Author: Tenneson Woolf

I have spent the last three days in the grasp of a flu and cold. Body aches. Chills. Fatigue. Coughing. Raw throat. Runny nose. Watery eyes. You get the picture. I’m glad this doesn’t happen often, but the last three days have been full on.

Today, hopefully, the turning point that I feel this morning will hold through the day. I will be released into relief. Not fully better. Just beyond the thickest and most fatiguing parts.

I learned a lot about the kind of sick person I am over the last three days.  Indulge me. One is that I’m the kind of sick person that appreciates being alone. I like to find a place to lay down, be completely quiet, and lick my wounds so to speak. If I were the USS Enterprise in a Star Trek episode, I just need to slow down to impulse power. Nothing near warp speeds that so regularly define my days.

So as not to sound only like a completely geeked Trekkie, I am coming to really value periods of slowing down. Not just as imposition from a flu, as the last three days have been — that is a different category — but as deliberate strategy for overall well-being. Emptying my mind. Letting go of todo lists. Not filling every available moment of time with something productive. I’m more productive when I’m less productive, if that makes sense.

Much of my thinking lately has been about presence, presence as core competency. With a friend that I’ve started writing with, we have asserted that presence is “the” core competency. In the 24/7 ever-on world in which most of us live and work, tenacity has trumped presence, rendering its need nearly invisible. He or she that gets the most done wins. I’ve long admired the nobility of such tenacity. It has a buzz to it, doest it. I find, these days, that that buzz, unchecked, is a trap. It is a kind of seduction. It can take many of us away from an essential grounding, an essential presence that I believe most humans want to feel, need to feel.

I’m hopeful in this day. Just for a relief. Just for a turning of the corner. And for the picture of presence-making that is more commonly grasping and grounding me.

 

Yesterday a friend sent me this poem. It is by American poet, Mary Oliver. She is one of my favorites, whom I know not in person, but very personally through her words.[br]

On Meditating, Sort Of
Mary Oliver (From Blue Horses)

Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place — half asleep — where the world,
spring, summer, autumn, winter —
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.

So I just lie like that, while distance and time
reveal their true attitudes: they never
heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.

Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints —
all that glorious, temporary stuff.[br]

The first “detail” of this poem that I immediately related to was the reference to time. “Time has never heard of me, never will, or even need to.” As personal as I, and I believe many others, make it — “time is not on my side,” “time is a master,” “time is unforgiving” — and, as commoditized as I make it — “I don’t have enough of it” — time is simply a human creation. A construct. A handy system of measurement. Not the general quality of seasonal time. Not the kairos version of time beyond time. These are the kinds of time that I want to give my true devotion. Where I would like to change my relationship to time is in the obsession of ticking seconds, compressed minutes, and of cramming in the most possible to a limited window. It’s revered, I know. And I admit, there is a buzz to having some capacity to do it. Yet something feels deeply amiss in this for me.  It is no different that over-stuffing a suitcase. Sometime it is essential, but let’s face it, sometimes good things must stay behind. Just thinking it doesn’t create an expandable zipper compartment.

These days, in this place of life, I want to feel a deliberate relationship with spaciousness. Just because. And, well, because it is such an attractive alternative to the imposition and rather punishing personification of time.

The second detail of this poem is related to this. For me it is about “being” meditation, not “doing” meditation. I know, all being is practice, right. I accept this. After a certain amount of practice, it seems, however, that the practice shifts from “doing something from external guidance to being something from deep internal sourcing.”  “Becoming” might even be more accurate. Becoming meditation. Becoming spaciousness.

I suspect “becoming” has a whole lot to do with entering into a wholeness of belonging. With what? The universe, sort of. The divine, sort of. The vast inner world of compassionate perception, sort of. But these are musings for another day and another tree.

Over the last ten years I’ve been asked many times to define the purpose of The Art of Hosting. Each time I’ve responded, I’ve been aware there are many layers to the question and any response I might offer.

Below are four of those layers, all of which I suspect will be present and poignant when we gather in February for the Art of Hosting, Bowen Island. Our hosting team of Chris Corrigan, Caitlin Frost, Teresa Posakony, Amanda Fenton and myself all bring significant experience and genuine inquiry to contribute to these layers.

