

Likewise I said in human history union is our natural way of being.  The holy books that tell the creation stories that start with Adam and Eve mislead us into thinking that humans were ever alone.  We have never as a species known lonliness – we have always been living in union with each other.  When our structures lose life, it is individuals that reclaim our natural way of being within them.  When, then, does union appear?  Is it with the first relationship, or is it when the structure of the Union appears on the scene?  

We’re playing in questions like these this week, all in service of the most powerful and compassionate work that unions do in this country – supporting the learning and survival of working families and communities and helping community to thrive in all times, not just good ones.  Or bad ones.