The village as emergent container
Being, Community, Complexity, Containers, Emergence, Featured
Me and some friends “villaging” back in 1996 or so at a session at The Irish Heather in Vancouver. That’s me blissed out on the bottom right of this photo. We are playing traditional Irish tunes together.
Barbara Holmes today in a post at the Centre for Action and Contemplation:
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to survive. For many of us, villages are a thing of the past. We no longer draw our water from the village well or share the chores of barn raising, sowing, and harvesting. We can get … almost everything that we need online. Yet even though our societies are connected by technology, the rule of law, and a global economy, our relationships are deeply rooted in the memory of local spaces.
Villages are organizational spaces that hold our collective beginnings. They’re spaces that we can return to, if only through memory, when we are in need of welcoming and familiar places. What is a village but a local group of folks who share experiences, values, and mutual support in common? I’m using the word “village” to invoke similar spiritual and tribal commitments and obligations.… When there is a crisis, it takes a village to survive.
In each generation, we are tested. Will we love our neighbors as ourselves, or will we measure our responsibilities to one another in accordance with whomever we deem to be in or out of our social circles? And what of those unexpected moments of crisis, those critical events that place an entire village at risk? How do we survive together? How do we resist together? How do we respond to unspeakable brutality and the collective oppression of our neighbors?
Our lifelong efforts to map our uniqueness do not defeat our collective connections. Although I’m an individual with a name, family history, and embodiment as an African American woman, I am also inextricably connected to several villages that reflect my social, cultural, national, spiritual, and generational identifications. These connections require that I respond and resist when any village is under assault.…
— Barbara Holmes. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/a-collective-response/
I like this idea that connection alone doesn’t equal community. Connection alone is not enough to create spaces where we make meaning of our lives or generate meaning and life with and for others. Instead, there is a need to enliven the space of connection with purpose, shared identity, and meaning.
I am working on a book on dialogic containers, and it really comes down to the principle that what is “contained” in these kinds of contexts is “meaning.” I once heard Jennifer Garvey-Berger use the term “life-giving contexts” in a webinar, and it really struck me that THIS is what we are trying to do when we are working with “containers” in dialogue and participatory leadership work. It is not enough to hand each other a business card or place an organization’s pamphlet in the centre of a circle. That does not create a dialogic container; it does not create a life-giving context for action.
Villages, as Barbara Holmes points out, DO. And a village is not merely a collection of uninhabited houses. It is an emergent identity of a place of human life. You may live in an apartment building, but do you live in a village? What is the difference between your building and a village? What can you do to make it more village?
The answer to that question is the essence of dialogic organizational and community development. The answer to that question leads you to meaning-making together.
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Straight to the heart of the matter.
Rats … this is what I wanted to enclose in the brackets above:
(( I am working on a book on dialogic containers, and it really comes down to the principle that what is “contained” in these kinds of contexts is “meaning”. ))
Ha! Yes. Straight to the point indeed. Thanks Jon.
Ooooh Chris, so lovely to read these words. Dr. Barbara Holmes words and wisdom deeply resonate and these questions she offers are truly gifts for anyone reading this to begin integrating this village work right where they are.
This stirred up some reflections in me that I wanted to offer to the center. I’ve been diving deep into the inquiry of place, the role it has in shaping and forming our meanings and understandings of how we are being, thinking and doing together.
So far what I’m finding in the research around place, culture and meaning-making is that there are social, environmental and developmental conditions that are present in place-sourced work. When we are intentional and conscious of our being in relationship to one another (social) and the collective effort is grounded into relationship to place (environmental) the work is developmental, emergent and ever evolving our consciousness and influencing our actions.
These practices require that the process is tended to and cared for in a collective, conscious, caring, reflective and generative way that is aligned with life, led by the heart and rooted into place. These skills and capabilities are innate within each of us, and whether we are focusing on villages and / or social containers – these practices and conditions offer us one way that they can be developed in and with community.
Thank you (and Dr. Barbara Holmes) for resourcing this reflection in me mate, I wanted to offer something back to the center around this.
Lovely insights Katie! Thanks for sharing them.
Hi Chris! Some synchronicity here… I just sent this out in a newsletter: “I’m curious about how might we practice listening to one another, in a way that helps to support each of us, in our own creativity and sense of agency — how might we support one another, in breaking out of our isolation, and out of the cultural trance of seeing a “train wreck coming” yet feeling too helpless and paralyzed to do much about it? (Or, alternatively, we might feel that whatever we do, is “not enough”…)”
There’s a link in the newsletter to a draft of something I’m calling “incubator circles”… would love to get your thoughts on it. https://the-listening-arts.ck.page/posts/new-year-s-musings
This is a good inquiry Rosa. For those of us that live in villages, this is indeed how it works. Often times a community will be divided by some topic and it will pit former friends against each other for a while. And then a new thing arrives and the division happens along different lines. When you live in a place long enough with people you need to encounter in all sorts of different contexts you do indeed find yourself probing for differences rather than sameness. Those who live in an echo chamber in a village tend to be very lonely actually and quite disconnected from what’s going on.
Thanks Chris… I resonate a lot with your focus on creating dialogic containers for meaning, and for “creating life-giving contexts for action”…. whether it’s communities within organizations, and/or, communities of place….
also whether it’s more long-term communities… or even, short-term, more temporary “learning villages”…. looking forward to your book!
Great post Chris. Readers who want to ‘be more village’ may be interested in my Village In The City work, which sets out six elements of village-building which can be used in any setting (connection, hosts, meeting places, inclusivity, inclusive events, identity). There is also a free Village Builder Handbook. http://villageinthecity.net.
Amazing. Thanks Mark!
This was good!