More on patience and it’s relationship to emergence. Roshi Bernie Glassman is a Zen teacher and an activist. In this interview with Andrew Cohen he describes the relationship between enlightenment and action: “practices for enlightenment,” he says,”have to lead to action in the world.” For Glassman coming out of Zen Buddhist practice, enlightenment comes from reducing your attachments and cultivating sunyata, or emptiness. In a brilliant statement, Glassman connects this emptiness to action that is of the most valuable kind: action directed at an unknown outcome: AC: How can we remain attentive to the severity of the crisis without being …
In Saskatoon, Raymon points to a new online atlas of urban Aboriginal peoples published by the University of Saskatchewan. He follows the link with this little note: . . . high school students constantly involved in the process of identity always refer to the eastside/westside struggle . . . poverty, aboriginal ancestry, housing, municipal planning bias, all contribute to identity . . . I left him a comment saying that the little bit of work I have done with Aboriginal youth in Saskatoon has been remarkable. You have young kids with multiple ancestries – Cree, Metis, Ukranian, Scottish – trying …
I’m synching up my blogroll with my RSS subscriptions. This means that what you see on the left under “Good Reads” are actually the subs in my Bloglines account. I lament the fact that this means I can’t keep up with some very good blogs, because they either don’t publish feeds, or they publish partial feeds. It’s a time and convienence issue. Also, partial feeds just don’t work for me. The only site that manages to pull me with a partial feed is defective yeti. Everyone else usually gets a miss. I know this is not a quirk specific to …
One of the things I love about the connectivity of the Internet is that I end up finding people in my own backyard who are doing really interesting things. So today, here’s a link to Jessie Sutherland a Victoria BC woman who is pioneering some reconciliation strategies using a set of tools called worldviewing which help people to understand their own world views and those of others. Worldviewing entails three sets of skills: 1. Connecting parties to their fundamental worldview 2. Learning to engage across worldview difference 3. Regenerating Indigenous cultures and re-civilising Western cultures. Jessie is using these strategies …
Sunday I was pleased to sit on a panel on the practice of leadership for the current cohort of learners with the Leadership Vancouver organization. The other panelists were amazing people: Marguerite Ford, Pam Goldsmith-Jones, and Bar-Chya Lee. Each of us spoke for 10 or 15 minutes on practices of leadership, and then we answered questions from the participants. Pam talked about embracing the call to action, quoting from a sign above the bar at the Cactus Club in Vancouver: “The House of Yes.” Marguerite quoted Senator Nancy Heath and said that “a job worth doing is worth doing badly” …