In June I wrote about the work of living in the territory of the open heart. This is a strong personal claling for me.
Today I stumbled upon this video of the mayor of San Diego doing just that – approving a resolution to endorse same sex marriage in his city, in part because his daughter and some of his staff members are gay and lesbian. It’s a hard, tearful and emotional place to be, but it is worth it for the change that will come from decisions made in this place.
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Carman Pirie with a nice bit of noticing:
The good folks at Facebook are facing a bit of a backlash after closing the account of at least one Canadian mother whose snaps of her nursing her child were deemed obscene.The Facebook group “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” is gaining members as fast as Angelina Jolie’s fan club…. all of them rather put off by all of this.
The way I see it, the rules have changed. Just because you’ve built (and could sell for an incredible amount of cash) a social network like Facebook, doesn’t mean you own it. The users own it. Facebook can learn this now, or learn it later – but learn it they will.
My advice: take the same ingenuity used to create Facebook and build a self-governance framework for users. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for self-governance when the conditions are right.
This is pretty basic chaordic theory really…. determine the minimum amount of order required, then get out of the way. Control is not the answer.
[tags]facebook, chaordic[/tags]
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One session in Camden last week that really grabbed my interest was hosted by my dear friend and colleague Father Brian Bainbridge from Australia. Brian is another remarkable man, generous, dry in his humour and open hearted. He has been working on a little book for a while about brining Open Space to parish life, which documents his stories of working with the parishoners of St. Scholastica’s in Melbourne. In a little over two years, Brian has been exploring the transformation that comes about from shifting from the managerial worldview to the open space worldview. What he has found is a renewal in the life of the parish, and in the spiritual life of the parishioners. What interests me about this transformation is how it relates to the spiritual teachings that lie at the heart of the parish. In other words, is an Open Space worldview compatible with Christian teachings?
Brian was good enough to host a session on this topic which was attended by folks from many faith traditions. For me, it became very clear that Open Space invites us as individuals to connect with the deeper sources of creation in our world. Almost all major religions teach both a path for individual spiritual practice and a path for collective spiritual community building. Whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, Baha’i, Jew, Taoist, Muslim, Hindu or you practice a traditional spirituality, there are precepts for the life of spiritual communities that, I think, invite us to notice the source of creative energy as it flows between us. Living in community is a spiritual practice. Open Space, it seems to me, offers us a chance to connect with one another in a deeper way by connecting with the source of creativity in the universe. We call this by many names. Religious people migt call it Spirit, secular folks will see it as self-organization, Taoists call it the Tao. Whatever it is named, it is possible to experience it, and Open Space seems to create the conditions for that experience. This explains to me why many people report a much deeper experience in Open Space than in many other process I work with.
This theme surfaced at the Art of Hosting workshop I took part in later in the week in Indiana, where there was a large contingent of participants who were exploring the roots of their leadership practice and discovering that at a certain point they converged with their spiritual paths as well. This continues to be interesting for me, and I wonder what your experience of leadership, Open Space in particular and spirituality is?
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Here is a selection of interesting papers for your summer reading:
- Is it time to unplug our schools? – Almost everything published in Orion is interesting. This article looks at what schools are doing to teach a deep relationship to nature.
- Altar calls for true believers – on the challenge of practicing what we preach with respect to sustainability. This is a good piece on why systemic change in general doesn’t necessarily correlate with necessity.
- Horse Power – Old technology for a new world.
- No coffee – A great piece on Jurgen Habermas, coffeehouses and the power of conversation.
- Modern Cosmology: Science or folktale? – I think the cosmic story is both. This article argues the same, but from the perspective of a skeptical scientist.
- World Bank economist Kirk Hamilton on the planet’s real wealth. – It turns out that the greatest resource the world has is “intangible capital” – people’s wisdom and labour.
- Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. A review of a new biography about the Italian patriot Giusepe Garibaldi, for whom my local extinct volcano at the head of Howe Sound was named.
- Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch – Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom think it’s possible we live in The Matrix.
- Heretical thoughts about science and society – Freeman Dyson muses about the global warming crises. But he might be wrong. He’s been wrong before!
- The quandry of quality – a great blog post from Bob Sutton on what is hard to measure but essential nonetheless.
[tags]nature, sustainability, change, horses, Habermas, coffee, conversation, cosmology, big bang, human resources, Garibaldi, Matrix, Nick Bostrom, freeman dyson, robert crick, global warming[/tags]
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The Elders are with us.
Could we do this locally? We are building Elders into the work of the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Authority for child and family services. What if the Elders sat in Council for all of us here?