La Fermata

At Bainbridge Graduate Institute, some of the challenges we encountered when defining leverage points and interventions in a team project on Student Engagement were:

• Choosing the leverage points we thought were most pertinent to K-12 schools: finding places where we believed actionable steps could be taken to enact change.
• Coming to consensus on key leverage points: each of us has a different background and different values, and our personal choices were affected by these differences.
• The complexity of the issues surrounding each leverage point: narrowing our focus to the key issues connected to each leverage point meant carefully selecting issues that seemed most pertinent to our research findings.

A living systems theory informed my approach to successfully implement a change initiative addressing the issues surrounding Student Engagement by: encouraging me to dig deeply into each of the issues to obtain as holistic an understanding of them as possible, reminding me that no single answer is necessarily the correct answer, and through helping me identify “problem areas” where change might be enacted.

On a more personal level, I believe that mindfully holding a space for the understanding that everything, ultimately, is an element of the system (no matter how seemingly insignificant or extraneous) allows one to begin to develop a sight that perceives increasing layers of complexity and draws connections where they might have before been invisible. Seeing these deeper connections is key to identifying increasingly powerful leverage points.

Last weekend, I co-facilitated a Creative Empowerment retreat for a self-organized group of friends who recently started a grassroots group education initiative called Skill Share, where people take turns hosting and leading an evening teaching us to make/do any subject they fancy; pie making, pickling, making salves, herbal chocolates, bike repair–you name it, we’ve most likely got someone who knows how to teach it.

Last weekend we took 3 days to interact and learn together more intensely than usual. The intention of the weekend was to empower each other through creativity and learning to build our ability to have a clear vision for the role of creativity in our lives and the knowledge and resources necessary to achieve it.

Using various creative expression exercises taught by a friend of mine who is working toward a masters in Art Therapy at the California school of Integral Studies, and through several group conversations friends and I facilitated, we learned ways to create safe spaces for creative self-expression, did exercises for developing personal leadership skills and worked on creating a strong network to help empower ourselves and each other to achieve our goals and dreams. All of this was done in an incredibly inspiring place; a quirky lakeside manor so filled with art and incredible creations that it was difficult to discern up from down.

It is a fascinating and incredibly moving process to participate in and observe to this group of caring, energetic, live-loving talented people moving into a space of great nutritive potential and gestational energy as we begin to build a new awareness and community together through our shared passion for learning, teaching, sharing and celebrating life.

As Donella Meadows puts it, “The most stunning thing living systems and some social systems can do to change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors.”

Last weekend, I had the rare and incredibly delicate, beautiful opportunity of being present to the experience of watching creativity move as a force for self-organization and new structures and behavior unfold as a result, the gift of existing with others in a space of the endless possibilities that force can hold. I can’t wait to see what happens next…

• All action is rooted in memory: the “drift to low performance,” or eroding goals archetype becomes prevalent when the past and how things came to be is forgotten.
• Conviviality is vital and essential: when an emphasis on the quality of societal interactions declines, the tragedy of the commons begins to occur; relationships shatter and common resources are squandered.
• The necessity of balance in all things: when competitive patterns are reinforced, escalation begins to occur, causing unbalance and extremes.
• Time is  circle: the more expansive and fluid our awareness of time is, the more likely we are to avoid traps such as  balancing process with delay– low awareness of the importance time plays in our decisions and subsequent ineffectual or negative decisions based on misinformation.
• The power of knowing your place: it is necessary for growth to have its limits–unchecked growth is, in all effect, a metaphor for cancer. When we lose sight of this, the systems trap “success to the successful” begins to occur–the winners continue to win while the losers are eliminated one by one. This systems archetype is likely partially responsible for the near extinction of the Kogi message in mainstream culture.

I’m curious to know what you think the rest of these cultural aspects of the Kogi could represent in terms of systems archetypes? Email me at brittney (at) lafermata.org.

• The living world sets the laws
• The harmony of opposites
• The problem with leaders
• The primary importance of talking
• A spiritual force is what brings us to life

Scott Hannan’s Letter:

Hello friends and companeros.

I have had the blessing of being able to spend time with the people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.  They are my family as are they yours.  It is good that I have learned many things with them, and I am grateful to them all.

I discovered this outline (below), composed by a french man, as a nice initial synopsis of what is a very ALIVE culture in the reality of our world right now among these people.  I share it with you as they have shared it with me.  Again, these words awaken in you a way that is ALIVE NOW IN OUR WORLD.  Any thoughts? I would love to hear from you.

