Author: Tenneson Woolf

My last five days have been spent in vigil on behalf of my Grandmother, who, after experiencing a heart attack a week ago, is somehow still holding on. Grandma Fern. She is 95. Ten days ago she was going to movies, having dinner with family, attending church in her senior center. It was not uncommon to hear family talk about her making it to 100.

But things change. Sometimes rapidly. Whether the passage that is death, or other related passages that include loss of memory, loss of purpose, loss of bodily function.

I love Christina Baldwin’s writing. I love her friendship too. She wrote some of these passages recently, “Stardust, Black Holes, and Fog.” That post includes this poem below, crafted by her senior Mom.

“You see me sitting alone in my chair,

You think that I’m here, but I’m really out there—

Communing with angels, I’ll be with them soon, 

Just after I learn how to jump over the moon.”

I have another older friend who once told me, while in her 80s, “this getting old isn’t for sissies.” True, right.

My friend Charles LaFond says it wonderfully.

“Raising my tolerance for uncertainty is the hardest heavy-lifting I have had to do in my life.”

I continue to learn that underneath most of my plans, most of my meetings, most of my committees, most of my worries, most of my fears — and currently, holding vigil for my Grandmother to pass away — there lays an inevitable uncertainty. Coming to terms with this, rather than the natural ways that many of us unconsciously avoid it, is indeed heavy lifting.

Read Charles’ full post. It is worth it. He says it well and in a way that feels particularly poignant now.

A few weeks ago a friend and I spent 45 minutes together on a Skype call. He is working with faith communities. He knows that I have done significant work with faith communities. He wanted to explore some of that.

We did. We explored some of the dynamics. Some key questions. Some important assumptions. It was really quite enjoyable.

But it was his last statement when checking out of our call that really caught my attention. “I don’t know what the answer is, but I want to be involved in the mystery.”

Beautiful. Enough said. That’s what friends are for (even when in teams and congregations).

Yesterday, a friend / colleague (frolleague) and I were speaking about some ways to set up some community engagement that she was planning. Not set up as in tables and chairs. Rather, setup that is a narrative and invitation that sets the tone for people to turn to one another. It matters. It is one of my favorite conversations to have.

I often rely on one of two approaches to that setup narrative: 1) a personal story that connects to the overarching purpose (if it’s about forming better relations, tell a personal story of when you’ve experienced better relations, or, of a story when you knew that relationships weren’t good); 2) an expression of what I love about the method we are using to listen and learn together (if it’s Circle then make talk about how Circle help improve listening, or slows us down to be heard differently).

I tend to rely on the right story coming to me in the immediate hours or minutes preceding my convening with them. It matters that it be honest, simple, and from the heart more than delivering it with perfect polish.

Yesterday’s conversation with my frolleague had me recalling these two paragraphs from physicist David Bohm (excerpted from Joseph Jaworski’s book, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership:

On dialogue

“From time to time, (the) tribe (gathered) in circle. They just talked and talked and talked, apparently to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader. And everybody could participate. There may have been wise men or wise women who were listened to a bit more–the older ones–but everybody could talk. The meeting went on, until it finally seemed to stop for no reason at all and the group dispersed. Yet after that, everybody seemed to know what to do, because they understood each other so well. Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or decide things.”

And then more, on “superconductivity,”

“Bohm compared dialogue to superconductivity. ‘In superconductivity, electrons cooled to a very low temperature act more like a coherent whole than as separate parts. They flow around obstacles without colliding with one another, creating no resistance and very high energy. At higher temperatures, however, they begin to act like separate parts, scattering into a random movement and losing momentum.’ In dialogue, the goal is to create a special environment in which a different kind of relationship among parts can come into play — one that reveals both high energy and high intelligence.”

It leads to great questions, right. “What cools us? What cools you? Where do you experience no resistance? When have you experienced high energy here? It sets context, an invitation to be together in the most meaningful way that we can muster.

And that, I find, changes all of us. That’s when people say, “whatever that was, let’s do more of that.”