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Touring storyscapes

July 17, 2006 By Being, Uncategorized 2 Comments

I’m here in Peterborough, Ontario, where my partner Caitlin and I met and where we lived 15 years ago.   Today I drove past a place I lived in up in Lakefield, north of the city, where I took a room at the tender age of just-gone-eighteen.   After 20 years, the house is still there and the town remarkably familiar.

We are travelling here and to Ottawa and Toronto to visit places we have lived so that our kids (now aged 9 and 5) can get a sense of some of the life their parents had before they were born.   It’s remarkable to visit a place – even after 15 or 20 years – and be completely unable to see it as it is.   Instead I see a storyscape in front of me with many places so full of meaning and cloaked in personal history that it is impossible to see them as my children are seeing them, as if for the first time.   Good practice, this seeing.
It has been an interesting trip today, and will get more interesting tomorrow as we visit Trent University, with narratives running in my head as my kids squirm in the heat in the back seat of the car not seeing the point in any of this when they could be swimming in the river instead!

Anyway, this is the reason for light posting, and the light spell will continue for another week or so.

Oh and by the way, free wireless at the Holiday Inn on George Street in Peterborough.   Gotta love that.

[tags]Peterborough [/tags]

Linkage

July 6, 2006 By Notes 3 Comments

I’m throwing some love out to Jordon Cooper who got accused of plagerism because helinks to things without saying where he got the link. So here are ten pieces of linkage for you, discovered recently, from a variety of sources:

  1. Funding strategies for progressives
  2. James Howard Kunstler interview at Worldchanging: “Anybody can put a poster of the Rocky Mountains in their basement and go down there and sit and feel groovy about it, but meanwhile their town is crumbling around them.”
  3. Nipun Mehta on Organic Orgnaizational Growth: “My vision for any holistic organization would be one that anchors itself in the spirit of service and compassion, one where each of its constituents are rooted in being that change, and one where there is humility and openness for all that our conscious awareness can’t grasp.”
  4. A Taoist take on activism: “We have to do a lot of work on ourselves to make sure that the people who are making change in the world are making that change from a place of strength rather than weakness,” Legault says. “And that strength is comprised of a strong spiritual grounding — whatever spiritual grounding that is — and that we act from love and compassion rather than fear, hatred and anger.”
  5. Social innovation conversations: Podcasts with worldchangers.
  6. Choose your seatmates wisely: “We show ourselves in moments of system failure and panic and change and difficulty and crash-landings, not calm.”
  7. Watching the Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd:”After the BLACK &WHITE MGM Lion roars for the THIRD (3rd) time IMMEDIATELY hit the play button on the CD player. Be sure to turn down the sound on the TV because the dialogue and original soundtrack are not necessary for this experiment. “The Dark Side of the Moon” will provide all the sound you need.”
  8. Down with Jazz: A short story by Dervala Hanley
  9. The Spirit of the Game: “Spirit of the Game has to be on the rise, in ultimate and beyond, because technology has brought us an era where survival means valuing brains over brawn. It doesn’t matter anymore that my teammates can tackle your teammates to annihilate your key player. Because it can’t matter anymore that my country can blow up your country – everyone knows the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, and knows we’re ALL worse off if balance is lost. If the games we play reflect society, then there’s a damn good reason why kids should learn the negotiation skills ultimate teaches. We’re their examples”
  10. Incredible photos of the shapes of a flock of 1,000,000 European starlings

Facilitator as artist, duty as job description

July 6, 2006 By Facilitation, Poetry, Practice 2 Comments

From whiskey river today:

The Artist’s Duty

So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame
To extend all boundaries
To fog them in right over the plate
To kill only what is ridiculous
To establish problem
To ignore solutions
To listen to no one
To omit nothing
To contradict everything
To generate the free brain
To bear no cross
To take part in no crucifixion
To tinkle a warning when mankind strays
To explode upon all parties
To wound deeper than the soldier
To heal this poor obstinate monkey once and for all

To verify the irrational
To exaggerate all things
To inhibit everyone
To lubricate each proportion
To experience only experience

To set a flame in the high air
To exclaim at the commonplace alone
To cause the unseen eyes to open

To admire only the absurd
To be concerned with every profession save his own
To raise a fortuitous stink on the boulevards of truth and beauty
To desire an electrifiable intercourse with a female alligator
To lift the flesh above the suffering
To forgive the beautiful its disconsolate deceit

To flash his vengeful badge at every abyss

To HAPPEN

It is the artist’s duty to be alive
To drag people into glittering occupations

To blush perpetually in gaping innocence
To drift happily through the ruined race-intelligence
To burrow beneath the subconscious
To defend the unreal at the cost of his reason
To obey each outrageous impulse
To commit his company to all enchantments.
— Kenneth Patchen

The best facilitators, the best consultants and the best and truest helpers are like that too.

[tags]kenneth patchen[/tags]

My collection of Open Space stories

July 5, 2006 By Facilitation, Open Space, Stories

I have just finished posting a collection of 21 stories of Open Space events I have facilitated over the past 6 years.   Most of these stories are about community-based events in Aboriginal communities here in Canada, but I believe they have lessons about the practice of Open Space that are more widely applicable in different settings and for unconferences too.

I hope you may find the collection useful.

[tags]unconference[/tags]

Remembering the birth of my son

July 4, 2006 By Being, Stories One Comment

I was trolling through some old emails tonight and I discovered a note I had written to the OSLIST on the birth of my son five and a half years ago. I thought I’d share it here:

It’s funny thing. The smallest spaces need the most attention.
Sometimes, the smallest are the largest.

On Tuesday (and for all of Monday and most of Sunday) I was opening
space for my second child, a boy named Finn Sinclair Corrigan-Frost, who
entered the world singing before he was fully born — the Elders call it
“bringing greetings from the spirt world” — on Novemer 7.

He was born at home in the company of two midwives, a doula, my
partner’s mother and our 3 year old daughter, Aine, who cut the cord and
officially brought him into our world.

It was a good birth and a long, but good labour. He is healthy and my
partner Caitlin is doing really well. As we were walking around down by
the ocean on Monday, with Caitlin in labour and a long day and night
ahead of us, she turned to me and said “it’s a funny thing being in
labour. The old world has passed away and the new one has yet to
begin. I feel like a spirit, invisible to everyone, dwelling in the
boundary between the two worlds, holding space for what is about to
come.”

Those words have had a profound impact on me, and I recently wrote a song in which I used Caitlin’s line without remembering it at all.

And the boy? Just a beautiful young man, with whom I am currently enjoying hours and hours of playing Pokemon and Dungeons and Dragons.