Feb 26, 2022

Feb 26, 2022h in Cognition & Communications, Collaboration Strategies, Contribution to the Field, Graphic Facilitation, Inspiration, Leading Change, Mental Models, Personal Transformation, Visualizing by

As the pandemic eases and world crises erupts over Ukraine, I’m finding myself embracing a real turn in my creative life. Beside writing poetry, I’m beginning to explore video as a medium of sharing. I’m returning again and again to the feeling that it is more important than ever to share my experiences in facilitation and change. This urge, which feels like a “calling” is leading me to turn my attention away from serving the outcomes others set for me as a consultant, to following my own calling and expressing it through our Global Learning & Exchange Network (the GLEN). Its purpose of supporting a network of change agents and facilitators in become even more capable of guiding collaborative processes seems more important than ever. We simply must learn how to work together to face the enormous problems of these times.

This post is to share a new video I created at The Grove during what we are calling a Grove Dojo session. I am beginning to do this in person at The Grove offices in the Presidio of San Francisco on a regular basis and welcome persons who might be interested to join in. They are held on Friday afternoons. (contact me if you are interested). Trent Wakenight, our new consultant is helping with the shooting and production. Krista Bremer, a person I will introduce soon as a new Program Director at the GLEN, helped support this particular expression.

I’m posting the Use of Self video here for you to enjoy, and to encourage myself to do more. It’s only 10 minutes long and is part of a series of “legacy videos” I’m creating about the many insights, principles and practices that have informed my visual facilitation work over the 45 years I have been practicing.

Feb 21, 2022

Feb 21, 2022h in Cognition & Communications, Inspiration, Mental Models, Social Change by

My writing keeps leaning into the poetic. Here is one reflecting on “whiteness” following many conversations with clients and colleagues about being culturally sensitive.

WHITENESS

I stare at the point
on the horizon where
the sun will rise.

I stare without moving
until the entire landscape
becomes white,
a trance of
not seeing.

A bird lands on a tree
near my focal point
and the movement jumps
out like fireworks,
then back to white.

I grew up in a town
where all the faces were white,
different shades of course
but not seen as color.

One year a man from Nigeria
visited, his black face jumped out
of the whiteness of my youth
in a burst of awareness.

Did this surprise later
draw me to a city
without a dominant color,
a port town, pulling from
the world, patches of white
with large splashes of color.

I wonder if whiteness is
simply the absence of color
or is it the field beyond form,
the clear white light
arising in stillness and death?

Is reaching for being white
a call to this light, an escape
from identity and control?
The sky began to glow
as I stared.

The sun itself burst through
at the very center
of my focus.

And from that point two Peregrines
rose from the tree and
spiraled into the sun.

They danced and dived, and
my vision was no longer
a field of white, but a
riot of feeling
as I flew into the day.

On the white page of my
journal, a single stroke
breaks the whiteness.

Sometimes, like a bird,
it flies unimpeded by
color or form, white
and black dancing on
the same page.

When did we lose
our connection,
to the beauty
of surprise?

Oct 31, 2021

Oct 31, 2021h in Cognition & Communications, Family, Inspiration, Mental Models, Personal Development, Personal Transformation, Relationship by

My weekly poetry writing is influencing my prose. Here is what might be called a prose poem. It arose from a prompt that is its title.

LEANING IN

“It’s about trusting. Just lean in, stay connected to your partner,” the leader instructed. She was facilitating a trust activity where partners stand opposite, hands joined in an arc over open space. “Move back slowly and lean in. Go as far as you can.”

I know we will fall. We’ve passed the point of having control and balance. Only the strength of connection keeps us up, and the leaning in.

But my muse doesn’t have such steady hands. When she appears it’s a feeling in my chest, or fascination with some little figurine on my desk. And if I lean in too quickly. the feeling disappears. I fall into thinking. I fall into trying.

When my partner comes to the table with upset in her eyes, masked by comments about the weather or what she wants to eat, can I trust my seeing, and lean into the edges of something I cannot yet see? And when the conversation turns to feelings of being discounted and dismissed, can I stay leaning into listening, just listening, and just feeling the weight and push of it for a while?

There is a certain thrill that comes when the leaning in spans a long reach, well beyond what is possible alone, when the listening tiptoes past my pain and defensiveness and begins to soften the edges of a brittle heart. Breath in pain. Breath out compassion. Tonglen—taking and sending as leaning in. Staying connected beyond one’s own stability.

In the exercise we collapse on the floor laughing when we go too far. “Okay do it again; focus on your connection; move back slowly, together. You will go farther this time.”

Can I lean in without a facilitator? Can I lean into my own faint callings? Can I laugh when I fall on the floor of my unknowing?  It’s about trusting, I know, this leaning in, and listening, and feeling the leaning come back my way.

Perhaps a steady leaning in can be strong enough for dancing.

David Sibbet. 10-26-21

Oct 05, 2021

Oct 05, 2021h in Cognition & Communications, Inspiration, Leading Change, Mental Models, Personal Development, Social Change, Sustainability by

For a couple of months I have been in a writing dyads with a colleague. We give each other prompts. Write for 20 minutes. Read what emerges, and then share how the writing landed. What resonated? What touched us.

As a result I’ve been writing poems, and somehow the voice that is coming out is one I want to reinforce, so I am sharing a poem I wrote and evolved a bit this morning. It’s current. It is called:

PREMONITION

Long cycles hide in the

busy flow of daily life,

deep currents under the

crashing waves.

 

Sometimes the cycles are a slow crumbling,

a weakening of foundations

that give way abruptly

breaking the surface calm,

giant whales of change.

 

Living in earthquake country

I listen for faint signals with

my body, tiny tremors that

foreshadow a major snap.

 

Is this background vigilance

sharpened my foreseeing,

or is the nervousness I feel

the past pushing forward,

clouding, memories of Vietnam?

 

Entrenched institutional arrangements

move like tectonic plates.

And their locked shifting can snap

and become depressions, and wars.

 

But are these tremors I feel today

true markers to be followed, and

feared, or simply the crumbling

confidence of my own long life?

 

Sometimes excitement seeking young people

play chicken with their fast machines,

but the institutional cracking and straining

I feel now, though called a game of chicken,

foreshadows more than a crash,

more a crumbling of trust,

with dreams and lives being pulled

into an opening chasm.

 

I breath in the fall air

and notice the lack of rain.

A central little tree in our back yard,

tucked under larger oaks

has died.

I look around for other

signs that this drought is

cutting more deeply,

quickening our cooking.

 

When will the long cycles

finally snap through

the sea of our distractions

and bring us face to face with

the breeching whales of change,

the generation shaping crumbling

of our foundations?

 

And what is asked of us with

this foreseeing?