Found: The Holy Grail of Wholeness in Organizational Life
by Mary Pierce Brosmer mpierce@consultingforachange.com
Dear Mother,
This morning the prayer words
“Mary Queen of Heaven”
float into my reverie
on our you & I
stalk of motherline,
grandmothers pruned long
before we could know them.
Today I am naming you
Isabel Queen of the Kitchen
Chairwoman—though we said “man" then
of the annual Crestline High School
Marching Band Uniform Fund
Spaghetti Dinner.
In the new, state-of-the-art
South Elementary School
kitchen you reigned.
With my girlfriends in our frilly
servers’ aprons setting tables in the cafeteria
I watched you above bubbling pots
of homemade sauce, your non-recipe/recipe,
stout Italian woman weaving
among the other mothers
prepping salad, cutting homemade pies
setting kettles to boil for pasta,
your never-manicured, clean hands
speaking your language of encouragement,
direction-without-condescension
It strikes me now how this was
the only place I could watch you perform.
Women then were so far behind
scenes, the cleaning, ironing, arranging flowers
stage-hands for priests and principals,
petty town politicians, policemen
all the princes
of our lives.
But through the kitchen pass-through
a proscenium of sorts, I saw how
you inspired—
my friends all loved you
brothers’ friends too
crowded our tiny porch summer nights where you
reigned from a rocker set between geranium pots
dispensing no-nonsense advice
You joked and laughed
but ALWAYS appropriately.
You were steadfast that mothers should be mothers
not faux girlfriends flirting and preening.
You courted no one, did not engage
in village intrigue
what could be intense competition
for small town prestige.
Mother, your reigning was
the raining-love-and-common sense
kind of Queenship,
if you had
a status-conscious,
bone in your body I never felt it
press in on me
and we hugged often.
Despite the jealous rumor of one
of my friends’ mothers that
“you pushed me” into achievement:
band, choir, honor society,
musical theater---
Oh, not a bit of it
you made space for me to express
what your life suppressed but did not
extinguish
JUST LOVE, put to good use.
Thank you so much for honoring me with your listening . It is no small thing for a person, much less such a large group of people to offer someone the generosity of their listening. One of the many things I love about reading poetry aloud in my work as an organizational consultant educator is that it requires a different kind of listening, it signals to the brain: danger, danger, meaning coming, feeling coming, down-shift, breathe.... One of the many things I love about writing poetry---and believe is critical to this historical moment of creating---if we are to survive---the new out of the shards of wrecked systems---is that poetry writing is a practice of creating patterns out of what is at hand. The word itself from the Greek poem: means Making---and oh, how desperately we again need to learn to make to construct, following our long era of deconstructing, or extracting the very marrow out of the earth's bones and throwing it on landfills, greedy for more, but I, only slightly, digress.
I am here to proclaim the discovery of the Holy Grail, it's been here all along, hidden in plain sight, singing its wholeness song to anyone with ears to hear: the wasteland we have made of nature and culture will only be restored when the we have the courage to enact ---everywhere-- conscious feminine leadership alongside the dominant traditional masculine: the greatest of the Great Both/Ands.
To be clear, I align with Karl Jung's description of feminine and masculine as innate and universal patterns in the human psyche. Not about sex organs alone but also about structures of consciousness. That said, women are more likely to be practitioners of conscious feminine leadership because we live in bodies capable of incarnating the great both/and in a way men's bodies cannot. This is not to agree with Freud that biology is destiny
but that, given our ability to house another life, only women have the bodily capacity of being both self and self with and for other . For this reason, I am passionate that women should be teachers of conscious feminine leadership, though sadly men in far greater numbers than women author books about feminine leadership models, or "soft power" while rarely enacting those theories at the conferences and in the organizations where they are the celebrated centers.
This paradox awakens a deep knowing that daunts me not a little: I am attempting to stand for something that appears to be impossible in my lifetime: the genuine and wholehearted embrace of the deep feminine as well as appreciation of the actual women practitioners of the feminine. This is not "just add women and stir," we've seen how little actual difference it has made when women are "in" but the condition of their being "in" is being honorary men.
This is a short list of the values which have taken on a life of their own, have grown out of all proportion, out of all connection to their healing / wholeness making opposites to the point of being unquestioned ---and therefore destructive -- because of the hegemony of the masculine
Size: larger is better
Scale: spread out, disperse do more with less, dumb down dilute
Speed: faster is always better, even when it isn't
Machinery: gizmos almost for their own sake
Competition: everything is a game
Money: as and end in itself
Action: (reflection is sissy stuff!)
