Human to Human

I just returned from two weeks hosting. One with friends and colleagues in Illinois that are committed to strengthening families statewide. The other with an amazing web in Indiana supporting a movement for wholeness.

I have so many questions living in me from these two experiences. They feel like they happened in a time warp. In Illinois, one person slipped in speaking and referenced us as being together for 16 days. The event itself was 4 days. In Indiana, the communication slip was 2 years. Working deeply and with intention can feel very full.

As I tried to make sense of all that happened, I was reminded of an old Star Trek, The Next Generation episode. What I remember was Captain Picard finding himself on a planet, not knowing how he got there. He was imported into a community and life. He had no contact with the ship. He didn’t know how he got there. He lived a full life on that planet. Married. Aged. I think, raised children. Lived in community. Learned to play a small flute. He learned to accept the life he was living and began to wonder if the Enterprise was an illusion. The episode ends with him waking on the Enterprise, doctors hovering over him. He had passed out for a minute or two in Enterprise time. He retained the whole of his planet life, including his ability to play the flute. I’m wondering what the flutes are of the last two weeks.

One, a few notes anyway, may be what this awareness of “learning as what we do.”

In Indianapolis these wicked questions were present and nibbling at the edges: What is the most meaningful harvest we can imagine from a large scale café? What core purpose does it serve? I loved what one of the participants named and received it as a gift – “we are not looking for an answer. We are looking for a journey.” What if learning is what we do – sometimes applied to particular projects etc. But the core is supporting the capacity and ongoing process to learn. What if this learning is just the flow of life, in us, through us, around us that enables imagining and manifesting the next level of system that serves?

Noticed this thread from the AoH listserve recently. It is a helpful piece on interior and exterior harvests by Chris Corrigan.

I wrote earlier on four levels of harvest (look at the bottom half). Content and process, which fit in with Chris’ exterior. And then relationships and field, which fit in with the interior.

“Just a thought in the harvest piece…For me there are many ways to harvest, but they all come down to either being interior harvests or exterior harvests. Exterior harvests are the ones we see and use to communicate with others, what we sometimes call artifacts. These can be notes, graphics, films, photos and other things that are portable and objective. They may be designed for a broad audience or only for those who were there, as a reminder of the experience, for example. I use all kinds of artifacts, and with most events I do now there is usually more than one.

The interior harvest – the learning and the collective story – needs special support to be useful. For me I use the shorthand of “feedback loops” to think about the ways in which we might create ongoing containers for these interior harvests to be revisited and refined. For example, setting up reflective practices to revisit learning, or setting a future schedule of storytelling sessions to continually work with the meaning arising from an event. These things use strategies of conversation and social technology as well as personal reflective practice to continue to work the interior harvest.

A holistic harvest scheme is an important part of the design of any event – it needs to meet needs, and sometimes that means a reductive accounting of time spent along side the establishment of a presencing practice to revisit personal learning.

It has helped a lot with clients when I say that we are planning a harvest and not a meeting. The meeting simply helps us arrive at the harvest that is needed for the group I am working with. Sometimes the need is just learning, and no external harvest document is necessary. Sometimes the need is a plan.”

The area was first discovered by cowboys of the old west. In the late 1920s a ferry owner / operator named Arthur Chaffin came into the valley. He came back in 1949 to further explore and photograph the area and named it Mushroom Valley because of the shape of the figures and stones. It was made a state park in 1964.

A few hikes are available in the area. Lots of great sites. Some camping in a campground as outside the park. Really beautiful. And guaranteed to send you home with red dust in your shoes.

More on Goblin Valley

Photos of the area, along with a few boy scouts.

I’ve just spend the last several days with with board members and friends of The Berkana Institute. It is an amazing group of people dedicated to social change and pioneering work. Many of us have been together in projects and deep learning together years. For me, this began in 1993. We really are family.

One of the initiatives that I became more familiar with this week is about Regional Learning Communities. These are groups engaged in local work (like solar cooking, which I learned about this week from Manish Jain) and trans-local learning (what happens when individual groups connect with other groups in their region or other places in the world).

From the Berkana website: “Each participant contributes to creating greater resilience in his or her own community through local action—from growing food to engaging youth to creating useful things out of waste. These pioneers are constantly experimenting with new approaches, ideas and technologies. When they connect regionally with others who share their culture and context, the capacity for learning and innovation accelerates.”

I am inspired by the description below on why regional learning communities matter (key phrases highlighted below that are strong communication points). I can see in it helpful framing for local networks, including one that I am supporting on sustainability in the Salt Lake Valley. The full document is really helpful for further stories, in this case featuring a South Africa Learning Collaborative.

“There is no universal solution for the challenges of poverty, community health, or ecological sustainability. But there is the possibility of widespread impact when people working at the local level are able to learn from one another, practice together, and share their learning with communities everywhere.”