On the possibilities of generating our realities

I've been reading some books lately about how managing people is mostly about designing processes. Design and processes. Edgar Schein, one of the organizational consultants I admire the most, speaks of this, and of how the structures we create have a profound impact on how we in turn behave.

Lately I've been wondering if in fact these structures don't inherently dictate the way we behave.

I have been feeling this acutely in regards to the frameworks I live in and their fusion with consumerism. I recently travelled to Europe and was struck by how airports are nothing more than large international shopping malls. And as someone who goes home for (and celebrates) Christmas, I have felt the intense crush of consumer madness all around me since stepping outside my door last week.

Travelling often accentuates, in stark tones and shades, what we struggle with during the rest of the year (see the post below on belonging for instance) - it is a steroid-esque picture of how our culture operates. It shows me what my culture values, what I hold dear, and how I express this to others (strangers and loved ones).

And this is where the structural elements come into play. How can I not be shaped by consumerism when I live in a small town built around strip malls and big box stores? When the entertainment offered comes from huge movie cinemas jam-packed with people watching the "pre-show" which consists of 30 minutes of commercials? When a holiday of togetherness is marked by that sense of panic trying to find the "perfect" gift that expresses the value I place on my relationships?

Every space seems to be turning into advertising for products - sites like the Fancy are virtual display cases for friends to share and exhibit the items that they want to buy, own, or just appreciate. It is overwhelming (to me, anyhow...) And I admit that I am a highly sensitive person with a difficulty ingesting so much....stuff. But I wonder how many other people feel similarly?

In saying this, I am not suggesting that championing well-made, interesting and local (or international) products is wrong. It is not a black and white issue - and I am not outside of the structures that reinforce how we think. But in this way of being, we miss out on much - how might we become generators as opposed to consumers of our realities, if we got into the habit?

There are some really great articles about teacher education and how teachers come to the class expecting to "get" taught, not create their own learnings together. Same with service-based populations - I come into situations thinking, "I am paying you x to offer me y" - We are accustomed to transactions as opposed to interactions. And not that every moment should be an interaction - at times, transactions make good sense, keep us from being overwhelmed and help us when we have little energy to give.

But what might it look like if we embraced structures that encouraged more interactions? An airport with a room where people from all over the world could go and exchange stories about what it's like to live where they do...and hear stories direct from someone with lived experience (think a mobile, living Wikipedia). Movie theatres that ran pre-shows of local videos and animations, governmental regulations on the % of space that can be commercial...

We have the capacity to create (and indeed constantly do create) these spaces in more ad-hoc, improvisational ways. I have had the blessing of experiencing shimmering moments full of connectivity and beauty without a designated anything or anyone. Yet without structural support, they take much more energy. These counter-cultural moments and spaces typically scrape by on little resources while facing the challenge of a system that attempts to co-opt or destroy their purposes and energy. This places a huge amount of stress on what I call interactional community experiences. I am grateful for, adore and profoundly admire each and every movement and person that risks being more-than, that risks being outside-of. Yet I want to live in a world where the structures that influence so much offer nourishment and become these very movements themselves.

I know, I know. I sound like an extremist (maybe) and definitely a ridiculous idealist - but it boggles my mind that dreaming up how we want to live together, being more mindful of the choices we make and the ways which we can create and play with one another - might be considered extremist. Well, if so, then I am an extremist, and happily so. The moments in my life that have felt the most precious have never come from the transactional side of things anyhow.

Maybe home can be found in that warm sense of disconnect.

Over the past four and a half days, I have slowly made my way south to the land of deep strip mall and gothic eyeliner, to box stores and massive cineplex, to Starbucks at every corner and mini marts named "Hi-Ya"...

I am officially home for the holidays.

I wish I could say I was at a point in my adult life where I felt a connection or a capacity to relate to the people surrounding me here. But I don't. I sit at a local market in London and look around, feeling somewhat - disgusted (honestly) - by the small town, urban hillbilly mentality. Or what I assume is so. I am frightened by my own close-mindedness, in disguise as open-minded metropolitan disdain for their apparent small-mindedness - but I know better. What's going on here is really my own need to feel included. And the fact that I never did - always the artsy, overly-aesthetic creature, without an Opera house or art gallery to call my own. I grew up a fish on a cement sidewalk- and that's one of the reasons why I still like it that way - I have been living in Québec now for 10 years and counting, complaining and equally loving the fact that I remain, and always will, an outsider, a stranger in a (most certainly) strange land.

