General Learning • Tenneson Woolf

January 2, 2018

It Is Human To Fall In Love, and If Lucky, To Welcome It

As a younger boy, I think in kindergarten, I remember feeling my first crush on a girl in my class. Her name was Dixie. She wore a purple shirt. I remember chasing her, and her me, on the playground. Such frolicking, and innocent fun, right.

In other stages of life, I remember other stages of love. A crush on a teacher. Being shy in middle school and high school, but eventually falling head over heals with a steady girlfriend that would shape so much of young adult life.

As life grows, I suppose perhaps, so does love. I realize that love becomes so much more than infatuation and a lot of firsts. It also becomes heavy lifting and being able to stand in a whole lot of imperfect together. It becomes grace, working with difference, a baseline of unity over years, and even a few scars to show for challenges along the way.

It is human to fall in love, isn’t it.

It is human to desire connection, isn’t it.

It is human and natural to want to be in association, isn’t it.

Something in us, I believe, knows this. From a soft or afraid heart. And from an instinct to be wise.

I’m learning about reclaiming the naturalness of wanting to be in connection, of wanting to be open to feeling love, and to being love. I’m learning, on so many layers, as people paying attention have for eons, that there is energy in love. An expansion. It’s different than the energy of fear, which so often is a contraction. And though these may be topics most often taken on by poets, they apply of course to working with teams.

I’m headed in to a week of offering a workshop on teams. How delicious. And I realize that I’m continuing to learn (in a no finish line kind of way) about love and being in love.

In love with, self.

In love with, other.

In love with, community.

In love with, silence.

In love with, rest.

In love with, challenge.

In love with, mystery.

In love with, the unknown.

In love with, uncertainty.

In love with, difference.

In love with, ease.

In love with, this moment followed by the next.

Amazing by what can get started with girls named Dixie wearing purple shirts, isn’t it.

January 1, 2018

Strange Attractors & Resolutions To Start the New Year

Well, here we are 2018.

It’s a calendar measure embedded within the chronos system of measuring time. It’s a cultural invitation to celebration. Except where it is not, which is many places. It’s not just fireworks going off at the stroke of 12. It’s bombs too. It’s not just parties. It’s people in survival too, hoping to stay warm through the night. I won’t resolve these paradoxes here. I’ve just always had an eye to seeing them, as clearly as my kid has had an eye on paying attention to his “Elf on the Shelf.”

No doubt there have been many new years resolutions set. I heard on a radio program earlier this week that the top resolution set is about exercising and losing weight. Well, let’s hope for fulfillment for all of us in the needs that we give a bit of extra attention too, be they soul-searching or to improve the decor.

It was Meg Wheatley who first introduced me to the concept of a strange attractor. An example, and the one used on the cover of her first book in 1992, Leadership and The New Science, is above. It’s often explained as a mathematical concept to help describe a dynamic and changing concept. Ah, the beauty of math, right. What’s not to fall in love with when it is so much more than simple linear equations. In “strange attractors” with numerous iterations, images like the above arise in a seemingly “order for free” kind of way.

That’s rather cool.

So, here’s my January 1st offering of a spin on resolutions. Resolutions act as strange attractors. They set an identity and purpose. They set an intent, and sometimes, dream. Beyond how many pounds one might drop to reshape a waistline, strange attractors also cohere some of the more mystical and less seen into an organizing pattern. For people. For groups. For teams. Yup, for nations also.

Organizing patterns (well beyond resolutions) are always in play. Sometimes it is fear, and we unwittingly make our decisions, plans, and perceptions based on what we are trying to be so ever careful of. Sometimes organizing patters are sprouted from flow, and with extended grace and apparent providence, we infuse our decisions, plans, and perceptions with imagination.

Strange. Attractors.

Welcome 2018.

And whatever awareness accompanies us, dynamically and strangely, into what I hope are some beautiful, and just-right-timed, patterns and beautiful experiments that make a difference.

December 27, 2017

Christmas Morning Blessing

Didn’t want to pass up on sharing this.

My friend Charles LaFond writes of the many contrasts, juxtapositions, and real differences in peoples lives.

The photo is his. As our the words. Offered here with thanks and appreciation for a good soul in my life that reminds me to look to the skies and to the ground.

A Christmas Morning Blessing

Blessed be this day.

Blessed be this Christmas day.

Blessing rest on the heads of children in families whose gifts cover a carpeted floor under a tree of lights.

Blessing rest on the heads of homeless children awakening in the shelters of our cities, awakening to a new day of walking in streets and reading in parked, cold cars.

Blessing rest on parents bustling around breakfast casseroles refereeing toy ownership and hosting puzzles by firesides.

Blessing rest on parents whose poverty calls into question this “loving God” referred to by wealthy Americans who trust in a God who provides wealth to rule-keepers.

Blessing rest on the hands and hearts of those, this Christmas Day, who comfort and serve the financially and emotionally poor, marginalized and hope-starved.

Blessing flow from the rivers, pouring water into dry fields.

Blessing flow from a warm sun, rising each day to warm a planet perfectly positioned to receive it into life – blue and green.

Blessing flow from animals and plants, the meat of which feeds this planet.

Blessing on the sick who hunger for vitality.

Blessing on we rich who hunger for enough with tine to read blogs and write them.

Blessing on the grief-stricken, whose loved ones and loved-lives have vanished leaving vast deserts of sand and hot lava stones. But in which, if one were to look carefully, new life is hosted.

Blessing on families awakening, like Mary and Joseph, into a state of homelessness or flight, or hiding, or all three.

Blessing on the dogs and cats whose presence is a comfort to the hairless bipeds whose suffering is soothed by a lick, a purring, a spooning and the heavy eyes of a pet which stands in witness and vigil, both.

Blessing on the hope which dawns on Christmas morning when churches are locked and blessedly silent even if for only a few hours.

Blessing on a Bishop’s mitre, a man’s AIDS virus and a child’s leprosy, all.

May we all, once boxes and bows have been secreted away for another year, spend this day in compassion for the dry sand ochres and lava rocks black while also celebrating baby pinks and blues.

Blessing on the cruel, the stupid, the caring and the kind. Christmas is a story in which all take center-stage together. In our desperate desire to scapegoat and achieve, may we remember a Savior who wanted nothing more than healing and peace, a simple meal and prayer emerging to celebrate considerably less pomp and rather more circumstance.

Blessing on sunrises and good tea. And Black Dog.

Blessing on enough.

December 20, 2017

Places I Love — Whidbey Island, Washington

This past weekend I was on Whidbey Island, just south of Bush Point. A place that I love. A place of love. And a place of awesome stones for balancing (like I did above) and enjoying in a myriad of ways.

It was a weekend of deep and important council with friends. To find balance. To watch a few stones fall. To cast vision out across the breadths and the depths. It was a weekend to feel the drizzle of rain on our cheeks and to enjoy patches of sun on our foreheads.

As I sign off in writing for this calendar year, and in the coming of solstice, I wish all of the above for my loved ones, the beautiful teams of people I’ve continued to work and dream with, the people who I’ve coached and who have coached me, and for myself.

Love.

Depth.

Important council.

Friends.

Balance.

Knowing that stones fall.

Vision.

Breadth.

Breath.

Drizzle of rain to refresh.

Patch of sun to warm and delight in.