Conversations:
I have been contemplating about the POL cycle and the annual retreats I have been involved with over many years. There are several ongoing themes that are critical components of my understanding of leadership and what I have to bring to my organization and my inner life. I have had four different jobs in my school district since I began the program- that ground is critical.
I use the language of adaptive leadership in my work. It is an ongoing conversation with my colleagues, and helping us bring mind to the table. It is liberating to be able to let go of a lot of the outcomes that often get an organization into the ditch. Distinguishing between adaptive and technical challenges is transformative, but takes a lot of practice and a lot of failure. But change happens there. We can invite others to that place.
The seasons metaphor is now not only how I view my organization, but how I view myself. I have learned to sink in to winter, and to use that in my work as a time to compost and mulch the different aspects of the work- to listen, to pause, to rest. In public education, things get really cranked up out of balance with the seasons, so it is especially important to lead by bringing people into balance. For example, in the fall, school opens, and the energy is much like spring or summer. But, our bodies, our surroundings, and our families are in fall- slowing down, squirreling away energy for the coming darkness. It is important to mind the store, so to speak.
The consultation model appears to me to be the most important way that POL helps us practice our shared understanding through each lens of the participants. I have benefitted as much from consulting as having a consultation, if not more. The Quaker tradition of discernment in the consultation group has a way of getting underneath the material, to see how we are feeling and emoting around a particularly charged issue. We can see the shadows. It also helps us gather strength through understanding and the communion of brothers and sisters who are there to hold the center for us to download all the stuff. My experience is that the consultations end up being far more about our inner world than the stated problem or tension.
The use of metaphor has proved to be on of the more important aspects of the work in POL. As Sharon has said, metaphors hold the complexity. As each of us approaches the metaphor through the lens of our work and our inner world, we begin to see not only the sharedness of our work in the commons, but the complexity and possibility in understanding. Metaphor becomes the power, the elephant in the middle of the room, or the nurse log from which epiphytic life springs.
Chinook is an extraordinary center of power in the Bioregion. Each of us feeds that power. That is not to say that the Institute does not have a shadow. I have been mindful of the dark as well as the light over my many years there. However, it is a human endeavor, and bound to have the shadow. That said, being in nature, surrounded by the wood harvested on the land in Thomas Berry Hall, and getting out to the sanctuary and the trails, and eating the local food is a way of grounding in place so that The Work can be done. That center of gravity seeds the Great Work in other bioregions.
While these obvious characteristics of POL live in each of the participants, what emerges for me as most important is what it means to have community with other people in a way that invites us to sink in deeply, deeply into the work. It is no longer about the skills and understanding we develop, it is more about what each of us brings to that circle of community in love, honesty, trust, loyalty and intention. It also invites our shadows- fear, hatred, despair, pain, mistrust. By inviting us into the dark depths around the hearth of home, we are allowed to work in a way that feeds us so we can get back to work of our lives and our professions.
I do not see these thoughts as promotion of the program per se but, rather, encouragement for all of us to seek this work in this way, and to show up in what we do. When we choose to show up with open heart, we are healed, others are healed, and the commons begins to return to us. Ultimately, this is the power of POL. That we choose to be present for the work, and to give ourselves over to the weekend’s agenda, the time, the conversations, the poems, etc., is profound.
The work we are all engaged in is damn hard. It will get harder. We are the ones who must hold the center, not out of our egos or dysfunctional caretaking, but because we are called to it and healed by it.
