“My grandmother was the one that inspired me,” said my friend Liz over lunch at the Valley Inn in Bella Coola. “She said that the world was once all together, and then it came apart and one day it will be all together again. So I just try to bring things together.” Liz is a pretty remarkable woman. She worked for years in family reunification in Vancouver, bringing together First Nations kids with their birth families, reconnecting them to their culture and communities. She is at home now in Bella Coola on council, working for the Ministry as a social …
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A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes: Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over …
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In the US right now, the health care “debate” is raging and town hall meetings being held across the country are being deliberately hijacked by those who don’t want to see reform go ahead. This tactic is discouraging but predictable. “Town Hall” meetings are not usually conducive to democratic deliberation, and they are never about dialogue. Over the past few days an amazing conversation has unfolded on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv about what these events mean for deliberative democracy. Tom Atlee has summarized a lot of the learning from these in a long blog post which …
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Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity. At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes: Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the …
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Lovely day here in Marin County hanging out with friends and charting some interesting paths forward on a few projects. One highlight of the day was spending time with Amy Lenzo, who I have known for a while but met only one time previously when we were on an diverse and eclectic team of facilitators holding space at the Pegasus systems thinking conference a couple of years ago. Amy is, among other things, the web goddess for The World Cafe community and we spent a lovely lunch at the excellent Buckeye Roadhouse talking over the nature of our …