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November 23, 2003 By Uncategorized

Euan Semple has a wonderful encounter:

“Coming home from work tonight I followed two middle aged, middle class ladies up the stairs into the multi story car-park.
One of them was carrying a banner mounted on a stick printed with an anti- Bush slogan.

I asked how it had gone today and she said:

‘I wanted to go on the last one. I wasn’t there today but these sticks are really good for my dahlias'”

He then wonders about the appropriateness of this posting in light of the death and destruction in Istanbul.

I am currently reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s latest book, Creating True Peace, in which one chapter is entitled “Turning Arrows Into Flowers.” Based on that I posted a follow up in Euan’s comments:

Thich Nhat Hahn, who knows a thing or two about violence, counsels us to practice mindful consumption and not to ingest scenes of death, violence and hatred into our consciousness. This seems like avoidance on first blush, but one can see from a Buddhist perspective how it actually leads to peaceful liberation, as one avoids generating the energies that keep us locked in hatred. This is not to say one should not have compassion for victims of violence, far from it. In fact, he says that this practice is what allows us to have compassion. With hatred and violence dominating our consciouness, it is impossible to have compassion for anything.

In that respect, this story about the women making dahlia posts from protest signs is a huge teching for me, Euan. It is literally, as Thich Nhat Hahn says “turning arrows into flowers.”

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November 22, 2003 By Uncategorized

In an inspired move, the National Hockey League today staged two games outdoors in Edmonton. The temperature was -19 Celsius, and over 57,000 crammed into Commonwealth stadium for the Heritage Classic.

The first game, a 30 minute affair, featured players from the great 1980s Edmonton Oilers teams and the 1970s Montreal Canadiens teams. Edmonton won 2-0. The regular season game between the current versions of those two clubs had Montreal ekeing out a 4-3 win with goalie Jose Theordore looking cooler than anyone in his mask and touque.

There is not a pro hockey player in the world that did not learn a significant amount of his or her game on outdoor rinks in countries like Canada, the USA, Finland, Sweden, Russia or the Czech Republic. Returning hockey to its roots is a fantastic way to re-inject the spirit of the game into the professional league. Suddenly egos go out the window, and the players become kids again and actually play.

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November 20, 2003 By Uncategorized

If I disappear for a while, it’s because I have become completelyy immersed in this website, Research on Place and Space. Astounding, is perhaps the best word to use to describe it.

“This set of resources draws together work from a variety of disciplines on the concept(s) of place and space. The term ‘place’ does not necessarily have the same implications or meanings in the different disciplines. Furthermore, other terms are sometimes used in place of place, such as home, dwelling, milieu, territory, and of course, space. None of these, though, are necessarily equivalent to the notion of place.

The purpose of this set of resources is to try to cross-pollinate the notion of place across disciplines. Philosophy, for example (my own discipline), has much to learn from the way that other disciplines conceive of place, even as those disciplines have drawn on the resources of philosophy in order to reflect on place. There is no real attempt at a definition here, except perhaps by extension.

As can be seen, this set of resources begins from the concept of place, rather than space. I have added some space resources as they seem significant, and will continue to do so, but that may take awhile. Thus, a section such as physics which deals much more with space than place is quite thin at the moment.”

No apologies necessary. It’ll be years before I even get to physics!

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November 17, 2003 By Uncategorized

Run, don’t walk, to the CBC Radio webiste for Ideas where you will discover that this year’s Massey Lectures are by Thomas King on the “The Truth About Stories, a Native Narrative.” for you to savour. The lectures run all this week on Ideas, which can be heard on the web. Possibly they will show up in the archive for a spell too, but I doubt it.

However, as they do every year, House of Anansi has published the book and I picked it up today and read four of the five lectures. They are stunning. Get engaged with this stuff. I’ll post from the book when I have a little more time.

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November 15, 2003 By Uncategorized

At the Practice of Peace conference last week, there was a lot of laughing going on. There was an offering on laughing as practice, and Alexander Kjerulf offered a session that, from my vantage point through a window, looked like a battle between two sides of hysterical fighters, trying to out-joy each other.

And now comes news from Flemming Funch that an Ethiopian man named Gima Belachew has broken his own laughing record.

The story is quite a read, including this great quote:

We are living full of stress… Natural disasters, economical, political, social problems… My aim is to minimise this stress. Please let us communicate by smiling,” he said.

“Our slogan is ‘laughter, love, peace for all human beings’.”