Just outside Berlin, during a 3-day Presencing Ecosystem Gathering in Nauen, I had the good fortune to challenge my practice in the safety of 35 friends and colleagues biased toward experimentation and social change. I experienced a profound shift in understanding the role of social art, and this post will hopefully map some of the contributing conditions to that.
As Otto Scharmer aptly summed it up after the session, we used a drawing “as a meditative surface,” as a specific tool for resonance—like a ringing bell—to “transform our collective attention, and give rise to a new type of collective container,” opening space for presencing and generative flow.
The drawing was about 8×8 feet (2.4×2.4 meters) on paper, made with acrylic, chalk, and permanent inks, crafted mainly during breaks and evenings, alone, in much silence. These are the main sections of the post:
WALKTHROUGH – CONTEXT – DRAWING – BLACK – PROCESS INNOVATION – LITERACY
WALKTHROUGH… Otto led the walkthrough of the drawing on the group’s final morning together. If you make it through the full ~17 minutes you will hear us each speak to essential parts: 1) Otto the cognitive aspects, the journey we had taken in the room that included key framings and a new process i write out at the end of the post; and 2) at about minute 10.20, my speaking to the inner aspects, the more intuitive or felt components that are suggestive of, but do not specify, meaning. It was hard to articulate, as i was still coming to understand what the drawing offered, not only what i had represented.
CONTEXT… Notes scrawled from the opening evening welcome. For anyone wondering how my “scribe” writing is so tidy, know that the process is a slow one: from listening, to gathering data, to sitting with what is most relevant, to writing on a wall. It starts out as a mess!
Before that opening, though, in a strategy meeting with the Presencing Institute (PI) that took place days before in Berlin, my friend and colleague Manish Srivastava drew the image on the left. It was a midway mapping of a Social Presencing Theater (SPT) process from our smaller group. The details i carried most strongly into the large drawing were the placement of “aspiration” on top, balanced in a vertical axis with “earth” at the bottom. This axis seemed incredibly strong and held many other parts – such as infrastructure, conscious institutions, capacity building, and absencing (to name only some) – in relation. The axis carried through to the end of the sculpting, informing the direction of PI and the gathering.
Before the PI strategy meeting, even, there are other influences: 1) the drawing from a 2018 live broadcast for Transforming Capitalism, where i drew an activated, marginalized labor population as a texture, for lack of a more clear and dignified way to represent it (see image on left, and the area under “Value”, where my hesitancy is clear and the markings not…) 2) a 2017 u.lab session where the overarching theme was connecting with our deepest humanity and creativity, and where i used my hand and red chalk ink to represent reducing fear as a gateway to access the open will.
And one final, unavoidable reference… two painting series i worked on around 2007-09. Beats, on the left, made with only an index finger, channelling the small and intimate quality of a heartbeat. Pulses, on the right, placed with masses of brushstrokes, calling to the emergence and recession of our presence. These, as the images above, show the slow evolution of the “activation orbs”.
THE DRAWING… i’m aware this image suggests multiple interpretations, and that’s intentional, and i will leave it for you to find your own meaning. I’ve been wondering how abstract my scribing can be, especially given my love of abstraction in painting and my deep appreciation for indigenous arts. How few marks can a scribe make to adequately convey wisdom and story? How many words are really necessary? What is the balance required to engage and communicate with both the rational and emotional aspects of our beings?
Here are some journal notes, trying to document the layout and order of how the parts came to be on the page. First to come out: the channel. Last: “basic bravery.”
Overall, this drawing turned out to be a perfect example of working WITH what does not come out the way we want. Notice the two lines on the lower left, coming down from the main orb… The one on the inside was the first. It felt immediately off, mis-drawn, out of balance with the upper arms. I then drew another line farther out. Neither would have worked well on their own, but together they worked with the leg on the right and held the overall shape in place, like legs of a stool, or like a 3-legged spider.
Also of note are the many smaller drawings to the right, on white, which each person in the room had created during a brief exercise on generative scribing while i read a section of my book on “Source“. These drawings were on the wall the entire time i drew, and you can observe the influence.
THE ROLE OF BLACK… Here’s a picture of the obsidian mentioned in the video, and an inspiration for letting the shiny black ink (covering mistakes) take on a positive role. Earlier in the week, a friend had given me the piece on the right from Mono Basin, CA. Thirty years ago, i had collected the piece on the left from a beach in Lipari. My fascination with this lava glass was brought right into the present moment.
Otto and i and others in PI have for years associated the black backgrounds we choose to use in branding, drawings, websites, etc with a few meanings. These include a reference to social art pioneer Joseph Beuys and his use of blackboards for note-taking, i.e.; in a 1977 installation on “improving the future of society”. When broadcasting from MIT during u.lab and other session, i scribe on old blackboards, too, ones we’ve been fortunate to have available as built-in features of the old classroom.
Black for me also represents space, the universe, places untouchable and large that situate us as specks. I think of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s 1969 song Woodstock: “We are stardust, We are golden, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden” – as relevant today as it was then.
Black has a lot of meaning. Kandinsky had a somewhat negative view: “A totally dead silence… a silence with no possibility, has the inner harmony of black… Outwardly black is the color with least harmony of all, a kind of neutral background against which the minutest shades of other colours stand clearly forward.” He continues about white, just for contrast: “It differs from white in this also, for with white nearly every color is in discord, or even mute altogether.”(1)
I have a more positive view, where black represents vast possibility. It’s introspective, rather than extroverted like yellow. Black to me is old, wise, even seductive in its quiet. White is new, young, innocent, almost drifty, like dandelion spores in a breeze. Black is the most challenging color for me to draw on, and Kandinsky is of course correct: other colors can easily take on a neon quality and appear falsely bright, insincere. It absorbs light and highlights contrast. It is the silent, if visual, dance partner that edges me to take risk.
