Regina, Saskatchewan I love it here…big open prairie sky meets wide expanse of earth. And over it all, the air is chilled, so cold that I actually succumbed to the spit test. I spat on the sidewalk and immediately poked at my saliva with my boot. It had instantly turned to ice powder. The thermometer in my ride’s car said -41. By this afternoon it had warmed up to -28, which is the current temperature. If the warming trend continues, it’s supposed to be a balmy -14 by tomorrow afternoon. That is a 27 degree difference: the difference between a …
Those of you interested in exploring the Art of Hosting, our pattern language for working with conversational leadership in living systems, might consider joining Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf, Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea and I at teh Whidbey Institute near Seattle in the New Year. Invitation and information is here. You presence is desired!
A combination of quotes from two different emails today on certainty. First from Ashley Cooper, quoting Daniel Sielgel: “When we are certain we don’t feel the need to pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion.” And then this, from Tenneson Woolf, who currently has my copy of Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. From that books is this is a story of Keetsa, an Ahousaht whaling chief who runs into trouble when the space is no longer held for him: Every protocol had been observed between the whaling chief and the spirit …
From my friend Ria, who advanced a little in her inquiry on holding space: When I am holding space, I connect in my body with the unmanifest potential of this person, this group or this place. It asks for an emptiness and a deep stillness inside to be able to carry this potential. Maybe it is better to say to be a container for it, and I mean it in a very physical way. I open my body to be this container in service of something that wants or can become manifest.
Photo by Vik Nanda Some things popping up and absorbing my attention this week. Mushrooms + human hair = oil spill cleanup Customizing big flying spaces. What will the future archeologists say? The economics and ecologics of such endeavours stagger me. Wow. Ashley dreams of flying,by putting all that space on the OUTSIDE. An old friend from Peterborough, Andy Quan, comes back on my radar with a new book of poems edited by another old friend, John Barton, with whom I was a associate editor of ARC magazine in the early 1990s. I love the web. Good media (page 1, …