cultural differences
It can be difficult to find what you don't expect
Today, a friend shared an IG post reminding me of my 'egg hunt' in London last year. My wife and I were grocery shopping and couldn't find the eggs. This corner store had everything else... milk, deli meat, bread, cheese, prepared sandwiches, and much more.... Building bridges and bursting bubbles.
Anytime we address new interlocutors, we engage in a constant recalibration of our common assumptions. And, why deny it: preaching to the choir feels better than talking to a wall. Yet, we don't want to be preachy, at least not admittedly.
This takes me back to @blake's humility and pride dialectic... My question is:I'm all in for building bridges and bursting bubbles, and I it's almost a mantra for a lifetime project of mine. But I have to constantly remind myself: who's 'in charge' of designing the bridges? What's the most gentle way to burst someone else's bubble, if we deem it necessary?
An example: this very morning I brought up Gandhi to my 17-18 year old highschool students. No one knew who he was. For a moment I had the urge to find a scream booth somewhere near, but after discarding the possibility, I proceeded to introduce the guy and his works to a new audience.
By now you can see I am assuming you know who Gandhi was, but how can I possibly tell, this is a new audience to all of us! What common grounds are we relying on? Are we aware of them? For instance, most of you are English native speakers, while I'm not, so now I'm sort of bracketing other idiosyncratic and linguistic stuff I carry around, in my attempt to (co)build a bridge with you... Or burst a bubble in an almost gentle way...
I sincerely hope you are looking up and/or not looking up Gandhi on Wikipedia right now (yes, both at the same time, mixed feeling or what have you...) Let me know what you think and feel (which can't be separated) about this...#DeepTakes
I actually had to look up Jan 6, even though I knew about what had happened in the capitol, outside USA it's just another day--actually in most of the Spanish speaking countries and elsewhere the first association might be "los Reyes Magos"... Led a Huachuma Circle yesterday for my birthday. Yesterday I had a 9-hour birthday party together with my friend
K
who is a plant medicine facilitator. This is our second foray into altered-states facilitation, and once again we proved correct the thesis that group trips and Relatefulness are a great combo.It’s hard to pin down what exactly the Huachuma was doing, but it led to a circle that was beautifully stably multi-threaded. There were 4 or 5 threads, and people were very confident staying in theirs, paying attention to the thing they were with, and the people they were with. At times there were multiple people crying, each in their own thing, each with other people attuning to them. The threads would recur as wanted, without anyone needing to direct the flow, channel to streams to be more rational, or more
held
.At one point K said
We can have multiple threads at the same time
, and I told him,I think you said that for yourself. They all already got it
.My specific thread was difficult for me. A woman I had just met earlier that day said she felt connected to me because we share a "latin america connection" but distant from me because I support genocide. I completely froze when she said that word....