From our Art of Hosting gathering that concluded here on Bowen Island today comes a great line from my friend Christie Diamond: “Conversation begins before it starts, continues after it ends and doesn’t always involve words.” Brilliant, because once you understand THAT, you embark on the path of mastery. Update: Dave Pollard has posted a nice harvest of his learning at our gathering.
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I was working with a group yesterday that was making a number of small decisions as they worked their way through an agenda. The meeting was semi-formal and my role as facilitator was mostly to hold space and draw attention to process where appropriate. I let the group talk, asked questions from time to time and noted the decisions that they had made. As I was observing this group working, I noticed something interesting about their process. Frequent readers will know that I use the diamond of participation often as a map to organize and design meeting processes. …
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Back in April, I got to be a part of one of the best hosting experiences of my life when I joined Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Phil Cass and Tim Merry and a bunch of others in designing and hosting the 2008 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference. The other day Erin Caricoffe, one of the staff members of the core team we worked with sent out this summary of where we are now: By all shared accounts, the 2008 Food and Society Gathering for Good Food was a success, meeting planning Team goals of providing a …
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I have never understood the idea that you can’t talk to terrorists. I don’t mean in the moment of vioence being committed. I mean the idea that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan for example, are a non-starter for Canada. We have committed 6 years to the “war on terror” and the exit strategy seems to be “kill all the bad guys before going home.” This is an impossible condition for victory. At some point people have to sit down and talk about how they are going to leave each other alone, no? This interesting article …
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Doug posted a creed a little while back: We are nothing alone. We cannot exist without reference points. We cannot know ourselves until another knows us. This is why we seek love–not just something to hold, but someone to know us and hold us as just us. Neither can we be together if we do not exist as individuals. Both are needed. Dialogue is both our existence and what we do. We are beings in our doings. Our purpose is to stir things up. The stirrings are the living edge of us. Where we leak into others, there we create …