Ma salaam.

–Scott Hannan

The Kogi attach great importance to memory. The memory of events with which the community has been confronted, the memory of social regulations within the group and so forth. “Memory,” they say, “is like eyes which were made to see. If they close, everything becomes darkness.” For them, this memory cannot be written down, it must be spoken, passed down by members of the group. In writing, memories are separated from the people and lose their effectiveness. Every time I speak to the Kogi about current projects, they spend many days analyzing what we have said, in order to be able to compare it to a similar situation, which has been experienced by the community in the past. This is how future actions are suggested and decided.

2. Conviviality is vital and essential

In Kogi society, acting together is seen as the measure of quality in social relations. Thus, working collectively on a bridge or a hut reflects positively upon the interactive skills of the group. Indeed, a group in which people are experiencing difficulties in getting along may be asked to work together in order to reduce those differences. Action cannot take place without thought, and thought cannot take place without action; one reflects upon the quality of the other. Every action-–weaving, construction, decoration, reflects the quality of relations with others and with the world. Solidarity is a condition of survival.

3. The necessity of balance in all things

The idea of balance is at the heart of Kogi society. It is the balance of each person with themselves, with others and with the world. There is no real concept of good and evil, rather one of greater or lesser fairness—and what may be fair in one situation can be very inappropriate in another. Balance can be seen particularly in the relationships the Kogi have with the earth: if these relations are not fair, harvests will be poor, and parents will not be able to feed their children.
All work which the Kogi try to carry out (sometimes desperately) aims to maintain or re-establish balance in the world, which they believe is being seriously unbalanced by modern ways of operating. “Those who are extracting oil, gas or coal,” says a Kogi , “do not understand what they are doing: they are causing a haemorrhage which is taking the strength out of the earth. It’s like taking the minerals out of a body; it causes imbalance, the body becomes weak and illnesses can take hold. The Younger Brothers [the Kogi phrase for modern civilization] do not understand the imbalances that they are bringing about.”

4. Time is a circle

The Kogi view time as cyclical, whereas most of us in the modern world see it as linear. Cyclical time calls for the continual re-creation of the world, as opposed to linear time, which views the past as outdated and generally assumes the future will inevitably be better. Linked to the living world, from which their society takes its collective operating rules, the Kogi celebrate the existence of a vital cycle of birth, maturity, death and re-birth. In this cyclical life, the fundamental stages of individual and collective life are marked by rituals; specific ceremonies which, through shared experience, allow the integration and the construction of an identity for each individual. Cyclical time also allows individuals their own experience of the world, within the framework of rules made by the elders. It allows each generation to take advantage of this experience, and thus to open up its field of conscience. For the Kogi, conscience is paramount, and this demands watchfulness at all times.

5. The power of knowing your place

We asked a young Kogi of probably around ten or eleven years, what his dream was. Without hesitating, a broad smile crossing his face, he replied: “I dream of being a Kogi, of knowing how to work the land, of building my home and of protecting my family.” The Kogi and most indigenous peoples belong to a place, and carry its identity. If you ask a Kogi who he is, he will always answer you: “We are Kogi, inhabitants of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta.” The natural context, demanding and infinitely diversified, forms identities and nurtures aboriginal cultures in their richness and their diversity. This demands watchfulness, solidarity, and putting others and the world before oneself—a question of survival.

6. The living world sets the laws

“For us,” says a Kogi, “nature is like your books. Everything is written there. The Younger Brothers appoint leaders, captains, but they make war with each other, they kill each other and are permanently in conflict. Why? Because they live alone, and have no shared rules. Try to understand that Mother Earth is both energy and balance. If we do not respect her rules, we will become like lost children. Everyone makes up their own laws, and disarray sets in. We think that illness is a form of punishment, which tells us that we have not respected the laws of nature. We must listen to the voices of nature.”

In contrast to modern societies, “root” societies like the Kogi have never separated themselves from the living world. They believe themselves to be one of the parts that make up the living body of the earth. This special relationship, which they experience day after day, enables them to see the world as a giant ecosystem. Their astounding knowledge of interdependencies between the species, for instance, allows them to restore lands considered by other farmers as barren beyond redemption.

