Kitchen Table Talk -- a renewed clinical supervision experience

 

The Emerging Compassionate World -- by Drew Moore

The following piece is part of a larger piece written by Drew Moore. This is a speech given by a character in a novel he is writing. I loved what he was saying and wanted to share it. He happily obliged.

***

I should like to speak to you today on a concept that I like to call “The Emerging Compassionate World.” A world in which children are allowed to grow up in an atmosphere of love, dignity and respect, and are allowed a free range of expression of their humanity. Further that we who are charged with shepherding them are caught up with wonder and delight with our own existence.

I stand steadfast in my belief in this world, and believe beyond doubt that we, the collective humanity, are caught in the midst of that emergence. Think birth; at times ugly, even profane, yet powerful and unstoppable. We are not passive observers of this emergence, rather we are mid-wives, those who facilitate the very genesis of this world. So for today, and only for today, for that is all that I have, I stand in advocacy of something.

I am not advocating for the reduction or abolishment of anything. Absences lead to vacuums, and nature in his irreverence of us, tends to fill vacuums with that which we wanted eradicated in the first place. As well, to stand contrary to anything hinders the process by which The Emerging Compassionate World arrives.

I am calling for a filling in, a condensing, and compacting of qualities. Think saturation. Think of the experiments we did in our childhood where we created our own crystals. Double was our delight for not only did we experience the thrill of creating something out of nothing, that something was pretty and tasted good too. You remember, creating sugar crystals? It taught us about saturation.

We would take a pot, or a beaker, and after filling it with water we would heat it. As the water heated we would add sugar until the water was beginning to boil and the crystals no longer dissolved. Then we would allow the solution to cool, and add a catalyst, a thread, to which the sugar would solidify against.

I am talking a super-saturation, a saturation to the point where none else can exist. I am talking about a saturation of respect, love and dignity to the point where compassion crystallizes in spontaneous acts – no catalyst is required. These acts of compassion reverberate with acts of kindness and affection.

I believe that at this point in time, we stand at a precipice that allows us an opportunity to create such an environment. Never before, in all the annals of time, have we had the world so inter-related. Billions of people around the world have in their hand a device that transmits data in so many different ways that our commonality as one people has never been more realized than it is now. In other words, the environment required for supersaturating is ready, the water is heated.

What is required is the acceptance of three specific concepts. Rather, these concepts need to be embraced as if we were drowning people clasping our life saver; for we are. We need to embrace these concepts with much more vigour than we have grasped the concept that violence is an acceptable means to our ends.

These three concepts are easy to understand, the challenge is to live by them.

The first. There is no separation. We are not separate from each other, nor are we separate from our sisters the animals. You and I are the same being. When I look into your eyes, it is my own soul that I see. Any act towards you is an act towards myself, to heal one is to yourself and to heal all. In this concept lies the truth that there is no such thing as charity, to care for another is an act of self-nurturing.

Consider the poem “The Stream of Life” by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

We are where we are supposed to be, we stand in the middle of the presence of divinity, and she is all around us and in us and is infused in the very fibre of everything that is seen and unseen, felt and unfelt, known and unknown. There is no terrible rejection of us, there is no need to transcend to get back to being in her presence for we are already held comfortably in her lap. There is no favour to seek, no failure to overcome, no chasm to cross, there is no dread hereafter, there is only now.

The Second. You are insignificant. With the exception of a handful people no one waited with baited breath for your arrival. And with the exception of a different handful of people your passing will not be noted.

If you think significance is possible ask any child who Edward Jenner is? Or ask who Louis Pasteur? You might try, Galileo Galilei? Think Steve Jobs will be remember? Think again. Those who we do remember, we actually remember the person, maybe the accomplishment, but really we remember who they were for us.

You are no more significant, than the man down the street, the woman half way round the world, the child who plays. There is no attribute that makes one unique – regardless of age, race, religion, gender, weight, height, intelligence, and nationality we all fill the same role – the expression of her who created us.

The humour filled irony is, that when you embrace that you are insignificant you are then free to pursue the designs of your own heart. It is within this freedom that great accomplishments come to pass.

If you seek significance, seek it in the handful of people who surround you now. For it is the handfuls of people that we are truly known, loved and appreciated.

The third. Our morality, must be based on our being elicited to serve each other and to live in joy. This compelling is not through force or threat of punishment but is an irresistible response to the world around us; think salmon spawning; think of our bodies responding to the beat of music; think of our desire for sex. We are driven from within to action.

