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art of hosting
September 2009 
The Art of Hosting Death
Posted on Dec 10th, 2008
by 
Peter
Peter
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.
Access: Public
This is indeed a rich and most necessary topic to explore and to hold together. Thank you for sharing the harvest. It inspired me to write:
Squeezed in this space of powerful transition
Grief and expectancy have their say
Tenderly welcoming the gifts that arise
With immense privilege hospicing and midwifing in each breath
Thank you Peter, for letting us participate a bit in what went on in your explorations of this topic. Reminded of a quote by John Schaar: ”The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating.
The paths are not to be found, but made. And the activity of making
them changes both the maker and their destination.”
In this world we are continually transforming and being transformed by death is a good friend…
Thank you Peter and the whole Engage! team for this blog entry and the harvest. I was very much in spirit with you, as the theme of this gathering spoke directly to my heart, but somehow it wasn’t the right time for me to be there.
Once a teacher of me said: “You can’t have a living relationship when you are not prepared to die.” It took me some time to understand, but now I do and it extends beyond relationship(s). In another time I realised that my life is not really alive, when I postpone things to do later. I want to live in a way that I can happily die tomorrow. That has been in the back of my mind a lot, and guided my life.
This has a lot to do with “acknowledging what is and what is not”. I learned a lot about that from experiences with systemic constellations. Basically that is the healing, being present with what is or what is not. I think the depth of experiencing what has died, or needs dying, is providing for the depth of feeling alive…