This week I was in a gathering with 16 friends about the nature of hosting new organizational structures that arise from the hosting practices that seek to move groups to new levels of consciousness and collaboration. The gathering was essentially four days long, and at the end of second last day I had an interesting conversation with my friends Peggy Holman and George Por about the art of harvesting. “Harvesting” is usually thought of as a way of telling the historical story of a gathering, and as a metaphor it has some value in terms of expanding the idea beyond …
“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.” –Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301 I wish I could find a more coherent way to talk about this, about the complex set of emotions I feel in wearing a poppy and believing in peace. Joseph Boyden’s quote reminds me about the humanity that is at war. Whenever humans are involved in something, it’s never simple, so bear with me. I am trying to write about something that lives strongly in my heart, and heart …
A colleague passed last week. Laurel Doersam was my co-host for the Open Space on Open Space in 2001 in Vancouver. We met originally when she sent me an email asking about Open Space and after connecting, she decided to go to Berlin in 2000 to OSonoS where she made the offer on behaf of the both of us to come to Vancouver in 2001. Laurel ran the business end of the operation, which was not something either of us really had passion for, but she took it on and made sure we didn’t lose any money or any people …
“The secret of life is to have a question or task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day of your whole life and the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do!” — Henry Moore With thanks to my friend Patti DeSante, and also Michael Jones, who uses this quote in “Artful Leadership” (.pdf). [tags]Henry Moore, Michael Jones, secret of life[/tags] Photo of Henry Moore sculpture at Hakone Open Air Museum by Nemo’s Great Uncle
From my friend Roq Garreau: “Visioning means imagining. At first generally, and then, with increasing specificity, what you really want. That is what you really want. Not what someone else has taught you to want and not what you have learned to settle for. Visioning means taking off all of the constraints of assumed feasibility, of disbelief and past disappointments and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, treasured, uplifting dreams. Some people, especially young people, engage in visioning with enthusiasm and ease. Some people find the exercise of visioning painful because a glowing picture of what could be …