Promises to tomorrow #8 Senses and Sensibilities

The WOMADelaide 2017 app is now available for downloading. A simple piece of advice full of texture, colour, sound, sights, smells and diversity. Without the app those qualities of WOMAD would still be there, and when the app isn’t ready to be downloaded you can still peek in to what is offering through the magic of the webpage … but there is something abut downloading the app that brings it all home and you can begin to plan what journey you will make over the Sounds of the Planet weekend in March once again.

There are decisions to be made and Spoilt for Choice moments are matched with Fear of Missing Out syndrome.

The rich blend that is WOMADelaide draws me in year after year finding ways to connect in novel and surprising ways – over a bump in a queue, a trample over someone’s marked out space, a melting of bodies in a dusty dance floor, the inevitable serendipitous hello with an old acquaintance in the toilet block, furious attention to liaison points between acts and of course the never to be forgotten moment that comes when it is time to share the world’s best organic donut as part of the annual voracious worship in the food court. WOMADelaide is a sign of what our planetary community could be like everyday – a multicultural fused better version of ourselves in a market place where the currency is trust and deposited are made in the micro banking world of rugs placed under Moreton Bay Fig trees and territories of tribes with porous borders so children can safely roam without the benefit of adults having a child protection check, police check or health check documentation on hand to oversee the play space.

WOMADelaide gives me hope. It tells me there are other ways of being a community. It reminds me that music, dance, conversing about our planet, honouring the ancient cultures, experiencing new and emerging cultures are ways of being and becoming. When the stars shine and the moon finds it way across the night sky on the first evening of WOMADelaide, I am being invited once again into four days and nights of opening up to my senses and the sensibilities of our common humanity – and the one thing we all have in common is the planet we live on.

My promise to tomorrow WOMADelaide offers each year is the promise of being a cultural custodian and the culture I want to have custody of is one where you can put your rug out on a lawn and there is no fear it is going to be whipped away; one where you are invited to join a table if there is a spare seat and even if there isn’t one you can find one to join in; where conversations are hosted and some how it doesn’t matter who is sitting at the table the conversation continues whether you are there or not; where the music wafts around you and soaks into one of your sensory orifices unfiltered by your conscious mind.

The app is now on the phone, and my choices don’t really matter when tomorrow sounds so promising. Looking forward to putting on my 2017 four day pass-port to global citizenship.

Womadelaide 4 day pass

 

Promises to Tomorrow #7 Badlands

Vows are a solemn promise to the future. Not necessarily a guarantee, but certainly a declaration and always vocational, a sacred intention.  How do we bring our commitments to fruition in an ever-changing complex world?  The idea of a vow is an old fashioned one and connected to a time where relationships had their own time line linked to the longevity of a human’s life span.

I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honour you all the days of my life. Wedding vows

The good times and the bad times – in equal measure and yet sickness comes before health in the marriage vows, a secret code embedded into the transaction to let you know that is where the learning will most likely come.  Another hint of the future hidden in the vows knowing the days of life are limited and finite.

Loving you is also a key message – not loving some kind of preferred imaginary version of you, but you, a clever little word able to be singular and plural.  What if the vow refers to the plural – the you the couple becomes by being in union?

Taking an oath is sacred and sanctified by the witnesses.  In these days when the oath is linked to office or evidence it is a public declaration that brings integrity and honour.  It is also an opportunity to be humble and being willing to hold yourself to some kind of public account. It is a marriage with the people or with the truth.

Our world is challenged by ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ and so the marriage, the social contract with those who have taken vows and oaths on our behalf: delusional leads to dissolution.  The marriage between political leaders and the public is heading to divorce. The public prefer the good times and health to bad times and sickness and their patience won’t last as long as most marriages.

The social contract between those who make oaths and vows with us is under threat. Springsteen forecasted in Badlands (from Darkness on the Edge of Town) these badlands are the price to pay before we are raised above and are treated so much better.  The vows strain towards hope, lean towards fidelity, taken in dark times, cling to the promise of better days beyond the badlands.

…Poor man wanna be rich,
Rich man wanna be king,
And a king ain’t satisfied,
’til he rules everything …

Well, I believe in the love that you gave me,
I believe in the faith that can save me,
I believe in the hope and I pray,
That someday it may raise me
Above these badlands …

Badlands, you gotta live it everyday,
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay,
We’ll keep pushin’ ’til it’s understood,
And these badlands start treating us good …

What vows will you make to the future to go beyond the badlands?

