Category: Edited

Appreciating the stories that I’m hearing now with Quinault Indian Nation. There are 16 people here gathered at the Quinault School, home of the Chitwhins. My friends Sono, Teresa, and John are hosting a Domain Leadership meeting. People are now meeting in specific domains to support an overall strategic plan: Community, Wellness, Prosperity, and Learning. Other domain groups will convene later: Land, Governance, and the Queets Community Group. The focus is on preferred futures, indicators of wellness, and essential starting goals.

Great to hear the sparking ideas, particularly as I listen to the Learning Domain. One person is sharing some traits of learning that characterize the Quinault people. “We learn by doing. If you want to learn to make a basket, do it with me. We’ll make mistakes and then we’ll laugh together and figure it out.”

Another story was about being resourceful. “We used to do what we needed to. My husband came home one day with a paycheck of $99. It was not enough to pay our bills. We had someone help with our kids. We went clam digging. With what we got from the clams, we were able to pay our bills. Our schools are important. But it was wrong to take our skills away from us. We need to learn again to dig for clams, hunt, and be in our land.”

Happy to witness some of this work, the claim of sovereignty, and it’s expression in this culture.

A few pictures here.

Appreciating these eight principles, sent to me from my friend Rowan Simonsen, now in Bogota. They are a collection of principles from Disciplines of Peace. A 4 minute video with a bit of description is here.

1. Spirit as light emanates life force
2. True presence is the doorway to the great mystery
3. Wholeness is only experienced through diversity
4. The essence of identity is embedded in cellular memory
5. The darkness in the holy womb of light contains all light
6. The universal relationship of co-creation exists through cause and effect
7. Universal truth informs right action
8. All things are born of woman

It is 2,3,4 that I particularly resonate with as I continue to learn and explore world views. Presence as core capacity for times like these — yes! Wholeness experienced through the ever opening eyes, ears, and heart to a larger ecosystem — yes! Identity in cellular memory, that can be remembered and activated — yes to that too.

Number 8 also catches my attention. With an awareness and knowing. With an appreciation for the feminine (in me and others). And with a bit of jealously wanting the inclusion (“well wait a minute.”)

Thanks Rowan.

•  #AoHSask Celebrating some really good work, and this representation of it offered by Shelley Keyes: yfrog.com/met4wglj
• Research from BYU: Being socially disconnected equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes / day. We are a meant to remember ourselves as web.
• With Sono & Teresa on QIN learning: Patterned pathologies when gifting becomes charity and naming becomes labeling.
• Oxygen supports life – but breathing oxygen is not the purpose. Money supports companies, but money is not their purpose. OS LIst.
• Super grateful for fall in Saskatchewan. Reminds me of the 10 years of doing so as a young boy for Thanksgiving weekends in Kerrobert.
• #AoHSask — Complete with this event. Not complete with the learning. Much stirring as I harvest, reflect, reach out.
• #AoHSask Great night with telling stories, sharing food, wine. Laughing. Ease of community.
• #AoHSask Teaching Berkana kit on engaging community. Principles for freedom in design of social process. yfrog.com/h3naaocj
• #AoHSask Knowledge camp happening now. 2 Loops, Chaordic Stepping Stones. Good, powerful stories in the room.
• #AoHSask Lovely checkin this morning from Vicki, Cathy. Grounding practice. Journaling. Mary Oliver poem.
• #AoHSask Open Space on diving deep. Primed by 3 conditions for conversation: work, co-learning, relationships.
• #AoHSask World view of diverge / converge with living system qualities overlaid.
• #AoHSask Watching participants interact. There is a question to give it focus. However, mostly seeing it as energy activating.
• #AoHSask yfrog.com/h89m3haj
• #AoHSask Lilly Tomlin – “Reality is only a widely shared consensual hunch.”
• #AoHSask: In triads exploring world view that supports engagement and hosting.
• yfrog.com/khketgwj Starting with checkin, beginning to notice what is emerging as important to offer here.
• Friend Glen in New Zealand, as invitation to our work: “let our mastery lay in thinking from, not about the principles of our field.
• Leaving now for six days of hosting and learning in Saskatchewan. With anticipation.
• And further for process-based events: “Push practice. Not project.”
• An essential for belief for process-based events (thanks Chris, Teresa, Mark): “Hold space for others to do their work.”
• Moving poetry from Drew Dellinger — Planetize the Movement. Just enjoy and share (and care, dare to beware)! bit.ly/rfRcyM
• I’m cohosting this. Join us. on.fb.me/r719ZJ. Came together with ease. Such skill and grace of the people on the team.
• If you get circle (stillness, deliberateness, conditions for life flowing through), it’s easier to go deep in other practices.
• RT @PeggyHolman: We can listen not just with our ears, but with all of our senses, including our heart and our intuition.
• Gross National Happiness in Bhutan by Silver Donald Cameron — A TED Talk so worth watching: youtu.be/1CLJwYW6-Ao

