Sometimes sound and light is better at conveying the essence of things than words …
Council Of Hosts – video powered by Metacafe
(This video was made at a Council of Hosts gathering in Bowen Island, by Ashley Cooper and Thomas Arthur of Woven Essence)
Born on the northeast coast of England, of Viking and Welsh ancestry, I grew up as a granddaughter of the Empire and daughter of the Commonwealth. As a young girl in the years following the First World War, I puzzled and then grieved that the men came back so hurt—legs lost, difficulty breathing––and so many dead. How could we have done this? I wondered. Why couldn’t we have talked it through? This was a question that really mattered to me.
Later, studying the armistice conditions ending the war, it became very clear that the lack of ongoing and authentic dialogue among nations created conditions for future conflict. I determined that, when I grew up, I would study ways in which these mistakes would not be repeated.
But then, instead of peace, World War II came, and I spent almost five years in the Royal Air Force. The overarching mission was simple: survive, defeat Nazism, end holocausts, and make the world safe for democracy. In the course of wartime, I lost friends, comrades, and home. One searing experience in Europe, in which I encountered ambulatory Jews being brought out of the camps, caused me to ask my commanding officer: Sir, how could we have done this? He snapped that of course, we had not done this, they had. Yet I knew that, somehow, our human community as a whole had failed in the face of these atrocities.
In my contemplation and study of these questions, it became clear to me that every societal change process I knew of started with an informal conversation in which men and women—young or old—were witnessed and “heard into speech,” sharing their dreams and hopes for making a difference around something they cared about. In being truly seen and heard, people discovered their mutual commitment to act and were transformed.
Networks of small circles of conversation springing up around the world were bringing forth an emerging collective consciousness that yearns for a more equitable and sustainable future for all people on this planet. Since the days in which the World Café was born in Juanita and David’s living room, I recognized it as a living metaphor for what life itself had taught me and have been intimately involved in guiding its evolution.
How can we talk it through? The question that has informed all of my life choices, now lies, I believe, at the heart of our capacity to survive as a species, and to ensure that our home, this beautiful planet, survives. For me, it is the core question that informs all of our other questions. If we could converse and talk things out, we would find new ways of being together in the world. But instead, we separate, conflicts begin, and when worse comes to the worse, we go to war. Then death comes in as a walking partner, instead of life.
I get so sad when I see how we adults cut off the conversations our children have with life––with grass, trees, birds and with their own imaginations. Engagement in the conversation of life is discouraged when in fact it is the most essential of our capacities: it is embracing a spirit of conversation that connects us to all forms of life. Authentic conversation without openness is not possible. I want to suggest to practitioners, to emerging leaders and to our children, that life itself can be a conversation—with other people, with nature, and with all of life.
When we walk together, we have a choice between destructive diatribe and a constructive dialogue. We can choose life and loving connection, or separation and disintegration. Listening to each other and truly talking together—these are deep, socio-spiritual actions. Conversation is a profound evolutionary act that helps us to expand our consciousness and connect together parts and people that appear to be separated. It is one of our unique human paths to fulfillment and wholeness.
We, collectively, can make the agreement as to how we will live together, and that only happens when we talk about it. We cannot do it alone. We must look at the dilemmas of our current situation and ask, “How can we be doing this?” We need to look together at what has happened and what is happening to humanity because we would not “talk it through”!
The promise of the World Café and other dialogue approaches is that we now know that we can experience a collective intelligence and wisdom in relation to complex questions. We can, by becoming conscious participants in the conversations of our lives, increase the probability of the right choices being made—life-affirming choices. Life itself is asking us to become co-evolutionists––to be responsible for our common destiny––to re-connect with the natural world and with each other. Making the choice to participate in this way is actually a sacred act. I define sacred as that which has value in and of itself and gives meaning to the whole.
Our conversations feed our stories and the stories flow into a great new story. Humanity is being invited to learn to speak honestly, listen compassionately, truly attune, hear, and sense the depth of what is emerging in our midst. We must tend communicative space, design our Cafés, search for the deepest questions that open gateways to the future, harvest and make visible our new collective thoughts as they emerge: together we will discover creative ways of living and being together in these uncertain times.
As Elder and “guardian of the soul“ of the World Café, I embrace this work as sacred and view life itself as a conversation. When I see the care and love of Café hosts setting out tables, placing the small flowers in the center, attending to the precision of questions that matter and welcoming people at the doorway, I cherish the knowledge that our human souls and the soul of the world is being honored.
Now, with gratitude to our ancestors and blessings to all of life, I invite you to enter the gateway to the future—discovering your own best hopes along with honoring the needs of future generations, including the young and those not yet born. Welcome! Find a seat with people you haven’t met. I invite you into conversations that serve life, and bless your efforts to discover how we can talk it through—together.
The following is a story in response to a question Juanita posed:
How did you become aware of conversation as a co-evolutionary force and why do you think that is an important insight for engaging with the critical challenges of our time?
It was 1970 and I was 16, a ‘run-away’ living in a hippie commune in the back woods of Vermont.
One day a group of enterprising souls announced a ‘gathering of the
tribes’ to be held at one of the communal farms north of Burlington,
and word quickly circulated among all the communes in the region. On the designated
day people came pouring in from all over Vermont and New Hampshire and we began to set up
our tents and tipis in the fields surrounding the farm.