In embracing my responsibility, there are no lesser thans or greater thans. The role I play is no less or more important than yours, regardless of how many or few people can do each. At its core is the recognition that I can only be as content as we can be.

Our response to the wrongs of others? A compassionate out pouring of support to come back to the innocence that we were born possessing us. An understanding that she who picks up weapons is inclined to cut only her own hand.

Rhizome and Gift Exchange -- Ideas that Recreate Worlds

This is a piece I wrote recently as a summary of a book chapter I am preparing. However, I like the way it stands on its own. I think it provides a quick and clean description of rhizome and gift-exchange.

***

Christopher Kinman introduces certain processes that he sees as providing new promise and possibility to all of our current social realms -- whether those might be family life, friendship, community, business, and the various political structures we have, such as cities, nations and international organizations. Christopher discusses two metaphors which he sees as offering great promise to all of these realms. These two metaphors are rhizome and gift-exchange.

Rhizome reminds us that everything good and enlivening that happens to us, no matter what social contexts we are connected to, happens within relationships, within vast networks of relationship. Rhizome includes all those connections that bind us in our present time, real-life engagements – no relation is considered unimportant. Rhizome also includes those connections that precede us, the relations that provide legacies for our current movements. Rhizome also includes those relations that are not yet, those that are still to come. And these rhizome networks are not limited to relations between people, but also include connections with animals, geographies and landscapes, technologies, ideas, histories, spiritual relations, etc.

The second metaphor is certainly connected to the idea of rhizome. It is the gift-exchange. Christopher sees gift-exchange as an idea that reminds us of how life-affirming things and actions move throughout our social realms. The goods we receive, the positive outcomes we welcome, the loves we cherish, all these things come to us through lines of innumerable gifts. The movements of gifts abound in all social realms, not just human realms, and these gifts are too numerous to list. Gifts are given and received through gestures, through words, through objects, through creative processes. All day and every day we are in the midst of gift-exchanges. Our sense of Aliveness is connected to such gift-exchanges.

Christopher suggests that understanding rhizome and gift-exchange sets the stage for the creation of many real and pragmatic possibilities within our worlds. He goes as far as to suggest that these ideas contain the seeds of possibility that can address our most challenging world difficulties.

Rhizome and Gift Exchange -- Ideas that Recreate Worlds

This is a piece I wrote recently as a summary of a book chapter I am preparing. However, I like the way it stands on its own. I think it provides a quick and clean description of rhizome and gift-exchange.

***

Christopher Kinman introduces certain processes that he sees as providing new promise and possibility to all of our current social realms -- whether those might be family life, friendship, community, business, and the various political structures we have, such as cities, nations and international organizations. Christopher discusses two metaphors which he sees as offering great

promise to all of these realms. These two metaphors are rhizome and gift-exchange.

Rhizome reminds us that everything good and enlivening that happens to us, no matter what social contexts we are connected to, happens within relationships, within vast networks of relationship. Rhizome includes all those connections that bind us in our present time, real-life engagements – no relation is considered unimportant. Rhizome also includes those connections that precede us, the relations that provide legacies for our current movements. Rhizome also includes those relations that are not yet, those that are still to come. And these rhizome networks are not limited to relations between people, but also include connections with animals, geographies and landscapes, technologies, ideas, histories, spiritual relations, etc.

The second metaphor is certainly connected to the idea of rhizome. It is the gift-exchange. Christopher sees gift-exchange as an idea that reminds us of how life-affirming things and actions move throughout our social realms. The goods we receive, the positive outcomes we welcome, the loves we cherish, all these things come to us through lines of innumerable gifts. The movements of gifts abound in all social realms, not just human realms, and these gifts are too numerous to list. Gifts are given and received through gestures, through words, through objects, through creative processes. All day and every day we are in the midst of gift-exchanges. Our sense of Aliveness is connected to such gift-exchanges.

Christopher suggests that understanding rhizome and gift-exchange sets the stage for the creation of many real and pragmatic possibilities within our worlds. He goes as far as to suggest that these ideas contain the seeds of possibility that can address our most challenging world difficulties.

Laura Calderon de la Barca -- Towards the Ordinary and the Overlooked

A Forward to the Book "Pilgrimages of the Gift" by Christopher Kinman

Book available at: http://rhizomeway.com/site/?page_id=687

I met Chris – a story teller of gifts of the Alive, and a weaver of life-honouring relationships. I met him, as he might say: once upon a rhizome. He welcomed me to his world within an open heart, a place for the exploration of all things human and alive. This welcoming began in 2007 at a small gathering, a conference he organized in Vancouver, focusing on the future of the helping professions.

