Friends who fed me this week:
- Ashley Cooper on a piece by Parker palmer on teaching with heart and soul.
- Rob Bailey writes the owner’s manual on the coconut.
- Tenneson Woolf uses Wordle to produce a harvest
- whiskey river on the emotional mechanics of inspiration
- Mark Woods celebrates Edward Abbey’s passing with some excerpts from his work and meditations on deserts
- Peter Rukavina‘s unorthodox diary of his day without digital technology.
- Peter Rawsthorne on the ways we are shaping citizen eGovernment on Bowen Island.
This is Peter Reinhart, a master baker, a theologian and a story teller who has written a great book on baking called The Baker’s Apprentice. In this talk he discusses the science of baking, but puts it in the context of the meaning of bread as an act of transformation from living components to new forms.
Reinhart speaks from the four levels of the literal, metaphoric/poetic, political/ethical and mystical level. As a novice bread baker, I have to say that my exploration of the literal level is just beginning, and although I make some pretty good breads now, this dive into the deeper meaning of baking bread is fascinating, and takes my mixing, kneading, forming and baking to new levels.
Citizens and political representatives on my home island of Bowen Island, at a meeting this week in which a controversial decision was made to build an artifical turf playing field at our community school. I didn’t run this meeting…it was a regular council meeting, but the one in which the decision was made. The soundtrack is something of a political statement from the videographer, but the images are beautiful. They show my friends and neighbours as they sit pitted against one another in a tense meeting over a deep quality of life issue. Just studying and watching these faces reminds me of how hard this work really is sometimes, to tough through difficult choices and live out your principles and dreams.
On my way to Regina to work with the Urban Aboriginal Strategy steering committee there. We’re running an Open Space for the community on Saturday preceded by a community development/hosting training on Friday. Still designing the training and using the basic structure of covering invitation, hosting and convergence/action/decision making. Can anyone suggest exercises that might be useful in the context of a day long training to explore skills around these three areas? I’m interested in trying new things to teach the importance of these areas of attention.
I’m looking forward to our Open Space. I was in Regina a year ago, when the windchill was -55 and we were talking about how people survived these temperatures on the prairies 400 years ago. If you were not a part of the group, you were dead. So depending on relationship and getting to a fire was a life or death situation. Amazing how easy it is to forget that when so many of our basic needs are covered.
This is my son Finn, one of my teachers, facing huge waves at Ka’anapali on Maui last week. He plays in these waves with no fear at all. Waves that are two or three times taller than he is simply wash over him. He knows what to do, how to dive under the wave, how to swim in and out of currents, how to watch and read the sea, and his fear becomes play. He taught himself to bodysurf.
Fear does funny things to us. It makes us change sizes, for example. When we are confronted with a situation that creates fear, we puff ourselves up to seem bigger than we are, or we shrink away to hide and not be noticed. We do this by boasting, by telling stories that makes us seem more competent, more brave, more experienced than we are, or by engaging in self-deprecating behaviour that lessens our accomplishments, lowers expectations, diminshes our offerings.
It can seem like a challenge sometimes to just be the size that you really are, but I think when we are that size, comfortable in our skin and fearless in the moment, we become completely authentic.