Navajo people call human beings “five-fingered” people. This refers to the way that Navajos relate their clan connections using the fingers of their hands. The thumb is “shay”, myself. And each one is imprinted with a unique spiral pattern. This spiral pattern is said to emerge when a child has spirit blown into it be the ye’i – the ancestors, who also produce the spiral of hair on the top of each person’s head. The spiral gives life. From there, each person can recite their clan heritage through the remaining four fingers, their father and mother, their father’s mother and …
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Last wekk I was working with some good friends – Kyra Mason, Thomas Ufer, Ruth Lyall, Jennifer Charlesworth and Nanette Taylor. Together we designed and delivered a one day workshop on what we called “Chaordic Leadership in Changing Times.” The focus of the workshop was collaborative leadership practice and we were asking questions about collaborating around a movement in the child and family services sector in British Columbia. Collaborative leadership practice has a couple of key capacities. First is the ability to be in and hold space for conversations that matter. The second is the practice of developing and holding …
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Photo by Santa Rosa “The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. They say that they say that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to …
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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 …
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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 …