7. The harmony of opposites

Inhalation and exhalation, night and day, masculine and feminine are all different versions of the two dimensions of life, whose continual alternation and harmonious association is the key to all creation. This approach to existence is explicitly seen in many of the Kogi rituals and rites of passage. Thus, when the men are weaving their clothes, the other Kogi come and sit in front of the loom, a symbol of the world and of its duality. The front of the fabric represents the day, and the back represents the night, the shuttle is the symbol of human beings and their capacity to link opposites in order to create. The clothes the Kogi wear reflect the nature of their relationship with the world, and their ability to identify the duality of the world and to make it bear fruit.

8. The problem with leaders

The Kogi society does not have formal leaders. The power of one of the members of the group over the whole of the community is seen as a threat of unbalance. Power is diluted and shared by all. It is a participatory society, where no one makes decisions on behalf of others. Major decisions concerning the community are taken in the nuhé, or temple. One Kogi says: “The nuhé is like a father or a grandfather; in its presence we cannot argue. We come there to discuss important things. While the men discuss amongst themselves in the male nuhé, the women do the same in the female nuhé. Everything always happens in the dark there, and over sufficient a time for all energies to be regulated [possibly over several days]. It is our way of maintaining balance within the community.”

9. The primary importance of talking

To avoid any risk of imbalance, and to transcend conflicts and emotions, the Kogi spend a lot of time talking. When you arrive in a Kogi village, you need to explain for many hours who you are, where you come from, and what your intentions are. It is a special time of listening, sharing, and strong experiences, which allows tensions to be regulated, emotions to be expressed and social relationships to be nurtured. Whether in a threesome, as a family or in a broader group, talking has a calming effect. Words can cure ills. This creates strong, harmonious interpersonal relationships, which nurture a whole social network that seeks balance. With a holistic outlook, root societies like the Kogi draw their social and political rules out of a strong bond with the living world—the natural environment on which they depend for their survival.

10. A spiritual force is what brings us to life

According to the Kogi, it is aluna—thought processes, the soul, energy—that creates different physical forms of life. All living beings have this spiritual force that makes us alive. Without aluna, the body is simply inert matter, whose natural components rot and disappear. Interactions between aluna and matter create a new force, which the Kogi call seiwa.
Children who are chosen to become mama (shaman) are committed to an initiation process lasting several years. Their learning, which takes place entirely in the dark, aims to let them enter into a relationship with the spirit of everything on earth. They will not know the sea physically, but by its spirit. They will not know the jaguar physically, but by its spirit. At the end of the learning period, the mama who accompanied the pupil on his road to knowledge can then say the ritual phrase: “You have learned to see through mountains, through the heart of men, you have learned to look beyond appearances. Now, you are a mama.”

Patterns. So beautiful and so fascinating. I see so many patterns that sometimes I find it exhausting. The way blades of grass are arranged on a green lawn and how they change and shift as they grow closer to a foreign plant or object…  The rhythmic driPlop of raindrops on windowpane, moss, lichens, the spaces between branches on a tree, soft fibers on willow unblossoms… The pattern of positive change initiated by looking to one’s central self and speaking honestly, from the heart, the pattern of awakenings and openings that occur as a result.

Sometimes, I even see patterns when I close my eyes.

Patterns in myself: I’m a squirrel and love to hide things away for a rainy day, storing bits and ends and odds of all sorts. I’m highly sensitive, and the more I pay attention to patterns, the more likely I am to get caught in a feedback loop where my sensitivity continues to increase to the point where I’m either completely engrossed or utterly overstimulated. I also like to arrange items according to how well they balance the colors of the rainbow throughout space.

In kindergarten, I clearly remember a lesson we were having in class about light and dark. Mrs. Wilson, my teacher, was talking about darkness and light, and I raised my hand to ask a question. She called on me and I asked “If it’s dark when we turn out the lights, then what are the teeny tiny light things that I see moving around in the air the dark?” She responded by telling me that my experience wasn’t real–that the subtle patterns I perceived of light in the darkness didn’t actually exist.

What if giving children the possibility to believe in their own experience of reality were a pattern repeated in every classroom across the world? What words of wisdom would escape from their tiny mouths? I can only imagine the new insights into deep understandings of systems and ways of being we’d all learn…

I like systems. They fascinate me…how things work, interconnections and relationships and the fine subtle delicate lines and letters in between. I like processes. Like this work of art (below)… thinking about fall and feeling leaves crunch beneath my shoes, stopping to pick them up, look at their colors and lines and textures. Imagining them sliding about in the wind on a street corner. Gathering them up, carrying them in my purse for a few days, depositing them in a pile. Dip in wax, coat with gloss, watch them grow strange, new…

I feel a deep connection with nature and other human beings. I see patterns and lines and connections, which I love to explore in contemplation and in my creative processes.

When we were in class this weekend, one concept we discussed was the idea “without meaning there can be no context,” which I find to be fundamentally flawed. Flawed because I believe that it is absolutely possible for meaning to exist outside of contex, that putting it so absolutely runs the risk of overlooking deeper truths and a more unified, clear understanding of meaning itself. Flawed because I think the essence of systems thinking is examining one singular interconnected and unified whole in its parts, and the unified whole exists outside of contextual confines. Limiting it within this framework detracts from the intentions of systems theory by negating the importance of something far greater than the limits of our understanding or capabilities to create context and meaning.

Haven’t you ever felt the meaning of something without having any context for understanding? I have…

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to build resilience into a system over the past few years, especially after some health problems I was unaware of culminated in several attacks of acute severe pancreatitis that left me quite literally re-building my body, mind and ways of being thoughtfully and methodically, bit by bit, pain by pain, awakening by awakening.

In Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows describes resilience as: “a measure of a system’s ability to survive and persist within a variable environment. The opposite of resilience is brittleness or rigidity.”  According to her, the highest levels of resilience are found in feedback loops (or balancing systems) that “can learn, create, design, and evolve ever more complex restorative structures.” She then goes on to use the human body as an example of an amazingly complex, resilient system. (Meadows, 2008, p76)

by Brittney Williams ©2010

I find Meadows’ example of the human example to be quite poignant in reference to my personal experience of watching and feeling the systems in my body reach a point where its limits where overwhelmed and began to malfunction, go haywire and eventually shut down, one by one, and then later, out of necessity to survive, moving intentionally and deliberately through some of  incredibly complex, normally automatic tasks performed by the body that we often take for granted.

While my body was healing, I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do to rebuild my life in a way that would support my newly discovered health challenges and allow me to adapt to persevere given the quite daunting new list of limitations upon me. It was during that time, in the spring of 2009, that I conceived of this website, La Fermata, as a way to represent and share my personal artwork and thoughts with the world. As I would consider my intentions and goals for the project, the words “Live, Learn, Grow” would constantly come to mind, and I decided to use them (and the slight modification “Pause, Sustain, Grow”–which makes a reference to the musical notation fermata) to represent my work. I  find their direct correlation to Meadows’ conditions for high resilience to be noteworthy and self-affirming
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by Brittney Williams ©2010

For me, to live is to create and design. For me, to learn or teach is to love. For me, to grow is to evolve.

Re-learning and re-building resilience in my body has been a slow process that is still not finished and may never be. It has required dedication and an exhausting amount of attention to detail, relationships and systems. I am thankful for the experience it has given me in revealing a higher level of a whole-system view of health and wellbeing. I am thankful for the experiences of pain, of suffering, not-knowing, fear, of despair and hopelessness:  they allow me to deeply relate to our human struggles with resilience–they have instilled within me a deep sense of compassion for others and a strong desire to help people Live, Learn, and Grow.

l’ve been kicking myself for, oh, about 5 months now that I haven’t been able to keep my personal commitment to myself to write a weekly blog.

I realize why I haven’t been able to keep up with this commitment: over the past 5 months I have organized, performed in and supported multiple arts events in italy, flown back to the us for little brother Zacky and new sister Caitlin’s wedding, translated a 40-page theater play from colloquial Italian into English, co-facilitated numerous Italian theatre workshops, attended to auditions for our upcoming play, La Zuffa e` Servita at Key City Public Theater, moved halfway around the world, created dozens of works of art, spent time catching up with my dear friends (congtatulations to Nelly and Brian, who will be married next August, and to Becca and Mitchell who will have a bitty baby boy in less than 2 months, and Seth who finally found his dream job!), and…oh yeah, I also started grad school this fall and am working toward earning a Sustainable MBA from Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

All possible explainations, excuses and reasons aside, I still wish I had had the discipline to blog regularly throughout the experience like I had commited to doing. So I shall spend some time this week thinking about why it happened and what I can do to strengthen and support my Bloggerific Commitment, and hopefully have an update for you about it next week!