I made my way to this event through unexpected connections that arose between us. I heard about the event through Harlene Anderson (Houston, Texas). I had personally witnessed Harlene’s capacity to discover ways of being with others that welcomed inspiration, authenticity and openness. I suspected I might find some of this same inspiration at the gathering Chris was organizing. I was not disappointed. At the time, I was waiting for the examiners of my PhD thesis to submit their report. The rather unusual theme of the thesis, a therapeutic session for a pretty complex client, Mexico, my country of origin, won me a place in the meeting. Chris contacted me and we arranged for my attendance. So it was that during those beautiful sunny days in November, overlooking the breath-taking, snow-capped mountains and Vancouver skyline from the Vancouver Rowing Club’s Trophy Room, I heard him speak -- inspired by Gregory Bateson and his understanding of the Creatura -- about the world of the Alive.

The ideas he spoke of that day, and that he shares with us in this book are not bare abstractions. They come in flesh and blood as we experience the moments of the Alive inexorably associated with them. I have been moved not only by these ideas and their possibilities, but by the actual connections that were brought to life in conversations first with Chris and then with his book.

It is in this sense that Chris seems to me a story-teller. The things he talks about have names, have occurred in specific contexts, in particular times. These things can only be grasped through their embodiment in the material world. And yet, there is something in the way they are animate that inspires reverence, and that seems somehow to paradoxically transcend time precisely by being grounded in it -- from the rushed atmospheric dynamics that create sounds of wind in the trees to the time-worn crustacean shells that create a beach.

As can be seen throughout the book, Chris sees, with Christopher Alexander, ‘the Alive’ as connected to both nature and creative actions: we are part of the creative creatura, us humans; but we don’t own creation. As we become present to our relatedness to the rest of creation, a certain intensity comes to life, ‘a thickening of feeling’, as Chris would say, through which the Alive enters, opens up, opening us up. And through this we can find ourselves in ‘joint creations in cooperation with the moments of a living world’.

As I follow the book, it becomes clear to me that these creations occupy us as music occupies notes. Each of us is, in this game of creation, a note; singular and beautiful, but insufficient to make music, as Chris wisely points out (p. 89). The music of creation is only available if we surrender to something larger than our individual selves. And in the book, Chris beautifully demonstrates how to be a part of this music: by truly being with others; that is, by offering ourselves as witnesses to the becomings of the world, allowing ourselves to respond to them and making our response known.

In that sense, Chris’ story-telling of the Alive doesn’t just happen through narrative. Story-telling often requires a conclusion, a point to be made, a lesson, an evaluation. Chris’ stories are not like that. As the abundance he writes about, he has little interest in judgment. His stories do not offer to take you anywhere better, or to go and change anything. And it is precisely in letting go of that attempt that they move you, they change you. For these stories are sharings, a bringing-back of moments when he was present to something Alive, something that touched him and made him Alive. His words take us with him, to become witnesses of the Alive in the becomings of the world, to be found in the most apparently random locations: in a little boy’s combusting squiggle, in economies riding on the wing of a gull, in the visual beauty of a swarm of gnats, in the fragile companionship of a generous rabbit, or in the ephemeral touch of a child’s hand, his own child. And, regarding this touch, in the awareness of the possibility of the absence of this touch’s, its barest grazing unleashes in him ‘that roar which lies on the other side of silence’, as George Elliot would say, moving him, and myself with him, to tears as I become aware of the Alive in me, as I, childless, feel the loss nevertheless... or maybe because of it.

The Alive is not made present in Chris’s words alone, it also comes forth in his images. The knack he has for catching life unaware is evident in his pictures, in the gentleness apparent in the lick of the puma, the purple beauty of a partially crushed oyster, slowly becoming a beach, or the easy companionship of Pessoa’s friends in the café in Lisbon. He has tenderly intimated with the Alive, offering it his openness and sensitivity, and finding in return that it reveals itself to him in the overlooked and the ordinary. Sharing his findings with us, Chris offers us in passing a glimpse of what we might find if we cross our own doorway to the other side of silence. Enjoy the roar.

Laura Calderón de la Barca

Vancouver, BC; Mexico City

An Aphorism -- On Thought

Thought is not generated inside a skull, it cherishes no friendship with the emptiness of interiority.

Thought emerges in the midst of engagement with a world -- with innumerable worlds.

Thought is that which oozes between the abundances of bodies, that which squeezes between complexities of relations.

