Origin of CHRIIS

A decade ago, I (first author) attended a wedding off the coast of Maine. Before the ceremony we were asked to take a word from a hat and to find some object on the island that would represent that word. Then we were to place the object on one of four alters as a gift to the couple.

To my surprise, the word I chose was transform. I had spent thirty years studying design and transformative learning, and I wondered what I could find that would not just repeat what I already knew. And what object would represent that?

As I walked along a trail through the forest pondering the challenge, I came across a downed birch tree. It was chewed apart at the base, leading me to infer that it had been felled by beavers. I examined it further and realized that it was beautiful, as beautiful as the standing trees around it, but in a different way. This caused me to think about cycles of creation and destruction, and the beauty throughout. I realized in the moment that seeing beauty in what is or was, is essential to creating what might or ought to be. In other words, for participants in designing, honoring the good in the situation and in ourselves is necessary to releasing the ties that bind us to the status quo. Then releasing those ties frees us to imagine what might be and to create the new. I was seeing the cycle of life, in this case of a tree, as a sustained cycle of systemic design.

This felt profound. But what object would I take back for the alter? I searched for something that suggested a cycle, and the mostly circular shapes that I found did not feel quite right. The cycle was more evolutionary and subject to the arrow of time; it did not return one to the same place. I walked on, and at the end of the trail I came to the shoreline and to a cabin where Mabel Loomis Todd had edited Emily Dickinson’s poems. On the mantle of the fireplace in the cabin, I found an S-shaped link of chain. That was it. It was like an infinity symbol, but with ends not meeting, suggesting entry and exit at different places. I did not want to take the link, so I traced it with charcoal from the fireplace onto a piece of paper. I added the concepts that had come to mind as forming the cycle: honor, release, imagine, create, and sustain. Then as I reversed course and came to the birch tree, I saw that the bark could be peeled and shaped into the S. I took the paper and the bark back to place on the alter. And then I realized that the words, if slightly reordered, could be recalled with the acronym CHRIS. Chris was the groom's name.