- Languid crepuscular morning. The sky is barely stirring. Ravens scream for summer. #
- Spent an hour pitting cherries, up to my wrists in juice, midwifing little seeds. #
- Train yourself only to see relationships. This zephyr, that flock of juncos, the thick cool air of morning. All connected. #
- Dedicate yourself to something if only to find out what you need to clear in yourself so you can be fully present with the world. #
- Well done Netherlands! #
- Perfect Bowen summer evening. Good friends BBQ salmon, a swim in the sea and sleeping outside in the warn still air. Ahhhhhh… #
- Cleansed all night by cool katabatic winds flowing off our mountain. Smudged by the breezeshed. Diamond clear morning, rarest of dawns. #
- RT @thomasart: At work today in the Reverie Research Department at the Institute for Sunny Days on the Back Deck. #
- The day as it was here on Bowen: http://bit.ly/blypuq #
- RT @wendyfarmer: Cajoling passion & responsibility without conferring adequate authority is a set up. <– Excellent! #
- It is so hot. Into Vancouver to watch the Whitecaps play tonight. #
- you tube redirecting to wikipedia? wtf? #
- The sun has beat the air and sea to a flat calm liquid. Everything feels as if it is swimming. Even the chickadees are panting. #
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Back to some regular noticing:
- An Indian MP calls for a 21st century residential school policy. Appalling.
- Johnnie Moore finds research that vindicates my approach of having questions rather than goals.
- Metafilter post on desire lines.
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Or so says the police officer about 3:50 minutes into this video. Wow. If that is true, then York Regional Police officer 815 was acting out of his jurisdiction and was therefore simply a bully. With a sidearm.
Think about that.
There are dozens and dozens of stories like this coming out of the G20. Only a public inquiry will get to the bottom of that, and it needs to result in some clear guidelines for how police enforce laws within the context of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, even when there are special circumstances. Since 9/11 politicians and police have used “security” as a pretext for suspending civil rights with dubious pieces of legislation and unlawful policing behaviour. This has to stop. If indeed we live in a world with heightened security threats, we have to find ways to deal with them precisely and without arbitrary measures. If the state gets sloppy with law enforcement, it crosses the line. In a democracy you cannot round up dozens of people on the pretext that there might be someone hiding among them. Those who call for that have no idea what they are asking for. We will become a police state no different from other states in which civil rights are suspend for arbitrary reasons.
The cop is right. This ain’t Canada right now. That needs to change.
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There is never a time when we are not a participant in this world. Our mere presence in any place makes us a participant. So rule number one is “there is no outside.”
In fact I think the very idea that we can somehow be separate from what is going on around is is actually a delusion and it causes great problems. It blinds us to our own influence in a field and it actually hides our own gifts and brilliance and denies them from being used as people find their way.
In most indigenous cultures work with, there is no outside. Elders do not stand apart from the groups they are working with. They insert themselves and hold space from within. They are never shy to share what they know, and their awareness of their presence and its power is a gift to the community.
To me this is as it should be. Indigenous science is about discovering the connections between things, rather than isolating something and trying to understand it free from the externalities that tie it to everything else. I think this is why the kind of leadership we all are discovering is most valuable in indigenous communities: it gives us a way of looking at and thinking about the world that encourages us to dive in, connect and put relationships to use. In this way the path of hosting as we are discovering in the AoH community of practice is very different from standard business practices of facilitation and mediation, where the facilitator stands apart from the group and tries not to influence the outcomes. I personally could never understand how that is even possible, let alone the impulse to withhold useful insights and perspectives from a group that is struggling.
At any rate, all I would encourage you to do is admit that you ARE in the field, that the field is influenced by your being there and that your first job is of course to host yourself well, so that with consciousness, you can play a part in the whole that is beneficial and serves the life that wants to emerge in the field. This is not easy, which is why it is an art. And it is a practice of constant, sharpened awareness.
In Anishnaabemowin, the language of Anishnaabe people, the word is Dinewemaganig means “all my relations” or more precisely “I belong to everything.” That is the first principle. From there, leadership takes on a very different face.
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