Aligning Bigger Bodies
Continuing to play today with this notion of organizations and communities as (bigger) bodies: pelvis as base and seat of power, OpenSpaceTech community or strategic dialogues as heart, and mapping, planning and visualization as brain. Thinking about how the shape of government, community and development on Bowen Island can rest and move more easily as a whole body, rather than divided into council discussions, private he-said, she-said conversations, and a coterie of local experts and visionaries each nurturing individually brilliant visions for the future of the Island.
Thinking too about what Anne Ironside is telling me about the visionary work of Frithjof Bergmann needing to be grounded locally, her own work in developing the UBC Women’s Employment Center on the ground here in Vancouver needing vision, and both of those needing something in between wherein the brilliance and the action can mix. Anne tells me that she thinks my work in OpenSpaceTech, practice groups, community dialogue and organic organization can help make these connections. In body terms again, this makes OpenSpaceTech and community dialogues the Heart, resting into the bowl of Anne’s local programming and informed by the vision of Bergmann.
Sitting in group meditation Sunday morning with Lisa Barrett, Bowen Island mayor, my mind returns again and again the question she and I and others have been rolling around with for the last several weeks here: How does the formality of the municipal council, the passion and openness of community dialogue, and the vision of the mapping process here all fit together in a whole (healthy) Island community body? What would normally be a distraction from the meditation work becomes fodder for it, expands it, transcends it, includes it. Early in the session, I decide that it’s only through the pulsation between awareness of individual body and awareness of community body can this question be answered.