On Becomings

Deleuze, following Nietzsche, talks of becomings. I wish to continue in that flow.

I wish to talk of becomings rather than change. I wish to talk of becomings rather than established truths or determined states.

No beginnings, no endings -- just flows, perpetual movements.

No beginnings, no endings -- always in the middle of things.

In the middle -- between times more than at a point in time; never concerned with providing firm resolution to difference; never in a central and fixed location.

We do not have any surety of where becomings will lead us, but we can, from within our rhizome connections, create imaginations regarding how these becomings might be transforming us and others. Such imaginations are powerful creative forces (though not concerned with accuracy or predictability) and must never be trivialized.

Becomings – Nature and People

Becomings are not about a person/organism manipulating life and surroundings for the purpose of ensuring a determined outcome.

No, instead it is more likely we find ourselves carried by, even living out the desires of... becomings.

Particular becomings.

Becomings are best understood not as abstract generalities (i.e. becoming generous, becoming strong, becoming responsible) but as becoming a specificity, an image, a name (becoming animal, becoming woman, becoming river, becoming sea, becoming child, becoming eagle, becoming Buddha, becoming Christ, becoming godless, becoming... ).

I wish to talk of the becomings we are connected to as intimately associated with the becomings of nature. I wish to see our human worlds as indistinct from nature. I wish to see our becomings as sharing much in common with the constant becomings emerging within the grass, the rivers, the trees, amidst the lives of birds, fish, insects...

We know, of course, that the language we give to nature often invites separations – nature/culture; natural/artificial; natural/human -- dualisms that can set the stage for numerous violations and violences.

Yet, we still wish to talk of nature. We wish to see ourselves connected to those vast becomings wherein all life moves.

Rhizome Becomings

Becomings are always rhizome events, can be nothing but communal.

Individuals never determine and construct their own becomings. While we can easily delude ourselves with language, we can never truly be separate from the diversities of life.

As individual organisms we can give creative energy to our becomings, but that which is created is never simply the product of our own actions, it is never something over which we can individually claim ownership.

The initiation of becomings is also never an act of individual powers. Life initiates incessant becomings; they can go unnoticed, they can be purposely ignored, but they also can grasp us, even sweep us off our feet.

Becomings connect us to new worlds. They create repeated innovations, including new and renewed rhizome community.

Becomings and Negation

These becomings which we experience do not emerge from negation processes.

Now, clearly, negations surround us. Out of force of habit, we repeatedly participate in them. Negations are all too often engrained in our thought. They appear integral to the very structure of our lives.

We are led to believe that change only emerge by means of bravely coming face-to-face with negations. We are told that if we discover what is wrong with us, if we acknowledge what is wrong with us and if we then make changes based on such learnings we will accomplish our required redemption.

However, in life I see very little of this. Negations are far more likely to create reactive negations in response -- negations triggering further rounds of negations. Or they are likely to create a depressive paralysis, an immobility that breeds further depressive negations, that leads toward a sense of falling-backwards.

There seems to be a significant tie between those experiences we see as depression and worlds dominated by varied and incessant negations. Reactive and negative forces tend to glorify depression. These forces inform us that it is necessary to bear the burdens of one's errors, to repeatedly be reminded of the pain of one's sins – this is often thought of as a requisite for the journey towards a healed life.

Negation is part of the age–old tradition of sin/redemption. In this tradition our connections to the natural world swarming around us are condemned. Such connections were historically considered "pagan" and undesirable. In the dominions of fall/redemption we are informed of our sinfulness, of our transgressions against, not imminent forces around us in our lived world, but forces transcendent to life, forces far beyond everything that is nature. We are also informed of the requisite transcendent mechanisms which are able to redeem us. People are thereby pulled away from nature, from the forces of life, and become dependent upon the transcendent worlds of redemption. Such ideas of transcendent redemption become firmly established and ordained within modern religious and secular institutions.

A further note on the idea of redemption: as Deleuze aptly suggested, we must learn to live life and not save it.

Entering the Becomings

While we as individuals are not the architects of our own becomings there are actions that we can engage in.

However, as tempting as it might be, I refrain from detailing here such responses. Detailed suggestions coming from outside the specificity of the flows of a rhizome life are likely to fall somewhere between useless and damaging.

We all bring to life creative powers in abundance. Responses will appear to all of us who:

· affirm the creativity that life has bestowed upon us;

· resist the influences of negation which repeatedly attempt to keep us from creativity and action;

· appreciate and affirm the rhizome relations in which our lives are embedded.

The challenge for us is to learn how to determine which response to give, not to determine if there is a response.

What can we do, beyond providing detailed instruction?

· We can dare to put aside the influences of negation.

· We can affirm and respond to life, immanent life; affirm and respond to life as it moves amongst bodies (human and otherwise); respond to the endless complexities that life produces.

· We can create things, with others, with nature as a partner and leader.

· We can create rhizome words that engender relations with many and diverse bodies and, therein, many powerful becomings.

· We can enter with the grass and the trees, the grasshopper and the crow, those unmanaged and joyful realms of becoming.

Re-Imagining Life and Time -- Gilles Deleuze and Brian Eno

The Experimentations of Brian Eno

Brian Eno -- musician, collaborator, producer, musical experimenter -- has recently found his interest focussed on the artistic image. Using his long experience with sound experimentation, Eno now experiments with images that move and shift, constantly recreating, never repeatable. A new show where he highlights these experiments is generating intense interest, it is called 77 Million Paintings.

In this art-form Eno introduces a new idea about time into the concept of image or painting. Not simply the implication of movement in a still image, but images that actually constantly morph, constantly generate new forms. It also introduces an art which is not dependent upon the artist for a distinct and specific form, but rather the artist is involved in a process which in turn creates art-forms in movement, in constant becomings. This is a radicalization of art, where art is no longer the gift of a single person, but more like a process of nature, a generator of beauty that is not dependent upon the artist, but not removed from the artist either.

Eno also introduces another twist on art-in-process. Eno creates music which is set to the images of life-in-process. Images move in ways parallel to real-time, in rhythms connected to the flows of time nature creates. Not dependent upon narrative inventions, just the flows of time and life. A forest which simply morphs through seasons. A tree by a river, moving through days and months.

Gilles Deleuze and Brian Eno

I find much resonance between Eno's visual and auditory experiments and the various conceptions of time and life created by Deleuze.

Outside of Narrative

Deleuze presents concepts which invite a view of life and time not structured so much by narrative or other traditional inventions for seeing and organizing time. These concepts invite appreciation for and engagements with the many possibilities for the movements of life in the process-of-life.

Complex Relations

A quick note on Deleuze's thinking on life. He creates ways of seeing that evade all simplistic description.

For Deleuze life:

• evades categorization,
• is always connected to diversities,
• is engaging in constant movements,
• generates unpredictable futures,
• and is always tied together through numerous lines of relationship.

A Generative Process

Deleuze does not invite a copying of nature, not a forming of structures that simply replicate what we have come to believe about how nature operates, but he calls for the creation of ideas, concepts and ways of life that connect us to the endless possible movements of life. To re-emphasize -- this is a generative, creative process that creates much more than ideas and words, it creates new possibilities of relationship with the diversities of life itself.

Next Posting -- Becomings and Rhizome

Two ideas Deleuze presents that illustrate such connections to life are "Becomings," and "Rhizome."

I will explore these two concepts in upcoming postings.

***

A final video. Brian Eno with Bono and The Edge.

The Opposite of a Morality of Salvation

Immersed with thoughts from Lawrence, Whitman and Spinoza, among others, Deleuze talks about the soul and the body.

The soul and the body, the soul is neither above nor inside, it is "with", it is on the road, exposed to all contacts, encounters, in the company of those who follow in the same way," feel with them, seize the vibration of their soul and their body as they pass", the opposite of a morality of salvation, teaching the soul to live its life, not to save it.

Deleuze, Dialogues, pge 62.

Let me repeat...

"Feel with them, seize the vibration of their soul and their body as they pass", the opposite of a morality of salvation, teaching the soul to live its life, not to save it,

The soul as described here is not a divine creation, a product of higher powers inserted inside a body. It is not aligned with either the interiorities or the individualisms of Western life. It is not about an inner life. The soul is outside us -- it is with us, with all we walk through life with.

As Lynn Hoffman would say, the idea of the soul creates a "withness" not an "aboutness." It does not reside above or within, it resides amongst.

The soul accompanies us, connects us to complex worlds of relations. And it connects us to the pragmatics of our movements in real geographies and ecologies.

Experiments with Gilles Deleuze

I have clearly been absent from regular posting on this blog for sometime now. This is not because certain ideas and ways of living are not moving me, or that the words are absent, but because the forms of creation that I have been driven to have altered from when I was regularly posting on this site.

However, I now want to return, but to do so with a particular and different focus. Recently I have been taken by an old passion -- that is the ideas created by French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. I want to experiment in this blog, at this point in time, with the thoughts of Deleuze, see where they might lead. I am not doing this out of a sense of discipleship, and certainly not from some sense of obligation.

It is more like a kind of exorcism, a desire to give my own form to these ideas, to address them, remove them from the vague, less-than-formed mass they feel to be right now. Remove them, create with them, and move on to some other ground...

I do not feel I am mining his thoughts, nor searching for an authentic author's voice for Deleuze. No, I want to let his ideas springboard to new places, let them create new ideas, actions, communal-relations, timely-constructions that assist in nudging and moving to productive places in life.

The Eagles are Satiated

The eagles are satiated
They only fly away when my
Proximity becomes
Absolutely intolerable

For they are
Drunk on the
Grease-crammed eyes of
Endless salmon

Stoned on fat
Omega three stained beaks
Blue oil soaks the sand
Pulled by gravity
To the river

Running from layers
Of scattered vertebrae
Jawbones
Hollowed eye sockets
Colourless skin
Cartilage

Fat fleeing everything

That the eagles and gulls
Would not stomach

And from all of this abundance
Of skin and bones and oil

Overwhelming life
Endless tomorrows

Thinking about Charity and Gift-Exchange

It’s the Christmas season again, a time of year when we are called to focus upon those people who we consider less fortunate than ourselves. We are called to give from our own wealth to those who are perceived as lacking or in-need. We are repetitively informed that it is the season for such an approach to giving..

However...

***

• Charity is no gift-exchange.

• In a gift-exchange we are giving in response to gifts already given, we enter into an emerging game of reciprocity.

• The gift is always in response to an encounter with abundance.

• The gift-exchange pays little interest in need or lack – that is the work of charity.

• We all-too-often talk as if the world needs more charity, more people giving to other people who are lacking and in need.

• I argue we do not require more charity.

• We must resist the belief that human lives are empty and lacking.

• Instead, we must see human lives as rich and full – understanding that this fullness is not always an easy thing, sometimes it can also be a source of pain.

• We take on the responsibility of bearing witness to our own experience of the fullness in human lives, and in life in general.

• And we take on the responsibility of creating meaningful, enlivening and specific response to our encounters with such abundance.

• Such responses are always unique... they never can be truly scripted or anticipated.

• We respond to a unique and irreplaceable presentation of a particular act of giving within a complex rhizome world.

• We respond to the abundance of others, not to lack and poverty.

***

• Such an emphasis on gift-exchange does not at all minimize the horrors of poverty.

• On the contrary, poverty is tragic and reprehensible precisely because it repeatedly minimizes the gifts circulating within human lives and worlds.

• Our response to poverty is actually not a response to poverty at all -- it is a response to the gifts circulating within the lives and worlds of those people we are engaged with.

• And, our response to such a circulation of gifts is not limited to emotions such as gratitude, but might call forth any number of responses, including actions of anger which emerge upon the understanding that the circulation of these gifts might be minimized and limited.

Creating a Relational Work - Part II

Life and Work through Image: Bill Reid and The Spirit of Haida Gwaii.

To access: Creating a Relational Work - Part I, click here.

We are all too often led to believe that in order to give understanding and direction to life and work we are in need of the appropriate words. We are taught that it is in language that we are supposed to discover truth, meaning, instruction, enlightenment – it is hard to envisage any other way. However, I am here inviting an exploration of life and work through an encounter with an image.

In the international departures area of the Vancouver International Airport there is a large bronze statue created by the late Haida sculptor, Bill Reid. It is called The Spirit of Haida Gwaii -- it is sometimes also called the Jade Canoe. This image is also found on the Canadian twenty-dollar bill.

I will let Lynn Hoffman introduce you to this work of art (she first encountered The Spirit of Haida Gwaii in another location, not the airport):

Another feature of this work was a strong communal presence. During a break in my workshop, which was being held in Vancouver, a person in the audience took me into a room filled with green light. There, in the midst of ficus trees and bamboo, was an astonishing object. It was a greenish bronze canoe, half the size of the room, and in it a variety of totemic animals were struggling with each other: the raven with the bear, the wolf with the eagle, the crow with the dog, while half-human creatures like the Dogfish Woman, or the Bear Mother, paddled, watched over by the sombre Village Chief with his temple-shaped hat. I learned that this was the achievement of a sculptor called Bill Reid, who was himself descended from First Nations people. In this work, titled “The Spirit of the Haida Gwai,” Reid represented himself as the Ancient Conscript, paddling along with the rest.