Myy lived experience, of never having felt connected to my home or the people here growing up, of having always felt different and at odds with my first environments, has led to now assuming that everyone still living here has nothing of interest to say or to contribute to the social fabric. Seriously. It's intense. I am being honest because it's important for me to understand my own biases and judgements - that although I can travel to the middle of nowhere somewhere else and find a heap of gorgeousness in the people there (and I know there is gorgeousness in people everywhere) there is something about this sense of HOME, of THIS IS ME here that is unsettling. Perhaps what is most unsettling of all is my own humanness in it all.

The Otherness of Love

Has been on my mind so often lately - this past year, truly, a ripping or moulding or breaking open into this vast otherness.

I just now did a search online to see what "the otherness of love" would produce, and surprisingly, got very few relevant hits.

Does this mean that I am supposed to write about it? Perhaps. It seems to keep coming up.

For now it's just good to know that it is a focus, a marker, not on the journey but THE journey.

Of all the hours

There's this one, then, one to go.
Before arrivals.
And attempted departures of excess weight.

Could a passing truck
Three-storeys below
Carry it away
If it was thrown carefully enough

With consideration for timing, mostly?
All the bags
and tick-tock
of the internal clock

Which beats out but does not beat out
What goes on underneath

Feeling the Weight.

And so much goodness, hats on Bach and the like.

Orange glow of fish lamp.

Time to retire. Re: tired.

Eyes and feet, but mostly heart.

Primate Behaviour

Kortlandt, who studied chimpanzees in the wild, concealed
within his blind, would sometimes see them find
his eyes, and stare in thought and wander off.
Contemplation and doubt were what he saw
or thought he saw, behind their searching eyes
these times and others, as if they tried
to make sense of an always, or often, puzzling world.

It seems a sad as well as a wondrous thing.

He doesn't say, but he leaves the thought to occur
that our primate nature could be, not as we think
it is: to know, but only to be disturbed,
as these simpler beasts are disturbed, in their simpler world,
that all the unknown should strike us, even though
it stops at that. No more. We stare in thought.

-William Bronk, (from The Empty Hands)

It's been so long...

I am not sure why words here have been so slow in coming. It might have to do with this Master's I am doing currently (which indeed takes up much time). It might have to do with the vast transformations I have been experiencing this past year. Their magnitude and depth leave little-ole' me feeling quiet like in awe. Perhaps the intimacy created in the face of genuine awesome has left my voice hushed or flat-out silent. At least in this form.

For now I am going to simply blame winter. Not that anything needs blaming, really. The hibernation of creature and sound and thought and body is so necessary. Yet I avoid it. We all do. Well, most of us. A cultural disdain for hidin' out and restin' up, I think. A fear of stayin' put...

It sure does run through these veins, that anxiety of being-not-doing. But what happens when the being part starts to take over anyhow out of necessity?

This Beloved Thing

The loving person is one who grasps non-relatively each thing they grasp. They do not think of inserting the experienced thing into relations to other things; at the moment of experience nothing else exists, nothing save this beloved thing, filling out the world and indistinguishably coinciding with it. Where you with agile fingers draw out the qualities common to all things and distribute them in ready-made categories, the loving person's dream-powerful and primally-awake heart beholds the non-common. This, the unique, is the bestowing shape, the self of the thing, that cannot be contained within the pure circle of world comprehensibility. What you extract and combine is always only the passivity of things. But their activity, their effective reality, reveals itself only to the loving person who knows them. And thus they know the world.
In the features of the beloved, whose self they realize, they discern the enigmatic countenance of the universe.

-Martin Buber

On Democracy, part II

I have recently started a Masters in something called Human Systems Intervention, which is too complicated to get into here (in this space, which is not really a physical space, but still represents and therefore IS space....uh....yeah....)

Anyhow, point being (for this moment, for the now-time) that I at first had no idea what the difference was between this program and say, Human Relations. Or psychology. And while they do indeed have much crossover, there are major differences between them all. Important differences. Differences which make the reason why I am studying what I am studying all the more obvious.....(to me....)

To highlight this, a website here devoted to Open Systems Theory, (OST) which was developed by Fred and Merreyln Emery. It is founded on the notion of creating environments that are democratic in nature. I will dive into more details soon. In the meanwhile, I find myself fascinated that my current interest in democracy (a reawakening in many ways) comes at the same time as my introduction to theories that not only talk about how people behave together in contexts, but how the contexts & structures themselves dictate in part, or guide, how that behaviour might look.

That democracy, or the notion of democracy as I understand it currently (and have been averse to for some time now) is somewhat paradoxical in the sense that the structures through which we try to achieve democratic realities in Western culture (parliament, representation by riding, etc) are not actually very democratic themselves. Which poses many questions that OST grapples with and offers some interesting solutions to....or at least, beginnings.....

