Cairns #52
End of the Long Nights, 2008
The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth,
back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the
headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E.
is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that
inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.
I
took my first kayak run of the spring. Swallows were flying about and an osprey
was carrying nesting material. My beloved shooting stars are in flower. It’s
wonderful how the shooting stars emerge in the same places year after year. I
walk to the same spot every year to check. Three weeks ago, they were not yet
up. The last two weeks have been too busy. This weekend, they are here.
Changing
a Habit
Step
One: In the winter, we drive with the windows up. One day I noticed that closing
the truck door caused a pressure wave that was unpleasant on the ears. It
wasn’t painful but I could feel a strong compression of the air within the
truck cab and my ears as the closing door pushed and trapped more air within the
small cab.
Step
Two: I started noticing this more often. At some point, I thought that this
unpleasantness could be eliminated by rolling the window down a bit before I
closed the door.
Step
Three: I would get into the truck and close the door. I’d feel the compression
and remember, “oh, I should have rolled the window down a bit first.” I can
get stuck in Step Three a long time because it is the completion of the old
habit that reminds me of the change I want to make but then it is too late to do
it right (ie, the door is now closed and the unpleasant compression is past).
What follows is the wisdom I’ve learned to shortcut this.
Step
Four: The first time I grow aware that I am in Step Three (“Oh, I just closed
the door again without rolling the window down a bit. When will I ever
learn…”), I stop my forward momentum and take the time to go back and do the
action the new way. I open the door again, roll the window down a bit, and close
the door. “Yep, that feels nicer.” Roll the window back up. The habit
changes fairly quickly after that. The key is using the moment of “oops”
awareness to go back and redo the action in the newly intended way.
Changing
Chrysalis’s money flow
Chrysalis
is having a good year (which is great because last year was very hard-what with
losing our museum classrooms). Students are happy, responsible, and treat one
another kindly. Learning is strong. Parents feel and appreciate the magic of our
community. The teachers team together magnificently.
Our
two sites are baldly inadequate. Our salaries are too modest. But things feel
very good. One of the most important reasons for this is a change we made in our
governance/money flow two years ago.
We
included in our founding charter twelve years ago some quotations from the book,
Complexity, by Michael Waldrop
including this one: "Use local control instead of global control. Let the
behavior emerge from the bottom up, instead of being specified from the top
down. And while you're at it, focus on ongoing behavior instead of the final
result…. [L]iving systems never really settle down."
To
capture this bottom-up nature, the school organized its finances this way: the
state money we received for each student flowed directly into the classroom
budget of that student’s lead teacher. A certain percentage (it worked out to
around 40%) of this funding was “taxed” for school-wide expenses – rent,
administrative salaries, copy machines and paper, utilities, insurance,
reserves, etc. The remainder was then available for however the teacher chose to
spend it, including setting his or her own salary.
That
money flow seemed very bold and empowered teachers far more than the standard
model in which teachers are hired, paid, and work in the conditions negotiated
between the union and the administration through collective bargaining. Our
system worked all right. Lots of good, creative things happened in our first ten
years but there was also occasional conflict. How to resolve the situation, for
example, when one teacher thought another teacher was structuring that classroom
budget to maximize salary at the expense of the students? Did the one teacher
have the right to interfere in the other teacher’s program? Governance got
touchy. Teachers found themselves in conflict over fairness. So we changed this
structure when we renewed our charter two years ago.
We
operate now as a teachers’ co-operative. As a group we decide how much of the
school’s revenue will go into salaries and then the salaries are divvied up
according to an agreed upon (but changeable) formula. This change has brought
the teachers strongly together. We are much more unified with more give and take
flowing easily. The program is stronger and parents feel the difference. In
retrospect, the main thing “wrong” with the original system, perhaps, was
that our “bottom-up” attempt of having money flow issues decided
individually put it at too low a level.
To
use a body image: at the cellular level one finds a certain level of
organization and function, at the organ level another level or organization and
function emerges, at the system level other organizations and functions emerge.
The flow of blood, for example, emerges at the level of the circulatory system.
Even though the goal of blood flow is the nourishing of every living cell, it is
not organized at that level. Similarly, the level of individual teachers was not
the appropriate level at which to organize the flow of money through the school.
It needs to be at a higher level of organization that binds the individual
teachers into a next level of organization where all the teachers are working
together towards a common vision of “health.” (However, our level of money
flow is lower than in the typical school where teachers have limited say about
the flow of money through the school.)
The
lesson to be derived is that it makes a profound difference at what level within
an organization a certain function is organized. A simplistic orientation of
“higher” or “lower” or “bottom-up” won’t do. But when it happens
at the right level, it can bind the smaller systems together into a more
dynamic, vital whole.
