Well, among other places, hosting and teaching at ALIA West this past week, and on my way to Cornwall Ontario this week to work with Tenneson Woolf and Esther Matte and a team at the Canadian Labour Congress as we explore the Art of Hosting Conversations with folks from many different unions.
In transit I have stumbled on some great links this week, so here’s what I am reading:
- Dave Snowdon has an important post on measuring impact rather than outcomes.
- Drawball is worth a look for the way it takes chaos to community with art.
- Myriam Laberge on helpful interventions for tricky group dynamics
- Ashley Cooper shares the film she and Thomas Arthur made as a harvest from Leadership in a Self-Organizing World.
- Wendy Farmer-O`Neil says change is dead in a lovely provocative way.
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Facts from the longest business trip of my life
- Number of days on the road this trip: 20
- Number of seperate projects worked on: 5
- Total number of people hosted: 835
- Customs officials spoken to: 4
- Number of those officials who wished me a good flight: 1
- Number who welcomed me to their country: 3
- Number who have said “Welcome back to the United States, sir” to me in the past ten years: 0
- Number who did on Sunday: 2
- Aircraft flown on: 12
- Airports landed at: 8
- Number of these I visited on more than one separate occasion: 3
- Number of Kazakh pickerels eaten in Manitoba: 1
- Estimated distance travelled in kilometers by that fish: 8771
- Distance between my plate and the Red River, where pickerel can be found, in meters: 200
- Colleagues I collaborated with: 26
- Gray whales seen: 5
- Porpoises seen: 1
- Minutes it took to fly over the flood waters south of Winnipeg: 10
- Number of times pulled over for running a red light: 1
- Number of tickets received: 0
- Hours I played a talking drum and got paid for it: 2
- Number of passengers who snarked rudely at an Air Canada flight attendant when the captain of the plane was an hour late due to HIS flight being delayed: 7
- Minutes by which the delay was reduced thanks to these interventions: 0
- Approximate number of rock balancing sculptures set up by a group of us on the Pembroke, Ontario riverfront: 30.
- Number of local senior citizens who said they were going to go home and try that: 3
- Age, in years, of Highland Park Orkney whiskey served to me by Allistair Hain: 25
- Minutes it took me to drink it: 30
- Number of juggling balls I left home with: 7
- Number I returned home with: 1
- Indigenous languages heard spoken: 4
- Number of these I understood enough to talk to the Elder about it: 1
- Different guitars played: 3
- People spotted wcearing paper face masks during a three hour wait in San Francisco: 7
- Number of poems I wrote and read out as part of my professional duties: 2
- Number of pieces of olive and sundried tomato pesto stuffed calamari that come served on a roasted cauliflower and fennel salad at RauDZ in Kelowna: 6
- Number of beds slept in: 9
- Percent of annual rainfall that fell in Hoopa, CA during the two days I was there: 4
- Number of elk heads on the walls at Cinnebar Joe’s in Willow Creek, CA: 7
- Number of hockey sticks on the walls: 1
- Number of times my credit card was returned to me by a cab driver who drove 20 minutes out of his way to do so: 1
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Anchored down in San Francisco awaiting a delayed hop to Eureka California, from where we will drive to the Hoopa Valley and work there for a couple of days. On leg five of the epic journey.
So a little time to breathe and reflect on a couple of harvests. First from Geoff Selig who was at the Pembroke Art of Hosting, and who collected the tablecloths from a final day World Cafe on what we have learned about the power of conversation.
Second, a harvest poem from the Open Space I ran yesterday in Kelowna. This was an afternoon session for the 30th anniversary of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils and 18 conversations took place that reflected the place of these volunteers and staff people who support the arts in towns, cities, islands and villages across our province. With Open Space these days I am trying as much as possible to have a place in which a meta harvest can be collected and created. Most often this looks like a graphic recorder who gathers materials and snippets from the sessions and co-creates a harvest with session conveners and participants. This gives a high level framework upon which the individual sessions can hang, and it invites another level of coherence and pattern noticing. Yesterday. we had no graphic recorder available, so I substituted with this poem that I created partly from the titles of the 18 sessions and partly from what I was seeing emerging in the conversations. As we only had 15 minutes for a closing, I presented this in lieu of a closing circle, and it made for a nice cap on the day:
The assembly of those who host space
by Chris Corrigan
Who are we? What do we do?
