A few years ago, a friend gave me a rattlesnake skin for my 40th birthday. This led me to a new curiosity about how a rattlesnake shed’s its skin. Did you know just before the snake begins to shed its skin, it is at its most vulnerable to being killed and often hides and if found can be irritable and aggressive? Did you know that after a successful shed, another segment is added to its rattle? And that the rattle wards off enemies and danger and that it is used to confuse and disconcert a potential enemy? How do these lessons about growth and change relate to your personal, community or organizational challenge? These are just some of the rattlesnake lessons for change, to learn more contact us about our Supporting Change and Transitions training and our keynote addresses . Read more…
During Finding Home’s launch dialogue, Senator Roméo Dallaire explained we live in an era of globalization and technological development where we have the ability to communicate around the world, with the whole of humanity, in the space of hours; where global issues like the environment have stark consequences for all of humanity. We live in “an era of massive rapid revolutionary change that is hitting us at constant pressure”. Our times, he says, “call for consciousness of the future, for pro-activeness and long-term planning.” From Rwanda, to Oka, Darfur to Iraq, Senator Dallaire illustrated the multiple frictions that exist around the world today. Humanity, he explained, is now recognizing it is in conflict with the Earth and in conflict with itself. He urged us to see that we live in a complex era where there are no simple or easy answers.
In the spirit of great optimism Senator Dallaire shared a vision of humanity in 200 years. A humanity that is comfortable with it’s differences, that recognizes “a common humanity”. He explained “differences will not become instruments of frustration and friction but in fact become complementary…we need to recognize that the humanity that exists in all of us is just expressing itself in different ways and in so doing there might be a complementarity there versus a source of friction that leads to conflict.” He challenged us that the task at hand is within the next two hundred years to further develop and disseminate the tools to transform our conflicts, allowing us to find a common vision for unity – recognizing each other’s inherent search for serenity. He suggests one of these tools is the global human rights movement.
J.J. Verigen, Executive Director of the Union of the Spiritual Communities of Christ, weighed in about our technological advancements and our growing inability to manage the ethical and moral implications of “progress”. And asked “Do you think in your 200 hundred year prognosis, we as human beings will ever come to be whole? Will our capacity to care, ever be surpassed by our compulsion to kill?”
Listen to Senator Dallaire’s response.
