On board the Victoria Clipper, Strait of Juan de Fuca I’m out in the middle of a big piece of water that seperates Vancouver Island from the Olympic Penisula. Historically this strait is significant. Many of the Europeans who arrived here in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries had a sense that this might be the Northwest Passage. It is the first big opening in the coast that you reach coming north from San Franciso Bay, and it seems to head roughly the right way. It didn’t take long for Europeans to discover that it is …
\ Victoria, BC Sitting at a window seat at Moka House in the funkyhip Cook Street village district of Victoria. In a tourist town, little neighbourhoods like this are the ones that keep locals sane. I’m here partly because it appears that I am turning into more and more of a local around here. We did a good day of work today with the VIATT crew, cracking some solid communications questions and planning our Art of Hosting training for later next month. We are getting deep into a process of community linkage that will expand and solidify …
Closing up some tabs that have been opened for a while: Back to Bach: ” How, though, does Bach’s music achieve, or at least point to, transcendence?” Good question. A new book takes a stab at the answer. Robert Paterson at his finest, as he compares our engagement with global warming to the appeasement of Hitler by Chamberlain in 1939: “So here is my prediction. I think that the time now is Munich. Our politicians think that they can negotiate with the institutions that really govern us. We hope they can too. After all – who wants to …
Seaplane terminal, Vancouver harbour, BC Today is the beginning of a long road trip which will take me to several places in the next two weeks. Starting off this morning in Vancouver where I am fogbound, waiting for the cloud ceiling to lift so we can fly out to Victoria. The nature of the seaplane terminal in Vancouver harbour during a fog delay is reminiscent of what it must have felt like in the Chicago Bears dressing room yesterday as they felt their Superbowl chances slip away. Here it is the same. On the coast, important people …
I had never come across the work of Mary Parker Follett before until this week, and I have had some Firefox tabs open with her work in them including The New State written in 1918 when it must have felt like the state itself had become a murderous and inhumane human construction, in which the role of groups in democratic process must have seemed in need of some deep reflection. Follet lays out her thesis in the very first paragraph of the work: Politics must have a technique based on the understanding of the laws of association, that is, based …