Revisiting Meanings of Place and Other Essays
As I spend some time shaping a new essay investigating what integrity looks and feels like in the rich and fluid webs of complex relationality we human creatures live within, here are some previous essays -ˋˏ ༻❁✿❀༺ ˎˊ-
Meanings Of Place
Summary: Meanings Of Place is an exploration of the different ways that we human creatures are informed by ‘place’, with place as being located in space, time, and meaning, social location, and social navigation. Then, extending that lens to organisations and discovering that, for organisations, place is also organisational cosmologies or worldviews and organisational location and navigation.
Extract: ‘In the English language and culture, as I know it, place holds many different meanings.
The first place that first comes to mind is the place that’s locating us in space, time, and meaning. This place is full of tender memories and relational deepenings, the place of: ‘I’ll meet you at that riverside cafe on the quay where we met last time’; of gentle, everyday relational irritations, such as the muttered: ‘Why did he leave the keys there again?; and the shared evocations that seemingly simple descriptions can ignite, where a few words like: ‘I currently live in Exeter, on the edge of the Jurassic Coast and Dartmoor’ offers tales of deep time and geographic and ecological wonders, as well as stories of a life.
Then there’s the second place, that of social location. This is the place of ancestral lines, what nationality we’re born into, who and where our family is, where ‘home’ lies; and all the questions and emotions and yearnings that questions of social location hold. This is the place of feeling ancestrally or nationally displaced or rooted; of family of origin or family of choice or no family at all; of places that we know and that knows us, being at home as an always-explorer, or walking ourselves into a new place.
The third place is that of social navigation. This is how we ‘know our place’ within family and community, institutions and organisations...’
Read Meanings of Place: From organisational cosmologies to organisational location and navigation, 'place' matters to ecological organisations.
Critical Stories
Summary: Critical Stories is an invitation to notice and examine the large and small stories that shape us and are shaped by us. It offers an overview of the critical thinking approaches that I have found invaluable in noticing, naming, and examining my stories, so that I can ignite my agency to shape and be shaped by stories of service.
Extract: ‘We human creatures live within and from a myriad of stories. What I spend a lot of my time thinking about are the stories that we don’t realise are stories, especially the unexamined stories that aren’t always of service; that can be erroneous, or callous, or unintentionally harmful.
In numerous countries, including the UK where I live, fascism, and all that is encompassed in a fascist worldview, is on the rise. Proponents of fascism weave stories of rightful hierarchies of human value, of rightful dominion over the more-than-human and vital, complex, life-supporting ecosystems. They weave stories that celebrate and justify a brutal subordination of social and environmental policies that centralise empathy, generous care, and interbeing, policies born from a shared understanding that our lives are deeply, irreversibly, wonderfully weaved together.
In times like these, noticing, naming, and, if needed, disrupting our stories so that we can choose stories that are of service is nothing less than a beautiful, vital, and enlivening act of love...’
Read Critical Stories: Harnessing critical thinking to craft stories of service.
Ecological Organisations (Part 1): Worlding through really good stories
Summary: Ecological Organisations Part 1 is the first in a three-series exploration of the foundational beliefs of ‘ecological organisations’, a reimagined story of organisations as complex, relational, living systems that are deeply interwoven into wider ecosystems and social systems . In part 1, I focus on why stories matter and what the story of ‘being ecological’ can open up for us human creatures and the organisations we steward. Then, part 2 dives into humans and organisations as both edgeless and edged, whole and dependant, and part 3 into how being ecological is an ongoing process of discovery with no final arrival point.
Extract: ‘So much of the time we see stories as what’s alive between the opening of the story and the close. But stories are as much of the space outside their edges as they are of what they hold within. By its very act of being, a story holds space for all the other stories. A plurality of stories. A multitude of them. Each story takes its rightful place in the liminal space that holds all stories. And that, I believe, is a very good thing.
Stories are powerful creatures because the impacts of a really good story are so very, very real. Capitalism is a story. Whiteness is a story. Nations are stories. Community is a story. As is social hierarchy, ancestry, politics, time, cities, commons, stewardship, humanity (and so much else). We are irreparably arranged and rearranged by stories and their impacts.
When we pay attention, we can choose to step into the universe-sized liminal space that’s filled to bursting with stories.
Seeing our perspectives, ideas, and worldviews as stories helps us not only hold our perspectives more lightly but also see and honour the myriad ways of looking at and being with (and being changed by) the same thing. After all, it’s the plurality of worldviews and perspectives that makes this such a glorious and fascinating, as well as challenging and heartbreaking, world to live in and through...’
Read Ecological Organisations (Part 1): Worlding through really good stories.
A Staying Close To Self That Is A Multitude
Summary: A Staying Close To Self That Is A Multitude is an exploration of how the self is not singular but a multitude; a multitude that includes what’s unfolding now (place, neighbourhood, every single relationship, the more-than-human, the other-than-human, the local, the regional, the bio-regional, the global, the laws of physics) and what has unfolded before and might unfold after (ancestry, histories, possible futures, future descendants, and deeper time). Staying close to self becomes a discovery of self as a universe of relationality, with that relationality being an always fluid and shifting state.
Extract: ‘The way I see embodiment practised and spoken of, I now see as intimacy with sensory, somatic, physiological aliveness. Whereas I now understand embodiment as intimacy with internal and external landscapes that are as much of the horizontal as they are of the vertical.
The first framing is a singular experience. We might ask ourselves: What am I feeling? What am I experiencing? How might I adjust my experience through deeper breathing, mindfulness, attentiveness, daily practice?
The second framing holds the understanding that internal and external landscapes are irrevocably relational. Here, embodiment is the understanding that every experience, feeling, or mood is of the horizontal (everything that is taking place now) as well as being of the vertical (all that we carry from the past and all that we carry into the future).
To be intimate with internal and external landscapes as they are is to be intimate with ourselves as ecological beings. A staying close to self that is ecological.’
Read A Staying Close To Self That Is A Multitude: Embodiment as horizontal and vertical relationality.