Category: reflection

Exploring Other Ways of Knowing

Last summer I was reading multiple books at the same time. (Well, you know, I don’t actually read them simultaneously!) Notably, two non fiction, which is not my common summer practice. Two standouts were Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Everybody Come Alive by Marcie Alvis Walker. Serendipity in action. The writing of these two amazing women both brought, and continue to bring, me a deep, embodied sense of other ways of knowing. The ways different than the ones I use in my life, mostly without awareness. These books helped me to begin to notice the limitations of my own views and stances. And the importance of querying myself to understand where I’m coming from as a stepping stone to being open to others’.

This week another piece of writing, this time from Bayo Akomolafe came across my screen and this sense, this idea of our separateness and togetherness, of what we do or do not identify with and how we presume power over it or not jumped out again. He was asked to provide an alternative definition of nature than the Oxford English Dictionary and he wrote:

So, I offered this:

‘A theoretical, economic, political, and theological designation from the Enlightenment era that attempts to name the material world of trees, ecologies, animals, and general features and products of earth as separate from humans and human society, largely in a bid to position humans as masters over material forces, independent and capable of transforming the world for their exclusive ends.’ 

It’s as far as I could go without waxing poetic about nature as a colonial trope for biopolitical interventions. What felt important to say was that ‘nature’ is a performative, speculative gesture, a ritual of relations that rehearses a dissociation from the world. A subjectivizing force. A lounge in the terminal of the radioactive Human.

Now to notice how I am “performing…”

What Nancy is Doing These Days

Two buckets of greens (turnips and kale, to be specific) from the garden and a glimpse of a pair of feet in green garden clogs.

When people ask what I’m up to work-wise, I vaguely mention my “rewirement.” I’ve been in the process of redesigning my “working” life into a more consciously designed life flow. In other words, I’m doing less “paid work,” and devoting more time, attention and prioritization of family, my own learning, playing my guitar and spending time in my garden.

What does this mean if you want to hire me? I’m only taking on 1-2 clients at a time. I’m done juggling many work balls, now reveling in a more spacious life. And I have three criteria for saying “yes.”

  • 1. Work that matters in the world. Is your project trying to solve for a community? The world? Does your work echo beyond an event or project? I’m interested.
  • 2. Great people. I’m deeply attached to who I am working with. This is a relationship, not a transaction. We are in it together long enough to supports relating to each other as people?
  • 3. Everyone’s learning edge. I’ll refer you to wonderful folks to provide you a known service. I’m interested in the edge where we all learning. Together. Further, we are committed to sharing that learning.

If you and your work resonate with this, let’s talk.

Lying Fallow Part 3: Assumptions About Work

So earlier this year (this post) I basically admitted I dropped out for a while. I gave a quick update here. I’m still dropped out and I’m still loving it. Why didn’t I do this sooner? Why didn’t I create pauses earlier in my working life? Am I still me? Is my identity SO wrapped up in my work that the other aspects of me have either been quashed, or simply put in service of my work? All sorts of interesting questions.

As my lying fallow summer came and went, I did not seek additional gigs. I referred inquiries to other practitioners. I fulfilled a few small obligations, did some pro bono work and supported my various communities of practice. The latter being some of the most satisfying work all around. I think informally I’m also an on-call mentor to other practitioners and I deeply enjoy those conversations. All the juicy ideas and none of the work. PERFECT!

But still I feel no impulse to return to full-time, paid work. I read books. I putter in the garden. I try to walk consistently. I have finally dipped my toe into adding weight training to my routine. I project managed recovery of a basement flood, removal of a 100 year old giant tree, a solar install and new HVAC for our house that is now bereft of it’s natural cooling from that magnificent (and rotting) tree.

Because I’ve been such a workaholic all of my life, I’m pretty invested in my identity as a (senior) practitioner. It felt good when I was the person to call. That I was valued, needed, appreciated. That I finished my to do list, had my email inbox tamed. I do not miss this. I don’t crave it. My volunteer and community work provide plenty of social connection and intellectual stimulation.

So what happened to my assumptions about work? This is where we shift from resigning to reassessing.

