Love as the Foundation...

Love as the Foundation for a New Politics

A few weeks back, before falling into a holiday haze, I went to hear Rabbi Michael Lerner speak at Town Hall.  I knew of his activism against the Vietnam War as well as his criticisms of Israel’s actions towards Palestinians.  I did not know he had penned eleven books, mostly on spirituality and progressive politics and that his new book, Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform The World would capture so much of my own recent thinking and theorizing.  

At the age of 76, Rabbi Lerner’s latest appeal for more love and meaning in American politics builds on his life-long devotion to radical change through non-violent means without apology -- may I hope to be as bold in my 8th decade.  He calls for a ‘Love&Justice Movement’ that will create ‘The Caring Society’: “a society that constantly nurtures our ethical and spiritual capacities to care for each other and the planet and that facilitates our ability to give meaning to our lives that transcends material satisfactions.”   

To this end, he believes that:

·       We need an alternative to the materialist reductionist view of the world and its dependence on endless growth and the maximization of wealth and power.  Previous alternatives to capitalism (socialism or communism) will not work, in part, because they still neglect the basic human need for spirituality and meaning. 

·       We need to align our public policies, as well as the means by which we achieve them, with our explicitly stated values.  We can ‘operationalize’ generosity, transparency, empathy and a new relationship to Mother Earth as deserving of our respect, care and reciprocity. 

·       We need a politics that makes room for public conversations about meaning, love and purpose.  We can reach for this more humanistic vision and not be silenced by the ‘pragmatists’ who say that such political and economic transformation is unrealistic. 

·       We don’t have to play the game of politics the way it’s been played wherein the ends justify the means no matter the costs to our relationships.  We can honor the humanity of those around us, especially that of the people with whom we disagree, while also challenging life-destructive and unjust policies that commit us to a path of severe disparity and ecocide. 

·       We have an opportunity to expand the narrative of the ‘Left’ -- specifically to reach those who voted for Obama in 2012 but Trump in 2016 -- by avoiding the shaming & blaming aspects of identity politics to focus instead on the aspects of the system that aren’t working for all of us thereby uniting across class, race and gender.

A study that Rabbi Lerner’s team completed for the National Institute of Mental Health on the dynamics of work and stress on middle and lower-middle class Americans found that most people do not care only for their material security but are just as motivated by a search for meaning and purpose.  They express feeling disrespected by the ‘Left’ (reference the “deplorables” comment by Hilary Clinton) and perceive that they are being blamed for the inequities of a larger system. 

A few examples he offers of policy proposals that align with ‘A Caring Society’ include:

·     A living wage for all; guaranteed basic income; equal work for equal pay

·       An Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the Constitution

·       Massively scaled federal housing investments for affordable housing as well as housing for homeless

·     Democratization of corporate by-laws; greater representation by workers on all corporate boards

·       A Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal the wounds of slavery and genocide; Reparations for Black and Native Americans

·       Restorative justice; educational opportunities for all people in prison; community policing and engagement

·       Universal voter registration at birth; elimination of the Electoral College or support for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

As I read the chapter on policy proposals like these offered above, I feel the weight and inertia of my own political cynicism.  Yet I can choose to see these proposals as simply representations of our fundamental interconnectedness made actionable. And Rabbi Lerner reminds us again and again that every attempt to rectify the historical and structural power imbalances that rely on the suppression of the many by the few has, over time, yielded fruit.  It starts with a seemingly impossible dream for a different world that most see as ‘unrealistic.’  And as he said so succinctly the night of his talk, “we will never know what is possible until we struggle for what is desirable.”

As more of us yield to our desires for a new world, name them in beautiful detail and connect to others with similar aspirations, the forces of dominance give way.  Not overnight and not altogether.  But they do give way and more love eventually breaks through. 

Rabbi Lerner has given us an exceptional outline for the kinds of conversations I want to be having more of in 2020.  So join me on Saturday, January 25th for a gathering -- open house style -- to talk about our ideas for a new world, perhaps made manifest through a local Love&Justice movement, that could energize and inspire real political transformation this coming year. 

Where: My place, 522 19th Avenue, between Jefferson and Cherry.  On Metro Transit lines 3 and 4. 

When: Saturday, January 25th, 4-7pm. 

            The meaty part of the conversation will probably kick-in around 5pm

Light food and drink provided.  The more the merrier so bring whatever you’d like to share.   

RSVP:   lisa@creativegroundhq.com

A Call to Action for Our Time

The essential responsibility of anyone living today, especially those privileged with societal power of any kind, is to fully activate the truth of our human condition – that being our inherent interdependence and implicit connection to each other, other beings and the planet we call home. 

Accepting this responsibility, and changing one’s habits, behaviors and daily life practices is the highest form of generosity, the foundation for a new kind of leadership, and the great shared purpose of our time. 

A person with this awareness of interdependence speaks, reflects, relates, collaborates, acts and decides with an embodied knowledge and clear-minded confidence that we are not separate from anything in our environment, animate or inanimate.  We are at once whole, woven, and intimately bound with the destiny of each other, wherein our neighbors’ loss is truly our loss. 

The burning Amazon rainforest, the disappearing tigers, whales and elephants, the 65 million of us displaced from our homelands, our isolated elders, those of us incarcerated, all representations of the broken fabric of ourselves - these are real losses for us as well as the life we find it increasingly impossible to sustain.

To live from the belief that we are viscerally connected and inseparably part of a whole shapes everything and everyone we touch and has the power to change any personal or professional culture we inhabit, as well as the long-term trajectory of the global culture we find ourselves in.  The work required to live from this belief is essential, foundational, and immediate for it is work to examine the beliefs we live from and excavate those that perpetuate separation.

While it’s true that this commitment to a belief in our interdependence is for all of us to claim, those of us with the most power and access are uniquely responsible for activating the paradigm shift, starting today and going forward. 

To be clear, it is white people, men of any race, people holding positional authority within a family, group or organization, people with access to available financial resources, people with educational credentials of any kind, people with the gift of stable emotional, mental and physical health, even individuals with the courage to stand publicly for what they believe – it is we who are granted the most urgent responsibility to ‘rewire.’        

If you are one of these, or perhaps all of these, you’ve been gifted with the privileges as well as the inherent capacity to ‘go first’ and share the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual resources available to you with others by modeling your conviction of the foundational reality that is our implicit connection to everything else. 

 When we remain wedded to our belief in separation, our thoughts include ones like:

·      I am afraid of not having enough. 

·      I must compete with others for resources, relevance and status in a closed system. 

·      My comfort is primary regardless of the impacts it has on life around me. 

·      My negative thoughts only ‘soil my own nest’ but don’t affect the wider world. 

·      I must protect what I have. 

·      I need to be right. 

·      I need to focus more on what I can control, certify, validate, quantify, order, categorize, measure, and count. 