Click here to access Hoffman's entire document.

No words are necessary as we encounter this image. However, for many of us who see The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, who walk around it, who examine each detail and crevice, who touch the cool smoothness of those bronze creatures, we find that words cannot be escaped. For words are inevitably evoked, created in response to experiencing this creation. I will briefly share a few words that emerge through my own encounter with the The Spirit of Haida Gwaii:

• Life is almost always full, abundant, even crowded.

• The living of life can never escape a diversity of characters and relationships.

• Some of that diversity which elbows through our worlds includes relationships with animals -- animals are people too (and, of course, people are animals too)!

• We never move anywhere on our own through life, it is forever a communal event. The idea of individualism is simply a deceit – that emperor wears no clothes.

• Our movements through life are never direct and pure. There are always bumps and obstacles to be encountered.

• Our relationships in life are also never pure and free from conflict. There will always be a sense of clumsiness associated with our relationships, and, if we linger long enough in our looking, we will always find that somebody is biting somebody else.

• Yet, through it all, we somehow together manage to paddle that canoe, and (again -- if we linger long enough) we will repeatedly be confronted with a sense of fullness and even joy in our movements through life.

Lynn Hoffman - Cloudwork

Reading the following piece by Lynn Hoffman is like joining into the midst of an ongoing conversation, the reader is not necessarily party to to the prior conversation pieces. Rather than attempting to create an introduction that would provide adequate context for what is written, I decided to leave it the way it is. Just suffice it to know that this piece was written by Lynn to be read (by another person) at the occasion of her 85th birthday celebration.

In this short piece, Lynn (in a manner that has been so typical of her entire career) draws together strands of thought and work, creating a rhizome space which both honours and generates relationship. Also, in the context of such relationships, we are able to gain a richer understanding of the work we are engaged in.

***

Peggy, Sarah (I remember you!), Bonnie, Kevin – Your responses filled me like a helium balloon, and I have to tether myself to keep from going off into the wide blue yonder. This is very bouncy stuff.

First let me address the question about why I chose those Pillars of Wisdom. They stand for our special Ancestors who recently died: Harry, Tom and Michael. I give each a memory phrase: “not knowing” for Harry Goolishian (of course, Harlene Anderson first described its genesis); “reflecting team” for Tom Andersen, which is what he and his followers became famous for; and “witnessing,” which Michael White added. Even though Michael took the format of the reflecting team from Tom, the idea of “witnessing” enlarged it, allowing him to bring in an anthropological perspective based on the work of the American researcher Barbara Meyerhoff, who had shown the healing effect that ritualized remembrances have on the lives of uprooted persons.

I also connect the Ancestor concept with Bruce Chatwin’s “The Song Lines,” which describes the walkabouts that Australian aborigines take to familiarize themselves with landscapes or creatures that are part of their history. They call these Ancestors, and make amazing pointillist pictures of them, with names like Lizard Dreaming. While walking they will sing a song describing what “lines” or pathways the Ancestor stood for.

Sarah, thanks for pointing out how puzzled people with psychology or social work backgrounds feel when reading works by people who don’t tell you “how.” It sounds like Alice, who threw the whole deck up in the air at the end of Wonderland, saying, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards?” Yes, but then how do you play the game?

For this reason, I have always been interested in close study of practices. Ellen Landis, a dance therapist, is getting a doctorate in Expressive Arts Therapy at Leslie College, and has transcribed six workshop meetings with therapists who work with traumatized people, first giving them a questionnaire on Compassion Fatigue and then repeating it at the end. In most of the sessions, Ellen brought in art materials: bits of cloth, colored paper, stars, which she asked the group to use in expressing their reactions, whether to the questionnaire, or to the situations they worked with. The meetings had an unusually positive effect on people, even though the last one ended with disappointment (a mild social action piece that was left to the end and seemed to wither on the vine). Ellen and I taped conversations about each session, trying to see what Ellen did that was special.

In her workshops, Ellen also used an exercise that we called “Sharevision,” a practice that was born at People’s Bridge Action in Athol where I worked as a consultant [not] during the 80s and 90s. I came once a month, and on the off weeks, the staff met without a supervisor in “pods.” The group later developed a time-map for these meetings, and the name was self-evident. In Ellen’s workshop, participants alternated between the meetings with Ellen and Sharevision meetings on their own. These meetings went so well that everyone was amazed.

