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September 18, 2003 By Uncategorized

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

Here for the annual conference of the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers (CANDO) where I am facilitating two Open Space sessions. Today’s is about new direction in economic development and tomorrow we will look at caring for our communities and the role of economic development in healing First Nations communities. The proceedings from both of these conversation will be online somewhere (probably mirrored at
OpenSpaceWorld.Net where the conversation can continue.

At any rate, it’s one of those conference where one runs into old friends and colleagues from around the country, including folks I was with in the Native Management and Economic Development Program at Trent University in the early 1990s. We all graduated just before everyone got email addresses so it’s only now that some of us are catching up and sharing news of the triumphs and tragedies that have unfolded over the past 15 years.

But I wasn’t going to write about that stuff, at least not today. Today I wanted to capture the impressions I was left after attending an Open Space Technology meeting facilitated by Bill Cleveland for the EARTH project. I’m sure there will be an online presence for the notes at some point, but this is my record of a session I convened, and my impressions of what I learned.

The theme of the gathering was something like “how can we use our art and activism to empower the voices of youth to build a just and sustainable world.”

I proposed a session that was titled: “Invitation, self-organization and the art of community building: what can we learn from artistic practice about engaging with community.”

It was a far ranging discussion that began with me outlining the practice of Irish music as a social and community building activity and went from there. There was much to learn about the way in which various art practices (including theatre, painting, dance and music) lend themselves to the process of engaging in community building activities.

Artistic practices were outlined in the session and illustrated with stories, but learnings now come to me in bullet points, so here goes:


  • “The ability to make metaphors is what makes us both artists and humans.” David Diamond from Headlines Theater uttered this gem starting us off on a conversation about meaning-making

  • Art-making is inquiry. It requires a critical interpretation of the world. It develops the capacity to both connect with the natural world and understand and reflect on one’s internal responses to that world.

  • Two women in the group who had worked with abused women described a process where they did not raise painful issues in process but instead invited the women to make art together. Pain got dealt with as participants grew to trust each other and responded to each other’s art. This was a private process between the women, negotiated in the safety of a space which they created together. The overall benefit of this process was that women described feeling empowered by the fact that they had unlocked their own creativity.

A fascinating discussion all round.

Anyway, back to work up here. It snowed two inches last night. Summer North of 60 is always fun!

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September 14, 2003 By Uncategorized

I am about to engage with DanceArts Vancouver on a three year global project called the Earth Project. It is an international collaboration that will bring together all kinds of people involved in the arts, sustainability, community development and activism and social justice to look at how the arts can facilitate conversations and dialogue on these issues, especially with youth.

I’ll be attending an Open Space meeting on Monday with Bill Cleveland from the Center for the Study of Art and Community in Minneapolis who wrote a fantastic paper called Mapping the Field: Arts-Based Community Development. I will be learning a lot more about this over the next little while, but right now I am struck by the above diagram (another quadrants model!) and this description of the field of arts-based community development:

Much of our work at the Center for the Study of Art and Community is about documenting, describing and learning from the ABCD field. We have also challenged the field to consider some hard questions about the efficacy of their work in and with communities. The information, ideas and opinions we have gathered show a field that is new and growing rapidly. It reflects a field that is hungry to learn from itself and eager to make collegial connections. It also portrays a field largely unaware of its history, driven by a diverse pastiche of philosophies, practices, motivations and intents. The mix is complex and intriguing and some through lines and patterns have emerged.

Read the paper to find out about some of these lines and directions. I’ll report more from the Open Space.

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September 12, 2003 By Uncategorized


Rock Balancing art from Oasis Design, Photo by Art Ludwig

Robert Brady, writing in his blog Pure Land Mountain about the lessons learned from working with stones:

If you want a wall that is a stone poem in stone syntax, you have to learn the bit-by-bit stones teach until at last you have a stone wall, not a book wall, not a you wall. The finest mortar for a stone wall, therefore, is patience in the builder, blended with integrity. No integrity in the builder, no integrity in the wall.

But the bigger lesson comes later, when the wall is standing at last and you go out into the world alight with the knowledge that this dialectic pertains to EVERYTHING you do: that any worthy activity is a dialog, that wisdom is a living thing, not frozen in time, not a doctrine or a dogma, not a monument, not a library, not a printed book, and that you are filled with wisdom, ready and waiting to be known to you.

What does living wisdom tell us? Among other things, that the solution is where the problem is: in ourselves. Loss of beauty, living beauty, within and without our lives, is the sign, the lesson, the marker, the measure, of our deviation from living wisdom. Lack of affinity with living wisdom lies at the heart of our problems, and if we continue this way we are ended: the real thing won’t stand for it. Existence must be a dialog with the moment, as the living, thinking person is taught by any art, any worthy endeavor. You are instructed and guided by the very task, by the very ongoing. You are taught the true way most truly only by traveling it, not just by standing still and listening to others tell you about it, or by merely looking at an old map others have made. The way is vast, greater far than we, and it will prevail, no matter how we treat it or perceive it. We either go as it goes or the walls we have built will collapse upon us.

I carry stones around with me everywhere I go, and one of my favourite things to do is to balance rocks and stones on the beach. It’s a form of meditation to connect with the bigger fundamental forces and logic that Brady writes about, using the stones and rocks as vehicles and brutal teachers. When balancing two large rocks, there is only one way to get it right. Get it wrong, and the rocks will fall and implore you to better understand them and their connections to their environment.

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September 11, 2003 By Uncategorized

Stockholm, New York, Santiago.

Maybe we should just skip September 11 altogether and go straight from 9/10 to 9/12 instead.

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September 10, 2003 By Uncategorized

I’m reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and it’s totally engroosing. In the middle of the dozen or so stories that swirl around between the covers of the book are gems of writing like these:

Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu experiements on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of getting bounced of the grille of a shreiking Buick once when he chased a roughly shopping-cart-sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into the centre of it. He knew they were both fragile and tenacious. You could just stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot, or swirl around iot, and keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch one in your hands, it would vansih — but then you’d look up and see another one just like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and yet indisputably self-perpetuating and failry robust systems sort of gave Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.

— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

I’m not the only one taken with this piece of writing either. Others have quoted it too.

More on the physics of dust devils.