Don't even get me started on what happens to language---which is how we know ourselves and one another: happy talk, banter, clever, superficial, sexy, un-nuanced, war stories, shock-talk, sports metaphors.
Let me clear a little more space for what I'm really saying by saying what I'm not saying.
I'm not disparaging the values on my short list---but their disconnection from their wholeness-making opposites. I'm not disparaging the masculine , nor individual men, great or otherwise. Gregory Bateson, for example, wrote something which has been a life-giving mantra to me for many years. "The pattern that corrects is the pattern that connects." Shamed early and often for carrying the feminine gifts of feeling and nurture into public life, I never want to be an instrument of knee-jerk anti-masculinism, or any other simplistic reaction. I do not want my remarks to be taken an argument for destroying the masculine self, as if that would be a final solution. I do not believe in final solutions.
What I am saying
I want those who have power, women and men--- because their lives and ways of leading have been sanctioned by the dominant culture to use that power to make space
for the unexpressed, the under-privileged values of life and leadership. Insiders by
virtue of their abilities in areas valued in traditional culture, I want them to
have the courage to open the door to what has been forced outside, cut off but experienced subliminally in organizational like phantom, longed-for limbs.
depth
spirit
wisdom
kindness
reflection
honest questions
win-win vs. win-lose
empathy
joy
poetry
dare I say it in public: love
Let me rush to say it, before you wonder if I realize it: these values too----the starved feminine values can, disconnected from their healing opposites, take on a life of their own, and become as unproductive and hegemonic as the overfed / vaunted masculine values. WE ONLY FIND THE GRAIL of the Feminine to RESTORE IT TO full partnership, not to put it alone on the high cultural altar and worship it.
So, what might conscious feminine leadership look like on the ground?
A Primer of Con Fem Leadership
keep this question alive at all times: what are we gathered here to give life to?
Understand: "We" are "they" and "the system is "US"
don't go to war with "the way things are" Create alternative realities
For each piece of work which is yours to accomplish:
Have the whole system in the room
Create the space for all voices and versions to be heard, with conditions of
psychological and physical safety
creativity and warmth over sterility and "casual cool" off-the-cuff "talking about"
Remember: "conversations" and debates privilege the masculine
Hold the creative tension between process and product, openness and boundaries
risk and safety---don't capitulate to either comfy extreme.
Care for the container on a regular basis: what's working / what is not
Set your intentions publicly
Avoid hidden agendas
Ask others to do the same
Create context and define terms for maximum inclusion of all players
Open the space
set boundaries around it so what emerges can be seen
Clarify the process of decision-making: who how, why and by when
how long will decisions remain in place before re-evaluated?
Give up the need to be seen as a player, smart, cool, "in crowd" that's high school stuff
Ask, 'what can we make of this?' rather than 'whose fault is it?'
Have the courage to ask: what's going on in the room right now? what isn't being said? what am I feeling? what are others feeling?
Integrate life-giving and soulful tools:circles, silence, flowers, poetry, stories.
Connect:
theory with practice
research with action
ideas with implementation
activism with compassion
community well-being with individual achievement
I'll warn you: publicly adding feminine values will make you vulnerable,
possibly less valued, but do it anyway, intentionally and respectfully. Do it anyway because we are running out of time, because it is the very definition of insanity to continue doing things the way we always have: the maimed, half-brained, closed-hearted way, the hero's way, the warrior's way, the purist's way, the way of masculine = public, feminine = private.
. I choose to place myself in the leadership lineage of the conscious feminine, to
place my self in service to the conviction that we will never restore the messes we've made, the places and words we've desecrated, both natural and organizational, until we
admit to the--if not original--very early sin of banishing the feminine from our public
lives, from our notions of authority, value and power. I intend my words and work
to be part of a conversation and a movement to re-define what it mean to lead in
an era of crisis brought on by gamesmanship and greed of Leaders as We Have Known
Them, posturing and pillaging on the brightly-lit stages of press conferences, trade expos,
lecture halls, board rooms, pulpits and nonprofit dog and pony shows put on to show donors that "something is being done with their money."
I choose to act as if leadership is love, put to good use, wherever there is need
and where isn't there a need for love?
Mary Pierce Brosmer
The Holy Grail of Wholeness in Organizational Life
