Full Circle Associates

My friend and mentor-of-many domains, Barbara Ganley, asked me to offer a guest post related to my gardens sin her Open View Garden blog. This week I finally feel some inspiration — we’ve had more than a spattering of days that an legitimately be described as a warm sunny day here in Seattle. I debated about cross posting… What does gardening have to do with onsline communities, facilitation or technology stewardship, right?

In fact at a metaphorical or den spiritual level, these topic have everything to do with each other. They are each about systems, about intent and improvising with whatever you are dealt. They are about finding regeneration, life and beauty wherever we look. So here is what I wrote for Barbara…

Gratefulness: August Garden in a Cool Summer

In mid July we talked about the number of MINUTES of summer we’d had so far. One of the coldest. One of the wettest. I was still in shock that I kept my poor tomato seedlings squished in the too-short cold frame well into June, stunting their growth and productivity. My pea starts grew slower than a glacier. I was morose and relished my week in the sunny warmth of North Carolina. At yoga class, were we try to practice a more positive, accepting attitude, we could not stop those little comments about the weather.

(Have I ever mentioned that as I get older, I crave light, sun, and warmth more than I ever did before? I do. I”ll say it again. I do!)

Now a month later I walked out into my garden and realized the abundance is there this year, but in a different way. I was just not looking at it through the eyes of abundance. So here is a little tour from our small garden.

For those who don’t know my geography, I live in Seattle, in a neighborhood called Ravenna or Ravenna-Bryant (we are actually smack dab between three named neighborhoods. So identity is always a bit tricky.) Our lot is 50 feet wide and 100 feed deep. Our little house sits towards the back of the lot, so our front yard is both our front yard and our back yard.  We put in raised beds the summer after we moved here in 1984. Over the years, we’ve hacked back the overgrown shrubs, removed most of the lawn and replaced them with plantings, patio and deck, to enjoy “outdoor rooms” even though the weather here doesn’t always encourage our venturing forth.

The lot is bracketed by three very large trees – so large that when you fly over the area on the way to a landing at the airport (approach from the North) you can spot our house easily. It’s the one you can’t see underneath the three big trees! To the southeast there is a huge old horse chestnut on the corner of our neighbor’s lot. It drops blossoms, chestnuts (watch your head!) and leaves in abundance. I only wish the darn nuts were edible. They keep the squirrels busy in the fall, burying and losing them. We have, needless to say, many small horse chestnut starts all around the place.

To the east, directly behind our house, is a big old maple we estimate to be just under 100 years. It is our air conditioning in warm years, shading the house from the hot afternoon sun. In the cool, cloudy summers, I admit I curse her a bit. The arborist tells us the tree is healthy, but heading towards its natural decline as the trees usually live about 100 years. Ours has a lovely vase-branching structure, so there are no humongous branches to fall and crush things. Thank goodness.

On the north east corner sits the sisters: two trees, one on our property and one on the neighbors, but growing root to root, trunk to trunk. Ours is an old Douglas fir which I estimate is about 80 feet tall. The other is a pine that is infected with some disease that is slowly killing it. These two so block the rain that the chicken cook beneath it stays dry unless the rain is blowing vertically from winter’s southerly gales.  Between these three grand dames, you can imagine … I have little full time sun on my garden and it is diminishing by the year. Our raspberries are less sweet. Our greens and peas less robust, robbed of sun. But our ferns and hostas are lush. Thank goodness for shade plants.

But I want to talk about the food that comes out of the garden, and the flowers, like the huge, fragrant “Conc’d Or” (sp?) lillies on my dining room table, the raspberries in my freezer and the dozen eggs in the fridge, courtesy of “the girls” — our three urban chickens ensconced in their cleverly overbuilt coop. The dinosaur kale, the amazing Japanese cucumber that has thrived despite the weather. The clusters of small, green tomatoes on the vines in our “Earthtainer.”  The few slender green beans that survived grazing by the chickens. (Oh, and the second planting of sugar snap peas totally destroyed by the chickens and my not so clever fencing…)

As I look around, I see the horseradish loves the mild summer. That the growth on the apple trees and berries promises good harvests next year. That the hard work I did to amend the neglected soil over the winter DID pay off, even if the bounty is modest. I made two batches of jam this week with the berries, augmented with apricots and some rosemary I had to appropriate from a hedge on a walk, as mine were wiped out by a sudden freeze late last Fall. How glorious the jars look, how delicious the jam tastes. How appreciative friends will be when they receive them in the winter holidays. (If I can stop myself from eating all the jam up myself.)

