Author: Tenneson Woolf

I’m sitting in the Minneapolis airport, on a layover on my way to La Crosse, Wisconsin. My partner, Teresa Posakony, and I are imagining some of the meeting that we will be co-hosting over the next two days. The people we are working with are women religious leaders for the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. There are 12-14 people. We are preparing for their 2013 General Assembly.

Our design is good. We will spend some of the first day checking in with each other, clarifying a next level of purpose and possibility. We’ll give some attention to what has worked before, what some of the key challenges and issues are for this community. We’ll generate a few ideas that are important. By the end of the second day we will have some sense of plan and skeleton of design for the process leading up to the Assembly.

All good.

As Teresa and I continue to talk, I can feel both of us asking the deeper purpose and intention of what we are doing. We are asking each other what is really possible in working with this group, not only these two days, but over the next year together.

One of those possibilities is about calling in our best attention. Being willing to notice what is holding our attention together. We are both thinking about the morning that we will have. The circle that we will host. Wanting to invite each of these leaders to feel comfortable sharing what has their attention. Whether that be something related to the assembly or not. If it has their attention, they will be giving it energy. I think this is one of the things I most want to build pattern around. Notice what has your attention. And notice how often, that is a gift or doorway related to the work that we are about. I think the assumption is this: “What has your attention is often an offering from the wholeness of the world so that we might just notice how the inner condition is projecting an outer reality. In so doing, we have opportunity to be in conscious relation with that.”

Looking forward to being with this gang the next two days.

• Rachel Maddow author of Drift, on the Daily Show, on public and political sense making: “conspiracy is just easier than complexity”
• http://yfrog.com/nz31lmej Bit of spring from Utah.
• RT @acuginotti: A big part of this #homeschooling & #unschooling journey is deschooling the parents
• RT @annbadillo: What We Owe Adrienne Rich by Madeline Ostrander — YES! Magazine http://bit.ly/H3IYr3
• My sweetie and partner Teresa Posakony launched her website, http://bit.ly/H39FeL. Emerging Wisdom. Check it out.
• Provocative sufi mystic articles (thanks MJW for forwarding) that change the story. http://bit.ly/GWzZW8 and http://bit.ly/GWA1xn
• Inspiring article on health care renewal and participative leadership, forwarded from friend Tim Merry. http://huff.to/H4MxKf
• Nice harvest video from friends working with community in Minnesota: http://youtu.be/wg7IV1ot-80.
• From Cecilia Corcoran, Fransiscan Sister, this gem: “Only in the experience of a luminous interior life can we move with the inner authority to respond with a compassionate heart to know and do what is ours to do.”
• Interesting writing retreat in Vermont April 19-22. Join my friend Lex Schroeder and Erica Dhawan for Ideas That Move: http://bit.ly/wCNUzc
• From one of my labour union hosting colleagues on capitalism — “surely there must be a way for reasonable distribution of wealth.”
• RT @laurelhubber: “leadership is about creating change that you believe in” – Seth Godin. Or hosting process of share creation.
• Watching Elijah at swim class. He is a fish!
• A couple hours of yard work today. Great to pull out winter kill and spread some compost. Something good about hands in dirt.
• The Most Astounding Fact with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. From my friend Corbin. Great images, music, story. http://bit.ly/xNXHnt
• Great meeting today with my friend Carla and a school principle preparing for a bully-prevention community conversation later this week.

I appreciate this phrase from Jeff Thies, “we maintain a commitment to the tension,” from a phone call I was in yesterday. Jeff is a senior leader with St. Joseph Health System. He was describing some of the realities of their efforts, everything from the inspiring spiritual grounding of dignity, care, connection, and compassion to the juxtaposed current runaway-cost of healthcare, confrontative political context in the US, and culture of disease management. I love Jeff’s honesty in it. “We try to stay present to what wants to evolve,” he said.

Good to hear this with Jeff. And, beyond the words of it, nice as they are, to feel the realness of his voice. Hmmm…. To stay present requires a realness. And an ability to lean in to the tensions. Become curious about them with each other. That’s pretty good learning and practice at all levels of scale, isn’t it.

I appreciated this topic for our monthly local Participative Leadership Practitioners Circle (PLPC), co-hosted last week by Ben Mates and myself. Complimentary Currencies is a body of work Ben has been supporting and exploring in the Salt Lake Valley.

As always with this group, we have a simple, deliberate format. The topic invitation is sent in advance so that people can choose to participate. We sit in a circle. The group has been 6-16 people. I usually offer a bit of context for the process and specifically for the evening. We check-in with a bit of voice from everyone. We give our attention and curiosity to the topic for the evening. We harvest some of the learning. We close with deliberateness. Good simple process for tapping intelligence in the group.

Ben’s description for the invitation was this:

The way we use currency to exchange and circulate wealth is often unconscious. We rarely consider that there might be alternative means of facilitating this exchange/circulation. I’m interested in convening conversations where we examine the often-unconscious assumptions around money and begin to explore alternative currencies that could offer healthier ways to be in relationship with each other and the world that gives us life. How can I best engage people and invite them to explore?

This was a great night of learning for me. Ben offered some framing about how money is energy and his focus is on creating alternative ways for energy to move and flow in a society. We played a couple of games to get this point. And then we played an additional game to help see some of our own patterns and beliefs in relation to money, things, exchange. The conversation that followed was very stimulating to me. Deep. Reflective. Thoughtful. Not surprising — this is what I know in how Ben is in the world. He is one of the good challengers and paradigm shifters that I know.

One part of the game had us naming for ourselves something that has three qualities (and energy). 1) what you like to do, 2) what you are good at, and 3) what people value. I found this particularly valuable to notice these things and notice that these becomes currencies that we can offer to each other. Nice. There is a spirit to it. That helped me to see more of that.

For those interested there are many further resources to stir the thinking.

-Ben has an article pending publication in Catalyst Magazine (benjmates@att.com)

–An article by Michel Bauwens on post-capitalism (thanks to my friend Ria in Belgium)

-Several books by Bernard Lietaer: The Future of Money; The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, New Money for a New World (search for these on Google or Amazon)

-Several Books also by Charles Eisenstein: The Ascent of Humanity is particularly good I found.

Thanks Ben, all.