Menu

Many cups of tea

May 21, 2022 By Being, Travel 7 Comments

It is apparently International Tea Day, and my friend Ciaran Camman sent along this beautiful twitter thread describing tea culture across the Muslim world. It put me in mind of some memorable cups of tea I have had in my time:

  • I fell in love with Turkish tea culture sipping tea from tulip glasses in Istanbul, during summer downpours in Taksim, by the side of the Bosphoros, or in the quiet back alleys of the old town as the calls to prayer echoed through the streets. Or on a gullet in the quiet waters off Demera, or in the mountains of Selçuk.
  • A impromptu stop in for a gorgeous cup of tea and a perfect scone with my beloved beside the Ouse in St. Ives in the UK on a summer day, pictured above.
  • Developing a deep love of the cornflower flavoured black tea that we used to buy from The Tea Merchant on the Byward market in Ottawa.
  • Endless cups of Dilmah tea with my lovely mother-in-law. She introduced me to Dilmah, and I’ve never gone back. A lovely Ceylon tea, from a great company.
  • Drinking dark thick, bitter tea from a huge pot boiled for hours on a woodstove in a hunting cabin on the tundra of Nunavik as a group of Inuit polar bear hunters sat in circle and discussed their futures over caribou stew and bowhead muktuk.
  • Making an impromptu tea ceremony with So Yoshida and friends in a small tea house in a little park near the Tokyo harbour.
  • Watching used Irish Breakfast tea bags pile up in a little plate in the kitchen of a cottage I shared with Chris Chapman and Anthony McCann by the shores of Galway Bay in Ballyvaughn, Co. Clare as a kind of metric of the conversations and stories we were telling.
  • Sharing a pot of tea with Simon and Julia Lucas back in 1989 when a group of us Native Studies students travelled to Hesquiaht in Clayoquot Sound with Sennan Charleson to spend a week immersed in the community. It was my first trip ever to BC, the first time I ever got to meet Simon and Julia and it was a memorable afternoon, listening to stories of the community, the culture, the language and the plans for the future.
  • Drinking rooibos outside our meeting space while watching giraffes carefully pick their way around small dialogue groups during an Art of Hosting at the Heia Safari in South Africa.

Grateful for these experiences and connections.

Defining facilitation in relation to difference

May 20, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Democracy, Facilitation, Featured 8 Comments

Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time:

“While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.”

That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over the years. Like many, when I started out as a facilitator I was really trying hard to deliver outcomes and to lead a group through a process to get to a preconceived set of ideas. It’s not that I wasn’t alos hosting some creative work, but my early forays in the field were probably brutal to sit through as I steered people through a process and, being a naturally conflict averse person, quelled differences. There would be brainstorming, but I was very much the kind of guy that seized on ideas I liked and inquired more into them, even if the group had other thoughts. Ick.

Now it’s all about the right tools for the right job, and sometimes that’s just the right tool. But not often. And definitely not in the unconscious way that I applied facilitation.

Once I trundled into the world of Open Space Technology, the Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development and the complexity world, my practice radically changed. It really did become about building containers for dialogue, creating spaces and contexts in which interesting things might happen. It took to locus of responsibility for the content off of me and put it on the participants. I became responsible for managing the constraints that would help a group do that.

If you look on my site for posts on complex facilitation, you’ll find a bit more thinking on that practice, but one things that stands out in the IAF article from 5 years ago is the commitment to difference and diversity. I recently took a Deep Democracy workshop with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson as a part of my reluctant commitment to overcome my aversion to conflict, and I walked away with the idea that we need to get good at the practice of “conflict preservation” instead of “conflict resolution.” By that I mean that we need to be able to host conversations in which conflicts are present and remain present as a source of creativity and life, and not quash them because we are afraid of their energy. That means creating a container in which conflict is productive, in which people feel free to share different opinions, different perspectives, and contribute different gifts. And, of course, being conflict averse, this terrifies me. What if someone gets hurt? What if the space isn’t safe enough? What if something really offensive gets said?