Any of these thoughts, even if they run in the background of other, more altruistic ones, will exacerbate the destructive aspects of our world.  For those of us with more power and influence, these thoughts cause even greater harm.

Consequently, we must accept the responsibility that is ours to learn a new language—the language of interdependence--on behalf of the whole.   Learning a new language can be slow and difficult and we will struggle to understand each other. We have such a long history with and comfortable lexicon for the old language of separation. 

We’ll do better when we commit to learn the language of interdependence with others, immerse ourselves in communities of others who speak it as a first language, practice with beginners, extend ourselves, lose faith, fall down and try again. 

At some point, these new ideas and the language they influence will become a fluency.  Over time these ideas will shape our experience, assuring our nervous systems of their truth.  We’ll begin to see ourselves living from ideas like: 

·      I have enough. 

·      I may have more than enough. 

·      My thoughts shape my experience and the culture around me.

·      The quality of my relationship to all things is a primary measure of my health. 

·      My well-being depends on the well-being of the wider world. 

·      Questing to learn nourishes and sustains all of us while questing to win depletes all of us. 

·      When I create space for reflection, connection, and stillness, the culture of myself heals the culture of the whole. 

·      I am a single wave amidst an endless ocean. 

·      I am also the ocean. 

In many ways I have spent my whole life inquiring into the concept and practice of leadership.  I studied the power dynamics in my own family, those of every group I ever joined, every institution I was a member of.  I majored in political science and sought jobs with elected officials who attempt to lead.  I’ve accepted offers for positional authority and tried, and often failed, to share that power more consciously.  I’ve founded organizations, coached other leaders, and sought new ways to inspire collective leadership.  I’ve even long struggled to become the sovereign of my own life. 

What I can see from this 52-year old perspective is that leadership is up for reinvention.  What we think of it now, what we witness of it in the world, is but a meager shadow of what we need to renew the world.  The truth is we don’t know yet what leadership will look like in its more evolved expression, but I feel confident it will be grounded in a belief of our implicit connectedness.  So let’s start there.  Let each of us imagine ourselves as the seed for a new kind of leadership.  Let us accept the responsibility of caring for its fragile new beginning.  Take the work seriously.  Tend to it generously.  Trust.  Be patient.  Be committed.  And watch what happens. 

An Apt Fable...

Learning to walk again without pain after a hip replacement is one way to be forced to slow down.  Someone told me it would take about 6 months before I’d feel like myself again. 

Hearing such news, my mind went blank.  Then I saw ‘does not compute’ in small green letters typed out across my inner monitor.  I was so identified with driving in constant acceleration mode, I had no idea where 1st gear even was. 

Turns out it will take 6 months to recover and realign.  Maybe longer.  Yet soon enough, and much to the benefit of my soul, my livelihood and really to everyone around me, I will have turned ‘going slower’ into a new groove.  Phew. 

Oh, to be moving in 1st gear.  Besides actually seeing and appreciating what’s happening in my life, I’m hearing more truth coming from the inside.  Truth about what I actually need, what I want to create, what nourishes me.  For the most part, these truths had mostly been drowned out by a boatload of conditioning – conditioning being all the ideas and beliefs (the memes) absorbed from others and the culture around me since day one. 

Some of these ideas and beliefs were valuable and some did keep me safe.  But a whole host of them are just crap.  I look around at these scattered piles of ideas and see they are carried down from generations.  They are plain ‘ole used-up.  Worse, they are proven trip wires to living well. 

So, before I share some of the life-affirming truths I’m hearing, first a very partial listing of the defunct ideas that will assure toil, repetition, a scarcity of joy and a blunt on my creativity. 

Old ideas like:

• Making a living has to be hard.  I’m not contributing unless I am, in some way, suffering

• I can only make a living if I hustle and push what I’m ‘selling’

• I need to make my ‘should’ list the priority, otherwise I’ll be deemed irresponsible and self-centered

• The world only values what I’ve done, not the core of who I am

• Things get done because I apply myself and use my personal will to shape the world

• I can direct and control my life

• Fill in yours here: ____________________________________________________

These ideas run deep.  It’s part of our ‘heroic’ cultural mythology, especially those of us grown in the soil of the West.  It sure looks like what everyone else believes.  And because so many of us share these beliefs, we’ve created a reality where these ideas appear to be ‘true.’ 

But moving into 1st gear for the last 6 months has created a startling new stillness.  I can no longer saddle up and direct myself into the world.  I haven’t had the energy for socializing or planning ahead.  I read less and sleep more.  Even music, something I would play in the background most of the time, has gone silent for long stretches. 

Some people close to me would probably counter all this and say, from their perspective, it looks like I’m still pretty engaged.  But for me, it’s engagement in 1st gear, not 5th.  And in this new gear, I hear my joyful soul.  She’s offering up several compelling ideas.  New ideas like:

• I can create sufficient abundance to care for self & family without pushing

• Living simply with fewer material attachments is living richly

• When I trust in life, I stop gripping…and start learning

• Listening to my soul’s calling is honoring my own dream, not the dreams of others

• Everything is already happening.  My only real task is to respond to what’s happening more creatively.

• Life is far more beautiful as a mystery than it is as something to control

As I listen to what my soul has to say, I have come to believe what my soul has to say.  And I can no longer abide by the life-suppressing rules of our current culture, a collective dream that too often feels like a nightmare.  Instead I will honor another set of rules—principles, to be more precise--that come from the quietest place.  From here I will live a dream of my own imagining and experience a freedom of my own choosing. 

Each of us has our own dream to live and when we express it without self-judgment, we are all artists.  Arts Corps, the amazing organization that grew from my and many others’ imaginations 20 years ago, once led with a vision statement that read ‘Freedom to Imagine, Courage to Be.’ 

Thank you to all the individuals who have shaped that vision and made it real for thousands of young people.  An emboldened expression of it now comes through my new website, as well as a new podcast series I’ve started with my friend Helen Lowe, where I hope to meet the world with less conditioning and more joy. 

 Hello World.  Meet me here. 

As Fate Would Have It

I guess I should have predicted my fate over this, our annual solstice pivot. Several months back, when confronted with the news that I had no cartilage left in my right hip joint, I chose surgery to replace the degrading bone on the very auspicious date of December 21. 

I would ‘go under’ when everyone else was retreating for the holiday season and take a full three weeks apart from the world of doing.  As I lay in the hospital bed that night recovering from what felt like a full scale attack on my physical form, I spoke an intention out loud.  I would “let this hip replacement journey transform me from the inside out.”

In that moment, my ask felt reasonable enough.  For why else go through something so traumatizing, albeit to live henceforth with less pain, and not invite a broader change of scope to one’s life?

Listening intently from their watchful place, my ancestors, my angels, and whoever it was that heard my possibly drug-induced but coherent prayer responded with “So be it.”

