Waging Beauty with Empty Shoes

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Katharine Weinmann

Last October I co-hosted a small gathering for the community of practice alumni from my Leading in Emergence learning lab. Six of us came together that last Wednesday morning of the month, in the warm and comfortable living room of one of our members, in, as Otto Scharmer writes, “a space for profound collaborative renewal.”

I was eager to prototype a simple reflective practice based on a recently acquired book, In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty by Mark Gonzales. The title alone captivated me, both in that resonates with a deep knowing that beauty is an antidote, if not cure to the world’s pain and suffering, and with its paradoxical injunction to “wage” beauty, a verb often used with “war” and aggression. This simple and elegantly designed volume of brief ideas, observations, insights, and mantra-like wisdom speaks to the power of story, ancestors, empowered choice and bold action.

Each of us was invited bring an image of and reflect on an ancestor, mentor or respected elder. In circle we shared a brief story of how that person’s life served as a beacon of inspiration. We created a communal collage, dedicating our images and stories to the future. Then, we closed by sharing our impressions of the beauty seen before us, held within, taken with us. Below, the “caught” poem:

Waging Beauty: A Collage of the Imagined and Ineffable

Gardens of colour transformed by garbage and utility into communities of wonder.

New growth in nature.

Connectedness building strength and vibrancy in empty shoes that belong to us all.

Resilience in a sense of place.

Wisdom in a world wise and enraptured by third eye seeing.

Sensing synchronicity that defies labels and logic and contrived manipulation.

Silence shared with strangers and near strangers. The simplest beauty there is.

What strikes me now is the uncanny prescience, from that morning a month before, of the beauty waged in Paris, days after terror struck the city and killed over one hundred of its citizens enjoying their Friday evening.

MIGUEL MEDINA, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Ten thousand empty shoes silently displayed in the Place de la Republique on November 29, 2015, represented the peoples’ determination to “have” their voice in a symbolic march against climate change on the eve of the UN Climate Conference when their actual presence was forbidden due to safety and security concerns.

The strength and vibrancy in empty shoes that belong to us all.

Stepping into a Legacy of Learning

Posted on November 9, 2015 by Katharine Weinmann

CP Hosts In late September I had the privilege of co-hosting with local friend and colleague, Beth Sanders, The Circle Way training practicum with founders and master circle practitioners, Ann Linnea and Christina Baldwin. Seventeen people joined us, from Germany, Indiana, Minnesota, British Columbia, together with a strong local contingent.

Strawberry Creek Lodge welcomed and held us for the five days, providing nourishment for body and spirit, its simple and natural beauty – with acres of glowing golden aspens and towering spruce and pine, leaf-covered trails, beaver, moose, coyote and bird – creating the larger container into which we created our circle of intention, learning, curiosity, and compassion.

P1010046 It was the second time such a circle had been called. In 2011, the day before I departed for three months abroad, I emailed Ann and Christina wondering if they’d come to Edmonton to teach circle. Then, too, seventeen of us gathered at Strawberry Creek Lodge in the glorious splendor of fall of 2012. Then, intent to bring circle more fully into my personal and professional work, hardly would I have imagined this manifesting as co-teaching with Ann and Christina during their final off-site training.

In the weeks prior to this circle, in the moments between “skippering” our home’s renovation, I felt anxious, apprehensive even. In counsel with a wise woman, she offered that of course, such would be the response to stepping into a legacy. Relief with having been so deeply heard, with having received the “frame” for understanding and navigating this new role and context. My choice of token to bring to the opening circle’s centre, the solid pewter sea urchin, its circular shape and surface covered with tiny circles, its weight signifying the gravitas of the occasion for me.

Kana Ishii Paszek Photography, 2015 Together, we four held well the circle’s directions, energies, and teachings. Together, we were both present to and in a grief that came in with this circle – supporting, shepherding and stewarding, with clarity, focus and compassion, several momentous transitions. Together, we practiced and modeled a cornerstone Circle Way agreement: “ask for what you need, offer what you can.”

And in the end, after a mid-night of Northern Lights that shimmered in the brilliant sky, clear after a day of blustery wind and steady rain, the torches passed, marked by the green and orange “Glassy Baby” candles, gifts from Ann and Christina to Beth and me.

