Clarity: in complexity
Conundrums
Some heart, head and hara-centered connections for agility in uncertainty, surrounded by volatility and in our ever/always ambiguous situations.
Resources to draw perspectives, power and passion from-onto-into our complex worlds and selves.
Our world is astoundingly complex. We humans do not understand, for instance, how we manage to collectively perpetuate outcomes that no human wants–injustice, civil unrest, poverty, war, and pollution of our own air and water.
Jimmy Parker#
What can help us in our complexity?
Heart
I’m drawn to poetry for the clarity it can hold.
That’s on many levels (complex of course 🙂 ). One clear illustration is in grief—who isn’t touched by this, consciously or unconsciously, with all the loss and suffering of our times and crises. Such sadness brings insight too.
In that, Poetry is a way of seeing—assisting abilities to better hold what is difficult with some lightness, curiosity and even delight.
Nóirín Ní Riain: In Irish the word for poet, is filé, and that extends to a very ancient word in Irish which is fèicē which means a way of seeing.
The poet has a way of seeing that nobody else has. And they can unveil, they can lift that veil for you by their words.
A poet, in Irish, is one who sees through the darkness, one who sees through the depths, through the obscure, to make it clear for everybody else. To allow it to be seen clearly for others, almost like removing a cataract.
David Whyte: I would say that Irish poetry in particular has celebrated the parts of us that at times do not know how to go on. And not knowing this you go to a place with which you are not yet familiar. Which strangely has everything you need.
… there’s a beautiful apprenticeship and invocation in the whole phenomenology of grief, and despair, in the Irish tradition, which generation, after generation, of poets has elucidated for us.
Poetry is, in part, an invitation to bring our compex realities, the many pieces of ourselves, our intra-existances with others, things that seem opposing to a still point. To speak:
not from the place that already knows but from a place that doesn’t know… uncovering the dispensation in that new speech.
David Whyte#

Hara
Just beyond yourself, just beyond ourselves, there is power in the harshness and robustness of our world.
That’s really obvious here where I am—the vastness, wildness and harshness of far north Atlantic Ocean dictates a lot of my life.
Physically that’s power. From my European northwesterly-coast look left and it’s straight out—waves, water and weather, nothing else—until Labrador.
I feel this on many days. It’s the only place in the world I’ve been blown off my feet. The only place in the world I’ve turned around on a walk from too much wind.
Being viscerally closer to the world and its weather is alive as well as threatening.
But we all experience this regardless of geography…
We are all being confronted by so much painful suffering—to all species with climate change, to people physically and traumatically with war, to disruption of balance and consequential strains as we globally push our interconnected living systems with deep disruption—there is a lot that is blowing us off our feet.
To feel some of the power, the dissonance alongside unbridled joy, yet do this while being centered—such things can co-exist without diminishing the strengths of either or all—watch Patrick Dexter! Video right/below>
Féile
Cello music composed by Patrick Dexter. He says it is in response to the birth of his niece whose name is Féile:
It was during one of our lockdowns. I couldn’t be with my family. But to get this news was such extreme joy…
Myself and my wife we ran outside a cottage out into the wild storms that were happening … You can have these moments of extreme joy accompanied by moments of deep difficulty and sadness.
It’s like the harsh landscape and the darkness of the winters we have here. There’s also extreme beauty in it. … knowing my niece Féile was born my joy wasn’t in any way diminished by the darkness of the time, the world seeming like it was spinning into chaos. Both joy and difficulty live side-by-side.#
Head
There are many powerful learning frames that help us in complexity.
A lot of such learning falls into the ‘both-and’ category. In one way or another.
For example, single, double and triple loops for deeper action—moving from responding to reframing to reconceptualizing. We can address situations with a plan. At a deeper level, we can enquire into our basis of understanding of such situations.
It is not either-or, not a response or reframing the situations but both-and. When we look at a whole system (typical supporting reframing) we’re still thinking about the particulars and possible responses.
See examples here: Single, double and triple loop learning> and Waltz: for more effective action>
A similar example is vertical development, the thinking patterns through which we are making sense of our world and the world around us.
This learning structure describes how we move through discreet, non-linear, stages of understanding. However, such development encompasses all that has gone before it. Indeed, much that we have been socialised to see our worlds through remains with us, even as we may develop our own ethical systems and values. Our socialised norms are sticky, strong attractors. Vertical learning is both-and.
See examples: A developmental journey: power, perspectives and passion> and Attractors: strangely, we keep getting pulled in>

Resources
Links and credits
Quotes and short video piece Féile is from David Whyte’s Return to Ireland series. Find out more / subscribe here>
More of Patrick Dexter’s music here>
More on Nóirín Ní Riain here>
On (be) Benevolution you will find a visual index of poetry here>
For different sorts of insight try Key & Peele’s Oddest elderly characters—video below/right 🙂
Jimmy Parker quote from his dissertation Assessing the vertical development of organizations.
Photos by Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.
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