As someone who has been involved in the development of people and organizations over some thirty years it occurs to me that people grow for three reasons:

• They want to achieve an ambition;

• They are forced into it by crisis;

• It is a natural hunger.

Sometimes all three come together at times of transition and opportunity. Whatever the motivation, growing beyond our comfort zone demands courage, curiosity and risk-taking. We must be able to tolerate the creative tension that is only found at the edge of our learning.

In my view, few people can tolerate this “constant, therapeutic irritation” for long. Most of us prefer automatic pilot and the familar world of the status quo.

Visionmakers, those who are pursuing a journey of heart and meaning, carry a lifelong commitment to learning and growth. There’s is not the path of comfort or conformity. Visionmakers prefer to follow the dictates of the heart, the guidance of values and principles and a bias to action.

That is a rare commitment in today’s world.

Visionmakers are also vigilant about the false-self system that seeks to keep us preoccupied with our deficiencies and character flaws. Nothing puts us in the ditch faster than patterns of self-sabotage and indulgence in behaviors that undermine our personal power.

The way of the Visionmaker calls us past our vanity, laziness, pride and wilfullness to a new territory where we are asked to sacrifice our stories, reasons and excuses. These relics of an undisciplined life create inertia and keep us from growing beyond our belief systems, into our excellence.

By shaking up our own status quo, we liberate ourselves from the oppression of the past, the limits of our preconceptions. This allows us to see clearly and act impeccably. Such liberation is necessary to the Visionmaker’s journey and to the rendez-vous with Destiny.

When our hunger for meaning becomes greater than our addiction to comfort and predictability, a new journey of the heart begins.

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

He’s coming to dinner.
All the women
fussing over this and that.
Irritating.
I sit in my chair
pretending
to read my paper,
eavesdropping.
I feel them
glancing
in my general direction
nervous.
Has a good job
they say.
Comes from a good family.
We’ll see.
He arrives
awkward,
searching for signs
he won’t get from me.
Sit over there, boy.
I can see the terror in his eyes,
hear the tremor in his voice.
Good. Let him squirm.
Doesn’t he know
no one
is just going
to waltz in here
and take
my daughter?

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

Let us be silent so we may hear the whisper of the gods. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The natural home of the Visionmaker is the realm of silence. Turning from the noise and the haste of the world, the Visionmaker returns each day to periods of silence for sustenance and guidance.

 

Today, most people cannot tolerate extended silence. Life is carefully constructed to keep silence at bay. We attempt to vanquish silence through diversion –computers, television, radio and endless chat.

 

Silence is the domain of the unseen world. As Emerson reminds us, it is the place that one encounters “the whisper of the gods.” It is here that we recover our equanimity, find solace, encounter the stillness that allows us to remember who we are.

 

The world around us batters our senses. How can we hope to see our heart’s desire and understand what is most meaningful apart from silence? It is in this “world behind the world” that we can assemble ourselves for our rendez-vous with Destiny.

 

When I worked as a hard-rock miner, I had a unique opportunity to spend significant time in silence, alone in the underground darkness with my thoughts. Something happens to you a mile under the earth. Your vision of reality changes dramatically.

 

When you turn your headlamp off, there is a darkness unlike anything you have ever experienced. Usually darkness is no more than a reduction of light. Even night has some visual definition – the moon, stars, streetlights, a light in the hallway. Underground, without a headlamp for illumination, you can’t see your fingers an inch from your eyes.

 

That kind of darkness amplifies both the silence and the sounds: water dripping down the rock face, the whoosh of air concussing from a blast somewhere else in the mine, the sound of your own breathing.

 

Although your eyes have stopped apprehending the outer world altogether, sensory deprivation brings new awareness. Your eyes turn inward, and the blackness serves as a screen for other visions. Here you see your life projected in flashes backward and forward, glimpses of what you have been, done, thought, haven’t done; and imaginings and fantasies of life yet to be lived.

 

Death is native to this realm. You feel it in the air, knowing that this dark is not the darkness of sleep. They took a young man, your age, to the surface in his lunch bucket because he made a fatal error. To go to sleep in such a place for even a moment would be to totally surrender to Death, to relinquish any right to return to the surface where the world awaits you and life can be lived with the new clarity that comes from being temporarily entombed.

 

Every Visionmaker knows that silence is a mentor of purpose. It is always calling us back to the heart, back to meaning. Silence is the crucible that allows us to hear that primal question that lies beneath our self-talk: “How are you using the great gift of life?”

 

 

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

Last night I had the great pleasure of spending some time over dinner with John McKnight, Professor of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University. John has made a major contribution to neighborhood and community development by turning conventional thinking on it’s head.

He explained that traditional thinking about communities is based on deficit identification. In other words, let’s see what’s wrong with the community and begin from there. What John and his colleagues concluded was not only was the approach wrong, it reinforced a condition of dysfunction and the psychology of scarcity in the communities it attempted to “fix.”

Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) “considers local assets as the primary building blocks of sustainable community development. Building on the skills of local residents, the power of local associations, and the supportive functions of local institutions, asset-based community development draws upon existing community strengths to build stronger, more sustainable communities for the future.”

What a concept. As McKnight explained “we tend to see the glass as half empty. We decided to look at it as half-full.”

Part of the work of capacity-building is to engage the disenfranchised and marginalized. McKnight informed me that when you approach someone as a potential contributor –despite their circumstances– with requisite gifts and talents, you open up an entirely different relationship.

Asset-Based Community Development has spread world-wide. Thanks to John McKnight and his colleagues, our vision of what is possible in community has grown exponentially.

For more information on this important work please visit:www.abcdinstitute.org.

