#thecircleway • Tenneson Woolf

August 8, 2017

Days of The Circle Way

I have many gatherings in the next six weeks that are deliberately focused on The Circle Way. That makes me quite happy — The Circle Way is such a grounding and core methodology that underlays a way of being. There is The Circle Way Practicum August 23-28 on Whidbey Island, teaching with Amanda Fenton — Amanda and I have picked up a twenty year tradition of teaching in Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea’s home teaching space. There is a workshop and a practicum in September in Australia, again with Amanda. This is new territory for both of us, and delightfully partnered with Penny Hamilton from Brisbane. There is a new weekend leadership retreat in mid September in Minnesota with Quanita Roberson and Barbara McAfee, who are both people that I love to laugh with.

I’ve been reviewing this morning some of my notes from the practicum workbook. It gets me quite excited. I love the feeling of added nuance that arrives when it feels like I’m on the on ramp to those events. I get excited to teach. I get excited to play off of what these really skilled teaching companions bring to the table themselves.

One of my favorite learnings about The Circle Way came earlier this year in conversation with Christina. She was framing intent that she and Ann felt very deeply in offering The Circle Way. “We wanted a culturally neutral, light structure to correct what goes awry in so many contemporary forms of meeting.” I’ve always loved the way that Christina can take a deeply spiritual practice and bring it down to the everyday. I’m a pretty natural question catcher. From this statement it makes we want to engage a group around questions of what goes awry in so many meetings, and, what is possible in these meetings?

Circle creates a container for so many of the important conversations needed in the ongoing weave that is humanity. It’s a container for the challenging conversations, the ones that we are often afraid to take on. It’s a container for some of the exciting conversations also, to give them more depth and reach. Wisdom-based change arises from people together. That’s pretty cool. It just needs some support and structure.

I’m grateful for wise people that have guided me. I’m grateful for imaginative and kind teaching companions. I’m grateful to further immerse myself in teachings and practices from The Circle Way over these coming weeks. Because, well, they feel like home in how they animate realness together.

May 9, 2017

The Truest Statement — You Never Know

Last week at The Circle Way Tofino (Chesterman Beach, above), my teaching colleague and friend Amanda Fenton shared the passage below. It is from Richard Wagamese. Wagamese is Ojibwe, a Canadian author and journalist who died earlier this spring.

The beginning of wisdom is the same as its attainment: wonder. The truest statement in the world is “you never know.” There is always something to evoke wonder, to wonder about, because this world, this life, this universe, this reality is far more than just the sum of its parts. Even the slightest detail contains much more. The overwhelming awe and wonder we feel teach us more than we can ever glean or come to know of things. In the presence of that wonder, the head has no answers and the heart has no questions.

I was moved by the part, “the truest statement in the world is ‘you never know.'” It had particular relevance in this context of working in the Nuu Chah Nulth region on Vancouver Island in Canada. Kelly Foxcroft Poirier and her sister Dawn Foxcroft shared many insights with us that were drawn from their indigenous heritage. This included the statement that “for our people, everything is contextual.”

Ah…, there is something that I was looking for. The appreciation and commitment for the subjective, the contextual, and the relational. It’s a contrast to the so much dominant contemporary pattern of the objective, the isolated, and the individual. Any time you can find just a few words that encapsulate a couple of decades of searching — well, that’s a good day. That’s what was sparked for me in “you never know.”

Wagamese’s life is itself an important story. On its own, and for the pattern that it represents in the last century of indigenous, First Nations life and culture taken by European settlers. From Wikipedia, these paragraphs also moved me.

Wagamese described his first home in his essay “The Path to Healing” as a tent hung from a spruce bough. He and his three siblings, abandoned by adults on a binge drinking trip in Kenora, left the bush camp when they had run out of food and sheltered at a railroad depot. Found by a policeman, he would not see his family again for 21 years. He later described the adults in his family. “Each of the adults had suffered in an institution that tried to scrape the Indian out of their insides, and they came back to the bush raw, sore and aching.” His parents, Marjorie Wagamese and Stanley Raven, had been among the many native children who, under Canadian law, were removed from their families and forced to attend certain government-run residential schools, the primary purpose of which was to separate them from their native culture.

