David, a friend of mine, and I were having a conversation the other day about religion, We were both trying to understand our present day connection to Christianity. For him, he was trying to reconcile faith with his humanist upbringing and I related how I was very interested for a time in becoming a Minister when I was a teenager, and since then drifted away from mainstream Christianity although I have had an enduring, although somewhat academic, interest in Christian spirituality. It only creeps into practice through music: I sing in a Christian Evensong chorale and that experience has brought me into closer contact with Christianity. I still do not call myself a Christian, unable to accept the truth of belief as stated in the Nicene Creed.
Ironically however, singing has not brought me closer to Christian teaching per se, but rather has drawn me closer to the inspiration for the music, tapping some of the same spirit that Bach and Bruckner and Verdi sensed.
I have written a little over the years about Christianity, and I’m number one on Google for “beatitudes vs. ten commandments”, because of this post from a few years ago. There is much that resonates with me about Christianity, and especially from the example of Christ’s life. But there is much that I cannot abide, like the tales of genocide in the Old Testament in the name of the God that sent Christ to earth.
So in conversation with my friend I expressed a concern that so much of Christian sacred text seems to me to be pointless, and yet, if one takes this as necessarily complete, then it all must come with the territory. I can figure out how Leviticus or Daniel applies to my life today, and I cannot accept those prescritions on my life and family. So am I just to selcect and pick and choose? How is it that Christians reconcile their belief in the Bible as the exclusive source of their religion with some of the strange things that are contained in there?
My friend David gave me the appreciative answer to this question: notice what resonates with you and honour that response. There must be something to it. This is not the answer that serves to move one closer to becoming a practicing Christian, but it is a useful response for a non-Christian in understanding the value of these stories and the traditions that have supported them for thousands of years
And here, finally, is good advice. If we work on tuning ourselves, we can become more and more sensitive to what might land on us and find ways to incorporate that into the evolving beings that we are.
I am a very mindful driver. For me driving is an exercise in flow and self-organization and I even see it as a bit of a giving practice.
So I was intensely interested when my friend Kathryn Thompson told me of an article entitled “Why don’t we do it in the road? recently published in Salon, which talks about how to make streets safer by removing controls.
“One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. “The history of traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos,” he says. “Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive.”
In the past, in this space, I posted a video of traffic in India which demonstrates this point.
Chaos does make us more mindful. We make better choices in more chaotic environments because we pay much closer attention to the subtleties of what is happening around us. You cannot be on your cellphone, or talking to others or letting your mind wander when you are driving in unregulated traffic. You have to use all of the capacities that every driving instructor tries to teach you when you are sixteen. Pay attention, anticipate, leave space and be careful. Good advice for a chaotic world.
In a meeting yesterday we were discussing the fact that the human species is approaching a cliff, a massive precipice, and that we have so far been completely unable to figure out how to turn back from the edge.
I suggested that maybe it’s too late for that and we only have time to teach each other how to fly.
Also in Peterbourgh I met with David Newhouse, perhaps my most influential university teacher and a good friend. David arrived at Trent in 1989 from the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He came to teach in the Native Management and Economic Development Program, which at that time was a fledgling effort, mostly focused on economic development and with no real management curriculum. I was hired in May of 1989 to help research the field of native management, and I spent the first month of my employment searching for one book – any book! – on the subject. There simply wasn’t one anywhere.
We quickly realized that if we wanted to teach the subject, we had to create it. David, being an MBA graduate of Western University, felt strongly that we should be using the Western/Harvard case study method, which meant that I, as the researcher, needed to produce some cases. And thus began a three year collaboration during which I wrote or co-wrote something like 24 case studies for teaching management in Aboriginal communities and organizations.
My opus magnum of case studies was a set of four I did on the National Association of Friendship Centre’s process to negotiation with the federal government for their funding program. It was a large set, with many documents and many conversations detailed from notes taken by NAFC staff. Working on that case set introduced me to the NAFC, and when I subsequently moved to Ottawa in 1991, I started working there. They very much started my career, and my connection to them was facilitated by David and the cases I put together.
In my final year I undertook an honours thesis with David as my supervisor. I produced an 80 page piece of original research, developing a model that might be useful for looking at Aboriginal organizational culture. It was a rich learning experience writing that paper – the richest of my entire academic career – and on its completion (receiving the only A+ of my entire academic career) I felt no need to pursue academic studies further.
