On contemplations ability to deliver awe. Richard Rohr:
We’re usually blocked against being awestruck, just as we are blocked against great love and great suffering. Early-stage contemplation is largely about identifying and releasing ourselves from these blockages by recognizing the unconscious reservoir of expectations, assumptions, and beliefs in which we are already immersed. If we don’t see what’s in our reservoir, we will process all new encounters and experiences in the same old-patterned way—and nothing new will ever happen. A new idea held by the old self is never really a new idea, whereas even an old idea held by a new self will soon become fresh and refreshing.
Back in 1985 kd lang came to Vancouver for a series of gigs and she showed up on Jack Webster’s phone in show charming the irascible commentator while being precocious and confident and solid within her own skin. And what follows is the most amazing half hour of banter and genius and fun ranging from reincarnation to old Scottish songs to feminist takes on go go dancing.
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The wind and rain has swung east again and it’s stormy and very dark out, and so I’m out of the house and spending the day at the library which is such a nice bright and warm place to be. As I walked in I see that my friends Erica Olson and Marysia McGilvray have announced a S?wx?wú7mesh History Book Club for 2026 and I’m excited by that. It picks up on an initiative my friend Pauline Le Bel and I are doing to raise money for a Welcome Figure on Bowen.
Back in the day on the blogs we used to issue hat tips to other bloggers who steered us onto some good stuff. Hat tip to Cory Doctorow for this hefty article by John Lanchester on financialization published in the London Review of Books. And a hat tip to Patti Digh for this truly great list of book recommendations.
Happy 25th anniversary to Coastal First Nations, an incredible organization that has worked hard to protect the central and north coast of BC including Haida Gwaii and northern Vancouver Island. When people ask me what reconciliation really looks like I point to that organization, rooted in First Nations jurisdiction and governance, working in partnership with community, western and Indigenous scientists, knowledge keepers and experts. It’s a remarkable organization and long may it continue to represent the best of what can be in this country.
Managing tankers in the central coast is a key challenge for Coastal First Nations and everyone else who lives in the region. In Strong Coast yesterday, Kashmir Falconbridge, the deputy mayor of the community of Port Clemence on Haida Gwaii, writes about why diluted bitumen tankers should never be allowed on the north coast, specifically the Hecate Strait:
The strait is shallow, which makes the waves steep and violent. Winter storms regularly produce seas of eight to ten metres. Historical accounts describe waves reaching ten to twenty metres during exceptional storms. Short interval waves slam vessels from unpredictable angles. Currents tear through channels at speeds that can overpower even modern ships. Even our seasoned mariners will tell you that the strait demands respect at all times.
The Wall Street Journal installed a vending machine powered by AI and it ran a business for a while until it sunk it into the ground. Which, if you read the Wall Street Journal, is what much of their core market does every day. Even the way it signs off is so typical of how CEOs wrap up operations with their staff.
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I was having a great conversation today catching up with colleagues from the New Jersey Education Association who have long used the principles and framework of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting for their work. One of their offerings is the NJEA Teacher-Leader Academy which is an accredited course in participatory leadership for New Jersey school teachers. It is anchored entirely in the four-fold practice.
In chatting today, I was sharing with them some of the published peer-reviewed and other research that has been done over the years on the Art of Hosting specific to or adjacent to education. I threw a bunch of links in the chat, and before I close the tabs, I thought I’d record them here for posterity.
- Practicing the Art of Hosting: Exploring what Art of Hosting and Harvesting workshop participants understand and do. A paper by Jodi Sanford, Nicholas Stuber and Kathryn Quick looking at the results of several Art of Hosting workshops done in the early 2010s at the University of Minnesota.
- Cultivating Change in the Academy: Practicing the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter within the University of Minnesota. An open source ebook on teh application of this work throughout the university.
- Learning to facilitate deliberation: practicing the art of hosting. By Kathryn Quick and Jodi Sanford and published in Critical Policy Studies in 2014. This paper talks about how deliberation practitioners learn deliberative practice through this training.
- What the f…has research got to do with the Art of Hosting. A video of Jodi discussing this research from a gathering on harvesting in 2017.
- Hosting humanizing practices in times of complexity: Lessons to be learned from Paulo Freire. This is Elizabeth Hunt’s master thesis which links the Art of Hosting to Friere’s work.
- The Art of Hosting in Education – Shifting mindsets using participatory methodologies and practices by Laura Weisel, which documents especially the role of participatory methods in educational settings
- Parent Cafes: The Gift that Keeps on Giving. A interview with Lina Cramer who spent many years using World Cafe to convene Parent Leaders within and around public school in Illinois.
I’m struck at how much of the research here focuses on methods. There isn’t A LOT on the four fold practice as a scaffolding for leadership and facilitation practice. My friends in New Jersey are underscoring the importance of that, and I hope at some point they will contribute to this body of knowledge with their own reflections on the work.
We continue to explore this world, most recently through an annual Reimagining Education offering that is called by Jennifer Williams along with me, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle. This has been a truly amazing offering the past three years and we will offer it again in 2026 in a new location in the fall.
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Khelsilem reflects on his most valuable lesson from his first term of a Masters of Public Administration, and he hones in on insights from the Competing Values Framework relating to how good leadership holds tensions :
At the individual level, CVF is quietly demanding. It suggests that many leaders are not under-skilled, but over-specialized. Under pressure, they default to familiar patterns—control, inspiration, competition, or care. Leadership development, through this lens, is about expanding range: being able to support without avoiding accountability, to drive results without burning people out, to innovate without destabilizing the system.
Frameworks that help people hold tensions are useful in complexity. There are many, and here’s a collection of them from Diane Finegood who taught the Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. They can all be useful depending on context, needs, and intentions.
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I was replying to a question on the Art of Hosting Facebook page about whether anyone had done a low stimulus training, without a facility that fills with posters, and stickies and graphic recording and all manner of artifiacts.
I sent this reply:
I once did a one day Art of Hosting that took place on a walk in a forest here on my home island. We first sat together by a water fall to check in on the question of what is flowing and what is staying the same. We stopped at a set of old hollowed out cedar tress for a cafe conversation, where we were able to fit four groups of three inside the burnt out trucks of the old cedars. We walked around a lake while I taught about the four fold practice to a small meditation sanctuary in the woods next to a 1100 year old Douglas fir where we sat in circle. And then we set a round of of Open Space conversations and we walked halfway back for the first round. Then stopped in a meadow to start the second round. and finished those conversations before returning to the village, and the pub for beer and dinner and then I sent my friends away on the ferry. There was no writing, no sticky notes, no posters, no flip charts, nothing other than a few good questions, a teaching on the ground and some lovely conversation. I'd do it again in a second.