Ecosystem Notes # Secret Spaces
Social Leadership Daily - Day #837
I am in the Forest, and yet isolated from it, on the train to London. It’s one of those watery late winder days, with the sky almost blue, yet hazed with cloud, and the ground overwhelmingly sodden. The rain has been unrelenting since early January: not continuously raining, but continually wet. The floodplains by the Stour are like a lake, and many of the fords uncrossable. As we travel across the bridge over the road by Christchurch, I see a line of cards, all pulling U-turns after seeing the depth of water in the tunnel under the railway. A sensible choice: I once made it through the ford in Brockenhurst after a storm, in the Land Rover, but at one point felt the wheels lose traction, and we achieved a moment of unnerving buoyancy.
But It’s not the rain that I came here to write about: rather it’s about the secret place that I want to walk this month.
I’ve been travelling to London on this train for twenty five years, and it gives you the most wonderful views through the Forest, including one place where I almost always see deer. Not just one or two: at times I’ve seen fifty of sixty, including a white buck (whose lineage, so the local folklore goes, is centuries old). It’s a place I’ve never walked, indeed I cannot fathom how to walk there, but that will be my quest next week.
This will be an act of trespass: within the ecosystem everything is held within a boundary. The individual enclosures, the roads, the limits of the NationalPark, the farms, villages, private houses, estates, the rivers and plantations. Some are open access, some fenced and guarded, and some simply ‘of nature’. Not specifically private or hidden, but rather away from the beaten track. Away from any track except those made by the horses and deer, rabbits and badgers. And this is that type of place.
So next week, with River, I will set out to find it.
This work is part of a year long journey through the same ecosystem, but travelling different paths, and through different seasons. The journey forms the backdrop to a broader exploration of the ‘Organisation as Ecosystem’, a systems view of the social and structural Organisation, across aspects of scale, boundary, and power. This is early stage #WorkingOutLoud.