“Furthermore, let’s clean out the far reaches of your closet.  It’s the solstice, the start of a new year, what better time.  Yes, it’s more that you planned for, but when has a request for transformation ever gone exactly as planned?  As you must remember, Lisa, it doesn’t work that way.”

I didn’t actually hear their somewhat didactic response then, or even later.  Given what transpired, it’s what I know they must have said, but wasn’t prepared to hear.

It took me a little longer to leave the hospital.  My blood pressure was too low when I would try to stand up and I’d lose my balance.  Finally, an occupational therapist appeared in the afternoon of the next day and was the first person to greet me by reaching out to hold my hand and ask how I was doing.  Awash in tears of relief for her humanity, I felt the torrent of fear moving up and out.  And with her help, I finally took my first steady steps and met their requirements for sending me home.

Those first few days at home, I entered some kind of opiate portal and submitted to total dependence on other people for sitting on the toilet, changing out ice packs and bringing in home-cooked food.  I think it was day 5 that I felt the beginnings of a cold which, more than insult to injury, also felt slightly ominous.  And then just a week after surgery, my dog Athena and sweetest companion of 9 years, stopped eating.  The next 5 days shot me into another dimension entirely as we received her diagnosis of severe anemia, followed by that of incurable lymphoma.

At this point, the hip surgery seemed like the smallest of potatoes.  I and my close friend—a recently anointed Florence Nightingale–started sleeping downstairs because Athena wasn’t getting up anymore and I couldn’t bear to leave her side.  My son came home from Hawaii only to be greeted with the news of Athena’s rapid decline and, after some time wrestling with and trying to reject our new reality, we scheduled a vet to come to our home and put her to sleep.

Not so fast, sayeth the ancestors.  You asked for transformation, remember?  So sometime after midnight, my dear canine friend started struggling to breathe, just as they had warned she might.  With no ability to ease her suffering, we held her as she labored, reversing the work her mother must have done while birthing her.  It was beyond excruciating.

I would never have chosen this for her or for any of us.  It was as agonizing a process as I have ever been through and ‘helpless’ can’t begin to describe our surrendered state.  Yet bearing witness to suffering of this scope, the suffering any one of us may face before death, is transformational, far more so than having a portion of the largest bone in my body replaced.  In fact, these two events are decidedly not even in the same league.

Stumbling around in the middle of the night, we, the chosen three, wrapped her body in a sheet, laid her under the Christmas tree, surrounded her with lit candles and sat for a long time in silence.  Sleep came eventually for some of us, infusing my son and ‘Nurse Nightingale’ with just enough energy the next day to dig a hole between the three maple trees out back.  Finally, we laid her to rest amongst all her favorite things, a ritual worthy of any ancient royal.

I spent the rest of the day with no access to the small, petty things.  Brain congestive crap like grievances about my work, worries about paying health insurance bills soon to arrive, regrets about not calling a vet sooner, and wonderings about how long it would be before I could do the most basic of hamstring stretches.  Nope, my ‘small self’ had been zeroed out.  It was absolute liberation, not a tether in sight to my conditioned, anxiety-ridden ego.

I did start to wonder if this wasn’t exactly what it felt like to take a hero’s dose of psilocybin; it sure felt like everything I’d ever read when the ego stops clutching and the expanse of who we really are opens up for us onto the endless savannah of deepest memory.

Could I stay in this place?  I didn’t think so, but I could already sense that accessing it just for a time was expanding my circuitry.  I may not remain in this profound equanimity but I could soak in the memory of it, and maybe call it up again on my own.  And for as long as it lasted, I sat on a new perch, looking out, awash in gratitude.

A week has passed.  I’ve made a slideshow of every photo of Athena I could find.  I still reach for her ears in the morning and miss her generous wiggling every time I walk in the front door.  Yet a deeper truth soothes my soul.  Athena’s death, though excruciating to witness, has become a gift 1,000 times over.  All three of us present that night found new places inside we have never met before.  We’ve shed layers of old skin to make room for bigger versions of ourselves.

And as each of us expands, I believe so shall the many friends, relatives, colleagues, and humans in general with whom we cross paths.  Our new patterning will prompt new patterning with the world around us.  Through osmosis.  Through the phenomenon of morphic resonance. Through plain ’ole love, damnit.

So, here’s an idea.  Just one among many.  Faced with this formidable tanker ship of political discord, ecological devastation, and untenable disparities, let’s see ourselves as one of Buckminster Fuller’s metaphorical ‘trim tabs’ and claim our power as single individuals to slowly but decidedly steer this ship in a new direction.  And when offered the opportunity, for there will be many ahead, stay fully present to the depth of your own or someone else’s suffering.

Even when that suffering looks like anger, blame or lashing out, do not look away or change the subject, but give it your full attention without trying to fix it or offer superficial palliative.  If it feels unbearable, therein lies the medicine.  Suffering, yours and that of others’, will not last forever.  We just need to stay with it long enough for it to morph, as it always does, into something new.  To make the transformational journey, we all need a loving witness.

So be that.  And you too will be transformed.

Like all gifts of transformation, I know this possibility in my bones.  Maybe also in the titanium femur head now resting inside my right hip.  Yes, I do now know this one….most assuredly.

Love to all, Lisa

Sovereignty

I subscribe to the idea that every one of us leads. As in, cutting a path, parting the waters or taking the helm. So when I think about leadership, it’s not a lofty vision for individuals who manage people in an organization or who run for public office or who launch a movement.

Leadership to me is simply a demonstration of human virtues in the minutes and moments of our layered and interdependent lives. We lead for ourselves, we lead for community. And we lead with the most integrity of all when we respect our own and others’ inherent sovereignty.

It doesn’t appear that humanity has done a great job on the “respecting ours and others’ sovereignty” (R.O.O.S) front. It’s been a colonizing free-for-all for centuries and a subjugation free-for-all for millennia. So I can understand if this collective R.O.O.S muscle is isolated and atrophied.

Thank you, daily life adventures, for helping me find new ways to strengthen my own.

Last week, my 16 year-old and I were having one of those driving conversations (as in, driving home from his crew workout) about “what to do” in response to the chaos and polarized debates we’re watching in American politics.

His own leadership instincts are keen. His mind was fixed on rational policy responses–on political strategies that might better navigate between the extreme positions and move the needle towards sanity. He likes to push up against my ideas and prove he’s got better ones. 

And usually I’d be wrestling with his ideas, trying to present an optimal political road map.

So I suited up with the vague beginnings of a politically savvy plan that also aligned with my values. But this time I found myself without any fuel left to architect my point of view. It just made me tired. It felt too much like the policy debates raging on social media that become a war of words where the humans behind them are forever misinterpreted and misunderstood.

In a modest fit of pique, I told my sparring partner, that I really wasn’t interested in winning the argument. I didn’t care that my political views appeared so naïve from his very logical mind’s perspective.

