37days

Retreat to move forward

Sometimes in the madness of our lives what we really need is a quiet space on 63 acres of rolling land in the mountains of North Carolina, a moment to look at our life's stories, to learn from them, and to re-story ourselves.

I'll hold only one public retreat this year, from September 26-28, 2008, near Asheville, North Carolina. I would love for you to be there. It won't be the same without you.

Participants will be the first to receive my new book, LIFE IS A VERB, which won't hit bookstore shelves until October.

We'll explore six conditions for intentional, mindful living as a small learning community in a beautiful space. We'll eat organic vegetarian food cooked on site for us by a Kitchen Goddess. We'll laugh. We'll leave refreshed and connected and more.

Information is here, including details on our 2008 full scholarship for a single parent to attend.

Unfortunately, we are limited to only 20 participants, so early registration is advised as participation is on a first-come, first-reserved, basis.

J is for jijnasu

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan

In 2008, I want to be a jijnasu, a seeker of wisdom, an inquirer.

When I was preparing to talk with Billy Collins the other day (doesn’t that sound casual?), Mr Brilliant was holding the paper bag while I hyperventilated, metaphorically speaking, helping me think about what questions I wanted to ask the dear poet of my dreams.

“Ask him what his favorite word is,” he said, excitedly. Mr Brilliant is a great cataloguer of such information.

I blinked at him.

Tess ran by. “Tess!” he shouted as she sped by. “What’s your favorite word?”

“WHY!” she yelled without stopping, making a tiny circular path from living room to family room to dining room and back. Just as Mr Brilliant started to answer her, she shouted again: “WHY IS MY FAVORITE WORD!”

He beamed.

“What a fantastic favorite word,” he murmured, contentedly. “You should tell Billy Collins that ‘why’ is your four-year-old’s favorite word.”

I blinked at him.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do that right after I pass out when he answers the phone.”

Read this book...

Thanks to everyone for diversity book club suggestions - you are helping to create an amazing list. Keep those suggestions coming...

The first book we're reading for our April meeting is "The Time of Our Singing" by Richard Powers. My philosophy professor from way back in my days at Guilford College recommended it - thanks, Jonathan!

Called "one of the best novels written about race in America," I am halfway through it now and it is going on my "books I wish I had written" list. The 4-page fictional account of Emmett Till's murder alone is one of the most insightful, amazing passages I've ever read. Take this for example:

"His crime swells past rape, worst than murder. It spits in the face of creation. What the whites must do, they do--no rage to their motion, no hysteria, no lesson. They exterminate by deep reflex--a flinch that comes before even self-defense. They put a bullet through the fourteen-year-old's brain, as they might kill a rabid animal. A desperate protection, the safeguard of their kind."

"They exterminate by deep reflex--a flinch that comes before even self-defense." Richard Powers is a masterful, smart writer - the Chicago Tribune calls this book "a bold and vibrant set of variations on the themes of music, race, and time." The Philadelphia Inquirer writes that "this is a novel God might relish and call enriching. Powers' heart-cry should win big prizes." The Christian Science Monitor wrote, "the best black novel to appear in America since Beloved has just been written by a white man."

"The power of music in its relation to a racially divided family and culture is dramatized with unprecedented brilliance in this panoramic novel..." "Massive and dazzling...." "Opens up a universe of thought and makes you hear the legendary music of the spheres...."

At 631 pages, it's not a wee tidbit of a book. As one book club member wrote: "I checked out Richard Powers’ book today. I want to thank you for choosing the largest novel in the library. I had to have help from one of the librarians to carry it to the car!"

"Wisdom," I wrote him back, "takes work."

Start a diversity bookclub

In any community, there are diversity issues - the natives vs the newcomers, race issues that pit black against white, gay and straight clashes, classism - and often, we're not equipped to talk about them. Dialogue that approaches the issues head-on sometimes is too difficult, we avoid it, or we talk "at" rather than "with" those we perceive to be different from ourselves. We demonize the other and try to prove them wrong rather than understand their point of view. We don't bridge, but create both metaphoric and literal gated communities instead.

Can literature help?

Retreat to move forward

Sometimes we have to retreat to move forward.

The next 37days retreat is scheduled for September 28-30, 2007, and registration has just opened for it. Limited to 14 people, I hope you can be one of them. I'll be joined by my business partner, David Robinson, in facilitating the weekend retreat. He's magical and brings so much to the gathering. Plus, we laugh a lot.

September 28-30, 2007  / MIND THE GAP: The Power of Personal Stories

[A 37days Retreat]

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” -James M. Barrie

If you had only 37 days to live, would you feel happy with the story you have lived thus far? How would you express that story, learn from it, leave it for others? Those are the fundamental questions behind this blog and the grounding for this unique, experiential weekend gathering focused on unmasking our personal stories to achieve greater creativity, healthier relationships, and fuller engagement in what poet Mary Oliver calls our “one wild and precious life.”

Often, there is a gap between how we wish to be seen and who we really believe ourselves to be, between the story we meant to write and the one we’ve written so far. This gap mutes the colors of our lives and inhibits the quality of our engagements with other people—in our families, our organizations, our communities. Maintaining that gap diminishes our creative impulse and often splits our intentions. Why, then, don’t we do more to shorten that distance and mind that gap?

