Human to Human • Tenneson Woolf

July 17, 2017

Life Wants To Be In Partnership

I’ve been writing this week. For a short book on partnering with Life. It’s got some work remaining, but I’ve started to send to a few readers. I’m excited and nervous! Here’s a teaser from the Preface.

I am the kind of human being that typically enjoys anything that questions the nature of reality. I good conversation. A movie. A book. I can’t really help it. Something deep in me believes that the world is not what it seems. Despite the granularity of details that science has taught us to seek, and that we’ve become pretty good at — much remains mystery, masked as an illusion of certainty. Like believing that our bodies are mostly substance, when in fact, we are mostly water. Like believing that even that water is mostly substance, when in fact, it is mostly space.

The primary premise for this book also questions the nature of reality. The contents come from breaking down a statement that arrived to me in 2010, during another time of reflection. I can say that it arrived, but it really slow-cooked in me for much longer than a single moment.

Life wants to be in partnership with us.

It does so by offering us experiences, people, and symbols

that catch and hold our attention.

In these offerings, Life gives us invitation

to notice more of how our inner condition

is projecting our outer reality,

which in fact, renders us,

co-creators with Life.

This book is about that. It is about fleshing out these phrases that I hold as a kind of user’s guide for being in this world in these days so that in particular, we do not lose the mystery and the always changing richness of human lives lived.

July 13, 2017

Pastor as Convener

“A pastor re-envisions his primary vocation not as a preacher, teacher, healer or administrator but as a host, a “convener.” It wasn’t what seminary prepared him for, but it’s a high and holy calling.”

The above is a headline for an article written by a colleague and friend, Cameron Barr, in the publication, “Faith & Leadership.” Cameron is pastor at a UCC church in Grinnell, Iowa. He’s as sharp and clear as they come. Oozes with the ability to shape story and invite people into it.

Cameron and I got to work together several times in the ways that he describes in this article. I was primary consultant in what started for them as a strategic planning process. What I was able to offer was an invitation to shift how that work is done, and a set of practices that helped give it a chance — all based on a premise of turning to one another, and going further together.

I love these words from Cameron:

The turning point came late in my first year, when I discovered the Art of Hosting(link is external), a leadership approach that views leadership primarily as a practice of hospitality. With the help of a consultant and ardent proponent of the Art of Hosting philosophy, our church focused on re-connecting with each other and “re-humanizing” our relationships. We spent time together, sharing meals, telling stories and reviewing our community’s history.

Soon, we held a series of retreats to engage church members outside our ordinary structure of boards and committees. Instead of recruiting people to existing bodies, we invited people to follow their energy and work on needs they had identified.

Gradually, I accepted that I was powerless to direct our ministry toward my own ideas of what a church should be. I began to think of myself primarily not as a preacher, teacher, healer or administrator but as a host — a convener. My greatest asset was not my knowledge but my position in our community. So I started creating a space for church members to have more genuine encounters with one another. I learned not to look within myself for answers but to summon the gifts of others.

Rehumaning is at the core of it. Funny to say this. Yet, I say it often. We are just trying to create processes (or interrupt some stuck ones) that help us to be better, smarter, kinder, more imaginative humans together in these varied arenas of life. It helps to be deliberate in noticing where there is energy. It helps to create multiple encounters that welcome genuineness of what people really care about.

July 12, 2017

Power of Song, Power of Voice

This September I get to work/play with Barbara McAfee and Quanita Roberson in St. Paul, Minnesota. We’ve created a new format to work with — Circle, Song, and Ceremony. Please come join us! Quanita feels like an old friend though we’ve only known each other since 2013. Barbara is tops on my list of people I know about, and that many of my best friends know directly, yet, that I’ve never met in person. Fun.

Barbara posted this video recently, her Ted Talk in Bend, Oregon from earlier this year. Enjoy it fully. It left me and my 12 year-old singing through much of the day.

Here’s my headlines:

Barbara — “The oral tradition, voice, and song help us live and work better together.” Amen!

William James (American Philosopher and Psychologist) — “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface, but connected in the deep.” Gold!

Hafiz (13th Century Persian Poet) — “I wish that I could show you, whenever you are lonely or walking in the dark, the astonishing light of your being.” Thank you!

July 11, 2017

Space

The road from Fairmont Hot Springs, British Columbia to Calgary, Alberta is ultimately scenic. It’s about a three hour drive, which I took a week ago today, with my mom, to take my daughter and son in-law to the Calgary airport. While driving, we saw mountain goats, deer, and a very large moose with wide expanse of rack standing just off the highway. Yes, it was impressive and a bit scary. Our drive also included gorgeous geography like the picture above that I snapped along the way. Deep green spruced forests. Ranges of sharp rising rocky mountains (Castle Mountain above) against deliciously open blue skies. The road from Fairmont to Calgary winds a fair amount. Lots of new views exposed around corners and turns. There was much to be in awe about.

The awe that I perhaps appreciate the most in that drive is the space. You can’t help but be impressed by the open expanse of geography. And, more clearly, it’s the way that that expanse calls out an inner expansive space within me that is so alluring. Space to imagine. Space to feel decompressed. Space to wonder and wander. Space to let go. Space to re-sort some of the inner stirrings. I’ve always loved the people that refer to us humans as nature (not “in nature”). Being in that drive (yes, a mechanical, non-nature vehicle) was pulling out inner nature from within me in a big way.

Most of us live in a culture that values compression. It’s true individually, communally, and organizationally. Doing more. Doing more in less time. Doing more in less time with less resources. Speed and efficiency are so revered and so linked to perceptions of intelligence, accomplishment, and value. It creates pressure, doesn’t it. To fill the moments with more so as to become more (or even curb the impression of losing ground). Yikes!

It was 15 years ago with friend (like a brother, friend) Toke Moeller through whom I first learned this template question that I ask often with people I work with — What could _____ also be? I think the first time I heard him ask it, it was about a school that he was working with in Denmark. What could this school also be? The “also be” is important to me. It honors what is, yet also invites imagination to what is, what what could be, evolving.

Back to space and becoming more, I find myself advocating much these days for the question, what could space also be? What could pause also be? What could emptiness also be? It’s fascinating to me, and also feels as natural and inherent as the feelings that arose when driving near Castle Mountain. What if we were to commit more to a strategic pause and invitation to release reverence for speed and scale (OK, I’m aware that I’m asking a question that calls for more of another kind — space; cultural stories run deep) and the fears that lay beneath them? It’s not a race! It’s not a race to be the last one able to survive amidst scarcity. Yikes again! These are indeed deep cultural stories, but in all fairness, aren’t the only stories that shape cultures — they are just the loud ones.

I know that I’m the kind of human being that deeply values the pause. In facilitation, it often means my desire is to double the amount of time that I plan for a particular section, even though the agenda is often calling for half the time. The pause and the space is fundamental to interrupt patterns and welcome a taste of the new. In individuals. In communities. In organizations. It is my experience, and my continued hope. that the awe and the space, just like it was near Castle Mountain, fills us in different and needed ways.