My dear friend John Engle is an Open Space facilitator living and working in Haiti. I just found out that he has a blog (oh joy!) and he blogs from Haiti about the recent unrest there, and how nothing is ever as simple as it seems:
Merline and I do live, witnessing the violence of grinding poverty: hungry people on one’s path so often, children living on the streets, people who are seriously ill but have no money for treatment or pain relievers. The violence that is making the news right now stems from the grinding violence of poverty, which usually doesn’t make the news.
And, in the midst of it all, our lives are full with friends and rich moments. The construction of Kent and Shelly’s house was recently completed. Our neighbor Rosias, oversaw the construction of a simple, well-built house on Merline’s and my land. We decided it was a moment to celebrate. And what fun we had. Fried plantain covered with picklees (spicy coleslaw), chicken, rice and beans, cake, wine, rhum punch, soda and beer…not to mention chocolate cake. We sang and danced and pretended to be possessed by ‘lwa’ spirits, and then to be converted and possessed by the holy spirit. The jokes and laughter flowed as freely as the big bottle of red wine.
There is a time to be sad. There is a time to be joyful.
When I think of John and Merline all I can see is their smiling faces, and all I can think of is song.
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Saskatchewan was fantastic, and I’ll write more about it soon. In addition to working with some amazing First Nations and Metis youth in Prince Albert and Saskatoon, I had a nice dinner with fellow blogger and Hockey Pundit Jordon Cooper, chatting over the NHL, Christianity and politics.
The moment I got home though, and started catching up on my reading, I got gobsmacked by Michael Herman who has just posted something on markets that resonates:
…since we know that profit, per se, is not essential to life, we can say this another way. we can say that if markets and their movements are consistent with the flow of life, and ‘profit’ in itself is not essential to life, then there must be other reasons for our being in markets. life reasons. we can’t get past the ‘profit’ unless we get underneath it to those needs whose satisfaction *is* essential to life. food, shelter, hope, future, direction, support. and if we can see and satisfy those life reasons for entering markets, real needs for living, then i think the interim ‘need’ for profit begins to dissolve.
also worth noting, markets are not only based on private ownership… they are also based on public space. no space, no market. without a commons, then we can only have me crossing over to your territory to deal. or you crossing to mine. if there is no other trading space, there may be the sense that there are no other traders, and no alternative to the prices that we quote to each other.
without some other trading space, real physical trading space or at least mindspace wherein other trading/pricing alternative choices can be plausibly imagined and analyzed, then there may be not movement between us… there is always the chance of deadlock or dominance. have you ever been in a marketplace where the seller tried to convince you that his/her product was the only option, tried to keep you from considering others? i think we naturally recoil from those who would limit our access to the rest of the ‘market’ that we know is out there.
we need big markets, open spaces, and commons because they provide the mental juice that lubricates our individual dealings, they mediate life in the same way parks and streets and meeting halls mediate our living together in physical spaces.
Reading this immediately brought to mind a quote from (who else?) Vaclav Havel, out of a short essay he published in the most recent issue of The Walrus. The essay is called “The Culture of Enterprise” and it aligns nicely with Michael’s writing and something I posted a few weeks ago on the nature of my business activities:
…it’s worth stressing that entrepreneurship is above all about the creation of values, not about the accumulation of wealth. Of course material gain – profit – is the force that drives the market economy, but it should be understood to a far greater extent as an essential instrument of human creativity, not as an end in itself. By far the best way for an entrepreneur to support culture is by shaping the culture of his or her own enterprise, its quality and its significance. The human and social measures of success, common sense, humility before the mysteries of nature and the world, consideration for future generations, a well-developed conscience – all of these things have to enter into the creation of the culture of entrepreneurship.
Amen to that.
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Off to Saskatchewan for a week, where last week a spot near Prince Albert recorded a temperature of -53.2C and was noted as the coldest place on earth that day. Blogging may be light. In Meadow Lake it got down to -60 with the wind chill.
Jesus. What the hell am I doing?
Anyway, to keep up to date while my teeth are cracking, why not subscribe to my handy RSS feed? I think at -60 light freezes, so the fibre optics may not be working, but if something does make it down the pipe, you’ll be the first to know.
[This post was updatde with the correct Atom RSS feed URL]
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Linkage:
- Large collection of books bay and about Gandhi online
- The Satir Change Model. Via ourhouse
- Ten traps for facilitators
- Math and physics visualizers. Via boing boing
- Joy Harjo blogs the passing of James Welch
- Explorations in Learning & Instruction: The Theory Into Practice Database
- The 1919 Molasses Disaster via Reinvented
- A collection of Balanced Scorecard Methodology links
- Digiquaria: a digital aquarium
- Lovely review of BBC Symphony Orchestra’s John Cage performance via Brian’s Culture Blog
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Quite a day of connecting in meatspace with cyber colleagues.
This morning it was a conversation with Marcelo Vieta at Bojangles on Denman Street in Vancouver. Marcelo is putting together a Master’s thesis on blogging using a phenomenological framework to look at the role of users and technology in the creation of online community. He’s doing research on bloggers and if you’re in Vancouver and you think about this stuff, you should get in touch with him so he can include you in his research. The conversations alone are worth it.
We talked for an hour about truth and why blogging allows us to finally embody the connections that the internet infrastructure promises. And most excitingly, we talked about why blogging is a healthy practice because, like journal writing, it causes us to be reflective of our experience, but unlike journal writing it also causes us to be attentive towards the intersubjective space in which we are projecting our thoughts. This is a rich vein of practice, it seems to me, for developing the capacity to engage in “living in truth” because it extends this practice of discerning truth within ourselves to creating shared understandings in community.
I was reflecting on the fact that my training for this happened in my community radio days at Trent Radio in Peterborough, Ontario. There, when one is putting together a late night improvisational jazz show, one is never sure if there is anyone actually listening to the broadcast. The act of radio then becomes a private performance in a potentially public space, and causes one to think carefully about what is being put out on the airwaves, even if absolutely no one is listening. It can be hairy (not to mention confusing) and was a good training ground for the kind of play between the individual and collective spheres that blogging encourages.
Following my conversation with Marcelo, I walked up the street and met Jon “Wirearchy” Husband for sushi. I haven’t seen him in a while and we talked at length about the process of making meaning in the world. It was a beautiful conversation. It made me realize that living in truth is actually an act of courage and it is so hard because we must differentiate ourselves from the culture that tries to interpret the world for us…the news anchors that cry, the pop musicians that embody emotion and trick us into believeing their version of coporate sanctioned dissent, the sports commentators that tell us how it feels to be a fan. All of this stuff is the current we swim against as we head upstream to find our own truth in the world.
Sometimes, as in the case of indigenous communities this struggle to legitimate one’s own take in the colonial world is fraught with the danger of actually bucking the power. To think that an Aboriginal story, an indigenous meaning, can actually have currency against the powers that be is a brave thought. To put it into action is even braver.
Today’s conversations brought me back to another Vaclav Havel quote, where he is describing what it feels like to suddenly have the experience of knowing your own truth:
Everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.”
— from Jonathan Schell The Unconquerable World, p. 199
This palpable sense of immediate transformation: it’s feeling a little like that these days.