Café Wonderment
Tuesday, in the Kingsmill, the place and Learning Center that I live in with Judith, Lieven and Chrisje, we started an initiative that we call Café Wonderment.
This Café was born out of the recent Art of Hosting training we organized in Flanders. Since long I have been looking for what would be a good format to let people connect. Not just any people, but the ones in Flanders that are looking to make the new possible. So we came up with a design that includes as first part an introduction of a new or challenging perspective on one of the topics that bothers us all. The second part is having dinner together, which fosters the connection between people and creates also a sense of community. After that we designed a World Café to dive deeper into the topic started earlier.
The topic we were introduced in was: Value Creation through Collaboration. We got an introduction through history, and wondered what collaboration could look like in its next form. Our guide, Geert, introduced us to the model of Steiner – without naming it – in which three fields of life are distinguished. These fields are all interrelated, but it is also worthwhile to see the differences. Geert presented history as a movement of making these areas more and more free and conscious for everybody. He also asked us how these three areas could all be present at the same time and in balance.
The three areas are Spirit Life: the realm of life that deals with vision, beliefs, thinking, inspiration, values, education and so on. Next one is the Area of Law, translated in agreements, rules – the world of how we deal with each other as we make it concrete in these agreements. The last area is the Economic one, that area where we really do something, where we create something tangible, where we can see the actions.
The interesting point was that Geert connected these three areas of life with the three words of the French Revolution: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood. This means that each area of life has its own basic value or principle and when you mix them up you get into trouble. In the World Café we explored why this was so. Here are the questions we gathered around:
How do you experience Freedom in the spirit realm, and why doesn’t and brotherhood belong there?
How do you experience Equality in the realm of Law, and why doesn’t Freedom and Brotherhood belong there?
How do you experience Brotherhood in the realm of Economics, and why doesn’t Freedom and Equality belong there?
For most of us it was quite obvious why freedom needs to be in the center of the spirit realm. It is a fluid world, full of potential and possibilities, the world of reflection and inspiration. There is freedom to choose.
It was a little bit more difficult to understand how and why Equality was the grounding principle in the area of Law. I don’t think it is about ‘everybody is equal’, but about everybody needs to have an equal chance in this realm of agreements and rules.
But the next one – Brotherhood – was even harder to understand in the realm of Economics. How to make sense out of that?
Due to two brothers who were present, we started on our table from that experience. You can’t choose who will be your brother, and still we can have love and trust. There seems to be some kind of engagement or commitment involved. It is for sure not free and we aren’t all equal! At the end of the café round it dawned on me that brotherhood in the economic realm could be understood – or maybe needs to be understood – as a brotherhood between all humans on earth. Right in this moment, I think it probably relates not only to humans but to all beings on planet Earth. I’m still not sure what consequences this has for my own economic behavior. I guess I imply a lot of humans and beings when I buy organic food and tend my own garden in a permacultural way. But what does brotherhood mean when I charge my individual clients for a therapy session or when I charge an organization for my hosting work? Would it be enough to agree on the price between both parties? Or is this applying the principle of egality in the setting of the price, and it has nothing to do with brotherhood?
Many questions stay; although I see the value of separating these areas of life with its own principles. It gives more clarity to what fits where.
Another point, that we didn’t talk about, but was raised in the explanation of Geert, was a quote from Tim Merry: Communities are the answer to everything. It became clear that for a healthy community we need to apply these three principles in these three areas of life. They all need each other and are interrelated. My hunch is that brotherhood is the principle that needs the community more than the other two principles… I can’t grasp it right now…
And would sisterhood and brotherhood be the same in this regard? I wonder…