Author: Tenneson Woolf

Dave Pollard is a person I’ve met a few times over the last ten years. I’ve enjoyed it each time. Dave writes rather epic blogs under the heading “How To Save The World.” They are long, as is the one I’m referencing here on time. But they are also very thoughtful and articulate. Dave knows stuff. I love his honesty about who he is and what he sees, as is highlighted on his site:

“…chronicle of civilization’s collapse, creative works and essays on our culture. A trail of crumbs, runes and exclamations along my path in search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.”

Here’s a snippet from a recent post, About Time: An Inquiry. I love his thinking that meditation is “simply being in the presence of awareness,” which helps me empty just a bit more when my mind takes over.

“We normally consider that meditation is some kind of an activity of the mind. It’s a focusing of the mind, usually on a mantra or a flame or on the breath or just on the current situation. In other words meditation is normally conceived as an activity. What we understand here by meditation is something very different from that. Meditation is not an activity that is undertaken by a mind. Meditation here we understand as simply being in the presence of awareness…”

The full post is a good read, with a cup of tea to settle in.

Macklemore, the rapper and songwriter from Seattle, recently released a teaser for an upcoming album, The Unruly Mess I’ve Made.

First, I love the title. The naming out loud of something that is an unspoken truth.

Second, I love this line, “If you aren’t scared of what you’ve created, you aren’t done yet.”

I also love it that Macklemore has remained an independent performer, not signing recording contracts with major studios, to preserve his freedom to create as inspired.

There’s a little something in this for all of us. Don’t have to like rap. Just hear or read the narrative and notice the part of any of us that wants and needs to create.

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Today I leave for this event, on health transformation in Washington State. I’m cohosting it with Paul Horton, Faith Trimble, Teresa Posakony, Phil Cass, Chase Napier, and Judy Hall. I’ll have a few days in Seattle before we begin working as design team on Sunday.

This one is unique in that there is an “Executive Day.” It is an option for participation on the first day only of what is a three day event. Yesterday we had a team call, some of which was focussed on design for this first day in particular. Judy Hall asked the most relevant question, I found, “How to be a good sponsor?”

From the conversation that followed, what I heard and stitched together is several chunks of design.

• We need systems awareness. It’s important that all of us continue to see ourselves in a broadly connected system, even in its complexity, rather than in a widely fragmented system. Isolation is a belief of convenience.
• We need a grounding story. In this case, Phil has much to tell of his experience in Columbus, Ohio. The work must be real, not just hypothetical. People will be able to find themselves in that.
• We need to focus on key questions. It is our questions that will shape the work and the integration of people working on it together. The premise her is that there is nothing as useful as a good question to invite people into learning together.
• We need engagement. The primary purpose of a meeting like this is to have people turn to one another. It suggests that wisdom comes from engagement by the group. It matters that we tell our stories with one another as a way of creating fabric to take on such complexity together.
• We need focus on an inner transformation. Phil says it well. “Unless the inner changes, the inner state of the leader, there is not much that changes or sticks in the outer programs. The programs come and go, each with their value. But there is not getting around the need for our inner change.”

Tack on a welcome and check-in at the beginning, and a good check-out at the end. That’s a good day that might look something like this.

 

 

I’ve been looking through a few old folders in which I collect phrases, images, and articles that mean something to me. Check this one from Christina Baldwin, spoken at the Circle Practicum in August 2015.

“There is a kind of grief when you find what you want. It is the grief of fulfillment.”

I’ve seen this kind of grief often, though have not named it so, when people experience a moment of meaning in how they are being together. It’s an awareness of what is. It’s an awareness of what could have been all this time. It’s a grief, perhaps, for the walls of protection that many of us have built around us, thinking them necessary, yet realizing that they aren’t.

Grief has many reaches.