A Learning Log

This afternoon I had the pleasure of a public conversation with Michael Jones and several Institute alumni - Cheryl Faber, Scott Cameron, and Karasima. 

Over the hour-long tele-session I was struck by the language everyone used to describe the Communities Collaborating Institute experience.  Karasima spoke about bringing head and hearts together.  Scott used a metaphor of skipping rather than sinking stones.  And Cheryl referenced song, stillness and synthesizing.

When Michael spoke, I hurriedly scribbled down some of his exquisite phrasing.  He spoke of:

• the commons as what our future holds for us; where everyone belongs; where one can encounter the fellowship of strangers
• the magnificence of our inter-commons
• finding the intimate connection of our own voice; the language of imagination; the genius in us that is magnified in the presence of others
• generative innovation as shifting paradigms and finding the thread of your own aliveness and curiousity.

He spoke with poetry.  And he referenced Hannah Arendt, Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats.

Last week, at the Collaborative Leadership Retreat we began in each day with inspiration.  And each day, the inspiration was a poem. 

We quoted Vaclav Havel, Margaret Wheatley, David Wagoner and Mary Oliver.  David Chrislip had a collection of Oliver's poems with him and reading just one of her poems took my breath away.

In reflecting on her experience there, Sandra Goth shared poems she wrote over those three days and posted them in the online forum for Collaborative Leadership.  I can't imagine a better way to continue the conversations begun in a hotel conference room!

What is it about poetry that captures the heart and head?  How does it, at someone said at last year's Institute, "hold the paradox" in ways nothing else can? 

Today, I'm captivated by the image of the falconer in Yeats' "The Second Coming."  Michael asked us today, "who's holding the centre?"  I'm not sure what to do with that question, so I think I'll just hold it for a while ...

  The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?