We did a second round of Open Space, 10am to 3pm, on the Entrance to Aspen on Saturday. Another 50 people showed up, reviewed the posters summarizing Wednesday’s conversations, posting another dozen or so issues. The focus was more squarely on asking the questions and bringing ideas that might “change the conversation” in the direction of resolution.

Where Wednesday had seemed to be focused on establishing positions, among perhaps a dozen or more different possible solutions, Saturday’s conversations were more about connecting and cross-pollinating. Several people remarked that they had changed their positions as a result of Saturday’s conversations. Skeptics from Wednesday offered that they were grateful and heartened by the quality of this second round.

Going forward, the City of Aspen will help keep the newly-spirited conversations going with a kit they call a ‘meeting in a box’ which will offer informtion, discussion questions, and citizen comment forms to anyone in town who would like to host a conversation on this 37-year-old question of what to do with the highway coming into Aspen. Then on April 12th, they’ll host and evening of keypad voting on questions that will be shaped by all this community conversing.

Saturday’s conversations were perhaps “less focused”, but that seems to be just what was needed for folks to soften their positions and start to listen and connect with others’ ideas and interests. After 26 ballot initiatives, this year might yet deliver real resolution to this question.

I worked with Claudia Haack on this one and together we wrote a nice set of finishing questions. These might be my new default set for closing circles. We asked participants to reflect on these things and then offer one short comment, maybe just one line, what might be their response to a friend asking “So what happened at that meeting, anyway?”

• What was your experience here?
• What are you taking away?
• What did you learn? Any a-ha’s?
• What was strange or different here?
• How might you/we keep this going?
• What new or next questions might make a difference now?

Meanwhile, I can also report that I skied all afternoon at Snowmass on Friday. Great snow, freezing cold (zero degrees, before counting the wind) outside, toasty warm in old hacker gear, no wrecks, but totally wore myself out. Some serious motivation for making body stronger this year.

This was the scene last night at the high school in Aspen, Colorado, in the first of two open space meetings to address a set of transportation issues that has generated 26 ballot initiatives in 37 years. This is the kind of space that you do the opening, unplug the microphone, and keep it with you, just in case. Participants posted 27 issues, which after combinations generated 18 working sessions. The Aspen Times (photo) and Aspen Daily News both had good things to say about our progess on their front pages this morning. We’ll have another round on Saturday.

In the meantime, today was my first time on skis in 10 or 12 years. Let’s just say that nobody skied the Greens at Buttermilk as hard as I did today! Hoping to make it a big Blues day tomorrow at Snowmass.

To blog or not to blog? Well… okay… blog. It’s been a grand experiment, but there are things I put here now that I don’t have any other place to put. Much to my surprise, and chagrin, there is more to say. So without further ado, here is where I’ve been, mostly gladly, spending big piles of attention these last four months…

• Four weeks of being very much out in the world, in India and Nepal, honeymooning, retreating, and training in Open Space (notes for the latter, totally redesigned, forthcoming)
• Learning to use a cellphone. Yes I finally caved, converted my oldest landline, so the number remains the same. And yes, learning… still catching myself listening for the dial tone before dialing. (grin)
• Rebuilding the best bicycle I ever had (1981). Photo forthcoming, when it gets launched on the first good bright sunny day of Spring.
• Tearing around Lincoln Square area on foot and on my other bicycle, learning to ride in the cold again, for first time since high school — and looking for a HOUSE.
• Learning to ride the bike and talk on the phone.
• Long holidays with the WHOLE family.
• Facilitating the 2nd Annual Chicago Area Food Policy Advisory Summit, especially rewarding as this is the most lively growing edge of what started in a statewide Summit I facilitated in 2001.
• C3 summit project, C3 weblog, green dinners, WorldChanging, and Massive Change in the City.
• Updates to MichaelHerman.com and OpenSpaceWorld.org
• Opening Space projects, including one for the City of Aspen, a community-wide affair to cultivate broad community support to resolve a decades-old debate about what to do about inbound traffic there.

The Aspen events happen later this week, so I’m off to the airport. Inviting Again. Call me on the slopes, I’ll think I’m going to need the rest breaks!

All at once, Life seems as chaotic and coherent, pressured and peaceful, stirred up and stable as I can ever remember. All of my energy and attention seems fully deployed, into three nested spheres and three separate blogs — Open Space World, Chicago Conservation Corps, and here Inviting Life — each one a tidy list and squirming heap — of thinkings and meetings and doings.

The strangest thing now is how all three lay claim to being my center of everything. I’m Body alive, radiating energy and taking action, in Chicago communities and a global Open Space movement. I’m facilitating Open Space meetings, inviting leadership in community, and practicing intimacy with Life. And I’m balancing it all on my bike. Most everything that’s really working and getting done these days has some sort of grounding within riding distance.

Of course, the big exception to that last one is that Jill and I are leaving on Sunday — for four weeks in northern India and Kathmandu, Nepal. We’re going to eat and explore, to see old friends and big mountains, for a practice retreat and a honeymoon, and (another) bit of Open Space work with NAINN. Go figure. I guess we’re going for everything.

siona on why we should write in books.

I find that my desk this morning reflects well the shifting and mixing that I’m working on these days. I notice that I’m working simultaneously on several things… the hot cereal and fruit in my bowl… taking notes from a yoga book to improve the practice I just finished… still reading the latest issue of Yes! magazine, on our cultural/community shift from Empire to Earth Community… keeping an eye on market reactions to consumer confidence and Fed notes releases… two fledgling books on Open Space, one to edit, one to co-author… and into all of that Jill rings in from London to say good night. Add in the email box with responses due to Nepal, Sweden, Australia and a few other places… and you’ve got a pretty good snapshot of what’s attempting to come together here… body, community, environment, markets, books, conversations, relationship.