I think of the three rows of potatoes planted in my friend’s sunnier, larger yard north of Seattle, how we weeded and prepped the rows together, and how she has shared half the harvest. The first row is in and I have eaten creamy new potatoes with home made pesto – even if I had to buy the basil from the farmers market.

I can sit out on my patio. The wifi even reaches there. Or the deck to the south of the house, where I also relish drying my laundry when the weather permits. It smells so good. I can eat bread and jam, jam and bread. I can talk to the chickens and listen as they talk to me. I can hear the scolding crows (who scare the chickens) and blue jays. Watch for humming birds on the cape fuschias. Holler out to neighbors, now that we’ve hacked down the 20 food holly hedge (not so friendly!) It is amazing what cutting down a hedge will do, or placing some comfy chairs around a small round patio made of bricks reclaimed from a neighbor’s chimney when they remodeled.

There are signs of community everywhere. In nature’s community responding to a wet, cold summer. In the human and animal neighborhood. Opening my eyes, reframing my perspective, I see potential where before I saw dark, grey, soddenness. From mud to jam.

Gratefulness is powerful.

Apricot/Berry/Rosemary Jam

Inspired from FoodinJars , Mrs. Wheelbarrow, and   Open View Gardens (for the French maceration approach)

5 cups apricots – sweet, mushy and pitted

1 cup of berries – raspberries, blackberries – -whatever

juice of 2 lemons

3 cups sugar

1-3 teaspoons of finely chopped fresh rosemary. Yes, rosemary. Go light if you are shy…

Directions

Wash, pit, and measure fruit into a large glass or plastic bowl. Finely chop and add rosemary. (Doesn’t everyone like green bits in their jam?) Mush things around a bit and then cover and refrigerate over night. I forgot and let mind sit two nights. (I also made this without the maceration and twice boil method – just boiled the whole lot for 15 minutes. It was good too!)

When ready to cook the jam, sterilize your jars, lids, rims etc. (Read good advice from others listed above for all the details!)

Drain the liquid from the fruit into a large non-aluminum pan and gently bring to a boil up to 220 degrees F. Add back in the fruit, bring to a boil you can’t stir down and cook for 5 minutes or until the jam coats the back of a spoon thickly. Take off heat, pour  into your nice clean jars, put on caps and rims making sure your jar tops are wiped clean and process in a boiling hot water bath for 10 minutes. (Again, read their recipes for all the how-to’s. They all have great blogs)

Take the jars out of the hot water bath (carefully), cool, label, share and enjoy!

Full Garden photoset here.

It is hard to say “no” to friends. It is harder yet to predict what will happen when you say “yes.” When you will stumble upon a magic moment.  Months ago I agreed to do an online session for one of my Australian pals, Frankie Forsythe, who I’ve known online for years since she took my (now dormant) online facilitation class.

The event was the Australian Flexible Learning Frameworks’ eRealities online conference. I was to kick of the second day.

Frankie and her colleagues asked me to do a session that wove together a ton of things and I was worried about a total fragmented mess. So after a few back and forths, we came to this description which you can see, could get one into trouble!

It’s a story with three hearts. It has a scaffold with three legs. It is a story told for the ears, the eyes and the heart. Join me as we explore how we got to this crazy time of “social media” and what it means for our learning with and from each other, how we can do it the best we are able to in a rapidly changing and often tension-filled context, and consider together what kind of future we want to build going forward.

At the end of the session participants were able to:
• understand how the intersection of technology and group forms impact our learning together online
• identify ways to work generatively with the tension of many opportunities and a scarcity of time (hey, what can we STOP doing?)
• identify steps to prepare to move forward positively in a time of rapid change

I had not overprepared for this session. I went in with 7 images and some thoughts, which is risky when you are in a “keynote” position. But my instinct was right. I was able to be really present. To listen. To follow and respond to/incorporate the chat stream into the conversation. We paused three times for full group input and people jumped in with head, heart and hand. You know those moments when you FEEL something. I was feeling it and I think at least some of the people in the online space were feeling it too.

So what was resonating? We were telling stories and using hand drawn images to reduce our electronic distance and barriers? We were talking about experiences that resonated for people in their work of teaching and learning online? I’m not sure. But it worked for me. I was grateful for the opportunity. When I was asked to send my invoice I said “contribute my honorarium to some local good cause. You gave me a gift.”