As for Sarah’s mention of ideas about body, this has been a perpetual interest of mine. I became fascinated by Gregory Bateson’s research on communication which lacks a way to say “No,” like the speech of schizophrenics, the “language of the creatura,” the realms of humor, art, religion, metaphors, dreams, illness. After vainly trying to find a phrase that would nail the phenomenon in question, I ended up with the “Unlisted Languages.”

You ask about “Empathy.” Well, I tried to make it “Tempathy,” for Travelling Empathy. (see “Family Therapy: An Intimate History.”) I was not satisfied with the within-person idea but wanted to make it more like resonance, which is not “inside” anyone but is picked up variously, as whales pick up the sonar dimensions of their ocean-to-ocean habitat. It is the responses or echoes, not just the individual beeps, that count. What would “Sonar Practices” be like as a category of therapy?

I agree about Seikkula’s use of the love word, but that is a byproduct, and I would like to see what goes into that general effect – what the sonar of it is. Mary Olson did a nice paper with Seikkula on Open Dialogue, which I will ask her about.

Bonnie, nice example of being a telepath - like Sookie Stackhouse on Trueblood. But it is hard work for mere mortals. I use the Big Beach metaphor: the waves may be fierce, but even after a storm the beach will usually still be there, and you may find a new and interesting pebble or shell.

It’s true that models and structures exist for the comfort of the therapist, but if you have too many ropes or monkey bars, they can turn on you. Which bar or rope should I grab first?

And Kevin, I really like your so-called “mistakes.” Now Knowing is important. It cuts off the higher layers that get in the way, like “What if?” Seeing withness as witness is also useful – they go together. And the “contact improv” analogy is maybe more accurate than “conversation” for what we do. I think that text, conversation, written or spoken, is beginning to drop away as a guiding notion – that’s why I use the image of underground rivers, and more recently “cenotes,” the subterranean pools under the surface of the ground in places in Mexico.

As for Seikkula and Co’s break-through study of Open Dialogue, I love their emphasis on creating a common language rather than drawing a diagnosis out of an antique box. Redefining the goal as preventing chronicity, rather than suppressing symptoms is another great idea. Seikkula works with the whole ecology, in the service of creating a “sustaining web.” What is my definition of that? A setting where people can feel “more safe, more free, and more alive.”

I want to mention here a useful counter-practice invented by Chris Kinman who works with in indigenous communities in Vancouver. He came up with the idea of a “Collaborative Action Plan” instead of the “Problem-Oriented Record.” Question One: What gifts and potentials can this young person bring to the community? Question Two: What gifts and potentials can the community bring to the young person? Question Three: What are the Roadblocks that stand in the way of both? Tested on the public health nurses working in the Fraser River Valley, this change made life radically better for the front-line nurses, the university teachers, some of the bureaucrats, and all of the clients.

The ideas above are part of what I call the ˝Gutenberg Century” - the effect of a new technology on everybody’s ways of thinking and doing. If, as I suspect, the Internet is changing our ruling metaphor, which has been the System, we must leave unit-linked ideas like individual or family or ethnic group, and start looking at the connectivity suggested by certain kinds of Webs. The Internet can’t do web-building on its own, (witness the problems with MySpace or Facebook, or the aboutface by Wikipedia) but we should put our minds to this.

Cloud Computing stands for universal access, for better or for worse. Building Webs is the social must-do of the present. So are ideas about rhizomes. If we take seriously Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s warning against “arborescence,” the hierarchical tree-shape that imprints our current institutions, then why not take the Rhizome as a counter-concept? It will help us begin to see the pluses and minuses ahead.

The Ancestors who are part of my Songlines -Harry Goolishian, Tom Andersen, Michael White - were among the pioneers who already were playing with concepts of connectivity like webs and clouds. Then there are horizontal visions like the rhizome metaphor of Deleuze and Guattari, or Tom Friedman’s “The World is Flat.” Another work questioning our fetish for hierarchy is called “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations,” by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom.

Finally, there is Chris Kinman’s beautiful self-printed essay: “Territories of the Alive: Nature, Community and the Gift.” Website: christopherkinman.blogspot.com.

To summarize, I am experimenting with new terms like Web-Building, Cloud-work, Sonar Practices, Kinman’s “The Rhizome Way.” “Sharevision” is another concept that fits. A number of philosophers like Mikhail Bakhtin, J.F. Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have been our heralds and soothsayers, and Gregory Bateson was the first to see as basic the evolutionary unit of creature and natural world. Nothing is congealed yet - we are still taking the measurement of the changes that are engulfing us - but we have a chance to fill the new mold while the metal still runs hot.