As many of you know, I have been focusing a great deal of attention lately on the Four Practices of Open Space, namely opening, inviting, holding and grounding. At the moment I am putting the final touches on a resource manual for an Open Space practice workshop (it’s never too late to register!) and I’ve been tracking all over the internet assembling bits and pieces. The manual can’t be too big, and of course a lot of the stuff I have found and read over the years can’t be included. However, thanks to del.icio.us, I have set up four tags, one for each of these practices, and so now you too can join in the fun, tagging stuff out there that seems to relate to these practices and subscribing to the feeds to see what we are turning up.
Here are the links:
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At the end of September I opened space for a group of citizens looking to support the Islands Trust here in British Columbia. The Islands Trust is a governance body that seeks to preserve and protect the character of the Gulf Islands, one of which is my home.
Along with a team of four other island-based OST facilitators we convened a 1.5 day Open Space on the topic of citizens supporting the islands Trust mandate. During the meeting I was interviewed for The Island Tides newspaper out of salt Spring Island and the resulting article is a pretty good summary of what happens in Open Space. If you want to see the article, you can download it here, which is a 4.3Mb pdf. The article is on page two.
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My neighbour up the road, Spider Robinson, has penned a beautiful obituary for Paul Pena a blues singer who died on October 1st. Pena was a blues man, a didgeridoo player and a world champion Tuuvan throat singer. Spider’s obit contains a live recording of Kargyraa Moan which is pure ear candy.
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The other day, courtesy of things magazine, I stumbled across an amazing site full of old Cajun music for the 1920s oward. I made a playlist at Webjay for your streaming pleasure, and have added the track below to the Parking Lot playlist.
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“Nature has no responsibility to be economic, this is a flawed ideology. A food producing farm is still a farm whether or not it is ‘economically’ viable, in that the food still provides a ‘living’ for people. Somehow we must allow farms to ‘be’ irrespective of whether or not they are economically viable, -after all society seems to be able to accept that parks don’t need to be profitable.”
— from the comments on the 100 Mile Thanksgiving
It was Thanksgiving here in Canada last weekend. Being a huge fan of local food, our family contributed a roasted squash soup to the occasion, made entirely from local ingredients, sourced within 100 miles of home.
My inspiration for this is, among other things, The 100 Mile Diet, at The Tyee, British Columbia’s online newspaper and perhaps the finest example of online major media I have ever read. The series, which has been running since the spring has charted the lives of James MacKinnon and Alicia Smith as they try to eat exclusively foods grown within 100 miles of their home in Vancouver. As they have tried (and succeeded) to do this they have discovered some interesting realities about the way food is produced in this country and what it means for our diet, our economy and our society.