Category: General Learning

Over the last few weeks I’ve talked and emailed several times with my friend Bob Stilger. Bob and I met in the late 1990s while working through The Berkana Institute. Bob, like Berkana, has always embodied a spirit of dialogue and inquiry that has inspired me.

One of our conversation topics has been this idea of “unknowable futures.” The entry point for our conversations has been a couple of workshops that Bob and I are involved in creating. And more specifically, Bob has many years, decades really, of working and living in Japan. Most recently, this has included learning journeys to Japan to explore thriving after disasters.

Disaster, thriving, calling communities back to life — these are all entry points. The real focus that I appreciate in Bob is the call to being in the unknowable. Becoming comfortably uncomfortable with uncertainty.

It occurred to me that there is an important distinction between “unknowable” and “unknown.” And unknown future has some implication that it can be known. If we try harder. If we learn more. If we prepare more thoroughly. It feels like good old due diligence. There are times when this is essential.

But Bob is saying something else. An “unknowable” future is one that cannot be known regardless of the due diligence efforts. The unknowable is not an interruption from which we will soon return to the normal. “Unknowable” is increasingly the new normal.

The unknowable highlights qualities and practices needed. Individually and together. Personally and professionally. The unknowable requires ways of being that release us from the fallacy of knowing. It requires dispositions of curiosity, non-judgement, and compassion for self and others. It requires keen honesty and emotional literacy.

These may be categories of life-long practice. Yes, all of us can get better. But I believe they are required and possible now. Just starting somewhere.

Thanks Bob.

I like this poem by Meister Eckhart, a German mystic, monk, and Catholic scholar from the late 1200s and early 1300s. I particularly like the last line, “Love frees.” It occurs to me that the best of friendship does this also. Or the best of working together. Or the best of community. It occurs to me, and makes me smile like the burro, that we humans are coded to appreciate freedom.

Love Does That

All day long a little burro labors, sometimes
with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries
about things that bother only
burros.

And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting
than physical labor.

Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,

he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears

and for a few seconds the burro is free
and even seems to laugh,

because love does
that.

Love frees.

As a young boy I got to go camping with my grandparents, my sister, and two cousins. Billy and Fern, my grandparents, were, and are, salt of the earth people. They were always inclusive. There was always room at their dinner table for one more. My sister Wendy was the oldest, 20 months my elder. Wendy and I were the ones that tanned up quite easily. My cousins Dennis and Trudy were three and four years younger than me, respectively. They were the ones that sun-burned quite easily. Funny how difference works, even in family.

We all piled into Grandpa’s Chrysler each summer, three in the front seat and three in the back seat, to make the drive from Edmonton, Alberta into the Okanagan area of British Columbia. With our pop-up tent-trailer in tow, it’s a 50 year-old trailer that I now have, we did this for eight or nine years, each for a week or two at a time.

These were fantastic formative years for all of us kids. They were rich times with our grandparents, creating an important bond that has remained with us through our lives. We took turns planning the days and meals. Swimming in the lake was our primary entertainment, most often at Skaha Beach in Penticton. We picked cherries in the orchards, often eating as many as we picked of course.

It was on these trips that we learned some key values that remain with me today. One of those was to leave the campground better than we found it. In Penticton, this meant that when it was time for us to go, our job as kids included picking up little bits of trash, candy wrappers, and cigarette butts. As kids, we complained. Of course there were things that we didn’t’ drop there. But my grandparents were clear and committed. We need to leave it better than we found it.

Last week, that Grandpa, Billy Gould, passed away. He was 98, which is rather impressive longevity. Grandpa’s death was expected, yet of course, impactful. As a family we will be celebrating his life later next month. Stories. Memories. Toasts. Tears. Laughter.

Grandma Fern is 94. She remains impressively sharp. I call her pretty much every week. We talk about sports — Grandma knows a lot. We talk about gardening. We talk about the kids, her great grandkids. Sometimes we talk about old camping stories. We talk about her adjusting to Grandpa’s passing, which I believe she is doing quite well.

My Grandparents continue to mean much to me. Grandpa was born April 10, 1917. I’m told he was a 15 pound baby. He died April 21, 2015, after a full life. He most certainly left me better than he found me. Thank you Grandpa.

“Rehumaning” was the most basic coherence and story line I could offer for this past weekend’s gathering in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was also the most honest purpose I could name. “Re,” as in “again,” or “not the first time.” To do again. To claim again. To call to awareness again. And the “human” part, ahh, that’s the focus of the “again.” Claiming humanness, because it’s needed. Becoming more keenly aware of our humanness, individually and together, because it’s needed.

I know, for all intents and purposes, we are already human, right? Not alien, even though it may feel that way sometimes. True. Yet, there are some aspects of ourselves that can use some periodic deliberate attention and remembering. Being a daughter or a son doesn’t mean you don’t periodically question how you are doing as a daughter or a son. Same for parenting. Same for partnering. Same for being on a team.

This Cincinnati gathering was Friday evening through Sunday afternoon. We called it QT. My friend Quanita Roberson and I hosted the gathering. Twelve other people joined us. We held it at Quanita’s home. Five of us slept at her home, having travelled some distance. The rest, as locals, commuted. All had some connection to Quanita.

QT was a lot of things. A retreat. A weekend with friends. A small group dialogue. There was food together. Doing dishes together. There was singing — it is impressive to me what the medium of raising voice together can do, even for those of us that are challenged to hit the notes. There was simple ritual and ceremony — invoking the elements of water, fire, earth, sky. Each person was gifted with a candle to burn while together and take home when done. There was dream sharing that prompted everything from rich laughter to puzzling questions.

QT was not a weekend in which we as a group needed to solve anything. Not the world’s problems. We didn’t need to create a grand strategic plan. There was no outcome required. My belief, and my hope however, is that the experience of the weekend, the vibration if you will, will find it’s way into all of what all of us do in the world. It may change our partnering. It may change our planning with others. It may offer a home base, a reality check for each of us — is what we are doing sufficiently human? It it real? Is it honest?

You see, QT was about following our attention. It was about giving ourselves freedom to follow what has our attention as a way of understanding more of how the inner condition is creating outer reality. That’s very human. Our deliberate conversations helped. Our rest helped, a long afternoon break on Saturday. Our hanging out together helped, giving ourselves permission to just be. Our art helped, bringing yet another layer of expression.

Rehumaning. I could say it differently, and in some groups, would. “Getting clear on purpose” would work. But I like the simplicity and complexity that are both present in rehumaning. Like the simplicity of a river bank that holds the complex flowing of a river. Like the refreshing splash from the river that stays with us through the full of a summer day.