Fractals

We’re excited that the Peterborough Dialogues initiative — our community dialogue and new narrative arts studio dedicated to our local community’s thriving — is abuzz with activity this month. Click the link that follows to learn more about these local happenings: a gathering on rethinking citizen engagement, a hosting arts training workshop and a human services and justice summit.

Peterborough Dialogues Events & Happenings

I shared this image to social media almost exactly a year ago: a fractal structure, in delicate balance, built patiently and by hand, in unique relationship to a place — and with it a quotation from Victoria Safford's essay “The Small Work in the Great Work,” beginning “Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope.”

It had just become financially impossible to fully staff and fund emerging work we were still in the process of sensing the full shape and possibility of at Axiom News — some of the best work I have ever been involved in, what has become the Peterborough Dialogues.

	our-mission.jpg
	Photo: Rock art by Richard Schilling

I just kept coming, first part-time and then full time and more. It was too right to stop. The magic was almost in reach. Those of us pursuing this discovered we were transforming ourselves by the work. We became deep co-creators, drawn (quoting Rumi) “by the strange pull of what we truly love.” We have lived frugally, dared joyfully, experienced moment after moment of being joined by amazing and generative people in deep search for community. We've paid ourselves when we can be paid.

It's been coming into bloom over the last few months, locally where something beautiful and amazing seems to happen almost every day, and internationally now too in a small but powerful way. Today is the fifth call in our global Adventure Into Generative Journalism & the New Narrative Arts, with participants from Cedar Rapids, Cincinnati, Seattle, Calgary, Winnipeg, Montreal, Delburne, New Delhi, Berlin, Antwerp, Mopertingen (Belgium) and more. We might just be collectively birthing a worldwide network of projects that combine citizen journalism with local convening, all in the service of life, local resilience and community.

It's doing what we dream of doing. Community-building. Learning. Media-making. Change. Creating (in the words of a paper co-written by a brilliant friend, Vanessa Reid, of the Living Wholeness Institute, "a learning ecology for community transformation.”

It's been an extraordinary year, the adventure is only beginning — and I've rarely been so grateful to be reminded of a year-old post by the robots of Facebook.

Here's the quotation, from Rev. Victoria Safford:

“Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of ‘Everything is gonna be all right.’ But a different, sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.”
— from “The Small Work in the Great Work”

The Adventure into Generative Journalism & the New Narrative Arts has begun, and the first dialogue has seeded a harvest that includes artwork, a video, a blog and Facebook bursts of reflection and gratitude. We include one of the artifacts, here, a phrase-poem by Ben Wolfe. All of the words were spoken by participants in the call. Enjoy!

it's starting
and the energy is right

i was in the room with people who want to make the world a better place,
by being present to each other,
the openness and honesty were incredible,

that spark of connection
added a whole different level of energy
within the first half hour —

i have found colleagues,
i do not have to be alone

i received the gift of listening
i received the gift of common ground

i received the gift of validation
that i hadn't realized i needed
quite so much
right now

it was a wonderful gift to hear the deeper thread
a stranger heard in my story

they told me i am at the beginning of a great journey
i felt the adventure through their eyes

i am sensing the shift,
i can almost name
what i am on the cusp of learning —

i am in the right place
in the right time
with the right people —
i am feeling the friendship already