I’ve been in this inquiry lately about the responsibility of love, by which I mean that the work of supporting open heartedness comes at a cost. It;s not that we need to stop supporting open heartedness, just that we have to do it with a degree of care and consciousness.
Rob Paterson today posted a photo that captures this dilemma, along with a post about NGOs in a messy world.
Burlington, Vermont
I grew up in Ontario and this my favourite time of year in Eastern North America for many reasons. But chief among those reasons is what happens to forests out here in the fall. It is hard to describe to anyone who has never seen them, a maple forest in the fall, where the colours are bright yellow, orange and red. Pitched against a blue sky, the scene is iconic, beautiful and stirs up a nostalgia in me for home.
Flying from Choicago to Burlington today, we crossed over the maple woodlots of the farming country of southern Ontario and upstate New York which were alive with the colour of turning. Then over the Adirondacks, past Mount Marcy and Skylight, two peaks I have climbed upon, these ancient worn down mountains, 20 times older than the ones I live on now but still showing their grandeur and the shape of peaks and valleys covered with pine and spruce with pockets of yellow birch and red maple. Over Lake Champlain, and into Burlington, a lovely older town on the lake, biger and more modern than I remembered it from a previous visit in 1993 but still small enough to have a main street feel about it.
Met up with my Art of Hosting mate Lenore Mewton and we stopped in at the CommunityMatters reception at the Echo Centre and then on for an excellent meal of contemporary Cantonese food at A SIngle Pebble.
Beautiful part of the world to retrun too, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the gathering tomorrow.
I’m on the road again, travelling to Burlington Vermont to Open Space at the CommunityMatters07 conference. This is a great conference, working with really interesting people focused on innovative and artistic practices for community planning.
It seems that I’m doing a fair amount of work these days with artists and with those who see themselves as practictioners of an art, whether it is my colleagues in the Art of Hosting, the community artists from the Art of Engagement or these community planners. I have a sense that there is an emerging consciousness around work: that people increasingly see themselves as practitioners and as artists, even in traditionally scientific disciplines like community planning.
I’m curious if you are thinking of your practice as an art, or, if you are an artist in other aspect of your life, what does it mean to bring your artistic sensibility to traditionally “non-artistic” fields?
Jack Martin Leith is writing again, prolifically and brilliantly on the subject of facilitation, conferences, meeting, organization and work in general.
I may be late to the party, noticng his new blog, but I’m glad to see him back on the web sharing as generously as ever.
I have been absorbed lately in a series of photographs about China form an online exhibit called “Humanizing China.” The exhibit is divided into three subject areas: Survival, Relationships and Desires. I have all three loaded into permanenty open tabs in my browser and I spend a few minutes at a time reflecting on these photos. It is like a little mindfulness meditation and a good practice of seeing to just be with these images and reflect on the multitude of untold stories that lie beneath these moments captured with light.