A few thoughts on harvest from a piece I started to write three years ago.

FOUR LEVELS OF HARVEST:
Content, Process, Relationships, Energy
Tenneson Woolf (www.tennesonwoolf.com) — August 2010

There are many people in deep practices of harvesting from conversations and other forms of connection. Many of us are finding it helpful to name categories for that harvesting. To help make learning available to ourselves and to others.

Below are a few ways of thinking about harvesting. The first, reflections after working with a health care organization for three days. The second, by friend and colleague Chris Corrigan, a helpful piece on interior and exterior harvests.

Four Levels of Harvest

1. Content — Most of the time, I feel that people are focused on a content level of harvest. What is the work? What is the solution? What facts do we know? Reports. Recommendations. Proposals. Data. These are all important. It is quite amazing to think of the tools we have for harvesting that were once far less accessible — cameras, blogs, social media sites, etc. — to animate content.

2. Process — Less commonly harvested is process. The simple methods and designs behind collecting content. Circle, World Café, Open Space Technology, and Appreciative Inquiry are some that I use often. Describing process, the “how” helps add life to the content, the “what.”

3. Relationships —  A third level of harvest. I like my friend Chris Corrigan’s reference — “we convene conversations and harvest relations.” When we have better quality of relationship – a commitment to curiosity even in difference, we have better chance of doing our work in healthy ways. We shift from extremes of cajoling to invitations to create together. We shift from force to support. If people leave in friendship, more work will get done and with more imagination.

4. Field — Field is a fourth level of harvest. It is the more difficult to voice, yet may be the most important. It is the feeling when good relationships are taken to scale. When the sweetness and effectiveness of one relationship transcends into the relationship of the whole. It is the space where trust abounds, and where information needed also abounds. It starts to feel metaphyscical, and I believe is. At some point I sense we will all find more language for this – building on what is already there, for example, when we speak of strong culture – that shows us something present but hard to see in our current habits.

Interior and Exterior Harvests

“Just a thought in the harvest piece…For me there are many ways to harvest, but they all come down to either being interior harvests or exterior harvests. Exterior harvests are the ones we see and use to communicate with others, what we sometimes call artifacts. These can be notes, graphics, films, photos and other things that are portable and objective. They may be designed for a broad audience or only for those who were there, as a reminder of the experience, for example. I use all kinds of artifacts, and with most events I do now there is usually more than one.

The interior harvest – the learning and the collective story – needs special support to be useful. For me I use the shorthand of “feedback loops” to think about the ways in which we might create ongoing containers for these interior harvests to be revisited and refined. For example, setting up reflective practices to revisit learning, or setting a future schedule of storytelling sessions to continually work with the meaning arising from an event. These things use strategies of conversation and social technology as well as personal reflective practice to continue to work the interior harvest.

A holistic harvest scheme is an important part of the design of any event – it needs to meet needs, and sometimes that means a reductive accounting of time spent along side the establishment of a presencing practice to revisit personal learning.

It has helped a lot with clients when I say that we are planning a harvest and not a meeting. The meeting simply helps us arrive at the harvest that is needed for the group I am working with. Sometimes the need is just learning, and no external harvest document is necessary. Sometimes the need is a plan.”