You can watch all the recorded sessions – you’ll have to register (free) but once you are in, you can find them all. Here is the information:

For those who couldn’t make it to the live conference, or didn’t get to attend all the sessions they were interested in, session recordings and resources are now available.

Just follow these steps:

• Log into the conference site - http://flexiblelearning.net.au/networksevents - if you have not previously registered you will need to do so to access the recordings
  
• Click on the Program tab
• Select the Title of the Session you would like to review

Click on the blue “Enter’ button to open the recording of the session.

Here are some of the event artifacts:

Chat text from ere11 session

RöCô Ilizaliturri has posted a simple, visually intelligent and sweet video on Facebook. I was totally captivated. Maybe it is the frame of mind I’m in, but the juxtaposition of images, music and text (in this case in Spanish, which causes me to pay attention differently) just caught me.

It doesn’t appear to be embeddable, so you’ll have to wander over to Facebook to see it.

RöCô Ilizaliturri: Sé Feliz!

While it feels more like winter than Autumn here in Seattle (22 F and -8 C I think, 6-8 inches of snow on the ground) I watch the last of the leaves falling off the big horse chestnut at the end of our driveway. Harvest time. While I’ve put my garden to bed for the winter, the chickens are still giving us a few eggs and all the pickles and chutneys we cooked up earlier in the Fall are looking beautiful on the shelf. The harvest.

I posted a few days ago about reflective teacher practices. Reflection is a form of harvest. Debriefing an experience is another form that I am particularly appreciating these days. Each of these processes has a potential internal and external value. I wanted to point out some examples of how people have shared out their harvest on blogs, tweets, and other social media to create external value.

Via Nadia Manning-Thomas of the CGIAR ICT-KM program shared two after event reflections on their blog, one on a particular activity design and debrief of a social media workshop. Nadia’s posts were thoughtful and probably took a fair amount of time to weave together – full of links, photos and content.

Chris Corrigan has an amazing range of harvest approaches from the very deep to the light and poetic, haiku-like practices.

Harold Jarche who is great at sharing his reflections, captured a quick post workshop blog post.  Not everything needs to be polished and for busy people, sometimes the quick share is the quick win for the rest of us.

Immediately after the workshop, I wrote, So what did I learn or what was reinforced?

A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.

Only a small percentage ~10% of members will be active.

Wikis need to be extremely focused on real tasks/projects in order to be adopted.

If facilitators can seed good questions and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.

Use a very gentle hand in controlling the learners and some will become highly participative.

Design for after the course, using tools like social bookmarks, so that artifacts can be used for reference or performance support.

Create the role of “synthesizer”. I found it quite helpful when Tony and Michele summarized the previous week’s activities.

Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

Having worked with many other online communities in the past two years, I would say that the role of “synthesizer” remains important, and it is a critical part of being a good online community manager.

I’m currently coming to the final phase of a formal evaluation which has lots of reflection, tons of things we’ve harvested, and now we are trying to figure out how to make them valuable. How can this “harvest” feed, rather than rot in a pile? Any inspirations for me?

With nearly two months between posts, one starts to wonder, “what is Nancy up to?” I tweet occasionally, I have been blogging a bit on the Network Weaving Community of Practice blog, but mostly I have been heads down, working. We had a rare early snow here in Seattle and my afternoon face to face appointment was rescheduled. So instead of diving back into the to the to do list, I thought a quick update on the blog was in order.

This fall I have been helping design and coach an internal online facilitation workshop, run some online peer learning events for a group here in my own Washington state, continue some low level consulting for 3 different UN agencies and two US funders, work with an agricultural sustainability group, a community building group, a running club, an online language learning group, an evaluation for a European NGO, a global evaluation project, a Washington state coalition for young children and at least 5 online presentations. As I look at my calendar I have been BUSY. In this economy, that means I have been blessed by work, income, but far more important, I have a lot to be thankful to for my learning partners and clients.

The US Thanksgiving holiday is this week. It is a lovely holiday for more than just over-eating. It is a holiday for reflection. So I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all the people who are my friends, colleagues and learners all around the world. You are clients. You are collaborators. You are friends. You are perhaps even distant network nodes who have touched me, but in a way that shapes who I am and the path I walk.

Thank you all!