Why conversation for reconciliation is important: this story about neighbourhood dialogue in a gentrifying Portland, Oregon neighbourhood contains this sheer nugget of wisdom: “The one who strikes the blow doesn’t know the force of the blow,” Mowry says. “Only the one who has received the blow knows its force.” That quote serves to me to point out why reconciliation efforts led by the striker don’t really heal. I think a little about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission here in Canada which is supposed to look at the residential school experience in a way that hears the story. But it is …
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Phil Cubeta hits a home run with a lament for what lies at our collective centre: As you can tell, this post is not about venture philanthropists per se but about language. What saddens me is the impoverishment of our ways of talking about our shared lives in community with one another. To see the languages of love withering, or sequestered behind closed doors, while the language of money thrives in all venues is a cause and symptom of a decline in the moral imagination. We have become people for whom the master metaphor is finance, even as the markets …
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For many years on this site I have kept a page of facilitation resources that is my working library. I haven’t updated it for a long time, and so today, I went through folders and bookmarks and old emails and blog posts and revised the page. For your edification, my renewed library of Facilitation Resources, free for the taking. The best links and site to partcipatory process I have found. Enjoy.
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Last week I was working with an interesting group of 60 Aboriginal folks who work within the Canadian Forces and the department of National Defense, providing advice and support on Aboriginal issues within the military and civilian systems. We ran two half days in Open Space to work on emerging issues and action plans. In an interesting side conversation, I spoke with a career soldier about fear. This man, one of the support staff for the gathering, had worked for a couple of decades as a corporal, mostly working as a mechanic on trucks. We got into …
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Jack Ricchiuto was writing about narrative the other day: We need to start reviving the narrative aesthetic where stories are more fields of countless possibilities than linear in nature, where the possibilities of meaning are more infinite than finite. We need to stop calling sound bites stories, which they’re not. We need to call stories the narratives that evoke a sense of wonderment more than conclusion. Stories are dear to my heart and storytelling is a practice that seems more and more about who I am. I think one way to help people become story tellers is to practice …