Playful Perspectives

The Voice of the Elder February 17, 2012

As I woke up this morning and went outside there was a crow sitting on my car… “Wake up!” is the crow’s call to me. I had a call with some friends first thing this morning and I annoyed one of them, I triggered something and it created a mess. More mess.

I feel like I have created and am sitting in a big mess: this is a natural outcome of my default role judge and critic. In this pot of swirling energy, there is sorrow, fear, anger, injustice, determination, passion, resentment, self-loathing, vulnerability and longing.

I know that I made a lot of people ‘wrong’ with my unpopular perspective. I am sorry for that. My question then is how do I get to be right and they get to be right too? It takes me back to the Leap in the Co-active summit. I was judge and critic there too. How do people get to hold opinions that are entirely opposite from one another, and yet neither get to be wrong. How do these opposing passionate voices all get to be valid? I imagine sitting round a camp fire, and tossing pieces of wood into that fire and with each piece of wood a different perspective is thrown in. It catches fire and is transformed into energy. The elders just sit there and hold the space, they wait for all voices to be heard, for all the stories to come out. That once those voices are truly heard then they blow off with the wind.

No one member of their community, this circle, gets to be more extraordinary than the other, everyone has their piece that they bring to the circle. Mine is no better, no more valid than anyone else.

The step that is important in this process, for energy to be transformed is that all voices need to be heard. Where one voice is quashed or not validated, all those negative feelings remain, and there is a stalemate.

And perhaps I need to go further and say that I hear and understand those millions of voices of compassion, love and sorrow, that want to honour and respect the life of a brilliant, gifted voice that had an enormous impact on the world and the tremendous sadness that in many ways it was a life wasted by cruel addiction and a blindness to her own brilliance.

I also hear the voice of injustice that longs for that amazing compassion, love and sorrow to be directed at those who are invisible and unseen.

Unfolding the story February 14, 2012

The real question I want to play with is: What is education for? And I think that needs to be held in the container of: What are we here for? I want to play with these ideas and have no definitive answers, and the answers I may find, may well be wrong… but that’s the idea of playing.. trying things out, failing and finding other ways. As you create a new possibility, the opportunity arises from the question.

Remembering is a good place to start. Remembering who we are, remembering what we love to do, remembering where we came from. Story has such an important part to play in all of these places. We have our own personal stories, we have our own family stories, we have cultural stories, we have world stories. Each story whether its the story of creation, the development of humanity and the earth, the story of industrialisation, science, philosophy, evolution, faith… has a tale to unfold. Some of them we can only guess at, others we come closer to the truth as our ability to investigate becomes more and more specialized. Some of those stories look extremely different from your particular stand point, your cultural experience, your gender and your value system. There is one story that is common to us all, you are born and then you die. According to the UN Population Fund, I am the 3,619,848,244 person to be born amongst the current 7 billion. However there were 77,710,520,904 people who have lived since the beginning of history. All those stories! And one collective consciousness..

The media as we have seen has a huge role in developing current stories. I remember having a conversation about what I thought was an important news worthy story with one of my journalist friends and being asked… yes, great story, but whats the hook? What is going to hook the audience? No hook, no story… What is the hook, or what are the hooks that grab you? Grab your attention? What are the hooks that grab your child’s attention?

“Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief” by Rick Riordan has helped transform my resistant son into an expert on the Ancient Greek and Roman gods, demi- gods, heros and monsters. This author has captured his reader’s imagination in such a profound way that he is hooked on the classical stories. It is amazing to watch this resistant reader become enthralled by this story. My son is also extremely fortunate to have a brilliant English teacher who is unfolding the pleasures of Shakespeare to him: writing is very difficult for my son, he has significant processing difficulties, that mean he is very slow to put his ideas on paper and organize his thoughts. He has found “English” classes incredibly dispiriting so far in his life, and yet now with a teacher that is engaging him in story, he is being ‘hooked’ in.

It won’t surprise anyone who reads my blog that I failed English Language O Level… I hadn’t got a clue how to string a sentence together, or how to punctuate or how to control my written language. I still don’t. Its not something that particularly matters to me, I think its more about the ideas and images you are communicating, than the correctness of how you do it. Trying to teach me to understand the significance of grammar and punctuation was really at the time an alien concept. I was entirely bewildered by it, and thought that there was something wrong with me, that I couldn’t get it. And I made up that there was something wrong with me, that affected me and my personal story, for quite a long time… it wasn’t really until I found a creative flow in my writing that, until I found that narrative voice that I was good at expressing verbally… that I understood how to create sentences and structures. What is interesting to me about this, is that although when I am writing and putting my thoughts together in a stream, they maybe very disparate thoughts that I am connecting together. I can see the flow of the ideas; the connection is clear to me. How do I know if those connections are being made over there? What is the signal to me, that over there, they are getting it? How do I know if I have hooked them in? My husband says he sees the significance of the stories, but for him the real beauty is in the tools.

So again, what is education for? How do we get the best out of children? How do we get the best out of people? What are the common stories that will hook an entire class in? And what are the stories that hook individuals in? Their personal interests or passions? As Slade Suiter said in a fascinating conversation last night: Do we KNOW the children? Or do we NO the children?

Over there February 13, 2012

It is not comfortable holding an unpopular perspective. It is not that I wish to offend or disrespect anyone, by holding that perspective and yet I know that I do.

This thing called story is a very powerful tool. The media know how to use it, to grab our attention, to bring that which captures our imagination to the forefront of our minds, and to make human tragedy something so compelling that we will stay captivated, enthralled and entranced. In the ‘interests’ of the public, they will trawl through a persons baggage, their garbage, and with miniscule details of that persons personal life will bring them alive as a character, as a hero or more often anti-hero. We have been doing this for hundreds of years, the media today have it down to a real art.

My neighbour in Washington worked for a senior politician. Everything in the street was quiet until the day that this politician was caught doing something wrong. It didn’t matter what his record in politics was, his personal life had caught up with him. Suddenly we had fifty odd journalists camped outside our doors, all through the nights, all through the days. It felt like being surrounded by predators, waiting to pounce, perhaps more like pack animals, wild dogs, or vultures descending on a human carcass whose career was now in ruins.

The gaze of Sauron’s eye comes to mind, where is the focus of that gaze? If the gaze is focussed West, to the wonderful world of glitter and glamour, what is being overlooked in the East? My intuition always tells me when something that needs our attention is happening. I remember the initial reports from Rwanda about the chaos and indiscriminate killings, and thinking there is something awful happening here, and yet we seemed to do nothing. Infact we did nothing and I have read articles that have suggested Western Media was culpable for not stopping the genocide that was happening.

I saw a photo on Friday, from Syria, it was a banner saying “We are being slaughtered – where is the world?”. Well I know where the gaze was yesterday. If I was in Syria yesterday when the focus was on the West, I would question the values of this democratic world the West lives in. I know there are aid workers and journalists risking their lives to help and tell the stories, I know that there is a diplomatic process that needs to be pursued. I can only think that if Sauron’s gaze were focussed on the places that really need it, change would happen. How often does history need to tell us to act before its too late? Perhaps our celebrity envoys can help cast the focus – over there –

For me at least these are not separate issues, we are one world, one people, one consciousness.