Community singing

[Lucia Nass]

I have signed up for U.lab - a free online course or MOOC facilitated by Otto Scharmer from Theory U and more recently Leading from the merging future. 

In the course, I have joined a coaching circle with a couple of people who happened to have selected the time I was interested in. Our first coaching circle started with community singing – and it was a bonding start.

If you give birth to what’s inside you, it will save you, it will save you

If you don’t give birth to what’s inside you, it will destroy you, it will destroy you

 

What a beautiful case too, focusing on practical environmental education for students. Helping them design for a meaningful life. And all of this towards a vision of connected communities, living locally. The case stirred some powerful images and feelings in me:

• Dancing and signing around a campfire in Bhutan, where I lived for 5 years, and where belonging to a community and living with respect for nature is still so much part of daily life
• My twitter background image of the clay humans embracing each other in a circle – came up when the case giver talked about her team
• The cover of Easycracy – a book (sorry, it's in Dutch) about networked lives and solutions as an alternative to bureaucracy – came up when the case giver talked about being scared of leaving her job to pursue her calling, but funders taking less interest in higher level systemic change. One of the points the book makes is that social networks make things happen without funding first
• A completely incomprehensible chat message my niece send to a friend – youth have such different language – and yet we can find words and connections across generations

 

The generative dialogue brought us from our own attempts (and failures) to live with more respect for each other, for nature, and how this can be a source of connecting with others. …to the power of youth to drive change, of parents to discover and teach new values to their children: we are the first generation that truly understands that we are the cause of all the problems around us. Young parents might be particularly interested in exploring new values they might want to give pass on to their children.

 

What an amazing connection we felt among three women sitting in three different continents. Thank you – I look forward to the rest of the coaching journey.