Airplane Slow...

Now the challenges begin.

I thought this morning that I should schedule a retreat after Conversation Week. Somewhere beautiful, relaxing, uplifting, surrounded by grand people.

This afternoon an invitation came in for all that - for free. The only hitch is... it's in upstate New York. I checked the train. It would be 3 days from here to New York City. Only $312. Sitting up all the way. I wrote the organizer, thanking him but guessing I might pass on it. He wrote back:
"i took a sabbatical earlier this year and to get to europe i sailed. let's just say that i will forego europe entirely before sailing there again!"

So where can I go closer to home? There's the Korean Spa in Lynnwood. No joke. It's total self care for under $100. I could organize a gaggle of girlfriends to take a day together there and maybe go to a show in Seattle. Then I checked out Breitenbush. Yep, I could take two days there ($100 plus gas and massage) before speaking in Vancouver, WA.

In the old days (and maybe the future) I'd travel if the destination, purpose and the people appealed and somehow it was 'free'. I hid from myself that it wasn't free to the earth and it wasn't free really as it took those two travel days and two pack/unpack days to make the days away happen. I was a tad enthralled with these unbidden opportunities for high play, good work and deep conversation. In the new days of this Airplane fast I'm discovering it's like most other 'diets.' You substitute one pleasure for another and discover tastes for things that formerly seemed ordinary or invisible. Like people who now vacation in their cars because flight and hotels and exchange rates are through the roof, will I gush eventually about all the beauties close to home?

I also recognize that this constraint is voluntary for me and imposed for most others. I understand that fasting in this way is as much an expression of my privilege as flying. We all live in the ambiguity of the times.

Airplane Fast. Part 2

What's so dramatic. I haven't gotten in an airplane this week either. Pretty soon it will be no news.

But here are some observations...

• A question for Conversation Week was submitted from Mauritius. Not sure where it was, I flew over there via maps.live.com. It's an island off the East Coast of Tanzania. Well, back in the old days two months ago I could have imagined myself putting Mauritius with it's beautiful beaches (I could see them in my Internet fly-over) on the "Bucket List" - somewhere to go before kicking the bucket. If my fast goes longer than a year, or if in this year conditions change such that the cost of flying goes into the stratosphere, I'm pretty certainly never going to Mauritius. By land and sea, it is probably 3 months away.
• A deeper sense of belonging is creeping in here on my island. I am becoming part of those who stay put, who make the invisible web that holds the life here while others come and go. I bumped into a woman who was in the Vagina Monologues with me last year and she said with surprise, "You're here!" I replied "I live in Langley." "But you are always off somewhere," she said, "You're never here." I am beginning to feel the difference between my friends who are here and the ones who travel a lot. I really miss my traveling friend... just when i want to take a walk or have a cup of tea, they're answer machine says, "Off to Mauritius (my new code word for far afield), back in two weeks for a week, then off on a cruise in Arctic, gotta see it before it melts."
• Today I realized I'm going to have a challenge in the Fall. There's a conference in Austin I've long wanted to attend, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. Is that when I do a road trip in my Honda Insight for a month, visiting friends all along the way? Do I go by train and treat myself to 10 books on tape for the journey? Do I by then figure our a way to attend electronically? Or host a regional gathering here for all the "left behinds".
• Thanks to Leif Utne's work on Conversation Week, I'm entering even more fully the world of Web 2.0, the internet swarms on Facebook, Skype, YouTube, blogs, surveys, webcams, virtual meetings and more. Here in cyberspace, the world is vast and within reach. The future is in the conversation, the infinite permutations and combinations. Decisions aren't made per se, they are born in one conversation and raised in another and become all stars or weaklings as people around the world starve them or feed them attention.
  

Stay tuned.

What is a host?

The Conversation Week month of searching for the most important questions in the world today is coming to a close. In a week, the top ten will be selected, though the top 50 should live on somewhere... and even the 600 amazing questions submitted.

Now the month of getting 400 or more hosts signed up to bring Conversation Week to their communities (hopefully on all seven continents) begins. Thousands of people in our networks (the Conversation Cafe, Conversation Week, Global Mindshift, Gaia.com, Facebook, YouTube, QuantumshiftTV and Lord knows where else) will be encouraged to sign up to host. Last year there were probably hundreds of conversations we had no idea were happening - people just participated. Signing up makes them part of the annual global experiment to learn how people around the world can be in respectful dialogue about the worlds most important questions.

