Tag Archives: uncertainty

Improvisation unlocks the magic of spontaneity and connection

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All told, we’ve collaborated to offer eleven Restorying retreats over the last two years, with more in the planning stages. They’ve come to have a dynamic balance between structure and improvisation. We are learning as leaders to be present and notice the field, to give ourselves over to what wants to happen next, what the earth is dreaming for us. Within a framework of ritual and ceremony, poetry and mythic time and space, we enter the door that leads to the realm of heart and soul and mystery.

Themes, questions, and insights begin to weave into and through the assembled group from the first gathering. We are getting better at tuning into that and inviting participants to join in the fun of giving ourselves over to what Mystery wants to do with us. It reminds me of what Malcolm Gladwell had to say about improvisation in his book, Blink. Using basketball as an example, he wrote that in practice, the players drill patterns and set-ups relentlessly, and then every game is totally improvisational. The patterns are strung together in completely new ways in every game, every moment. I can guess from the way my son talks about soccer that it’s much the same. Continue reading →

Who are we at war with? Let’s be honest about opposites.

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I usually refrain from engaging in arguments on political or economic theory because I don’t consider myself to be well enough informed to do any particular stance justice with supporting evidence. Today I learned that my reasons go deeper than that. I recently violated my own injunction by posting a quote from Governor Scott Walker on my Facebook page about dependence on the government. He was calling up a trope from the Reagan era, one that ignores that he and all Americans are dependent on the government for roads, help in emergencies, and education, to name only a few.

In the ensuing back and forth argument, my Libertarian cousin chimed in about the role of government, taxation, military spending, energy policy, and the squeeze of the middle class. I responded that it saddens me to see finger pointing at “those people” who are on public assistance. Maybe if their place of work (WalMart, McDonald’s) paid them a living wage, they could afford to put a roof over their head and food on the table without such help. Or if the “education” they received had actually educated them, they could get a higher paying job. It’s so small minded and petty, and reflects poorly on Americans. I still prefer to believe that we are capable of much better. And yet my salvo is a distraction from the deeper lessons of this exchange. Continue reading →

Jumping out of a moving car is ill-advised, but I did it anyway

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I am not by nature a patient person. Back when I was working with organizations to design and launch sustainability initiatives, we had a metaphor that I liked very much. I borrowed it from one of the early thought leaders of green architecture, William McDonough. He was fond of pointing out that a fundamental problem with sustainable design as defined and implemented is that so much of it was about “being less bad.” He would say, if you’re driving to Canada at 70 miles an hour and you realize you really need to be going to Mexico, you won’t get there by driving to Canada more slowly. You have to turn the car around.

I’m all about turning the car around. Why use all this energy when technology and craft exist to cut our energy use in buildings by 70% right now, today? Yet, clients seemed always to be dragging their feet, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. One day, when I was voicing my frustration with how long all this change stuff was taking, my colleague accused me of wanting to bail out of the car altogether, while it’s still going 50 mph. And he was right! Continue reading →

On clearing, patience, trust, and magic

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2009_8.26_Yosemite2_620w-3I love the image from Martha Postlethwaite’s poem of clearing a space. It’s a beautiful reminder to tend to my inner landscape, before I turn to outward work, no matter how urgent or grandiose the calling feels. The recommended order is: go inside, open your hands and wait for your song to drop into them.

Which implies two important points. One, that we each do have a song. And, two: that all we have to do to receive it is make a small clearing in our dense, wild places and wait patiently. Just ask and it will come. That it will fall into my open cupped hands is a nice image. It implies a readiness just this side of expectation, a proper, welcoming stance. Receptivity sourced from trust. Continue reading →

Cultivating our ability to balance opposites and heal separation

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This wonderful five-minute talk by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee about women and the mystery of creation appeals to the great potential of the sacred feminine to help shift our cultural stories. When you think about it, how miraculous it is that women have this ability to bring a new person into the world, to give a soul the experience of this physical plane. Spirit and matter are literally united within a woman’s body.

Throughout most of human history, women, therefore, were the guardians of the spiritual life of the people. Their connection to the earth’s cycles and seasons, as well as its great Creative power, made this connection natural and enduring. Anything we can do to align with the cyclical and the non-linear, the intuitive and the more-than-rational, will feed into this connection. Continue reading →

Living with the messy realities of both/and

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” ~ Charles Dickens

This opening to A Tale of Two Cities is a perfect encapsulation of how reality feels to me these days, and I am aware that many of us are living with the strangeness of both/and. I’ve had several conversations lately to puzzle over the apparent stalling of green building in my area, even while trend graphs put out by the U.S. Green Building Council look rosy as ever. I wouldn’t go so far as to lament that it was a fad that’s now fizzling, but I am curious about what feels like a slowdown, if not a general lack of interest, as compared with most of the 2000’s. Here’s a story that is not atypical. Continue reading →

On gender, power, being an outsider, and inhabiting the “other”

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It’s not hard to notice that a lot of the people on the frontiers of “alternative” health, justice, education, [fill-in-the-blank], those helping to write the new stories, are women and what is known as “minorities.” (Which, just think about it, is a horrible word in so many ways.) Why is that? We have less to lose, for one thing. We’ve lived our entire lives on the outside of a system that, we can see from here, makes little sense. For starters, whoever heard of a functioning natural system that excludes whole swaths of reality?

Being on the outside does have its upside. From here, it’s easier to a) spot the flaws, inconsistencies, and insanity of the dominant system; b) see alternatives, and c) shift sideways, away from the mess and towards something better.

The disadvantages are many as well: a) lower status, in the eyes of the white men inside the system, means b) difficulty having much influence on the system itself, and c) risk of being disregarded or downright ignored by those in power, and consequently, d) preaching only to the choir without effecting much change. Continue reading →

Song of the dog at the door

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The house can barely contain her now, its four-cornered world no match for what calls to the dark forest from within. A flimsy summer cottage of a house, full of strangers, windows thrown open, their screens torn away at the sill, the better to admit small animals in the night.

She’s at the back door with the leashed dog, looking out across grass to a scene at the forest edge. A man and a boy are there with four German Shepherds, an adult male and three pups. The middle pup is posed on an overturned garbage can, its throat tied with a complicated rope, its wild enthusiasm spilling over. The man works hard to pose it while the boy aims a camera, but the puppy is too rambunctious and won’t stop moving. Continue reading →

Problems are a gift for the imagination

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Don’t force solutions. Let them find you.

Problems may beg to be solved, but they have another, more interesting purpose: to prick our curiosity and wake us from a slumber of sameness and complacency. To hint at the hidden dimensions that lie beneath the surfaces of everyday life.

Problems prod us to soften into the unknown. Or to stand on our head, turn sideways, and see reality — or what we think is reality – afresh. Old ways of coping, of sliding by, no longer work. We are invited to give up control of the eventual outcome, and for that we need to call upon imagination. Continue reading →

Naming the dominant stories of civilization

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Last summer, I attended a course at Schumacher College, a veritable Shangri-La of New Story in theory and practice. It’s a beautiful, gentle place overflowing with wonderful, brilliant people who actually walk the talk, and have been for over twenty years. I went to the Dark Mountain course, which brought together the two founders, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, with a self-selected smattering of people who identify with their Manifesto, “Uncivilisation,” and other writings.

We spent a lovely week telling stories, listening to master storyteller Martin Shaw, and talking about a wide range of aspects of this threshold upon which we live. One of our ongoing conversations was about the ways in which the dominant stories show up and what they would have us believe. (Not the “they” that people like to blame when feeling the tightening screws of power-over dynamics, but “they” as in the stories themselves.) Continue reading →