Month: April 2022

I love a good burn. Fire is a goto element for me. The inside my home variety of burn is a candle. Sometimes a tea-light that burns 4-5 hours. Sometimes a larger jar candle that I can also burn for short periods or extend to 3 consecutive days. The outside my home variety of fire is most often a backyard chiminea. It’s great to sit in the dusk of a day that moves to night. I love to stare into a fire.

I love to sit by a fire for fun in company with others. Beers. Hotdogs. Smores. I also love to sit by, and tend a fire for ritual. Releases and lettings go. Animating of wishes and intentions. It is not at all uncommon for me to create a ritual — write a few things on paper and then take it to the fire. It’s all part of an achemized life to me — welcoming the straw to gold transition that is our human lives of inner connected with outer.

I love the way that I’m hearing of Fire & Water participants going to the fire. This after recent retreat communal tending of an outdoor fire for 48 consecutive hours — that did it’s alchemizing. There’s Nicole Frederickson’s story of Release, bringing old notebooks to the fire. I love her commitment to clarity. There’s another participant’s sharing of burning bills and old papers. Again, in release. These are simple rituals that anyone can do, and that I think of as so much more than ridding of materials. These fire moments are a way of ritualizing now — ritualized nowing — so as to invite even more attentiveness to present moment awareness and present moment vibration.

I love the way that fire, and a good burn, invites my inner being to be in relationship with mystery and mystical. I love the way that fire, a good burn, adds ritual to release. And I love the way that fire, a good burn, invokes a keen sense of right here, right now. How that relationship with fire can invite potency of the moment to guide the way. Without needing to think it all into being.

I love the way that so often when I feel rushed, hurried, worried, trapped, bullied, stressed into the myriad of contemporary life patterns that fire, a good burn, suspends time, opens way to the deeper moments of being with silence and stillness. I love the way that fire marks a moment of profound invitation — ritualized nowing — that then changes who I am in the regular day to day acts of living.

Earlier this week a friend / colleague, Tim Merry (The Outside) met with Quanita Roberson and me to set up a podcast conversation for the summer. Tim asked a few questions. It was mostly a connection call for what will later be a conversation (Tim, Tuesday, Quanita, me) on equity, presence, systems change, inner change — or whatever arises live in the moment.

At the end of the call, Tim gave us a heads up. “We like to ask people if there is a poem that they are carrying with them lately. Or a song.” That kind of invite lights me up. So often I’m bridging what is the arts to what is the work of organizational change. Let’s just combine it now, shall we — the art of organizational change…the art of inner change. I love the deep humanity in this.

My poem will change a bunch between now and podcast time, but my regular practice of noticing such things led me today to 1900s Spanish Poet, Juan Ramon Jimenez.

Oceans
Juan Ramon Jiminez

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.

And nothing
happens! Nothing…Silence…Waves…
–Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Poetry invites a different energy. It can welcome a different vibration. Just as the phrase, “Once upon a time…” invokes the vibration of a story about to be told. Poetry reopens the door to heart.

If poetry opens the door, then a question connected to an image in the poem is the doorknob.

What is new life that you now seek?
What can only be heard for you in the quiet?
What waves are moving you now?

So many choices. I love the new life of living with keen attention and surrender to what is artfully unfolding now that can bring human beings into such sweet vibrational connection together.

I’m in several 1-1 interviews today. The context is the beginning of a 5-month leadership development program. The program is one that I created with a colleague for application internally at the company he works at. The interviews are mostly about connecting — starting or growing a relationship that will encourage learning, wonder, experiments together, and developing a more robust interior.

I love that this program isn’t a delivery of information. There are a few core teachings. But much of the mode of the program is inviting participants to encounter those teachings with some curiosity, and to make internal sense individually and together. It’s less of a test — regurgitating external answers. It’s more of an invitation — exploring internal sense-making and intuition. Today I get to begin the process with several participants.

I’ve come to realize over the last many years how much I’m drawn to this purpose and objective of developing robust interior. It means that not all of the learning is linear — I love telling people up front that we will be deliberately non-linear. I love bringing in resources that invite participants to explore their principles and values that guide their lives — the things that bring them alive — and then connecting that back to what they do at work.

The work that I’m most interested in with people is this deeply inner work. I used to worry that it might be too far removed from the day to day accountabilities that people hold at work. Yet I’ve learned the there is always a connection made by the people themselves. My work is often guiding, extending invitation for them to explore more of their inner and reconnect how that has enlivening and lasting relevance to their outer lives at work.

So here’s to the growing of the robust interior, that includes these initial 1-1 interviews. Here’s to the clarity of values. The dwelling with inner compass. The remembering and trusting intuition. And the weaving of community of people growing inside and out, making difference with those around them.

Landscapes thrill me. Like this one above, driving through Montana last week. It’s all of it. The clouds. The snow-capped mountains. The open fields. All of that opens my imagination. It casts a spell of wonder.

Landscapes of other kinds also thrill me. Like the one below, written by Caitlin Seida (shared by Shawna Lemay). It’s the invitation to know Hope’s bad-assed side. The teeth and claws. The chewy determination. All of that, too, opens my imagination and casts a spell of remembering.

For inspiration.

Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat

by Caitlin Seida

Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.

It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
diseases as
optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across
your path
and 
bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.