Building Community on Purpose - Conflict Done Well
The people I admire the most spend time imagining how reality works. They realize that truth is most often paradoxical and even the most concrete or religiously held ideas are also an imaginative experiment -- potentially sublime and inescapably problematic at the same time. What follows is a brief introduction to the terms I have borrowed and invented to use as bookmarks and tools for working with my own notions. These marks are my trade (trade marks), facilitate the services I provide (service marks), and name methods which have stood the test of revision through study and activism. 
indicates a strong "copyleft" with selective rights reserved and available with permission.
In the most moderate of circumstances, human beings are only partly in control, even of themselves. Thought and belief are partly conscious and action mirrors both their unintentional and intentional interaction. As a result, cultures are built on mythologies, philosophies, and ideologies which are both clear in their intentions and creative in ways that are inescapably indirect and often oppose a sytem's overt intention in their effects. Every human system auto-generates its own opposition and critique, which it is naturally inclined to reject and deny.
Science, for instance, can not and does not restrict itself to the natural world. Especially with the addition of Cartesian beliefs, metaphors which began as "natural philosophy" swelled to attribute all possible significance to human reason and imagine everything as material split from and subject to the objective mind. Literalizing this objectivism, the Industrial Revolution circles the globe in the minds and hands of the most powerful human groups. Each becomes dominant by adopting, adapting, and perpetuating a mechanical mythology devoted to the scientific development, fabrication, and multiplication of objectification and material products, specifically more destructive weapons and dominating ideologies.
Psychology arose within this frame with its own natural tension, perpetuating the dilemmas of the industrial imagination but also drawing attention away from the what of production and to the how of creativity. Psychology questions how you do what you do before, during, and after you produce. Today psychology is everywhere - not only in the form of psychotherapy but mass produced and distributed in the form of a multitude of process-level practices which pull the metaphors of psychology beyond the consulting room in order to facilitate human beings work together. Examples include, at least: organizational development, mediation, group process practices, psychological and somatic therapies, conflict facilitation and resolution, and the practice of post-modern critique. I imagine these facilitative practices, whose product is process, as a single discipline - the Process Arts - and hope practitioners will identify as colleagues in order to grow the work into relationship with liberal education from grade school to post graduate studies, form professional associations, and develop an ethics for the field that addresses our psychologies' industrial neuroses and models peace through social justice. Please look for process arts represented across the internet and around the world. My working definition is evolving
but the term itself is reserved to the Commons for the use of all.
Practice of the process arts provides tools to shape culture as an artifact. This carries with it tremendous responsibility for what is made in an age where any change can sweep rapidly around the globe. ABCglobal is an organization and a modular intentional community created in response to the need for ethical and relationally sustainable facilitation devoted to building consciously interdependent communities on purpose. We seek to serve within a network pursuing similar intentions, as though co-creating community culture were an art form, requiring a creative ensemble where all voices are heard thoroughly and the connections and disconnections between people are attended with depth and consistency. Living this myth implies needs are met, wants are respected, and it becomes a pleasure to live and work together through conflict and difference. ABC has provided facilitator trainings and local workshops, umbrellas community projects, and its members work together as well as separately with aligned organizations in need of facilitation.
"Your vocation is the place where your heart's deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." (Buechner)
It is my desire and vocation to participate in the making of environments the purpose of which is learning the practice of building community through sympathy and difference. I originated and use the proprietary name "Culturesmith" to refer to the role I play and share when I facilitate and participate in groups. I am open to being asked for permission to share the term by others who do similar work with a commitment to developing a shared ethics. My background in this work is based on academic graduate degrees in Mythology and Psychology, hundreds of hours applying various process arts to group facilitation, and a whole-systems change method I call Associative Inquiry. 
is the primary frame for my individual methods. This work plays in the paradox that "conflict done well" characterizes living communities where ideas like Peace apply. Our ideas about friction and difference need healing so that the process of conflicting may heal and result in cooperation and understanding in the service of Life. This requires practice at a level of dedication similar to competitive, martial, and performing arts and is best engaged with fellow learners. Within Healing Friction, Martial Nonviolence is the theory and practice behind the bodymind Flexibility in Adversity Training (FIAT) I offer. MNv and FIAT are based on my experience as an non-profit executive, mediator, academic, 4th degree black belt instructor of aikido, and as a survivor of criminal violence and grief.
