Layers of connection

This week was the last face-to-face for the class, and after next week's conclusion online, we are done now until August.  We have been engaged in a clinical practice with groups class, and I teach the class as parallel process:  training the group leader through the process of a group.  Several students were on tap to lead during the final practice lab.  At completion of an activity, from my perspective of sitting eye level with the strings connecting us to each other, it struck me as a metaphor for what we were trying to accomplish.  The more we interacted, the more layered and complex the levels of string became, but as one student also noted:

This makes you see it is really complex, but it is really simple.

We talked about how to take this awareness out of the classroom, and into our communities, agencies, nation...What kind of strategies would enable us to co-create the kinds of relationships outside of the class as we had managed to create in the class throughout the summer?

My mind tends to always go the the Shreveport-Bossier City Community Renewal program.  They use a systematic approach, based on particular principles, that can be replicated.  In shorthand:

What kind of world do we want?  What kind of society makes possible that kind of world?  What kind of community makes possible that kind of society?  What kind of family makes possible that kind of community?  What kind of person makes possible that kind of family?  What kind of environment makes possible that kind of person?  What do we have to do to make possible that kind of environment?

We challenged ourselves to continue the kind of thinking that has brought us to this point in our lives and common work, and to put that kind of thinking into action in our lives.  "Change starts by shaking the whole tree" (Mack McCarter, 2013).