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Insomnia and Poetry

I woke up at 3am to the rustling sounds of wind and rain. Couldn’t find my way back to sleep.

This week a friend reminded me of David Whyte, who has been one of my all-time favorite poets for years. He’s also a Fortune 500 consultant who works to integrate poetry with organizational development and change. I’ve always wondered what that looked like. How he pulled it off.

As I lay awake, I found myself thinking of how difficult it can be to integrate the language of the heart into the work place. Even though, one might argue, it’s the most important language we have.

So here I break down the walls of Work and Life for a moment, and offer one of my favorite Whyte poems.

Seemed like a nice way to start the day.

The House of Belonging
by David Whyte

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for a
moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light.

The tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first roof of light
the sun had made.

This is the bright home
in which I live
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

Post NTC Musings

I am back from the NTEN conference, regrouping and musing.

The success of an event is marked, in large part, by it’s wake… Is there engagement, inspiration, resistance, frustration? Is there cause for conversation?

Absolutely.

Whatever my gripes (note previous rant), I’m glad I was there. I think the NTEN gang has worked very hard to form a community of practice, and I applaud these efforts.

From the newsletter appearing under my door each morning (nice analog touch), to the many opps to connect with like-minded individuals, to the midnight scheming and dreaming in the hotel lobby, I appreciated the care and attention put into making a valuable space for us to connect and learn.

I met some great new folks, and had lots of time and space to convene with long-time collaborators — invaluable.

At the same, I was uninspired by almost all the session content. Which only means that anything I thought would be inspiring, and therefore attended, turned out to be a total bore. Jason Z from Democracy in Action sums this up well. If you had a different experience and happened upon a Fabulous New Thing somewhere in the mix, please do tell.

I was also very wierded out by the lurking corporatization of absolutely every aspect of the event. I realize this is standard operating procedure, but ouch. Microsoft, or Intel, or Adobe, or Care2 sponsor our dessert, and so we have to stare at their logos on hundred foot screens during lunch.

Feels surreal, wrong, and somewhat embarrassing. Is this the world we’re fighting for? One in which you can’t have a cocktail party without thanking your corporate sponsors?

Something just ain’t right about that.

What it all comes down to is that NTEN is what it is. I appreciate their hard work tremendously, and they do provide a great deal of value to a particular aspect of the nonprofit sector.

But they don’t really speak to my core concerns. And maybe no big conference every will. I don’t know.

I need a space which focuses on social justice values, strategy, and the innovative tools that can help us build a movement for change. I need a space that allows us to work through the hard questions we face in our work, including how our sector deals with very real issues of social stratification, class, race and gender dynamics, etc.

Most of all, I really need a space in which corporate sponsors graciously agree to be listed in the fine print, and not on the program cover. It’s supposed to be philanthropy, not advertising.

So thanks to NTEN for what you do.

And to those of you out there who share my concerns, I think we have our own space to create sometime soon. So let’s start imagining…

“Revolution is Not an Event, But a Process”

I’m at the NTEN conference in Seattle.

This morning’s keynote was by Guy Kawasaki, who evangelized for Apple in the mid-eighties before becoming a hot shot venture capitalist for Garage.com.

The guy gives over 100 speeches a year, so he is funny and engaging, and he pops some very good one-liners. Perhaps because of this audience — the supposed change-the-world types — he chose to sprinkle his speech with references to the Black Panthers and Chairman Mau (why do people still do that?), along with a bunch of other against-all-odds corporate success stories.

When we talk about nonprofits using technology, which is what this conference is about, I want to see a strong and intentional connection to a real-world theory of change. Because if that’s not what we’re here for, then what the hell?

This is mostly lacking in this space.

Lots of great people and ideas. But not a lot of talk about what it means to affect social change, and how technology supports (or does not) support this.

I went into this morning’s speech ready to be bored and/or offended. To my surprise, it was the venture capitalist among us who was the first to talk about changing the world — what it means to make revolution, evolution, meaning.

Now, the art of selling crap is how to make meaning out of it, and I’m kind of a pushover.

But no one else here is talking about meaning, or innovation, or anything having to do with the change we want to see in the world, and in our lives.

And it doesn’t have to be that way.

The nonprofit sector (now nearly 7% of the US economy) is an increasingly targeted, highly profitable, verticle market. I’m not an anti-capitalist purist, and I have nothing against non-exploitative profit in principle, but let’s call it like it is.

Some people are here to change the world. And some people are here to live their lives, run a good business, find more customers for their products, and never rock the boat.

That’s not my game.

So I’m quoting the venture capitalist.

Innovation makes meaning.

Meaning makes change.

Go for the prize.

Don’t be afraid to polarize (you can’t make everyone happy, ever).

Screw up, and itterate, and keep itterating.

Revolution is not an event, but a process.

That’s what I want to talk about.