Professional community builders training together regularly, practicing peace as conflict done well, and sharing this practice with others are Guardians of Peace. Guardians are professional facilitators, practicing nonviolence with martial dedication in partnership, to love the idea that peace is not an absence or supression of conflict. It is the ongoing work of expecting even the most intractable and violent of experiences to yield to deeper connection which moves the people involved closer to what they need and want for living together sustainably. This is not The Truth. It is a myth we chose for its truth and compassion.
I lost my beloved fifteen month old little boy to an unknown ailment on December 12th, 2006. Clearly, the most important parts of living can die in an instant and potential futures fade utterly without warning or explanation. The only response I know is to work toward beauty and sympathy in this life. In all that I do, authentic service to and guidance of children plays a primary part in memorial tribute to my son.
Alongside beauty and a devotion to building lasting, loving communities, there is a clarity that the endurance to insist on peace leads to an ongoing exposure to loss and grief. Life promises both legitimate suffering and needless pain and violence. I believe chosing to remain in the presence of this suffering and of death, without pretending everything is/will be fine, is essential to our survival as a species as we confront the realities of having exhausted resources on which our children will depend.
Extending the metaphor of Blue Fire developed by Thomas Moore to discuss the work of James Hillman, I created the term "bluevolution" to refer to the process of shared legitimate suffering as an activism leading to sustainable community. In order to improve our chances of soul survival, I believe humanity will be required to loose and lose the hope of eternal rescue to which we have grown accustomed. At the other end of that loss we may expect a new mythology of community that will measure value in terms of balanced relationship and lead to stewardship of wilderness, food, air, and water such that we may both refresh ourselves and wash our dead tribal myths for true burial.
At that ritual burial is where hope may come alive again in song and story.
Peace,
Brandon WilliamsCraig
Related Work
Aikido is a modern Japanese martial art with a unique voice. From philosophy to application it was and is designed to be an "art of peace," changing the way conflict works rather than accepting the premise of violent confrontation and simplistically becoming as proficient as possible in emerging victorious. Both the principles and practice of aikido posit an insistence on peace, redefined as conflict done well, redefined as dismantling the cycle of violence so that it is very difficult to continue as victim or as oppressor, making way for many other roles and options that do not involve victimization. Aiki Extensions (AE) is the worldwide network and community devoted to extending these principles, these arts of peace, beyond the walls of the schools in which they are taught and into the mainstream of public consciousness and the practice of citizenship. Through 2008, AE contracted with Association Building Community (above) in order for me to create the position of Executive Director in AE and occupy it in order to build AE from ad hoc network into a responsive international community. Though my official position is ended I continue to actively support AE's mission and initiatives around the world.
ACME, "a new high point in depth", is also known, tongue even further in cheek, as "edgeucation". It proposes an educational reform revitalizing the liberal arts through process arts of systemic learning through dialogue and deliberation. This is a cultural movement already in progress.
While "fast-track" job training and mechanisms of standardized assessment continue to replace the disciplined thinking explicitly developed through liberal education, how shall we keep up with ourselves as a society in need of engaged citizens? How to clarify, track, and shape the associated systems that form our societies? How to find the leading edge of education for ourselves and our children in the process of making cultures that are both beautiful and life-giving?
Terms of Use
- Process Arts and variants: strong copyleft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) All are free to Share (copy, distribute, display, and use the idea and phrase) and make derivative works using the term "process arts" under the condition of attribution and definition of scope. Each formal or public use must attribute the origin of the phrase "process arts" to its originator, Brandon WilliamsCraig, in a way that does not suggest that he endorses an individual, group, or specific use of the idea and phrase. The phrase may not be used to imply that "process arts" refers to a single or proprietary method. The phrase "process arts" refers to the field of approaches to group process facilitation and co-facilitation which effect change through attention devoted to systemic and methodical choices. For any formal or public use or distribution, the user must make clear to others the terms of license. All text citations should make the name, Brandon WilliamsCraig, a link to the web page http://bdwc.net whenever possible. Any of the above conditions can be waived with permission from the copyright holder. Apart from the derivative rights granted under this license, nothing in this license impairs or restricts the originator's moral rights.
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