Category: reflection

From the Archives: Planting Trees, Investing in Ecosystems

From the blog draft archives 2014. This one is posted as written in 2014…

You know that feeling when ideas keep converging? It has been happening to me lately. And the central theme that shows up for me is investment — investment in people, communities, ecosystems, organizations.  There is too much for one post, so let me start by planting a few seeds in your mental garden.

Looking up the twisted trunks of a 100 year old big leaf maple tree with blue sky behind. No leaves.

Last week on our beloved Seattle Farm Coop email list (yes, an urban farm coop!) there was a discussion on native plants.  Why they are valuable. How to grow them. Then this post came in from Emily (used with permission .  The emphasis in bold and clarifications in italics are mine  because things lose context out of context!):

Oh Elder…we appreciate you! (referring to elderberry)

Yes on Burnt Ridge (a Western Washington plant nursery)! Their site makes notes on fruiting plants for shade
For seeds couldn’t say enough beautiful things about Horizon Herbs. http://www.horizonherbs.com/. They have varieties of Elderberry seeds. I started some seeds this fall…red, blue and black…so we’ll see how they do. (sending them love now!) Will post on Market Days when plants start emerging from their rest. I can’t describe the feelings of starting trees from seed…but for me, they come from the most inside places. Unpredictably moving, significant, precious.
Emily

 In the whole message, she demonstrated appreciation and network connecting practices. Beautiful. But in that last sentence Emily caught, in her last sentence, what I SENSE about online communities and made me recall the early, deep and significant experiences I had online in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  It was in the leap of faith to invest in people. Simply go for it.

I had time to do that in the “early days.” There wasn’t a profusion of options for online connections. No Facebook, Twitter, Google+. Mobile phones were for calls and maybe texts. So stepping into an online discussion board was not a fleeting moment, but a chunk of time I used to explore and deepen experiences and connections with others. I invested.

Today, it takes quite a bit of gardening to nurture an online community with deep roots and spreading boughs. It seems we are in an era, though, of rhizomes, instead of simply trees. Networks that spread like the amazing mycorrhizal fungi, the symbiotic association of fungus and roots. From Wikipedia (perhaps a mycorrhizal network itself in some ways)

Mycorrhizal networks (also known as common mycorrhizal networks – CMN) are underground hyphal networks created by mycorrhizal fungi that connect individual plants together and transfer water, carbon, and nutrients. The formation of these networks is context dependent, and can be influenced by soil fertility, resource availability, host or myco-symbiont genotype, disturbance and seasonal variation.[1]

So where do we invest when we are aware that we are operating in an ecosystem? This is now a driving question. Is it more than planting a tree seed that takes time to germinate and mature?

Then Sue Braiden posted the following on Facebook, spawning a wonderful response thread that criss-crossed between technology, sociology and many other juicy things. It hearkened so much to me that I asked for permission to post it on my blog as a guest post which went up earlier today.

An ecomuseum is a participatory approach to culture by definition. And their motto at the Ecomuseum of Santa Cruz is ‘a people will only preserve what they love and they will only love what they know’. The values of participation are encoded into their DNA, they are the very reason why the institution exists and they affect everything about the experience, from the language it uses to the way people experience it – the soul of the organisation.

(Can’t refind on FB… grrr)

EDITED NOTE: The list of links below were intended to inform the subsequent parts of this blog series. Clearly I never got around to drafting those. Clearly the passing of one of my idols/teachers, Pete Seger, crept into my train of thought.

From the Archives: 5 Things I Learned Reading/Commenting on the Moxie Project

I’m not sure why I never posted this. I regret not sharing this with the students in my role as their blog commenter. The last post on the Project Moxie site is 2020. I was a commenter in 2013. How often do we get to cross over our silos of age, space and domain and reflect together? 

———————

First, a rather long preamble. Feel free to skip. For a number of years I’ve participated as a volunteer in the Duke Reader Project. The origins of the project were to find alumni to act as critical readers of a students writing in a particular course. Last year they added blogs as part of some of the summer experiences Duke students can join.  Last year I followed a group in Durban, South Africa. It was a “so-so” experience. The students didn’t blog regularly and none replied to questions or responses from their readers.

This year I got picked to be a commentor for the The Moxie Project. (More here.)  I was encouraged by the topic (working with women’s organizations in New York City,) and by the level engagement of the sponsor, Ada Gregory.

Here was our introduction to the project:

Dear Readers,

Thanks so much for agreeing to support us by reading and responding to the student blog for DukeEngage NYC– the Moxie Project. The blogging is much more meaningful when students have a community that is following along with them, pushing them to think more deeply, and encouraging them when they need it.

Tomorrow 10 students will arrive to begin their summer in New York City. They’ll begin work first thing Monday morning with little time to adjust to the pace of the city, 9-5 work, or the challenges of the Moxie Project. Each of them crafted a pre-arrival blog that you can read now!

Each week throughout the summer, I will send you a brief note about the activities and topics we’ve been discussing and a link to the blog when new posts are up. You can expect to see about five blogs each week from different students. Some posts will be crafted in response to a particular prompt, which I will share with you. However, students are also encouraged to write about whatever might be most significant to them during that particular week.
… Please do not feel pressure to leave comments on every post. Look for posts with few responses and, of course, ones that are most interesting to you.

Let me know if you have any questions at all. Again thanks so much for helping us. It should be a great summer!

