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February 22, 2007 By Facilitation, Uncategorized 3 Comments

Back in the fall I published The Tao of Holding Space (.pdf), a small ebook I had been working on for a number of years.   It seemed to get the attention of Lyn Hartley from Fieldnotes, the online journal of the Shambhala Institute.   She ran a little interview with me, and this month it appeared in the most recent issue.   The interview covers the origins of the book and then we get into some detail about my facilitation practice and the underlying foundation for the way I work.

Thanks to Lyn for the interest in my work.

Back home again

February 21, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Travel 4 Comments

Back from a two week road trip. Less blogging than I thought I’d do as I was mostly out of range and trying just to turn off and spend time with the kids while we drove through New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Nevada.

Highlights included three days working with Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf and Roq Gareau doing an Art of Hosting with the Navajo Nation health promotion folks. Tenneson has some photos of our work and harvest at his flickr site. We have some amazing things cooking as a result of that work, including a community based peer support project outline for diabetes maagement, and some designs for what the next level of the Art of Hosting might be, Much thanks to Orlando Pichoe, Karen Sandoval and Chris Percy at the Navajo Nation for hosting us there and for Teresa, Tenn, Roq and Berkana Institute for inviting me along. Good mates, all.
From that event, in Gallup NM, we drove up to Windowrock, Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley and Zion National Park (which gets more wow’s per mile than anywhere I’ve ever been) before returning home through the utter madhouse of Las Vegas on a long weekend with the NBA All Star game in town. Overwhelming impressions of Vegas were mostly line ups, being helped to get lost and flooded hotel rooms and overpriced food punctuated only by the beauty and grace of Cirque de Soleil’s show “O” which brought some of the serenity of the landscape back to mind.

Great trip but nice to be finally home, albeit for a short time.

Crossing waters

February 7, 2007 By Travel 3 Comments

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 actually the entrance to the Salish Sea, encompassing the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and the inland archipelagos of islands that ie between Vancouver Island and the solid and inpenatrable North American continental mainland.

This is the first time I’ve crossed this body of water, and it’s dark and rainy this evening so there isn’t much to see.   The ferry itself is a catamaran, so the seating is more like a train than it is on our single hulled ships in BC.   Also the food is zipped up in a ton of plastic, but the wild salmon chunk was pretty good.   We are right now heading to Seattle where I will spend a few days before travelling south with the family to meet mates Tennesson Woolf, Teresa Posakiny and Roq Gareau for an Art of Hosting with our friends at the Navajo Nation health service.   It’s funny to think of this trip from here, in the rainy northwest, to the cold high desert of Navajo country.

[tags]Victoria clipper, juan de fuca strait[/tags]

Living life away from home

February 6, 2007 By First Nations, Travel, Uncategorized One Comment

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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 the capacity of the indigenous communities of Vancouver Island to participate and run the set of child and family services that are provided in their communities.   There is some solid vision at play here and a very good team of curious, spirited and innovative people who bring a variety of perspectives to every question.   The conversations we have are amazing, and there is deep a solid commitment to the core purpose of the initiative: to keep children at the centre of our deliberations.   We have even taken to the practice of placing pictures of our kids on the table in the centre of our workspace, as you can see from the photo above.

One result of the good quality of the work here and the desire to go very deep into the fundamental work is the fact that it seems like I’ll be spending a lot more time in Victoria over the next year.   And so, I’m looking for ways to bring some normalcy to my life here.   Last night I trained with a local Taekwondo school and tonight I stopped by the house of a friend and colleague tonight to cook supper.   He has been on long term disability for more than a year battling the extreme pain of chronic arthritis and suffering the attendant demons, slings and arrows that come with it.   It was good to see him, good to stand in a kitchen and cook some curry and have a bit of a semblance of a real life, even if the family are back home on the Island that I rarely see these days.

Three gems of varying nature

February 6, 2007 By Notes 2 Comments

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 go to all out war.

The institutions, like Hitler, will say all the right things to make us feel better and that we are making progress – “Peace in our Time” – A better environment in our time and all we had to go was to negotiate a few terms. We could let Czechoslovakia go because we knew that this was the price for peace. So we can let the tar sands still run or worse – back Ethanol made from Industrially farmed Corn that costs more to make that it yields.
The a new crisis will emerge, as in the fall of Poland – we will say that we are really going to war. But we wont. We wont give up how we live really and we wont really take on the institutions that govern how we live.
Only after a out and out disaster, as in the fall of France or Pearl Harbor, we will get serious.”