How much do we lose when we let work be a (or THE) central force in our lives, even if by dint of the hours, let alone intentions? What gets deprioritized? For me, rest, reflection, open-ended thinking that can lead down creative paths and cleaner, clearer sleep, as just a few examples. Since I’ve been working less I’m sleeping better. (Less time at a screen part of that? I think so!) I’ve read a TON more – fiction and non fiction. I’ve delved deeper into topics I’d previously claimed were important to me but I had not, as they say, done the work. I would like to believe I’m listening to and engaging the two grandpeople (ages 9 and 12) who live with me more fully. I hope I am being a better adult for them.

When I was working like a maniac, at the end of the day I would collapse in front of a screen, social media scrolling or half attention to a television program. I was seeking mindlessness. Now it takes a lot more to sit me in front of the telly. I still have some addiction to the scrolly-stuff and have been trying to dial that down. I hate being a counter example to the grandpeople.

So why is it I waited till now to take a pause, a fallow season, a sabbatical? I can list a few: financial security, identity (especially as a babyboomer, feminist, and to acknowledge my privilege, a white woman), passion for the work, once I discovered what I loved (and becoming an independent consultant at age 41). I raised two kids. I am co-raising two more grandkids. I can say I think my workaholism took some of me away from those people and that is one of the very FEW regrets I have about my work habits.

But what if I worked just a bit less in those years? Would my work have been as successful? (I have always been fortunate to have a full client docket, come rain or shine but I carried that fear that if I said no to a client, no one else would knock on my virtual door.) Would I have been as fulfilled? Would I be doing something different now?

A friend once told me that sometimes she sensed only one of my wings was fully unfurled. That stops you in your tracks…

I think with fabulous hindsight I could have worked less. AND it would have been much easier if our (white) American culture was not so predicated on valuing people for how many freaking hours they work a week. What if we had a four day work week? More people to work, less burnout, more family and friends time. Maybe with less of a focus on consumerism (I dream big!)

I hear colleagues 50+ talking about taking a break. What I anecdotally hear from colleagues in their 20s and 30s is a different model. The “great resignation” is not just the burnt out olders, but the dissatisfied youngers. Could we all benefit by reassessing, rethinking what work means, the role it plays not only in our personal economic subsistence, but also the role it plays in society?

I’m certainly not the first person to think about this. (See this lovely essay by Maria Popova reflecting on the work of Oliver Burkman’s work,  Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals . This crossed my screen this week thanks to Patti Digh.) I just wonder why it took me 63+ years to slow down… Or maybe this is not about slowing down, but simply making different choices. Or better yet, in Oliver Burkman’s beautiful words;

Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility… Since finitude defines our lives… living a truly authentic life — becoming fully human — means facing up to that fact.

[…]

It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.

Oliver Burkman,  Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Update from the “fallow” period: hope

As some of you know, last Summer I declared a fallow period for myself. I was so tired.

Well, I’ve arrived at the cleaning stage. Clearing out books I’ll never open again. Going through files and digging into the huge (garbage) pile that is my office. Attacking deferred home maintenance projects.

Close up image of of a small wild temperate purple orchid from the University of Washington's Medicinal Garden.
A spring flower from the University of Washington’s Medicinal Plant Garden

What one can discover never ceases to amaze. Even some words that help me through a turn.

First I notice that I’m now rested enough that I can start and even ENJOY these tasks. It may be an indicator how far I’ve come from last summer’s burn out. And I can see the top of my desk! I feel comfortable giving away books and recycling piles of files. I’m scanning a few, offering some to folks who appreciate artifacts from the early days of online community, and holding on to some that are near and dear.

Some of the things I’ve unearthed remind me that phase changes are amazing moments to both reflect AND start out on new explorations and (learning) adventures. I found my independent study on solar algae ponds and the chemistry of phytoplankton in the aquaculture environment. Wow, I was smart back then! I found my high school year book. I realize no one knew me until I got the lead in the senior play. Invisibility, eh? I found printouts of the governance thrash when Electric Minds (snapshot here) lost its funding and in a hail Mary, became Eminds. (Howard wrote about that a bit here.) Names and personalities came flooding back. Moments of joy and moments of regret. The shattering of my naiveté about the possibilities of online community.

