Using the tools of democracy I voted today. Like all elections, I stuffed my ballot in the box and a little voice said �Is that it? People have died for this?� Elections are always anti-climactic. Thirty-five days of being bombarded by messages and courted by spin leading to one moment � barely one second � when we mark an X in a circle and are done with it, somehow unsure if our singular contribution matters. Many Canadians will not vote today precisely because they feel too small to make a difference, even in an election like this where small margins …
We are in the midst of a federal election here in Canada and it’s getting nasty. In an effort to counteract some of the negative spin, our public broadcaster CBC has been running a number of interesting documentaries. Today a producer followed three candidates in Toronto who were struggling with how to work with diversity rather than falling into the political trap of polarizing people. One of the candidates was Borys Wrzesnewskyj who is a Liberal running in the west end of Toronto. He is the owner of the Future Bakery in Toronto, a thriving local chain that was founded …
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide. I’ve been enjoying James Joyce’s Ulysses as posted by Botheration. One page a day, pushed through my RSS feeder. What a great way to read a great book. So what if it takes two years!
Dave Pollard offers a graduation address for all those of us who had lame ones when we matriculated: So your generation is in a double bind. You have been born into a vast and terrible prison that you think of as the only way to live, and nothing has equipped you to even see the need to escape, let alone the means. And the ecological, and hence human, crisis that the astonishing growth of this prison is precipitating will only be felt in your children’s, perhaps even your grandchildren’s lifetimes. How can anyone expect you to do anything under these …
Lilia Efimova notes that Open Space makes you the one in charge and then asks: “‘No way to delegate’ 🙂 Can we found a trigger for self-organised attitude here?” Yup. And the keys, as Harrison Owen will say repeatedly are that OST works with passion bounded by responsibility. Passion is what gets you out of your seat, responsibility is what causes you to take action. With these two ingredients, and the tools to support them, you have a trigger for self organizing systems in humans. Open Space embodies a dance from individual intention, to collective storytelling, to self organization to …