One of the quotes I keep rolling out all the time is this one from Christina Baldwin: No group can prove itself safe by the definition of one member; it can only prove itself healthy and responsive to the the needs of different people over time Christina Baldwin, Calling the Circle, p. 172 I sometimes reframe this quote as “No one person can be responsible for safety in a group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for its own safety.” For a group to work well, especially if it is confronting challenges, uncertainty, complexity, or conflict, it needs …
Some unbelievable gift of nature and spirit and technical mastery has conspired to provide the Vahdat sisters – Marjan and Mahsa – with voices that exude impeccable vocal control, deep passionate expression, and unending soulfulness. Marjan Vahdat’s new album, “Our Garden Is Alone” is outstanding and topped World Music Central’s Transworld Music Chart for May 2022. That is a list which never fails to deliver amazing music, by the way. I must have first heard of the Vahdat sisters about six or seven years ago when I stumbled on a recording that Mahsa Vahdat made with Mighty Sam McClain, called …
Euan Semple was the first person I ever linked to on my blog. Today he posts a little reflection on his blogging practice: …I’ve always said, my blog posts are mostly memos to self. They are for me to react to the world around me and to see those reactions placed before me for inspection. Yes inspection by others but mostly by me. Being concerned about whether or not people like what I have written affects how I write. I guess this process mirrors our struggles to identify our true selves in the rest of our lives. The draw of …
I’m single handedly trying to lift a near dead art form up from a seven year slumber. It seems like everyone stopped blogging in around 2015 In the intervening years folks would post “I really should get back to this” blog entries but then would find themselves deep in Facebook world where their writing was hard to find and search and sometimes limited only to friends. Or they would post on twitter where the link sharing would happen but without the added reflection and sometimes you’d have to battle bots and trolls to participate. Sure twitter threads are okay. But …
The other day on the Art of Hosting facebook group, my friend Cedric Jamet asked folks for some materials about the four fold practice, which is the basic essence of the Art of Hosting. Toke Moeller weighed in with his latest posters from a session he was leading with graduate students in sustainability leadership. Toke was, of course, one of the originals who put the four fold practice together and like all good generative frameworks, it has changed over time and it gets expressed in different ways depending on context. But the essence is that it balances self-awareness and focused …