My “what to do” in the face of our society’s madness would be to speak fearlessly to the larger truths about who is suffering in this country and follow-up with personal action. It would be to palpably demonstrate my willingness to ease the suffering with the relatively little time I had left and with the gifts I’ve been given. And it would be to lead from where I stood and live out my virtues as best I could in spite of the assault and violence going on around me.

In that moment, he could see that I’d “left the ring.” It was confusing to us both. If we didn’t debate these policy fixes, how would we flex those mental muscles that seem so important to getting things right and making things better. Maybe my 50 years of mental sparring juice had just run out.

Whatever was happening, I felt a quiet swell of relief that I could be in the world without having to prove myself and my ideas. That my leadership, as a single individual with no positional power to speak of, did not depend on how smart I was but rather on the clarity of the language coming from my heart. I had accessed some remote county of the sovereign landscape I hadn’t known existed. And it sure as hell felt like freedom.

We pulled up to the house. He could see that this debate, with me anyway, would be fruitless. We stopped talking for a while. He went off to his room and I started fixing dinner. He didn’t try to re-engage me or accuse me of wimping out. He seemed to authentically, if not begrudgingly, respect that I had simply defined some new “terms of engagement” for myself and they were just different than his. And in a house where elbows can get sharp between two feisty alphas, I sensed the whiff of peace.

The whole incident got me thinking a lot about this concept of “terms of engagement.” I had unwittingly stumbled upon new terms for myself that included valuing the language of the heart as equally relevant to, if not more important than, a mentally constructed worldview. And if my son and I had different terms of engagement, it wouldn’t mean we couldn’t live together peacefully, it just meant we had to acknowledge and respect these differences so one of us didn’t colonize the other.

Dominant culture feels to me like a set of norms most of us understand as the inherent terms of engagement required to survive and materially thrive. To survive, most of us have accommodated the dominant culture, leaving our own terms of engagement—I believe our innate sovereignty–behind. When we act outside the bounds of these norms, or when we resist the colonizing force of a dominant culture, we find ourselves marginalized and unable to access the system’s spoils. Worse, when we simply look like something outside these norms, we are subjugated and even exterminated.

People’s willingness to tolerate the dominant culture, and subjugate their own terms of engagement, has reached a breaking point. We want out. We want to experience our sovereignty as portkey to liberation. Yet I’ve discovered how layered my own sovereignty give-aways have been and still are. I didn’t even know how freeing it could be to stop trying to prove myself with the elegance of my mental arguments until I just stopped doing it and let my heart lead.

Yes, there is privilege in all that I am saying here. It’s absolutely easier for me as a white woman to reject my own dominant practice of mental gymnastics and embrace a more heart-led life. But each soul has a journey and this is mine. 

Today, I know in my bones that I have much more to discover about my terms of engagement. The good news is life will keep serving up the right learning environments—often in the form of conflict or challenge–for me to see them more clearly.

I imagine many of us are on this same road to the as-yet fully explored world of personal sovereignty. And may even have found new territories of freedom in places you would not have expected. These are the news stories I’d rather hear about so write them down, share them with your communities, help us all learn what this can look like. I’m listening!

Grief’s Invitation...

Grief’s Invitation to Meet Our Innocence

Ever since the election I’ve felt disembodied.  It’s like my brain and my body are not in radio contact.  Last week when I couldn’t find my keys, I finally found them on top of the yogurt in the refrigerator.  After a contentious work meeting, I left a journal filled with confidential musings behind with no guarantee of who might read it before I could retrieve it.  I’ve tripped on curbs so often my ankles might as well be silly putty.

And yesterday, as I was pumping gas into my car, I pulled the hose out mid-stream spraying me all over head to toe.  I slipped in the resultant oil slick and it pulled my right boot’s sole partially off.  Clonking around half-soled 15 minutes later, I showed up at a doctor’s appointment and had to apologize for my off-gassing which had, in a matter of seconds, overwhelmed the small office.

Where am I?? My body asks with heightened urgency.  My brain’s doing its best to explain.  It’s ok, you’re still in Seattle, cushioned (somewhat) from the palpable xenophobia seeping across most of the rest of the country.  Yes, Donald Drumpf is our next President but we have enough checks and balances to maintain the freedoms embedded in our democracy.  And yes, the Cascade Mountains are still stunning in the orange-pink alpenglow of a late fall afternoon.  When all else fails, my brain reminds me, look to the timeless and be assured.

But my body is not sure of anything and the awkward fumbles and miscues speak to this uncertainty.

Just in the last few days, I discovered a trail of breadcrumbs to the feelings that override all rational thought marching through my logical brain.  And the found feelings map directly to my grief.

When I say this, when I mention grief, people think I mean the grief associated with a Drumpf presidency.  But that’s not it.  Drumpf’s election simply located the well-cap covering the well-spring of nameless, gargantuan, unbounded grief associated with eons of missed opportunity, mine and the collective’s. The opportunity we’ve always had to connect to each other’s unique yet universal humanity but have not known quite how.

So just as Drumpf’s election located this well-cap of grief inside me, subsequent events have been trying to unscrew it from its rusty, hardened hinges.

Events like going to the Egyptian Theatre and watching Moonlight, a movie by writer and director Barry Jenkins about an African American boy in Miami having to grow up too fast.  A movie about bearing witness to the tender, sensitive side of ‘the masculine’ meeting itself in the body of boy becoming a man attracted to other men.  It’s achingly beautiful and deeply human.  Through such beauty, the film commands you to sit with our human vulnerability and wonder about the opportunities we’ve missed to connect from that place.

Leaving the theatre, I notice the well-cap has been pried further lose. Wending my way through crowded sidewalks, I can almost smell the warm-blooded humanity of every person I pass, crossing Broadway, standing in front of Rancho Bravo, turning the corner towards home.

When an older man approaches asking for spare change, I stop before he can expel a word.  As I go searching for my wallet, he dives into his knapsack to offer me one of several hats he had for a trade. I don’t think I would recognize him if we passed again on the street.  But my memory of his kindness, inspiring my own, is firmly intact.

Our conversation is open and honest.  He explains he’s found a safe place to sleep lately, away from the drugs and drinking.  He shows me a new sleeping bag that is making his nights a lot cozier.  He asks me where I grew up and how I like Seattle.  I ask him about his family back in Arkansas and if he missed them.  It is a lifetime of sharing in less than 5 minutes.  Overwhelmed and undone, I feel the grief pushing me to my knees in gratitude for an opportunity to share this much connection with a stranger.  Yet I hold onto my ocean of emotion, afraid of what kind of public spectacle open weeping would create.  And then he is gone.

Who was this man? Hadn’t I known him all my life?  He is family.  He is friend.  It felt like we’d been children together.  That we had known each other before, at a time of our own innocence, before the weight of trauma and losses of the heart had piled up.  Before the many years of external pressures and societal conditioning molded us into the separate, protected individuals we’d become.