The following photos are a hodge-podge collection of my whereabouts and happenings during spring/summer 2010:

Last week, Germano and I found ourselves driving through the winding hills of Lazio on a tranquil Sunday afternoon.  He mentioned that there was a beautiful convent in the nearby town of Celleno that had been transformed into a co-op hotel where he had once participated in a workshop called “Sensory Integration and its Role in Art Therapy.” I asked if we could go take a look and we decided to go check it out.

The Convento S. Giovanni Battista is perched upon a little hill in Celleno, a small town halfway between Orvieto and Viterbo. Built in 1610, the monastery was purchased by four families who created a co-operative in the 1980s and restored to its original simple beauty.

It now hosts a vast array of workshops and seminars from around the world, and has been so successful that they are booked out almost 2 years in advance by repeat customers. There are flower and vegetable gardens outside, simple rooms with beautiful views, a large dining room, a practice/workshop/performance space where the chapel used to be, and a tidy little breakfast bar.

The families who purchased and restored the convent say that they came together and were united around some common shared interests: political, social, spiritual, cultural and work-ethic sensibility and this quote on their website left me feeling hopeful that more collaborative endeavors of this nature can be created in the future:

“Il mondo e` nelle mani di coloro che hanno il coraggio di sognare e di correre il rischio di vivere i propri sogni.”

“The world is in the hands of those who have the courage to dream and run the risk of actually living their dreams.”

Lemons + a cello = limoncello!!! Well, not really, although their perfume is so zingy it makes me want to burst into spontaneous song. Lemons are in season and it’s time to make limoncello, a traditional Italian lemon liqueur!

I walked past the lemon tree at the Casale Santa Brigida and could smell the tangy sweet citrus from a distance. I plucked a heap of lemons from the branches and took them home to make this year’s fresh batch of limoncello.

Making this delicious treat is far simpler than it seems, and requires only a few simple ingredients and, most importantly, patience: a patient, steady hand as you gently peel the lemon and take care to make sure none of the white rind remains on the piece you have peeled, and a bit more patience while you wait for the lemon peels to steep in alcohol and release their citrus flavor.

One of the reasons I enjoy learning how to make traditional, labor-intensive foods and treats is that it’s fun to share what I’ve learned and made with friends. In the case of limoncello, this is especially true since I don’t actually even drink alcohol. Traveler hint: the best lemon I have ever tasted in my life was handed to me by a kind stranger as I walked down a cobblestone street in Montemarcello–it tasted like a delicate, tart piece of candy.

Here is my own simple limoncello recipe that I’ve come up with after trying out and modifying a few traditional Italian recipes:

Limoncello

Step 1: Lemon Peels + Alcohol

• 1 liter (1000 ml) “95% pure alcohol” if you can get it (or a bottle of  of Everclear alcohol if you can’t)
• 10 medium to large organic, untreated lemons

Wash the lemons in hot water and scrub them with a vegetable brush, making sure to dry each one afterward. Using a sharp paring knife, carefully remove only the yellow part of the rinds from the lemons so that there is no white pith on them. Pour the alcohol into a larger jug (I like to use a 2-liter wine jug with a handle) and add the rind-peelings to the large container. Cover the container and let it sit for thirty days.

After a month has passed, strain the the peels from alcohol and discard the peels. Proceed to Step 2.

Step 2: Simple Syrup

• 3.5 cups water
• 3 cups organic cane sugar (or try 2 cups honey for an interesting taste twist)

In a large pot, make a simple syrup by combining the water and sugar; bring it to a boil and then reduce the heat to medium-low and let it simmer “fast” for 15 minutes and stir frequently. Let the simple syrup cool to room temperature, then add it to the lemon alcohol.

(Note: you may want to add more or less simple syrup depending on how sweet you like your limoncello, I recommend adding 3/4 the simple syrup, tasting the mixture and then adding more as needed)

Step 3: Bottle and Enjoy!

Use a funnel (or a steady hand) and pour the limoncello into bottles. It’s ready to drink immediately and will keep for about a year. I’m a bottle squirrel–I save all  kinds of funny bottles, clean them and re-use them so I have plenty of vessels for sharing what I’ve made with others.

Makes about 2 liters.

but carry myself with pride

may I be silent
to listen to the letters in between

but also dare to sing

I tear my flesh, and, innards exposed,
am open

may I be honest

may I be daring and bold

skillfully aware
lighthearted

Unto you I unfold.