Monday, February 15, 2010

Reflection rewrite

Sometimes my writing goes easy, and sometimes it is a torturous affair. Writing a reflection about collaboration this afternoon for an independent study on eco-theology was an experience with the latter. Not only did my musing take what seemed like forever, I am convinced that when it was all said and done, I got caught up with the details and skimmed through what might have been the depth in the exploration.

I concluded that collaboration was staying balanced on ever shifting ground. It is a concoction that is forever changing.

Now, I’m thinking that it’s a bit like playing volleyball. With volleyball, at least the rules that I played by in high school and briefly in an adult league some 16 years ago, is that the ball had to be touched by at least two people, optimally three, before it could be hit over the net. So even if there was good shot that would send the ball to some unguarded spot on the court, you had to set up the ball for another player. You had to risk getting the ball over the net, by placing it where another could hit it.

That’s collaboration. It involves trust in your teammates.

Second, collaboration demands that you put aside your own ego and need for control, accomplishment and distinction. Consider the volleyball shot again. Can you really take credit for the point if your contribution is setting up the spike for someone else to nail down? Not really. You can say that you assisted, but that’s the extent of it. Can you really be assured that your teammate will get the job done? Letting go is a really hard thing to do, especially if you feel you are responsible for the win or for getting the job done.

So collaboration is about teamwork, placing the responsibility on the team as a whole and runs contrary to our postmodern individualist mindset of “I am all I need.” It involves creating a mechanism for shared leadership and working toward a shared vision. It involves trusting the collective process and letting go of the final outcome.

It’s actually pretty scary stuff, and terribly exciting when it works right. It’s exciting when it works right because it is new and uncontrolled. It’s invigorating when it works right because it is at its root an act of creation and innovation. It’s satisfying when it works right because it has the capacity to be complex or amazingly simple in ways that reveals themselves as subtle transformation of thought or action.

It’s amazing when it works right because it’s a paradigm shift that speaks to a more inclusive whole that has at its root space for all. It’s a methodology that, quite simply, we need to practice.

Not unlike redoing or rewriting a reflection.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Snow day

The predicted snow has begun. I ask Stephen how much will fall, and he tells me that the accumulation for our area will be four to eight inches. It doesn’t seem like much in relation to the big hoopla about the storm’s immensity, although meteorologists are undoubtedly looking at the larger cumulative effects across the Eastern seaboard.

My younger brother grumbles last night on the phone that the Philadelphia school systems announced that they would be closed today before so much as a flake fell. Knowing my brother, I can only imagine that he is annoyed that our technology can, more or less, accurately predict snowstorms, and yet we are not unable, or unwilling, to effectively harness our collective wills or our technology to not continue to harm this precious world that we have gotten pretty good at listening to.

Earlier in the day, I laughed out loud, snorting in a cynical kind of way, at this week’s River Reporter story about how Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection is essentially putting a moratorium on subdivisions due to a new ruling that will safeguard the high quality streams in the area by insisting that developers and homeowners submit a sewage management plan for new construction before permits will be issued. It seems ironic that the environmental agency will allow thousands of natural gas wells to be hydrofracked, each leaving up to 2.5 million gallons of water that has highly carcinogenic substances added to it deep underground, while worrying that human excrement cannot break down in cement holding tanks.

“It’s the DEP way,” a colleague commented.

Undoubtedly, it’s easier to instruct municipalities to figure out a system to require homeowners to pump their septic tanks every three years than it is to balance a nation’s insatiable energy needs and our developed palate for turning natural resources into financial fodder. Undoubtedly, the DEP is relying on the concept that the toxic water is separated from our fresh water sources by thousands of feet of dense rock layers, rock layers some of which get fractured in the process. But unlike sophisticated satellite imagery that now allows our meteorologists to see and track a developing storm, we have no science on hydro-fracking. We actually don’t know what will happen decades to come to our water supplies. Interestingly, we are starting to track how a deteriorating planet affects our psychology and sense of well-being.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html

The snow is graceful this morning. The branches on the white pines across the side field are now dusted in white, like a sweet confection. The snow will assert itself on our day today, allowing many of us to stay home and contemplate how we are dependent and interdependent with the nature outside our doors. And while we might think that we gain some measure of control with our accurate predictions, the earth’s system will be the final arbiter of today’s activities, which is, in my mind, makes perfect sense.