But I am just starting out now, on my horse into the realm of this whole muck of a subject, so I know not much nor do I profess to be able to re-tell the tale in a fashion that speaks to its hearts and bones. With that disclaimer in mind, stay tuned....

On Democracy...

This is a new, old topic for me. I am agog and aghast at how I have kept the word at bay for years, similar to some of the other words in existence that I have held at more than an arm's distance. That I HAVE indeed, been pushing back on it, that as opposed to embracing and allowing democracy to integrate into my system, I have instead chosen to actively fight against what I thought would be a "small l", liberal suffocation. The radical bones in my body shook at the thought. And still, I admit, shake.

Meaning that while it's been such an integral part of how I feel about things, (this notion of democracy and what it means for myself as well as the other humans and beasts that populate this world), I have filtered it through a system of cynicism and paralysis that has rendered its fundamental heart helpless in offering the circulatory movement needed to keep it alive within me.

While these words need some distillation and clarity, perhaps, I want to simply begin vocalizing my coming home to a place I feared for quite a long time. And not without reason. As Malcolm X once said, democracy could be described as, "white nationalism"...and while he was referring to it (I believe) in relationship to his specific time and culture, to the way in which democracy was playing out around him (and I don't really feel like much has changed) I don't believe he was talking about its POTENTIAL, or what its heart-before-it-gets-cut-off pumps out.

The heart of democracy is something much more complex, inclusive, sustainable, difficult, tense. Hence the reason why it is so hard to even conceive of, let alone remotely begin to entangle myself in actively.

But it's starting to look like that's what I am indeed, supposed to do.....

More to follow.

Friends will arrive, friends will disappear...

If you want me, honey-baby I'll be near.

Out of the mouths of a thousand birds...

Out of the Mouths of a Thousand Birds

Listen -
Listen more carefully to what is around you
Right now.

In my world
There are the bells from the clanks
Of the morning milk drums,

And a wagon wheel outside my window
Just hit a bump

Which turned into an ecstatic chorus
Of the Beloved's Name.

There is the Prayer Call
Rising up like the sun
Out of the mouths of a thousand birds.

There is an astonishing vastness
Of movement and Life

Emanating sound and light
From my folded hands

And my even quieter simple being and heart.

My dear,
Is it true that your mind
Is sometimes like a battering
Ram

Running all through the city,
Shouting so madly inside and out

About the ten thousand things
That do not matter?

Hafiz, too,
For many years beat his head in youth

And thought himself at a great distance,
Far from an armistice
With God.

But that is why this scarred old pilgrim
Has now become such a sweet rare vintage
Who weeps and sings for you.

O listen -
Listen more carefully
To what is inside of you right now.

In my world
All that remains is the wondrous call to
Dance and prayer

Rising up like a thousand suns
Out of the mouth of a
Single bird.

Hafiz

Bees in Brooklyn, NYC

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is pretty unbee-lievable.

Okay, I actually can't believe I just wrote that, but....I was there recently and maybe went a little camera crazy over the amazing bees I encountered.

It was also a good time to reflect upon the importance of bees to our food chain systems and the global ecosystem on so many levels.

Click on the link above to listen to an interesting podcast about just how essential bees are.

It's been some time....

And then some more. But here I am again, and to start the ball rolling in this part of my world once more, a quote about leadership that I am reflecting on today from the amazing blog of Eve Poole:

The Archbishop of York has a lovely story about camels. There once was a Bedouin who had three sons and 17 camels. In his will he left half of his 17 camels to his elder son, one-third to his second son and one-ninth to his youngest son. When the father died, the children attempted to divide the camels according to their father’s will, and struggled to divide 17 camels into one-half, one-third and one-ninth. They went to consult a very wise old man, who said: ‘Simple. I will lend you my camel. It will be the 18th, and you can get what your father wanted you to have.’ Eureka! Half of 18 is nine, a third of 18 is six, and a ninth of 18 is two, making a total of 17. The sons divided up the camels, then the wise old man took his camel home. I think that a good way of describing the job of a leader is to use this 18th camel as an analogy, whereby the leader is essentially a catalyst to help complex things work out smoothly.

The ones beautifully, left behind

Just before all of it explodes...

When some of it is, but not all.

Of late...(willow-wispe'd)

Of late....(ice-tippe'd)

Of late...(tulip'ed)

Remember that romance runs deeper than I think

It's beyond rational, and certainly beyond the narrow things I place in its infinite category.

As Chesterton said:

Romance is the deepest thing in life, romance is deeper even than reality.