So on Saturday, i stumble across a nice piece of music about Vanuatu and I write a little post about it and mention my old friend John Salong, with whom I lived in 1988.
Not five minutes ago I just got off a Skype call with him. That’s less than four days from the Parking Lot to Google To John and back over Skype.
Turns out that someone who was working with him Googled him, found my posting and John called to say hi and to catch up. We’re both fathers of 8-9 year kids, we’re both working in the same field – facilitation and community development – and we were both equally gobsmacked at the amazing ability of Skype and the web to bring us back together.
It’s times like this when I feel like Skype will save the world.
There is a great flowering of dialogic facilitation training this month around these parts in southern British Columbia and northern Washington State. First Peggy Holman and Tom Cato are offering an Appreciative Inquiry training in Seattle from October 18-21.
Following that, Toke Paludan Moeller and friends will be right here on Bowen Island offering the excellent Art of Hosting gathering which I can highly recommend. That workshop will run October 30 to November 3 which is a great time to be here on our island, as we celebrate Hallowe’en as a quasi-national holiday. That workshop will also feature an alumni gathering that I’ll be at on November 2 and 3.
Finally, you can top off your learning month with an Open Space practice workshop offered by myself and Wendy Farmer-O’Neil in Nanaimo from November 15-17.
Port Alberni, BC
I am on the road here, travelling around Vancouver Island hosting conversations with people about what seems like an impossible future.
And as we move into discussions about the work we are doing, I find myself more and more focused on finding the questions that help us discern these two subtle presences: the seed of the emergent future crossing the abyss back to our present moment, and the place where our feet fall on the other side of that abyss, the place where we our hearts are all ready present in that desired future.
I am facilitating conversations that, if done well, simply give us a taste, tune our palettes and turn us into gourmands of the possible.
This is all very tricky, yet so rich.
I was saddened to learn today that Bernie Whiteford – Wap-Pisk-Ki-Kakiw Isqueo (White Raven Woman) – passed away on April 28. Her obituary at RedwayBC mentions a short illness.
Bernie was a strong advocate for the rights of Aboriginal women in BC and was the executive director of the Helping Spirit Lodge Society.. Helping Spirit Lodge is an organization on the front lines of stopping violence and creating healthy families and communities. It is an important part of the Vancouver Aboriginal community and Bernie was a key voice in that community. I knew her from various community events I facilitated and work I did on child welfare over the years. She’ll be missed greatly.
As a musician one of my favourite things about the web is the way we can trade music on it. I am a music junky and with the rise of file sharing technology, my ears have opened wide at what is out there.
I’ve been toying around with Webjay for a while, which is a way of compiling playlists of music all of which, in my case, is offered free and legally by artists, record labels and others. I have two playlists in the “Little Projects” section to the left, one which is a small collection of Canadian songs and another which is my ever changing top 40 of world music. To those I now add this playlist, the soundtrack of Parking Lot, in which you may find a nice variety of tunes offered somewhat in the spirit of my favourite radio show, Late Junction from BBC Radio Three.
And so I’ll launch this soundtrack with this piece called “Here we Come Around” from Dear Nora.