Gaia Community: Adrian Pyle's Blog

Feeling Some Angst to Get Busy Jesus Promotin'

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:23:36 GMT

A transcript of an address by the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne found its way under my nose this week. He addressed a crowd of religious educators from church schools around Victoria. His intent in delivering the speech seemed to be to encourage those schools to be 1) clear about their solid grounding in Christian faith and 2) given that clarity, more proprietarily certain about their Christian orientation.

.............

There's no point in me criticising the Archbishop for this viewpoint. These perspectives are understandable. He is a middle-aged, Euro-Australian man formed in the patterns and understandings of post-enlightenment institutional Christianity. ....read more.....

Tags:

Piddling in the Pond While The Network Bottom Line Expands

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:36:45 GMT

I haven't watched an early-evening commercial news broadcast for a long, long time. So when I was in Brisbane recently and flicked on the 6pm news I was shocked by the lack of depth in the bulletin I saw. Before being accused of naivety, I know that ratings and advertising revenue are driving these news programs. Yet even allowing for this I was still taken aback by the "nothingness" of the news content. read more

Tags:

As Long As We've Got Security Cameras, We're All Safe Aren't We?

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:22:05 GMT

With the introduction of each camera, the citizenry hands over sovereignty of its habitat to a piece of technology and a small army of security guards acting as professional peace keepers. This is a giving up of our own capacity to make community and a turning to our strict father for short-term comfort - and at a rate so slow to be imperceptible until our dependency becomes an ingrained cultural deficiency .......read more

Tags:

Are “should” and “must” the most violent words of our language?

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:07:59 GMT

See this new entry at my new blog at http://www.gift-a-blog.net/2009/12/are-should-and-must-most-violent-words.html

Tags:

In Search of Friendship Covenants

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:39:37 GMT

Jim Burklo's blog continually throws up quirky, creative and sensitive ways of looking at practical spirituality. Today he's written about a more open view of friendship that I think can come about with greater spiritual depth. Here is part of what he had to say.....

Everybody needs friends who will speak up when they sense something isn't quite right. We all need somebody to seek us out, if we should suddenly fall off the social radar. We all need friends who don't just throw up their hands when the going gets rough, but roll up their sleeves and try to be useful. It helps to get specific about the kind of intervention and support that we need.

Of course, friendship can get tricky if we intervene too much in each others' lives. Few of us want friends who are going to take over and boss us around. But neither do we want friends to fail to show concern when we appear to be in crisis. Sometimes we let our friends down when we go too far in protecting their privacy.

Each of us draws the line at a different place, so what a great idea it is to speak up and tell our friends what we hope from them in tough times!

I admire the "friendship contract" that Jesus specified for his disciples. He let them know what he wanted from them. He spelled it out in detail: stay with me, watch with me, pray with me, preach with me, heal with me, continue my work after my death. To be sure, they broke that contract repeatedly. But his "contract" with them was ultimately unforgettable. Even after he was gone, they tried to follow it with each other. His is an example for us to emulate in expressing to each other what it really means to be friends.

Tags: spirituality, progressive Christianity, friendship, covenants, open communication

Loving Even More Nonsense

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:10:42 GMT

I'm continuing to be energised by reports of "nonsense" and how it's essential to the creative life. This report from Salon explores how "nonsense" from children begins to make a lot of sense in generating creativity. Yesterday I was in a meeting where someone described a planning techniques where "it felt like we were children again and it felt so good." And of course the Jesus character in the Christian testament loves to draw the parallel between the life of the child and the spiritual life - which I think is also the highly creative life.

Tags: spirituality, children, nonsense, creativity

Valuing Non-sense

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:22:55 GMT

A link suggesting that nonsense simulii in our day actually heighten our ability to see patterns (make "sense") in the rest of life.

Tags: nonsense, shadow and light, everything belongs

Valuing Non-sense

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:23:25 GMT

A link suggesting that nonsense simulii in our day actually heighten our ability to see patterns (make "sense") in the rest of life.

Tags: nonsense, shadow and light, everything belongs

Musing Over Community Capacities

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:27:10 GMT

In an address to the "From Clients to Citizens Forum", at the Coady International Institute, the co-director of the Asset Based Community Development Institute John McKnight made the following wonderful comment (amongst many)....

