Another visionary insight encapsulates our current position:

‘I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather….In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or is dehumanized.’ (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832).

Participants’ own ‘gathered’ responses to ‘World Poverty’ (detail)

[Amy:]: Andrew and I were invited to co-design and co-facilitate a pilot event called The Monticle Challenge, in Toronto. The story there is that it was co-originated and funded by a Canadian entrepreneur,  Billy Liu who left China with one way ticket to Canada from his father when he was still young and his business partner.

Monticle (small mountain) was formed by Lampo Communications Inc. and a group who donate their time to the service of youth in society. I first met Billy at a Buddhist temple in Toronto, on a course we co-facilitated for youths several years ago. As Andrew and I both mentor young people here in the UK we decided to fund ourselves for this trip to Canada. It is an investment worth making in a world imperfectly readying itself for Perfect Storms.

Much of our own experience of how organizations deal with the challenges of this age, particularly in the tri-sector, leaves Andrew and I speechless. Dave unfolded another story for us; of how the latest US legislation for addressing Climate Change has been ‘watered down’  accommodating the prejudice of the anti abortion constituency in America so that now largely useless legislation can be passed. To a massive extent, fear, bloated egos and self interest riddle the interventionist culture.

“ The dark and gathering sameness of the world” 

The music darkens

“The young people who connected at Amy’s retreat felt it, and like the climate scientists, they were overwhelmed by their realizations, by their recognition of what conservationist Terry Glavin calls “the dark and gathering sameness of the world.” They were compelled, as they explored this, to cry out, as one, we were here! as if this message had to be expressed before it was lost — back, perhaps, into the quiet desperate dissonance, or forward to the world where the actions and words of humanity will, once again, no longer be seen or heard.”
– Dave Pollard

[Amy:] When Andrew and I first met in London he was working with a work of art that he’d held for many years; Gorecki’s Symphony No.3, “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” which he felt contains a deep ‘future message’ drawn out of the past.

    [Deep underneath the Gestapo headquarters in Zakopane, inside Cell No.3, on 26th September 1944, the then 18-year-old Helena Wanda Blazusiakówna scratched a prayer on one of the stone walls that imprisoned her. In a voice of gloom, Helena asks her Mother not to cry for her. Out of the darkness, the ringing radiance of the opening theme returns as the soprano calls out to "Mamo" (Mother). In music which weaves subtly between misery and hope, the great current of love in all its joy and pain melds together mother and child, child and mother.]

Andrew started the day using the phrase: ‘playing with the brushes on the back of my hand’, as a way of encouraging the young participants to pay deeper and unfamiliar attention, allowing this tool to become an extension of them- connecting with the brush, listening to the brush as it ‘speaks’ and feeling it’s contact with their skin, turning and tuning into the textures, quality, sensations of contact….

‘first contact’

We drew this inspiration on the day, working out a previous co-creative collaboration, at INTEGRAL REVIEW June 2009 Vol. 5, No. 1, 156 Leung & Campbell: Playing With Brushes on the Back of My Hand from which this is taken,

As a context that is “generated by the immediate presence that binds together a conscious “self” with a conscious “other.”  the interhuman offers a key dormant dimension of inter subjective experience that learners discover through I-Thou meeting: When two individuals “happen” to each other, there is an essential remainder that reaches out beyond the special sphere of each-the “sphere of the between.” In an essential relation the barriers of individual being are breached and “the other becomes present, not merely in the imagination or feeling, but in the depths of one’s substance, so that one experiences the mystery of the other being in the mystery of one’s own.” The interhuman involves relating to others as partners in a living intersubjective event, bringing about a context where I-Thou relationship may emerge.

Buber’s characterization of the interhuman signals describes a subtle way of the being with others from the condition of presence, presence-based realm where former barriers or boundaries between self and other soften, offering an existential referent in that it enables the self and the other to become more immediate, tangible and real. Buber’s work offers a helpful insight into the transformative potential of addressing one another through deeper presence in the inter subjective encounter, which can give rise to an ontological shift in the context of our inquiry and learning within educational settings. By implementing contemplative second-person approaches that are not only aware of the relational and sacred implications of I-thou encounters with our students, but also committed to enacting the interhuman as a primary concern, I believe Buber’s contributions to intersubjectivity can shed important light on one of the necessary preconditions for collective contemplative methods informed by the deeper ontological realms of the interhuman sphere of the between.

We stood in the round and as as a whole, looking at a large collective ‘map’, made of painted waterways of semi visible water, no colour…they had made their first right mark…Splash, splat, …lines, curves, clouds, symbols, a few words – love appeared in wrinkled sheets, as trees remembered rain…then we gave them the three primary colours to run through the sheets with, brought together now into a new global flag, a flag of their disposition.

Waterways, flag and subsequent small group work, with primary colours

They moved into groups of six or so, making paintings in one of the primary colours, images of whatever comes. They were also encouraged to engage emotionally in each other’s work, while also now talking about their own ….Joining in some of the groups we were keen to encourage them to look upon their output as a part of themselves.  We were in awe of some of these images- the sensitivities…A: ‘What do you see in this picture?’ P: ‘A boat in a storm…’ A: ‘How does this relate to leadership?’ P: ‘Well, it’s about knowing what to do when things are stormy..’ A: ‘Is being fifteen sometimes stormy?’ P: ‘Yes….(nods all round)..’ A: ‘Do you always know what to do?  ….I guess life can be quite confusing sometimes…’ hmmmm… A:’ So, maybe leadership is not always about knowing what to do…’ P:’ Maybe….courage….’

