Soul and infrastructure -- for after the conference ends Thursday 3:30 pm
Actions:
From John-- this session is about:
The heart and infrastructure for harvesting what is coming out of this conference
How we can come together to work and play after this conference
How we can invite others to join with us in what we're doing after the conference
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(from Jan, the notetaker: apologies if I did not capture your words correctly... please feel free to edit... I was a bit tired...)
Interconnections among the above (from John):
The infrastructure piece came to John first (online, CDs?)... we have all this material that has been generated... one function or role is editing the material and putting it into forms that you can hand to someone else and say, "Here, this is what we're doing." And the infrastructure that we develop to do that can serve us to help us work and play in the future.
Adin: we want to create an infrastructure that carries the safety and openness of what we experienced here into the next form. What are the qualities we want in this? What will it take as far as infrastructure?
Conference calls offer some possibilities...
Gayatri: when she was explaining the conference to other people beforehand, she talked about how all our beliefs are really just stories... and we have the opportunity to become conscious storymakers. People seemed to be able to grasp that.
Skye: Similar to Gayatri -- "you know how people carry stories about things we're not good at ('I'm not a good writer') and these limit our capacities. Similarly, we carry stories as a culture that limit our capacity... and this is about shifting our stories to release more human capacity."
John: I'd guess that each person talking generated excitement not precisely by how they talked about the conference but by their enthusiasm... we could create 'invitation patterns' (from notetaker: originally the phrase in the conversation was 'marketing tools' but those words made several people uncomfortable) to help people talk about this.
For Skye, the sense of 'container' has been an important part of this conference... somehow she would like that projected by what we create. By 'container' she meant not just the Open Space aspect, but the way it could hold the tensions we saw on Wednesday morning (and other times)-- and allow them to be as they were-- so that people mostly stayed. --The HSL (hear, see, love) part of it.
Lorraine: She saw this as a conference for people who feel the call of a new story... she comes from Ashland, OR and people there understood that immediately. The 'next generation' offering that was made on Wednesday night was really inspiring for her: she feels that one of the things that the older generations now can do is really really support the younger generations in their process of self-organizing. But, before the conference, she did hear a particular person say "It sounds too New Agey to me."
John: One of the things we can do is to support each other as we work through ways to talk about this kind of thing.
Adin: I've learned that it's not a good idea to try to convince people of things they don't feel connected to.
John: Yeah -- and when someone says that ("it's too New Agey" or whatever), I might immediately think -- that person has a story -- and I'd want to listen. -- Not to try to convince them to come, really, but just to hear it.
Jan: I mean absolutely no criticism of the work that appeared on the Web site for this conference, but I'm afraid it might have come across as amateurish to some people. And it took a long time to find one's way in from the Web site to the nitty-gritty of what the conference was about. I would like to see that changed.
And, on a separate note, when I talked to people before the conference, I said something like "We all live and breathe in a field of stories, and it affects how we see things and thererfore all our actions. This conference is about helping the story field shift."
Jane: The word of mouth part of what brought people in was enormously important. The East coast culture doesn't really respond to ideas about "consciousness" and "energy," so it gets very tricky when you use words like this. Dealing with the racial divide and the system that perpetuates it is extremely important, and should clearly be a part of what this conference is represented to be--white people dealing with the racial divide. It's the elephant in the middle of the room. It needs to be part of the planning for the invitation (not necessarily in the wording of the invitation).
Skye: One idea about the invitation... bring in other voices in the invitation... be comfortable with them (the voices) in their own form, even if they don't quite jibe (especially if they don't quite jibe). Suppression of the indigenous mind, suppression of somatic consciousness, is part of what has been going on...
John: Multiple invitations, maybe...
(more discussion -- about the image of Vanessa's kids coming here -- how could we make it safe for them? -- one idea: ask Vanessa, of course... ask them ! )
John: Part of the work might be that groups of us go to conferences together, build our connections that way.
Lion: A concern: what would happen if (at next year's conference) the black people went to all the same sessions and the white people went to all the same sessions?
John: It has already been happening here... and we've been talking about it, and people have started to make an effort to show up at sessions they might otherwise not show up at.
Jane: One important thing: keeping this community going in an exciting, playful way. Not just blogging... but getting on the phone together in conference calls. Calls like that can be really important (she gave examples) for people to hear what's going on. "We string our beads"-- a Native American expression for hearing what's going on with each other. We can also sit together (physically) for these calls, if it works. (Jane mentioned reaching out to her friend Samson, who she knew would have added so much & would have benefited so much from the conference-- but he could not come.)
Lion: I believe America is committed to this process. I believe that.
John: Conference calls sound good--and we could post information about them (date, time, number) on the wiki.
Skye: Jean Houston's system of conference calls is one of the most developed Skye has seen. (description of details of it) Skye emphasized she offered this as an example.
Discussion continued... there are possibilities for the wiki to have "theme" pages, and the theme page could have information about related conference calls. There was a mention that having about 12 people in a conference call makes it a good size. We're so large, we'll probably be multi-modal (not just calls).
Adin: Let's ensure that the process for setting up agendas for conference calls is open, as the conference was.
Jan: It's really important that the initial page for a Web site or wiki site be simple--not too crammed with stuff-- perhaps have a "feature" item, for example, one could say "Check out the Conference Call info at link_would_go_here" -- or any other featured item, maybe one a month.
There was discussion about how you can't always "Skip Intro" on the Story Field web site.
There was some tech talk about Google groups.