Health, safety, economy, environment, food, children and care are the seven responsibilities of our movement. They are the necessities that only we can fulfill. And when we fail, no institution or government can succeed. Because we are the veritable foundation of the society

McKnight is referring to the movement of the citizens - you and me - taking responsibility for the fact that in the end, we create the world together. The whole address is more than worth a read.

Tags: community develop, spirituality, asset based community development

Not Into Wordy Petitions to the "Absent Divine"

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:39:59 GMT

So I'm not into wordy petitions to the "absent divine" but am asked to "write a 'significant' prayer of both thankfulness and lament" for an event. What to do? This is what I came up with, which I think does a reasonably good job of placing my experience of "infused divine" into a western/modern writen form (and I delivered it very slowly, letting each word sink in):

Let us move to a time of quietness, a time of thanks for the gifts of the whole cosmos. Let us close our eyes and quieten our minds, heightening the other gifts of the senses we enjoy.

We recognize the presence of an imminent spirit in every loving act. And in each such act, a seed of selflessness is planted that might grow richly, fervently, abundantly in yearning hearts.

It is a simple choice to grow in love, yet it is never easy. The World is impatient for decision and action. Making space to see, hear, smell, touch and taste this imminent spirit is not a luxury the World often affords. We are thankful for our awareness of the need for discernment. May we support each other, building resolve to wait for your wisdom.

We are thankful, as we grow ever more aware of how to wait on such wisdom, that this wisdom comes ...so often in ordinary ways.

So we are thankful for our sense of sight. And at the sight of poverty in our streets and on our television screens, we ask how our gifts - seemingly tiny against the scale of the problem - can nevertheless be a force for good?

We see, we discern and our spiritual wisdom grows.

So we are thankful for our sense of taste. At the taste of fresh fruit, may we understand there are places where children have never tasted fresh fruit - and we understand that justice is somehow about stepping into the other's shoes.

We taste, we discern and our spiritual wisdom grows.

So we are thankful for our sense of smell. At the smell of car fumes, we wonder whether our rush to get from point a to point b is fair to those who make their homes on hundreds of small, vulnerable atolls around the World.

We smell, we discern and our spiritual wisdom grows.

So we are thankful for the sense of touch. At the touch of a hand much older than our own, we understand that our differences of opinions with our elders are the product of a wholly different set of circumstances.

We touch, we discern and our spiritual wisdom grows.

So we are thankful for the sense of hearing. And at the sound of a baby's cry, we know that so much of our whole life is about being heard, and how unfulfilling it can be to not be heard.

We hear, we discern and our spiritual wisdom grows.

In a moment of quietness, name up the things for which you give thanks, faithful that in the way the imminent spirit moves, you can find - in discernment - a faithful way to use these gifts.

Our prayers envelop this place and its creatures today and all the gifts that that place and those creatures bring to the World. May this be a place where spiritual wisdom pours in all of the ordinary ways of life such that "the Christ" - the sense of divine always imminent - might be known here.

Amen

Tags: spirituality, gift, prayer

Celebrating Finding the Voice Within the Child....

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:43:31 GMT

How best to write an album of children's songs? In this open-systems, self-organising world the answer's becoming clearer and clearer ..... surface the wisdom and talent within children of course! This link describes such a process beautifully, showing how appreciative inquiry can be used to children's songs really the songs of children.

Tags: appreciaitve inquiry, community development, vocation, spirituality

Wondering about Self-Congratulation....

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:09:50 GMT

I find myself in "church meetings" from time to time. There are frustrations associated with most institutional meetings but I couldn't put my finger on a particular frustration I had with church meetings.

Then someone who never attends such meetings found themselves in one. And I had to ask - at the conclusion - what they thought of it.

They told me they detected a significant feeling of self-congratulation. By this they meant, even amongst the quite open-minded group that were present, there was a pervading sense that the church "had spirituality under control" or was "the peak body for spirituality."

Suddenly a light went on for me. That's the frustration I often feel. A mild sense - (well, often more than mild) - of a stifling self-sufficiency and a separation from the world.

Recently the Uniting Church in Australia made some marvellous decisions about its constitutional preamble. The preamble now recognises an existing indigenous spirituality in this land prior to European settlement. Knowing the mechanics of the church, it is a wonderful achievement for the church to make this institutional recognition. So be assured that I don't want to detract form that achievement. Yet the hyperbole from some church groups about the decision might lead you to believe that the institutional church had just led society down a new path.

