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Publication
A Final Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master’s Degree in Conflict Facilitation and Organizational Change, Process Work Institute, Portland, OR, 2008
Local notes
http://www.processwork.org/files/Finalprojects/Murphy_A_March_2008.pdf
Introduction
"Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing what's in us lorn and loan and oansome.” (Hoban, 1980, p.7) I am thinking on what is in me that is lorn and loan and oansome, the inner thoughts and experiences that would bring colour and meaning to my everyday mundane life if I could find a context in which to befriend and socialise them. I am captivated, and at the same time a little disturbed, by the idea of what I myt be if I could bring my dreaming into world welcoming and celebrating what has been isolated and hidden in me. My project title indicates where I am going with a sometimes personal and profound experience that is difficult to explain with the words of theory, science, history or even fiction. Memorable, meaningful and truly authentic, are my words to describe my otherwise indescribable first encounter with Process Work and my subsequent study of myth. I prefer “...lorn and loan and oansome”, words that author Russell Hoban puts into the vocabulary of his fictional character, Riddley Walker. I am the protagonist of the journey I relate in this paper. Like a storybook Dorothy or Alice, I find myself unintentionally transported from my everyday life and on the threshold of a foreign existence. Once familiar paradigms for sense-making no-longer seem purposeful and the journey evolves into an individual’s quest for the restoration of meaning. This is a personal journey and Joseph Campbell described how, in today’s world, all meaning is in the individual: ‘... there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.”(1949, p. 388)
In this paper I narrate an odyssey, an existential search, to discover meaning. My yellow brick road follows a path of heart across boundaries, real and imagined, across countries, at times beyond language. Meaning is indeed in the individual and the quest is an inner one, as I found myself forging a path between paradigms and levels of personal awareness, and wading into the realm of myth.
Introduction
"Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing what's in us lorn and loan and oansome.” (Hoban, 1980, p.7) I am thinking on what is in me that is lorn and loan and oansome, the inner thoughts and experiences that would bring colour and meaning to my everyday mundane life if I could find a context in which to befriend and socialise them. I am captivated, and at the same time a little disturbed, by the idea of what I myt be if I could bring my dreaming into world welcoming and celebrating what has been isolated and hidden in me. My project title indicates where I am going with a sometimes personal and profound experience that is difficult to explain with the words of theory, science, history or even fiction. Memorable, meaningful and truly authentic, are my words to describe my otherwise indescribable first encounter with Process Work and my subsequent study of myth. I prefer “...lorn and loan and oansome”, words that author Russell Hoban puts into the vocabulary of his fictional character, Riddley Walker. I am the protagonist of the journey I relate in this paper. Like a storybook Dorothy or Alice, I find myself unintentionally transported from my everyday life and on the threshold of a foreign existence. Once familiar paradigms for sense-making no-longer seem purposeful and the journey evolves into an individual’s quest for the restoration of meaning. This is a personal journey and Joseph Campbell described how, in today’s world, all meaning is in the individual: ‘... there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.”(1949, p. 388)
In this paper I narrate an odyssey, an existential search, to discover meaning. My yellow brick road follows a path of heart across boundaries, real and imagined, across countries, at times beyond language. Meaning is indeed in the individual and the quest is an inner one, as I found myself forging a path between paradigms and levels of personal awareness, and wading into the realm of myth.