(Reminds
me of something I read about Napoleon. One of the reasons his army was the
terror of European royalty is that his soldiers wanted to fight for his cause
(unlike the conscripted serfs used as cannon fodder for centuries by kings in
petty land disputes with one another). That willingness to fight allowed a level
of initiative to emerge far lower in the ranks, creating a flexibility and
swiftness that outflanked the stodgy, slow top-down military movements of the
royal armies.)
Science
article
January
18th
Science journal had an interesting article on stream dynamics. The author states
that most of the stream studies that developed our sense of how a “natural”
stream works were done in the Piedmont area of eastern
Kalynn’s
circle
In
“Meanwhile,
the latest issue of Environmental
Architecture and Phenomenology had two articles concerning the architect
Christopher Alexander’s latest opus, The
Nature of Order. In Alexander’s “Empirical Findings from The Nature of
Order,” I came upon this complex but key sentence: “It appears that the
process of making a living environment succeeds or not to the degree
that the making process is based on the repeated use of the criterion, ‘How
much is this part, that part, or that whole like my true, inner self?’”
Because
of that sentence, that article, I looked for more information on Alexander’s The
Nature of Order and came upon the 15 properties that he believes are part of
the process by which wholeness is generated and extended - in nature and in
beautiful creations by people. I immediately internalized properties like
“living centers”, boundaries, and gradients because of all my time in
nature. Everything I read of his felt immediately applicable and helpful to our
dreams for the potential site at Parkville Ranch. Then this January I discovered
that our library had copies of two of his earlier books, A
Pattern Language and The Timeless Way
of Building. I read them and again, so many of his ideas felt right because
he is tapping into what I consider the wisdom of nature. His work was like
coming into a new territory that I need to explore and finding that a kindred
soul had already mapped key features far more than I ever could have imagined.
These
two books were written thirty years ago but I found them deepening my vision of
how profound an impact
One
of Alexander’s goals is to design our surrounding space so that it supports
our deepest levels. A built environment can create conflict and stress. If you
don’t have an external shelf next to the door, for example, you have to go
through an awkward dance when you are carrying groceries and need to fish out
your house keys. A proper design of the entrance will eliminate that hassle. But
Alexander wants design to do more than eliminate negatives. It can create
positives: the way light can fill a room, the way a structure can create a sense
of psychological security, the way a proper pattern of paths and seats helps
create spontaneous social interactions. Change the design and more becomes
possible. The possibilities of design become spiritual – enhancing the
environment to aid our soul’s journey.
Then
in early February I came upon the website Alexander’s group is creating around
The Nature of Order. It has a section
on creating living neighborhoods. http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm
Again, it feels so
natural and right to Parkville, partly because the first steps in his process of
designing a living neighborhood were the steps we had already done because we
couldn’t imagine any other way to proceed.
This
brings me to the story I want to share. One of Alexander’s first steps is to
walk the land and locate “centers” – places where several people
experience beauty and tranquility. (One such place at
“If the boundary needs emphasizing, try putting an additional
bit of ‘something’ to increase the enclosure of the place.
“In the same way, see if the space needs a center to embellish the
feeling of being there. This center does not need to be in the middle. If it
needs it, you might try to embellish it, very subtly, by making something that
makes the center feel more solid, something you can connect yourself to, when
you are there.
“Above
all, work to make sure that whatever you do there leaves the beauty of what is
there now, intact.”
One
center we call the Beyond Grove. Two coves scooped into the edge of the highland
leave a space projecting out encircled by trees. The space does not visually
declare itself. Rather, you feel it more as you walk around the space. So I
thought I would try “enhancing” it. The space was “cluttered” with
fallen branches. I moved them into a circular arrangement that defined the space
within the grove, both by forming a circular line and by emptying this enclosed
space of clutter. A week later, I brought the middle school kids to the site and
asked them, a la Alexander, to walk the site and locate places where they
experienced greater beauty.
Kalynn
found great beauty in the space beneath the slanting branch of a tree growing on
the edge of my branch-defined circle. Without knowing what I had done and
without instruction from me, he started pulling the fallen branches around him
into “something to increase the enclosure of the place.” His entrance faces
into the center of the grove. He brought a large rounded rock of interesting
shape and placed it within his structure “to embellish the feeling of being
there.” It’s not in the center but barely visible off to the left side of
the structure. I think his structure is beautiful. I did not read the Alexander quote to him;
this is what he did spontaneously with the place. The complete overlap between
Kalynn and Alexander affirms for me the rightness of this approach in developing
the site.
I
shared my sense of the fit between Alexander and our vision for
The Upward Spiral
available on-line
Thanks
to one of you, The Upward Spiral can
be watched in its entirety at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7159959880810159488&hl=en