    Courage is not the towering oak
    That sees storms come and go,
    It is the fragile blossom
    That opens in the snow
    — Alice MacKenzie Swaim

Untitled: A Boat in a Storm

(top): First set of images (left), and second set of images (right), framing the first set.
(bottom): Detail: girl her with hand on her heart. ( The word courage comes from the old French cour for ‘heart’ )

“In your heart of hearts” — Dave Pollard

[Amy:]: In a Reos Partners film of work with policy advisers to the Dutch Government, some of whom Andrew worked with in London, who face their own amassing systemic problems, there is a telling clip/. It’s of a senior adviser who works directly with the Prime Minister. Her group made a little hand made model of a typically ‘complex problem’. The woman explains in the film that she sees some hope  in their little co-creation – pointing to the paper figure of a man in the tableau, which has a little paper heart pinned to his chest, she says, “.., I am close to him, I am hopeful now because I know this issue is close to his heart.”

Once again, participants laid down their work- the collective of images hit me in the guts- my voice was shaky with emotion…we spoke a little more about ‘art’- what we were seeing was not about whether the output was ‘good’ or ‘bad’- we suspended that judgement, what they’d created and co-created was the expression of a intrinsic part of each of them- every picture was a unique expression. One round of images were produced by swapping and painting each other’s pictures…there was an exponential change in complexity and- coherence….again some of the images were breathtakingly powerful.

Primary images (left) and Untitled : Red Guts

‘Turning to the sharper end of the brush’ — Andrew Campbell

[Amy:] The afternoon was spent exploring ‘pointed’ global issues. Andrew said to them that, while they ate lunch, two thousand more children had died of starvation. They were then invited to write down key words and phrases associated with war, poverty, water and sanitation, flooding, global warming…unprompted, they produced mini scenarios …[In our keenness to integrate the two days, we had a longer than expected interlude, when their instructors told stories of 'foreign humanitarian  adventures'] – so that their focused energy dissipated somewhat, as if air had been let out of a balloon- we thought that as facilitators we had ‘lost it’. I remember sitting on the stairs with Andrew saying ‘…what matters is now- NOW…what’s gone is gone…what matters now is that we still have a small amount of time and a lot can happen in that Time…’

We reconvened the group, and we saw that during the afternoon break they’d covered their skin in the paints they’d used on the paper. Some looked like urban guerillas, warriors, others like South American – Amazonian Indians. It was a  spontaneous emergence, wherein the medium has joined themselves as their living skin.  

[In Native Tribes, face and body painting has been used for artistic expression since ancient times. The art of transforming ourselves is a universal phenomenon. Just as we sought to vent our artistic impulse on a cave wall, we painted on our faces and bodies. Amazonian Indians have said that in this power to change ourselves we demonstrate our humanity, set ourselves apart from the world of the animals.]

It is easy to dismiss such ‘fragile insights’, especially with youngsters. Andrew’s friend, the scenarist and former Reos adviser Napier Collyns and his associate Schwartz co-founders of GBN would argue otherwise. See their piece, How is America going to end : The world’s leading futurologists have four theories, by Josh Levin in Slate Magazine. “The big picture: If you want to glimpse the future, seek out remarkable people and open your mind to loony-sounding ideas…Schwartz happily plays the emcee for the end of America. He speaks more quickly and authoritatively than anyone else, and he’s the one patrolling the line between what’s crazy enough to destroy the United States and what’s just plain crazy. His first idea: racial warfare.”….

We invited each person- if they felt so moved- to commit to one single thing they will do in the context of everything they had done that day…

lining up and signing up to act

At the last moment we stood together for the last time, and each person was invited to say one thought, something to close their day. As we stood looking at all the artistic expressions of ‘selves’, we asked the group what they would like us to do with their work…several people offered suggestions- a couple of people picked up their pictures to take home…then one person said:

‘It would be good if you could keep it for the future…it’s like….saying to others….we were here…’      

The proof of gold is fire

    “It is said in the Confucian tradition that the mark of any golden era is that children are the most important members of a society and teaching is the most revered profession. Today, fear, anxiety, overwork, and under-appreciation characterize a great many professions, but few more so than teaching. Realism tells us that the journey to regain our sanity regarding children and teaching will be a long one. Passion tells us that the path to the future is the one we tread here, now. – I say to sustain teachers is to sustain us all— for who are we at our best save teachers, and who matters more to us than the children?”  

– Peter Senge, author, The Fifth Discipline.

If enough of us say it, and begin to act on it, then at least our collective realizations might move forward from exclamations of “we were here” to proclamations of “we are here”

 – Dave Pollard

   
Post script:
While we were in Canada a friend sent Andrew a picture from South Africa (below) which he never saw until his return. The little boys are members of a family in a small community who struggle daily with hunger, lack of education, AIDS and the bitter cold. He had coached     the project leader, Pauline pro-bono last year, and gave them some little money. The boys are seen wearing warm coats, prior to which they had only t-shirts, like the ones worn by the Monticle Challenge youngsters, in temperatures of minus 2. The idea is to help establish a     garden and an orchard for fruit. On the very same day that the image and message below arrived in the UK, Andrew and I were sitting together in a café in Toronto, waiting for Dave to pick us up. On the music system Coldplays’s anthem, Lights Will Guide You Home, struck up. Through the thin walls of their tin shack, their only abode and a world away a bright beam of light shines through onto the older brother’s new coat. It is exactly the same shape as Billy’s project logo.
 

Lento

…But what Amy was talking about was something even deeper, more present, and more visceral. My first direct sense of this came from a couple of recent face-to-face conversations with climate scientists and conservationists. They were attempting to talk rationally about what needed to be done in light of the constant barrage of new and startling information about the pace of events precipitating climate change and what would be required to mitigate it and adapt to it. But what was clear from the undertone of their discussions, their expressions, and the anxiety present in their answers to questions, was that they are absolutely terrified….

– Dave Pollard

The world is a tangle, who will untangle the tangle?

‘We Are Here’

My friend Dussault always said of people like me “a generalist is someone who doesn’t know enough about anything to know enough about anything.” He was a believer in becoming expert at something, anything — the very best in the world. That, he believed, gave you a foundation, a context for learning about everything else, and most importantly appreciating how little you know about everything else. He argued that without such a foundation you see everything superficially, and as a result you impute meaning, and connections, where there are none.

Last year when I visited him, he had been studying a variant of poker called Tableau. Here’s how he explained the rules:

Dussault insisted that, once you’d played this a hundred times or so, and studied it (he’d programmed the computer to play against him), you’d learn a strategy that would allow you to win, on average, three times as often as players playing a merely diligent game. The strategy involved holding back a good card to play in the final round in the intersection, turning over cards that overlapped with the opponent with the strongest hand showing, and expecting a high three-of-a-kind, on average, to win the pot. If certain cards were declared wild, he said, the strategic player’s advantage was even greater. He claimed that casinos now resort to using cameras and advanced photo recognition technology to ban experts in gaming theory, because they had to confess that expertise conveys such a knowledge advantage that the casino, even with the odds rigged in their favour, can’t match. He argued that banning experts from casinos is as unfair and unreasonable as banning Google from the Internet — because they’re too good for the competition to keep up.

I laughed at him, saying playing 100 games of poker was far short of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour (five year full-time) threshold for developing expertise. I read him Bill Tozier’s brilliant paean to generalists. I told him I’d rather be “part of the world that links things together” than the world’s best at doing something. We’re pattern recognizers by nature, I argued. A little knowledge isn’t a dangerous thing, I told him, its what allows us to see how something over here might be applied way over there, in a way that no specialist, steeped in his or her narrow area of expertise, would ever recognize.

He snorted. “Almost all the patterns you perceive will be red herrings,” he replied, “because you don’t know enough to know whether you actually understand what’s going on either here or way over there. You’re just playing, like a child rearranging a dollhouse, presuming to suggest that the result of that caprice is somehow a potential breakthrough in urban design”. He reminded me that, when I was younger, I had argued that perhaps the “big bang” was an optical illusion. I’d put two chess pieces on my record turntable and had him hunch down and look at them from the side as it spun. “Look!”, I said sarcastically, “the two pawns are accelerating apart! Oh, now they’ve stopped and they’re collapsing back together again!”

“Delightful fantasy,” he’d laughed, “but utterly, staggeringly ignorant of the science of astrophysics. I imagine with this breakthrough you’re ready to tackle cold fusion next!”

“No,” I’d replied. “I thought I’d take on the absurdity of string theory instead.”

“Ah, well, I’m with you on that,” he’d said. “A bunch of dilettantes. Virtual theorists run amok. No understanding of the real world, that bunch. Probably the same clowns who think the brain is like a computer”. He was getting heated.

I told him that I thought it was arrogant to believe we can ever become an expert in, or deeply knowledgeable about, anything important in a world in which everything important is complex, fundamentally unknowable, unpredictable. The best we can do, I asserted, is pay deep attention to as much as we can, as broadly as we can, and look for patterns, and then talk with others about them to see if we can arrive at any congruence on what they signify, what they mean, what opportunities and threats they present, and represent. I said that I’d often talked to experts about some of my ideas but they were, in my view, presumptively and prematurely dismissive. They were only interested in talking with people who confirmed what they already believed.

He sighed. “There is some truth to that,” he said. “This is, however, more a matter of what you rightfully call ‘imaginative poverty’ than it is a reflection of their ‘specialized incompetence’. A principal purpose of research, and of knowledge generally, is to identify and pose important questions, and this requires not only deep subject matter knowledge but also imagination. Most self-described experts these days have, alas, the former but not the latter. But to have unimaginative people with deep knowledge meet imaginative people with superficial knowledge is hopeless, because the former won’t entertain the possibility that the superficial ideas of the latter might prompt areas of important exploration, while the latter can’t understand why their ideas are naive and unworkable. This is one of the reasons there is essentially no innovation going on in almost every area of human endeavour. The people with knowledge and the people with ideas can’t and won’t communicate with each other. Our society is at an intellectual nadir, exactly when our collective creativity is most desperately needed.”

“So is what you’re suggesting,” I asked, “that we generalists have to pick up the slack, and learn enough about the subjects we have interesting ideas about, to be able to substantiate that these ideas are not naive?”

“I doubt that’s practicable,” he replied. “You just can’t learn enough about all the things you have ideas about.”

I waited for him to suggest an alternative solution but he seemed nonplussed. Finally, I asked “Perhaps what’s needed is a collaboration of more than two. The idea-ist to float a naive possibility, the expert to assess its practicability, and some intermediaries to enhance it, challenge it, bless it, give it some tempered credibility?”

“Sounds clumsy and cumbersome,” he said, dubiously. “How does it work in business meetings, Open Space events, collaborations, facilitated sessions? How do good ideas get researched or imagined, and what happens to them when the crowd gets hold of them?”

I thought for a while. I suggested that good ideas, when proffered unsolicited, generally provoke no response or interest at all. The prerequisite for entertaining an idea, it seemed to me, is an acknowledged need or problem. The more bold the idea, the greater the sense of urgency and importance of finding a solution that’s required to entertain it. And even when an idea is entertained, it generally won’t get any traction unless it’s easy to implement — unless there is an obvious line of sight from idea to realization.

“That’s about what I thought,” he replied. “That’s why I think the indigenous cultures have always had it right. Your job as an ideator is just to articulate the idea, as coherently and compellingly as possible, which is generally best done by telling a story. It’s not your job to research its plausibility, to become enough of an expert to know whether and how to make it happen. You just tell the story. Then the responsibility for implementing is left to each person to accept, or not. If the idea has wings, then people will do what they must to make sure it is implemented. No lists of who will do what by when. The experts will show up if the invitation is well-crafted and well-offered. And they’ll be open to new ideas if they sense, among the invitees, an appetite for it, a hunger. In which case, if it can be made to work, they’ll make it work.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “So what’s the trick for making the story compelling? And what’s the trick for knowing who to invite to hear it, and how?”