In this drawing, i was confronted with a double challenge: how to draw into black as a space of possibility and how to work with this shinier black that seemed to have it’s own, new meaning; it had come to represent denial, my wanting to hide my wrong words and mis-drawn lines.
The shiny black started to represent absencing, an “architecture of separation” that “facilitates disconnects from the world around us and the word that is emerging… which results in blaming others and destruction.” (2) I have been experiencing absencing—especially in the US these days—as a fixed state of society , an inescapable, dominant reality plagued by polarized ideologies.
But then, as I was sitting with the two unresolved bottom left lines, Arawana Hayashi led us in an SPT “Stuck” exercise, and my thinking instantly shifted. In SPT, you essentially find one pose to embody the current reality, then sense what wants to move. Then you let a new pose that embodies a future reality slowly form.
I started to make a connection between the pain and discomfort experienced in absencing and the parts of the drawing that i felt had come out forced, lacking care. When Arawana spoke these lines: “Seeing is not about the eyes; it’s about the heart” I realized my own stuck seeing. I was looking at the lines, not yet seeing with my heart into the possibility they formed. I was seeing the shiny black as a problem, not yet as an opportunity. Likewise, i had been considering absencing purely as a destructive force, not yet relating to it’s transformative energy.
PROCESS INNOVATION… In the walkthrough video, when Otto asks: “How generative are we in using the scribing?” he was referring to a prompt by Katrin Kaeufer, who had inquired about how we actually engage with generative scribing. Earlier, during a fishbowl conversation about ecosystem leadership activation, Jayce Pei Yu Lee, Olaf Baldini, and I (left to right, below) each scribed in stationary points that formed a dynamic triangle around the circle. Consistent with my experience of scribing, the drawings served the moment and then personal reflection, as individuals would walk by the posted sheets on a wall outside our main room. But it was more passive than active engagement. And Katrin must have caught this.
The result of her inquiry was that on the final morning, we slowed down to be with the larger, primary drawing; we settled into the image and let it’s energy —harnessed from and through the group—speak back. Hence Otto’s reference to Arthur Zajonc…
During a 2011 PI Masterclass, Arthur had spoken about the contemplative dimensions of presencing, and led us through a “focused attention” and “open awareness” practice while chiming a bell. He had us first focus on the sound and then relax into the silence, while letting go of the sound and the memory of sound to let come an afterimage. You can watch a video here where Arthur leads the practice (minute 29) “If I strike the bell, it’s a call to attention. Then sound the bell again, in memory, hear the onset, and the long quieting of the bell.” This image traces Arthur’s talk with us:
With this inspiration, using the drawing as a bell, Otto guided the following process:
1) He mapped out what i’ll now call “Four Levels of Engagement” (i imagine this language and description will shift in the coming months).
- Level 1: Capture. The scribe records content, and those in the room get the image as an “after-artifact”.
- Level 2: Observe. People look at a drawing at the end of a workshop, as a final product.
- Level 3: Reflect. Participants have touch points with the drawing midway in their process, to allow for reflection.
- Level 4: Resonate. The social body opens up, shares stillness, absorbs the drawing, and contemplates any “afterimage”.
2) Otto and I each offered an orientation to the drawing, as a guide from observation into reflection.
3) Clustered at the wall, the group then attended to the image at level 4 for a few minutes, in silence, and then proceeded back to the circle.
4) Those in the room let go of the content of the drawing, stayed with the after-image, and tuned into the resonance. Then we payed attention to what was arising in terms of images, feelings, gestures.
5) We engaged in open, generative dialogue, with one comment building on another, and new meaning and understanding coming through the center of our circle.
One comment from someone in the group, shared after we had all parted ways: “The afterimage that came up this morning was how silently the large shadows of consequences (“black on black”) of absencing in our world had trickled through the entry points of the small groups [we’d shared through the session] as gateways into our container. How they had stretched out taking our heart into their grip like with loooong thin black fingers (for me particularly through stories) the pain, the anger, and sadness spreading out, partially into the larger circle later. Then a second image emerged: that of the introductory circle in the morning, where each of us had presented ourselves as an individual facet expression of the cracking global body we’re holding (“gold on gold” on upper right side of picture). It felt as if we’d all been speaking out of one force. Our words seemed to morph into a sparkling bowl of strength and confidence and hope, a sovereign collectiveness building to reside amongst us…”
LITERACY… In closing, and to sum up the relevancy of everything shared thus far, one key point in the drawing (upper right corner) was around the concept of literacy. The Presencing Institute has been clearly focused on these main areas: creating knowledge, convening innovation labs, and building capacity—all in service of activating social fields and civilizational renewal. The image on the left, the bubbles. The image on the right, Otto’s framing (if i understand it correctly) that layers over the top bubble “creating knowledge” and builds on peace researcher Johan Galtung‘s work. These are seven methods of literacy: “I”, “You”, “It”, “I-You”, “You-It”, “I-It”, and “Field/Presence”. And our work now? Sharpening that literacy.
This includes how we create, how we share, how we reflect, how we sit in silence together, how we are still, and how we come to new sense. As was spoken in this sacred circle, “We reconnect language with experience, as a way to rejoin self with our deeper humanity.”
(related posts: Decoding a Wall and Generative Scribing: Unpacked)
1 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (London: Dover Publications, 1977), republished from the original The Art of Spiritual Harmony (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1914), p. 39.
2 C. Otto Scharmer, The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Application (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018), p. 31.