“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.” –Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301 Three Day Road is about two Oji-Cree soldiers who fight for Canada in the first world war. They survive the fight with the enemy on the battlefield, but they lose the war to the other enemy, the one that lurks on the inner front. It is only *I* that holds others as “enemies.” No one is born into this world as my enemy. I create that story. My …
Share:
There is something ineffable about being held in a space that is hosted. One of the key things that simply can’t be taught in any facilitation training is “presence.” It’s possible to talk about it, to model it and even to help others connect with it, but you can’t transmit it. It is not a technical piece. It is a practice. I make a lot of connections between hosting practice and martial arts practice. Today, looking through some of the handful of martial arts weblogs I read, I discovered this post: Regardless of how many …
Share:
From a paper on Korean poetry comes this poem by Ko Un, “Ode to Shim-chong:” Indangsu sea, shine dark blue, come rising as a cloudlike drumbeat. The waters, the sailors who know the waters, may know the dark fate of the world beyond that lies past the path that sometimes appears, the weeping of children born into this world, and the sailors may know my daughter’s path. How can the waters exist without the world beyond? Full-bodied fear has now become the most yearned-for thing in the world, and my daughter’s whimpering stillness in the lotus bud will be such; …
Share:
There is a lovely new translation of the Tao te Ching online, which I discovered thanks to the ever mercurial wood s lot. From the introduction to the Book of the Forest Path: I am trying to accomplish a couple of things in the translation that follows. First of all, I have a particular philosophical interpretation of Taoism, and I am trying to see how far it can be reflected in a translation. I think it is not compatible with the translations I’ve seen. Second, I’ve tried to make it plain and cool English. My objection to the existing …
Share:
I wasn’t at the Nexus for Change conference although I was there in spirit. I had a few lovely long design talks with Peggy Holman, Gabriel Shirley and Tracy Robinson who were hosting various parts of it. I also followed it online a little and even from a distance it was possible to pick up a thread and extend it a little into my own learning. What stood out for me was this emerging identity as a process artist. John Abbe brought this to my attention with an update to his weblog in which he announced a Nexus project involving …