Fitfully tracing portals for five years, wood s lot celebrates a birthday.

I love Mark Wood’s weblog. It was one of my first bloggy reads and I continue to read it several times a week, finding myself taken far away by his amazing collection of links and findings. Unfortunately, he hand rolls the blog and has never produced an RSS feed of any quality, so he doesn’t show up in my links roll, which is powered by Bloglines. But he’s always been generous with sending traffic my way, and I’ve appreciated that and the occasional email exchange we have had over the years, so here’s a shout out to Mark and a great big thank you for the continuing education in cultural studies that unfurls from the garage on the river in Perth, Ontario.

If you’ve never heard Metis music before, you should go over to metisradio.fm and tune in. This is a good quality 64kb stream of traditional and contemporary Metis music.

Metis music is predominantly a fiddle genre, springing out of the traditional cultures of the French and Scottish traders that went west and married First Nations women. As the Metis Nation arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did the music, becoming a unique genre of fiddling, although borrowing many tunes and styles from Celtic, French, Old Time and, more recently, country music.

Saying that Metis music is just fiddle music doesn’t do it justice though. Traditional influences still pervade the music and hand drumming, singing and chanting are still a part of the Metis music world. It is perhaps the most diverse single genre of traditional North American music.

One of the real treasures of this site is the collection of recordings from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota, which is a strong home of the American parts of the Metis Nation. These recordings are astounding quality and give an amazing overview of this diversity and range of music produced out of the French, Scottish and Chippewa traditions.

Bonus stream: Aboriginal Voices Radio Canada’s national Aboriginal broadcaster, broadcasting in Toronto on 106.5fm and across the web.

I’ve just returned from a very interesting small conference in Arizona, where we were talking about philanthropy, discovery and education. And I have some questions for you all…

• What if the essential political questions of our time – the questions that ask “how should we do things?” – were not about right vs. left but bottom-up vs. top down? What would that do to the political spectrum and its discourse?
• What if our work was about creating space – for discovery, connection and collaboration – rather than narrowing down options and coming up with answers?
• What if accountability was about trust, intimacy and love, and not measurement, punishment and suspicion? How would we foster such a system? What would it mean for politics, governance, leadership and community?

I’d be really curious about your answers, or further questions that are suggested by this short list.

It has occurred to me that the act of driving can be both the greatest source of stress in my life, or one of the best opportunities to develop a practice of compassion, relaxation and offering. Being the kind of guy that prefers the latter to the former, I have developed a driving practice to enhance those qualities.

The basic theory is this: when you are on the road, driving in traffic you have unlimited space to give others. Ironically, there is only very limited space to TAKE, because taking space usually means speeding up, driving dangerously and aggressively. Giving space however is simple. It means slowing down. Doing that creates as much space as you need to then give away to someone else. It’s almost magic.

Every time you are driving, you can open space and give it to others almost constantly. If someone wants in, let them in. If someone is waiting to cross the road, stop and let them cross. If someone is tailgating you, slow down so that they can pass. Let people have the speed they want to have.

Start doing this and you realize that it is only a small step to actually inviting people to occupy the space you open for them. Once people realize that you are actually offering them the chance to go ahead, they will gladly wave at you, flash their lights in appreciation or nod and smile. That feeds you soul. You can drive all day in traffic and arrive where you are going refreshed because you have been doing nothing but giving all day long.

This sets up a nice positive feedback loop. The guy that cuts you off and speeds ahead of you is actually receiving the gift you are creating for him. Slow down, back off and you will become more relaxed and he won’t be so uptight. There is no race for him to win, and so the competition evaporates.

The woman on her cell phone weaving in and out of traffic needs space because her attention is divided. Giving her all kinds of space is a gift and keeps you safe too. She stops weaving because things are not so tight around her.

It sounds bizarre, but now, on the rare occasions when I actually have to drive in heavy traffic I look forward to it, and to the results of giving unconditionally to those who need more of what I have to offer.

On the weekend I was happy to be running an Open Space event for 125 people who live across British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. We had a ball, and I’ll write more shortly.

One of the great things that happened there was that four amazing people joined me in holding space: Wendy Farmer-O’Neil, Valerie Embry, Nancy McPhee and Beverley Neff.

A million small and interesting conversations happened between us during the event, a great side effect of working with a team. One of them was about the vagaries of praise and blame, and especially how important it is to be stable as a facilitator.

Ever the trickster, Wendy illuminated the topic with this parable:

Want more wisdom like this? Come to our training in November!

🙂