Pool of Relationality

I learned a new phrase last week that I’ve been looking for for a long time. “Pool of relationality.” It was a friend and colleague Corbin Tobey Davis that spoke it as a group of five of us convened in a learning cohort.

Something happens when we create the conditions for being together in deliberate ways. Yes, that is for conversation. Yes, that is for stories. Yes, that is for curiosity and questions together. These are all wonderful things. And most of us have a general orientation towards the power of working together. Even the smallest of inklings toward “the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts” is helpful.

However, there is a nuanced layer that I’ve been experimenting with for quite sometime. It’s felt a bit elusive, like the search for the philosopher’s stone. Focus too much on it and you will miss it. Focus to little on it, and it will seem not present, though in reality, is nearby. Just not seen nor felt.

I’ve called it “composite being” before. I’ve called it “field.” Sometimes “chemistry.” Sometimes “synchronicity.” Sometimes “flow.” All of these are accurate. And, all are inadequate. Language gives us a chance. But feeling and intuition must accompany language to get us closer to fine.

When we are together, in a pool of relationality, there is just more that is available than when we are not. It is as if we are plugged in to a whole new frequency that gets us in to the secret section of the library that requires special permission to be within. New frequency. New understanding. Deeper understanding. More ease. More obviousness — sometimes so obvious to us as individuals plugged in that we forget quickly that it was the “pool” from which our individual knowing was seeded. The pool, if I offer another image is like a heat source. When you feel that warmth, you can quickly forget about the cold. Yet, step away from the fire into the cold of the night and your realize how great that warmth was, and you seek to return to it.

I’ve worked with oodles of groups. I’ve been participant. I’ve been host and co-host. I’ve been in beginnings, middles, and ends with everyone from strangers to intact shared teams tasked with the future of a project, an initiative, or a vision. I’ve been in 45 minutes huddles that changed everything. I’ve been in multi-day retreats that slow-cooked all of us. It took me a while to even begin to see and count on the pool of relationality. I don’t want to unintentionally get too mystical here — but let’s not remove the mystical either. It too is essential to go with our good minds, and words, and thinking. I’ve seen this pool of relationality be so clear, in the moment. So easy. It would seem like what we get with one another in the pool will never go away. Will never be lost. However, I’ve seen the lost also. That design that felt so easy and obvious when in the pool, became hard to even remember two days later. Or hard to feel imbued with such natural and life-giving energy.

Who we are together is different and more than who we are alone. Thanks Meg Wheatley. It’s one of the key learnings that I picked up that came from our now 25 years of friendship and colleagueship.

Yup. This simple truth, and it’s nuancing, changes how we pay attention to what we get together that we can’t get when we are not together.

I get it that being in teams and relation can be troubling and challenging also. Yes. Sucky at times. Fair. Let’s stay curious about all of that.

But for now, just let our attention rest on the pool. It’s about learning source, not just losing ourselves further in the story of individual (and sometimes egoic) brilliance. To change the story of source — well, that changes a lot doesn’t it.

Thanks Corbin — and everyone I’ve been thinking with and journeying with to get to this glimmer.

This Moment. This Moment. This Moment.

A beloved friend, Charles LaFond has been checking in on me this week.

He knows that I’m euthanizing my family dog, Shadow (shown above), on Saturday. Charles has deep affiliation for his dog, Kai — I know that Charles understands. He knows that this euthanizing will happen at my home. He knows that Shadow has been a great companion. Charles also knows that Shadow has become disoriented (his eyesight and hearing) in his old bones and 14 year-old body.

One of the things I appreciate with Charles is his deep soulfulness. He’s a priest, whose ministry is now focussed on supporting the homeless in New Mexico. I love his centered words that he shared with me this week, knowing that this moment is intricately linked to so much more.

“One step and one moment at a time. This moment. This moment. This moment.”

Thanks Charles. Good practice for much more than what is happening this week, yet feels so extra crystal clear in the day to day of this particular week.

