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Three gems of varying nature

February 6, 2007 By Notes 2 Comments

Closing up some tabs that have been opened for a while:

  • Back to Bach: ” How, though, does Bach’s music achieve, or at least point to, transcendence?”   Good question.   A new book takes a stab at the answer.
  • Robert Paterson at his finest, as he compares our engagement with global warming to the appeasement of Hitler by Chamberlain in 1939:

“So here is my prediction.

I think that the time now is Munich. Our politicians think that they can negotiate with the institutions that really govern us. We hope they can too. After all – who wants to go to all out war.

The institutions, like Hitler, will say all the right things to make us feel better and that we are making progress – “Peace in our Time” – A better environment in our time and all we had to go was to negotiate a few terms. We could let Czechoslovakia go because we knew that this was the price for peace. So we can let the tar sands still run or worse – back Ethanol made from Industrially farmed Corn that costs more to make that it yields.
The a new crisis will emerge, as in the fall of Poland – we will say that we are really going to war. But we wont. We wont give up how we live really and we wont really take on the institutions that govern how we live.
Only after a out and out disaster, as in the fall of France or Pearl Harbor, we will get serious.”

Fog bound and flowing

February 5, 2007 By Travel 2 Comments

Seaplane terminal, Vancouver harbour, BC

Today is the beginning of a long road trip which will take me to several places in the next two weeks.   Starting off this morning in Vancouver where I am fogbound, waiting for the cloud ceiling to lift so we can fly out to Victoria.   The nature of the seaplane terminal in Vancouver harbour during a fog delay is reminiscent of what it must have felt like in the Chicago Bears dressing room yesterday as they felt their Superbowl chances slip away.   Here it is the same. On the coast, important people with important things to do travel by plane between Vancouver to Victoria and a lot of the time what they are doing is time-critical.   When the winter weather asserts its wild character on the best-laid and finest-tuned plans, faces grow red, legs start twitching and people grow anxious and angry. As flight after flight gets cancelled or further delayed, and the sense of helplessness grows, the atmosphere becomes bitter and frantic.   I really feel for the counter staff here at Harbour Air, who are eternally patient and good hearted.   They are cheerfully serving excellent espressos and capuccinos to lawyers and businessmen who don’t even look up from their Bluetooth enabled Blackberries while they desperately rebook their travel plans or apologize profusely to clients and bosses and give up altogether.

It makes matters workse that the Helijet is flying; Sikorskies are cruising up over the seaplane terminal every half hour on their way to Victoria.   When one flies over, everyone here lifts their eyes wistfully skyward and curses their bad fortune at having booked on the seaplane rather than the helicopter.

And now comes news that my flight is cancelled and so I am going to hop a ferry to the Island and make a day of travelling.   Ferries and buses it is.

[tags]harbour air[/tags]

Mary Parker Follett

February 3, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Organization

I had never come across the work of Mary Parker Follett before until this week, and I have had some Firefox tabs open with her work in them including The New State written in 1918 when it must have felt like the state itself had become a murderous and inhumane human construction, in which the role of groups in democratic process must have seemed in need of some deep reflection. Follet lays out her thesis in the very first paragraph of the work:

Politics must have a technique based on the understanding of the laws of association, that is, based on a new and progressive social psychology. Politics alone should not escape all the modern tendency of scientific method, of analysis, of efficiency engineering. The study of democracy has been based largely on the study of institutions; it should be based on the study of how men behave together. We have to deal, not with institutions, or any mechanical thing, or with abstract ideas, or “man,” or anything but just men, ordinary men. The importance of the new psychology is that it acknowledges man as the centre and shaper of his universe. In his nature all institutions are latent and perforce must be adapted to this nature. Man not things must be the starting point of the future.

Some of the work I have been doing this week is poised on the edge between human centred and process or structure centred systems, so this work, 90 years old but still fresh in many ways, is an interesting read. Key to her thoughts is looking at structures that facilitate “power with” rather than “power over” and so she is surely the deep ancestor of the practices we teach in the Art of Hosting and the organizational forms that spring from their use.

Bonus link: Mary Parker Follet on informal education:

The training for democracy can never cease while we exercise democracy. We older ones need it exactly as much as the younger ones. That education is a continuous process is a truism. It does not end with graduation day; it does not end when ‘life’ begins. Life and education must never be separated. We must have more life in our universities, more education in our life… We need education all the time and we all need education.

[tags]mary parker follet, democracy[/tags]

Nanaimo, foggy winter morning

February 2, 2007 By Travel 4 Comments

Nanaimo, BC

If you arrive in Departure Bay on the 6:30 am ferry from Horseshoe Bay, and the fog is so thick that you can hardly see from ship to shore, and you walk along the waterfront, past the marinas and chandelries and seedy nautical-themed alehouses and you take a moment to admire the gleam of a freshly burnished screw on a small tug in dry dock and you say “good morning” to everyone you pass because it’s still early enough that we’re all neighbours, and you stop to admire a surfacing eider duck and you spend a few minutes kicking yourself for not bringing your camera to photograph the hoarfrost glowing in the muted light and you pause to help a binner who has fallen off his bike on the frost, and watch people shrug at their bad luck as they wait fog bound at the seaplane terminal with the planes all tied up in the morning quiet pierced only by fog horns near and far and you get along to downtown and up into Perkins Coffee where the regulars are debating heating systems and the Canucks and the real estate market and you order a double espresso and a walnut biscotti and sit down to write, then it will take you 46 minutes.

Photo by ai.dan

Mindful learning

January 31, 2007 By Appreciative Inquiry, Art of Hosting, Being, Learning

For my friends Toke and Silas and their learning mates in Kufunda who train in the arts of peaceful warriorship in the dojo there, using swords and inquiry to acheive clarity and peace.:


One day Soshi was walking on the bank of a river with a friend. “How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the water,” exclaimed Soshi. Hi friend spoke to him thus: “You are not a fish, how do you know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?” “You are not myself,” returned Soshi. “How do you know that I do not know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?” – Kakuzo Okakura

“How can we know if we do not ask? Why should we ask if we are certain we know? All answers come out of the question. If we pay attention to our questions, we increase the power of mindful learning.”

— Ellen J. Langer The Power of Mindful Learning.

[tags]toke moeller, mindful learning[/tags]