My friend Elizabeth Hunt reminded me on twitter of a conversation I had with her in Glasgow a couple of years ago when she attended a complexity workshop I was offering with Bronagh Gallagher. It was a conversation around what is sometimes called the mid-life crisis, and somehow the image that came to mind when Elizabeth told me how she was doing was one of a chrysalis. This will be a non-scientific post, so if you are an actual entomologist I apologize for appropriating your field here. But chrysalises both inspire and baffle me. The thought that a caterpillar can …
You might think it a little bit late, but here on the in Howe Sound where I live, New Year traditionally begins. In the local language, Sk?wx?wu?7mesh sni?chim, this time of year is known as “tem welhxs” which refers to the time of the last snows and the frogs starting to sing. Ten days ago here on Bowen Island, we had a massive snow and windstorm, but at lower levels, all that snow has melted, flooding the creeks and wetlands and making the forest bright green in today’s after-rain sunshine. It’s warm – 9 degrees celsius – and it does …
One of the core practices in the world of participatory leadership is working closely with others, and staying in relationship. I’ve sometimes said that my business model is friendship, and that feels truer than ever as I move into my fifties and find myself practicing more and more accompaniment and mentorship in my life and work. It has been an important metric for me to have more collaborators than clients in a given year. It is a further metric that I count many of my clients as collaborators and friends. And so here is a list of the amazing people …
It has been thirty years since 14 women were killed at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, and every year I mark their passing here. I’ve always associated this song with that event, and I’ve even asked Lynn Miles about it, and she has said to me, despite her introduction in the above video, “yeah, I guess it’s also about that.” And let’s remember their names and what they were studying or working on that day because they were our peers and their deaths marked a whole generation of us. Geneviève Bergeron, 21, was a second year scholarship student in civil …
We’ve just completed our 17th annual Art of Hosting here on Bowen Island. For 17 years I have welcomed nearly 1000 people to our home place through more than 50 workshops we have conducted here. I always appreciate seeing the island through the eyes of our visitors. And so, coming fresh off of that experience, I responded today on our community facebook page to a question posed by a long time Islander, Rob Wall: What is “The Bowen Way.” This was my answer. It changes over time and with waves of people who come and go. As a person who …