I love this, and I hope he keeps it up. This is the personal website of our new Prime Minister, Paul Martin. On the site is a blog which has been sleeping since October, but there is also Paul Martin with Flat Mark, a photo montage of the new Prime Minister going about his day with a cardboard cut out doll called Flat Mark. He even poses with Flat Mark as he is waiting to be called into the Governer-General’s residence to be sworn in as Canada’s 21st prime minister.
It is about time our political leaders had blogs, and a sense of humour. Good on the new PM. Hope he gets back to the blog.
The Transformation of Chris Corrigan
Micheal Herman and Penny Scott have nothing better to do than play around with Photoshop.
Will someone kindly hire them?
Over the past few months, several people have been exploring the applications of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language to endeavours other than architecture.
Peter Lindberg has been concerning himself with the application of patterns to software development. The folks at BlueOxen have been looking at Patterns of community building and collaboration, Mike Lee blogged patterns of introducing change into organizations last summer, and Michael Herman and I took a shot at defining some patterns of Open Space Technology
based on The Nature of Order. We’re not done yet.
(I have to say that pattern languages have not helped the patternlanguage.com people design very good websites)
Perhaps it is time to propose a set of patterns for blogging about patterns?
At any rate, I use this entry more as a bookmark, to gather these conversations into one place for the time being. I’ll shortly add a page on the Parking Lot wiki to extend the collection. In the meantime, what do these pattern conversations mean to you? Are there other places you have seen people talking about patterns?
From the Winter 2001 issue of Barrow Street:
Balance
by Jane Hirshfield
by Jane Hirshfield
Balance is noticed most when almost failed of-
in an elephant’s delicate wavering
on her circus stool, for instance,
or that moment
when a ladder starts to tip but steadies back.
There are, too, its mysterious departures.
Hours after the dishes are washed and stacked,
a metal bowl clangs to the floor,
the weight of drying water all that altered;
a painting vertical for years
one morning-why?- requires a restoring tap.
You have felt it disappearing
from your own capricious heart-
a restlessness enters, the smallest leaning begins.
Already then inevitable,
the full collision,
the life you will describe afterwards always as “after.”
There is something to this, this noticing of balance when you don’t have it anymore, like the old blues song “You don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry.” If we want to achieve and sustain balance in our lives, communities and organizations then, I think it’s not a bad idea to engage in the practice of noticing it when you have it, rather than trying to identify it when it is about to collapse. At that point (a tipping point?), as the elephant is falling off the stool, or the dish is crashing to the floor, you are reacting to losing something you were only slightly aware that you had. The crises mode is exactly NOT the state you want to be in to contemplate balance again.
This kind of proactive mode of inquiry can extend to many other areas of life too. Peace? Do we have peace right now? What does it look like? Success? Stability? Happiness? Noting these thing now means that when they start to slip, you can remember what they were so that as you cruise and surf on the changes, you have an idea of where you might want to go.
Thanks to riley dog for the link.
Genevieve Bergeron
Nathalie Croteau
Anne-Marie Edward
Maryse Laganiere
Anne-Marie Lemay
Michele Richard
Annie Turcotte
Helene Colgan
Barbara Daigneault
Maud Haviernick
Maryse LeClair
Sonia Pelletier
Annie St-Arneault
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz