I am available to facilitate groups, provide workshops and trainings, and mentor those learning process arts.

The people I admire the most spend time imagining how reality works. They realize that truth is most often paradoxical and even the most concrete or religiously held ideas are also an imaginative experiment -- potentially sublime and inescapably problematic at the same time. What follows is a brief introduction to the terms I have borrowed and invented to use as bookmarks and tools for working with my own notions. These marks are my trade (trade marks), facilitate the services I provide (service marks), and name methods which have stood the test of revision through study and activism. indicates a strong "copyleft" with selective rights reserved and available with permission.

Process Arts

Scientific and Cartesian rationalism attributes all significance to human reason and imagines all else as material split from and subject to the objective mind. By the time of the Industrial Revolution humanity had adopted a mechanical mythology to the multiplication of material product. Psychology arose within this frame, drawing attention away from the what of production and to the how of creativity. Psychological questions notice how you do what you do before during and after what you actually produce. Today psychology is everywhere in the form of a multitude of practices beyond the consulting room which all concern themselves with facilitating how human beings work together. Examples include at least organizational development, mediation, group process practices, psychological and somatic therapies, conflict facilitation and resolution, and the practice of post-modern critique. I imagine these facilitative practices whose product is process as a single discipline - the Process Arts - and hope practitioners will identify as colleagues in order to grow the work into relationship with liberal education from grade school to post graduate studies, form professional associations, and develop an ethics for the field that prioritizes peace through social justice. Please look for process arts across the internet and around the world. My working definition is evolving but the term itself I reserve to the Commons for the use of all.

Association Building Community, Inc.

Practice of the process arts provides tools to shape culture as an artifact. This carries with it tremendous responsibility for what is made in an age where any change can sweep around the globe. ABC is an organization and a modular intentional community created in response to the need for ethical and relationally sustainable facilitation devoted to building living communities of support and understanding - on purpose. We seek to learn within a network pursuing similar intentions with purpose, as though co-creating community culture were an art form, where all voices are heard thoroughly and the connections and disconnections between people are attended with depth and consistency, such that needs are met, wants are respected, and it becomes a pleasure to live together, especially through conflict and difference. ABC umbrellas community projects and its members work together and individually with aligned organizations in need of facilitation.

Culturesmith

I originated and use the proprietary name "Culturesmith" to refer to the role I play and then share when I facilitate groups. I am open to being asked for permission to share the term by others who do similar work with a commitment to a related ethics. Frederick Buechner wrote, "Your vocation is the place where your heart's deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." It is my desire and vocation to participate in the making of environments the purpose of which is learning the practice of building community. My background in this work is based on hundreds of hours applying various process arts of group facilitation, academic graduate degrees in Mythology and Psychology, and a whole-systems change method I call Associative Inquiry.

Healing Friction

is my overall method. This work plays in the paradox that "conflict done well" characterizes living communities where ideas like Peace apply. Our ideas about friction and difference need healing so that the process of conflict is expected to result in cooperation and understanding in the service of Life. This requires practice at a level of dedication similar to physical martial and performing arts and is best engaged with fellow learners. Within Healing Friction, Martial Nonviolence is the theory and practice behind the bodymind Flexibility in Adversity Training (FIAT) I offer based on my experience as an executive, mediator, academic, 4th degree black belt instructor of aikido, and as a survivor of violence and grief.

Guardians of Peace

Professional community builders training together regularly, practicing peace as conflict done well, are Guardians of Peace. Not purveyors of Security per se, Guardians are process artists practicing Martial Nonviolence in partnership to love the idea that peace is less an absence of conflict than the ongoing work of expecting even the most intractable and violent of experiences to yield deeper connection and move the people involved closer to what they need and want for living together sustainably.

Bluevolution

I lost my beloved fifteen month old little boy to a still unknown ailment on December 12th, 2006. What is most important can die in an instant without warning or explanation. In all that I do, support and authentic guidance of children plays a primary part in memorial tribute to my son.

On the other side of the devotion to community building there is a place where it becomes clear that the endurance to insist on peace in this way leads to an ongoing exposure to loss and grief while engaging both legitimate suffering and the needless violence in daily life. Especially at the cultural level, remaining in the presence of this suffering and of death, without pretending everything is/will be fine, is essential to our survival as a species as we confront the realities of having exhausted resources on which our children will depend.

Extending the metaphor of Blue Fire developed by Thomas Moore to discuss the work of James Hillman, I created the term "bluevolution" to refer to the process of shared legitimate suffering as an activism leading to sustainable community. In order to improve our chances of soul survival, I believe humanity will be required to loose and lose the hope of eternal rescue to which, through mechanistic perfectionism, we have grown accustomed. At the other end of that loss we may expect a new mythology of community that will measure value in terms of balanced relationship and lead to stewardship of wilderness, food, air, and water such that we may both refresh ourselves and wash our dead tribal myths for true burial.

At that ritual burial is where hope may come alive again.

Peace,

Brandon WilliamsCraig

Related Work

Aiki Extensions, Inc.

Aikido is a modern Japanese martial art with a unique voice. From philosophy to application it was and is designed to be an "art of peace," changing the way conflict works rather than accepting the premise of violent confrontation and simplistically becoming as proficient as possible in emerging victorious. Both the principles and practice of aikido posit an insistence on peace, redefined as conflict done well, redefined as dismantling the cycle of violence so that it is very difficult to continue as victim or as oppressor, making way for many other roles and options that do not involve victimization. Aiki Extensions (AE) is the worldwide network and community devoted to extending these principles, these arts of peace, beyond the walls of the schools in which they are taught and into the mainstream of public consciousness and the practice of citizenship. Through 2008, AE contracted with Association Building Community (above) in order for me to create the position of Executive Director in AE and occupy it in order to build AE from ad hoc network into a responsive international community. Though my official position is ended I continue to actively support AE's mission and initiatives around the world.

Association Cultural Movement Education

ACME, "a new high point in depth", is also known, tongue even further in cheek, as "edgeucation". It proposes an educational reform revitalizing the liberal arts through process arts of systemic learning through dialogue and deliberation. This is a cultural movement already in progress.

While "fast-track" job training and mechanisms of standardized assessment continue to replace the disciplined thinking explicitly developed through liberal education, how shall we keep up with ourselves as a society in need of engaged citizens? How to clarify, track, and shape the associated systems that form our societies? How to find the leading edge of education for ourselves and our children in the process of making cultures that are both beautiful and life-giving?