Two good friends of mine, Roq Gareau who works for the Canadian Border Services Agency and Orlando Pioche who works for the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, NM. Men doing serious work who work together as deep friends.
From Wendel Berry:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health.
It heals with grace.It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no ear hears it except in fragments.
Sent out to all my friends, especially Steven, Kathryn, Tenneson and Beverley, with whom I did some good work this week. And to those good friends I will be working with this coming week in Phoenix at the Good Food Gathering – Toke, Monica, Tim, Phil and Tuesday.
Working with friends is perhaps the wisest thing one can do in pursuing larcge scale change. Only with the ears and hearts of friends tuned to one another’s needs can we hear more of the wholeness of the music that only comes to us in fragments.
I’m in some big work these days, whether it is in the child and family services system here in British Columbia, or hosting a 500 person World Cafe and Open Space at the Good Food Gathering to help the good food movement find it’s way with renewed leadership and vigour. None of this is remotley possible alone. I am working with close friends.
While it may be true that one person can make a difference in the world, I believe that the difference one person makes is choosing to work with others. We have long since exited the age of heros, and I wonder if we were ever in that age.
I once sat with Tenneson Woolf on a beach on my home island and we gazed across the Strait of Georgia. We talked about how huge everything is, how small we are in relation to the vast world. And we asked this question: if we are born of this world, knowing deeply the scale in which we live in relation to everything else, why do we feel like we can make an impact? What put that impulse there? We are the only creatures that entertain the delusion that we can shift things, and yet, we persist. AND, it’s true, to the extent that we can even shift the climate of our home world. There is almost a drive to do it.
There is nothing around you right now that is not the result of a group of people working together. No structure, no machine, no community, no idea exists because one person thought of it. Everything is born in relationship, and to the extent that our relationships are filled with quality, the work we do will be filled with quality. I choose first of all to work with friends, and from there to find the work that we can do together. When we attend to this quality of relationship, everything else becomes possible. Nothing around you has ever emerged otherwise.
So thank you to my friends who make it possible for me to satisfy my personal version of the human drive to make an impact. Together, as we tune to one another and reach into possibility, we can find the holy chords of that fragmented music, and sing.
Share:

A bench at Killarney Lake near my home on Bowen Island
Recent cool stuff
- Pulse: a book on the coming age of machines inspired by living systems. The whole book is being published by RSS.
- The Evolutionary LIfe Newsletter. March edition.
- Life with Thomas: a two part video about sustainable living at the Dancing Rabbit ecovillage.
- World cafe image bank.
- Good quote from Viv: ““Knowledge is knowing you’re on a one-way street; wisdom is looking both ways anyway.”
- Why I let my 9 year old ride the subway alone. On fostering independence in children and bucking the American climate of fear…
- …and nicely paired with Bill McKibben’s exhortation towards dependence.
- Josh Waitzkin on chess, taichi and learning.
- A real cool series of videos about The World Cafe, prepared from the European World Cafe gathering in 2007.
Share:

Over my entire life, I have been incredibly blessed to work with amazing people. Being a curious person by nature, I have come to appreciate that there are teachers everywhere, if only we have the ears and the open heart to listen and experience another’s life as a teaching.
One of the reasons for starting this blog in 2002 was to capture what I was learning as I travelled through the world. I’m thinking a little about slipping some of this stuff between the covers of a book at some point and in reflecting on what has seemed important about my work and life, I started compiling a collection of things I’ve learned. You can read them on this page, and by following the link up there in the upper left hand part of your screen. I’ll update these as we go, and I’m still digging through the archives looking for stuff, but there it is so far.
Share:
Robert Paterson is musing about The Power of One. Seems his website will record 1,000,000 hits this summer. When he started blogging he had no idea that within five years, a million people would have hit the site.
So I posted a question in his comments, and I extend it to you. If you knew that in five years 1 million people would read what you have written, what would you do with that opportunity?
It might come as a surprise to some, but greatness is not predetermined. Great ideas do not emerge fully hatched, marketable and readily consumed by the ,ultitudes. They start as small thoughts, little experiements, testing the waters. Who knows whether the blog post you write today will lead to millions of readers checking in with you. You have an unprecedented historical opportunity to send a message to all those minds and hearts.
What would you want to say?
Share:
From Nancy White, a brilliant video of Tom Sparough juggling cigar boxes and talking about courage. And from Jon Husband, with whom I had a lovely conversation today related to my 30 day learning journey, an mp3 from Ben Zander about possibility.