Lots of travel this week. During the time I was away in Ontario working with labour educators from a number of Canadian unions I heard a great line from a Canadian Auto Workers educator that sustains him when he is challenged while doing good work: “You don’t always have to like th emembers, but you have to love them.” I was reflecting on that line this week after I hosted an Open Space on Bowen Island, in my home community to provide a space for my neighbours to discuss a proposal to turn some of Bowen’s Crown Lands into a …
A lovely little passage from a book I am reading at the moment, that describes the allure of living with shadow. We are captivated by fog. I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog. And romantic it certainly was–the fog, like the grey shadow of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery, groping their way blindly through the Unseen, and clamouring and clanging in confident speech the while …
From my friend Jerry Nagel, a quote from guitar maker Phil Patrillo: We send our kids to school. I call it the “brain laundry.” They teach them everything you don’t want them to know. It’s done in the name of education and fairness and righteousness, and the things of common sense and how things are done, are never explored. You get a piece of paper with your name on it, if you follow the instructions. I got a Doctorate not because I wanted the piece of paper; I got the Doctorate because my professor said to me, “You know more …
On my way to Hawai’i, the big island to co-host a gathering called Beyond Sustainability: Creating a Community of Leadership based on a Platform of Reverance. This gathering has been several years in the making, and over the last two years I have been deeply involved in the design of the work, finding myself stopping and starting as we find the best way to bring high powered people together to connect existing work, explore indigenous worldviews and creating some coherent results that may positively affect the values that underlie consumer society. It is a hugely audacious reach that we are …