I’ve been living a rather simple, but busier than you’d expect, sort of life for the last five and some months. I’ve been mostly resident here at Jamyang, in the upstairs cell block of a 135-year-old courthouse turned meditation center, just across the Thames from central London. Primary duties have been cleaning, receiving, and cooking.
My neighbors in the three other upstairs cells are all transients. Many are monks or nuns or volunteers working for just a few days. Some other staff and volunteers live in bigger cells downstairs. In my time here, the four-member volunteer team has come from Spain, Columbia, Holland, Russia, England, Germany, Canada and the USA. The cell renters upstairs in my hallway have come from many more places.
This is a building where monks robes look pretty normal, and second-hand working and travelling clothes are common. When I go out of here in suit and tie for a meeting, it gets noticed. Yesterday, Grace Davis, one of the upstairs visitors, asked me about where I was going last week. As I explained my work, a lightbulb goes on and she says, “That sounds a lot like this thing called Open Space.”
Turns out that after I went around the world running OpenSpaceTech training and practice workshops in 2002, one of my partners, Brendan McKeague, an irishman now rooted in Perth, Western Australia, ran around that continent doing some more trainings. Grace, and english woman with connections down under, attended that training. So strange and wonderful to trip over one’s own lineage halfway between home and Oz!