We all worked together to build a practical infrastructure that could support that many people (there were several hundred of us by then), and for three days and three nights we gathered in groups large and small around campfires, communal camp kitchens, and in the green fields that surrounded us. We met one another and developed relationships; we cooked and ate and drank together; we talked about what we were doing and why, what we wanted to see happen in the world and what issues we were facing in our communes. We talked about our dreams and fears for the future of our country and our hopes for our individual lives.
Those conversations seeded a hundred more that kept going as we all returned to our various homes, and before a year had passed the group that gathered that weekend had achieved something miraculous. We had collectively started a newsletter, opened a collectively-run residential elementary school for the kids, and launched a collaborative food co-op – soon to have our own tractor-trailer and 6 food distribution centers from New Hampshire to Montreal.
From that experience I learned that ANYTHING is possible if there is intention, and that intention can be catalyzed, by even what seems like a very small action. I learned that the momentum that starts when people are talking about things that really matter to them is unstoppable, and that friendship is one of the strongest bonds on earth.
We didn’t just get things done out of that conversation – our conversations that day were part of creating ourselves and the beings we would each become. If it’s true that we listen each other into being, and I believe it is, those conversations were not only pivotal moments in our personal development as individuals, but they were helping to form the ideological foundation for the socially progressive work that many of us are still involved in today.
A few years later I experienced another conversation that took my exploration of self and world even deeper. I was introduced to a group of people who had started a spiritual school based on the eclectic philosophy of a South American mystic named Oscar Ichazo. In those early years we had intensive, ongoing conversations about the big questions: “What is a human being?", and "What is consciousness?". These conversations opened up a whole new dimension for me. The answers that arose from serious contemplation of those questions changed the direction of my life.
The experience gave me a bodily sense of humanity as one spirit. It taught me that the right question can open up the heart of things and take us deep inside our own truth. Ultimately, it helped reveal a sense of purpose and the nature of my own unique role in creating a future that works for all beings.
It’s been clear to me ever since that even a small group of people asking the right questions and engaging others in conversation about them are the crucial factors that will catalyze the challenges of our times into opportunities for a better world.
My original awareness of conversation as a fundamental and generative force in our collective lives came from a source and a setting that I could never have anticipated. It was the innocent curiosity of two corporate leaders…
The year was 1993 and World Café had not yet appeared in our lives. I was sitting in the living room of our home in Mill Valley, California, with John Browning and Frank Gonzalez, leaders of a regional Sales organization within a major U.S. corporation. They wanted to build their organization as a community. How did you do it in the farm workers’ movement, they asked? What really is at the heart of community development, anyway?
Of course, the house meetings! The house meetings were the basic unit for building community in the farm workers’ movement. Cesar or another farm worker organizer would ask a local family to host and convene a conversation among their friends. As workers shared tortillas and bean suppers, they shared the “if only’s” about their lives and imagined the impossible. They began, through dialogue, to ask the “what if” questions. And from the “what if’s” came the “why nots!”
Two or three members of the first house meeting would then decide to host another house meeting with a small circle of friends in their own homes. The ideas from one conversation would seed several others.
As I stopped to think about it, the light bulb went on. All these years I’d somehow believed it was the phone calls, the lists, the disciplined follow up, and the mass meetings that got people mobilized for action. Of course these activities were important to success. But was there something else, something underneath all of that?
Suddenly I felt as if I’d been hit over the head! Why hadn’t I seen it?
It was the conversations themselves in those thousands of house meetings that actually did the organizing. It was not us, the organizers, that did it. It was the power of the conversations themselves and the meanings that people took from them that did the organizing. When those conversations were really alive, people couldn’t help but act. In concert with others, they discovered the capacity to transform their lives.
I heard myself saying to these two corporate executives, “It’s conversation that’s the heart of it. We can attribute our successes to all kinds of techniques and other key factors, but it’s actually the dialogue, reflection, and shared meaning, along with the seeding and linking of the conversations, and people knowing that their conversations are connected, that’s the core process for co-evolving large-scale social change.
Conversation lies beneath organizing and strategizing!
When I look back at other large-scale change movements—the salons that birthed the French Revolution, the sewing circles that nurtured the birth of the American experiment in democracy, the study circles that transformed Scandinavian society early in the century—all embody the same underlying conversational pattern.
This was such a powerful personal insight about conversation as a co-evolutionary force that I’ve dedicated my life to deepening both the theory (there’s a paper on it that I’ve contributed to this blog) and the conversational practices (both the World Café and others) that can spread this awareness as on behalf of conscious evolution in relation to the collective challenges of our time.
What enables conversation to be a co-evolutionary force in our lives, fostering healthy connection and catalyzing creativity and wisdom in our organizations, communities, and cultures?
What are the conversations that matter most to us right now – and what if convening and hosting those conversations were the key to shaping positive futures?
What if we viewed all of the conversations taking place when people throughout the world gather to explore their deepest questions as a dynamic, interconnected, collective inquiry – the “world as café,” reflecting our collective quest to create a world that nourishes all life?
Join us to explore the deeper dimensions of conversation about questions that matter – conversations dedicated to awakening and engaging collective intelligence – and the principles and patterns that underlie them.
Bring your insights, questions, and stories – and welcome to the conversation!
