The view from my home island, Bowen Island, looking across the Queen Charlotte Channel to Cypress Bowl, where the freestyle skiing events will be held during the Olympics. It’s 10 degrees and raining, and that cloud deck shows no sign of lifting.
Yes there is very little snow. It’s February in Vancouver. It’s always like this. In fact I should have had my snow tires off the car two weeks ago. Daffodils are coming up and spring is just around the corner.
Jack Ricchiuto publishes a new little paper on The Practice & Power of Authentic Community Engagement :
When a community is authentically engaged in conversations that matter, the conversation engages their assets in the realization of their dreams. In authentic engagement, the community becomes author of its own future.
The opposite of authentic engagement is lip service to engagement. It is an invitation to conversation that simply engages the community’s voices of victimhood and entitlement. Lip service engagement loudly proclaims commitments to change, but has no power to bring it about and is ironically the shortest distance to sustaining the status quo.
One of the cool cultural Olympiad things happening around here for the 2010 Winter Games is an interactive light exhibit which makes patterns in the sky with 20 spotlights along False Creek. We can see these from our house on Bowen Island. They are part of an interactive art installation called Vectoral Elevations. Very cool, and you can play too! Make your own pattern online and submit it. There’s a good chance we’ll see it as we have been completely entranced by these lights the last few nights.
Sunday afternoon a small group of my neighbours here on Bowen Island gathered to inaugurate an improv group. All I had was a bunch of exercises culled from the web, some eager players and a space. And that was all we needed.
After a few warm ups, we got into some evxercises and then played a few scenes. At least half of the group of eight were experienced actors, several of whom were comfortable with the openness of the structure and others who struggled a little. It was cool to see us hit some real high points (especially during on exercise called ABC where you play a scene with the dialogue rotating through each actor, and each line starting with a subsequent letter of the alphabet. What I noticed was how comfortable we were in general with a little bit of order and then space inside that to play.
For me, in addition to playing, this is really an exercise in discovering chaordic structure in practice. What is the happy balance between a little form and a little space? What constraints give us freedom and how does too much openness oppress? It’s interesting to be in this space, listening carefully, struggling to find a way to advance the line, make an offer, build on what has gone before. This is fun, but HARD, and that is the delightful challenge of it.
We’re going to keep going Monday nights at Collins Hall on Bowen Island. If you are on island, some and play! Bring a game to offer, and come prepared to learn.
The view from the Rockefeller Foundation meeting room, looking south towards the Empire State Building. Today I worked in this location with friends Willie Toliver and Kelly McGowan supporting the work of a group of executive leaders in the New York City municapl administration. I was struck by how, despite the responsibility and magnitude of influence these people have, that they are nonetheless human beings – vulnerable, falliable and authentic as the rest of us.
Here is the poem that was created from the checkout.
We are just poor weak human beings,
Resisting the call
Because we cease and desist
our belief in all we can offer
Somehow we have created
single places upon which everything hinges
and when we are put in those spaces
we confront our smallness, see it in
perspective because none of us are
big enough to be the change others expect
and we have long stopped fooling ourselves.
To confront our own smallness is terrifying
especially when people project bigness on us –
the scale of challenge, the scope of our capability.
The I we are through other people’s eyes
is never the me we see through our own.
Know this – you have been chosen only to live.
It is never over until you leave.
the only line you ever cross
is the one you choose to draw..