Yes, well, I’ve done it again. What started as the GlobalChicago Weblog, became Pea Soup when I moved to London, then (did I miss one in here?) became Practice Matters, after absorbing SmallChangeNews, has now been christened Inviting Life.

When Global Chicago (the site, not the weblog) started in 1998, the whole point of it was to connect Global movements with Local people and activities. What I like about this new name is that Life feels bigger than Global, and the practice of Inviting seems more intimate still, than Local. Growth in two directions, and still whole!

Today my friend Katie Brick and I traded several emails, trying to figure out if we share a set of great great great great grandparents. She and I met years ago through a Fast Company group in Chicago. Even if we’re not related, it seems certain that our ancestors partied together on the outskirts of Detroit, circa 1850. What I emailed her today was a bit of data from a family history a great aunt of mine did in 1945. Katie’s still checking the story on her side for overlaps.

The other reason this is exciting now is that I spent a good chunk of last week helping my Dad format and publish 200 pages of his favorite stories. Some of these things I’d never heard him tell and might never have heard him tell, about growing up, making choices, doing work, learning through life. Other things that the next generation will certainly hear me tell, but be able to read it in my Dad’s own words, as well. The details are delicious, but also the patterns. In the reading, I can see the patterns of who he is and how he thinks about the world… and then of course i can see them in myself, as well. What a treasure.

I remember with a strange clarity, one day in the fourth grade, when a new kid joined our class. I remember thinking how lucky I was to have been going to this school from the beginning, to have a history with the school and my classmates. These books give me some of that same gratitude and satisfaction and confidence, a history, a lineage, back to some of my great great great greats. As so much of the world churns and falls away, I can’t begin to imagine what it might be like decades from now, for the children of my newborn nephew and year-old niece to scan this sort of a record for new baby names and old family patterns.

I think what is most fascinating for me in all of these stories is the simultaneous realities: I, Michael Herman, could not have been planned, especially by those great-great-greats… and yet, the patterns that I carry are not random or accidental, they are (I am, we all are) generations-old mind and practice.

My friend Colleen Taylor is taking a big leap, of the job change sort. Her story sparked some reflection about my own leaps and edges.

As far as I can tell, for all my leaping, I have never really gotten over the edge. Even when I thought I’d literally stepped off “the big one” some years ago, and fell to the rocks below, it turned out to be just 15 feet of falling and tumbling.

That one literal leap aside, it seems the edge just keeps moving closer to and then deeper into who I am. The leaps, even the apparently big ones, dissolve into so many daring little internal shifts.

just in from the campfire (still at no mind) where a very few of us lasted until 3am, a german accordian player, a swedish singer, myself and a few others, writing a song as the sun came up in the middle of the night.

“…feel how precious it is to have grace walking beside you… holding your hand… loving you now… flow through your heart… the seeds in your hand… bloom in the land.”

how lucky to be along for this ride and be able to add a few words along the way. grace.

This is a new word for this American blogger, but clearly “festival” means something to my European friends this week, here at Ångsbacka, a spiritual or heart center in central Sweden. I’m here in week two of the No Mind Festival, seeking to support and extend openness, acceptance, love and compassion into the world. Some bits of the scene here, mostly observed as I walked across the central lawn space yesterday afternoon…

…day four of the second week… sunny blue sky and bright sun continue… rolling green meadows bounded by forest… couples sitting together in practice, or lying together on blankets… parents with little kids napping… some kids perpetually fascinated with the small fountain and goldfish pool… some of the wee ones naked and painted, running and giggling… some adults painted too… one old guy comes to lunch wearing nothing but blue paint, but doesn’t stay very long…

some meditate in the grass… or trade massages… a wild-looking viking sort of guy journals quietly… a young woman sketches in a diary in the shade of a small fruit tree… blankets and a few tables scattered around, a big family picnic… the pulse of african drumming comes from one corner of the festival space… spiritual music and chanting from another direction… somebody yells powerfully, releasing something into the forest… heart music from the big barn “may i take peaceful steps upon the earth… i bow to you a flower… i love your fear… walk slowly… i want to be your lover baby…”

…a woman knits a fuzzy orange scarf in the cafe… the wind lifts long brightly-colored satin pennants from the tops of 20ft sticks… long blond hair and loose frilly skirts… chocolate covered ice cream on sticks… a guitar strummed for some at the fire circle… the ashes of yesterdays food boxes whipped into the air… conversations a light buzz over cups of tea on the deck… a meadowful of tents, one of cars, trailers and housetents in the parking lots, other packed into small dorm rooms… volunteers cooking and cleaning and smiling… two guys with boxing gloves sparring in the parking lot…

…at campfires, i’ve heard mostly beatles and bagpipes, and almost no dylan, denver, or other folk tunes… some bicycles, a nearby lake beach, small village, a creativity space full of paint, fabric, plaster and more… kids on swings and dipping in an inflatable pool… open stage, drumming, dancing, healings, tantra, concerts, and a wee bit of open space technology growing into the mix this year for the first time… and absolutely no one appears to be “in charge” of anything but the organic vegetarian kitchen… so perhaps the chef rules all… for now.

the thing that stands out is the spirit of love, the steady flow of music, the freedom of movement, the quality of smiling, openness in so many faces… open hearts and open eyes everywhere, it seems.

more on how we took over the kitchen and changed the world in my next posting.