Human to Human: Blog and Podcast

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Varied, Like All Of Us

Little Brook

Last night my spouse and I had dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant. We shared a fajita. When I reached for a toothpick, I saw an invitation to a King County poetry contest under the theme, “Your Body of Water.” Fifty words or less. Selected entries will be used in a year-long initiative, Poetry on Buses.

I love stuff like that. It’s compelling. Like a rising full moon that you can’t not pay attention to.

I shared the brochure with my spouse, telling her, “you should enter this.” Then I couldn’t help myself. As we drove home, to Little Brook, I scribbled a few words myself that connect water’s flow to human variability.
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Varied, Like All Of Us

Just as my Little Brook
slows to a summer’s bare trickle,
and yet can quickly torrent
to massed tributary of cascading emerald rain,
so flows human life.
It isn’t flawed.
Just like Little Brook,
it is varied.
Like all of us.

 

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Magical Wilderness

Kinde Nebeker is a good friend and colleague. We continue to develop a body of work together called, The Inner and Outer of Evolutionary Leadership. I love the focus on both the inner (presence and grounding) combined with the outer (convening and hosting). We offered a three-part series in the spring of this year. We are solidifying dates for a fall 2016 and spring 2017 series.

Kinde comes from a background of design and design education, transpersonal psychology and ecopsychology. She guides wilderness rites of passage trips and supports individuals in their psychological and spiritual development. I love this about Kinde. She’s opening so much to the practice of emergence and through her work, I find new layers in myself.

In her recent writing, The Magical Wilderness Between People Together, Kinde says,

“I have an immense curiosity about this territory, this sort of magical invisible wilderness that I’ve stumbled into now and again when I am with other people in a particular kind of way. I am curious because I feel most alive and fully human this invisible wild space together. I am curious because new and amazing things can be created in this space. And I am also curious to understand this phenomenon better because I sense it could be a critically important place for us all to know how to be in as we face unprecedented global challenges.”

Give it a full read on her site.

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Mental Model Shift

There was a bit of a conversation happening last week on the Art of Hosting list serve. It’s a global group of practitioners connected by a few things that include a medium (list serve), some shared purpose (applied participative leadership practice), and a desire to learn together (from just beginning to multiple years of experience). It’s a comforting kind of list to me — definitely disturbs any thoughts of being alone. And it’s a wise group of people. People know stuff and are willing to share.

The conversation last week that caught my attention was on mental models. One person named a workshop that she was creating. She asked for examples of mental models. One participant, Lori from California (whom I don’t know) offered these five gems, each of which I relate to. I love her clarity of “from this to that.” I also love some of her invocation of entrepreneurial spirit.

  • I have to do it all myself ~ I have lots of support around me
  • I have to work for a company ~ I can be successful as a contractor/freelancer
  • If others don’t value me, I have no value ~ When I value myself with confidence others are drawn to me
  • The government (or organization, etc.) should solve that ~ I can do something to create a solution or improvement
  • I have no power in the situation ~ I always have power in the way I perceive, my attitude, and my choices – where I choose to focus.
 Just a bit of conversation. And some good wisdom.
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From Drip to Torrent

thornton

The rain is falling in Seattle. It is what happens in September. I can feel summer letting go, giving way. What has been glorious, sunny days, are now in their inevitable yielding. Cloudy, and sopped in.

Thornton Creek, near my Seattle home, sometimes a mere drip in the hot summer, quickly turns to a raging torrent, making it’s way under the bridge in the back yard. The creek is only three feet wide where I am. However it can go from an inch deep trickle to four foot deep “be careful” in an instant, catching volume from upstream tributaries.

I don’t know how long the season of rain will last, but it is that, a season. Not just a sporadic shower on a day.

I’m told that when the rain comes, the salmon can begin to smell home. It is one of the things that stimulates their epic journey from ocean, to lake, to river, to stream —  back to where they were spawned. Amazing, right. I’m also told that the salmon have made their way near this part of Thornton. Restoration efforts have been on-going — they might even go beneath the bridge some day. Thornton makes it’s way to Meadowbrook Park and eventually to Lake Washington. Then Lake Union. Then the Pacific. It’s a journey.

I loved hearing the creek this morning. And feeling wonder in it, and thinking about the salmon that might just find their way here.

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