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.

Particular Phenomena

For our 25^th wedding anniversary, Alysia and I went sea kayaking around the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound this summer. We learned that if currents or winds are pushing relentlessly, you can paddle into a kelp bed, hold onto a kelp frond, and rest. Kelp beds had always been places I had seen offshore but I had never spent any time around. One thing we noticed was a kelp frond turning like an Archimedes’ screw in the current. Like a windmill in the wind, the kelp frond slowly spun as it streamed down current. I’ve talked about kelp absorbing wave energy but I was then thinking about the whole multi-ton mass streaming back and forth. I didn’t realize the surfaces of the fronds themselves might be absorbing even more wave energy with each twist.

After about twenty minutes, I looked down and discovered that a school of thirty to forty brown, three-inch long fish had risen up through the kelp to the surface beside us. The kelp bed became more than kelp. I had always known that kelp beds harbored a community of creatures. But that is intellectual knowing. Seeing the fish made it immediate – and also signaled that we foreigners who had sought shelter within the kelp were being accepted as another member of the kelp bed community. A month later, the rising of that school of fish remains my cardinal memory of our week in the San Juans.

I’ve created this heading, Particular Phenomena, to acknowledge and honor the influence of two people: Freeman House with his phrase “engaging the particulars of place”  and Dr. David Seamon for introducing me to “phenomenonology.” I will use this heading for descriptions of encounters that bring me into deeper communion with the world.

Wonderful Experience

I received an invitation to attend a gathering on the Oregon coast in June from people interested in making the world a better place. I went in the spirit of adventure and discovered that most of the attendees had seen my The Upward Spiral and were using its ideas to help them in their particular work. So I walked into a setting in which these ideas, dear to me, were already known to them.

I find it hard to have deep conversations with adults. So many of the ideas dear to me depend on seeing the world as dynamic interactions of flows. Establishing that groundwork requires an effort that, rightly or wrongly, becomes a barrier for me in conversation. It was nice to be with many people where I didn’t feel that barrier, where I could begin beyond that and simply converse. And I didn’t necessarily talk. I could just listen to someone else talk of their passion – talking more freely because they already knew where I was listening from. Easier conversations led to significant inflows of new ideas and uplifting enthusiasms.

Much of my thinking works with analogies. Analogies are a powerful way to generate hypotheses but they do not prove them. So one way I try testing my hypotheses is by trying to live my life in alignment with them and observing what happens. Some ideas have to be discarded. Other ideas bear enough fruit to continue living the experiment to see what happens next. Meeting a group of people, each in their own way, using the ideas in The Upward Spiral to further their desire to have their lives make a difference within the world, deeply confirmed the hypothesis of “Begin the work. Don’t let your limits of what you think is possible block your work. Allies will emerge. We have no idea of what is possible.” I’m very grateful to them for that experience. I stride with more assurance into the territory beyond.

Moving Rocks

A couple of times in the last month I’ve been diverging water in rocky streambeds and wanted to move a rock that is deeply buried in the gravel/sand/silt. No matter how hard I try to pull the rock out, it hardly moves. I feel the soft yet firm cling of suction holding the rock within its moist matrix. But if I exert only enough energy to create that initial, almost imperceptible, “hardly moves” and simply hold the rock in that position long enough for percolating water to fill in the gap and remove the suction, then I can move the rock a bit again. Hold it. Wait. Pull it back the other direction. Wiggling the rock back and forth grows easier and the rock rises out of the streambed. It became a fun challenge to see how many of the seemingly immovable rocks I encounter can actually be moved. A nice kinesthetic encounter with how several small, accumulating moves can be more effective than striving for one large move.

Maturity

Next year’s eighth grade Chrysalis class had a good talking circle about maturity. But in the course of talking about it, they spoke as if the taking on of responsibility was naturally accompanied by a letting go of the happiness of childhood. So I asked them, with only a few minutes left, if maturity implied a saddening. The question went around to much shorter, tentative responses and we broke for lunch. I had deliberately refrained from speaking during the circles, wanting the kids to think and articulate for themselves. As we walked back, Josh asked me what I thought about maturity and happiness. I reflexively assumed I would do the classic teacherly “reflecting the question back to him so that he would practice developing his own answer.” But Josh asked with such genuine interest and sincerity that I felt called to answer to the best of my knowledge.

