As part of the Engage! Art of Hosting we are in at the moment, we spent today on the art of hosting death. How do we help the old to die gracefully, and in such a way that it fertilises the soil for the new? It was one of the most profound and insightful days I have spent. It is part of a four day process in which we are exploring the arts of hosting protection, death, the emergence of the new, and bridges from old to new.
Today we told stories of hosting death in ourselves, of loved ones, of organisational forms, and of species on the planet at this time. We asked how do we know if something is at the end of its natural life-cycle or if we have just not learned to nurture it properly - only to realise that this was an inadequate question. We realised the deep truth in dying every moment to live the next one. We understood the need for conscious choice in every moment, in which we choose to bring one path to life, and allow a number of other potential paths to die. We felt the importance of honouring what has been, and where we choose not to go.
We delved into what it meant to lead death in an organisation. From the moment of announcing with clarity and commitment a decision that something has to change (although we don't know what yet), through the hosting of a collective quest into what needs to die, into a collective presencing to that which wants to be born, finalising in another clear moment of leadership decision in which the new is announced and a line is drawn. Ritual marks key moments of this process.
This is such a rich subject. There is much more to be explored and harvested here. And it feels like an essential art to develop, with so much disintegration in the world right now, with such a need to fertilise rather than poison the soil for the new, and with the need for rapid experimentation in which experiments that don't work need to be released to die as soon as possible with the learning harvested to feed the next iteration. Dying for life.
Click here to hear a harvest of the Open Space session we had on this. The harvest is in the form of a number of 4-line prayers put to music.
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Integral
September 2009 
Peter
Access: Public