The Healing Time

Some of us face immediate circumstances that require healing.

The paper cut that actually needs a bandage to contain a couple drops of blood and tighten the skin’s connection to re-seal. The sprained ankle that requires rest, ice, compression, and elevation.

Some of us face cumulative life experience that benefits from deliberate healing attention. Loss of loved ones that you realize takes decades to integrate. Paths fulfilled that require a marker in time, and unfulfilled, that require ceremony and ritual.

Healing isn’t an event. It’s an attention. And, I want to believe, natural.

The body and the psyche are coded for wholeness. There’s just a few things that are readily available and try to convince us otherwise, and distract away from an inherent resilience.

Well, that’s good. And, healing isn’t about never being sick. Or never being wounded. Or never feeling loss. Life offers these. Sometimes imposes them.

Count it as a gift to have friends that lend support to our respective healing, be they personal and in the moment, or cumulative that come from life lived. Count it as gift to be witnessed, and encouraged to lean into the sorrow and the wound rather than protected from. The existential has always been as interesting to me as the psychological and the physical.

Yes, I would suggest that we can’t be human without knowing a time or two, even collapsing a time or two, in to the nicks, scrapes, cuts, bruises, wounds, and losses that come with this guest house that is human being (thanks Rumi).

Quanita Roberson, has been one of those friends for me, sharing a few key inspirations with me this week as I tend to the transition that is euthanizing my family dog, Shadow, and the galaxy of stories and memories that connect to such a time.

The poem is from Pesha Gertler, a Seattle area poet and teacher, that died a couple of years ago. She was known for bringing poetry to public places, like on buses and in city council.

The Healing Time
Pesha Gertler (Seattle Area Poet and Teacher)

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.

Revolution of Joy

Photo Credit — Kufunda Learning Village

I went to Zimbabwe in the early 2000s. Through Johannesburg and up to Harare. I remember feeling excited and a bit scared. It was my first time to Africa. I travelled with a group through The Berkana Institute and in support of our global leadership initiative, From the Four Directions. We were invited in particular to celebrate a friend and colleague, Maaianne Knuth’s 30th birthday, a beautiful human being, half Danish and half Zimbabwean. We were invited to witness what she was attempting to dream, establish, and grow in Zimbabwe, a learning village called Kufunda. Kufunda was about courage and wholeness. It was about daring to walk a path of awakening individually and as a local community. It was about reclaiming an inherent resourcefulness amidst towering inflation and access only to each other.

Maaianne’s birthday, which she referenced as a “celebration of life” was also about courage, wholeness and kind daring. It was not just for her but for all of us. There was life in being together, the group of about 40 of us over seven days. There was thoughtful and deliberate conversation and connection together. There was singing and dancing and food late into the night at her Grandmother’s remote village, where we all stayed in tents. There was wonder in visiting Victoria Falls and Hwange National Park. There was “aha” in realizing how easy it was for wild baboons and monkeys to get in to a few back packs that were left behind on the bus.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Maaianne. I’ve stayed in touch with the evolution of Kufunda, the learning village that was just beginning when I was there. I’ve wondered these last weeks in particular about how Maaianne is and how she is seeing the evolution of Zimbabwe now that Mugabe has stepped aside. This comes with awareness that there were years, including when I went in the early 2000s when political violence was enough to cancel trips, or at minimum proceed with much much caution. I’m happy to read Maaianne’s words this morning, “A Joy Revolution.”

“What was most remarkable was the absence of hatred and anger. The overwhelming feeling on the streets was joy. I don’t know that I have ever experienced such a collective well-spring of joy. Joy and love and unity that transcended decades of fear, division and hatred.”

There is much that is challenging in the world. Much that is drowning many of us in full despair. However, there is much that is joyful in the world also. Maaianne’s reflections and her commitment to growing life through life remind me of that.

Read her full reflection about Zimbabwe’s joy revolution here.