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “The recipe for a compelling story has a lot of ingredients, but no one formula. It has to be a story of passion, of overcoming a difficult challenge heroically, astonishingly. It has to have resonance, so that your audience relates to it, makes it their own. And it has to be real, credible, down to earth, neither too easy nor too difficult to believe. As for the trick for knowing who to invite, that’s easier: people who care. You can’t know that with people you haven’t met. When you tell them why you care, and look them right in the eye, you will know whether they care. The hard part is finding people who care. Not just people who say they care, who nod and shake your hand. If people don’t really care — about the issue, not necessarily about your idea to deal with it — if people don’t really care, you’re wasting your time. If they do really care, which means they also know, because we can’t care about things we don’t know about, which is why so many of us don’t want to know, then all you have to do is invite them together, and tell your story well. They’ll do the rest.”

I commented that this seemed like a lot of work. He told me it would become easier with practice. “No more than 10,000 hours,” he said, smiling. “Practice conversation, until you know how to pay attention, how to really listen, how to show that you care and what you care about and why, authentically, how to understand what the person you’re conversing with cares about and why, and how to connect with them in ways and with language that they understand and appreciate. Then you will know whether to invite them to collaborate with you, and how. And then practice telling your story, which is just another form of conversation, and which requires the same capacities.”

A short time after this discussion, Dussault contracted a painful and wasting disease, and he then became an expert in how to end one’s own life, and in his final practice, took his expertise with him. He left me a note, which read as follows:

this is my first attempt at translation of a creative work. i hope the author will forgive my misunderstandings and my clumsiness.
the poem is the first prize winner of the en route poetry prize for 2009. it was written in french. comments and corrections to my translation are welcome.

6:20
by judy quinn

december 6, 1998
you are already into the second chapter of it,
and not a word has been said.

you are just an extension:
the flower spike that opens and scatters its seeds.
your happiness is joyless,
your pain exposed.
you no longer belong to yourself.

sainte-justine, montreal,
just like at saint-raphael, san jose –
4:50, notes the nurse:
you make your way earthward
where even invisible things fragment apart,
one year pressed against the other,
your forehead pressed against the table:
to replace, says the book,
break apart, then replace.

towards those who, before you,
dressed up their web of illusions,
a picture of hands, lost,
bubbles trapped on the surface of a lake,
bloop, blip:
all these lives that once were yours.

they have plugged in their probes,
plunged into the restless waters.
you see nothing, but everything’s clear.
on the screen, a raised arm hails a taxi,
a lawnmower scrapes the sky,
let me out of here before the storm.

they have pumped the blood,
drawn back the doors, and remade the bed.
they played with your mother’s hair, and said:
it’s nothing, relax, this is normal,
everything’s perfectly normal.

5:03, notes the nurse, and leaves:
for millennia, our words depreciate each day,
the same lamp, carried from room to room
shines on each blinding day:
it’s been this way for millennia, she writes, and leaves.

your mother admires the houseplants,
the green unpleated drapes,
your father, sitting, his schoolbag at his feet.
an island that the merest word cracks.

5:53, december 6, 1998,
what separates the sky from the window,
your father’s bedside chair,
disappears,
the centrifugal force that glues us, skin to skin,
time has left the room.

one day, you’ll see, says your mother,
no one will have to be buried anymore.
and the nurse notes:
elevated pulse
bloodshot eyes
slight delirium
everything is perfectly normal.

silent bell-towers toll our distress.
dressed in green feathers,
under the worried eyes
of the stars, we will cease
all procreation –
my child
you will be born without me.

6:20, december 6, 1998
buried in billions of light-years of dust,
silent and sterile
a hand unblocks a plumbing pipe.
from black to red, nail polish
like the beginning of the cosmos.

6:20, local time
peeps, diving flights,
the yellow pink of a summer evening’s heat –
the rain, the clouds of bees,
complement each other.

you are coming. we will empty the world.
outside the room
a tree sways in the languid morning,
the final outcome of the growing dawn.
a brown apple pressed against a face.

when you get free from the vice,
the one you weren’t even aware of,
when you have not cried, in today’s book,
you were already real enough.

for a first note:
nine out of ten, white, you
failed the colour test.

when you came, carrying on your skin
that whiteness from the time before
we each looked out for ourselves,
and the tree, and the rose.
this counterweight so sensitive to words
that without them, it would have fallen over.

you are this spot, as soft as infinite clay.
your eyes are the seal of renewal.

you expect heaven — do not seek it.
smell the soiled linen, the vomit and blood,
these diapers down here, nothing higher.
you would have to have been born
in another time.
here, they’ve placed a limit on our dreams.

once you’ve frowned, looked at nothing,
your black almond eyes, with no blue hue,
unable to tell your mother from a blot of ink
you already knew
that to live, you must forget.

omit what’s essential, don’t be concerned about it.
it’s a long trek. on the uneven road
you’ll get lost a million times, and a million times
lay down your dusty burden
looking for the break in the wire that holds your life
back at the starting line.

6:20 am
they tossed you on top of your mother,
the frozen ghost,
under the neon lights of the room
furnished to please the administrators.
i love you, and i want so much to love you
says your mother,
so much that i want you to live forever.
without asking, they picked you up again.

you will set up so many ideals,
says your father
and they will rise up against you
he says, for his own benefit.
there will be enough of them,
they’ll beat you back
and stay alongside the living.

don’t pay any attention:
everything is perfectly normal.

just born, mechanically,
you brought your lips to your mother’s breast
and sewed her back up with a web of drool.
your mouth is partly played.

you were baptized even before you were born,
this twisted name swollen
with a russian hero’s pride.
it carries the scent of the plains.

in the moment when the earth steals it,
a field of wheat at the other end of the world
grows and moves with the sound of your name.

they wish you to be noble,
but you will be nothing but earth.
they will prevent you from leaving.
you’ll be left alone.
they will regain their former whiteness.

don’t think about it,
it will be done for you.

head turned towards childhood,
your hand feels out eternity, and with the other
you hold death by its collar,
its body on the cross.

don’t think about it.

