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