Off to Kalamazoo, Michigan to attend a retreat with the Fetzer Institute on Indigenous leadership. We’ll gather together 24 or so folks from around the US who are working with leadership in Indigenous communities, organizations and governments and ask some interesting questions about the kinds of worldviews that drive our current practice of leadership, moving us away from traditional collective leadership capacities and towards individual leadership and scientific management models. The photo above is the scene I just watched, the sun rising over Mount Baker. My friend Dustin Rivers says that the [e Sḵwxwú7mesh word for this time …
From George Nemeth some a link to this post, which I repeat in full: Today, about 35 local and regional organizations, foundations, companies and banks came together to support and actively engage the City of East Cleveland in its strategy for revitalization and transformation. No, not three, but 35. It began with an extremely simple concept, but often hard to do. We asked. We invited individuals to attend. We asked for engagement and questions. We asked for people to envision new partnerships, not based on previous relationships, but new ones. We invited individuals in a personal way to participate in …
Following a great talk from Gil Fronsdel on how self is constructed, I had a nice insight yesterday about personal identity. Fronsdel says that when something happens, there are three things going on: There is the reality There is what we think about the reality There is the “I” that is thinking. These are conditional, that is, they depend on and arise from each other. When I see something, I think something about it and my self in strengthened. For example: It’s raining today I hate rainy days. I’m not suited to living in a rainforest! In Buddhism, …
Thinking today about the challenge of engaging community for real change, and I am playing around with two simple on the surface, but difficult to execute ideas. I think though that if these ideas are executed, it creates the best possible conditions for sustained action and transformative change. The ideas, expressed as patterns, are: operate from a clear centre, and embody your future now. I was riding the ferry with my friend Patti DeSante who is at the moment in deep Zen training with Roshi Joan Halifax and exploring many aspects of embodied practice in the world. We were discussing …
Friends who fed me this week: Ashley Cooper on a piece by Parker palmer on teaching with heart and soul. Rob Bailey writes the owner’s manual on the coconut. Tenneson Woolf uses Wordle to produce a harvest whiskey river on the emotional mechanics of inspiration Mark Woods celebrates Edward Abbey’s passing with some excerpts from his work and meditations on deserts Peter Rukavina‘s unorthodox diary of his day without digital technology. Peter Rawsthorne on the ways we are shaping citizen eGovernment on Bowen Island.