David is not a character without controversy, and this is why I love him. He needles around the edges of things, finding the questions that change everything. He is uncompromising, but curious and he quietly holds ground where he feels that truth is at stake. Here’s what he says on his profile page for the Department of Indigenous Studies:
“My interest is in examining the ideas that are forming the basis of collective, i.e. societal or institutional action within contemporary Aboriginal society. I want to try and counter the idea that we laid in front of the bulldozer of western civilization and waited for it to flatten us. The historical and contemporary record indicates that we have always understood the world around us, knew what was happening and tried to affect the world to make it more hospitable and amicable to us. For the most part, our agency as living, thinking human beings has been erased. I want to show how we used our imaginations to live in the world we found ourselves in.“
I love that…it sums up much I know about this man.
The ideas that I was exposed to working with David have constantly resurfaced in my life over the past 15 years. Like all good teachers, he teaches by being. He offers much in his stance towards a world obsessed with the pre, post- and present day modernity of indigenous peoples by simply refusing to allow anyone to pin it all down. Indigenous life is a slippery every changing world of transformation, conversation and change, and that is what David is too. There are no easy answers, only an invitation to converse together thereby discover together who and where we are.
The road trip continues with visits this week to two teachers in Peterborough who have deeply influenced my life: John Muir and David Newhouse.
John Muir was one of the founders of Trent Radio in Peterborough, and is the current general manager. He has been a fixture in Peterborough for 25 years or more and is an inspiriing teacher in many ways. First, he is all about making technology accessible. He was a great teacher of Caitlin’s when she was introduced to the medium of radio and Tuesday he worked patiently with our kids as they recorded promos for Trent Radio.
Second, John has created a unique institution in Trent Radio, and one which has influenced my thinking about community ever since I was a programmer and Board member there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Trent Radio is an organization that supports and then stays out of the way of the self-expression of programmers and producers. When I was a producer there, the station management made a big deal about the fact that there was no “brand” to Trent Radio. The call letters, CFFF, were really hard to say on the fly. No easy to remember acronym, no name for the station. When you produced a program at Trent Radio the station was yours, and you were the producer, prgrammer and host. It was a profound example of passion bounded by responsibility, self-expression within the boundaires of a community definition of standards. If you programmed something completely irresponsible, the station might lose its license and everyone would suffer. So people took great care to both push the boundaries and preserve the viability of the station.
Third, John’s thinking about the nature of community radio – and you could spend a week with him and it would never be enough – contributed to how I think about various media like blogging. Many people have used the frame of publishing to understand blogging, but I am perhaps more heavily influenced by community radio. Blogs are like channels and the small audience that would follow your work often deeply engage with your thoughts. Community radio is both peer-to-peer and one-to-many. It’s no surprise perhaps that the ‘zine scene in North America was closely aligned with campus/community radio. Anyone could pick up your ‘zine, but it was intended for a small audience, who formed a community around the ideas, the scene, or the story. Same with the shows I hosted on Trent Radio, dealing with jazz, blues and improvisational music. Interesting.
For John – and for me – the advent of podcasting was a beautiful marriage of two media that, far from being opposites, are actually mates occupying a spectrum of expression. It is no surprise then that some of us, including Rob Paterson, consider John something of a godfather of podcasting, a notion that dates back to a conference called Zap your PRAM hosted by Peter Rukavina (another Trent Radio alumn) on Prince Edward Island during which Dave Winer and John had a conversation about John’s ideas on radio, the internet, audience and community.
John continues to be an inspiration for the way he holds space in community. He recently formed a consortium to buy some Saldier House, a wonderful old building that Trent University liquidated when it closed my old college, Peter Robinson. The non-profit that bought the building uses it to support arts and culture events in a space that can host performances, workshops, studios and other cultural infrastructure. My experience of John’s role in the ever changing community of Peterborough is to quietly hold principles and values that serve a culture of invitation, flow, and connection and in this sense, having grown up in many ways within the communities John formed, I see myself very much as a grateful product of his work.
[tags]John Muir, Trent Radio, podcasting, Peterborough, Peter Rukavina[/tags]