Just a little story about how I lost my assumptions about mask culture. Here in Vancouver, over the past twenty years, it used to be very common to see people from Asia, specifically China, Japan, and Korea, wearing masks out in public. I have to admit that for a long time I felt it was kind of arrogant like you were wearing a mask because you didn’t want to contract something from me. To the naked eye, it didn’t look like folks were vulnerable. It looked like healthy, mostly young people were wearing masks to send a signal that somehow …
I’m on my way to Europe for a week, cobbling together the first leg of a 26 day trip that will take me to The Hague, Hamburg, Manitoulin Island, Thornbury Ontario, and New York City. On this leg I’m flying with Jet Airways, an Indian carrier that is in the throes of financial troubles at the moment, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. At any rate, this flight from Toronto to Delhi stops in Amsterdam and so it is full of a mix of travellers of all ages and every ethnicity you can imagine. There are …
I’ve been enjoying reading Adam Nicolson’s book “Sea Room” about the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides. The history of the small group of islands that he owns obsesses him. He charts the archaeology and natural history of the islands, and the book is filled with the characters who are the real owners of the place – the crofters and shepherds that work the land as tenants witinn the strange Scottish systems of private land ownership. Nicolson expresses some astonishment at the amount of activity that has taken place on the Shiants over history because they are considered so remote …
Just about to leave Montreal this morning for Toronto and north to Thornbury, Ontario to visit family. I was here for the conference of the Canadian Evaluation Society, where I participated on a panel on innovative dialogue methods (and yes I noted the irony in my remarks) and later led a World Cafe where I presented some of the sense-making processes I’ve been working on. I was here on the recommendation of Junita Brown who has been in some good conversations with evaluators around the use of the World Cafe for evaluation purposes. Originally Amy Lenzo and I were scheduled …
Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and I are snuggled into the attic rooms at the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B in downtown Denver, listening to some jazz, eating some pasta and salad and finishing up a productive design day together. We are preparing to teach the Art of Hosting to 60 leaders from the community at St. John’s in the Wilderness Cathedral in Denver. St. John’s is a high Anglican Gothic Episcopalian cathedral in the heart of Denver. We have been working with the cathedral community over the past couple of years to build the capacity among the 1700 members to be …