Category: Miscellany

As I’m getting around to meet people here in London for the first time, I’m finding the best conversations simply defy memory. Or maybe mutuality defies memory.

It has been my habit, ability, or perhaps my failure, to walk away from conversations with a fairly detailed mental rendering of where we went and how we got there. Lately, however, I’ve been taking this time of meeting a number of new people, with little real agenda, to practice listening differently.

I’m paying more attention to where attention goes. Refining the pulsation between me and you. Coming back more often to check if I’m sitting in easy alignment. Pulsing too between personal interests and income opportunities, histories and plans, brain and base. Letting all of these things inform all the rest.

Sometimes I notice that I’m doing it all quite well, and other times I notice that I’m way off. I hope I’m noticing sooner than I used to. Along the way, I’ve been amazed at what I’m not able to recall, at least in words, at the close of these conversations. I get thrown off by moments of not knowing where we’ve been or might go, and then a path appears. We go on. The shape of all things just keeps unfolding.

Today’s conversation was with Andy Borrows, at the Crypt Cafe, beneath St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish, off Trafalgar Square. The sign upstairs on the church door declares it as “…a place of worship… a business… [and] a care organization…” What better place to have a mutuality conversation?

And true to my story, I can hardly remember where more than three hours went, but I did come away with real things to do next. Most exciting, we’ll be working together, with Chris Corrigan, on Chris’ chapter of the 100bloggers book project. And Andy’s got a headful of Open Space to fish around in with colleagues back at work. Looking forward to another round, too.

UPDATE: Andy’s version

Just before going on duty here this morn, I read this about Hillary Clinton’s speech on abortion rights. Later on, as I’m setting out cushions and pads in the shrine room here at Jamyang, in preparation for tonight’s teachings, over and over again my mind keeps returning to the moment of this story.

Hugely divisive issue. Common ground. Pro-Choice and Pro-Life. Common ground. Clinton. Common ground. Hmmm… could it be? No, I don’t mean resolution. And it’s not so much the issue, the person, or the politics, but something more or other, something in the twist of it all. Something in the moment. A new shape of mind? …a light? …a space? …a way on?

I can’t quite explain it, but something about the shape and moment of this story just sparkled a bit. Maybe it’s hope. Something in this mix makes mutuality seem more likely, on abortion and beyond. It is but a speck, and still mind plays it over and over.

Choice and Life need not be, and cannot be, separate and opposing. Hopeful, I suppose, because this moment turned up at the center of American politics. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: Choose Life and Life Choices.

This popped up in the mailbag this morn, in response to yesterday’s posting:

…if everyone found work that they were passionate about and work and life merged, that would truly be the end of large corporations – I just don’t think any company can find thousands of people passionate and aligned with why the company exists, ready to merge their lives in pursuit of making the company succeed….

Not sure they’d go away, but they sure would be different. Consider that many tasks would go away, many of those seem likely to be related to gaining and maintaining control over others.

Furthermore, it might not be a problem to find people who are passionate about the work, but for how long? The most successful companies may or may not be smaller ones, and their turnover rates might actually rise significanly. Passion is volatile. Get in, work like crazy, get out. Mission accomplished.

Then, there would be more time for other, non-income things between jobs/companies, too. Instead of working for the middle forty years of life, we might work in more and shorter spurts, and longer into life. Retirement might be more seasonal, too. So it seems what we really need is more social and cultural support for the sabbatical.

Frithjof Bergmann (sp?) has done a bunch of stuff, though not much web-published, on what he calls New Work. A snippet…

Much of work is horrific; it maims and disfigures people, physically and emotionally. But work also has an opposite pole; it can be ecstatic and entrancing, so much so that “sex has to be good indeed to stand the competition with the most delicious and fantastic work.”

So given that some things really do require large corporate-type orgs to deliver, might we end up with delicious, fantastic, sexy corporations? Or perhaps a lifelong string of on again, off again, one-year stands?

I followed one of Euan’s threads this evening and found an older post by his friend Claire. What she says rings true for me:

The concept of work life balance is dead. If you find what you are passionate about and can do that for a living, then there is no boundary between what is work and what is life. Your work becomes your life and your life becomes your work.