they barely had to wash you,
they wiped out your nostrils, cleared your lungs,
they drew from your mouth your mother’s voice
which called out the world’s promises,
then they threw her away.
they dug for the words that you threw out to her
without finding them,
threw them out with the water.
only one remained.
only one was never delivered.

they tagged you,
measured the rest of the night on your wrists.
weighed your future
with nothing but a sketch of your heart.
then they put you in a bell jar:
so wise.

perhaps they dreamed about
the sunken cheeks they gave you.
that they raised, meager offerings
from the bottom of a well.

these cheeks where laughter will take shape in you
will capsize boats which, within you
well before this december 6, nineteen hundred and…
at 6:20 am
dead planets drifted.

image: from salon.com

i’ve taken you so much for granted,
lovely forest on my doorstep,
strange hybrid of native and ‘introduced’ species,
most at early stages of succession from land once farmed
and then abandoned,
with a few plantation sections, row on row, original purpose unknown.

what did this land look like, i wonder
before the first human eyes encountered it
and the first human hands began its sad ‘improvement’?

how long now before the damage of our species is undone?

such messy wetlands are not meant for man’s endeavour:
swamp and mud and rotted trees pocked with holes for creatures
fit to glide with ease from land, to pond, to sky.

and in the winter, drowned in snow and cold so still time stops.

man the surveyor looks at this chaotic scene, and dreams of draining out the marsh for grain
and chopping up the fallen trees for fuel: we like our beauty ordered, tamed.

i’ve walked these deer-worn trails a hundred times, but still
i do not know the names that humans call these trees;
my guidebooks sit unopened, useless as the facts within them.

i wish at least i knew which ones belong and which are new, invasive,
hogging all the sun and rain and soil like managers hog time in meetings.

such a mystery you are to me, a tiny piece of grace in touch with all the life on Earth
in ways i can’t imagine, now i’m deaf to nature’s primal tongue.

i do my best these days to still my mind and listen, sense and give attention,
not to think of what it means or represents,
or feel the grief of gaia’s loss that haunts me everywhere:
but just to sit and be here, now.

though i cannot.

this is my first farewell, for soon i’m gone:
this land’s too harsh for my arthritic bones and weary heart.

you’ll always be a part of me, and i of you, my land, my love, my teacher too.
we’re so alike: untidy, neither natural nor civilized, a little sad, a little wild,
a little worn, untamed and proud
and every year
a bit more silent.

thank you for your voice, your gentleness with me,
the other creatures that are part of you
and all you’ve showed me of adapting and of wisdom.

i understand at last the message you’ve proclaimed
for all who dare to hear, since life began a billion years ago:
a whisper in the wind, a rustle in the rain,
a baby’s peep, a robin’s song, the turtle’s ancient swim to spawn,
the senses’ spell, the cry of love and joy
and being one with all,
and welcome always,
everywhere.

photos by the author, on a blustery day this past weekend, in albion hills conservation forest, beside and part of where he lives, for now

I spent four days last week with my father, who’s 85, and who’s struggling a lot these days with memory, especially words and names. In the past year, he’s moved from the house he lived in for 57 years. The house my brother and I grew up in, the house my mother — the only child of a brutal but engaging Welsh railroad engineer to run away from him, after the terrible war that defined her teenage years, to the strange colony of Canada — lived her adult life in. The house she died in, of a cancer that consumed her in six short months at the age of 60, the age I’m approaching now, and which she managed as stoicly as the loneliness and depression that haunted her life. My father was with her every moment of those terrible months, as he had been for his own mother when she had died a decade earlier. After visiting my mother in the early stages of her cancer, I respected her request to fly home and not to visit her again, to remember her as she was when she was able to keep her demons at bay.

My father remarried a few years later. My stepmother was a WREN, a woman active with the navy during the final years of the war to defeat the enemy that was then raining terror down upon my mother and her family. Living a thousand miles away, I hardly met her in the years before she was diagnosed, more than a decade ago, with cortico-basal degeneration, an incurable disease that ravages the mind and body at the same time. From what I can piece together she had a terrible life, fleeing an abusive husband and raising her four terrified children alone. Her disease was the ultimate injustice. My father was pressed into nursing duty again, and tried for several years to care for her in his house, but finally had to admit her to a convalescent home when she kept falling and injuring herself. For the next seven years he spent twelve hours or more a day visiting her there, talking to her even after she could no longer speak, even after she could no longer move enough to even indicate if she knew who he was, feeding her and looking after her every need. He called it his “job”.

About a year ago, his memory started to fail, and he was also diagnosed with prostate cancer, and somewhat reluctantly agreed to move into an assisted-care facility, and give up his empty house, which he could no longer maintain properly, and his car. His new home is institutional but, as far as these places go, excellent. They make sure he takes the right pills and gets help with the treatments for his various ailments, and they offer a dining room with very good food, and drive him to visit my stepmother for three hours each day. At his insistance, we have hired a caregiver for her, to take up some of the slack of his reduced visit schedule (he’s convinced she is not well cared for at her convalesecent home in his absence). My brother and sister-in-law devote a great deal of time visiting and helping him. I’m the slacker brother, living a thousand miles away and only talking with him on the phone an hour or so a week.

To give my brother and sister-in-law a break, I’m spending a total of nine days with him this month and next, with twelve days exploring SW Australia sandwiched in between, while they’re in the UK on a much-needed vacation. Because his memory of words comes and goes, telephone conversations have become a bit hit-and-miss anyway, so I wanted to see whether our communication would be better with facial expression and body language to substitute for the missing words. I’ve discovered that it helps, but not a lot. The truth is that, philosophers and writers and voracious readers both, our worlds and lives require language to give them most of their meaning. I kind of wished we were carpenters or painters, so that we could do stuff together that didn’t require words, stuff he could still do without a struggle. I’m going to see if I can talk him into taking up some art or craft during my second visit. His coordination is failing somewhat, but it’s still a lot better than his memory and language skills.

