Fitfully tracing portals for five years, wood s lot celebrates a birthday. I love Mark Wood’s weblog. It was one of my first bloggy reads and I continue to read it several times a week, finding myself taken far away by his amazing collection of links and findings. Unfortunately, he hand rolls the blog and has never produced an RSS feed of any quality, so he doesn’t show up in my links roll, which is powered by Bloglines. But he’s always been generous with sending traffic my way, and I’ve appreciated that and the occasional email exchange we have had …
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If you’ve never heard Metis music before, you should go over to metisradio.fm and tune in. This is a good quality 64kb stream of traditional and contemporary Metis music. Metis music is predominantly a fiddle genre, springing out of the traditional cultures of the French and Scottish traders that went west and married First Nations women. As the Metis Nation arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did the music, becoming a unique genre of fiddling, although borrowing many tunes and styles from Celtic, French, Old Time and, more recently, country music. Saying that Metis music is just fiddle …
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I’ve just returned from a very interesting small conference in Arizona, where we were talking about philanthropy, discovery and education. And I have some questions for you all… What if the essential political questions of our time – the questions that ask “how should we do things?” – were not about right vs. left but bottom-up vs. top down? What would that do to the political spectrum and its discourse? What if our work was about creating space – for discovery, connection and collaboration – rather than narrowing down options and coming up with answers? What if accountability was about …
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It has occurred to me that the act of driving can be both the greatest source of stress in my life, or one of the best opportunities to develop a practice of compassion, relaxation and offering. Being the kind of guy that prefers the latter to the former, I have developed a driving practice to enhance those qualities. The basic theory is this: when you are on the road, driving in traffic you have unlimited space to give others. Ironically, there is only very limited space to TAKE, because taking space usually means speeding up, driving dangerously and aggressively. Giving …
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On the weekend I was happy to be running an Open Space event for 125 people who live across British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. We had a ball, and I’ll write more shortly. One of the great things that happened there was that four amazing people joined me in holding space: Wendy Farmer-O’Neil, Valerie Embry, Nancy McPhee and Beverley Neff. A million small and interesting conversations happened between us during the event, a great side effect of working with a team. One of them was about the vagaries of praise and blame, and especially how important it is to be stable …