20 Nov Giving Away Process
This past Sunday, November 18, the East Side Institute held a Community Meeting and Fundraiser. We’ve been hosting these twice a year for the last ten years. We get to share developments, advances and challenges in the organizing work we do at the grassroots and in academia and invite people to continue their financial support. About a hundred of our long-time supporters and a small number of newcomers to the Institute get to mingle, hear from and about builders of development and performance worldwide, and ponder with staff one of my favorite invitations for conversation: “Who are we/who are we becoming?”
I had to miss Sunday’s meeting, so I prepared a short statement for the event’s host Chris Helm to share with the crowd. Several people since asked me to post it here so as to share it with others. And so I am.
I’m sad that that I can’t be with you today—I have bronchitis and am following doctor’s orders to rest. But I’m happy at how healthy the East Side Institute and our development community are. We are larger, more diverse, more impactful that ever—and we are energized.
The theme of our community meeting is, “We build things to give them away.” But, of course, we don’t primarily build “things.” We build processes. We practice method. We perform. And when you give all this away, , all sorts of surprising and previously unimagined activities enter the world.
Cathy Salit and I participated in a Taos Institute conference in Mexico last weekend and someone used the work “rhizome.” It rang a bell and during the week I did some research—both my own memory and on the Internet. And I discovered that rhizome is a very helpful way of thinking about how we’re growing around the world.
A rhizome* is a kind of plant that, unlike a tree, doesn’t grow up from roots to stem to branches to leaves. Instead, a rhizome grows underground and horizontal. It has no top and no bottom, no clear beginning and no end. It sends out shoots in any and all directions. It is always open to what it finds and can connect to any point. In the 1970s the postmodernists Deleuze and Guattari turned “rhizome” into a philosophical and cultural concept with much the same meaning applied to ideas and social structures. Another conceptual pioneer, family therapist Lynn Hoffman, also made use of “rhizome” to describe therapy with a multiplicity of voices and always emergent. Coincidentally, our mentor and friend, the Institute’s co-founder Fred Newman and I had the pleasure of meeting with both the French postmodernists and Lynn Hoffman. We never did speak of the rhizome though. I wish we had.
I find it a helpful description of what and how we’re growing. We’re without hierarchy or binaries. We’re spreading in all directions. What’s being built by our development community in the US, in Canada, along the U.S.-Mexican border, in Europe, in Brazil, in Taiwan, in Japan are all so different from each other, and yet they’re part of the same rhizome. They continuously influence and learn from each other and yet they send out shoots embodying the specificity of their location and their experiences. They remain open and can be entered and expanded at any time. That’s what happens when you give away processes, when you give away method. Our rhizome is growing both underground and aboveground in many parts of the world and it is producing community wherever it spreads.
I wish I could be with you physically this afternoon. But while I may not be feeling well, I am full of joy knowing that through your hard work and financial support you’re growing our rhizome here and around the world.
- This video has brevity, clarity and beauty Three Minute Theory: What is the Rhizome?
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