Posts tagged with "process"

A good place to start

Its only 6 weeks since we all became friends in Knoydart but it feels like so much longer. Such a close bond formed in a long weekend. Then we have all been rushing around madly in our real lives and now here we are back together again. We all headed to Glen Tilt from across Scotland meeting up as we got nearer. Getting more and more excited until we were all on the train together at Perth and then into the mini-bus at Pitlochry. The autumn colours dominating the landscape more and more as we neared our destination. Even the driver was so keen to share the beauty with us he managed to drive into a ditch whilst pointing out a waterfall.

I’m quite anxious as well as excited though. This time together is so out of the norm of rushing around, deadlines, targets, outputs, relationships, responsibilities. It is such a privilege to have been given permission to slow down and reflect but it’s a big mental shift.

 A simple question when we all meet- how have you all been since Knoydart? I feel overwhelmed

So, it’s out with the big pad of paper and the coloured pens. People want to know what we are hoping to achieve, are we going to make a difference? How then? It so lucky to have freedom and licence to explore and express our passions. All those conversations, you longed for. Strong themes of commonality emerge for the problems of social and environmental injustice but can such a “self-indulgent” process as this go any way to improving anything? Trauma keeps coming up, trauma that needs to be acknowledged before progress can be made. There is a feeling of real change in the group, some more dramatic than others, often subtle but it’s mostly about self. It’s a good place to start.

The eternal rhythm

Kazantzakis writes:

‘I remember one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the back of a tree just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited awhile, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened; the butterfly started slowly crawling out, and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath, in vain.

It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.

That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm’

What is happening with us in this project is a powerful process 

a gestation.

It can’t be rushed. 

It needs nourishment, protection

love

And with these conditions 

it will grow

and unfold

in its own time.

The river awe

What a great name!  I live right next to the Awe and walk down there most days.  Recently with the rain we’ve had it was in spate - it rose at least a meter and was roaring down to the sea in a huge unstopable flow.  Watching the river was mesmerising and dizzying, and it filled me with energy.  It is back to its normal state now, and i went down it yesterday in my canoe, accompanied by dippers, looking at the marks high on the banks where it had been.

I have been thinking a lot about the flow of life, letting go, and it seems that rivers have been making their presence felt a lot in the last month.  I’ve been reflecting on letting things go through me (perhaps throwing in a new current), rather than me stopping them, trying to hold them back.  Part of it has to do with the constant onward flow of energy and ecology - it would be painful and pointless to resist the awe in full flood.

Returning home for me threw up a new realisation: working away so much in the wilds, i always struggle coming home, and i’ve come to realise that my day dreams about living in the places i work are partly about resisting that process of ‘leaving behind.’  I am committed to Taynuilt, the place where i live, but i realise that i have been leaving a lot of myself in the places where i work, and not really letting them go.

Reading through my research notes, and everyone’s blogs prior to reengageing with the group and the project next week has been great.  I felt like i was taking up the threads again reading everyones words, and seeing all the pictures.  What was clear to me as well, was the inexorable flow of the process - how far we have floated together.  And where will we fetch up?

Reflection on the process so far

My dream on the first night feels like a pattern for the process that’s started to evolve.

The day before everyone arrived, we spent time preparing, starting to build the container to hold the process.

Everyone  arrived. Suddenly, there was lots of energy – at full strength, all firing about in different directions.

As  the weekend developed, the energy that was firing about gradually started to come together and to move in a powerful circle, generating understanding and compassion.

What’s important?

In this project I think one of the most important things has been (and will continue to be) vital to this project’s evolution is maintaining a loose frame, not controlling too tightly or forcing the process. There is a chronic danger in our culture, and sometimes in my comfort zone, of over-defining, over controlling and setting very specific targets and outcomes. The participants, all probably used to being well informed, thoroughly briefed and often in positions of leadership each took bit of a leap into the dark by taking part in the project. I am deeply impressed by their courage and openness.  When individually invited they were purposely not told who else was taking part or exactly what the project workshops would entail. I wonder if they would have taken part if we had described the processes and practice in detail at the outset?

Yet now they are on board do they honestly appear like they have any regrets about taking part?  Certainly there seems to be process of change happening…

Motto:

Patience

Patience

Patience

First night

I’ve found a piece of driftwood on the beach. As I carve it, it turns into a sea otter. I think of the sea otter – how she lives in the water and on the land. Feels like my work at the moment – being alive to underwater currents and staying grounded.