Yup. Those are the questions we have to wrestle with. Because facilitation is needed in this time to ensure that people with vastly different experience and gifts have the chance to use them. Communities and societies contain many different kinds of people, including people whose opinions and ideas I don’t like.

Feel all those questions coming up? All those fears and “what if’s?” Yup. me too. Let’s talk about it below.

Vangelis has died

May 19, 2022 By Being, Music 7 Comments

That statement will either mean something to you, or it will mean nothing to you. It might mean nothing to you if washy space-y pretentious prog rock wasn’t your bag in the 1980s. But it was mine.

I have always had an eclectic taste in music and back in the early 1980s when I was 15 my friend Aiden, who was a couple of years older than me got me into all the British prog rock bands like Yes and Genesis and Pink Floyd and Emerson Lake and Palmer who had all done their best work in the previous decade. As a devotee of Queen, I was a bit suspicious of synthesizers, but I have also always had a penchant for drones and atmospheric washes and mystical poetry and stuff like that. Bands like Rush were doing all that, even if Queen, until 1981 anyway, was explicitly rejecting it.

Anyway, my love of Jon Anderson’s voice and Vangelis’ notoriety for the Chariots of Fire and Bladerunner soundtracks led me to an album that for a couple of years was a staple in my Walkman. “Private Collection” was bliss to listen to through the headphones. The following year, they released “The Best of Jon and Vangelis” and that was the extent of their discography that I owned on cassette.

Here is “Horizon” from from “Private Collection” in all of its 23 minute long glory.

Headphones on. Bliss out.

Thirty years on

May 19, 2022 By Being, Featured, First Nations 3 Comments

It was in this day In 1992 that I started my first real job in an office, beginning work as a policy analyst at the National Association of Friendship Centres in Ottawa.

I can remember that day vividly. It was a lovely warm morning in Ottawa and I even remember wearing a light purple collared shirt (it was the early 1990s) and carrying my lunch in a newly purchased MEC fabric briefcase that served me for many years.

The NAFC was small at that time, just an Executive Director, Jerome Berthelette, a financial guy, Brian Stinson, our office manager Mel Maracle, Molly LaFontaine who was the receptionist and EA to Jerome and Marc Maracle who was in charge of different projects. I think my first day was Jerome’s last and Terry Doxtator started the same day I did as Executive Director.

As a student I worked as a researcher for David Newhouse at Trent University and the NAFC was the subject of a set of case studies we wrote on Indigenous-Government program negotiations. Through the work and the material I used in my honours thesis on organizational development I got to know the staff and when I moved to Ottawa with Caitlin in 1991 Marc gave me a chance to come and work for the organization.

Lots was going on in Ottawa at that time. There were events marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s journey with many amazing shows and exhibits and productions on Indigenous resistance. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal People was at work and we contributed research and testimony to that. The Charlottetown Accord negotiations were dominating the policy discussions in the city and the talk of what it means to implement Constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights in Canada was everywhere. The fallout from the Oka crisis was on everybody’s mind and the fading years of the Mulroney government and subsequent transition to the Chrétien government threw up many policy challenges and a few key opportunities to our movement.

I worked there for two and a half years. It formed so much of what I went on to do for the rest of my life. I was grateful for the learning I got in the job in facilitating collaborative policy making processes. It was exciting to be in Ottawa during historic constitutional discussions – watching the first draft of the Charlottetown Accord come over our fax machine! – and I got to contribute to things like the Royal Commission, the establishment of the Aboriginal Head Start Program and the renewal and restructuring of the Friendship Centre core funding program.

Thirty years is a long time. And the blink of an eye. And I’m grateful these many years later for all the guidance and support I received as a young guy starting out. I’m proud to still call myself a Friendship Centre supporter and that movement will always have my heart and thanks for helping me get going in the world.

