Sometimes you just need to get a new perspective on things. One of the comments on this thread asks “what does looking at it upside accomplish?” The answer is, who knows until you actually do it? Learning to see the world differently means that you have to exercise different muscles and ACTUALLY look at things differently in order to learn what comes from that.
(h/t to Ciaran Camman for the link)
Since 2004, the Art of Hosting has been offered every autumn on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where I live. I was a participant in the first one and since then have been on the hosting team every year. We love hosting people here, as the island itself is such an incredible place to be and to sink into relationship with one another as we learn and explore participatory leadership and facilitation. What I especially love about this offering is the people that we work withe on our teams and the questions we get to be in together.
In the past all of our retreats have been residential, and as we ease out of COVID restrictions we have decided that we want to offer an Art of Hosting in this region, but we’re not yet ready to make it residential. And so we are proud to announce that from September 26-28, 2022 to be held in Vancouver. You can register here.
Our team this year will consist of me, Caitlin Frost, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and Kris Archie. All four of us have stewarded the Art of Hosting in this region for many years working with Indigenous communities, non-profits, governments, philanthropy, and businesses in a huge variety of settings. We bring a deep set of experiences with the Art of Hosting,using the four fold practice in incredibly diverse contexts, working with participatory methods and leadership development with equity and decolonization lenses and putting the tools and practices to use in contexts ranging from personal work to system change around social services, mainstream philanthropy, and governance.
These three partners are some of my closest collaborators in this work and I think it is fair to say that we are all mutually inspired by each other. I am excited to see the growing list of people coming to join us for this event. The learning and creativity in the room will be amazing.
We would love to have you join us. Click the link to learn more about the program and please come and join us in Vancouver in the fall.
Is it my imagination or was 2021 and 2022 WAY harder on us all than we know? I’m in a place of finally releasing – after being able to let go of my dad and all the arrangements we were holding around his funeral – and I’m slowly feeling the release of tensions, emotions, thoughts, attachments and feelings that I have been carrying for god knows how long.
This past winter especially, during the months of ever lengthening light, has been hard. I started to turn a corner in April, but the weather in the west coast was cold and dark and dreary for almost the whole spring, and so my mood followed, interior looking, cozy, quiet, reflective. It has taken a trip to the quiet humidity of an early southern Ontario summer to finally out some distance between my self and my mood. I’m in the midst of healing from a wound I don’t know I have. Putting my feet back under me so I can be more helpful.
I’ve not been at my best these past few months, not sure anyone has. Our brittle collective psyche seems cracked and damaged, held together by small hopes and small wins. I’ve found a few things that are helping me – a regular rhythm of practice in the morning and evening, eating very good food and not much of it, learning just a little bit more jazz every day. I’m taking joy in things like supporting my TSS Rovers FC and putting the wind in the sails of young professionals who are growing in their practices of hosting and harvesting.
But I still have this feeling of “waiting for something” that I’m trying hard to shake. I see friends and colleagues “getting back to normal” but I’m different. I am still quite careful in closed spaces, limiting my travel, wearing a mask in most places. I’m still living with the pandemic, which is worse now in terms of infections than it ever has been. I can feel the bifurcation of those still practicing public health practices and those who aren’t. I haven’t had COVID and I don’t want to have it. And so I keep close to home mostly and support colleagues from afar.
And when I lift my eyes I see that there are things that really worry me in the world. The creeping fascism that is a reactionary response to the big cracks now appearing in our economic system and our civic life not to mention our climate and environment. The hyper inequality that surrounds us. The displacement and the changes wrought on community and society. The intensification of colonization, misogyny, racism, homo- and transphobia that is taking deeper root in the legislative codes that govern people I care deeply about.
I find joy in music, in my spiritual practice, in the voices of those I can mentor, vicariously through their successes.
So what am I seeing? I know I’m not alone in seeing all this. What is similar and different where you are sitting?
My friend DJ O Show drops her first video today. She’s an inspiration to me and one of the most fabulous positive and grateful humans out there.
The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; thiswas never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
And Kate Bush just got her windfall from it:
It is not going to work for everyone, but if it’s one thing I have learned since the dawn of the World Wide Web, its that we can still find the means to produce and share our own creative work and there are ways to make a living out of that.
I’m happy to lift up the voices of those who are creating incredible new ideas and art that are meaningful to me, and lift them a little to the eyes and ears of the truly top rate people I have in my circles.
So for your edification, have a listen to what Lady Pace and Shael Wrinch, a couple of neighbours of mine from Bowen Island, do on a Sunday.