Halifax, Nova Scotia What a hairy day of travel that was. I’m here in Halifax for the 13th annual Open Space on Open Space conference. In an hour or so, 100 of us from all over the world will gather in in a church hall on Barrington Street, for our annual gathering, wherein we take stock of practices and the state of things Open Space. And of course we do it in Open Space. Yesterday it took me a long time to get here. My 7:00am flight was cancelled by the Air France crash in Toronto which backed up traffic …
Now this might seem a tad trite, but I heard an interview on CBC this morning with the David and Nanelle Barash, the authors of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature, a book that uses evolution as a lens for reading literature. On preview, I thought this was a silly idea, but it seems that what they have done is to review the western literary canon and note how prevalent Darwinian ideas have been over time. This, the authors claims is simply evidence that the best and most enduring pieces of literature come from very accurate observations …
It seems often that I am asked by clients to create a safe space, by which I think they mean a safe emotional space (and I’m never REALLY sure what they mean). As a facilitator I bristle at this request for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that there is no way I can guarantee that a space will be safe. The problem has always been how to tell this to a client. Yesterday, reading Christina Baldwin’s excellent “Calling the Circle” I got some good language around this question: No group can prove itself “safe” by …
You are no doubt aware of the varities of Asian throat singing whereby musicians produce overtones with their voices giving haunting and eerie sounds (see this mp3 for example). Today I stumbled on a couple of tracks from an American cowboy singer called Arthur Miles who seemed to have developed this style of singing all on his own. These two tracks are from the late 1920s and come from an excellent page of throat singing links. mp3: Arthur Miles – Lonesome Cowboy part 1 mp3: Arthur Miles – Lonesome Cowboy part 2
Colin Morley I’ve returned from my break to find the confirmation of Colin Morley’s death. Colin was an Open Space facilitator and although I never met him, I had several email conversations with him about Open Space, blogging and empowerment. His weblog is Empowerment Illustrated, and he was active in London with an initiative called Be The Change. If you visit there, you will find a memorial page for him. Colin died in the July 7 bombings in London. … be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms …