Silence and Friendship — Two Great Medicines

My friend Charles has taught me many things over the years now. We’ve taught each other. It’s what friends do, I suppose, just by being in some life together.

Today, I found this gift in Charles’ writings on his blog, The Daily Sip. Charles writes of the gift of silence, and the surprise that many come to in life, awakening to that fact that that life isn’t exactly what our egos may have wished it to be.

We can awake with a delighted stretch to meet the new day, with welcome to hear the birds chirping or the rooster crowing. I’m glad to have those mornings.

We can awake with pain and the dread of needing to face challenging circumstances. I know plenty of these also.

Through it all, this morning, I simple celebrate friends who know things, and our kind enough to welcome life together.

Silence.

This is the great medicine.

To sit in silence and wait, watching one’s breath and mindful of thoughts is the great work of the soul’s freshness.

Charles’ full post from The Daily Sip is here.

 

Pithy Summaries

I’ve been lucky to be a part of a learning cohort, Ignite, over the last year, a learning initiative of the Rocky Mountain Conference of The United Church of Christ.

There was the imagining.
There was the planning.
There was the wrestling.
There was the clarifying.
There was the convening.
There was the communing.
There was the delighting.
There was the crying.
There was the laughing.

Full experience, as I think of it, as well it should be — life deserves full expression, particularly with such good people that are helping to steward a quality of awakening in self and in others.

As part of the followup, I found myself wanting to offer a few pithy summaries of some of what we did together, primarily in two face-to-face gatherings, each of four days in October 2017 and earlier this month, April 2018. I wanted to pick out some of the skills and methodologies and teachings, with hopes that the simplification would encourage practice and experiments. I offer them here, for the broader group of us learning and hosting groups in our varied levels of learning.

Circle — Most basic container for turning to one another.
Check-In — Helping to presence just a bit more together, and shift from social space.
Check-Out — Being deliberate about releasing from learning space in a way that isn’t leaking out.
Ceremony — The focus that can take us beyond words.
World Cafe — Large(r) group method, yet supporting learning at small tables.
Two Loops — A systems map to help understanding working with change and emergence.
Polarities — Finding the “and”.
Games / Play — To get to principles.
Social Styles — Typology for understanding difference, similarity, and preferred forms of interaction.
Open Space Technology — Group methodology to help people self-organize and take responsibility for what they love.
Adaptive Leadership — It’s more than technical fix.
Working With Shadow — Understanding the hidden.
The Work of Byron Katie — Working with limiting beliefs.

Phew! And more. I hope all of us continue to practice ways of creating the deepening of self, enlivening of relationship, and the holy mischief of being church!

Inner + Outer

 

Kinde Nebeker and I (with a pile of really good people) continue to learn together.

I love exploring the inner of personal presence, grounding, understanding, depth, wonder, wander, complexity, and, and, and….

I love exploring the outer of how any of us take these things on as groups, and, and, and.

Learning to learn, feel, think together — it’s at the heart of the container-building that I feel I’m in.

Join us, May 11, 2018 at Snowbird, Utah, for the depth of this ongoing inquiry. For the community it takes to change the story under the story.

 

 

What If, What If?

 

What if, what if,
life could be lived from connection to the infinite?

What if, what if,
the infinite were found in but a tiny thimble of experience?

What if, what if,
a thimble of experience were available anywhere?

What if, what if,
anywhere changed everywhere?

Life is but a dream,
calling for waking.