My promise to the future is a vow: to be true to you (plural) and bring my truth to our conversations in public and private domains; seek to honour others truths;  bring what health I can to places where there is ill health … and that will take me into the badlands.

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Promises to tomorrow #6 Consensus Building

In response to a question on why some work had been delayed or at least incomplete the response was: they gave the job to a 23 year old woman. I sat there and didn’t call out the ageism and the sexism. Somehow implicit in the words was that it was not the fault of the person doing the work, but those who had appointed her. There was power playing at every level. I didn’t call that out either. I witnessed. There was nothing inherently wrong with stating the facts, yet why was the age and the gender relevant at all? I know some pretty amazing people who were delivering in their twenties and some now in their twenties doing the same. Maybe whoever appointed her to the work believed in her, just as someone believed in me when I was early in my career, maybe those who appointed her didn’t understand the brief or were struggling in some way themselves, maybe what was delivered back was OK, but didn’t match expectations … who knows and how relevant anyhow to my promise to tomorrow? In our parliament this week there has been abuse, defections, loss – all pointing to a lack of a shared vision for a country, and we can all see how that approach is working and spilling into fuelling fear and hatred all around the world from Syria to Moscow to Washington. Lets start naming what binds us together, not what keeps us apart.

I have lost my vigilance on sexism and ageism for the young. Going to the edge of our discomfort and acting from that place becoming vulnerable and speaking your truth doesn’t need to take others down with you. Holding your integrity and honouring difference is a quest. Consensus building takes time, requires space and demands commitment. I have served boards and been on governing bodies and in teams where consensus decision making was the only way forward – taking everyone with us. I thank the Quakers for all their teachings around this, Marshall Rosenberg for non-violence communication skills and for all the people whose arguments I endured before decisions were made. I thank the people who taught me to stop and take time for silence and to have a break in proceedings before a decision was taken and who insisted each person have time to speak and explain their position and hold the responsibility to devise a solution if they were going to block the decision.

Decisions take time to arrive. All the voices need to be heard, all the facts on the table, all the advice in the room, feelings expressed and respected.

My promise to tomorrow is to continue to practice my consensus making muscle to leave no one behind. I can’t see a tomorrow without a shared vision of where we all want to go on this little blue planet. That is going to bring me close to the edge often and on watch for baby steps that can be taken to address the divisions inherent in our language and actions to build a future for us all. I hope I am travelling with others who can hold me to account and get in my way so I can develop my consensus building practice.

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Promises to tomorrow #5 one word at a time

We are drowning in words coming at us relentlessly, rapidly and repeatedly. There are words that don’t stop and pack a punch – like hate, love, passion, fear. The micro poetry distilled in the drops of the work of Julius Popp’s installation work bit.fall is mesmerizing – I am literally hanging on every word. I am watching the words fall – they always fall. Falling away, dissolving in the earth with a steady, rhythmic beat the water cycle and the information cycle end together on the floor. The drops of water start dissolving long before they reach the ground, losing form joining with other elements to complete their journey disembodied from how they began.

Bit.fall is a meditation for our time – a machine holding the mirror up to human nature, revealing meaning via a logarithm making meaning from our collective on line endeavours and in the installation at MONA they cascade between a rock and a hard place. The wall behind the installation formed by bedrock blasted from deep underground and the polished hard place below. Regardless of whose gaze or even if there is no gaze, the fall continues one word at a time. In my beloved improvisation games chest, there is the game ‘one word at a time’ where each person builds on the word of the person before to form a story, a micro effort to find a shared thread of a story, and in the space creating the threshold between one voice and the next, there is a tiny silence where the thread is held by all before the next word bead is added. In the bit.fall the onlookers were doing something similar, holding their breaths with anticipation about what word might come next.

The dance between silence and sound is infinite. When the words keep coming and don’t stop it is hard to catch our breath, let alone the meaning and reflecting. John O’Donohue, the great Irish philosopher, poet and mystic, says if we don’t find these spaces of intimacy and silence we condemn ourselves to exile. Constant talk, faster, louder, where there are no silences in between to hang with the word in virtual suspended animation, is our ticket to separation – we are writing our own deportation orders.

I promise to find one word at a time to lead into more intimacy. Words free of fear, bringing empathy and comfort, words accumulated from a logarithm of compassion, elemental words, words worthy of having a space for silence before and after they are formed.

a moment at MONA 4 February 2017

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