Today in our planning for the 2009 Food and Society gathering, one of our young core team members made a bold declaration. She agreed to step up to be a target for any blame that might be generated during our work. When I later asked her out of which practice her commitment came, she said it was from the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong mind training, in which one of the slogans is “Drive all blames into one.” Trungpa Rinpoche comments on that slogan: The text says “drive all blames into one”. the reason you have to do that is …
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Apropos of the fact that Tim Merry, Monica Nissen and I are hosting a module on the Art of Intergernational Hosting at this year’s Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Action, comes this quote from Jack Ricchiuto: Every aging generation questions whether the generation coming of age has what it takes to learn into maturity as defined by the aging generation. Easy for each to think it knows better than the other. The fact is that they will always know more together than they could in isolation or competition. Hierarchy has the relevance of fossils. In an age of wisdom, …
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San Francisco OSonOS 2008 has begun with Lisa Heft opening up space in a beautiful building at San Francisco’s Presidio this morning for 120 of us from more than 15 countries to get into what Open Space is all about. This is my third worldwide OSonOS and I love these gatherings because I get to hang around with people for three days that I don;t have to explain myself to! That, I think may be a good working definition of a community of practice. THis one is different for me as I am here with my whole family, …
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Photo by aikijuanma Here is a lovely story of youth adding beauty to the world by setting up a poetry stand and giving away instantly crafted poems to anyone who asked for them. A few months ago as I was walking in Government Street in Victoria I met a woman standing beneath a tree outside Munro’s Books. The tree had small pieces of paper attached to them and when I looked closer I saw that they were poems, hanging on a “poet tree.” The poet turned out to be Yvonne Blomer and she asked me if she could read me …
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It’s kind of an old debate, but the question of “socialization” seems to come up a fair amount when I talk about homeschooling with people who aren’t familiar with that way of life. Usually I give the half-facetious remark that we don’t send our kids to school precisely because school seeks to socialize them. That starts a nice conversation about the role of institutions in shaping the behaviours of young people. In general people expect schools to do these things but then there is very little deep conversation about the role of school when folks talk about youth …