Let's face it, hundreds of people have been following God's spirit (church jargon for the perceived tendency in the cosmos to value diversity and gather that diversity towards unity) in this direction. Various world citizens - within and beyond the church - have recognised a profound spiritual consciousness - pre-settlement - in our indigenous brothers and sisters. And this has been happening for quite a long time.

The institutional church is finally recognising that movement of the spirit. I am not criticising that response time. I am simply asking that we say our "hoorays" humbly.......... And recognise that there are so many other "movements of the spirit' where parts of the world are calling the church towards them .....not the other way around. I'm fairly sure that has always been the case.

I guess that last paragraph sums up my "wondering" for this blog entry. We - individuals and institutions - can all be self-congratulatory. We all need help to say our "hoorays" humbly. I wonder I the church would be open to a little help on that front too?

Tags: progressive Christianity, humility, self-congratulation

Yearning for Spirited Composting

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:15:28 GMT

Some people can make even an e-mail poetically rich. A colleague recently shared two sentences from an e-mail one of her friends wrote.

They are in-spir-ing.

I cannot, not share them with you.

Here they are…

I'm convinced that there's an element of ritual that goes beyond aesthetics and 'belief and belonging' stuff, and has the potential to make us more whole and limber beings.

I want church to make us better shoppers, composters, listeners and lovers.

This is swoon stuff. Spiritual practice as a doorway to better listening, loving….and- yes – shopping and – yes, yes, yes – composting!

Ahhh …. practical mysticism …the mysticism in small, everyday things. I suspect there may be no other kind.

Tags: spiritual intelligence, community development, mysticism, everyday mysticism, practical mysticism.

Dreaming of an End to Human Waste (not that type)

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:12:33 GMT

My "wonderings" from yesterday re-minded me of Bliss Browne's beautiful understanding of "Trinitarian" wholeness. In this she refers to the "recycling symbol" as a symbol of perfect giving, perfect receiving and nothing wasted. In thinking of the "ideal" entrepreneurship - as I was yesterday - I'm dreaming of a world where no human insight or gift is wasted.

Impossible you say?

Maybe.

But are we at an optimal point of waste reduction?

I think not!

There is still a deeper place to go.

I'm also reminded here of James Carse's provocative words in his life-changing little book Finite and Infinite Games:

Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to a society for whatever reason, and have become...noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view - in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets - all places of desolation and uninhabitable. We live in a century whose master players have created many millions of such "superfluous persons." .....It is society that declares some persons to be waste.

Tags: entrepreneurship, waste, asset based community development, James Carse, Bliss Browne

E is for Entrepreneur and for Everybody

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:56:47 GMT

I wonder if everybody can be an entrepreneur?

By the traditional or modernist definition of the word - the "creativity in business as a separate life activity" type definition - this would not seem to be possible. But think for a moment about Peter Block's injunction that "The Answer to How is Yes" and we see things a different way. The idea is that too much reliance on "how" questions will set us routinely looking for answers beyond ourselves and this approach undermines our "gift" to life in two ways:

1) It devalues the fact that we each see the life situation (that led to the "how" question) in a unique way.
2) It devalues the particular creative capacity that each individual might bring to the particular situation, and replaces it with a desire for efficient (quick) solutions.

Our need for the quick solution is often driven by the need to reach some measurable performance target. But I think we are collectively beginning to question what this need for "measurable speed" does to our capacity to be co-creators of our world. As physicist David Bohm said of measurement: Indeed, the attempt to suppose that measure exists prior to man and independently of him leads, as has been seen, to the ‘objectification' of man's insight, so that it becomes rigidified and unable to change, eventually bringing about falseness and deception in our overall apprehension of the self and the world.

So perhaps there is a call on all of us to be entrepreneurs - and by that I mean those people who recognise the unique sense we each have of an issue and the unique gifts we bring to the world to develop creative solutions - and in that can be whatever sphere of life issues may arise.

Finally let me defer to the Institute for Participatory Design for another sense of how we open up our understanding of entrepreneurship:

Life entrepreneur: Our view is that in order to become an entrepreneur one would not necessarily have to establish a company. To behave in an entrepreneurial fashion, to us, means to implement ideas of an economic, social or ecological nature, with a view to improving one's surroundings in a responsible and autonomous way and with a willingness to take risks. An entrepreneur might build a house, establish a company, develop and produce a product, get an initiative underway, establish an NGO, help those in need, research a solution to a problem, or sail around the world in a self-built solar-driven boat. In this sense, all those who go through life with a positive, goal-oriented, self-responsible attitude are life entrepreneurs.

