As you consider Tom's original calling question, how has your sense of what we have to be and do shifted or developed?
Tom's calling question: What do we, as members of the dialogue and deliberation community of practice, have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems?
Collaborative Notes
Bruce: Image of the circle of the sun goddess with the meditative goddess and Ben's image of the fungi...for me, they symbolize
something profound and simply: integration and how we are coming together and the free association/random interconnectiveness of the fungi going in every direction. The huge creative tension that exists with the all of these spores and the tendancy to try to summarize it and hold it in some sort of top/down vision...quite a tension. Forced into the integral form that holds it can be fixed by the mycelium because we are listening for them. There is a tendancy to think of top/down and bottom up...a natural way of seeing things, but there is an integral way of looking at this...a tree form is a natural integrator. A tree allows us to go in many differenct directions. No commond ground necessarily is established. Finding myself being compelled into this integral form. We need some way of converging...
Bruce: Thanks for the good notes. I have started putting some notes together that go over these points, particularly emphasizing the vision of the Lakota Sioux Holy Man Black Elk(1863-1950), who offered a great vision of"The Hoop of the Nation"-- which I have put together here:
Network must congeal its power or it will fail to move forward.
Many spores being condensed.
Do we want to have a common cetner.
Top down holeness vs. million of parts flying around that are fertile but chaotic.
networknation.net = Bruce's website
[Jarod Translation] Fungi vs. tree(Network v. hierarchy)
Jarod: Looking at the question, I've realized since this conference there is a lot more people thinking about these questions that I had ever thought. Used to think of myself in a silo and now I realize there are lot more people looking at these issues. The reality is that there are millions of people thinking about this. Often times people aren't fully cognizant of these issues...if there were more ways for them to come together, more people would be discuss these things. Wants to build and find ways for more people to talk about these things.
Linda: Realized that there are many wonderful colleagues thinking about the same things but that our field is so ripe to step forward into this new realm. Talk about strategies, how to make this more wide spread to the general public. Its been glorious, like a kid in the candy store!
Heather: Hard to - lots going on for me besides this conference...a mindfulness course and Theory U with Otto Scharmer...can't quite separate out them all out...one thing that has shifted and developed for me is a deeper appreciation for conversation and deep listening. There is something about deep listening that changes everything. I met someone for the first time this morning and suddenly I realized that she was saying things about her personal life...had my own listening shifted? I must be different because people are talking differently to me...something about my own openness that I'm not even aware of has shifted. Otto talks about the 4 levels of conversation...downloading...talking nice...debate level...speaking from what we want to say...3rd level is dialogue and reflective inquiry...seeing myself as a whole...4th level: collective creative and generative flow...speaking from ...from the whole...wants to speak more from this 4th level. This is where vulnerability and generativity show up...being just in the moment. Orienting towards"level four--collective creativity/generative flow" conversation is what I'm sensing I can do that will enable the most positive, transformational impacts in the face of global crises.
Bruce: A whole lot of spores wanting to be condensed....network vs. tree is a tension. I have been following this model of indigenous councils...Black Elk...this vision of the hoop of the nation...goes to mythical archetypes...network of circles(hoops). There is a human creation, an organizing principle...point to point...blowing spores in every direction, randomly...we've been doing a lot of the random spores spreading...but what are the processes for bringing them together. Do we want to have an agreement, or a common center, or do we want to be continually just explode in different directions. A fundamental concept...top/down whole structures that can contain things...vs. the spreading of the spores...somehow we need to figure out how to agreement on the parts that we can be one whole. Sort of like our constitution...