In the days that follow, like a rewired computer, I watch the adults around me morph into the children they’d once been.  Something had happened to the frame through which I saw others.  It was more than new vision.  It was some kind of madly hatched superpower.

Of course, it was easier when I watched people from afar, people passing in silence in front of my car as I stopped at a red light. But even the adults sitting across from me in meetings had transformed.  Just beneath the surface of their serious words, complex sentences and well-practiced personas I could see the younger, softer versions of themselves.  All of them as 4 year-olds, carefree spirits, looking out at the world in wonder, emanating lightness of being.

As long as I kept my attention on the armor and conditioned responses of the adults in front of me, I remained locked in the same but of my own making.  From this place of attention, I wrestle with power, I struggle to negotiate perception, I remain mostly alone.

But the moment I imagined them as the children they once were, I experienced their tenderness, a tenderness that lies just beneath the surface like the pulse of blood you feel when you press your fingertips to a wrist.

My new attention, becoming new vision, was helping me see around their projections, underneath their protections, beyond their objections.  It was guiding me to feel into their beginnings, alongside their insecurities, and closer to their fragility.  It was, simply put, a pivot.  Yet a radical pivot that lifted my foot off the breaks of the resistance that maintained a wall of separation between me and others.  Between me and connection.  Between me and innocence. Theirs, and more importantly, my own.

My innocence.  It may be the last part of me I’ve wanted to acknowledge. I’ve already acknowledged so many of my shadows, those neglected parts of me I deny that wreak havoc in my relationships.  But I’ve sought them out and, for the most part, found a way to understand what they need.

Not so my innocence.  My innocence and I have mostly lived apart.  In a world of competition and scarcity, I couldn’t afford to know my innocence.  It would not–it did not–help me to survive.  Because unlike so much of the adult world, innocence has no guile, no pretension.  It’s sincere.  It wonders aloud.  It knows very little.  It feels alongside and with the world, not apart from it.   It’s unapologetic about its needs.  And to survive it must trust what it sees and experiences as it is, not as we project it to be.

It’s my innocence I met on the street corner that night in the form of an older man from Arkansas asking for some spare change.  I meet it in children.  I meet it every day in the sweet dog that sleeps at the foot of my bed.  I meet it in a relationship with a friend and lover whose life has not hardened him like most people.

But none of these has opened me so much to my own innocence as has seeing it in every other human around me where it’s not so obvious and doesn’t want to be seen.  Seeing it everywhere doesn’t come naturally.  Seeing it everywhere is a practice.  But seeing it everywhere is washing away the old defenses and creating more space for acceptance.

And seeing it everywhere is asking me to feel my grief. The grief of having spent an unknowable time unable to experience our shared innocence, the only place from which we can actually, truly connect.

So, I invite you to wonder aloud about your own innocence. What’s keeping you from asking him or her to come in from the cold and stay for while? How long has it been since you shared a cup of tea?  Not just with proxies for your innocence in the form of children, lovers or loyal dogs, but in you.

Without a relationship to our own innocence, we will likely not recognize it in others.  Without a relationship to our own innocence, we will struggle to understand much less actually forgive one another.  Without a relationship to our own innocence, I feel with increasing urgency, we will not survive this next chapter of  human evolution seeking expression on what feels like a very tender planet.

Lucky for us, it’s only a pivot of attention.  Albeit a radical one.

Making Room...

Making Room for our Relational Intelligence

So this Halloween I decided to go as my psoas.  For the last few weeks, it’s been screaming at me, so loud I have no idea what it’s saying.  It just hurts.  For those of you who haven’t communed with your psoas much, it’s a muscle central to just about everything else.  It runs from the middle of our spine through the pelvis and down into the femur.  It’s the muscle that takes up our fear response, the “flight or fight” we gird ourselves against since about day one of this adventure we call life.

So here I am, in a dynamic conversation with my psoas, thus my idea to just be my psoas on a day when our culture condones this kind of thing.  Costume design details slated for a future blog entry.

Turns out when the psoas isn’t happy, every other muscle seems to be affected, so let’s just say it’s getting my attention.  I’ve never felt this kind of tension before, so I’m asking, urgently, what’s out of balance.

She (my psoas) is talking back, and I’m learning a lot.  It’s not a muscle that needs strengthening, rather she needs to simply let go and be free.  Big time.  Liz Koch, a psoas expert who travels the globe, teaches a class called Stalking the Wild Psoas.  This psoas of ours has been armored as protection from the barrage of unpleasantness we meet in our lives.  Consequently, she is caged and constrained.  And as I release all this tension, there’s a boatload of information coming in about my subliminal patterning that I’ve never seen before.

Mostly this information comes through my dreams.  Among the list of obscure dream metaphors for the emotions hiding in my psoas, I have met chickens living in cages the size of the chickens, tiny neglected puppies broken in two, and just today a pre-pubescent girl simmering with resentment as permanent house servant.  This one opened the map, revealing the story behind my caged psoas and, more importantly, the story behind the caged woman in all of us.

Who was this girl in my dream?  She was about 10 or 11, just on the verge of filling out, surging with hormones and becoming a sexual being.  She looked tired as she lay about waiting for instructions of what to do next from the parents she lived with and from whoever else entered her home from the outside world.   She wore a two-piece bathing suit, and when called into service, much like an aging prostitute, changed in front of everyone, into a dress more appropriate for serving but still with an eye towards satisfying the environment’s need to see her flesh and availability.

At first, I was repulsed by the little creature.  And then, as I recognized her in me, I wanted to reach out and hold her desperate, exhausted being protectively to mine.  The more deeply I looked into the dream, the more I realized that the dream was not just for me, but for women everywhere.

Painfully, it appears as a parable for women, transitioning from childhood and entering the world of unwritten and dominant cultural norms and expectations, having already internalized servitude and physical objectification so deeply we can’t remember living any other way.

In the work I do inside of government agencies, facilitating trust, cohesion and relational intelligence, I watch women struggling to break free.  I watch them exquisitely uncomfortable trying to adhere to the dominant culture’s ways of working and flexing positional power.  I watch women biting their tongue, repressing their instincts, distorting their personal power, and making themselves small, so as not to threaten the dominant culture’s need for objective, rational, head-centered dialogue and decision-making.

Some women have so become the dominant culture, that their wild, wise and relational selves are completely subsumed and undetectable from the outside.  Other women’s repressed feral natures are coming to the surface expressing themselves through anger and vitriol, sometimes directed at others, sometimes just at themselves.

Many of these women have opened up to me, from a deep and personal place, and reveal the extreme imbalance in their lives.  Here I meet the exhausted 10 or 11 year old of my dream, decades later, neglecting the nourishment of her own soul, and instead becoming permanently available to the malnourished souls surrounding her.

