I’m back, and although this isn’t a photo I took, this is the scenery I drove through. A little more snow though!
I’m away again for the weekend, but back on March 1.
By the way Michael, the Queen Charlotte Islands were named for the wife of George III, but around here they are increasingly known by their Haida name, Haida Gwai’i.
Prince Rupert, British Columbia
It’s beautiful here in Prince Rupert. The sun is shining and I’ve seen the tops of mountains that I have never seen on my previous visits here. We’re on our way to Terrace to do the second of three consultation meetings I am doing on a federal government Aboriginal economic development program. This trip will take my colleague Veronica and I across Highway 16, which runs from Rupert here on the coast to Prince George. That’s where I’ll leave the highway, but the road continues all the way to Winnipeg as the Yellowhead highway, named for a Iroquois trader nicknamed Tete Jaune who made his way across this route in the 19th century.
We’re about to drive through the Coast Mountains up the Skeena River to Terrace. It should be a breathtaking ride. For more on our route today check here.
I am leaving for another extended roadt trip for a week in northern British Columbia, so blogging will once again become light. Before I go, I’ll leave you with this, which came by way of Beliefnet.com:
There are thousands upon thousands of students who have practiced meditation and obtained its fruits. Do not doubt its possibilities because of the simplicity of the method. If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
— “The Practice of Meditation” Zen Master Dogen
From Teachings of the Buddha edited by Jack Kornfield, 1993.
Right here, right now is where the truth is. Always.
Meanwhile, in Port au Prince, Haiti, my friend John Engle blogs about the unrest there:
I was in Haiti during the coup d’etat in 1991 when an estimated 500 civilians were killed in one day in Port au Prince. The horrific violence that U.S. viewers might be seeing on the television is about a three to four hour drive away from Port au Prince. While the rebels are threatening to come to the capital, we don’t anticipate this anytime soon.
The conflict is incredibly complex. The rebels for the most part, are baddies. In my opinion, Aristide and his regime are also baddies. True, he was democratically elected twice and I had hope like millions others that he was going to bring about vast improvements. The reality is that he has not and that his government is very corrupt. And, unfortunately, there is not the necessary structures in place to impeach him.
The legitimate opposition, who are not aligned with the armed rebels, is committed to using peaceful means to push Aristide to resign: demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, etc. There are a lot of good people in the opposition but, they do not have significant support from the grassroots sector.
And, in the midst of all the uncertainty and strife, my Haitian colleagues who practice Open Space and Reflection Circles push onward. Yesterday I received an invitation from Fremy Cesar and several other colleagues for an Open Space meeting March 15 on: Creating a Haiti Open Space Institute: challenges and opportunities.
You see, this is an example of all the high falutin’ musing I have been doing about living in truth. John and his Haitian colleagues like Fremy Cesar, whom I have met and who I like a lot, just keep plugging away at the little bits of truth that shine through all of the darkness that wants to surround them. In the moment it seems as if their work pales in comparison to the chaos that has engulfed parts of the country, but if civil society is exactly this kind of engagement and reflection and support for grassroots leadership, and the biggest danger facing Haiti is the breakdfown of civil society, then these guys are in fact holding open the possibility for a new society to emerge from whatever happens over the next couple of months.
Civil society is not an idea, it is a practice, and it begins with an invitation to engage. I’m holding open a belief that John and Fremy and Bayyinah and Merline and others will simply and elegantly continue their work and set the tone for Haiti’s future.
I have the best readers in the world. And in this case, I’m very lucky to count David Stevenson among my favourite clients and friends as well. Look what he left me on the subject of objective colonization of subjectivity:
Good words Chris. I have been thinking about your word for a couple of days. I want to response, with entheos. Subjectivity and subjective truth is in some ways a late arrival, therefore so too is inter subjectivity, these in themselves are fictions, myths we live by. The task of the “cultural creative” (pardon the buzz word) is a sort of hermeneutical immersion into Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty call the phenomenological world from whence the subject emerges, and not cleanly but pulling the mess of the world, the other with him, into him/her.
The individual truths “integrity, sincerity and trustworthiness” and collective truth as cultural fit, mutual understanding and rightness…a shared sense of justice are born out of that “hermeneutical immersion”. What we find there may not be “me” or the collective, but the stuff around which a “me” and a collective emerge.
Wallace Stevens wrote, “the absence of the imagination has itself to be imagined”. This is a core story of poetry and maybe metaphor. Shelly in the Defense of Poetry said that ‘the secret of morality is the imagination’. If the imagination is impaired we can’t image ourselves in the life of the other, we would have no sympathy, no way of truthing neither ours or the others being in the world.
And being in the world is a creative enterprise, as you say, not gathering facts, but living at the origin of truth, i.e. inhabited experience. Again that is not the Cartesian retreat to my subjectivity, but rather the soup of the phenomenological world out of which such things as collectivity and individuality arise, for that matter the phenomenological world itself. Again turtles. Democratic truths are meaningful to the extent that we inhabit them and are inhabited by them, as a mutually creative force, mythic energy, metaphoric.
It may be that transformation and spiritual health of the nation or the individual, comes from the capacity to sustain anxiety, instability and allow new forms to emerge. And to be able to do that, we may not need a ultimate myth, but the ability to ask the ultimate questions, say the final question Einstein asked, the one he thought was the ultimate question….”Is the universe a friendly place?” and following the Jewish theme here maybe the old Yiddish saying “man thinks god laughs” is a good response, a good creative expression to live by.
Maybe the heart of democracy is a collective laugh, free of any maliciousness, the blindfolded and the scales intact, deeply personal, unlimited in its capacity to create collective cultural fit. The myth of love is always an inclusive myth. That then would be the democratic myth, that we can include, and if Wilber is right, without compromise but as mutual transcendence. That way Mounties with turbans is about Transformation and development and gay marriage is a remembering, not only of those who are societies others, but of the wager that is the constitution.
Amazing. Thank you Dave. Time for you to get a blog my friend!