This unique Gathering will explore these questions:
How do we make meaning of our lives through story? What are the stories we tell ourselves about others? About ourselves? How do those stories reduce us? What learning and significances are right in front of us, in the stories of our days? How can we summon the courage to move beyond the limits of who we think we are into what we were meant to be? How can we relinquish our “role” in order to discover who we might be beneath the mask?  What treasures can be found in the in-between space between me and you, between perception and preconception, between my Self and the Other?

We’ll explore concepts such as:  Life as a finite or an infinite game, intention and direction, wicked problems & tame solutions, and naming our vicious and virtuous circles, those patterns that either reduce us or allow us to live expansively.

Learning Activities / We will: 

• Use improv theatre, ritual, metaphor, mask, story, writing, and other narrative tools
• Explore “role” and other expressive personal and organizational “masks”
• Be 85% experiential--not in the sense of simulations or role plays—but as unmasked engagement with others
• Invite participants to extract meaning from experiences as a collaborative learning community
• Use focused free writes to help participants frame experiences in their own language for deeper exploration
• Experience how changing ourselves can deeply impact our families, communities and organizations.

Here's what people had to say about the last 37days retreat:

“You created a safe environment for valuable learning.”

“I loved the gentle humor that developed in the group, the inclusive quality of the experience, and the practical writing techniques that I’ve probably encoded into my cells.”

“You don’t facilitate as if to say ‘we are the leaders.’ You’re great at taking cues from the group.”

“The story you wove through the whole weekend was masterful and amazing.”

“Your facilitation is beautifully collaborative.”

“Your ability to bring movement and play into the experience, and at the same time, relate that play to deeper concepts, was truly a pleasure to experience and to watch.”

“I appreciate all the thought, caring, and preparation you put into making the retreat weekend transformational for all of us.”

 Cost / To honor the impulse of giving behind 37days, this retreat is offered for a reduced fee of $475-775 inclusive of tuition, materials, housing, and all meals. Please pay what you can in that range.

Location / Our 2007 retreats will be held at the Bend of Ivy Lodge in Asheville, North Carolina. Go here for more information and registration forms for this and other 2007 retreats (PDF).

We'd love to have you join us there. It won't be the same without you.

Study for the essay questions

“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.” - Alec Bourne, A Doctor's Creed

Way back when I was learning my ABCs, names of state capitals, and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at happy Hillcrest Elementary School way up there on the crest of that hill, We the People of These United States weren’t offered the chance to take a foreign language. No, I had to wait until the 9^th grade when all those chatty and sparky synapses were concretized, making it almost impossible to create unusual, new sounds and different ways with sentences construct word order to.

Good instructional strategy, that.

In that Dark Insular Age (as opposed to our Transparent Yet Still Insular Age of 2005), the only language offered was French. Mais oui! Given the Massive and Unrelenting immigration of wine-swilling Frenchies to the hills of North Carolina, that monolithic linguistic choice made perfect sense, didn’t it? Mais non!

Examine your car for dents

“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” -Tuli Kupferberg

One interesting thing about life is that at a certain point, it all starts repeating.

Or perhaps it’s been repeating all along and it just takes a certain distance (age?) to begin seeing the patterns that emerge, again and again.

And perhaps those patterns keep emerging because we keep not seeing them, like a looping test, some sort of life exam, a great big sparkly Broadway musical of the Bill Murray film, “Groundhog Day” with all of us playing Bill playing the weatherman searching for Punxsutawney Phil and awakening every morning to the sounds of Sonny and Cher on the radio, finally recognizing with a start that we have, in fact, been here before and that, like Bill, we’ll have to keep on doing it until we get it right—an infinite regress of doing and knowing and recognizing and starting over.

Follow the disturbance

“Put down your clever,
Let your partner affect you:
Tenets of Improv”

-- review of Keith Johnstone’s Impro on HaikuBookReviews

I recently had an interesting experience that revealed to me a big truth, a Big Truth, that is, in capital letters. It was an encounter with a client.

My business partner, David, and I were working with the senior team of an organization and our focus was diversity in their workplace, a conversation I have facilitated many times for other groups. But never in my experience has the dialogue gone so deep and been so real and raw, so honest and so true, so close to a point of real change.

Roll on the floor

"Perspective is worth 80 IQ points." – Alan Kay (American computer scientist and researcher)

My daughter Emma and I watched a show on Animal Planet last Saturday that made me laugh. Then it made me think. And then it made me realize I had laughed because I could identify with the people who made me laugh in the first place. I like it when it happens in that order.

The show is called “Who Gets the Dog?” and it is yet another “reality show,” this one a competition between three sets of people vying to adopt a lucky dog picked from the jaws of death at an animal shelter (or saved at least from the pointer fingers of small children poking them incessantly). The dog in question this week was a Rocky, a black Labrador Pointer mix.

Know the point of your life

“Sheridan's gifts as a teacher were as rare as the purity of his passion. Wherein did these gifts lie? In his brilliance? Yes. In his mastery of his subject? Of course. In his capacity for lucid, concrete, and vivid explanation? Again, yes. But there is another factor, one whose roots lie in magic or the supernatural. Sheridan had charm.” --Jonathan Malino, Eulogy for Sheridan Simon, 11 April 1994

This week – today, actually – marks the eleventh anniversary of a death, a death far too young and far too fast and far too unfair. To keep him alive, I want you to meet a most special human being, an extraordinary mind, a brilliant writer, one of the very funniest people I’ve ever met, and a most amazing teacher. A man with definite charm.