Alberta Billy has died. Alberta was a woman who changed my life. She was a residential school survivor and a member of the United Church of Canada and very respected We Wai Kai Elder from Cape Mudge on Quadra Island. In 1985 she told Bob Smith, then the Moderator of the United Church of Canada that the Church needed to apologize for the destruction of Indigenous culture and spirituality (watch this video). Bob took on the challenge and in 1986, at its biennial General Council in Sudbury, the Church brought forward the proposal to issue an apology. I was an …
This quote from Richard Rohr, is one of the core principles of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living. It is also good complexity praxis, good leadership practice and good pedagogy. I was on a coaching call this morning where this came up too, listening to a team I am working with describe the trap we often find ourselves in as consultants, tempted to provide the new things a group should be doing, often in the form of recommendations or lists of …
You might not know that one of the things I have developed a deep passion for over the past 20 years or so is football. Soccer. Association football. Fütbol. It started when I lived in the UK as a kid and supported our local team Tottenham Hotspur. It waned a bit during the 1980s and 1990s when it was hard to watch games and no one in Canada really cared about the sport. But one of the great gifts of the internet was rekindling familiarity with the sport that I love. I love it for so many reasons, not the …
I live about 60 meters above the sea, facing southeast on the side of a mountain that is covered in Douglas-fir trees. My mornings at this time of year begin with light in my windows by 5am and the air full of birdsong. Up here, we are perched in the canopy of the forest and if I look out towards the sea, I am looking through to tops of tree that are 40 or 50 meters tall. As I have grown older, my eyes are not as good as they once were and while I can spot movement in the …
“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the …