Mastery in practice

A classic Taoist story. I love the line "now I go out to meet it with my whole spirit and don’t think only about what meets the eye."

Ting the cook was cutting meat free from the bones of an ox for Lord Wen-hui. His hands danced as his shoulders turned with the step of his foot and bending of his knee. With a shush and a hush, the blade sang following his lead, never missing a note. Ting and his blade moved as though dancing to “The Mulberry Grove,” or as if conducting the “Ching-shou” with a full orchestra.

Lord Wen-hui exclaimed, “What a joy! It’s good, is it not, that such a simple craft can be so elevated?”

Ting laid aside his knife. “All I care about is the Way. If find it in my craft, that’s all. When I first butchered an ox, I saw nothing but ox meat. It took three years for me to see the whole ox. Now I go out to meet it with my whole spirit and don’t think only about what meets the eye. Sensing and knowing stop. The spirit goes where it will, following the natural contours, revealing large cavities, leading the blade through openings, moving onward according to actual form — yet not touching the central arteries or tendons and ligaments, much less touching bone.

“A good cook need sharpen his blade but once a year. He cuts cleanly. An awkward cook sharpens his knife every month. He chops. I’ve used this knife for nineteen years, carving thousands of oxen. Still the blade is as sharp as the first time it was lifted from the whetstone. At the joints there are spaces, and the blade has no thickness. Entering with no thickness where there is space, the blade may move freely where it will: there’s plenty of room to move. Thus, after nineteen years, my knife remains as sharp as it was that first day.

“Even so, there are always difficult places, and when I see rough going ahead, my heart offers proper respect as I pause to look deeply into it. Then I work slowly, moving my blade with increasing subtlety until — kerplop! — meat falls apart like a crumbling clod of earth. I then raise my knife and assess my work until I’m fully satisfied. Then I give my knife a good cleaning and put it carefully away.”

Lord Wen-hui said, “That’s good, indeed! Ting the cook has shown me how to find the Way to nurture life.”

Translated by Sam Hamill and J.P. Seaton (The Essential Chuang Tzu, 1998)

Rivendell Revived!

Aerin captures the follow-up

More magic at Rivendell

Rivendell above the fog

Friends -- today I was at Rivendell and the fog was socked in on the channel below. We were in starling sunlight above the pea soup below. I went up on the hill behind the building to photograph it as the elves might have imagined it: floating in the sky above the clouds.

I was there to harvest learnings from a process that I co-lead in Victoria. My partner Lyla Brown and I were facilitating the Aboriginal engagement process for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement.

We used several hosting processes for the work we were doing, culminating in a one day community open space with a half day cafe designed to create strategies for keeping the ideas alive. There is more information and links to photos at my Parking Lot weblog.

My partner and our client decided that we needed to escape to Rivendell to harvest learnings about the process and help to organize our report. As a result of being back in that environment (we used the same room) we were able to get a handle on the heart language that we will use to create the report that conveys the richness of what happened in our work. When that report is finished, I'll post here so you can all have a copy.

At any rate, I thought you might appreciate having this view of Rivendell on a magical November day.

Some offline resources

In response to Lenore's post of a couple of minutes ago, I am linking to an ever evolving list of books that I find especially useful to share with people when they want to know more about this work.

Lenore, perhaps a thing to do would be to begin to add links in the sidebar of the blog to lists of resources such as these and the resources at Berkana. You can do that by editing the template and replacing the links that say "Edit Me."

Cape Roger Curtis, Bowen Island

Cape Roger Curtis

For those of you that didn't get out on the walk with us, here is a small taste of cape Roger curtis, on Bowen Island.

Irrefutable Laws of Change?

A couple of weeks ago I listened to a presentation on organizational change. The speaker started to list "irrefutable laws of change," but only got through one:

Before you can change a system, the system must know you.

The question has stuck with me. I would add:

People support what they create. (Hosting invites this through many methods.)

I wonder what you would offer as irrefutable laws of change, particularly as you think to your own experience of change at Bowen Island?

Yours in the love and learning,
Tenneson