Now Beth and I mark our own stepping in to create a pattern of learning experiences for the next phase of our lives. We hope you’ll join us for circle practicum trainings next spring and summer, and our newest (ad)venture, Soul Spark: Step Into the Fire of Doing the Work You Love to Do.

Thresholds Claimed

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Katharine Weinmann

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality.” – Florinda Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days

A month ago I traveled to Halifax, en route to a vacation touring Newfoundland. The week before my departure, I was thick into the preparations for and co-hosting our third Inside Outside Leadership gathering, this year focused on transitions and thresholds. In readying myself for both journeys, I realized how Halifax has become my “heart place” for acknowledging and crossing thresholds. So to spend a few days there was completely apropos given my own recent threshold, turning sixty and stepping into what the late Angeles Arrien calls the first stage of elderhood.

A bit of the backstory…I first went to Halifax in 2002, to attend what was then called the Shambhala Institute of Authentic Leadership, truly a transformative, deep dive into learning that significantly changed the course of my work, relationships, life. It became my professional community of practice, and I attended for several more years, the most recent being in June, 2010. Then, I recalled having to go “toe to toe” with my director to justify using the allocated professional development time and budget for this event. In hindsight, I realized this and another similar conversation wherein I “spoke truth to power,” most likely led to my position being “abolished” the following year, and put in play my eventual decision to “retire” in June, 2012. I remember flying across Canada, staving off a migraine, and feeling nauseous with anxiety the closer I got to Halifax. After a bit of soul-searching, I disclosed to my Halifax “sisters” who met and fetched me, that I felt I was about to cross a threshold – the first time I ever recall using this particular word – sensing an enormity and knowing only that I upon my return home, I’d complete those final weeks of work, and then begin my long awaited, year long, deferred salary leave, a year in which I was intentionally designing experiences to open me up to Life (studying process painting in Taos, NM with the method’s founder, Michele Cassou, and travelling “sola” to Europe for three months.)

File created with CoreGraphics

ALIA (Shambhala renamed) is masterful in designing the space and container for potent, transformative learning and community making. (Read Susan Szpakowski’s Little Book of Practice for a beautifully eloquent description of how.) And wouldn’t you know it, that year, as the group convened for the first time, “threshold” was our welcoming metaphor and ritual.

Threshold, as described by Angeles Arrien in The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom (2007), is “the place or moment where transformational work, learning, or integration occurs.” (9) She makes the distinction between a threshold and a gate, with the latter being:

“the protecting and testing that must occur before we are allowed entry and permitted to do the work at the threshold. Gates are often considered places of initiation or entryways into holy places, sacred grounds, or spiritually significant transitions. Deep archetypal feelings may surface when we are ‘at the gate.’ Instinctively, we recognize that we are required to let go of what is familiar, prepare to enter, and open ourselves to the unknown. Our passage through the gate is irreversible. After we open the gate and stand upon the threshold, we must do the work of transformation.” (10)

In the book’s forward, Arrien’s “Celtic friend and colleague,” the late John O’Donohue wrote, “Each life must find its true threshold, that edge where the individual gift fits the outer hunger and where the outer hunger fits the inner hunger….a human life can be understood in terms of a narrative of its thresholds.” (x)

Have I told you that over that year of intentional threshold crossing, I broke three hand mirrors? The first being during that week at ALIA. The second, as I prepared for my last trip to Italy, a bus tour of Sicily. The third and final, the hand mirror I travelled with throughout Europe, and found shattered when I unpacked upon arriving back in Canada.

Or that during that weekend before ALIA, when I celebrated with my “sisters” in Mahone Bay, enjoying fresh lobster, wine and heartful conversation, gifting them each with tiara, scepter, shawl and the book The Queen of My Self, evoking another threshold, the tarot card of death appeared in each of my readings?

It was never lost on me the potency of that particular June, crossing through the gate into the threshold that, now in my fifth year, I anticipate will continue for the yogic seven. The archetypal feelings and signs foretelling that my life as I had known it would shatter, die, shift and change.

So yes, it was with perfect and subtle attunement that I spontaneously added on the Halifax layover, and shared another fine weekend, in that same comfortable home with my “sisters,” again enjoying our tradition of fresh lobster, fine wine and heartful conversation. Now each of us five years older, tending to Life’s changes as children move and marry, parents flounder with less time than more, careers shift and end, health waxes and wanes, and “what next?” hovers large on the horizon. Stepping into what Life is calling forth from us, for us. Learning what it means to be an elder. Claiming its gate and threshold.

PS – With bittersweet and perhaps even divine synchronicity, John O’Donohue passed over unexpectedly on January 4, 2008, a few short months after writing the forward to Angeles Arrien’s book. In her introduction, she writes about their friendship and his forthcoming book, To Bless the Space Between Us, which was published posthumously on March 4, 2008. Angeles Arrien passed over in late April, 2014.

Heart Balm

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Katharine Weinmann

It’s been a tough week.

On Monday we found ourselves having to make the “no choice choice” of escorting our beloved Peggy dog to her final visit to the vet. Perhaps the kindest, most loving act, to give her the assistance to make this final transition. Yet how I dreaded it. How I often I had prayed these last weeks and months, “Please let her pass in her sleep, or as she sleeps beside me on the sofa in the morning.” “Please help me know when the time has come for us to intervene.”

So Monday morning, after watching her the day before in the backyard, wandering blindly in circles, stumbling into rose bushes, entrapped in dogwood branches, right hind leg foot limping, and then distressed and agitated with having messed in her kennel as she slept that night, we knew the time had come. We feared for her physical safety. We knew the quality of her life was at an all-time low, she the once meticulous self groomer, now being restricted to the kitchen, the sofa, our office, her kennel. We assumed she was in pain, though our little braveheart never complained. The Scientist made the call. We held vigil as she slept in the living room sunbeam, told her repeatedly how much we loved her. Then the final drive, holding, whispers and kisses. Now living the paradox of grief and relief, of feeling the fullness of her absence in every room of our home and hearts. Gentle Annie, our five year old Setter, has been at a loss, never having lived without kennel mates. And this is now the first time in over twenty years that we’ve shared our lives with only one “kid with fur.”

Come Wednesday, I co-hosted process at my monthly community of practice. As no one had stepped in, I volunteered the week earlier before knowing how my week was to unfold. I was eager to experiment with an elegant and simple process I’d discovered and I knew this gathering would be a safe space in which to try.

Lectio Poetica is a contemporary re-working of the ancient practice called Lectio Divina, or sacred reading, wherein sacred texts were slowly whispered, repeated and contemplated to hear the small, quiet voice of the divine within. During medieval times, it became formalized into four steps, or “movements,” and now, using poetry, into seven movements where grounding, considering one’s current life situation, posing a question, reading, reflecting, and deep listening to self and others bring insight and action.

I’ve relied on poetry both personally and professionally to help myself and others, find a way into and through the challenging, perplexing, complex and bitter-sweetness of life and work. Little did I know it would be my heart’s balm that night.

Wednesday brought sunshine, warmth and the absence of most of our snow. Eighteen of us convened in the St. James Room at a local church, a perfect place for what was to unfold. As anticipated, the “right poem” arrived that morning, a “simple to recite and listen to” by Leonard Nathan, posted on Facebook by Parker Palmer:

So?

So you aren’t Tolstoy or St. Francis

or even a well-known singer

of popular songs and will never read Greek

or speak French fluently

will never see something no one else

has seen before through a lens

or with the naked eye.

You’ve been given just the one life

in this world that matters

and upon which every other life

somehow depends as long as you live,

and also given the costly gifts of hunger,

choice, and pain with which to raise

a modest shrine to meaning.

The warm and appreciative reception encouraged me to use the process as the cornerstone in next week’s session on self-care for social workers. And I was inspired to set aside four Wednesday afternoons in April, and invite seven people to partake in a gently hosted circle, to create the space for “the ultimate meeting place.”

“It is said — here, now — that one of the great markers of spiritual kinship is a love for the same poetry. For if two souls are equally moved by the same pulsating constellation of metaphor and meaning, they are not only bound by a common language and a shared sensibility but also exist in the same dimension of truth and possibility. Poetry, after all, is the ultimate meeting place.” – Maria Popova, founder of Brain Pickings

You are welcome. Your place is waiting. Simply click here to register.

PS – Today we’re in the midst of Spring’s caprice, an Alberta snowstorm. Thinking about this post, I remembered phone photos I took of Peggy and Annie last year during a similar snowy spring morning.

