It Smelled Like Spring Yesterday…

…and I finally had time to call Rowan Hamilton, a teacher and practitioner of naturopathic medicine in Vancouver, BC. Here are some of the things we touched on in what turned out to be a remarkable conversation…

• A student of his is now in Duluth Minnesota and is working with large, corporate-type businesses to set up naturopathic clinics inside of the companies. This sounded to me like homeopathic organization, as it brings in a tiny bit of wellness and well-being information into the org and seems to have the potential to impact healthcare costs, employee health and well-being, and also the well-being of the business as a bigger body entity itself. In homeopathy, the more diluted the tincture, the more powerful the effect.
• In talking about Open Space Technology, I mentioned some of my ideas about death and release and we came to understand OpenSpaceTech as a way to invite the whole group or organization up into the cockpit of this ‘reality’ and look out together into the future. We noticed that Open Space lets us gaze out from the leading tip of the organization into the vast expanse of the future we’re flying into, and let’s us do it with others rather than in isolation from our seats and side windows, even though ‘otherness’ and separation don’t actually exist in that Space we’re looking into. That future is totally unscripted, until we impose our lines and stories on it. In that way, we can choose over and over again, to make less and less of these divisions between ourselves and others.
• We talked about his having given everything away to friends and family and left his home in England with a suitcase and a bicycle. He shared the story of another guy he’d met while hiking in the Grand Canyon. The guy had noticed his unhappiness with his wife and kids, his own body and his hometown of Bozeman Montana… and left. He packed a bag and hiked to the Canyon in Arizona where he found a job running supplies by muletrain in and out of remote villages. The Law of Two Feet writ large, i.e. if at any time you find that you’re not learning or contributing, you have the right and the responsibility to go where you need to in order to increase, maximize even, your own learning and contribution.
• He shared the story of a colleague who now lives on a self-imposed annual budget of $3,500 USD. He makes more than this, but gives the extra away. One of the things he does is teach some courses, one of which is a three-month residential in the backcountry of western Canada. He takes 30 students, for 3 months, to live in the woods… grow and find their food, live outside, the works. And after three months they leave the place without any footprints at all. Now that’s living lightly.
• Along the way we also noticed that it’s possible to change the shape of who we think we are in a direction away from physical things, clothes, body fat, houses, gear, policies, procedures, departments, equipment, and toys and carry more of ourselves as energy potential… and even shift further still to a space of awareness and noticing. Might think of this as the body equivalent of what is often talked about as a continuum of doing and being. As we get ‘lighter’ in rigid, heavy, physical ways, we have more energy available for applying in the moments where it’s really needed. And as we relax that energy store, as well, we can get more and more clearly aware of when and where it really is necessary to act. Linking back to the homeopathy story, as we relax from doing into being, from physical stuff, to raw energy, to awarness, we dilute our ‘selves’ and can have greater and greater effect in the world.
• Finally, we marvelled a bit at the territory we’d covered in this, our first conversation, and noticed that more and more of us are finding more and more of us who understand the shifts and opporutunities arising in communities, economies and across national borders these days. Even as the US seems to be already deeply engaged in WWIII, it also seems to be getting easier and easier to organize genuinely positive changes in the direction of generalized well-being on the planet. Interesting that these things seem to be happening in tandem.

Bonus Point: After I finished with Rowan, I went off (on my bicycle) to the Green Drinks sustainability gathering where Terra Brockman of the LandConnection and other panelists were talking about organic food for city folk.

• Terra had brought wild leeks, called ‘ramps’, to sell for $10/pound. Now these things grow wild in the woodland areas around her central Illinois home and a local farmer had harvested 3500 pounds from just one tenth of an acre. Do the math on that one, for one natural springtime’s yield. The moral of the story: there are more ways to make money on the land that plowing everything under for seas of corn and soybeans! We can be lighter on the land, too!

And as I rode home through a quiet downtown just after 10pm, a bank sign read 67 degrees. All Good Springing.