Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world. Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there. (PS…the headlines are links! Click for more) John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.” I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that …
Harrison, one of the last times I saw him. I’m on holiday in Portugal about to start a six-day walking trip in the Algarve and I’ve just learned that Harrison Owen died yesterday. His son Barry posted a brief notice on Facebook today. I had a lovely talk with him a couple of weeks ago before I left on this trip. We talked about some things he was reading (he recommended a new edition of “Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature” by Ilya Prigogine and Isabell Stengers) and we talked a bit about family and time of …
Euan Semple points me to a lovely piece by Annie Mueller. Anyway, that’s also the story of the internet, and blogging, at least from my limited, non-techie experience. The big corporate assholes and the big piles of SEO trash: we don’t need them. The internet would exist without them. Would exist, and would be better. Cleaner. More room for cool stuff, connections, learning, sharing, growth. We’ve managed to do that good stuff even as social media became one giant trash pile, and interesting little websites became conglomerate monsters, and the deep, frenetic, and satisfying experience of sliding down curvy twisty …
I’ve been going down a bit of a rabbit hole these past few mornings, looking at some commentary and writing about Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who died in 1947 was a psychologist whose theory and research had a tremendous influence on the modern movements or organizational development, action research, Gestalt theory, change management and group dynamics. To read his writings now is to read a person deeply interested in the complexity of human systems long before there was much language at all available to even discuss complexity. His ideas – or more precisely other people’s ideas about his ideas – have …
In this video, Harrison Owen discusses the chaos that is disrupting the order we take for granted and begins to create a new order and a different world. Harrison has been saying much the same thing for his entire career, starting with his dissertation on Aramaic and associated mythologies and cosmologies. He has been a long-time student of the dance of chaos and order, and his development of Open Space Technology came from this lifelong inquiry. i encountered Open Space first through an event that was hosted by Anne Stadler and Angeles Arien in 1995, and I met Harrison for …