Tag Archive: love

December 27, 2018

2018, The Year of Love: A Retrospective

“I need love
Not some sentimental prison
I need god
Not the political church
I need fire
To melt the frozen sea inside me
I need love.”

– Sam Phillips

Image by Luke, Ma, “Love by Nature,” shared under provisions of Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.

I started this year with a post focused on love, and this idea that 2018 would be the year of love. This thinking wasn’t offered through rose-colored glasses, but from a shared sense and conviction that love would be required to see the year through. And not just any kind of love. In that original post there were a few definitions and quotes that we have been playing with at IISC, including these:

“All awakening to love is spiritual awakening… All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic.” 

– bell hooks

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

– Cornel West

“To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him [sic] an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.”

– William Sloane Coffin

“Love is seeing the other as a legitimate other.”

– Humberto Maturana

“The ultimate act of love is allowing ourselves and others to be complex.” 

– Nora Bateson Read More
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June 18, 2018

A Network Learning Lab: Centering Story, Love and Emergence

“Words are how we think, stories are how we link.”

– Christina Baldwin

Last week I had the privilege of facilitating a two-day Network Learning Lab for a remarkable group of conservation leaders and network weavers. I co-designed the session with Olivia Millard and Amanda Wrona of The Nature Conservancy (and at the instigation of Lynn Decker of the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network) to connect and strengthen the capacity of those working at the intersection of ecosystem health and human/community development while building networks at local, state, regional, national and global levels. Our design was informed by input given by the participating network weavers themselves about their core challenges and learning objectives, while leaving room for the unexpected – enough spaciousness for the network magic of emergence to happen.

As with other network leadership institutes that we at IISC have had a hand in designing and facilitating, the experience last week had as its foundation plenty of opportunities for the cohort to authentically connect, to get to know one another on both professional and personal levels. And as with both leadership development sessions and ongoing network development initiatives that we support, we turned to storytelling as a way to create bonds and understanding. This included time for the participants to tell brief stories about their networks, doing so in 5 minute informal bursts sprinkled throughout the two days (which could also have been done as Pecha Kucha or Ignite presentations). The intent was to create a bit more understanding of what might make each network unique in its aspirations, attributes and accomplishments and to whet people’s appetites for further conversation at breaks, meals and into the evening.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

– Maya Angelou

We also set up a couple of exercises within the first hour of the lab for people to hear more about one another’s paths to the work they currently do, not by ticking off their resumes, but by telling stories about what happened to and moved them to be where they are now. Time and again, when I facilitate this kind of exercise, it shifts the tone of the gathering in the direction of greater openness and trust. And as we touched on in our debrief of those exercises, inviting that kind of storytelling into our work can send a signal about what is validated with respect to forms of knowing, expression and parts of ourselves to bring to the table. Along these lines, we also drew from poetry and other forms of creative expression, including a stanza from a favorite William Stafford piece, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” which, to me, gets at the heart of network building … Read More

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January 3, 2018

Welcoming 2018: The Year of … Love

“We rise and fall and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer

And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love, cannot be killed or swept aside.”

– Lin Manuel Miranda

Photo by Denise Krebs, shared under provisions of Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.

We know we are not alone at IISC when we say that 2017 left many of us a bit exhausted and breathless, if not somewhat dumbfounded. What occasionally felt like the wheels coming off of our country’s management and morality caught us by varying degrees of surprise, which is not to say that the underlying frustration and ongoing dynamics of “othering” were necessarily shocking. Rather, the unabashed in-your-face tenor of it all got to points where it was all I could do to stay even minimally tuned in to have at least a fingernail on the pulse of things (but really, there were few places to hide!).

I am grateful that as an organization we take a break at the end of the year to rest, restore and reflect. And while some of us may feel like we could use another week (or two), I for one feel ready and resolved to step boldly into 2018 with an open heart and humble sense of not knowing (what will happen, what is in others’ hearts and minds, what the answers are). I would characterize this as a stance of love or loving kindness. Read More

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September 19, 2017

Facilitating (and Leading) “From the Chair”

Photo by Siew Yi Liang, shared under the provisions of Creative Commons Attribution license 2.0.

 

One of the questions that often comes up in our popular workshop, Facilitative Leadership for Social Change goes something like this,

“It’s great that I’m learning all of these practical leadership and facilitation skills, but what happens when I’m not the one leading or facilitating?” 

How can we keep things rolling when we aren’t formally in charge and when formal leadership is perhaps not so skillful? My answer: There’s usually some opportunity to lead, ask good questions, and to facilitate from the chair! Read More

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July 25, 2017

Pulling Threads from Small Arcs: Reflections on Complexity, Living Systems and Leadership

“The difficulty we face is that the ecology of the biosphere is at odds with the ecology of our institutions.”

– Nora Bateson

In the past couple of posts, I have referenced Nora Bateson’s book Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patternsa collection of essays, poetry, personal stories and excerpts of talks focused on systems theory and complexity thinking. I just finished the book and have underlined and tweeted a number of provocative lines that resonated and gave me pause (in a good way). Here are a few gems from the book that I continue to contemplate in different contexts:

“The problem with problem-solving is the idea that a solution is an endpoint.”

“Systems theory is struggling inside a system that doesn’t actually accommodate it.”

“We cannot know the systems, but we can know more. We cannot perfect the systems, but we can do better.”

“What does it mean to be healthy in an unhealthy system?”

“No living thing exists in just one context.” 

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August 1, 2016

What the World Needs Now

Watching intermittent coverage of the Democratic National Convention my heart softened when I heard New Jersey Senator Corey Booker remind those listening that “Patriotism is the love of country, but you can’t love your country if you don’t love your countrymen.” He went on to define love as ‘being there for each other…empowering each other…finding common ground…and building bridges across differences…’ in pursuit of a common goal. He articulated a beautiful and hopeful vision of a nation of love as a free people, living interdependently. Later on during the convention, Broadway stars gathered on stage to sing the American classic, “What the World Needs Now is Love.”

It gave me a feeling of hope, not necessarily in the Party per se, but in the power of love to captivate the collective imaginations of millions of people who believe that another world is possible, and we can make it a better one for all of us.

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August 1, 2016

Net Work: “Soft” Tools for Real Change

I recently re-read portions of Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. This second update to the original 1972 report from the Club of Rome affirms that current business-as-usual resource usage globally has our socioeconomic systems headed toward collapse shortly after the year 2050. The update reiterates the necessity of taking the impending crisis seriously and mobilizing quickly to adopt strategies such as:

While all of this serves as a strong wake-up (or stay awake) call, what most caught my attention was the concluding chapter, where the authors move from discussion of the technical fixes required to get us on the right track to a serious appeal to more adaptive approaches. Read More

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July 12, 2016

On Love and Justice

This weekend I attended CommonBound 2016, the bi-annual conference of the New Economy Coalition (NEC), “…a [160-member] network of organizations imagining and building a future where people, communities, and ecosystems thrive. Together, we are creating deep change in our economy and politics—placing power in the hands of people and uprooting legacies of harm—so that a fundamentally new system can take root.”

As one might imagine given the mission, the conference was attended by people working on a wide range of projects from public engagement, participatory budgeting, and environmental sustainability to cooperatives, reparations, community land trusts, fossil fuel divestment and more. The 900 attendees were all in some way engaged in doing the very important work of organizing, shifting culture, developing alternative institutions and creative solutions, writing, resisting, and fundraising. All towards a goal of a society that is more just, more democratic, and more sustainable. NEC itself is fast becoming a network of networks engaging groups in the cooperative movement, movement for black lives, labor movement, student divestment network, environmental movement and more. Held in Buffalo, NY, the conference had all the makings of a pivotal moment in movement history, where a true intersectional approach to changing society for the better could be nurtured. The opportunities for significant connections and collaborations to develop were endless.

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July 1, 2016

It is a time for angels

Last week at the Institute during an internal training for our new cohort of Associates, my colleague Alia introduced a practice called ‘Secret Angels’. For those who are familiar with the Secret Santa idea, it is quite similar. You begin by randomly choosing a piece of paper with someone else’s name written on it. Then, for the duration of your time together, you must show appreciation and affection for this person, material or otherwise. You cannot reveal who you are throughout the exercise and you are allowed to elicit the support and collaboration of others. On this occasion the Secret Angel activity lasted three days and we were not allowed to spend money. Rather, we had to think of creative and resourceful ways of showing love for each other.

Some colleagues gave gifts, homemade items, drawings, written poems, chocolate and more. Others offered backrubs and massages. Some offered to do favors. Others arranged and delivered statements of appreciation, acknowledgement and sweet words of poetry. For those three days there was quite a LoveFest in the office! And this of course felt right at home since love is an integral component of our collaboration lens.

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June 22, 2016

Feeling Orlando

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. This is the interrelated structure of all reality.”

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

13473695_10207332726252235_689325856_nThat line is one my favorite lines from one of my favorite (probably my favorite) writing of Dr. King: Letter from Birmingham (City) Jail. It’s always resonated really strongly with me and it was also dated on my birth date, 16 April (I write and think about that speech often). Since I heard it, I’ve really tried to live believe it and feel it. I do genuinely think that deeply believing that idea is our (humans) only hope of getting out alive of the mess we’re creating of the planet and our societies.

Well, last week, I felt that interrelatedness in new way. Normally, I would keep stuff like this to myself, but I’ve found that sharing it has done more good than not. And since my colleague, Curtis Ogden, has introduced me to “thinking out loud,” I committed to start trying it. So here goes.

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June 20, 2016

Love and Liberation

01_queer-liberationTonight there will be a full moon, that time every month when the sun, moon and earth are in complete alignment. It is also the summer solstice when the sun (from the perspective of the earth) is at its highest point in the earth’s northern hemisphere marking the longest number of daylight hours in the year and the official beginning of summer.

According to many this will be the first time that these two astronomical events have coincided since June of 1967, during what was in the United States, the Summer of Love for many, and a summer of continued oppression for African Americans continuing the long struggle for Civil Rights, Justice, and Equality. Yesterday many of us celebrated Juneteenth, when we commemorate the day when the last enslaved Africans in the US finally received news of their freedom.

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