But what is a host? How can we communicate what a host is or does so that people realize that's precisely what they do or want to do - but never knew there were others worldwide also persistently holding space for brilliance to arise in human conversation.

Hosts do it in Conversation Cafes, of course, but they also do it in the streets. They talk to people. They invite their views. They ask questions. The observe out loud the world of the bus stop or grocery line or conference break in such a way that others want to add their own views. They make conversational "stone soup".

As the "stone soup" story goes, a group of dirty, weary bums in a railroad yard were standing around a fire and a pot of boiling water, wishing they had something to eat. One guy says, "Hey, we can make stone soup. Here. I've got a few great stones I've save to put in." and he pulls some stones from his pocket, puts them in the pot and sniffs. Mmmm. Another guy then pulls out some carrots he scavenged from Dumpster Diving. Seeing that, someone else takes a few potatoes out of his sack, cuts them with a pocket knife, mumbles "here's some taters" and puts them in. Moments pass and another guy who'd hung back pulls out a whole roasted chicken he'd been intending to eat when the others weren't looking. He borrows the knife, cuts it up and tosses it, bones and all, in the pot. Finally a kid throws in some wild greens he'd just picked... and they enjoyed Stone Soup. When it was all gone but the stones, the first fellow took them back. Never know when you'll need to start another pot.

Hosting is gathering at the fire, inviting people to warm themselves around it, putting on a pot (a container like the process and agreements of the CC) and drop in the first stone - a powerful questions. Conversation Cafes are soul food for hungry minds. They are intelligent conviviality for hungry souls.

I host conversations - at cafes, in my home, with strangers - because it's who I am, not what I do. I can't help it. I am always hosting. I am always inviting others to make meaning with me. I am always asking questions and listening to the answers, always wondering what others think and feel. The world of bustling humans is to me like a vast ocean of hidden meaning. I want to know what people understand of the events of their lives. I want to know the stories others tell themselves about this world we live together in. I want to go out of my mind, to fall out of my certainties for a while and into the conjectures of others. I am willing to be humbled, again and again, by how narrow and harsh and demanding my mind can become, because on the other side of that brittle, lonely place is love. Okay, there it is. Last year in Conversation Week one participant mused, "This feels different than I imagined. This is more than conversation. More than friendship even. This feels like love." I host because I love.

Here are some other thoughts about who you and I are as hosts:

• Hosts aren't made, they're born... whenever one person listens to another without interrupting and discovers that warm witness inside is actually listening to them listen to the other.
• Hosts aren't born, they're made... we can host a Conversation Cafe by the book and discover that at some point we aren't doing hosting, we are hosting. It's like learning to dance. At first you're all feet. And then you're flying.
• A host brings everyone to the table to have the conversation none can yet imagine yet all know must be had.
• A host is the grown up in the room, the one who shines by allowing others to shine.
• A host invites others to break bread and make meaning.
• A host has the courage to not know. And admit it. And ask.
  
• A host isn't a not-know-it-all.
  
• A host puts others at ease with their thoughts.
• A host removes what’s in the way of people offering their brilliance to the world.
• A host listens on behalf of the collective.
• A host is hospitable, makes space for others to be at ease.
• A host hospices the brittle, dying ideas that arrive, exhausted to the table.
• A host is a leader of those who will lead once she is gone

What is a host to you?

Pick the Questions for Conversation Week

Hey everyone, please go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=vZIiOzEV1pL0LV_2f17vLcLQ_3d_3d and rate the 50 questions there (selected from 600 submissions from around the world) to help select the 10 most important questions in the world today. And then send the link to 10 more friends... and ask them to send it to ten more. Imagine hundreds of thousands of people in the next two weeks voting on these questions. Imagine knowing the list we'll use for Conversation Week includes questions people the world around really loved! And then imagine hosting a conversation where you live.

Watch more videos like this at www.quantumshift.tv

Why conversation matters

You'd think with all the words spoken every day we'd have this "conversation" thing down. But conversations that really matter, that change a mind or heart or course of events, are rare. I live for those moments of shift, when my own or another's certainties fall away and something fresh and true-er is spoken. I love to rattle my own cage gently until something stuck breaks loose - and really listening to what another says without any need to say anything back is a great way to do that. That's one reason why I started the Conversation Cafes in the Summer of 2001. To chew on good ideas with others. To feast on insights. To relish discovery. To invite the muse of conversation to light once again in this land of babble.

