Control -- I wish I had it

[Harrison Owen]

Raffi -- you can be aggravating, but mostly you make me smile :-) In part, my smile comes from the fact that I see a great deal of my self in you. I know all about going on deep journeys to (forbidden) places and asking impossible questions. It is not for nothing that one of my most favorite stories is Rudyard Kipling's "The Elephant's Child."  There is no way I can do it justice here -- for those interested, find a copy (I think it is one of the "Just So" stories). -- but the bottom line is that the Elephant's Child fills his young life time asking "impossible questions," which lead him on dangerous journeys and inevitably into the ire of the adult world. His most impossible questions was -- "What does the crocodile have for dinner?" And he finds out -- to his pain and benefit. So I love your questioning if only because good questions are the fundament of genuine knowledge -- they create the open space in which new things appear. But good questions are "real" questions -- questions that do not have the (desired) answer implied. I find they must be savored, wallowed in -- and never rushed to judgment. For me Open Space has always been experienced as the ultimate question -- and never an answer. Savoring a question requires patience (something I don't have much of), a willing suspension of disbelief and early judgment, and most of all, genuine listening, being especially attentive to all the parts that don't make sense -- the anomalies of life. Anomalies are those wonderful things that make it quite clear that what we thought was all figured out is in fact open to question -- real Question. And somewhere in here is the requirement not to work too hard. Some people call this "sitting the question." Just be with it. 

I am thinking particularly about your questions on community, and are we one??? Occasionally it sounds as if there were strict specifications that must intentionally be applied -- somehow we must "decide to be a community." I have had some experience with "intentional communities" -- and generally speaking it seemed to me that folks worked so hard being in community that they end up having terrible fights which essentially destroyed the community that they are/were. Odd! I guess I come from a rather different place. For me, community is what we are -- it is not something we create, decide about (at least about the specifications and rules) -- it just happens. And it happens when a strange attractor (usually some common passion) pulls people together in a previously uninhabited open space. Things begin to spin, lazily or fast -- and the miracle of self-organization weaves a complex common fabric of relationship -- so complex that it defies analysis and certainly fabrication. An organism is manifest, which like all organisms has a beginning, middle and end. Time is important, but not determinative -- some communities last for ages, others pop up like mushrooms in the night and disappear in a day -- but are no less communities. The ending of a community is always sad, and it usually seems to occur when the passion drains and the space becomes closed. I am not sure that there much one can do when passion departs -- though people certainly try. For me, when passion is past, it is definitely time to remember the Law of Two Feet and to set out on a new journey in pursuit of what has heart and meaning. But there is something we can do about keeping the space open. Communities die when they run out of space, when the strictures of life become so constraining that life itself has no room to breathe. I think we have been learning a lot about opening space, and keeping it open. It all begins with invitation and real questions, or so I think.

As for control, I surely wish I had it. Probably would have made life much easier. For starters I would have patented Open Space Technology and been a billionaire! But of course in setting a fence around Open Space, I would have destroyed it -- so there you are. Much better to sit the question.

Harrison

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