Down on the Farm, rather than on the Mountain top.

At my annual get together this weekend to consider the forthcoming year (at a Devon organic farm rather than on a Swiss mountain top), I went for a walk, yesterday afternoon, up to the top of one of Devon's beautifully, rounded small hills. It was like walking across the surface of a giant sponge, the ground was so saturated. I have never experienced anything like it. The patterns of our weather are changing and at every level thought and adaptation are necessary. Our hosts sheep, Gotlands, for example, can take the cold (being from Scandinavia) but not the dampness, ground wet to feet. Does our host hope for the best or cross-breed them or change them and what would answering each of those questions cost (and look like)?

While the ethereal mechanisms of global governance churn on after ever more belated remedial action on climate change, these real questions haunt each and every farmer, globally, and, lest we forget, on intelligently answering these questions, do all of our lives, literally, depend! Farmers truly are the most important people in the world which is a profoundly counter cultural message!

One of our number, down on the farm, is a distinguished student (and teacher) of complexity (as applied to organisations) and one of our conversations, over dinner last night, was on how real strategy is, in fact, done from here - from going step by step into particular actions, recognising oneself as one actor amongst many, and alert and vulnerable to what is present in the nature of things and relationships. Our addiction to 'planning' is increasingly hubris: no sooner have we planned than reality has moved and our plan is a redundant map.

It seems to me that it is increasingly important to help people find this difficult comfort with uncertainty and their ability to act from their attention, insight and values rather from their 'experience' or 'strategic vision' or 'ability to plan' - and to make resources available on the basis of our excellence in judgement rather than on what we propose to do.

That is another major culture shift but our very survival may depend on it.

Comments

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog