The final sentence of my essay Ten Reasons Why We Struggle With Village-Making is this, “Until we can understand why it matters that the village might fail, we will never truly be engaged in village making.”
In response, someone asked me, “In your opinion, why does it matter that the village might fail? And do you mean fail/collapse altogether or at a particular task?”
Given the reality that most of our visions of village come from the place of never have grown up in one, the chances of success are remote and yet, despite the barren pantry we can fall under the Spell of Inevitability that, “Of course this will work!”
It rarely sounds that brash. It more often appears in statements like, “When we…” and the possibility of it not working out appears nowhere in the words to follow.
“When we create our village together…”
“When we create this beautiful community for our children to grow up in…”
When we hear such things, there should be a flashing red light that appears inviting us to slow way down. When I hear people prematurely using the word ‘we’ and ‘us’ I tend to start backing away because and explosion is coming. They’re not seeing reality of the situation clearly and so there solutions are likely to fail. Possibly in dramatic fashion. When people don’t see the likelihood of failure and the reasons for it, it rarely goes well.
Back to the question: “In your opinion, why does it matter that the village might fail? And do you mean fail/collapse altogether or at a particular task?”
In short, my answer is this: if it can fail, it’s alive. If it can’t, it’s a machine.
This isn’t to say that machines don’t break or fail us. But they are design to be without any faults at all. They are designed to work in a rigidly, identical fashion every time.
The good Randy Jones makes a distinction between a ceremony and a ritual. Of course, this is semantics. Many people use the word ceremony in the way that Randy uses ritual but this is Randy pointing at something important in the best language he’s found.
In his parlance, a ceremony is scripted and a ritual is not. A ceremony is contained, proscribed, first this and then that every time and a ritual is alive and responsive to what’s happening now. A ceremony is designed to never fail and never get weird.
I remember showing up to a wedding, a couple of minutes late, and realizing, as I sat down, that I’d missed the first hour. They were already at the vows. I double checked the time on my phone. And then looked at the invitation in my hand. I asked my neighbour for the time and they confirmed my time was right. I sat there totally baffled and annoyed with no particular anyone to be annoyed at.
When the ceremony was over I was told, “Oh, it only started two minutes before you arrived.” I was stunned. That meant the whole thing was only fifteen minutes long. It was scripted and contained to make sure nothing unpredictable happened. Easy. In and out. Efficient.
But life is weird. That ceremony gave no room for the people in it to appear. It was a template. It could have been anyone at the front and anyone in those sets. We were irrelevant to the proceedings.
To say it another way, no one was needed.
To say it another way still, no one was of any particular consequence.
Imagine another scenario: there is a wedding and particular people are leaned on to prepare speeches, to prepare food, to make gifts, to make the gowns and regalia, to decorate the space, to light the fire, to dip the candles etc.
If they don’t do their job, their piece will be missing.
If enough pieces are missing, the thing will fail. It just won’t work.
Back to the question: “In your opinion, why does it matter that the village might fail? And do you mean fail/collapse altogether or at a particular task?”
It matters not just that the village might fail (of course it might) but that we know this. That this is palpably felt than any path to success is fraught with danger.
I remember two friends were leaving Edmonton and so they asked some of their friends to host a farewell ceremony. On the night, everyone gathered and those leading it stumbled with leading it. They weren’t that good at it. And so they ones leaving took over the facilitation. They ‘rescued’ the ones they had asked to hold the space.
I heard this all months after the fact, while on a stroll with one of them in Victoria.
“You made sure it didn’t fail. And that’s completely understandable. It’s your farewell. It means so much to you. But, in rescuing them, the community was also robbed of the chance to see it not working, which means they don’t fully appreciate how important the role of host and facilitator is. You can learn a lot from things going wrong. They didn’t get to see the heartbreak on your face as you watched it collapse. You asked them to do that job. And you rescued them from failing. So they were robbed of the opportunity to fail and to learn from that and see all the ways they might better have prepared for the thing. You told the ones who you asked, without saying it, that they weren’t actually needed.”
It’s something to remember, if you are ever the occassion for a ritual: a farewell, a welcome, a birth etc. You should not, properly, be in charge of the thing because, if you are, if you take the reigns on it with a flair of self-sufficiency, how will anyone else around you learn? If we are going to practice village-making, that means needing other people. But really needing them - not pretend needing them. It means leaning on people who will likely let you down. It means failure galore.
But the failure isn’t all bad.
My friend John from Calgary spent ten years preparing for the initiation of his son. When the time came, despite a decade of men’s groups, there was no readiness and no older men where he lived who were, in any way, capable of initiating his son. And so he put out a call and four men stepped up - only one of whom lived in Sweden.
He asked them all, formally and in a ritual way, to take this on. And they did.
But, part way through, he saw them stumbling and dropping the ball. He confessed he was thinking seriously of pulling the plug on the whole thing and doing something himself.
“John,” I said. “You stand down and you stand down now. If you value your relationship with these men at all, you do not take away this job you gave them. The slap in the face this would be, the affront… Your relationship would likely never recover from it. That’s a mortal blow. You have to be willing to let this thing fail. I know. It’s your son. You want, more than anything, for this to be the success you imagined, the against-the-odds triumph you’ve had since he was born and you began to plant the seeds for this day. But you’re not in charge of this. You know how it is: the parent has no ability to direct the initiation of their children. They are obligated and able to do so for every other child in the community but, when it comes to their own, they have to stand down and let the community take them. Now, you don’t have a community and surely not one capable of what you’re asking. So you plead those you know near and far to do something. And they are. And it’s not what you would have done but what you would have done is something you should not do - not with your own boy. And besides, there’s so much that can be learned from failure. Your son gets to feel the consequence of what happens when older men promise to show up and then don’t. That’s worth learning. He gets to see what worked and what didn’t, mostly in retrospect when he’s older, in initiating a boy and he can learn as much from what fails as from what works. And then men leading it get to learn too. They get to feel the burn of shame from breaking their promises. They get to see what works and doesn’t. They get to see how impossibly hard this thing is to do and, in knowing that, they might be even more gracious and full of gifts when they ask others to step in, knowing firsthand how hard it is. You’ve got to be willing to let this thing fail.”
He nodded and agreed.
In the end, though it wasn’t what he’d hoped for, it was full of beauty.
Years ago, I attended a wedding. The man leading it, speaking to the 160 of us gathered in a timber-framed meadhall in the Ottawa valley where the walls were not yet erected, said, “We have about eight hours. I want everyone to speak.” And gave us the instructions on what to do: to stand up with our gift, to put it in one of two piles and to speak some words about it.
On the drive back to our AirBnB afterwards, many of us were venting and frustrated. So many people had never had the chance to speak at all because others had spoken for thirty minutes and, to make it worse, droned on and on about themselves in a way that lost everyone.
The man leading the thing, sat there the whole time, looking deeply unimpressed, and doing nothing to stop it. He let it fail.
The next morning, with immense compassion and good humour, he helped us see what had happened. The ways that people had taken the very real wedding of two people and, seduced by the attention of such a large group, turned it into a chance to, finally, be seen and heard and made it all about us getting fed instead of feeding the thing we were all a part of.
It was humbling to see.
The next wedding of two dear ones on Salt Spring, I saw the fruits of this failure. Those who’d been at the previous wedding, stood up with their gifts and hit the mark with their speeches. Everything the previous wedding speeches had lacked appeared in spades on that floor. None of us wanted to live through that boredom and annoyance without end again. I was in awe at the learning.
Learning which never would have happened had we not been allowed to fail.
The life robbing activities of the last wedding had taught us how to feed life more beautifully in this one. The culture killing speeches of the last one had shown us how to feed culture in this one.
One last story: a dear friend was coming out of a three day fast in the woods hosted by a local indigenous elder. She asked me to be there to be a part of the gathering in afterwards. We sat in a big lodge with two fires on either side of it. There was a man who was the fire keeper and he was asleep at the switch as the lodges fill up with smoke. When I stood to go to the bathroom, my eyes burned so much I could barely see. There was a lot of coughing.
Afterwards, I commented on this afterwards to an indigenous friend.
“Yeah,” they replied. “That was the fire-keepers job. That’s not supposed to happen. They’re supposed to keep those fires going with a minimum of smoke.”
I nodded. “I’m realizing how important that role is.”
They smiled.
In seeing it fail, I got some small window into the scale and importance of that job. If you are asked to be fire-keeper in a ceremony, you need to have the wood ready before the day comes. You can’t use wet wood from the forest. You gather it. You make sure you have enough of the right kind of wood. You dry it. And then you pay close attention to the fire the entire time, feeding her regularly so she doesn’t become smokey.
I never would have realized this all had I not seen it fail. I imagine that some elder spoke to the fire keeper afterwards about this and that this person will be better on the next one.
What seemed like a small role to me, ended up mattering a great deal.
To say this another way: every role in a village making endeavour, every job in a ritual, matters. If that job isn’t done or it’s done poorly, it affects the whole. If enough balls are dropped the thing fails and people have to live with it having failed because of them and see how deeply they matter in the world.
One more angle: most people, deep down, feel like they don’t matter at all. Search for evidence of their importance as they will, they find none. If they show up or not, the events they go to will be unchanged because they are all, increasingly, scripted.
By robbing people of roles that are counted on, we rob their lives of substance and consequence. When we say to people, “We’re counting on you for this,” it’s helpful if we really mean it.
Of course, that’s a recipe for a lot of early failures as people dissemble and make excuses, “Oh! I didn’t really think it mattered… I guess I didn’t think this through, ha ha. I guess I should have given myself more time. Shoot. Ah well.”
And we could rescue them with, “hey it’s okay.” Or we could let the failure show. We could not rush to hide the consequences from them or from us. We could let the poverty appear as they realize the consequence of saying, ‘yes’ to things and we realize the consequence of not preparing people properly or choosing the right people.
I remember an old quote I saw. “Success,” it said. “Is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is the result of experience. Experience is often the result of poor judgment.”
And that quote puts to mind the old story of Tom Watson, owner of IBM who called an employee into his office who had made a mistake that cost the company a fortune.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting to fire me,” the employee said.
“Fire you?!” barked Tom Watson. “I just spent a fortune educating you!”
The desire to prevent failure is understandable. But the only way to absolutely prevent failure is absolute control. And that is not culture. Culture hinges on people bringing their gifts to bear in unexpected ways at just the right moment. It hinges on reading the room, not memorizing the script. It hinges of leaving room to breath in the proceedings instead of choking the life out of it with well-intended but over-done details. The statue of David is beautiful but it’s also stone. That’s not a living, human body. It’s perfect and it’s not human.
One way to proceed is, “Ok. Here’s the schedule for the day.”
Another is, “Over to you,” and then stepping down and letting the group run it and stumble as they do. There will be failure galore and you can help people learn from that after.
Ideally, these things happen in low stakes situations and you save the roles in the high stakes ones for the pros.
It doesn’t mean we don’t prepare and do our best. But it does mean that we start where we are with what and who we have. And, right now, that’s not much.
In letting rituals and community-building endeavours fail, people’s consequence is handed back to them in a way they never expected and would never have asked for. What we are handing back in a seed, or maybe it’s good compost for the collective soil, or maybe it’s both, that will help ensure the success of the next culture-feeding event that those to come so desperately deserve.
“I know that all of my enterprises will fail. I know that already. I’m not holding out hope that somehow anythings going to change as a result of doing them. All I’m trying to do is participate in some small way in the small collection of memories that will accompany my death. That’s all I’m trying to do is having a small part to play in what those memories might be. Understanding now, that the way I’m proceeding is helping to author those things that people will remember. If they’re inclined to. And there’s not much more to me than that. But that is not a recipe for futility. One of the things I learned at the deathbed is… that’s the whole thing. That’s the magic of it. Our willingness to remember turns out to be a kind of banquet… and the remembering is the food. And I think that’s what we have to do in a rough time like this one, is that we have to give people even not yet born, we have to leave in the air a kind of an aroma… let’s call it ‘inconsolable possibility’ - a possibility that won’t be consoled into impotence.” - Stephen Jenkinson
I both love and have mixed feelings about the messaging here Tad. As a father four and recent grandfather I have had accept my place in my children's lives, basically the one that you depict here so eloquently, and watch them fail in ways that were obvious to me and my life experience, but that were leading edge choice points for them and their individuation and maturity process. To intervene would be to rob them of THEIR life path and learning, you know, where the lessons go in deep and change you. They give you wisdom in your bones and sinew, and often, will save you from making similar bad decisions in the future when the stakes and consequences might be much higher.
On the other hand I do believe are developing a language of communication between beings with more precision and nuance that has been there in the past, allowing for more direct transmission of wisdom between minds, and not necessarily via the school of hard knocks. My wife and I have been doing this for the last 20 years, and also have this kind of relationship with several of our kids.
What if any of your friends from these examples, say the one with the coming of age ceremony for his kid, instead of jumping in to save it (Modern consciousness) or letting it fail so lessons could be learned (Traditional Consciousness) had approached his friends and shared that while he really valued their efforts and contributions so far, he was also deeply distressed over the lack of organization and flow that he was witnessing for this super important event for him and his child and that he would like to talk to them about possible strategies to get things back on track. The friends have the opportunity to acknowledge both their successes and their failings as a group, they work together and come up with a new strategy that saves the da, and all groups involved walk away feeling stimulated to their edges and embracing the new growth and relationship depth they have experiences. I would call this a Post-Modern communication, based on honoring the other, honoring your own feelings and perspectives, and working together to find a 3rd perspective or approach that honors all parties needs.
So not only does the event get saved, but the quality of contact and relationship between the individuals deepen and the sense of bonding and ability to identify and transcend potential relationship corrosive dynamics is experienced and strengthened.
So I do honor and respect the lessons you are leaving here with us. I also, am by nature a contraire or backward walking person and tend to question everything and look for new perspectives, even on old wisdoms. I'll paraphrase something you shared in a previous blog discussion, that wisdom must dress itself differently for each new generation. To take it further, perhaps Wisdom itself must also grow over time to accommodate the growing complexity human beings and cultures and interactions.
With much respect.
This is so thought- and feeling-provoking for me, as are the other comments. On the one hand, it feels very true. On the other hand, it never occurred to me that a ritual (formal or informal) I did with other people could fail, because my experience is that they always work. It's certainly true that I often think they won't work-- that's just the hoop you need to go through to get past thinking and into ritual state, over the years that's refined itself from working up a real sweat to just brushing aside the thought and getting down to it.
And maybe all the rituals I've been part of (hundreds, if you count musical performances, and I do) don't work in the way imagined, but to me, that's what happens when you let something bigger than humans in, which is my definition of what ritual is. Sure, there are mistakes, awkward moments, things that you'd rather not do another time, people you might not want to do ritual with another time. But what needs to get accomplished gets accomplished : the state of things changes. Magic happens. And it shows up in the outer world.
I'm wondering if you're coming from a level I haven't investigated, and need to check out. Looking at it from an angle I haven't considered. I'm going to ponder this one.