Choose an object to look at – for example, a tree.

First of all, put the focus of your awareness right into the tree. See what it feels like.

Then, bring the focus of your awareness right into the centre of your body – still looking at the tree. See what that feels like.

Finally, let your awareness come into the space in between. Notice what that feels like.

It’s hard to write a narrative when I’m immersed in this process or immersed in the landscape. If my awareness is just on the landscape, I can describe it. If my awareness is just in myself, I can describe it. It’s harder in the space in between.

curled round

a neural tube

unfolding

lost pathways

silver essence

blind endings

an ancient face

a goat’s face

a sea monster

silver over grey

all the threads of our lives

enfolded

burrowed deep

curled warm

in this tiny container

we trust

it will hold 

Return

Sharing stories of the journey

Dropping into a deeper circle.

Rites of Passage

What we lack as adults today in western society is a form of rites of passage with a focus into ourselves, our ecological selves, our role in the world, what it means to be human and all the responsibility that entails.

Yet scratch the surface of the “modern consumer” and in evolutionary terms our instinctual, “primitive” or indigenous selves (which may be at least partially defined as living in harmony with nature, co-existing in community, without greed or plain “sustainable”) lie just below our skin.

I think the scratching of this surface by creating a modern, relevant, rites of passage in community and then passing that on, forms the backbone of this project.

The process is perhaps, necessarily, culturally specific in its approach but the themes that emerge will likely be universal human themes. My intention is that this approach, these thoughts, ideas, journeys and experiences in all their diversity are freely available through this website. The hope is that by reading the personal journals in the blogs and witnessing a process unfurl, you might find something that chimes with you, that you identify with and that in some form, at some time, you might want to take forward.

Where did the project idea come from?

fruits to seeds...

WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM?

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

Two questions I get asked all the time about the project that I’ll try to answer, at least in part…

BUT the answer to the second question really lies in the process of the project over the coming months. “It’s all about” how the process of this project affects the people taking part, how it changes the way they look at the world (theirs and others), how it changes the way they act and behave and also how they influence others’ to change. Of course we can talk about sustainable behaviour change but that must be the least inspiring combination of unimaginative words known in our language. I think it is more about the art of living, the creation and finding of meaning, rediscovering ourselves and what it means to be a human being alive in  2008 facing the pressures that we all face, yet finding that underneath our skins lies a unifying thread of humanity. Lofty ideals? Perhaps. But without lifting ourselves up to some noble aspirations, taking full responsibility and truthfully facing ourselves and where we come from as a species how can we genuinely hope to create a powerful vision of the next century for future generations of any species?

 So where did the idea for this project come from?

Well, like all ideas it is an amalgamation of thoughts, approaches, experiences, needs, creative process and partnerships. From my own perspective I can trace the birth of the idea back to about eighteen months ago when I was working up campaign and communication ideas for sustainable lifestyles for WWF and co-incidentally went on a WWF personal effectiveness course. There I was given an article called “For An Ecology of the Heart” that I will try to find for this blog. It was from Resurgence magazine, a magazine that I had (perhaps surprisingly) never heard of before, let alone read.

As soon as I read the words in “For An Ecology of the Heart” I was thrown into a storm of ideas and excitement – here, at last, was someone eloquently saying some of the things that I had been thinking and fumbling with for a while but had not yet found the means to express. I wondered if WWF could combine some form of these ideas with personal development approaches, communicate the concepts far wider and INSPIRE people to “sustainability” through a reconnection with nature and what it means to be human. For this communications project to work it would be far better to take real, interesting people on a journey spread over some time and for them to communicate it themselves. I believe there is nothing more powerful or affecting than personal experience. This led me on a personal quest to discover more about an inspiring and relatively unknown approach that combined art, nature, spirituality and psychology that I discovered mainly came under the name of eco psychology. Six months later I took part in the incredible eco therapy course run by Dave Key and Mary-Jayne Rust, upon which much of this project’s design and process is based (read Dave Key’s blog on here).

The intention is that we communicate as widely as possible about this project and research the process. The range of people taking part and the amount of time they will be thinking and creating should lead to some fascinating blogs (and potentially lifechanging experiences). For some of the blog readers the ideas and experience will resonate, for others it will leave them cold, but what this project won’t do is just leave people not knowing that this approach exists.  And just maybe…it could even create genuine, lasting change.