Clarksburg, Ontario Cruising the highways and byways of southern Georgian Bay in my old homeland of Ontario. Eating lots of corn, swimming in the lake and cursing our luck at an overcast sky for the meteor shower tonight. Spent some time with my old friend Stephen Couchman with whom I killed many nights in Peterbourough, Ontario in our student days doing performance art and making music. Nice to connect with one’s original collaborators. I’ll be back soon…in the meantime, have a look at what I’m reading on this trip.
Not quite done with The Gift yet, although definitely slowing down. Chapter five of the book deals with the community that is created by gifts and goes into some interesting detail about the scientific community and the implications of gift exchange on the free market. We’ll save the free market piece for the next post. Right now I want to focus on something Hyde says that has applicability in the blogging world. Hyde takes the view that “gift exchange at the level of the group offers equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability…[T]he conversion of gifts to commodities will …
Last year I did a series of Open Space meetings for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team, an Aboriginal child welfare authority on Vancouver Island. We were discussing the future of child welfare service delivery on the Island. There were three Open Space events that followed presentations by Dr. Martin Brokenleg. In Fort Rupert, near Port Hardy, we met in the big house, which is one of the biggest on the coast. This page of photos documents some of that gathering, including the above wonderful shot of a small group meeting at the base of one of the four huge …
Utah Phillips, from thetyee.ca Utah Phillips is back in our neck of the woods: ?If you and I can agree to do our share of the work in this world, if you and I can agree to take only what we need and put back what we can, if you and I can agree to care for the afflicted, if you and I can agree not to hurt anybody, if you and I can agree to in some small way to get the work of the world done without the boss and the state, that’s anarchism.? I’ve resisted political labels …
I’ve written before about the Aboriginal youth I’m lucky to be working with. One of them, Ginger Gosnell, is involved with the Assembly of First Nations and she shares some thoughts on the recent annual general assembly: That is one of the differences between the current generation and the future generation of leaders. Young people don’t have the mind set that certain personalities will make in the end all the difference to an initiative’s successs…..As Nelson Mandela says, ‘it is what you make out of what you have, not what you are given that seperates one person from the next’….Overall, …