I spent Friday afternoon taking in the surprisingly spacious and beautiful territory that is Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, catching up on life and work, hopelessly (hopefully?) interwined, with my friend and colleague Bliss Browne.

She had twelve hours in London, between Chicago and Johannesburg, and I got about half of them. A one-time resident of these parts, she led our tour. A few small things already blooming and daffodils poking through bravely… in January! This might be the first winter of my life I don’t see any snow.

We did a big loop in the park, stopped for lunch, and then jumped on a computer and had another blogging lesson. She’s dipping her toe in at Ubumama, the newest addition to the projects blogroll at sCNN. It’s good to link and work with friends.

…and totally different.

I had a long first conversation with Heather Sim in Glasgow, Scotland today. She’s developing projects with youth and businesses… to feed the businesses, and the youth. It’s mutuality writ large.

When I stood back to notice how many instances of these really amazing projects are popping up these days, it occured to me that someday I’ll be talking with my kids or other kids, and they’ll be asking questions about what it was like when I was young. And they’ll be screwing up their faces in disbelief when I tell them about silos and limits and scarcity mentalities, because it will be so different from the world they know. Like 50s days were to us in grade school. Weird.

…Department of Health, that is, here in the UK. Read an article this past weekend (while I was sitting around doing nothing, for a change) about new health recommendations for eating 9 servings of fruits and vegetables daily. I went to the website to check out the portion size info and discovered that the DH homepage is a blog. I feel better already!

What happens when 100 bloggers, from all over, linked by various bits of experience, practice, and html code, all focus their attention on one product… in this case a book? That’s what we want to find out.

Chris Corrigan is one of the originators of this project and he’s asked me to join. And I said “YES!” This should be a blast. It seems the product will be out in a couple of months.

And… as an invitation to blogging, this is totally in line with my work at sCNN, too.

Lynne Kiesling quoting WSJ in Knowledge Problem today…

The technology company announced today a pledge that it hopes will establish a sort of “patent commons” on which open-source software developers can base their code.

The pledge amounts to a promise that IBM, one of the staunchest backers of the Linux operating system among major computer makers, won’t enforce any of 500 designated patents against makers of open-source software. IBM has promoted Linux in part to blunt the dominance of Microsoft Corp. as it has tried to spread its operating systems to the corporate-computing world.

She goes on to explain…

By continuing to file patents, IBM indicates that it believes that the expected future value of the patented idea outweighs the discounted present value of the cost of acquiring the patent. That idea is not inconsistent with yesterday’s decision to stop enforcing particular patents, a move that indicates that the value to IBM of the patented idea being used in open source development is higher than its use in proprietary R&D and applications. They retain the property right, but they choose not to enforce it.

…and to conclude…

something has been beneficially destroyed here — the coupling of the patent right and the enforcement effort. They are two separate issues. Perhaps this shows a new way to reconcile patents and open source. Or maybe not.

Patents and open source, profit and commons. Ownership and self-interest are maintained, boundaries and body intact. AND… value, profit and well-being are maximized by offering, sharing and taking credit in commons, communities and markets. This is exactly the kind of mutuality that we must and will be developing more and more, as businesses feed communities for profit and community activists come together in markets like the small Change News Network.

Refining one of those bullet points from a few days ago. I want to put this somewhere prominently at small Change News Network:

The most powerful kind of leadership is participation …meaning that more and more, leadership is not, and cannot be, separate from the people, places and processes it wants to inspire and inform.

Not sure yet where to put it, or how much of it (long form or short form) to put there. Otherwise, was up way too late making good progress.

Gorgeous… Next time you dream of a simpler time

I haven’t seen a lot of tsunami television. What I have seen has moved so quickly that it’s been hard for me to really feel what happened to these pieces of land that were/are home to so many. These before and after pics are the first shots I’ve seen like this. They remind me of looking at twin tissue shots, healthy and sick, in medical textbook style. Powerful stuff. via George

Last week I took a grinding bore of a training course that despite the plodding, “you fill in the blanks while I lecture” format, managed to keep me captivated for much of the day. Despite the grueling format, I might actually have learned something. I think there is some kind of certificate coming in the mail, on which the Queen will attest that I know something about food hygiene and safety. This in preparation for my next role as kitchen yogi (cook’s assistant) here at the Center.

As it turns out, all the food safety laws and procedures don’t specify much what to do as much as they say nobody should get sick. And if somebody does, you’re supposed to be able to show that you did all you could to prevent it. So it’s not a rules-based system as much as a faith-based system. You can clean up, and the inspectors will tell you how, or rather what they accept as “all you can do,” but in the end, when you “disinfect” your tools and counters, you still can’t see if there are bacteria there, which there certainly are. The game is not elimation, but reduction of bacteria.

Watching food fears rising in the wake of the wave, it’s easy to see how easily that dovetails into fear of god, and how easily food preparation rituals parallel religious rituals. Faith and practice. Nothing is certain, except what the authorities tell you. And even the most well-meaning authorities can end up catching arrows.

Update to the last posting: I notice that organizations, relationships, communities, cultures have their own shapes and sizes and densities to them. I call them bigger bodies… but notice now that they also have/are bigger minds. These bigger shapes can be more and less easy and inviting for us to fit our own shapes of mind into.

Here is me, my mind and being and working, trying to fit into the mind of this meditation center. Here is the sneaky stuff I’ve been up to here lately, me tunnelling into more space without having to leave the community here. In this way, we are always stretching and shaping the collective spaces we “live in” and the mind spaces of people we “live with” or whose hearts we also “live in.”

And doesn’t this lead right back a few posts to my mutuality conversations with Johnnie and Karen… about who’s shaping and who’s being shaped… and recent observations about showing up and letting go…

Somewhere along the way, these last some years, I have let the yearend reflection and planning questions dissolve into how I am all year round. I’ve let yearend mind pop up at any and all times throughout the year.

A couple of days ago I noticed so clearly that it’s not how do i limit that is important, but ratherthatI limit. Also, that I limit because it is necessary.

The mind that fiddles with the code of the blog template has a different shape, scale of focus, density of awareness than the mind that does the posting. The template mind stretches out into future use considerations while the posting mind is often bounded and shaped by one moment, now or recently past.

And the posting mind is different, smaller, more rigid, I find, than the mind that walks down the street holding hands. Or the mind that has international conference calls with clients. The mind that is satisfied with picking off a few blogroll blogs to read this morning is different from the mind that insists that if I read one, I should read them all.

In this way, it seems that limits are not to be overcome. Limits support life. Mind has shape. The only reallimitis not a how but a that. A condition. A truth. I choose shapes, and the range of shapes of mind that I choose, is limited… but can be stretched. So too, the speed with which I am able to change shapes. And it seems that the soup one seems to swim through, that space between known and familiar shapes, is uncertainty, chaos, not knowing… and flow.

There is a pulsation then, between knowing and not knowing. In this way the obvious limits are two: certainty, a refusal or inability or unwillingness to let go of this shape and move to another and ignorance, a refusal, inability, or unwillingness to notice what is really going on now as self and others.

Limits are not something I do… they are what I am, even always I am also the movement in stretch stretch stretch flow snap twist dodge parry thrust spin…

When I am really paying attention, it’s really hard to tell who’s leading and who’s following. Johnnie Moore reminded me of this yesterday at lunch here in London. And that what any of us have to say to each other is likely not as important as our showing up in the first place. And that none of this is happening to any one of us. (It was a long lunch!)

So this was, I think, my first “we met first in the blogosphere” lunch. Then I came home and stayed up way too late tricking out the new Lumina Coaching blog for my old friend Karen Sella, me in London, her in Seattle. Six months ago, Karen and I had a milestone sort of mutuality conversation in Chicago. So of course she’d show up in my email on the same day as my mutuality chat with Johnnie.