Opposing a new LNG port in Átl’ka7tsem

May 18, 2022 By Bowen, Featured, First Nations

I live at the open end of a fjord called Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, on the south coast of British Columbia. It is a broad mouthed inlet that narrows as you head 45 kilometers up towards Squamish. It is home to a small archipelago of islands and some small villages and towns. The inlet has been recovering from massive industrial abuse for most of the last 100 years, mostly from horrendas mining and logging practices, and now we have herring, sea lions, seals, whales, dolphins and porpoises and even more important sea life, like extremely rare glass sponge reefs and healthy plankton blooms. showing up in ever increasing numbers. You can read more about this amazing place and its citizen-led recovery at the Howe Sound Marine Guide Átl’?a7tsem/Howe Sound Marine Stewardship Initiative website. This place is so special that last year the inlet was named Canada 19th UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

The inlet forms most of the southern half of Skwxwú7mesh-ulh Temíxw and the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation Government) is playing an increasingly important role in the jurisdiction and stewardship of this place, as is right. The Nation is the only government whose jurisdiction maps most precisely on the whole of the ecosystem, from mountain tops to the ocean floor from the source to the Strait of Georgia, and they are the government with by far the longest tenure in this place, dating back tens of thousands of years, into time immemorial. The deepest stories about this place extend into the Squamish period of history that was dominated by the Transformer brothers Xaay Xaays and the supernatural beings that formed and transformed the earth.

Next week, the proponents of Woodfibre LNG will be presenting to our Council on Bowen Island. I’m not sure what they will say, but I do know that it is important to be on the record opposing the project. This blog post will be my submission to Council.

I am opposed to any new fossil fuel infrastructure development. Anything that helps add to the amount of fossils fuels being burned is a contribution towards the increasingly likely potential that we will propagate an extinction level event on our home planet.

The Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw has entered into a benefits agreement with Woodfibre LNG and the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw environmental review process has approved the construction of the project. The company has worked with the Nation to mitigate the impact of the development at Swiyát, which is an especially significant place for herring spawning. I want to go on record as saying that I don’t blame the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw one bit for this decision. They have been clear from the beginning taht development in the territories needs to to meet their standards, and this development has done that. They have been transparent about their process and they have made decisions in the best interests of the Nation.

Since European contact, the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw and its constituent communities and leaders have been systemically and deliberately denied the opportunity to benefit from economic activity within the territory. The fact that they have asserted this right and signed an impact agreement worth more than $1 billion is good. In fact, it is surprising and shocking that ANY economic activity at all happens within Squamish Nation territories without some benefit accruing to the Nation.

Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw. is entirely within its rights to review and approve the project from the perspective of their. environmental and economic interests. This is a key part of the principle of free prior and informed consent recognized under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and it stand as an example to all of us who operate in these territories. If you aren’t already contributing something to the Nation as a person who “lives, works and plays” here, then it might be time to consider how you too can share your benefits with the traditional and historic owners of this territory.

The major objection I have to Woodfibre LNG is the fact that it introduces new fossil fuels into the earth’s atmosphere, at a time when we are confronting an existential crises on this planet. Woodfibre LNG will tell you that this is a clean project because it uses hydroelectricity for its operations. However, it fails to take any responsibility for the amount of LNG being shipped through the facility and burned in the world. This is like saying there has never been a fatality in a bomb factory, and therefore there has never been a more benign bomb factory. It fails to take into account the cumulative effect of the burning of new amounts of liquid natural gas over the lifetime of the project. I have asked the company what the estimates are for the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere from the gas shipped through Woodfibre, and if they reply I will update this post to reflect that. At the very least, the facility is intended to ship 2.7 million tons of LNG a year which, when burned, will produce about 2.76 times that amount, or 7,452,000 tons of CO2 without taking into consideration the supply chain emissions, or more importantly direct leaks and emissions of methane into the atmosphere. That Woodfibre is run on electricity is merely one dent an overall supply chain that uses and emits the gas that it mines.

We should not be building new fossil fuel infrastructure at all at this point in time. We have long since passed the the time when we should have stopped. All of us now need to stand in the face of our descendents and the future impacts of life on the planet and admit that at the very least, we didn’t do enough in a timely manner to address this issue. But some of us will need to say more. That even when we knew what negative impact we could expect from the short term gain we championed, we did it anyway.

Sorry won’t pay for this grief.