Babble. I got curious about how many words we do say in a day. Here's two estimates:

• The average woman speaks around 5000 words per day whereas the average male speaks around 2000. Apparently. (Source: Men are Lunatics, Women are Nuts)
• Working males average 2000-3000, females from 10,000-20000. However, both average about 500-700 words of actual value (i.e. words which have intent to communicate to another person an item of importance to both). (Source: book "Men are Pigs)

So women say about 5000 words a day but only 500 matter? No wonder I wanted to increase the meaning per minute in my days, the value of the words I hear and speak. No wonder I joined with two friends, Habib and Susan, in the summer of 2001, to invent the Conversation Cafes.

So here we are, over 7 years later, doing Conversation Week again, hoping tens of thousands more people will join us figuratively at the table to feast on conversations that matter. Hoping that thousands of people will take on the experiment Habib, Susan and I did - what if we took ourselves into public places like cafes and invited others to our tables and surfaced important questions and listened deeply and explored with curiosity and openess and discovered a kind of friendship and wisdom that's rare.

These seemingly simple, sometimes a bit awkward, conversations do something so important for us.

• They open and change our minds. We rally around "change" but deep, sustained and real change is not a spectator sport or armchair travel. It requires real honesty and humility.
  
• They expose us to people not like us and our friends. If we are lucky, people will come to our Conversation Cafes who actually see the world differently - shocking us into realizing that we do not know everything. To know something, you have to first know nothing - be hungry for answers. God we are so sure of ourselves, our words being used mostly to deBAT one another or to impress one another or to simply treat one another like empty receptacles to be filled with our ongoing narration of daily life.
• We make new friends. When it comes to being truly seen and understood, many of us are darn lonely - even if we have parties... and are the life of them. Building up layers of respectful listening can bring us into real relationship with others who may never be our lovers or our pals, but can be friends to our thoughts.
• We are listened to without argument. People give us a chance to gather our thoughts and finish our sentences and when we are done, the just nod and hold silence for a bit before speaking.
  

More on this later. for now, please do go to www.conversationweek.org and see what's cookin.

What is the Most Important Question in the World Today?

Watch more videos like this at www.quantumshift.tv

Here's my post inviting people to submit and vote on questions, posted at www.conversationweek.org

What is the Most Important Question in the World Today?

admin | Questions | Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Talk about herding cats. It’s hard to know if we humans will ever agree on who we are, what we believe, where we are headed and how to get there. But with over 30 significant wars raging globally, a human population topping 6.6 billion and oil, water and other reserves dwindling there are some very important conversations we just need to have. Conversation Week is that one time a year when the table is set for people to talk with strangers and friends about the most important questions in the world today. Of course, who can agree what those questions should be? That’s why we are asking thoughtful people — like you — to suggest potential questions, and asking people who care — like you — to vote on them and then inviting people who can listen and be curious — like you — to host conversations.

Conversation Week began in 2002 to launch the Conversation Cafes in Seattle, Washington. Then, 9-11 was on everyone’s mind. Since then we hosted CWs in 2003, 2007 and now 2008. The questions from last year (with some answers from around the world) are later on this blog. Reports from prior CWs are at www.conversationcafe.org.

Don’t pass up the chance to submit a question before Feburary 12, vote on your top pick questions from February 14-27 and host a conversation during Conversation Week March 24-30.

• How can we bring the world together across all of the traditional boundaries that have divided us to address the issue of climate security for ourselves, our children, and future generations?

  Comment by Juanita Brown — February 10, 2008 @ 5:48 am

• One thing we all have in common - even if to different degrees - is technologies based on science. All the time since the renaissance and indeed much earlier too , the aim of science has been to understand nature and so to control it. That dominance over nature is what all nations are following; and while it hase done so much undoubted good - most of us would not be here today without it - it has also brought us to this brink of wrecking life on earth. Take farming as an example: fantastic progress in green revolutioon and breeding new varieties based on the science of fertilisation of crops. Alongside this has been another science; that of the life of the soils and the fungal and bacterial associations with plants and their nutrition. This science has been largely neglected in application. There is no purely scientific way to choose between the two scientific appproaches - the first to overcome and short-circuit natures’ mechanisms, the other to harness them. To make this more popularly appreciated, I am proposing that we need another name for the second science, to contrast with conventional science. And I propose ‘convivial science’, meaning ‘with life’. Since this word has so many other connotations, maybe someone can come up with another. Meanwhile I am writing up this argument more fully.