I’m looking to connect this practice of mutuality, letting others be as real to me as I am to myself, with practices and premises that allow for commerce as well as conversation. Mutual conversation, mutual commerce. Not me consultant, you paying client. Not me coach keeping you company. Not me researcher, you sharing data and stories. But us in it together. If you’re in London and interested in mutual exploration, I want to meet.

• Under-resting and over-vigilance have a way of getting in the way.
• Showing up early enough to sit and do nothing before a meeting feels surprisingly kind to self.
• It really doesn’t take long at all, in a genuinely quiet moment, to come back to self, stability and sensation.
• Life is incredibly resilient, even and especially in the face of the unimaginable and inescapable.
• It seems more important to be able to pulse between knowing and not knowing than to master either one of them on its own.
• More and more it seems that the most important leadership act is simply participating in the flow.
• Elevated subway trains run past Royal Festival Hall. Sitting there in the cafe feels like home sweet chicago.

Jill posted yesterday in London Calling about dissatisfaction, suggesting that the way to shift satisfaction to dissatisfaction must somehow be related to letting go of expectations. I love the question, the openness of the inquiry, the quotes, and the way the whole thing springs from what she read in newspaper story i say lying on the kitchen table yesterday morning.

And… i think expectations are very different from desires and needs. expectations are made in brains. desires and needs and appetites spring from our ground, the ground, as we come into these bodies we have now.

i think it’s not possible to let go of desires and needs, but it is possible to move more deeply into them… to not be swayed by their surfaces but to get into them more and more so that we can see and satisfy them more directly.

on the surface i desire chocolate or cookies, but when i look into what i really want in the moment i’m dipping into the goodies jar, i often want rest. when i don’t think i can have what i want, i choose other options.

the key it seems is not letting go of the desires and needs but letting go of confusion about them. i think we need to work to get really clear about what we want. to dare then to ask for it, to see if satisfaction is possible. to inquire into others’ requests, to go further into figuring out what it is that they really want and need, beyond what they’re asking for. and we need to practice noticing when we already actually have what we really need and want.

this is letting go of the expectation or assumption that we can’t get what we want, which is different from expecting that we’ll get the promotion or that dinner will be on the table for us when we get home. one way to make this easier is to keep looking for the things we do have that we do want. i’ve heard from various sources that finding and naming at least four goodies for each one baddy is the ratio necessary to affect neurochemistry enough so that we actually *feel* a difference.

in this way, there need not be any loss or sadness, only an adding on, increasing our attention and capacity to notice what’s good and desirable and working. satisfaction guaranteed, though not necessarily immediately!

…the blog over at sCNN is starting to roll again. i did some good, i.e. satisfying, work on the outside this past weekend, not including this little sketch on a napkin while waiting for our pizza last night.

hoping to get the innards completely retooled in the next week or so, with some of that spiffing shining through on the outside, too, as skills and artistic donations allow. back on our way to wide open community blogging for the common good. please stay tuned.

UPDATE: Progress as promised. My cartooning notwithstanding, the artwork side of things ain’t half bad, either.

Thanks to Christy for posting these Hafiz lines in a comment a few days ago.

There are so many gifts, my dear,
Still unopened from your birthday…

A good way to start the year, I think. And something too that speaks simultaneously to this recent shifting, deep undersea and the big waves that have been crashing to shore in Asia. Not sleeping so well these days. So many gifts, so much energy and movement, so much churning and changing. I don’t imagine that anyone escapes untouched by these waves, even if we can’t quite say how.

Out this morning running an errand, I stopped at a little local bakery shop for a little bit of morning food. I chose this bakery because I like to support the little guys when I can… but I’ve gotta say, that the stuff I got was crap. This was actually my third trip to this guy, for three different kinds of food. So I’m afraid he’s now struck out.

But it’s bigger than that. As I was walking along this busy London street, noticing the Safeway’s and Tesco stores, and thinking about getting a second breakfast, it occurs to me that this crummy little baker has momentarily soured me on all little guys. This is how the big guys win! Because the little guys don’t ever realize that they’re all on the same team, representing a way of life and a way of business, not just themselves. Wake up, little guys!