Here I meet that same fragile, pre-adolescent girl, some 40 years later, having never been asked if she wanted to live her life as a servant and as “objectified other,” but instead simply felt expected to do so.

Here I meet the child-woman everywhere living out a life of indentured servitude, seeking to participate in the world professionally, yet only on the condition that she play by the dominant culture’s rules, and promise never to bring her innate relational intelligence to the game.

It is here that I meet myself every day in every woman I meet.  And it is here that I meet buried rage covering seismic grief.

The good news is women everywhere are waking up.  Our fury and rage, mirrored in the cataclysmic weather changes of our she-planet, are revealing the parts of us we’ve forgotten and left behind.  The wild wisdom we innately hold and have always brought to family and community wants out, wants in and wants a voice.

Marginalizing it will just make it stronger and fiercer as it emerges.  Witness the women at the Bernie Sanders rally just a few months ago seeking to speak for the experience of people of color everywhere and black people in America, in particular.  So here are some recommendations.

It’s fully time for the dominant culture to finally acknowledge the life-threatening imbalance it’s created.  It’s fully time for the dominant culture to refine our relational intelligence, an intelligence held in the body as much as it’s held in the brain, as rigorously as it’s refined the highly rational, linear intelligence characterized primarily by the left brain.

And it’s fully time for the dominant culture to invite women into the room–the executive conference rooms and forums of power and decision-making everywhere–to teach and model what we know about this kind of relational intelligence to resolve the ever expanding scope of conflict, division and polarity that is consuming our institutions, our communities and our globe.

Perhaps we should give credit to the dominant culture and its bias towards left-brain thinking as it has led us to mastery in virtually every tangible domain.  The scale and brilliance of human civilization, measured through our technology and the unparalleled accumulation of wealth, is something to behold.  Yet we believe mistakenly that this trajectory can, somehow, continue ‘as is’ and we will successfully bring all ‘backwaters’ forward into this material nirvana.

What we fail to adequately acknowledge, or perhaps we simply deny, is the fallout of this left-brain bias.  Without more mediation from the right brain which sees patterns, metaphors and “the forest for the trees” — without a relational intelligence that values trust, interconnectivity and information coming from our bodies — we experience rising conflict, intractable poverty, environmental devastation, and a desperate search for meaning — some way, any way beyond the relentless productivity treadmill which seems to offer only more screen time, more gadgets and more human isolation.

Relational intelligence. What does it look like?  What are we doing when we apply it to our world, to our work?

• We see people listening for understanding, listening infused with curiosity, and listening as power.

• We see individuals unafraid to be wrong, refraining from the need to be right, and allowing their perspective to be broadened by others’ views and opinions.

• We see individuals able to express authentic gratitude and appreciation to the people around them, not just for what they do, but for who they are.

• We see people willing to play with each other again, to return to a kind of innocence that generates trust, innovation and new ideas much more efficiently than linear problem-solving.

• We see people with a much greater ability to tolerate ambiguity, who do not need to fix, contain and control but who allow problems to unfurl in their own timing and trust our collective ability to act when it’s ripe.

• We witness a heightened capacity for patience, first for ourselves and then for others.

• We see people who regularly practice self-reflection and incorporate this learning of themselves into their thoughts and actions to intentionally develop as a person.

• We observe individuals who notice the unspoken feelings or energies in a room, and who are unafraid to make these “intangibles” visible, so they don’t undermine trust and connection.

• We see people able to acknowledge their human needs and vulnerabilities and speak to others from that place vs. blaming or demanding unconsciously that the world meet these needs for them.

• We see people taking responsibility for the mythologies of their fragile egos and relating without the ego defenses that distort connection and authenticity.

• And perhaps most importantly, we see individuals able to create a safe space that allows everyone to disarm and put down their proverbial weapons.  As Visaka Dharmadasa, a leader and peacemaker from Sri Lanka explained in an interview about peacemaking in her country, “we must make our enemy feel secure, for it’s only when they feel insecurethat they lash out and cause harm.”

Relational intelligence.  As I write about it, my psoas feels better.  Perhaps that part of me who wants to speak about the value of relational intelligence and the role women can play, no longer as servants in the dominant culture but as teachers in the relational realm, is finding her voice.

Playing such a role will require that we heal the wounds we’ve sustained from childhood, perhaps from many lifetimes, and feel through our grief, anger and rage, and ground ourselves with new confidence and self compassion.  Only then can we, as women–and men–be truly effective as facilitators of relational intelligence.  This will take more time.  And a lot more patience.

For now at least, I am relieved to have found one of my deepest wounds, right here in the psoas, waiting patiently for me to wake up and listen.  And thankfully, it’s just in time.

Where’s Government’s...

Where’s Government’s 12th Man or Woman?

Humans have been organizing themselves since the dawn of time, starting as packs, just like wolves or street gangs.  But we’ve evolved, thankfully, and so has our organizing.  Frederic Laloux elegantly traces the history of this parallel–between human consciousness and that of the organizations we’ve formed–in his 2013 book Reinventing Organizations.  It’s not Shades of Grey but for us practitioners of organizational health, it’s pretty riveting stuff.

It’s riveting because it describes the emergence of a totally new way of organizing ourselves to make good things happen.  Even better, it maps with what we see glimmers of in our work inside local government.

We’ve been working at almost every level of the hierarchy inside King County and City of Seattle these last few years.  It’s no secret that the effects of hierarchy weigh big on the negative side of the equation.  The pyramid structure of government, nearly the oldest organizational design, may have been what we needed to manage large scale infrastructure and public services, but it’s disabling to innovation and disempowering for everyone, even those at the top.

We’ve observed work cultures dominated by fear of reprisal, lack of transparency in communications, persistent triangulation, and an embedded ‘victim-aggressor’ mindset.  Employee trust in management decision-making is abysmally low and breeds toxic cynicism.

This ‘dis-ease’ within government reveals its symptoms inside and out.  High rates of absenteeism, sick leave, workplace injuries, and grievances constrain a burdened system already having to do more with less.  Exacerbating the problem is our increasing distrust in the system.  The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports that public distrust of the federal government hovers around 80%, an all-time high.

All of this feels tragic. Paradoxically, as public distrust grows, polls reveal we want government to do more for us, not less.  For employees in the system, what began for many as a desire to serve the public and steward our commons, becomes a struggle to survive in work environments that undermine individual agency, creativity, impact, even physical health, and fracture employees’ collective ability to deliver on mission.

I’m haunted by the image of Russell Wilson’s tear stained face after the Seahawks’ play-off victory a few week ago.  His message was clear —“we never stopped believing in each other.”  I’m haunted, because I rarely hear my clients give each other such benefit of the doubt.  The safety to make mistakes and the space to learn from them is uncommon. Yet this safety is the essential ingredient required for the kind of innovation needed to meet the expectations of an impatient, demanding public with rapidly declining resources.

