Category: General Learning

I continue to learn the importance of a framing story. A context. That creates invitation. That creates purpose.

A framing story is important in the details. In the granular. “We want more affirming meetings.” “We want to meet in ways that invites our curiosity and learning together.”

It’s good to ask the people we work with — What is the framing story of the granular that we wish.

A framing story is also important in the meta. In the longer arc. Here’s one of the framing stories in the meta that I find myself riffing on often.

“People everywhere are sorting complex and shifting environments. People everywhere are asking questions — What is belonging? Who do we choose to be, individually and communally? What is our institutional future? What is our experimental future? What holds it all? What lifts? What liberates? What deepens?”

The nudge I often offer, so as to further frame, riffs on this:

“People everywhere are learning and reaffirming the importance of relationship when it comes to such questions of community and leadership. That’s relationship with self. With other. With circumstance. With spirit. With life flowing.”

It’s good to ask the people we work with — What is the framing story of the meta that we wish?

I’ve very glad for oodles of colleagues and friends who know and live the spirit of such questions, such framing stories together. So that they can bring more affirming ways of working and living together.

It is some of the deeper work that I celebrate. Across many domains of work.

Headed to some of that this week. A community organization in Denver that seeks to grow belonging and a healthy masculine in young men.

Framing.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is an American Poet. She has roots in Colorado. I was introduced to her writings through a few friends.

In the poem below, For When People Ask, I so love the way that she points to the need for words that mean many things at one time. I love the way she points to a more complex registry of human experience that interrupts unintended, or intended, either / or thinking.

It happens every day in every day conversation. “How are you?” The short answer is often a colloquial agreement. “Good.” It’s succinct. And part of the pattern. But often, not even in proximity of real.

Any question of “How are you?” is likely to evoke much wider range of reality. “I’m good in that… I’m also struggling in that…” We are complex beings living complex realities that don’t have full vocabulary for a colloquial brevity together.

The question that lives behind all of that for me is about how to live, listen, and share in healthy, witnessing, real ways together. Yup, that’s a big part of the poetry, the coaching, and the group facilitation that I get to do with people.

Enjoy Trommer’s poem below.

For When People Ask
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
more than that: a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it—
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.
The heart understands swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.

Yup, it is breath that lives behind so much of the work that I get to do.

Thx Toke Moeller for posting this Prem Rawat quote earlier this week, “Enjoy every breath that comes into you. It’s a gift.”

It is breath that brings a circle alive.
It is breath that amplifies listening.
It is breath that clarifies speaking.
It is breath that connects people together.
It is breath that welcomes joy.
It is breath that animates learning.

It remains true for me that so much of the group and community convening that I do is a search for the very simple that coheres it all. It is a search for the kind of breath that resets the heart. It is a search for the kind of breath that brings natural rhythm of learning and loving, of contributing and curiosity.

I’m glad for the many of us seeking and practicing such breath and pace together.

Courage is bravery.
Courage is of the heart.
Courage is clarity.
Courage is simplicity.
Courage is celebration.
Courage is mustered commitment to these 15 minutes and then the next.
Courage is staying kind with things that hurt.
Courage is in the details.
Courage is in the bigger picture.
Courage is personal.
Courage is communal.

Interested?

January 25th. Online. 90 minutes.

Details and links to registration are here.

This is a workshop for people wishing to grow and nuance relationship with courage. The ways that we claim it. And, the ways that it claims us. So that we can contribute well. With things that we care about in work, in community, in life.

Please join.

With anticipation.