I found two things that helped a lot. Thanks to my brilliant daughter, who gave me a scrapbook full of photos for him, I discovered that when there are visual clues, like photographs, he can find the words he’s looking for more easily. Because we have lived so far apart for three decades, however, there is no shared context for recent photos, and you can only look at old photos for so long before you start feeling like you’re living in the past. So I’m going to collect recent photos of his life, and of mine, and we’ll take turns telling stories.

When I was young, my father’s idea of the perfect weekend was to go fishing in some lake in Manitoba he had never tried before. I didn’t like fishing but I loved exploring these remote areas, some of them four hours or more away from Winnipeg, so he drove and I navigated, and when we got to our destination, he fished and I hiked.

It occurred to me that he might enjoy a ride now, and he did — scenery, like photos, seems to help him find the words he seeks. We explored the roads all along the flooding Red and Assiniboine Rivers, including some roads that were completely flooded out, and my Dad regaled me with stories of picnics and outings from his youth, and from mine, that I’d forgotten. Afterwards, we visited my uncle and aunt’s house for dinner, and I learned that my aunt is either a better listener or more intuitive than I am, since she was able to fill in the blanks when my Dad was at a loss for words much better than either I or my uncle could.

We also went to visit my stepmother one day — the first time I had seen her, other than in sad photographs, since she became ill. Now, as for nearly a decade, she’s confined to a wheelchair, and shakes a lot, and her mouth is constantly open, but she has a lot of facial expression, and looks remarkably healthy for someone who’s been bedridden and locked inside a body that is no more than a terrible prison for her, for so long. I believe that, if I were in her situation, I would choose to simply stop swallowing food. That’s the choice I’ve been told another uncle of mine made when he died last year, and since we (my family) all have stated clear preferences for no resuscitation and no tube-feeding if/when we get to that stage in our lives, it is my guess that she is not in a lot of pain, and she is eating because she still has the will to live.

My theory is that, at this point in her life, she is staying alive only out of love for my father, in the belief that is what he wants of her. I find that thought overwhelming.

Another thought that occurred to me often over the last four days is how much I’m like my father, and how much the vector of my life, and of his, have been the same. We were both the nomads in our family, the writers, the readers, the philosophers, the hopeless idealists, the radical leftists. My father is an honorary lifetime member of an organization called Junior Achievement, that helps young people learn entrepreneurial skills. I spent most of my career helping entrepreneurs, and now have published a book on that subject. My father wrote a book but never found a publisher, and my success as a writer is one of the greatest joys of his life. He also received great vicarious pleasure that I followed his advice not to go into the ‘family business’ (he spent his life working there, unhappy and unfulfilled) — that I succeeded on my own merits, and that my children are doing the same. He taught me to be self-confident, to question and challenge everything, and that if you have that self-confidence you can do anything you want to. I have tried to pass along that simple wisdom to my children.

Now, when I hear myself talking to other people, it is my father’s voice I hear — his tone, his expressions, his vocabulary, his hesitations at forgotten words and names (I’ve always been terrible with names, and I’m relying more and more on my blog as my ‘extended memory’). I am constantly becoming him, and that infuriates and terrifies me. Ironically, or perhaps perceptively, he absolutely loved the ee cummings poem I read to him, and I am going to print it out and frame it for him:

My Dad is aware that my marriage has ended, and when I told him about it he predicted that I’d remarry, but I get a sense that he appreciates that, in some important senses, ones he greatly appreciates and admires, the trajectory of my life and of his have diverged. More than anything else, that is probably due to his counsel and my observations of some of the things that he’s done that have not made him happy. He has no regrets (he told me yesterday), and if he had his life to live over he’d do nothing different.

In these visits, he will take the opportunity to do one more thing for me, and for his family — to show us, through a life lived well, and generously, and fully, in accordance with principles from which he never wavered, how to be different, not only from everybody-else, but from him as well.

The consultant, who had been keeping up with the latest trends, suggested that rather on relying on economists, who were almost invariably wrong, the executive should assemble a diverse group of people and draw upon the Wisdom of Crowds.

So an invitation was issued to some of the brightest people in the nation from all walks of life, and soon dozens of people congregated in the executive’s conference room. The conference facilitator, who was a whiz with metaphors, welcomed everyone and then said to the amassed group: “There is an old  proverb that says that, when looking at a glass like this one” (he held up the glass in the picture), “the optimist will see it as half full, while the pessimist will see it as half empty. We would like to know how you see it.”

First to speak was an Appreciative Inquiry Specialist who said, “I wonder how it got half full? Because if we could figure that out, we could get it all the way full!”

Then a scientist replied “The glass is simply twice as large as it needs to be.”

Next an environmentalist piped up: “If it’s tap water, the glass is half full; if it’s bottled water, the glass is half empty.”

A doctor intoned “Pessimism correlates with stress-related diseases that can shorten your life by up to twenty years, so if you know what’s good for you, you had better see this glass as at least half full.”

An accountant in the group asked “How full or empty would you like it to be?”

A statistician shook his head, and, holding up a chart, explained “At no point is the glass precisely half full or half empty, because the water is constantly evaporating.”

Next up was a lawyer who said “We have no comment at this time regarding the fullness or emptiness of the alleged glass.”

And then a banker chimed in “If you consider the leverage opportunity we’ve created by allowing more air space into the glass, it’s clear that the glass is full to overflowing, but there remains considerable opportunity for it to become even fuller, without limit, indefinitely. And if not, we are more than willing to loan you a second glass on what we think are very reasonable terms, given your credit history.”

A new immigrant said “Where I come from we have no glasses, and nothing to put in them, so by comparison this glass looks very full to me.”

A former billionaire who had lost three fourths of his wealth retorted “Hey, I think that’s my glass, where did you get it? And when I last saw it it was full. And it was a bigger glass!”

A politician from the party in power drew himself up and proclaimed “Despite the fact that the previous administration neglected this glass disgracefully, we have made it a priority to ensure that the fullness of all glasses everywhere is and will be maximized.”