Comment about this on stumbleupon.com!; Digg it; Privately E-mail it!; Technorati Links; Save to del.icio.us

Tags: entrepreneurship, participation, community development, Peter Block, spirituality

Of Children and Carrots.....

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:34:08 GMT

I have just planted my carrot seeds for the southern summer. I wonder what proportion of early teen children in the overdeveloped world know where carrots come from?

I have just planted my carrot seeds for the southern summer. I wonder what proportion of early teen children in the overdeveloped world know where carrots come from? I wonder what proportion is "appropriate" or "acceptable?" I wonder whether 100% is the only acceptable number - almost as a "right of the child" to be able to picture where their food comes from and how they are connected to food? I wonder - in the tradition of positive deviance - how so many children do come to know about the origin of their carrots, and how that knowledge can assist those who don't?

Why this whimsical but wonder-ful questioning? I was looking at this wonderful site (related to one of the burgeoning number of projects that set out to financially encourage creative problem solving) and found this project and a related article here too.

As the first article says:

It's so fricking simple it's brilliant. The need was so clear. Cooking for a private household in a wealthy neighborhood in Connecticut 8 years ago, I brought home carrots with green tops and the kids had no idea what they were. What? You mean carrots aren't those one inch things that come in plastic baggies? At first I thought, "Come on, these kids are fooling me." But nope, since then I've been on a crusade to get kids reconnected to their carrots. To the source of healthy food - the healthy earth and family farms. And that food pyramid, and all that TALK about healthy food just ain't doing it. The kids have to get their hands and their MOUTHS on this food if we want them to start eating it.

Comment about this on stumbleupon.com!; Digg it; Privately E-mail it!; Technorati Links; Save to del.icio.us

Tags: community development, food, food security, children, spirituality

Appreciating Sustainable Leadership.

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:09:59 GMT

Adrian is appreciating sustainable leadership........

This opinion item relates to the use of appreciative inquiry for business reframing. It mentions the use of the "leader framework" from the Forum for the Future. That's not a well know organisation here in Australia but my viewing of their website created great excitement in me around the idea of a learning community for sustainability. I love this excerpt from one of the pages on sustainable leadership:

We have observed that strong leaders who incorporate sustainability into their thinking display three key characteristics. They look further into the future, they engage widely with a range of stakeholders, and they embrace meaning from a personal perspective. We call this three dimensional leadership.

Three dimensional leaders:

look further - leaders need to identify and understand future trends and issues so they can prepare for new challenges and opportunities;

engage widely - leaders need to understand how everything is connected so they can respond to a wide range of issues, perspectives and stakeholder concerns;

embrace meaning - leaders need to be authentic; and harness their personal values and beliefs in sustainable development to achieve the greatest impact.

Comment about this on stumbleupon.com!; Digg it; Privately E-mail it!; Technorati Links; Save to del.icio.us

Tags: leadership, community development, spirituality

Anti-Cancer?

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:30:25 GMT

Words are being created at a reasonable clip in the culture change/philosophy/ spirituality space. Usually such words are the result of adding a simple affix to a term that's already deeply important in the particular approach being explored.

"Inclusionality" is the most recent example I have found and I quite like it, given my sincere attachment to the root work - inclusion. Inclusionality is another way talking about the journey beyond the separation/dualism that comes with heady pursuits, but as I look at the "inclusionality" website there are some pretty "heady" concepts being explored.

Nevertheless I did resonate with the ideas in their MS PowerPoint presentation about the concept - another way to appreciate this journey beyond ego.

I particularly liked the comment on slide 12a (yes, there are quite a lot of slides) ...viz: "Don't declare self independent from neighbourhood, because to do so is cancerous."

The resonance here for me is that as I read David Servan-Schreiber's excellent book "Anti-Cancer - A New Way of Life" - ostensibly about the human/physiological understandings of cancer - I kept thinking "this is really a book about community, and the cancer that develops in society (read: any number of societal ills) when we lose connection amongst its parts."

Comment about this on stumbleupon.com!; Digg it; Privately E-mail it!; Technorati Links; Save to del.icio.us

Tags: cancer, community development, inclusionality, wholeness, spirituality

You Do Not Have to be Good.

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:07:51 GMT

I'm no expert on the art of humour. But maybe some of the sharpest acts of comedy arise when - through laughs - we are made starkly aware of a meaning deficit in our society.

This opinion arises out of conversations this week with my work colleagues. We now work in situation where we are connected to a large numbers of schools. And suddenly Chris Lilley's humour is bitingly funny to me in a way I've not fully understood it before. Or more to the point his parody of the schoolgirl with a plethora of overseas sponsor children alerts me to a crisis of meaning. For it seems that our schools have large numbers of students eager to sign up for clever charitable gimmicks. I mean the term "gimmick" clinically rather than critically here. For these charitable acts are purposefully designed for novelty and hence to generate a quantity of engagement.

And undoubtedly they contribute to specific, positive outcomes. But do they really tap into the student's passion, triggering questions within the student of what, uniquely, they are called to contribute? Can they take engagement from a quantity to a quality measure? For most students I suspect not. They are only ever production-line methods, designed to induce action out of our desire to "be good" -as poet Mary Oliver describes that behavioural driver. That's not a bad thing; it's just not the deeper stuff of life. And we get the idea of meaning confused when we think it's about the superficial desire to "be good." I suspect many students - and some school staff - are in that space.

And equally in that space might be many of our companies and their employees. As I've had these conversations with my UCA colleagues I've been simultaneously conversing with another colleague - this time a corporate consultant - about the very same thing. This time though the subject is corporate social responsibility. There are positive signs here, but still - my colleague thinks - too many "responsibility" efforts that are adjunct to core business. Too many droves of corporate employees unleashed on the world to plant trees, paint a fence or talk to a granny, acting at right angles to employee passion or corporate purpose. It's action that doesn't hurt anyone but Oliver's words ring in my ears - a disjointed corporate attempt to "be good."

I am a big fan of Oliver's poem. It cut s to the chase of meaning for me. "You do not have to be good" she exhorts. She then answers the dilemma presented by this blog entry, with - in my opinion - stunning advice.

"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Practically, this means schooling and corporate life with high levels of integration. So sweet-sixteen schoolgirl doesn't aim to be child sponsorship champion. Instead she's led to discern her own deep concern about income inequality (or whatever it is) and to bring her "passion project" to life through tailored lessons. Science, humanities, arts, sport - are all experienced through the lens of that student's particular gift. And because the "soft animal of her body is loving what it loves" every minute of the day she is engaging these lessons with a distinct level of enthusiasm (literally "in god").

And a junior technology analyst joins the corporate energy provider, not to be nice to a granny, but because he wants every technical solution he develops to make sustainable energy more and more available to a greater diversity of people. He's not "having to be good." He's just doing what he "couldn't not do."

Inspiration for this last phrase we owe to Martin Buber. I think the Jewish mystic was really tapping into the heart of life with his suggestion that life is not about the "have to's, musts or shoulds." Marshall Rosenberg - in his work on non-violent communication - showed us that, these are words of violence. That's because the action that results from these words is driven from somewhere outside the inner-most design of our being. Instead, returning to Buber, life is about that which you cannot, not do....a deep, inner sense and the place where compulsion and radical freedom meet. The resultant action is experienced as deeply meaningful.

No ...you do not have to be good!

Comment about this on stumbleupon.com!; Digg it; Privately E-mail it!; Technorati Links; Save to del.icio.us

Tags: spirituality, gift, passion, mysticism, vocation

The Campaign Against Work/Life Balance

http://adrian-pyle.gaia.com — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:09:51 GMT

If I was a fierce campaigner I think my next campaign would be to end "work/life balance".

Actually that's deliberately provocative because I don't have a particular problem with the concept that lies behind the term. It's the term itself that needs shelving. For don't we have enough dualisms in the world without creating the illusion that "work" is somehow different to/separate from/the opposite of "life?"

Clearly work is part of life and I suspect something resembling balance comes when we truly realise that integration.

In fact ,my hunch is that when we cease to create dichotomies that include the word "life" (such as "life v death" and "work/life balance") and realise that life can't be "separated out" and "it's all part of life" that we will have reached a profound new place in the evolution of human consciousness.

Comment about this on stumbleupon.com!; Digg it; Privately E-mail it!; Technorati Links; Save to del.icio.us

Tags: work, life, balance, dualisms, dicotomy, community development, spirituality