I have developed a deep respect for Josh, partly because of his and Hunter’s pure pursuit of the perfect paper airplane. They make beautiful planes which they adjust and refine after each flight until their planes are regularly soaring for 10 or more seconds. (On Field Study, one of their planes thrown from a slope rich with turkey vultures ridge-soaring held the class spell-bound with an amazing flight that drifted both back and forth across the slope as well as rising up near the top then gliding back down and finally drifting away several minutes later to collide with the next cliff head downriver.)

I began answering, only to discover that the answer I had held in my mind during the talking circle felt weak upon actual expression. Just a place-holder. So my answer started exploring sideways into new thoughts and my voice shifted from teacher to my self. My words were muddled but as I kept talking, trying to give my full mindfulness to his question, the following analogy came to mind which still glows with the feeling of truth.

“When you fly your airplanes, you are in pursuit of beauty, seeking with increasing precision, balance and subtle curves of paper to experience amazing flights. You have inspired and taught the younger students to fly paper airplanes. Some of the younger kids make crude airplanes that fly only five feet and yet they dance around with delight because they changed that piece of paper in a way that makes it move through the air in a new, unpredictable way. However, for you an airplane so poorly built with such short flight (from your perspective) would disappoint and be a waste of your time. So, yes, in the process of your maturing skill with airplanes, you have lost access to sources of happiness (a flight of one second) that were once accessible.

“But as you mature, your sense of what is possible expands. You have greater range, greater materials and possibilities with which to create magnificence that far transcends your initial airplanes – like that flight on the cliffs that took the breath away from fifty onlookers. So, it is for me. As I mature, I would not go back. The forces I’m playing with now and what they make possible is so much more wondrous than I ever imagined back as a child. So, no, Josh, happiness is not surrendered as one matures. It matures in ways that are invisible to those younger.”

Over the next few days, I reflected upon that deeply-satisfying answer and realized there was something else I really liked about this lesson. Josh had asked me a question that had called me out into new territory where I found new understanding. Josh had played the role we associate with the teacher and I had played the role we associate with the student. It is enlightening, as a teacher, to experience the student’s perspective. I reflect upon the initiating question and find myself contemplating its open-endedness. It was open-ended in not having a specific answer the asker was looking for. But more importantly, it was open-ended in spirit in that the questioner was seeking the answer alongside the “student.”

“Wow!” I thought, “how amazing it would be if my students could receive from me questions that led them to discoveries as satisfying as I received from Josh.” Teacher training in “higher order thinking skills,” Bloom’s taxonomy, and such can help us master the first open-endedness but not the second. In fact, psychologically/spiritually, a focus on this first quality of “open-endedness” can close us off to the second quality. We distinguish ourselves with professional pride in our ability to guide students to deeper thoughts.

The second quality of open-endedness makes sense in relation to Josh’s question about maturity. It can prove more evasive when teaching fractions or some other area where we, as teachers, know the answers. What brings us into the second quality is when we revel in our not knowing the path by which these particular students will come to understanding of these concepts. Yes, we might know what their final understanding will look like but we don’t know how they’ll get there and that is playing out right now, in real time, and we are part of the dance. When I am aware of myself as being in the presence of my students as explorers forging a path towards understanding that is unique in history, then my teacherly interactions take on more of this second quality of open-endedness.

Wrong Goals

I’ve been using Donella Meadows’ book [recently published posthumously by Chelsea Green], Thinking in Systems, to reinforce systems thinking with my eighth grade class. One excerpt I really like is in a section titled “Seeking the Wrong Goal.”

 “[O]ne of the most powerful ways to influence the behavior of a system is through its purpose or goal. That's because the goal is the direction setter of the system, the definer of discrepancies that require action, the indicator of compliance, failure, or success toward which balancing feedback spirals work. If the goal is defined badly, if it doesn't measure what it's supposed to measure, if it doesn't reflect what the system really wants, then the system can't possibly produce a desirable result…. If the desired system state is good education, measuring that goal by the amount of money spent per student will ensure money spent per student. If the quality of education is measured by performance on standardized tests, the system will produce performance on standardized tests. Whether either of these measures is correlated with good education is at least worth thinking about. These examples confuse effort with result, one of the most common mistakes in designing systems around the wrong goal.”

I was reminded of this concept when a mother, filling out a Chrysalis application form said that her son’s current teacher told her “I get a bonus if my class’s test scores go up and your son is bringing my test scores down.”

Nice Quotation

I read Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded. He has a quotation from Henry Ford that I really like. “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

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Business Stuff

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© 2009, Paul Krafel, P.O. Box 609, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609
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