Creating Relational, Cross-generation Spaces

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Katharine Weinmann

For the past two months, together with over 25,000 others, I was part of an experimental global learning community hosted by Otto Scharmer and his team at MIT. Called the U.Lab, it was a six week experiential journey down and up the U, as in Theory U, bringing to life Scharmer’s most recent book, Leading from the Emerging Future (2013). In addition to deep listening practice, “tweeting impressions,” reading, posting and responding to reflections, contributing to “wordle” summaries, and hosting a weekly face to face learning “hub” in my local library, I viewed several hours of video presentations by Otto and interviews with guest faculty, including his mentor, Peter Senge.

In the final week, and last segment of Peter’s interview, he said a few things that deeply resonate with me and give affirmation to my work:

“Well, I think a lot of the most important leadership will come from people in their 20s, and actually people 10 years earlier.”

“And, again, it’s a real tragedy when people are so busy, trying to get it done, that they’re not paying attention to the relational space they create. Because this relational space they create is what will determine what gets done.”

One morning last week, while sitting with my dear old Peggy dog, I tuned into one of Krista Tippett’s podcasts from her wonderful On Being website. Titled “The Inner Life of Rebellion,” it featured Quaker elder, educator and activist Parker Palmer, and journalist entrepreneur, Courtney Martin, in a cross generational conversation about the inner work of resilient, sustainable social change. Listening, I was particularly struck by their genuine respect for each other, and to their mutual commitment to creating relational, cross-generation spaces in which to share and witness the stories that have potential to transform us and our world.

During and since, it’s been my heart’s delight to be in several of these spaces, from the evening where fourteen of us gathered to consider how we might work together “unusually” (and I had the sudden, somewhat daunting realization that for the first time I was the oldest in the room!), to the sorta-surprise morning birthday party at the Duchess for one of our younger friends who left family abroad to make family and life here, to the monthly community of practice meeting I co-founded from the Leading in Emergence learning labs. Intended as a “practice field,” a safe space to allow our alumnae to prototype the new behaviours, mindsets and cross boundary collaborative cultures (Leading from the Emerging Future, 246), I participated, again as the oldest in the room, in a thoughtfully hosted conversation on how safe space is created within government and with its constituents.

I look ahead, with the energy and promise of our lengthening days, to knowing I will soon, again, have the honour of cohosting two such spaces. In early June, together with Marg Sanders, we’ll be gathering with twenty women for our third annual Inside Outside Leadership weekend, this year focusing on transitions. And in late September, I’ll be co-facilitating a Peerspirit Circle Practicum with Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea, and Beth Sanders. As Christina and Ann are actively transitioning out of this teaching work, it may well be their final training, as they pass the torch to others of us in The Circle Way community.

If you are yearning to sit in, or are keen to polish your skills in convening such rich spaces, please click on the above links for details and registration. I’d love to have you join us and welcome you to take your place.

Creating a Community of Practice

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Katharine Weinmann

In April, I co-hosted a two-day learning lab called Leading in Emergence. Designed for multi-sector leaders to explore, practice and apply current frames, competencies and practices for navigating the uneven and slippery terrain of complex emergence, our intention was to create a community of practice among the participants to continue what we began during those two remarkable days.

Etienne Wenger coined the phrase, “community of practice” and describes it as a group of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

From personal experience, we know that to learn and lead from the emerging future, we need to engage in deep learning cycles that involve opening our minds, our hearts and our wills to be able to see, be and do in new and innovative ways. To facilitate this type of learning, as learners and leaders, we need, as Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer suggest, “practice fields”- those safe spaces in which we prototype new behaviours, new mindsets and new cultures of collaboration across sectors.

A commitment was made with the participants to gather on the last Wednesday of the month, to share the various hosting roles, in order to learn how to do this work better. Yesterday was our first day in our fledgling circle. Twelve of us were warmly welcomed and hosted. Here’s the poem I “caught” from our check-in. Thanks to Beth Sanders for showing me how:

Sweet delight when frustration shifts to grace crossing thresholds of the internal and external

With deliberate intention, a balance found dabbling in emergence

When not enough time makes me a slave to the internal

When on vacation, a simpler tension – the yin and yang of the meaning I make out of sensing the not paying attention to what impacts

To touch every surface – to be present

Let the games begin!

PS: Our next Leading in Emergence learning lab is November 6-7, 2014. We’d love to have you join us.

Katharine Weinmann, MSW

attending to the inner life to live and lead with kindess, clarity and wisdom

Category Archives: Community of Practice