  Comment by Ulrich Loening — February 15, 2008 @ 6:16 pm

BE THE CHANGE

The primaries are not so much a national referendum on issues as a national Rorschach test. For those unfamiliar, that's a psychological tool to reveal the subconscious conflicts and desires. The client looks at ink blots and free associates. No, I'm not saying Obama or Clinton are merely symbols. They are real passionate human beings willing to be in the hottest fire there is. I'm saying if we don't watch out, we'll be polarizing and vilifying based on symbols, not facts.

People around me and "like me" (Progressive Cultural Creatives, Green Liberatarians, Spiritual Pragmatists, something like that) are overwhelmingly Obama supporters. I am too for reasons i said in the last post.

But people like me also sign their emails with Gandhi's quote: Be the change you want to see in the world. So if we mean that, if we support Obama precisely because he is promising a change in the polarized politics of class, race, party, gender, religion, and abetting terrorism by labeling whole populations as terrorists, then we need to find some way to be that change in the next 5 months. We can't support Obama by unleashing hatred against Clinton.

In reviewing 600 questions submitted for Conversation Week (www.conversationweek.org), i came across a very poignant one from a conservative christian who wondered how he and others like him might express their views about non hetero people without being labeled a bigot. There were many questions in there - the one i pulled out was: "What is the difference between holding strong convictions and being prejudiced?"

I think about this for our election. Important issues hang in the balance. If we don't get national health care, if we don't get out of Iraq, if we don't change our energy policy, if we don't take swift action towards drastically reducing climate pollution - we are in deeper trouble than the deep trouble we are in now. It's no joke. But it's also not just about if we like Obama and hate Clinton or vice versa.

I just hope we don't expend our political energy and bank account in the next five months and arrive at the supposedly real debate between the GOP and Dems with only slogans and battle scars and whoever the standard bearers are, they are stale and weakened by the drubbing they just got from their supposed allies.

Maybe my "being the change i want to see in the world" is hosting Conversation Week with a great group of colleagues, trying to bring civility and dialogue into a world of debate. Pronounce da BAT - like the kind you hit others over the head with - and you are closer to what substitutes for conversation in America.

My 2008 Airplane Fast

Kurt Hoelting http://www.insidepassages.com/ last Fall told me his plan to not travel more than 60 miles from home in 2008, and not drive anywhere. I knew the minute I heard him that my goose was cooked. The worst thing I do in terms of Global Warming is fly around the world educating people on lifestyle change. I decided that in 2008 I would not fly - and promptly went to Brazil, then California, then Florida. Enjoying them all the more knowing that in weeks I'd be grounded.

I will still travel as the need or desire arises, but only by car, boat, train or bus. Mostly, I wanted to do this fast to see what would show up in by slowing down an activity I'd come to count on for stimulation, novelty, respite, a bit of admiration when I'd speak, and the sense that despite the evidence of daily life, I was making a difference. Not flying felt more radical in this era of excess than anything I'd accomplish by flying. Not only that but my average of 10 trips a year meant at least 20 days of travel and 20 more days of packing and unpacking. That's over a month i'll get back. For what? good question. Beyond that, those days are fairly mindless and increasingly uncomfortable. If I want to be mindless with less impact, there's plenty to do at home.

Will my apartment be cleaner? Will i write more? Will I spend more time with my local friends, developing those intimacies i truly desire? Will I read and learn more, seeking the stimulation of great and rich minds rather than mindless novelty of ... what? another airport, another rental car, another city with Green and White Interstate signs. Further, can i keep connected with the people and cultures I love through other means? More phone calls (I've got my Skype set up and the videocam is coming soon), more letters (with stamps?). We'll see.

When I bounced up and down in silver sausages with wings on behalf of YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE I used to do a prayer for take-off and one for landing. On take off I'd express gratitude for this great gift of soaring above the earth, viewing her beauties from on high. On landing I'd pray that every person on this plane would achieve their highest intent for travel - even if they are all self-canceling. Even then I knew I could stay home and if the guy beside me going to a sales meeting for marketing useless widgets that pollute the earth in each moment of their brief life from oil, to factory to WalMart to the dump would stay home. But his drive to make a living by making a dying for the earth seemed to require us to file together onto planes and do our work. I'm finally acting on that irony. Of course, I also don't have a best selling book to tout, but even if I did - or do in the future - is there a way to stay home physically while traveling electronically?