So where are those glimmers, you say?  The glimmers we see come from small teams finding more cohesion and a new dynamism.  We see small groups of people either who have reached the end of their rope and, through crisis, have re-imagined how they want to work together or whose immediate supervisor has an innate intelligence about organizational design that supports the human beings in the room to do their best work.  Either way it’s an opportunity for a new approach.

Our approach involves a series of “learning labs,” healing historical conflict and 1:1 coaching.  We follow an emergent curriculum that integrates training in non-violent communications, Jungian psychology, creative habits of mind, and dynamic facilitation.  Along the way, and when they are ready, we observe individuals stepping up to a higher level of personal power and accountability.  This individual power and accountability translates directly into higher team function on a range of measures, both qualitative and quantitative.

Though a single individual’s change can energize a group, it takes everyone on a team choosing changed behaviors to catalyze real transformation.  And when that happens, it’s like watching a metamorphosis as dramatic as that of the nymph becoming a dragonfly.

The new team is truly barely recognizable from the old.  How?

• Apathy and disengagement become active contribution and participation by every member.

• Fear of reprisal becomes vulnerability by all to admit mistakes and a desire to learn from them.

• Reluctance to deal with conflict transforms into willingness to have difficult conversations and clear up misunderstandings right away.

• Confusion around roles makes way for the emergence of new roles and latent leadership skills within all members of the team.

• Deflection of leadership/accountability shifts into excitement by all to tackle collective problems, share decision-making and even “hold the whole.” 

• Triangulation dissolves into a practice around transparency to reduce misperceptions and distrust. 

• Negativity about coming to work becomes a new enthusiasm for being part of a transformed team.

• Fulfilling basic expectations elevates to greater individual creativity and group intelligence. 

• Lack of trust in management becomes increasingly irrelevant as teams refine their own, shared purpose. 

So this glimmer we speak of becomes a dawn when we focus on teams.  Teams have always provided the structure for humans to come together to do extraordinary things.  Every successful company knows this, every winning sports team, every truly healthy nuclear family.  Teams harbor the potential for true alchemy, for out-sizing the sum of our parts.  When the people around us believe in us despite our unavoidable mistakes, we discover our genius.  And hard as it is for many skeptics to believe, we’re witnessing it insidegovernment.

To its credit, King County’s Executive leadership has focused on healthy teams for several years through its Lean Initiative.  Lean’s roots lie in the organizational principles of Kaizen, a management philosophy cultivated by Toyota and now applied throughout the world.  It empowers employees at every level to work together to map out new work processes that reduce inefficiencies and save money.  We’ve heard Lean’s engagement practices also leave a healthier culture in its wake.  Two birds with one stone, as they say.

Yet, many managers are realizing that Lean’s culture changes don’t last.  Without direct attention to culture—how we treat each other, how we ‘operationalize’ our stated values—Lean’s benefits can dwindle over time.  We believe investment in culture change should happen first, creating the strongest foundation for Lean’s innovations to live long and prosper.  Many of our allies in the public sector agree and have witnessed the benefits of sequencing it this way.

While it’s probably more politically palatable to make LEAN the priority because of its focus on material efficiencies, a more pragmatic path is one that elevates culture to the same level as process stream improvements.  And it starts with groups of individuals at the top of the pyramid modeling the trust, transparency and distributed leadership needed to create cohesive, dynamic teams at their highest function.

However we do it, we’re officially signing up to be government’s 12th man or woman.  Because we haven’t stopped believing in the people who, among many other things, fix our streets, run our transit systems, tend to our parks, bring water and electricity to our homes, process our trash, keep us safe, educate our children, and house and feed those of us with the least.

And it seems to be making a difference.  So connect with us, we’d love to tell you more about what we’re learning and keep the conversation going.

Bushwhacking a Trail Home

People ask me all the time, “so…are you an artist?” And these days I say, “I am, because I live a creative life.”  I used to stutter my way through it.  It almost sounds awkward as I write it.  But I’ve become more confident, and it’s this creative life that’s grown my confidence.  Confidence as personal power.  Not power over anyone but the power to transform conflict into opportunity or to disarm and stay curious in the face of a judgment or to relinquish my own agenda on behalf of a collective one.

Re-reading some of my speeches and blogs, I see this extended dance between creativity and power with a consistent focus on the latter.  Like in:

• the power we give away through our over-reliance on others and the seductions of the outside world and

• the power we can find in trusting a much larger current to take us into experiences that grow us, and releasing strong attachments to how we think life should go and

• the power imbalance that continues between men and women and realize it’s just a reflection of the imbalance of the masculine and feminine energies inside us.

So what’s the link between creativity and personal power, you ask?  How are they related?  From a certain perspective, this all sounds like the language of spirituality or self-help books.

Yet I’ve found the only way to grow my personal power is through my capacity to make creative choices.  And to understand where this capacity comes from, we gotta know more about our brains.  So bear with me while I distill some brain science down to a few essentials.

Bruce Lipton, cellular biologist and author of The Biology of Belief, distills brain science down more efficiently than most.

(illustration copyright David Laskey, 2012)

Lipton explains that most of our actions and behaviors are driven by the subconscious brain.  It’s this “hard drive” that downloads sensory input from environmental stimuli at a rate 500,000 times greater than the input received by our conscious brain.

Our bodies can’t process the massive data we absorb from every life experience, starting in the womb up until now, so it narrows our conscious experience to a minute fraction of what’s actually happening around us.

The weird part is all that data still exists inside us and is shaping our choices, our interactions and our perceptions of the world.  Yet it’s “subconscious,” so it’s hidden from us.  We don’t know what’s inside that enormous databank except when we observe a repeating pattern in our lives, and then we get a window into the subconscious programming that runs our show.

Trying to stop that subconscious material from operating ain’t easy.  It’s built into our hard drive.  But thanks to evolution, we have a new boss in our brains humbly named the prefrontal cortex.  This mass of neurons can override pre-programmed behaviors if and when we see them happening.

And that’s a big “if.”  Most of the time we’re not present enough to see these behaviors until it’s too late. And many of us are not creating any significant space for self-reflection, so we miss the repeating patterns because we’re not paying attention.

To choose to act in a new way that is not supported by the old software in our brains is a highly creative act.

If I am used to attuning exclusively to the outside world and meeting other people’s needs before my own–because that’s the language of my subconscious programming–my choice to attune first to my own needs makes me an agent of creativity and personal power.

If I am programmed by early life experiences to see the world as threatening and I manage these fears by controlling my environment all the time, my choice to allow more space for improvisation is a vote for creativity and personal power.

I recently mapped the routes I’ve taken to live closer to my personal power.  It’s been the hinterlands of control, judgment, image and dependency that separate me from this personal Holy Grail.  I’ve traced my way back so many times, I’m no longer bushwhacking a path.  I’ve beaten a trail home.  Here’s some trail maps.

