Category: Edited

Most people I know are constantly adapting to very busy lives. It’s work. It’s health. It’s fullness. Yes, full live remains the best description I can offer.

Thursday, my colleagues in planning and designing a conference on creating healthier healthcare systems, spoke to some of this. Steve Ryman from Oregon. Kathy Jourdain from Nova Scotia.

I offered this image of toddlers learning to walk, and later wrote some in email about it. That is below. Steve and Kathy added to the images. Steve talking about his earlier hiking experiences, hopping and bouncing from one boulder to another to come down a mountain. “If you try to think it too much, it is painfully slow and difficult. Too much caution is actually more difficult. If you get in the flow of it, it is faster and easier!” I know this feeling. From skiing also. Moguls are meant to be skied. Faster. Easier. More exhilarating too, though I’ve cautiously slid down many in my time.

All of it is about learning and practicing to be in flow, a seemingly essential capacity for these times.

With gratitude for my boy, toddlers, hiking, and skiing.

“I would like to offer an image that has been very present for me these last weeks. It is for me about relationship to time, the busyness of life, the quickness of pace, the availability of consciousness.

My six year old Elijah is a big kid. He is in first grade. He weighs 92+ pounds. When he runs, he has a bit of clumsyness in him. A bit like he is falling forward. Looks like he is going to fall, but is learning to get those legs underneath his big frame in motion. This reminds me of younger children, toddlers first learning to walk. As a parent, I found this joyful and also hard to watch. I felt, “I know they need to do this, but they are going to fall a bunch and I sometimes need to turn my eyes away.” However, it all happens. In most cases, learning to walk and run happens from the experience of falling forward with grace.

In these times, this image helps me. I feel myself tumbling forward in the saying of yes. Falling forward in the availability of shifting consciousness, and how it changes the game. Learning to find my legs.

With hope, gratitude, and anticipation for all to unfold in helpful and well ways.”

Appreciating these words from Harrison Owen on the OS Listserve. It is all open space. Goes along with the other four basics: When it starts is the right time. When it is over, it is over. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whoever comes are the right people.

The 5th Principle is indeed alive, well, and living all over! Raffi – I think you’ve got it. At the very least you are confirming my experience that all the years of opening space (OS) prepares you well to see space opening wherever that happens. I guess the skeptic could say that when the only tool you have is a hammer, all the world look like a nail. Probably true, but I think this may be the exception that proves the rule. All the world is Open Space – we just didn’t quite notice it before. Of course that doesn’t mean that everything is open, free and delicious, for we all know of closed, dark, nasty places. BUT it COULD open, and that is the promise. This promise is realized in the Arab Spring, and presently in OWS. None of that will last for ever, nothing ever does. So I guess the secret is find a rhythm – open/close/open… Maybe that is what we do?

More to add from Tom Atlee and the earlier post I shared about “What’s Really Going On at Occupy Wall Street?”

For me, I’m asking questions about consciousness shift. What is underneath all of these gatherings that represents a consciousness shift?

I feel an awe of the expressions from that consciousness, the expectation to gather, to create voice. Not as showman. But indeed as irrepressible expressions of a self-organizing world in rapid change.

http://www.truth-out.org/occupying-wall-street-what-went-right/1318173044
Occupying Wall Street: What Went Right?
J.A. Myerson: “Of all the criticisms being hurled at Occupy Wall Street, the most substantively interesting is the issue of scale. How large can the living-society portion of the occupation grow, dependent as it is on a reasonably small living space and an inspiringly simple if limited amplification system? Questions like this are worth pondering, and I’ll be taking some of them up here at Truthout in the coming weeks, but let us pause for a moment to consider how astonishing it is that this is a concern at all.”

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http://www.nationofchange.org/where-99-percent-get-their-power-1318173459
Where the 99 Percent Get their Power
Sarah van Gelder:  “Powerful movements build not on a laundry list of policy demands, but on principles and values…. Powerful movements create their own spaces where they can shift the debate, and the culture, to one that better serves. That’s why showing up in person at the occupy sites is so critical to this movement’s success. In hundreds of communities around North America, people are showing up to make a statement and to listen to each other. They are also teaching one another to facilitate meetings, to take nonviolent direct action, to make their own media. They are taking care of each other, gathering food supplies, blankets, and clothes that can allow people to remain outdoors even as the weather gets wetter and colder.”

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/ambiguous-upsparkles-from_b_1003908.html

Ambiguous UpSparkles From the Heart of the Park (Mic Check/Occupy Wall Street)
Eve Ensler

• Berkana’s new website is live. For learning and collaborating with others. bit.ly/mRmxkp
• At the Art of Hosting people meet in their humanity and meet their humanity. Thanks Maria Scordiolu for this.
• Byron Katie = Neurological De-Colonization (thx Caitlin Frost).
• Open Space Technology = Practical De-colonization (thx Chris Corrigan).
• CBC doc (21 min) on impact of concussions. Told from a hockey perspective. Glad to see NHL looking at this. bit.ly/qs2up1
• Steve Jobs reflecting on living – “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
• From my friend Dominic, research on the value of organic vs conventional farming: rodaleinstitute.org/fst30years
• RT @dfrieze: Can the #Occupy Movement be a Turning Point? @doylecanning blog on Yes Mag: bit.ly/nvz9nx
• RT @EricSPeterson: Just saw sign in @CityWeekly office that reads: “In case of fire, exit building before tweeting about it.”
• RT @NoeticOrg: Shamanism, love, and medicines necessary to heal damage of our modern times – mp3 excerpt A Arrien: bit.ly/mU8KEW
• Noticing my need for still in my soul, some quiet. And, need for being in creation with others. A dance of these days.
• Dig this and come. Support a young and emerging leadership community in New Brunswick: Full invite here: bit.ly/ohBIyi
• RT @berkanainst: “Re-imagining Waste (and the new Berkana.org!)” bit.ly/ofvtJI (Pls RT!) #upcycling #walkoutwalkon
• Lovely poetry reflections from friend / colleague Dave Pollard. Perspective on this life, freedom, ease. bit.ly/ouzGjv
• QIN: Our traditions were taken from us. Our relation to the land. We need to relearn skills and community like when we dig for clams.
• QIN domain groups meeting: Wellness, Learning, Community, Prosperity. Sharing preferred futures, indicators of wellness, goals.
• With Sono & Teresa at Quinault Indian Nation: Strategic Plan to invoke tsooto / hope.