I'm just 7 weeks into the experiment. I've canceled one teaching trip, the result of which was the organizers "discovered" someone in their hometown who also teaches YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE. Hmmm. Does flying famous people around diminish our capacity to see the rich intelligences in our hometowns? I've declined to fly to CA to a quarterly meeting with a think/feel/be tank I've been with for 7 years. I'll go once on the train. But amazingly, at least one member of this group is going to be in my area and I've been invited to an afternoon of deep reflection with her. And I'll hang out with others more on the phone.

I've already been on the web and plotted my next trip to Brazil. A train to Miami and a boat to Rio will take me a few weeks, but then it's not 'traveling' in the dessicated sense of flying hither and yon, but rather a road trip, a cruise, an adventure all by itself. I'm even thinking of getting in my car a bit more and driving to vacation locally.

Pablo Neruda's poem applies...

KEEPING QUIET

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go

OBAMA+CLINTON+EDWARDS

What our nation needs is Obama+Clinton+Edwards - and the money we’ll waste between now and the Convention.

A blogger wrote that his son didn’t know the difference between baseball and politics. Why couldn’t the Dems just trade Bill for the Repubs’ John M? He has a point. Two points really. This election season is too long, too expensive, to divisive and too much like Ford vs Chevvy vs Prius.

First the cost vs benefit of these primaries. A year and a half ramp up to the Conventions tips elections out of democracy and into spectacle. Other democracies spend far less time and money on candidate selection and far more time hashing out a shared platform. Election season is short and to the point. Our process promises to top a billion http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/index.asp by the time all the media buys, travel, staff, printing, venue and consultants costs are paid off. A once every four years injection into the economy for… the airlines, media companies, venues (stadiums and auditoriums and theaters) and high paid operatives. Affordable housing anyone?

This campaign feels more like a national focus group for a product than a debate on substantive issues. It’s now framed as experience vs hope. Policies align almost exactly http://www.grist.org/candidate_chart_08.html?source=weekly. So the nation is getting, for the millions allocated to campaigns rather than something functional (like paying down the debt that’s drowning us), a sustained study of our psyche and voting on who WE are, not what the candidates promise and will produce. It’s more like the Mac vs PC debate than the Single Payer Health Care System vs Private Health Care Paid for by Private Insurance debate.

If I were anywhere near my caucus place I’d vote for Obama because he will give us a window of opportunity for making amends to the world for our atrocious and alienating end of Empire behavior. He can heal. And we sorely need that. However, right after that window we’ll need Clinton and her whole machine to ram through legislation that will fix problems. Looking at the voting patterns, I see that many of the people with real needs – elderly, women, poor, latinos – are voting Clinton. The hope they want is results. We need a mother and a preacher. An operative and an inspirer. Working together.

This is my second point. The Repubs team has shrewdly closed ranks around McCain and is going to stand by looking like grown ups while the Dems rip one another to pieces in the next few months and exhaust their campaign chests. Eventually one will win the nomination, but the other one will have given the Repubs all their talking points about what’s wrong with the winning candidate. The Dems in the next months will run the Repubs focus groups for free.

The shrewd and wise move would be for Clinton, Obama and Edwards to work out a deal right now. I’d opt for a Clinton/Obama ticket. Both for President. And Edwards for VP. Let’s face it. The nation needs balanced leadership. We’d have in the co-presidents and VP all the polarities held in a unified group we need. Masculine and feminine. Black and white. Fighter and uniter. Maturity in these times is all about reconciliation of opposites. Eventually we need to figure out how to have a wise council of leaders in such complex times, not a decider. Without the party uniting now we’ll have:

• McCain looking mature and the Dems looking like brawling kids
• A man who went to war and will continue war looking like the wise elder
• Hundreds of millions more wasted on in fighting when it could be spent on a consequential campaign
• Acrimony and disappointment and disaffection among currently mobilized Dems who dearly want to participate in a democracy that works, fixes what’s wrong, heals the nation, serves all interests and gets American back to being our best.

By uniting NOW Dems could upstage this Repub move and produce an end run (hmm, football again) and a big Goal. That being wisdom, not winning. That being prudence and frugality, not outspending. Okay, I know it’s unlikely and I’m just one voice and few will read this, but on this Washington State Caucus day I needed to say it.