But a politician from the opposition party replied “Despite the hard work of the citizens of our country, the current administration continues to shamefully allow this glass, and all glasses across this great country of ours, to be drained to the point of exhaustion.”

A conspiracy theorist with a frightened look went even further, saying “The government has cynically changed the way volume statistics are collected, to the point that any measure of fullness or emptyness is now meaningless.”

A psychiatrist replied patronizingly “The glass, of course, represents the womb, and so one’s perception of its emptiness or fullness will be affected by one’s desire to return to that womb, by the experiences one had while in the womb. And, I need not add, by the degree of one’s fear of drowning.”

A philosopher stroked his beard and inquired of the group: “At certain times, this glass has probably been full, and at other times empty, and at other times still all gradients of fullness and emptiness. And since time is ephemeral and flowing, who is to say what its state is, or even if the glass itself is merely an illusion, a construct of our imaginations?”

But a sports commentator interrupted and blurted out “Well, we’ve certainly never seen a glass do this before, at least not in these circumstances, and folks, you may be seeing one for the ages.”

Finally a Taoist said quietly: “The glass simply is what it is, and so is what is contained in it.”

Others in turn expressed their views, and finally the expert consultant thanked them all and declared the conference concluded. When the guests had all left, the executive said to the expert: “Well, now we’ve heard the Wisdom of Crowds; is the glass half full or half empty?”

“Yes,” said the expert. “Please let us know if we can be of further assistance in future.”

Well, it took me two years longer than I had expected to find the place I was meant to live, but it was worth it. I have a twenty-year lease on a piece of rainforest that is so staggeringly beautiful it almost hurts my eyes. I have constructed a roundhouse into the side of a hill with large walls of polarized glass so that animals and birds see it as opaque and don’t crash into it, but to me, when I awake each morning, I see floor-to-ceiling panoramas of forest and waterfalls, and I am a mile trail hike from the ocean beach, and a mile trail hike in the opposite direction to the road and the small village where I can get groceries and other supplies I need.

My typical day is the kind most people only dream of. In the morning I harvest fruit and nuts from the trees growing wild around me, and grains from my small garden, for breakfast. I go online and do a bit of research and video chat with friends all over the world online, using a new Virtual World software that allows my avatars (one that looks just like the real me, only a bit better; the other is my fantasy avatar, an eco-hero BirdMan) to collaborate with others, watch videos, look at documents etc. together as if we were together in real time and real space.

I have a steady stream of visitors from all over the world, so the rest of the morning is often consumed by a walk in the forest or along the beach or to the village with them. Our trips and chats are automatically video-recorded using our miniature headband cameras, and automatically electronically transcribed and posted on this blog with a link to the video. On days when I am alone I still sometimes record my morning walk, accompanied by a personal travelogue or perhaps a story I have written and memorized. Or, like today, I might do more ‘traditional’ blogging like this post.

Afternoons are my volunteering time. I do some teaching about natural enterprise, innovation and sustainability, both in the nearby village and online, where my ‘courses’ are available for free download and self-paced learning, and where my ‘office hours’ for real-time questions and mentoring are posted. The evenings are my time for writing, most of it creative writing these days (stories, plays, films, music, and poetry), but also sometimes essays, research and new ‘courseware’ and blog posts like this one.

I’ve nearly achieved zero footprint. I consume nearly nothing other than my vegan foods, most of which grow wild and local. No need for heat or air conditioning in this perfect human climate. My small electricity and lighting needs are produced by solar energy, and I’ve nearly forgotten what it’s like to wear clothes. Water is collected from the abundant rains and waste is composted. Most of my pension goes to projects to help others reduce their footprint, since I have almost nothing to spend it on.

Everything I do is allotted more than enough time, because I’ve learned that by doing things much more slowly I get much more accomplished, more effectively, more creatively, more attentively, and I have slowed my life down to the point that I am beginning to sense how animals in the wild live in Now Time. The only things I do are the ten things I blogged about three years ago as being what I was meant to do: exploring and discovering (mostly within a short walk of my front door), reflecting and imagining possibilities, writing, loving (people, here and virtually, and the wild creatures I live among and belong with here), learning, conversing, sensing and listening and paying attention and just being present, playing, coaching and showing others what I know and what I imagine, and self-managing (just trying to be an example for others of how to live responsibly, sustainably, and joyfully).

Virtually everything I produce I give away, and I remain astonished and humbled that I am given in return far more than I could ever use, so I just keep passing it forward. My vision of living in a natural, intentional community has come true, I think, but not in the way I had imagined. My community is everyone, and every creature, who happens to be here, each day. I am simply a part of it. This community has no ‘permanent residents’, not even me. I’m just here, for now, in this physical community, and in the virtual communities of which I am a part.

The world remains in crisis, and I am sad about that, but I do what I can, and what I must.

The crowd wandered in, speaking in animated tones, looking with curiosity at the array of beverages laid out for them: juices, ayurvedic teas, smoothies, concoctions of herbs and berries — açai, ginger, currants, hemp. A young woman in a long multi-coloured gown was playing the piano.

The visitors had been told that this was a two-hour ‘reading’ of their businesses from which they would learn an enormous amount about their companies, the economy, the market, and even about themselves. The event was unadvertised — attendees signed up based solely on word of mouth from previous attendees, people they trusted — and attendance was capped at forty. There was no set fee for the event — attendees would pay what they thought it was worth, in accordance with the Gift Economy.

The room was large and round, filled with curves of wood and blocks of stone, with a huge skylight open to the trees, and later, the stars. Forty chairs were arranged in a single circle, and on the floor in the centre there were dozens of strange artifacts — antique photos, pressed flowers, old postcards, strange coins and ornaments. Three projectors displayed pictures from around the world simultaneously on the wall at 120-degree intervals, so that they were visible from anywhere in the circle.