1. Better Skills, Better Meetings — This is what many people want. It is as basic to organizational health as regular exercise is to personal health. The Art of Hosting, and the general framing of participative leadership, offers a set of tools, methodologies, perspectives, and practices to help improve meetings. Committee meetings. Staff meetings. Or repeated meetings that are engagement strategies for long term community involvement. Our intent at The Art of Hosting is to help all participants leave as improved practitioners able to host better and more meaningful meetings.
2. Leaning in to Longings — Most of us have hopes and dreams about what our organizations can be. About what we want to be in them. Most of us are not satisfied in simply “getting by” or “enduring.” Most of us want to actively lean in to our longings, individual and collectively, on behalf of a deliberate and desirable future together. I believe because we are daring, and caring, enough to do so. And because we know that real longings, spoken genuinely, and heard with curiosity, reset and recenter the clarity of our endeavors.
3. Create a Narrative Arc to Hold Us Into the Future — For change to happen, or be sustained, most of us need a story. An overarching narrative that reminds us of a purpose. Sometimes it is the story of us as individuals. Sometimes it is the story of our teams. Sometimes it is the national or global story of a world that requires us to evolve with it. It was Christina Baldwin in her book Storycatcher that spoke, “Life hangs on a narrative thread. This thread is a braid of stories that inform us about who we are, and where we come from, and where we might go. The thread is slender but strong: we trust it to hold us and allow us to swing over the edge of the known into the future….”
4. Practice Presence as Core Competency — “Core competency” is language most commonly used in a business setting. Yet its meaning is widely known. An ability that is essential, a skill that is at the crux, a muscular memory central to accomplishing purpose. Like flour is to bread. Like kneading is to preparing it. Core competencies are very utilitarian. They help us get things done. They are things, or steps, that we wouldn’t, or couldn’t, live without. A premise I hold for the Art of Hosting is that presence is “the” core competency that is called for in these times. In professional life. In communal life. In the often fast paced, hyper-connected, ever-changing world, presence, perhaps more now that ever, is most needed.

The Art of Hosting, Bowen Island is one of the events I most look forward to during the year. The location is outstanding, nestled in forest. I trust our team, all of us, as friends and colleagues, who understand much about layers. I trust us to get to the needed layers that make lasting and significant difference for those who come.

Welcome.

Takuhatsu is a Japanese Zen practice of asking for alms. The monks in the community call people to the street. Sometimes chanting as an offering. Welcoming food. Welcoming gifts to their empty bowls.

My friend Bob Stilger described this practice to me yesterday, reflecting on his recent trip to Japan. What was unique in his description was an added layer of purpose found in Takuhatsu. Not just asking for food and resources, though that is important. Not just the practice of begging, though that is important too. But offering a way to connect the local community to the local Zen temple.

Takuhatsu creates a medium for engagement and access. A “welcoming boundary,” as Bob called it. A way for ordinary villagers and merchants to be in relation with the rigor required of the Zen monks in the temple. Not a “rigid boundary,” that so often isolates and separates. But a “welcoming boundary” that creates association at the edges, while fully respecting the identity and private aspects at the center of a Zen temple.

In living systems, permeable boundaries, or membranes, are essential for life to happen. Stuff comes in. Stuff goes out. There is exchange. It’s what leads to cell-division. To evolution of complex forms. To diversity of expression. To propagation.

In human systems, welcoming boundaries are essential too. It’s what leads to evolution of ideas, to inspiration, to broadened community, to newness. Even to respectful tending of endings.

The boundary is essential. It is what enables an identity to form, to specialize, and to contribute to a broader system. However, the edges of a boundary are also essential. When too rigid, life shuts down. When open, when welcoming, without forgoing fundamental identity (though sometimes this feels essential also, doesn’t it), life thrives. Life gives life.

I was given the bowl in this picture from a wise and caring friend. It is a begging bowl. When she gave it to me, she also gave me a story of the practice used for this bowl, including this reference point. “In order for the beggar to beg, the bowl must be empty.” Of course she wasn’t just speaking of the bowl. She was speaking of the person too.

I don’t believe that we as humans must empty ourselves of all identity. At least, not every day. There are times, those dark nights of the soul, when utter emptying is utterly essential. Make sure you have friends for these times of life. I do believe that, more commonly, there is an emptying of self, of the rigid parts, enough to create a inviting edge, a welcoming boundary, just as the Zen monks do with Takuhatsu, that connects us not only to ourselves but to the community of life and people and experience that surround us.