Meet, Notice Energy, Offer

One of the phone calls that I particularly enjoyed today was with two colleagues and friends. Both are people that I trust. One, Sarah MacDougall with The Circle Way, through being in friendship and shared work for several years now. The other, Holger Scholz, a more new friend and colleague, who feels like I have known for several years. There is a brothering energy that I appreciate with him.

This phone call was to explore an unknown together. It had a surface level — considering inviting Holger to The Circle Way board, or to a leadership team, or to a project. Those references are relevant, but they are not the real point. We needed to explore an unknown together. We needed to begin a conversation, not end it.

There is a pace to work in North America that I know many of us work at, or encounter. Sometimes confront. It tends to be quite fast-paced. It often is unquestioningly committed to speed and efficiency. It’s not surprising, right. It’s a cultural story that goes back many decades now into the heart of industrial revolution and the information revolution that has followed that. Get it done fast — that’s the motto.

Holger had a different pace to him today. I appreciated it. It was more spacious. I would say, kind. I would say, thoughtful. It was what I needed.

In our conversation, and in the content of it, we named a kind of operating principle. Meet. Notice energy. Offer. It applies to most of the settings I can name in my work with clients, conference organizers, internal teams, communities.

Meet
to say hello. To be in attention with another animate being. To be aware. To support a connection. To support the mystery of what might emerge from a connection. Just be willing to be in relationship. Even for the moment.

Notice energy,
particularly if there is a spark (though I realize that this could be the absence of a spark too — that’s good information). This is speaking to an emergence, what can arise in company together that doesn’t when alone. You know, emergence isn’t a cute card, though it is often used that way. It isn’t the brain child of a greeting card writer. Emergence, energy that arises from meeting — that is the invisible of a way of being long left in the shadows of heroic individualism. Just notice together, with freedom, what arises.

Offer
is to notice what is relevant in the moment. It might be the offering that is, “it would be smart for us to think on this a bit more.” It might be the offering that is, “I’d like to do this work together.” It might be the offering that is the clarity of, “I’m not drawn into this at this point in time.” It might be the offering that is, “I have just the thing!”

Meet, notice energy, offer.

Ah, that was the breath of simplicity, that I so needed. That was good to notice. And that was a delicious bit of energy in this day.

 

 

Today’s Society

Today's Society

I saw this yesterday on Chris Corrigan‘s Facebook post. Chris posted the simple words, “We are all connected.” I love the invitation and challenge he offers.

The best humor, I find, is the stuff that is true, and that shows the absurd. How absurd to think of being comfortable on the top end of the boat when the back of it is close to going under. How absurd to distance ourselves from what is so close. How absurd to not see the grand body of water that they are about to sink in. How absurd to deny connection.

I don’t think it is about everything connected in every way. But I do think that connection is a disposition. It’s not just an airy fairy mission statement. It’s an attitude and expectation. It is a red thread in the story. That’s different than the disposition (intended or unintended), attitude, red thread, and story of separation, AND, the behavior, practices, and policies that separation creates.

Trust in the Mystery

It seems it is about every six months or so that I have an, “I want to write about something I’m learning from Julia Walsh” moment. Sister Julia, FSPA, continues to write her blog, Messy Jesus Business. She doesn’t necessarily know that I’m having those moments. There are many times that I peek in to her blog and get a deep, satisfied grin, ear to ear. She is a truth teller. Deeply human. One of those unique people that deliberately respects and honors tradition, yet also knows to evolve the edges. That’s good, right.

Recently Sister Julia wrote about transition in her life, moving from a four year focus on teaching to becoming a retreat presenter. All within the FSPA tradition. But it’s still a move. It’s a different place to live. It’s goodbyes. It’s gratitudes. It’s sadness. It’s anticipation. Her point in all of it is that the practice of trusting in the mystery is essential.

Ah, there it is — trusting in the mystery. Again. Mystery is one of my favorite questions that I’ve been asking in my facilitation and leadership work over the last year. I usually ask it in the format of The Circle Way so that people can lean in to it deeply — “Do you relate to mystery in your work, or the unknowns? What is that like for you?” It takes people to an honest place, a matured inquiry about themselves and others, and a freed place — witnessing the mystery together.

It is my experience and observation that all of us face a level of mystery. The unknowns. In our work. In our families. In our communities. Some mysteries are the ones we carry with us for a lifetime — who am I, really? Who are we together, really? Some mysteries are for the week — I wonder why that dog is hanging out near our yard, and does he have a home? Some of us (all of us at times) try to suppress our relationship to mystery. We overlay it with grasps at certainty, thinking that a simple patch will make it go away and return us to the convenience of our certainty illusions, just like we might hope when overlaying a hole in a floor board with a small area rug.

Whether God or ancestors or guardian angels or other beings, I often imagine a group of them smiling at us as we evolve our own relationship to mystery. “Watch this, he’s getting closer to leaning in to mystery — nope! Oh, that was so close.” I imagine them then smiling and agreeing to check in on us again later, like coming back to watch a football game together another weekend.

Neither mystery, nor our need to be in deliberate relationship with mystery, nor the hole in the floor covered by the area rug, goes away. We just save the inevitable for another day. Or we simply go to sleep (figuratively and literally).

Thanks Sister Julia — your presence and playfulness in the mystery, continue to inspire.

 

 

Ceremony, Ancestors, and Aspen

Aspen at Willow Heights 2

In the last week I have been able to learn much with two important and good friends. I’ve learned about ceremony, ritual, ancestors, and aspen.

Chronologically, the first friend was with Kinde Nebeker, who hosted a day-long Medicine Walk up Big Cottonwood Canyon in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, seen above. The aspen are budding at this time of year at that elevation, about 8,500 feet. Just as Kinde’s work, that includes rites of passage, is budding into a more full presence. The medicine walk included a deliberateness of threshold crossing, setting an intention, going solo the bulk of the day, returning to share some of what I and the others learned, and to be witnessed. I love how she held space for a deeper letting go.

The second friend was Quanita Roberson, who came to Utah to host QT with me. QT very much connects to the letting go that I experienced with Kinde. There is one point in the process with Quanita when we created ceremony to let go of that which doesn’t serve us. It included fire, burning a symbol of that which we don’t need, and a grief canal, a passage to get to the work of releasing. I love the way that Quanita talked about ceremony and working with the ancestors. “The thing about ritual is that you don’t have to believe it or know how it works for it to work. The act of choosing to participate is enough.” She then added, from one of her teachers, the West African Dagara Elder, Malidoma Some, “The ancestors in the west are the most unemployed ancestors in the world.”

I don’t know how all of that invisible work works. But I have the feeling that we did indeed employ some of them in the last week.