A Brief Report—Pathfinding 2024

The first Pathfinding in Uncertainty was held in February, 2024, at Chadwick Library, Boonville, CA. Leah Walker and John Bloom, conveners, welcomed nine enthusiastic, wondering, and tentative participants to the first Intensive. The intensive’s official full title included Cultivating Capacities for Leading into the Future which indicated some of the intention for the time together—and indeed participants were leaders in their respective organizations and carried vocational and personal questions about their next steps in life and leadership.

The timbre of the gathering had both personal and organizational dimensions across a range of organizations including Waldorf schools, the arts, and anthroposophical medicine. Participants were from Northern California, Alabama, Georgia, New York, and Toronto. Convenient housing was provided so that each person could have their own space.

We spent the first cool rainy evening by the fireplace, to get to know each other a bit and to hear what each person’s hopes and expectations were for the time. As conveners we shared some of what gave rise to offering this Intensive, and also introduced the schedule with more background, dimension, and purpose for all to take into the evening rest. Courage, sacred space, permission, freedom, deep interest in each other, and confidentiality were brought into the group as a foundation for co-creative conversations in trust and paths of self-knowledge through knowing one another.

Key threads of the time together: Correspondence between inner and outer experience, recognition of another or others as central to knowing the self, deep biography work, and the art of agreements (or what governs the spaces between us all). Two highlights of the time together were a farm walk on the first day, and a forest walk on the second. Both were led by Farmers Chris and Stephanie Tebbutt. As “adjunct faculty,” they inspire through the depth of their experience connection to place and nature.

The exercises that we did together, brought deep engagement, developed the “muscle” for being vulnerable, and to live in the inquiry of what life was telling each of us and asking of us. There was no way to predict any specific outcomes. Simply, the pathway is to be awake, awaken others, be attentive to the whole, and to support others in their paths. From an organizational standpoint all of this is relevant to understanding the movement and flow of the social field, the spaces between us, and the agreements that serve as a kind of cultural glue.

Here is what a few participants said in their reflections and for which they granted permission to share:

“Pathfinding offered me a deep sense of hope and renewed energy to continue in my leadership role.  Being with like-minded people in a safe place and focusing on my personal leadership, while hearing about the experiences of colleagues in similar positions, was fortifying.”

“I experienced a vitalizing of my social sense and the essential quality of leading from a place of relationship.”

“It was wonderful to spend time with you both – and with the group. Your work at bringing us together, bringing us out of ourselves and weaving a warm, living social fabric may have been most impactful to me.”