One of my daughters moved home. She's got a new job and has moved home to save money. However, we've had no children at home for about four years. My husband and I settled into our house. This is a nice way of saying we had accumulated a lot of stuff.
This means it's time for spring cleaning! The year has turned towards spring. The days are warmer. The yard is green, the trees are starting to bud. It's time to clear out our space in order to make room for our daughter and to clear out our clutter.
To be orderly, tidy, structured would seem to be a human thing as opposed to something natural. A stroll in the woods, a thunderstorm, a wild river; none of these seem at all organized in the way that comes to mind when we used that word. “Organized” is more likely to produce images of a desk with every staple in its place, or a schedule so tight that relaxation time is marked on a calendar. But nature too is organized. In a mature eco-system, each element has a precise role to play. That role is highly efficient in that every plant, every animal, every bacterium performs multiple jobs within the system simply by going about their day.
The elderberry bush produces berries that both feeds birds and humans. It provides shade and shelter for small animals. Its rapidly growing branches create biomass that falls to the ground and nurtures and protects the soil herd.* The creatures the bush shelters poop and pee there, providing nutrients to the bush and the soil herd. The microbiota beneath the bush pull minerals and nitrogen from the soil and give it to the bush in exchange for a bit of carbon sugar that the plant makes special for each type of bacteria. The bacteria also build soil aggregates that retain water, which then nourishes the bush. Myochoriza - thin filaments of fungi – spread their strands between and through the roots, puncturing them and connecting the bush with other plants in the neighborhood. This allows them to share both resources and information.
In Part 1, we looked at Team Intrepid as it began an event planning process for a Pagan event without creating any structure for decisionmaking or establishing any goals, and diving right into minutia of the event. And this process can work as long as everyone agrees on everything.
This is the first in a series of posts on event planning. First, I'm going to outline some really bad event planning processes, and then I'll go into some event planning strategies and methods that are a bit more helpful. When I'm teaching leadership workshops, a lot of Pagans ask me, "Why do our teams have such problems working together?" I can tell you that poor event planning processes accounts for a lot of group blow-ups.
I've planned a lot of grassroots events. Some Pagan, some in the scifi-fantasy fandom community, and now some as a fiction author. I've seen a lot of things go wrong. Heck, I've contributed to some of those things going wrong. A lot of how we humans learn seems to unfortunately be through making mistakes of our own. Recently, I've had a few people asking me for advice on event planning. And as it happens, I've been part of a few online event planning processes that have reminded me of some sure-fire recipes for disaster.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
To be orderly, tidy, structured would seem to be a human thing as opposed to something natural. A stroll in the woods, a thunderstorm, a wild river; none of these seem at all organized in the way that comes to mind when we used that word. “Organized” is more likely to produce images of a desk with every staple in its place, or a schedule so tight that relaxation time is marked on a calendar. But nature too is organized. In a mature eco-system, each element has a precise role to play. That role is highly efficient in that every plant, every animal, every bacterium performs multiple jobs within the system simply by going about their day.
