What is it Possible to Communicate?

In this relationship. In this moment. Through this medium. What is it possible to communicate?

Babes, I am once again ruminating on some combination of the training I've been doing with Nora Bateson and what is alive with the people you might call my clients.

Everything here is deeply entangled with what I wrote about last week- "being strangers and finding the will to be known inside Capitalism".​

For his birthday, my son was gifted this card game, The Mind. You deal out anything from 1-12 cards each, you don't see anyone else's cards, and you have to put them down in ascending numerical order (1 to 100 but obviously you don't have them all and you don't know which ones you've collectively got) without speaking or otherwise overtly signalling anything to one another. It's actually THRILLING and I would highly recommend it.

It reminds me of my experience of playing Articulate- maybe you know this one- describing as many objects/ people/ places etc as you can in a minute for your partner to guess. It's all about what it's possible to say in your partnership. Success depends on shared references and enmeshed contexts to draw from- the fertility of the relational field. What's obvious to one person is a complete mystery to someone else. The game reveals a lot about how we understand one another, and what it's possible (or impossible) to say in a particular context.

It's fun to notice and to play with, *and* offers us essential insights in enriching the quality of our communication in our daily lives.

So many of my coaching conversations revolve around what Lola Olufemi calls "sticky, sticky relation".

Often, we are caught in patterns that limit what it's possible to communicate. Many of the conversations people bring to coaching for reflection could be summarised as "speaking about everything except what's really going on"- it's somehow become impossible to express it, or to receive it, or both.

We often find ourselves reaching for strategies that feel low risk, psychologically.

We turn away from one another, towards facts and information.

How does that tend to work out for us? Especially in this post truth, fake news world, algorithmically shaped, low trust society? And even within the context of our domestic lives- how does extracting a piece of behaviour from its context and using it to tell someone who they are tend to unfold?

Our most generative conversations are surely those that increase intimacy, that tend to that relational space between us. But this is high risk.

I believe that building tolerance for this is key to creating the conditions from which our shared liveable futures could emerge. We've been devastatingly de-skilled in relation inside these systems. Just as the soil of the Earth has been stripped by extractive systems, the terrain of relation is largely depleted.

How do we tend that terrain? How will we compost together?

We will need to meet at our edges. This reminds me of a permaculture principle I learned from sally of The Portal- Use Edges and Value the Marginal.

Of course we are going to feel overwhelmed if we imagine we can transform our relational patterns from dysfunctional to healthy in one go. What would it mean to value the marginal here? How could we seed, and nurture something radicle?

(Not a mispelling, I learned from Indy Johar's work that the radicle is "the first part of a plant embryo to emerge, developing into the primary root. It's the initial root that anchors the seedling and absorbs water and nutrients from the soil.")

What is it possible to communicate here and now?

What could it be possible to communicate here tomorrow?

Are we willing to find out?