At the end of our wedding, Jill and I went to a big gathering drum, started a pulse together, and invited our friends and family to come join us. Thanks to Chris Corrigan for capturing that celebration drumming in a big (7.6MB) .WAV file.

We just don’t know what his name is. Two weeks ago my sister-in-law Amy was dancing at the wedding. Last night she and Mark were up all night at the hospital, until successful delivery about noon today. Welcome to the family, small fry, whatever your name is! Congrats and Thank You, Mark and Amy!

Looking forward to some time with this one before I jet off this Wednesday to facilitate open space for 600-800 at the NoMindFestival in Sweden.

UPDATE: It’s Charles “Charlie” McIntyre Herman, named for my Dad and Amy’s family. Held him tonight and he’s a solid little guy! woohoo!

Something more than a week later, we’ve got some photos from friends and family posted. We thoroughly enjoyed the whole of it, from planning little surprises and having dinners with family in the days before, to having so many great friends in one place, telling stories and making music together in middle of the ceremony itself. I hope some of the fun of it all will come through in the photos.

Light blogging ahead while I enjoy the ripples, paint a few rooms, post more photos, and scribble a lot of thank you’s.

UPDATES: Our online Photo Album is done. We think we have all the photos we’re going to get now and we’ve spiffed the layout. Maybe someday we’ll have a go at cropping and captions, but for now we think it’s a pretty good view.

Well, I guess it’s started. Had dinner with Jill’s parents and grandma last night, just in from Texas. Tonight we add my parents to the party. Tomorrow the rest of family and a few cast and crew friends, more dinner than rehearsal. Then everybody for the (not really so) big wedding moment on Saturday.

Finished with cake and catering details yesterday. So the party is assured. Still working on writing those vows.

This shot is from our retreat in February.

If all else fails on the wedding-writing scene, we can always go back to these Dr. Seuss wedding vows.

Pastor: Will you answer me right now
These questions, as your wedding vow?

Wedding planning is in full swing here. One week and counting. The to-do list is getting lots of attention, even though mostly everything is decided. Now it just a lot of last minute logistics.

And the surprises. Or as I like to call them, as of today, Special Operations. These are the things that need to be on the list, but that Jill doesn’t know about. Little surprises. But how to keep track of them, and get time for them, if not on the list?

Code names, of course. So along with beverage shopping and airport pickups, we have things like Operation Corner Pocket, Operation Crystal Temple, Operation Frosty Krinkle, Paper Chase, Mouse Factory, Port and Starboard, and Handlebar on the task list.

Now, if we could just finally have a good run at Operation Write the Vows…

Somebody called today with a situation, an opening, a “better-than-zero” chance to propose a plan to take an old bureaucratic program to a new level using Open Space Technology. What to do?

I referred him back to the four questions from the Inviting Philanthropy post two days ago, re-framed a little bit into the context of him going to his boss and boss’s boss to inquire:

• What do you want (to see in the world, or in the program)?
• What do we already have (what’s working, what to keep and grow)?
• What do you need (to have, or see, or show, to support a shift)?
• What are you willing to do (approve, support) if you get what you need?

I suggested he make his own list. Run through it with his boss, adding the boss’s list to this. Then take it higher up to check their list against the chief. If nothing else, these four questions cut through a lot of potential crap. And saves my buddy from busting it on a proposal that goes nowhere.

Meanwhile, I see these four could be the very active punchline to the Inviting Leadership story that Corrigan and I are cooking:

• Embracing Heart: What do we really want? Do something that matters.
• Inviting Focus: What do we have to work with? Find a place to start from.
• Supporting Flow: What do you need? Ask and offer the things that make the difference.
• Making Good: What will you do? Got what you needed. Good. Use it. Do something.

My favorite place of action just now, by the way, is a new blogging project for Chicago Conservation Corps. Oh yes, and wedding planning… T: -1 weekend and counting. Blogged our organic wedding cake bakery today over there at C3. Yum!

Susan Walker quoted historian John Brooks last week in The Daily Reckoning:

[It] came with a kind of surrealistic slowness … so gradually that, on the one hand, it was possible to live through a good part of it without realizing that it was happening, and, on the other hand, it was possible to believe one had experienced and survived it when in fact it had no more than just begun.

He was writing about how it felt to live during the Great Depression, 1929-1933. She was writing about US housing markets these days. I wonder if it might not apply more broadly than that.

At what point does not knowing become worse that any one of the possible outcomes? Isn’t that the moment when the next big things really get to begin? The moment when we finally decide? And what if some billions would decide all at once?

My recent learning and practice is mostly about clearing and balancing myself more easily in the flow of things, allowing myself to be carried along my the waves that are already moving, while minimizing the amount of personal and direct efforting.  Chris would say I’m practicing as coho salmon, which uses pressure of local water flows to move it around, rather than swimming by pulling against the water.

I’ve been paying extra attention to the pressure differentials between the flows of global and local connectings, individual experience and budding coupledom (wedding countdown, five weeks), the art of a book emerging in the midst of business administrivia, online technology and face-to-face connection, dollar and non-dollar investments, friends and colleagues, long-term planning and moment-to-moment ease and practice as a body.

All a practice in mutuality, holding, balancing, and supporting two or more states or scopes or ways of knowing, letting each be distinct and valuable, informed and informing, by each or all of the others.  Clarity, it seems, is as much about not scraping my feet through the silty bottom as it is about any sort of efforting to make the water clearer.  Letting the flow be as real as the ground.

I take it as a good wedding omen that it just gets harder and harder to be away from home.

I’m done now with travel (I think) for the next couple of months and it feels really good to be home. So I’m starting a new practice, which I’m calling Nestworking, an inverted or locally-focused sort of networking.

For years, I’ve been expanding a global network of friends and colleagues. Now I want to actively request the good people I know around the world to connect me with interesting people they know or meet from Chicago. In this way, I want to turn my network back in on itself, and use it to help me find others who are active in global conversations — AND living and working here in town.

Mostly we think of extending networks, but this is a sort of local thickening, the practice of which has been new to everyone I’ve asked about it. Seems promising in a region of eight million or more people. I want to find those who live simultaneously in Chicago and in bigger global circles.

Who do you know is making good in Chicago and the world? This might be a quiet little series of connecting conversations or blossom as the next generation of GlobalChicago networking. Who do you think I should I know in Chicago?

Woohoo! Today is the first day of my 16th year of self-employment.

Once upon a time, I was sitting having a beer with an old friend in New York, when he asked me “Do you remember what you said when you first quit your job?” I did remember, and I told him, that my goal was to see if I could stay out for a year and have some adventures. “That was three years ago!” he pushed back, smiling. And indeed it had been. At the time it was rather shocking to me. Now that three-year mark is twelve years old and the adventures are going just fine.

A moment of thanks rippling out to all the friends, literally all around the world, who’ve been a part of this long strange fishing trip, if I may, on this momentous occasion, be allowed to to mix my literary references!

And happy birthday (tomorrow) to, Kevin, my old friend in New York.