It was in one of these print outs that I found a response from the wise and wonderful Jay Rosen of NYU. I was deeply dispirited and Jay stopped into the conversation thread that I LOVED most, “How to raise the caliber of the conversation on the Net.” Jay wrote about the social critic Christopher Lasch and his distinction between optimism and hope. Here are a few snippets that Jay quoted.

Optimism is the belief that things will somehow get better because that is the direction things go.

Jay Rosen, paraphrasing Lasch

“Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it. It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past.

“It derives from early memories–no doubt distorted, overlaid with later memories, and thus not wholly reliable as a guide to any factual reconstruction of events–in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionments cannot dislodge it.

“Such experience leaves as its residue the unshakable conviction, not that the past was better than the present, but that trust is never completely misplaced, even though it is never completely justified either and therefore destined inevitably to disappointments.

“If we distinguish hopefulness from the more conventional attitude known today as optimism–if we think of it as a character trait, a temperamental disposition…–we can see why it serves us better, in steering troubled waters ahead, than [optimism].

“Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst. The worst is what the hopeful are always prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if they had not survived disappointments in the past, while the knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for hope… Improvidence, a blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best, furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.

“… The disposition properly described as hope, trust, wonder–three names for the same state of heart and mind–asserts the goodness of life in the face of limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity. In the troubled times to come, we will need it even more than we needed it in the past.”

Christopher Lasch, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics”

Then Jay left his advice to me.

One is to remain optimistic and say: everything will work out. A second is to give in to despair, or give up on politics entirely.

The third is to steel yourself with hope. Prepared for the worst, fortified by loving memory of what was best in the past, open to a future in which trust is never wholly misplaced. That’s hope, in its muscular variety.

Jay Rosen, E-Minds, 1997

Lately the news of the world – Ukraine, White Supremacy, striking down of Roe v. Wade, shootings, hate — it has been taking its toll on me. Then I picked up this old print out and Jay reminded me, I can choose hope. Thanks, Jay!

Look Who is Blogging Again

Here comes a wander. Be warned.

There are some bulbs along our driveway that were here when we bought our house in 1984. In the Spring, they put up a bunch of large green, strappy leaves which dry and fade away as the Summer heat comes on. Then, come Autumn, large pink crocus-like flowers emerge. The surprise was delightful the first time and still is, 30-some years later. (Turns out they are probably Giant Colchicum – Autumn Crocus).

Image of an Autumn Crocus in full bloom against a neutral light blue background.
From https://www.gardenia.net/plant/colchicum-the-giant

So blogging… I’m not sure if it is because I’m paying attention differently, or if there is something emerging around personal blogging like the crocus. It is alive all year long. It sends up shoots in the Spring then disappears again, and then it flowers. Is a new cycle starting? People whose blogs I used to read consistently but who have faded out over the years are blogging again. There is crosslinking around the topic at hand. Look who is blogging again!! I’m so delighted. (AND: I need a better feedreader, email subscriptions are not as useful, help!)

Blogging is different than participating in social media for me. But it takes more time and attention. It is quieter for the most part. Sometimes solitary. Sometimes it connects. Sometimes it needs the permanency of a url so it can sit, and later, even much later, the flowers can emerge. It is NOT feed of the moment for me.

I wrote yesterday about my Blogiversary. One of the observations was the power of thinking out loud in a blog post and the tantalizing possibility that others may chime in, counter, improve or simply show they were “there” in a comment. As Chris Corrigan noted, the satisfaction is NOT like the (addictive, distracting, destructive) “likes” or “retweets” of FB, Instagram and Twitter. I feel something visceral in this. Cellular versus a visual stimulation that comes and goes in an instant.

Dave Pollard wonders out loud about the role of relationship in our blogging. About how relationships do or do not inform our sense of identity. Euan Semple riffs on the relationship and self knowing. ( I find Euan’s post today on non-identifying usefully troublesome and need to think about what is surfacing for me, about the down side of non-identifying when one is from a dominant culture, race, gender etc. Claiming non-identification can also be an abdication of the negative impact of privilege but that is another topic for pondering.)

What we all have in common is that we wonder out loud in our blogs.

P.S. If you don’t blog, and are INTERESTED, check out these suggestions from Chris.