Enjoy their blogs: sites.duke.edu/moxie

Ada

This week our writers have posted their final reflective blogs and I decided to go off-script and compose a blog post TO them, reflecting on my “Moxie-at-a-distance” experience. So here goes.

Dear Moxies

I’m stealing Brianna’s method of “five things” to take a moment and share what I’ve learned and what it has meant to be to be a Moxie project reader. This is my way of thanking all of you for letting me have a peek inside of your experiences and your courage in posting your thoughts out to the world.

1. Feminism, it all its glorious (and often misunderstood) diversity is alive and well in your generation. THANK GOODNESS!

2. Life is busy, but it is very much worth taking the time for reflection.

3. Some things tie our generations together. Some things give me a sense of a chasm.

4. Reading about sex still makes me squirm.

5. We can/must/won’t ever stop learning.

What is your design approach for facilitated events?

From the Blog Draft Archives, 2012. I’m leaving this one as is with a short reflection from today at the end.

Stories…

The 2012 Draft:
I am designing and facilitating a lot of face to face gatherings lately.  People ask me “how do you do this work?” and I realized that I was acting as an unconscious practitioner some of the time. So it was worth stepping back and asking myself the question, “what is my design approach for facilitated events?” With a little reflection, I realize I DO have an approach. Here is a quick description. I hope in the comments you might share your approaches!

  1. Purpose, Purpose Purpose
  2. Outcomes
  3. Process options
  4. Pacing, consistency and variety
  5. Harvest

Or, as John Smith calls it “memory practices.”

The 2022 addition. Those five things are pretty mundane. It is the stories we tell about them that holds the key. So the thing that remains most salient for me from the draft today is the idea of “memory practices.”

What is this? A quick search found something from Geoffrey Bowker’s book Memory Practices in the Sciences. “How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past.” As I’ve been reviewing old blog drafts and creating new ones, the way I’m telling stories is changing. My memory practices are changing. I find that fascinating!

From Control to Free Floating Reverie

Fresh Post! No Archive redraft!

Johnnie Moore pointed to a great LinkedIn post by Laurence Barrett that resonates with my current “fallow” project. It is no accident that Johnnie is an advocate of “unhurried!”

Laying fallow, I can reflect, observe and cross-pollinate ideas and experiences that surround me because I have the free time and head/heart space to do that. I am not fully confined by a large set of obligations. Yes, the grandkids are still #1 priority and that is a place for much of my energy, but the freedom from deliverables is quite intoxicating. I am available for reverie!

I’m pulling out two quotes, but it will make much more sense if you go and read the whole post! And don’t miss the P.S. at the bottom, which is fodder for even more reflection and blogging!

Mr. Barrett is talking in the context of coaching and the dynamic of “containment.” When I read it, I immediately thought about how a facilitator may try and contain human interaction in the well-intentioned service of the goal or purpose of a gathering. As group process folks, we have the opportunity (motive! means!) to create containers where people might do something different and more effective if engaged in something more free floating than overly structured.

The older I get, the more I sense that a lot of group process practices are about how we actually make a space less welcoming, “safe,” etc. Instead, Barrett reflects on another way that is less contained, and more “free floating.”

Here we may think of it as a dynamic, mutual and rather messy process of meaning making. Images and associations arise from the unconscious to be exchanged and evolved in what Wilfred Bion termed a ‘reverie’; a free-floating dialogue without defined goals and objectives.

In reverie both coach and client are ‘in’ and committed to the dialogue. Both can potentially be transformed.

And…

If our need to be ‘masterful’ or ‘powerful’ (words I see in some coach training) prevents us from entering a reverie we do not contain our clients, we just limit them.

A client is contained not by the coaches calm, rational, objectivity, but by our engagement and involvement, and both parties may be transformed by the encounter.

Pretending we are wisdom figures may fuel our narcissism or hide our anxiety, but it is definitely not containment.

I have worked hard through my professional life to show up not as some sort of wisdom figure and to engage in reciprocal work and learning. But there are old patterns in there that creep up in my head saying “I know what to do here.” Fully recognizing those moments, and choosing to let go, is something quite wonderful. And a door to reverie. (Using a “door” metaphor also reminds us there are many ways to think about space and containers. See this wonderful piece about other ways to think of space.

P.S. I love the four fundamental principles Mr. Barrett’s company espouses. I love them so much I took a screen shot. Mr. Barrett, if that is not OK, let me know and I’ll take the image down!

Image of four principles of Heresy Consulting. Each has an image, then the words underneath including: All change is a step into the unknown, Only through difference can we learn, Leadership is an expression of the soul, and We are made through our relationships.
The four principles of Heresy Consulting https://www.heresyconsulting.com/

NASA’s Salish Sea in the Snow

I’ve been absent from my blog catch up due to flooding basements and such things. Ah, good intentions.

Today I was led to a stunning photo by NASA of the Salish Sea region – where I spend my time – in the snow. Click in to look at it with more detail. It made me think of you, dear readers (all seven of you!)

We had record breaking cold and snow the last week in December. Seeing it from space was one of those “if I could only look from a new perspective” moments. We need those moments to question what we are doing and want to do. And to just sit in awe of nature.

Speaking of questioning things, Alexandra Samuel‘s remote work newsletter came out today with great reframing questions to consider not just about the return to F2F work, but the very nature of work. It made me want to convene a Strategic Knotworking Session (draft structure description in process to formalize this Liberating Structure here) about work! Worth a read!

Now, back to cleaning up the basement!