In the foreign land of control, I’m always driving. I know where I want to go, and I don’t trust anyone else to take the wheel.  There is only room for my own agenda.  It’s the survival skill I developed as a child but it’s tight, constrained, and disconnected from the bigger picture.

So when I see the pattern, I choose to get in the passenger seat.  I trust the expansion of possibilities in an experience I can’t predict.  I rest in ‘right timing’ for everything, because ‘only a ripe melon falls from the tree.’  And I’m home.

In the far away country of judgment, I see an attribute of another, or of the world, and I’m separate from it.  It’s bad, while I’m good.  It’s wrong, while I’m right.  I’m intolerant of its difference, and I disown any of its power to reflect something about me I haven’t been willing to look at.

This time, when I see the pattern, I decide to be curious.  I investigate how this attribute of cruelty, selfishness, or manipulation shows up in me.  How do I over-manage information?  How do I cruelly ignore my own needs?  I understand that if I don’t reconcile these patterns inside me, there is no hope of it happening for the collective.  And, once again, I am home.

In the backwater of image, I focus on my presentation.  I worry about title, relevance, appropriate attire, the number of people in my database, not looking stupid, saying the right thing.  I am dishonest about what’s most important to me and how I really feel.

Programmed from an early age to keep my *#@!%*  together, I waste all kinds of energy managing other people’s perceptions, and I am disconnected from myself.  Choosing to give my deeper instincts a voice, I feel vulnerable and exposed, but I access more humility.  I feel more connected to everything.  Home is just around the corner.

In the swamplands of dependency, I need people and things outside of me to feel secure.  My relationships feel like security blankets.  I use other people’ actions to measure my worth and try to freeze the world to make it safe.  Without the people and things to reflect my value, I become needy and scared.

But when I choose to break from my patterns and spend time alone, when I take space from the constant motion of the outer world, I can hear my own song.  I understand the uniqueness of my gifts, and I become more grounded in symbiotic relationships where equity is the “subconscious programming” that sustains life.  Finally, and most definitively, I am home.

When I first started Arts Corps, I knew in my bones that a creative path was a powerful path.  And I observed society’s marginal investments in arts learning as a choice to suppress the power of others.  Yet every day, through the work I do, I see individuals choosing old patterns and giving away their power.  Like they are waiting for someone else to fix the problem.  But it’s only ours to give away or to claim.

If the 99% of us, even some significant portion of the 99%, chose creativity over subconscious programming, our collective impact could redress the untenable power imbalance in the outside world.  Though often said, but rarely practiced, outer reality is just a reflection of our inner reality.  And while making change happen outside us is slow and daunting, there is no limit to our ability to change what happens inside us.  Every time, it’s just a choice.

The logic of choosing life

A sophomore from Duke called me this week and asked if she could interview me for a mock newspaper article she was writing for a public policy class.  I’d met with her a few times this summer as part of a program for students interning at various Seattle non-profits.

Now back at school, her professor had asked the class to pick someone interesting to interview.   She said our conversations about creativity, education and systems change had really struck a chord, and she had more questions.

“Why the arts?” she asked.  She said at most universities the push is for everyone to graduate with ‘bankable’ degrees in economics, technology, the sciences.   She cited a Forbesarticle suggesting the logic of less liberal arts and more “practical” curricula given economic realities.  She knew I’d navigated the same system of education she was in now, but somehow broke out of the matrix and pursued a less conventional path related to the arts, creativity, and culture.

Why the arts indeed.  Fresh out of college, the arts barely registered for me.  Twenty-five years and much life experience later, I’ll concede to more wisdom.

On the phone that day, I said that when we apply ourselves to the more amorphous disciplines of art, literature or philosophy, we breed a stronger tolerance for ambiguity, essential for living and leading well, now and always.

We also develop a fluency in self-reflection, since to interpret or create anything worthwhile in these realms demands a self-honesty not required in the world of clear-cut answers and right and wrong.

Taken further, I believe tolerance for ambiguity and self-honesty are the linchpins to transforming our broken systems of education, government, justice and economics to better reflect the humanity they were designed to serve.  They are simply not working for too many of us.

Big claim eh?  How’d I make such a leap? Experience, primarily, anchored in a heavy dose of common sense.

As a newly-minted political science major from Duke, I thrived on clear-cut answers, on certainty.  Armed with the rules of the game and a logically trained mind, I acquired positions, resources, external validation.  And then, a malignant tumor in my left breast.   Absolutely nothing I’d learned in 16 years of schooling had prepared me for cancer at thirty. Knowing the rules of the game and having a logical mind was entirely irrelevant.

As I set out to retrace my steps, I realized I’d gotten lost in a sea of expectations and values not my own.  My adherence to certainty and structure was so rigid I’d lost any balance.  While I appeared successful from the outside, my inner world was a tempest.  So I approached my illness as an invitation to introspection.  And this is how I found my way back to life and health.

Introspection, and the space it requires, made room for me to breath, for depth and new ideas, for creativity and transformation.  I needed fewer rules, more open pasture.  From this space, I imagined and built the foundation for Arts Corps, a thriving, nationally recognized arts education program, whose mission is to foster creative habits of mind that include tolerance for ambiguity and self-refection.

A decade later, I felt the discomfort that precedes change, and it was a pulse I could not ignore.  Leaving Arts Corps to grow on its own, I took another look under my hood and found more broken valves and corroded parts.  As I became more honest with myself, I saw how many choices I still made out of fear, how many versions of life I was still living not my own.

Slowly but surely, a north star emerged.  Politics called me back, and I brought my experience and understanding of tolerance for ambiguity and self-reflection to the people working within the public sector, facilitating healthier, more cohesive teams.

I had no set methodology, but a clear hypothesis.  If everyone within a group had access to their innate creative agency and power, and understood how to interact more seamlessly with everyone else from that place, then the culture of government could move from one marked by stagnation and disparity to one brimming with innovation.

Four years later, here’s what I observe:  When the human beings inside of institutions are allowed time for self-reflection, and leadership at all levels tolerates the ambiguity that comes with sharing power across hierarchy, there is more life.  There is more vitality and expansion.  More creativity and healthy conflict.  More equity and trust.

Without the capacities to tolerate ambiguity or self-reflect, I observe the opposite.  More denial and repetition.  More disparity and abuse.  More destructive conflict and contraction.

Yes, I’ll say it again.  The systems we’ve created to support life don’t work for too many of us.  We can jigger all we want with the levers and pulleys–the policies, procedures, and organizational charts–but we’ll only be inching our way forward, if at all.  It’s the humans in the room, and our capacity for aliveness and creativity, who can actually transform the systems from the inside out.

Why the arts, she asked me.  Simply put, it’s the most life-affirming strategy we have.

Life.  Nothing else really makes as much sense.

(All Illustrations copyright David Laskey 2012)