As the guests settled, the woman who had been playing the piano came into the room playing a tongue drum. She finished playing, set the drum down, took a deep breath, and… told a story. It was about a rabbi, and as she told it she turned slowly around the circle and spoke personally to every person in the room. Then she paused, and said:

And then she told another story, and another, weaving them together into a tapestry of western culture and a dozen other cultures. Personal stories, worker stories, vignettes, success stories, animal stories, inherited stories, customer stories, love stories, weltschmerz stories, business “war” stories, anecdotes of astonishing beauty, joy, courage, anguish and grief. She spoke slowly and deliberately, pausing after each image, each description of character or event, each extraordinary conclusion. The audience was transfixed, each person internalizing each story with his or her own details, context, understandings, making that story their own, learning it as surely and completely as if it were the lines of a play in which they played an integral part, preparing to add to it and to retell it.

For an hour and a half she continued, using the artifacts on the floor to embellish the stories, passing them around to touch, hear, smell, changing her voice to become the characters in her stories, changing her dress, her facial expression, her inflection, her accent, the way she moved her body. The pictures on the screens around and behind her flashed photographs, lines of poetry, drawings of exotic people and places, while the music changed to match the tone of each story she told.

It was as if she wasn’t telling the stories at all — the stories were telling themselves through her. She just held the frame for them, opened space through which they escaped. She wound into her stories the I-you philosophy of authentic encounter of Martin Buber (and his sphere of the between). She told stories about stories (“you don’t have to be anything but the story that comes through you”), and explained that the essence of relationship (business, loving, or therapeutic) was the capacity to create space to allow others to tell their stories.

And when she had finished, she remained quiet for a long moment, and then said:

And then she turned to each person in turn, and bowed her head, said “thank you, and good night”, and slowly walked out of the room.

(Thanks to Natalie for the inspiration.)

she watches from the cedar tree
this young and patient chickadee
as older birds flit gracefully
to feeder perch and back; she sees
the deft maneuver each trip needs
to back-flap wings, alight and feed
and then retreat, with precious seed.

she tries it once, her timing’s poor
another lands ahead of her –
she didn’t know to take her turn
there seems so much she has to learn;
this gentle complex aerial dance
coordinated in advance,
no single movement left to chance.

photo by tinyfishy

a hundred trials and now she’s deft;
she picks the seeds with larger heft,
and some she opens with her beak
and masters ‘rap on branch‘ technique
to open others, practicing
eternal, joyful ‘rites of wing’,
as one with every living thing.

each day ‘the monster’ trudges through
and spouts a trove of seeds into
the little plastic cylinders,
then wanders back between the firs
and whistles ‘pseudo chick-a-dee‘
the two-note-falling plaintive plea,
and wishes he could be so free.

our songbird, sated, soars away
and checks reserve supplies each day –
she has a thousand extra stores
in case ‘the monster’ comes no more.
and then it’s time for rest and fun,
to sing and frolic in the sun,
her life has only just begun.

she lives in ‘now time‘, nature’s child,
all is abundant in the wild.  
she lives to sense, to learn, to play,
explore, converse, reflect, convey,
self-manage, love, be present, show
that’s all she’ll ever need to know:
let things pass through,
be one with flow.

for she has learned to ‘know’ her place,
a model now, of Gaia’s grace.

You say you want it fixed. It is not good enough, you say, it does not work the way it was supposed to, the way it was advertised to work. It does not meet your expectations.

All right, then, I will look at it. I will perform a laying of hands on it, and free it to become what it was intended to be. I will mind-meld with it, to enlighten it. I will percolate it with my aura, blinding, pulsing waves of meaning, of intent.

But still I know it won’t be enough. It doesn’t soar, you say. It doesn’t end world poverty. It does not make you desirable to others by whom you wish to be desired. It lacks resonance, purpose, that old magic.

I bring it into the shop. I apply torque, and ratchet it up tighter. I mesmerize it, enthrall it with my very presence. It offers to do anything I want, so I ask it to grant you a hundred wishes, provided they are each worded in the form of a question.

Won’t do, you insist. It doesn’t sparkle, enchant. It cannot cut through steel, or broken hearts. It shudders when it hears the cries of children. It leaves calcium deposits, puncture wounds, a bitter aftertaste.

I take it to the specialist, the guru, the wizard, the doctor of imperfect things, the one who surpasseth understanding. I am in tears now, pleading for improvement, repair, freedom from the pain, the injury, the injustice.

The all-knowing one blesses it, decrees it to be of the highest colour, beyond colour even, achieving perfect clarity, integral, transcendent, at one with the force, copacetic.

But as soon as you see it, you frown. It still hasn’t provided global liquidity, you complain. Poxviruses continue to proliferate, everywhere there are locusts, sexual dysfunctions, fungi, celebrity scientologists, plagues of idealists, reality tv. It’s not working, it’s worse than useless. Take it away, you demand.

So I do. I wrap it in feather down and steal it away, in my arms, through the blizzard, the sandstorm, the anticyclonic gloom. I place it in a pyramid, which I place in turn in a box of styrofoam worms.

I return empty-handed, chastened, cleansed. I should have known better, I confess. I throw myself at your mercy. I genuflect, bow, drill holes in my forehead, scrub myself with baryons, admit to past indiscretions, libels, illicit thoughts about checkout girls, minor felonies involving periscopes, bicycle seats.

You are inconsolable. It’s not that, you say, not that thing that you kept trying to fix. It’s you. You are the cause of the epidemics, assasinations, Davos conferences, stuttering, extreme sports, anomie, conspicuous consumption, genital warts, Nascar, pthalates, failure to achieve cold fusion, failure to achieve carbon sequestration, YouTube beheading videos.

There is no defence for this. I failed to factor in the causes and effects, do the multivariate analysis. I ask how I should pay for this, what should be my recompense.

Accept responsibility, you reply. That is enough. Carry that weight. Push that rock uphill, and don’t stop. Wear a sign on your forehead, so everyone will know.

I sighed. This was much worse than I had feared. I had expected hanging, electrocution by faulty taser, lethal melamine injection, death by water.

I had hoped for excommunication, banishment. Exile.