Monet Refuses the Operation Doctor, you say that there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of …
Share:
I see it all the time, where cultivated and well-raised people stumble in the wild land of chaos and open space. Whether it is the tourist in the forest who complains against the mud or the leader in an organization, community or country (like Egypt) who clings to the illusion of confidence and control and who cannot make friends with the wild and the chaotic. Thoreau: I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be …
Share:
I am just returning from a memorial service for my friend and colleague John McBride. John and I worked on a number of Aboriginal economic development projects over the years and he died in October from pancreatic cancer. Today at his memorial his wife Val read some selections from his journals. One insight that really stuck with me was written in his final days as he was making sense of his death. He wrote that the end is about peeling back all the layers of who we have been to discover who we really are at our core. And he …
Share:
With thanks to Geoff and Euan. Beauty in body and land.
Share:
1. Practice noticing who’s in the room at meetings – how many men, how many women, how many white people, how many people of color, is it majority heterosexual, are there out queers, what are people’s class backgrounds. Don’t assume to know people, but also work at being more aware. 2a. Count how many times you speak and keep track of how long you speak. 2b. Count how many times other people speak and keep track of how long they speak. 3. Be conscious of how often you are actively listening to what other people are saying as opposed to …