Happy May Day to all my labour movement friends!
In Ottawa now, having helped host a lovely Art of Hosting workshop in Pembroke Ontario. This was my 20th Art of Hosting gathering as a participant or a teacher. It was a sweet one, with lots of work on personal hosting and what it takes to connect to source, individually and collectively. Rich threads emerging, but I wonder when I will have time to reflect on them.
Off to Kelowna now to do a half day Open Space for my friends at the ASsembly of BC Arts Councils during their annual meeting. From Kelowna I return to California for the last leg of the 20 day road trip with a vistt to Hoopa California, to look at how radio station KIDE has had an impact on the community, part of a project I am involved in with Public Radio Capital out of Minnesota to create an easy to use framework for measuring the multiple impacts of Native public radio stations in Native communities. If anyone has doen similar work, I’d be interested in hearing from you.
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I was talking to my daughter tonight on the phone. I was walking out of The Forks in Winnipeg where I had just eaten a pickerel (that I learned was from Kazakhstan…W.T.F!) and my daughter requested that I get a GPS that could beep and show where I am on this epic trip. After being on the road for eight days already, with another 12 ahead of me, I don’t even know where I am sometimes.
Yesterday I was wrapping up the 2009 Good Food Gathering in San Jose and I took a CalTrain up to SFO, hopped an Air Canada flight to Calgary, spent the night there, and flew to Winnipeg early this morning where I joined national gathering of Aboriginal youth who are meeting to thinking about how to renew a very successful federal government program. That’s a lot of travel, but it doesn’t stop there. I fly to Ottawa tomorrow and spend most of the week at an Art of Hosting in Pembroke, Ont. before flying to Kelowna for a one day Open Space and then down to California again, this time to Hoopa, to work with a small Native radio station, KIDE. I get home May 6 after 20 straight days on the road split between five different gigs.
The Kellogg gathering was a lovely experience, and I was especially tickled by how we dissolved the traditional conference model. Day one was all speakers and plenary panel presentations, with a little bit of conversation built in around the ballroom set up with six foot rounds. Day two, we got rid of the tables and held the whole day in Open Space. Day three, a day that we deliberately left free for an emergent design, featured us getting rid of the chairs. When the participants arrived, the room was empty save for a few pieces of tape on the floor. Although half the participants called it a day right there, about 250 stayed on to engage in a beautiful piece of intergenerational work. Led by our youngest team members, Norma Flores, Manny Miles and Maggie Wright, the participants self-organized into a spiral by age, with the youngest person at the centre and the oldest on the outside. Looking around that spiral was to see the journey of a person growing in the Good Food movement.
We then people gather with the ten people closest to them on the spiral and figure out a song, chant, slogan, sentence or movement, that captured what their small demographic had to say to the whole. The next 20 minutes consisted of people bot speaking to the centre and speaking from their place. A voice and story of life in the movement unfolded all the way from the energy and optimism of the youth to the stretch of middle aged people to the tired, but persistent presence of the movement’s elders. After we took a breath we moved to another room and ended it with a drum circle.
Fun.
Tomorrow, a day of Open Space with youth who are designing the future of the Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres Program and then it’s off to Ottawa to run this Art of Hosting with dear friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Kathy Jourdain and a great local team.
I’m twittering more than blogging these days. The microform works well. If you’re interested (yes Aine, YOU!) my twitter feed is here.
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The 2009 Kellogg Food and Society Gathering for Good Food began 45 minutes ago here in San Jose. Two and a half days of conversation is now underway. The gathering will feature a nearly full day in Open Space tomorrow and a participatory half day of closing. Today is the kick off – speakers and presenters and so on.
Last year we tried to awaken to social networking spirit when we were in Phoenix, but the hotel wanted $10,000 a day for universal wireless (Sheraton Wild Horse Canyon, in case you wanted to know) and so it wasn’t possible. This year, the Fairmont San Jose has realized that providing wireless means people can talk live about how great your hotel is. So we have wireless and lots of folks are twittering and blogging and flickring and facebooking. So if you would like to follow along with the collective live blog stream, you can do so through the conference website or by following the twitter feed directly which is acting as the defacto collective live blogging platform.
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On on the road again and posting will probably be light for the next little while, but here are the links that have caught my eye and fed my curiosity this week:
- Ton Zylstra on closed systems and the financial collapse
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Cross posted from my Bowen Island Journal, my long running blog about the place where I live:
Another beautiful morning here: clear and still. In the dawn chorus, there are a pair of chickadees nesting across the road from us that are the champion singers. They are doing their little call which is a two note descending tweet-tweet. One chickadee does it and the other follows on with the same song, but sung a note lower. Their rhythm is steady, and when they get out of synch, they stop and start again.
In the meantime, the crows and ravens are cawing, the flickers are drumming, towhees wheezing in the undergrowth. The nature of spring means that everyone is repeating their various sounds on a regular interval, and the forest is full of rhythm. Once in a while, warblers and wrens let loose with solos over top of the whole thing. It’s as if someone has sampled all of these birds and put them into a bed track. You could rhyme over top of it easily. The rhythm shifts and changessubtly but it is so engaging that I lay in my sleeping bag for a full hour listening raptly to the chorus, and feeling all of these beats beneath it.