Human to Human

A few links, reminders, and invitations. This is my quarterly newsletter, now in its 6th year. Enjoy peeking.

The context is this…

Connect, Learn, Experiment

Much of my work over the last six months has been with client systems. With medical professionals championing a movement of health. With a corporate cohort program trying to learn next layers of leadership. With a university cohort (that’s where the river photo above comes from) exploring participative models in leadership.

What I notice uncommon across these groups is the need to connect, learn, and experiment. My job is so often to create container and guiding experience. To make connection easy. To insist on deepening and learning. Then to offer formats that support them in their experiments.

A friend asked me recently (on my birthday) what has changed in my work over the last year. I replied, “I try to find the simple and the meaningful.” Well some of that is this connect, learn, experiment. Seeing over and over again that people care about their work together. 

Reach out. I’d love to get curious together about such things.

Thx Katie Norris. I used her poem this past weekend. To encourage presence and appreciation.

Be Where Your Feet Are
by Katie Norris

Maybe there is only small happiness

Watching the coffee grounds bloom
Petting the dogs after work
Say “I Love You” each day

Big joys are here and gone
But the small ones are everywhere
And they too are enough

Check her publication here.

It’s a moment of waiting for this BC Ferry. At Courtenay, on the way to Powell River. Hard not to get excited about such a moon rise over mountain and ocean.

I’m so grateful for a group of men gathered at Soultime. We tell stories. We sing songs. We cook food. We do deep work of the psyche and soul. We bring it back with us on the ferry to our families, to our work, and to our communities. I’ve been involved for over 15 years.

The most basic yet impactful of patterns at Soultime is reflection alone and together to the question — what is your detail? A “detail” is a noticing. Something that stands out to you. From the external story. From the internal story. From the external stimuli. From the inner wonder. There’s no wrong answer to such a question. There’s lots of gift in the permission to notice without needing to summarize. There’s a lot of gift in welcoming Life’s bigger patterns to organize our insights.

And then, a pivot to meaning and purpose. What does, or might, your noticing of that detail have to do with the life your are unfolding? Or wishing to unfold? Or struggling with?

It’s simple pattern. Repeated. That offers such rich insight. That lifts aliveness. That shares it. This time, among a Circle of Soultime Men.

Grateful.

This time on Texada Island, home to Bob and the yurt he built. Will be looking for whales from the ferry ride. And the whales and other creatures that show up in this gathering that has so moved many a heart.

I write about Soultime this way in my upcoming book, The Gifts of Circle (Fall 2024).

I’m grateful to a group of men with whom I’ve been meeting in Men’s Group for over 15 years. That’s in-person weekend retreats twice per year as able. That’s also 90-minute Zoom calls every other week, again as able. We explore together what it means to be men. We share stories. We listen. We ask questions. We create ritual. We create beauty together.

Circle is our primary container. It holds us in journeys big and small. We know how to pass a talking piece together. We know how to get past the joker that men so often employ to bond, yet that so often also blocks a craved authenticity.

We are a small, small pocket of men in a big, big pattern of meaning-making. That seeks to heal toxic wounds so often found in masculinity. We are a small, small pocket of men in big, big celebration. For who we are as men. For who we are as men with strong feminine capacity. For how we learn together about all of it.

Circle — with all of its invitations to listen and to share — has had profound influence on us as men. Freeing influence. Circle has given us structure to hold us as we connect through dreams, stories, losses, finds.