River: Flow and resilience
Jim Drescher hosting tea beside the LaHave River in late spring. Photo by Amanda Bostlund.
Some podcast themes
Holding the river banks: Finding the sweet spot between too much and too little structure. Facilitating flow through intention, care, and inspiring physical spaces
Welcoming our full selves: Valuing the cultural differences and complex identities in the room
Respect: Taking the time to really see people and not assume their ways and values are the same as one’s own
Finding new pathways: Creating room for people to take ownership and make stuff happen
Bringing in lightness and play: Balancing the serious work with curiosity, whimsy and humour (while being kind to our nervous systems)
Staying resilient: Helping groups stay flexible and creative through resilience-informed hosting
Acknowledgement
Big thanks to Coco Love Alcorn for sharing her song in this episode. An established presence on the Canadian music scene, Coco was named Contemporary Singer of the Year at the 2021 Canadian Folk Music Awards. She was born in Antigonish and is now based in Ontario. Her performances are always in the moment, joyful, and genuine. Coco has been part of How We Thrive’s online Narrative Project, improvising with phrases in the chat stream. Find out more about Coco, her albums and online choirs. The River is especially popular with community choirs.
The river is a healer
The river is a sage
The river knows no end
And the river feels no age
The river is a leader
Every single day
It's living in the moment
And it always finds a way
Water heal my body
Water heal my soul
When I go down, down
To the water
By the water I feel whole…
Related resources
Vanessa Reid
Video: Chaordic Path and the Art of Hosting, “Just enough order and just enough chaos for life and emergence.” Find out more about by Vanessa.
Free downloadable resources
Quotes
On flow
“Freeze bullshit, move like rapids when collective energy is flowing. As the facilitator, you need to continuously transform to meet and guide the room. Less prep, more presence.” —adrienne maree brown, Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation
“Constant motion, as manifested in cyclical or repetitive patterns, emphasizes process as opposed to product. It results in a concept of time that is dynamic but without motion. Time is part of the constant flux but goes nowhere. Time just is.” —Leroy Little Bear, Jagged Worldviews Colliding
On staying resilient
“I reached out to two Anishinaabe language speakers and knowledge keepers and asked them, How would we define resilience in our worldview? My cousin Rene Meshake said: ‘It is sibiksaagad, sibi (river), biskaa (flexible), gad (it is). You might say that resilience is described as a river flowing flexibly through the land.’” —Melanie Goodchild, “Relational Systems Thinking”
Brook introduces a food security researcher for the Maritimes and the CEO of Food First Newfoundland, who explain why the capacity to be networked, flexible and resilient is more crucial than relying on prediction and strategy, or simply reacting to the next disruption. explains:
“Fundamentally if we’re looking towards the future [of food security], it’s helpful if we look at it less as trying to predict what’s going to happen and reacting directly to those predictions—this idea that there’s going to be more hurricanes so we should have concrete anchors for our greenhouses—and more along the lines of recognizing that the future is going to be more unpredictable, and maybe more dramatically so, and so it’s good to focus on the things that enable us to adapt quickly, which if you’re a climate scientist you call adaptive capacity, and bolstering that. Having networks that communicate across different levels and sectors of the food system...is really important because it means good ideas can travel quickly. And that’s one of the most important ways we’re going to recover from shocks.” —Dr. Bernard Soubry, during How We Thrive’s Future of Food project.