How do we face change while staying true
to the art that is the heart of community unity?
What body serves the life that comes to us?
Here we pause and reflect:
Youth are the truth of growing inclusivity.
Dialogue, funding, engagement are our tools
and it’s what we create with them that fuels
the passion for change
and well-ordered offerings that welcome the stranger,
the small connections that bring us into relationship
with land, citizen, government and institution.
So how to begin to offer form
that invites the spirit of the arts to warm
the cold spaces of urban waste
and rural forgetting, arts-based, human-paced
endeavours that bring us home?
How do we step up to govern and guide
theatres, galleries, facilities, the sides
of desks off of which our best work is done?
And how do we cultivate the source of our energy,
the money and bodies that make smooth
the skid roads and rip rap that brings this enterprise alive,
delivers the promise which grows and thrives?
We host space.
The spaces between people that light up with the spark of connection
recognition, a shared story, historical succession,
the tending of the coming soon that arises
from the done before rooted in the best of now.
The space of social media
both digital and tactile that expedites
the meeting of needs,
the speaking of deeds
into the record of our collective story.
The spaces of creation and illumination
like so many star-birthing clouds
spaces that resound with the colour of the voices that sound
the melodies and harmonies of our becoming.
Spaces in which we re-create, in which we see
what we could be with the power of free
expression coursing through the veins
that carry the pulse of life – the arts beat.
And here we confront our souls,
navigate the narrow channels, reefs and shoals
that want to gobble us down,
sink us in work, overwhelm and drown
our efforts in the skookumchuk
where scarcity and demand
suck and boil together and we move uncomfortably with outstretched hand.
Only and finally in THIS space,
do we recognize friends, companions
that also walk our path between elation
and struggle, who know the million details that support creation.
Thirty years we have sat in assembly
hosting a resonance that trembles
up the coast, valleys and rivers
like so many shivers
through the spine of beauty,
a reverent bass line, upon which rests
the deep song of who we are.
A deep bow to you all –
for the boards that lead
for the boards that are tread,
for the boards that are hammered together,
the music of spruce and pine and fir
forming the floor from which we stage our flight,
take wing and soar.
This poem was composed in honour of the 30th anniversary gathering of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils. It is a reflection of the issues that were articulated in 18 Open Space dialogue sessions held on the afternoon of May 2, 2009 in Kelowna, when Assembly members gathered to find wisdom in the stories and questions that were held within their community of practice.
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Yesterday was a day of travel. Coming off a fabulous Art of Hosting in Pembroke Ontario that was a deep personal exploration of source and the spirit of hosting for many who were there. Thursday evening we gathered at Alastair Haynes’ home in the east end of Ottawa for a curry dinner followed by hours of music and whiskey, all of which wrapped up at 1am. Friday morning my mate Kathy Jourdain and I left ofr the airport, she to fly to Halifax and me to set out on a milk run across the country.
We left Ottawa at 12:35 on a nice CRJ705 (a better plane than the little CRJs that Air Canada also flies) headed for Winnipeg. It was cloudy over most of Northern Ontario, but clear over Lake Superior, the skies opening up over Whitefish Bay. And hour later we were descending over the flood waters of the Red River Valley into Winnipeg where I changed planes to a small CRJ bound for Calgary and Kelowna.
At Calgary, we landed for a station stop and a crew change, but what was to be a half hour pause turned out to be more than an hour when the plane carrying our captain failed to arrive on time. Eventually he was spotted rushing across the tarmac, and we set off on the third leg for Kelowna, out over the magnificent and clear Rocky and Kootenay Mountains. We entered the Okanagan Valley from the north and landed in Kelowna 40 minutes later.
After all that travel the best thing to do was to hook up with Jeremy Hiebert for some animal protein and hops, malt and barley juice. We jawed awhile about his evolving ice book, homeschooling, a little father to father talk about raising curious and lively kids. Funny that we didn’t really talk about music, except to note that we would both meet again in Princeton this summer for the 2nd annual Princeton Traditional Music Festival.
Here only for today, running an Open Space for the annual Assembly of BC Arts Councils and then it’s off early tomorrow morning to California, for the last leg of the epic journey of work and travel.