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Crossing waters

February 7, 2007 By Travel 3 Comments

On board the Victoria Clipper, Strait of Juan de Fuca

I’m out in the middle of a big piece of water that seperates Vancouver Island from the Olympic Penisula.   Historically this strait is significant.   Many of the Europeans who arrived here in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries had a sense that this might be the Northwest Passage.   It is the first big opening in the coast that you reach coming north from San Franciso Bay, and it seems to head roughly the right way.   It didn’t take long for Europeans to discover that it is actually the entrance to the Salish Sea, encompassing the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and the inland archipelagos of islands that ie between Vancouver Island and the solid and inpenatrable North American continental mainland.

This is the first time I’ve crossed this body of water, and it’s dark and rainy this evening so there isn’t much to see.   The ferry itself is a catamaran, so the seating is more like a train than it is on our single hulled ships in BC.   Also the food is zipped up in a ton of plastic, but the wild salmon chunk was pretty good.   We are right now heading to Seattle where I will spend a few days before travelling south with the family to meet mates Tennesson Woolf, Teresa Posakiny and Roq Gareau for an Art of Hosting with our friends at the Navajo Nation health service.   It’s funny to think of this trip from here, in the rainy northwest, to the cold high desert of Navajo country.

[tags]Victoria clipper, juan de fuca strait[/tags]

Living life away from home

February 6, 2007 By First Nations, Travel, Uncategorized One Comment

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Victoria, BC
Sitting at a window seat at Moka House in the funkyhip Cook Street village district of Victoria.   In a tourist town, little neighbourhoods like this are the ones that keep locals sane.   I’m here partly because it appears that I am turning into more and more of a local around here.
We did a good day of work today with the VIATT crew, cracking some solid communications questions and planning our Art of Hosting training for later next month.   We are getting deep into a process of community linkage that will expand and solidify the capacity of the indigenous communities of Vancouver Island to participate and run the set of child and family services that are provided in their communities.   There is some solid vision at play here and a very good team of curious, spirited and innovative people who bring a variety of perspectives to every question.   The conversations we have are amazing, and there is deep a solid commitment to the core purpose of the initiative: to keep children at the centre of our deliberations.   We have even taken to the practice of placing pictures of our kids on the table in the centre of our workspace, as you can see from the photo above.

One result of the good quality of the work here and the desire to go very deep into the fundamental work is the fact that it seems like I’ll be spending a lot more time in Victoria over the next year.   And so, I’m looking for ways to bring some normalcy to my life here.   Last night I trained with a local Taekwondo school and tonight I stopped by the house of a friend and colleague tonight to cook supper.   He has been on long term disability for more than a year battling the extreme pain of chronic arthritis and suffering the attendant demons, slings and arrows that come with it.   It was good to see him, good to stand in a kitchen and cook some curry and have a bit of a semblance of a real life, even if the family are back home on the Island that I rarely see these days.

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]