After being taken from his family by the Children’s Aid Society, he was raised in foster homes in northwestern Ontario before being adopted, at age nine, by a family that refused to allow him to maintain contact with his First Nations heritage and identity. Of this experience he wrote: “The wounds I suffered went far beyond the scars on my buttocks.” He was moved to St. Catharines, Ontario. The beatings and abuse he endured in foster care led him to leave home at 16, seeking to reconnect with indigenous culture. He lived on the street, abusing drugs and alcohol, and was imprisoned several times.

He reunited with his family at 23. After recounting his life to this point, an elder gave him the name Mushkotay Beezheekee Anakwat – Buffalo Cloud – and told him his role was to tell stories.

The truest statement — you never know. What an invitation to essential wonder that can and does do wonder in human beings being together.

May 8, 2017

Building Cathedrals

A friend that I’m working with shared this story recently, one that I’ve heard before, but was glad to hear again.

A man came upon a construction site where three people were working. He asked the first, “What are you doing?” and the person replied: “I am laying bricks.” He asked the second, “What are you doing?” and the person replied: “I am building a wall.” As he approached the third, he heard the person humming a tune while working, and asked, “What are you doing?” The person stood, looked up at the sky, and smiled, “I am building a cathedral!”

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With most of the people that I’m working with in participative leadership, I’m encouraging seeing a range of scale. From planning meetings to invoking movements. From trying a training once to apprenticing for three years. From dabbling in an experience to recreating a culture. From laying bricks to building cathedrals.

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My last three weeks have included significant gatherings at which I’ve been glad to see and feel this range. I can feel myself stuffed with good learnings that will continue to unpack over the next days, weeks, months, or even years. That will perhaps build to cathedrals themselves.

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There was the board meeting and retreat for The Circle Way. Because of the quality of people in this group, being together for four days was like advanced circle experience. In meeting each other. In exploring and committing to new initiatives. In decision making. In getting beneath the surface. I could feel a unique excitement as this group of people helped to repurpose a possibility through The Circle Way as a non-profit organization, working with young people, people of color, and people embedding circle in their work and community environments.

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There was the men’s retreat, Soultime. I’ve been able to be a participant at this gathering many times now. It is a unique mix of men, 40 – 70 in age, each thoughtful in their own way. Together, this group reclaims some missing initiatory experience to help grow ourselves differently. That sounds fancy to say it that way. Men welcomed to show up with listening, and dreaming, and wondering, and vulnerability, and song, and shared work (literally chopping wood this time) — that is cathedral building.

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There was The Circle Way Practicum in Tofino, British Columbia that I taught with Amanda Fenton, Kelly Foxcroft Poirier and Dawn Foxcroft. This is people learning skills to help offer and host important containers for difficult and important conversations, including those on reconciliation. This is people in depth of story and depth of questions. This is people committed to offering what they can in their respective communities. It’s so much more than rearranging the chairs. So much more than laying bricks.

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It may not be that the work that any of us are in, is always about cathedrals — even cathedrals, after all, get built by many steps of laying bricks and tending to very non-sexy jobs that are in front of us. But there are some days, when generating the energy of cathedral-building is the only thing that matters. May all of us be so lucky as to find friends and colleagues and surprise strangers with whom we can do this. May all of us be so clear, that we know to lean in to each other with deliberate supportive forms that bring out the whistling in us.

April 25, 2017

Hosting Circle Online

Amy Lenzo is a friend that goes two decades back into the World Cafe community. Most recently, Amy, along with another friend Rowan Simonsen, and I have been creating and offering the online course, The Circle Way: A Deep Dive.

To explore deep dive feels utterly essential. There are skills to be learned, mistakes to be made, and companions to be found. Deep dive also requires a lot of discerning. There are some things that are just too big to open up together in the time that we have — they require some overnight cooking and alchemy with one another that I relate to in a face to face way. Or, deep dive invokes a reference with hope that the mere reference will stay with people and work within them. Sometimes it is just sharing one imagination that can shape a months worth of dreaming. This is something I hope for in all of us. It is, I believe, a willingness to let an insight travel with you.

Amy does a lot of online work. She is smooth, thoughtful, and wise. I’ve really been glad to be in her abilities and skills over the course of this deep dive. Stirred by our last session on April 19th, and inspired to open it further, Amy posted this piece on Hosting Circle Online. It’s good tips. It is good grounding. From invoking images to lighting candles. All about challenging us to a belief of what is possible when present to oneself, to each other, and to the invisible yet ever so real fields that redefine time and space.