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

This is the season
of letting go
of the burdens of the heart.
Let every weight you carry
fall away
like colored leaves.
Let your heart
be restored to fullness.
Let your heart
be restored to openness.
Let your heart
be restored to clarity
Let your heart
be strong again.
This is the season
of letting go
of the burdens of the heart.
May they be compost
for new growth
and the renewal
of your indomitable
spirit.

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

Don’t lose heart.
Every journey of consequence
includes the experience of loss.
That’s how Chance teaches us
about letting go.
Release the past;
face the future.
This is the road of initiation.

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

Good shot son
well done!

That’s a fine looking buck.
The family is going
to eat well
this winter.
Thanks to you
and this animal.

Take the knife
you’ve watched me do this
time for you to cut.
Before you start
thank
the animal.

Make the first cut.
You have to be sure-handed,
true with the blade,
crotch to sternum.
Not so deep that it’s spoiled.
You need everything.

That knife was my father’s
now it’s yours
for what you did here today.
The handle is worn-in
fits the hand perfectly
while it works.

Learn
how to cut
strong,
but not too strong.
Never force
the knife.

The best stroke
is patient,
smooth and precise.
That’s how
a man moves
when he knows his business.

Well done, son.
I’ll help you with the saw.

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

“The future enters into us,in order to transform itself through us, long before it happens.” –Goethe

The teenage years might just be the most difficult time to figure out where you are headed with your life. It sure was for me. An indifferent student, my dream of playing professional hockey was shattered when I turned sixteen. It was then that I figured out what everyone else seemed to know already: I just wasn’t good enough to get there.

Like most kids in Canada, hockey was an obsession. I played in elite minor hockey leagues, first in Ontario, then in Quebec, and I was passionate about the game. That I was a step slower and couldn’t break an egg with my shot did not interfere with my hopes. I relied on strong defensive play, and aggressiveness, and managed to earn a place on some of the best teams in my city.

Then, one day, I got it. I saw what everyone else saw. It was like a bubble popping. I continued to play until I was eighteen, but by that time, the most talented of my teammates were already in junior hockey programs that fed the NHL.

Now what?

Long walks followed – a couple of years of long walks – lost in thought. I would walk for hours but always found myself drawn to a spot beneath the Galipeault Bridge that connected the western shore of the island of Montreal and Ile Perrot. The Grand Trunk Railway built that bridge, sometime in the late 1800’s.

Here I would sit and look into the darkness that shrouded my future. In those moments when I wasn’t completely bummed out, I began to notice the bridge itself, how it was constructed, and the arches that drew the eye across the water to the far shore. It was hypnotic. At the time, I was unaware that I journeyed daily to sit before a powerful metaphor for my dilemma… and my future.

The bridge, a symbol of “transition and connection,” provided a visual representation of my inner search. Bridging differences was a talent I had. I had always been “a bridge-walker” between different groups of people and was able to see the common ground that existed in seemingly disparate positions. I sought out different people from backgrounds that were unfamiliar to me. I loved living in the midst of two cultures – French and English – and felt enriched by that intermingling. Eventually, I was able to see that I had other aspirations beyond hockey, and pursued a university education in Communication Studies, which included cross-cultural communications.

It has taken me 35 years to understand what I was seeing as I looked at that bridge on the shoreline of Lac St. Louis. That image has haunted me – working on my subconscious mind until the day I made the connection to Visionmaking. The Bridge of Foresight, from current circumstances to future outcomes, had its genesis under the Galipeault Bridge.

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

Hole in the ground
passage to another world.
Elders speak the laws
cut our cheeks,
send us into darkness.
How long must we crawl
on our bellies like worms?
This is no dark that we understand;
this blackness authors the night.
Bodies barely fit these passages
as we inch forward.
Rock wet with blood,
we gasp for air
down, down we crawl
into the heat of the Mother.
Flash of light, flash again
drumming bends the air.
Our tongues crave the salt
of the rock walls
that rub against our wounds.
Dark hands
of the reindeer men
pull us to freedom.
Strong fingers
peel away the crust
of old skin
to reveal
our velvet antlers.

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved

This is graduation week in our house. Two of our three girls are having their convocation- April’s was yesterday and Alannah’s is on Friday.

Yesterday’s event was at the University of Western Ontario (Western). They chose to honor Phil Fontaine with an honorary degree and his remarks reminded me of how important his contribution has been to the advancement of aborignal people in Canada and abroad.

I met Phil Fontaine very briefly a number of years ago at the first State of the World Forum. In our short conversation, I was struck by what I nice guy he is. Very intellingent, easy to talk to, down to earth were three of the qualities that came through in our brief chat.

It wasn’t hard to see why he has been such a successful bridge-maker.

Yesterday, Western did a good job reminding the audience of Fontaine’s achievements. He is a three-term National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, a record that has never been equalled.

He has been passionate in building better communities, advocating for well-being, and has established ground breaking innovations in education, child and family services and alcohol and addiction treatment on reserves across the country.

His message yesterday was for a broader audience than the 500 or so graduates assembled:

“A lot is riding on the decisions you will make and the leadership you will provide. Making your mark on the world is hard, if it was easy everybody would do it, but it’s not. It takes patience, commitment and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction.

 

“Don’t let people talk you into doing what is easy or comfortable. Listen to what is inside of you and decide what it is you care about so much that you’re willing to risk it all. There are some betting against you. Prove them wrong.”

 

Phil Fontaine has proven that visionary leadership knows no boundaries. Anyone, with commitment, passion and tenacity, can make a difference. I was so happy that my daughter was in the audience yesterday to hear the inspiring words of this great man.

© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved