I was talking to my daughter tonight on the phone. I was walking out of The Forks in Winnipeg where I had just eaten a pickerel (that I learned was from Kazakhstan…W.T.F!) and my daughter requested that I get a GPS that could beep and show where I am on this epic trip. After being on the road for eight days already, with another 12 ahead of me, I don’t even know where I am sometimes.
Yesterday I was wrapping up the 2009 Good Food Gathering in San Jose and I took a CalTrain up to SFO, hopped an Air Canada flight to Calgary, spent the night there, and flew to Winnipeg early this morning where I joined national gathering of Aboriginal youth who are meeting to thinking about how to renew a very successful federal government program. That’s a lot of travel, but it doesn’t stop there. I fly to Ottawa tomorrow and spend most of the week at an Art of Hosting in Pembroke, Ont. before flying to Kelowna for a one day Open Space and then down to California again, this time to Hoopa, to work with a small Native radio station, KIDE. I get home May 6 after 20 straight days on the road split between five different gigs.
The Kellogg gathering was a lovely experience, and I was especially tickled by how we dissolved the traditional conference model. Day one was all speakers and plenary panel presentations, with a little bit of conversation built in around the ballroom set up with six foot rounds. Day two, we got rid of the tables and held the whole day in Open Space. Day three, a day that we deliberately left free for an emergent design, featured us getting rid of the chairs. When the participants arrived, the room was empty save for a few pieces of tape on the floor. Although half the participants called it a day right there, about 250 stayed on to engage in a beautiful piece of intergenerational work. Led by our youngest team members, Norma Flores, Manny Miles and Maggie Wright, the participants self-organized into a spiral by age, with the youngest person at the centre and the oldest on the outside. Looking around that spiral was to see the journey of a person growing in the Good Food movement.
We then people gather with the ten people closest to them on the spiral and figure out a song, chant, slogan, sentence or movement, that captured what their small demographic had to say to the whole. The next 20 minutes consisted of people bot speaking to the centre and speaking from their place. A voice and story of life in the movement unfolded all the way from the energy and optimism of the youth to the stretch of middle aged people to the tired, but persistent presence of the movement’s elders. After we took a breath we moved to another room and ended it with a drum circle.
Fun.
Tomorrow, a day of Open Space with youth who are designing the future of the Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres Program and then it’s off to Ottawa to run this Art of Hosting with dear friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Kathy Jourdain and a great local team.
I’m twittering more than blogging these days. The microform works well. If you’re interested (yes Aine, YOU!) my twitter feed is here.
Share:
Cross posted from my Bowen Island Journal, my long running blog about the place where I live:
Another beautiful morning here: clear and still. In the dawn chorus, there are a pair of chickadees nesting across the road from us that are the champion singers. They are doing their little call which is a two note descending tweet-tweet. One chickadee does it and the other follows on with the same song, but sung a note lower. Their rhythm is steady, and when they get out of synch, they stop and start again.
In the meantime, the crows and ravens are cawing, the flickers are drumming, towhees wheezing in the undergrowth. The nature of spring means that everyone is repeating their various sounds on a regular interval, and the forest is full of rhythm. Once in a while, warblers and wrens let loose with solos over top of the whole thing. It’s as if someone has sampled all of these birds and put them into a bed track. You could rhyme over top of it easily. The rhythm shifts and changessubtly but it is so engaging that I lay in my sleeping bag for a full hour listening raptly to the chorus, and feeling all of these beats beneath it.
Share:
That is one of the principles of wayfinding, which is simply to say that if you don’t know what to do, start anywhere and follow it somewhere. Each step will reveal the next thing to do.
For a beautiful, beautiful exercise in doing this, go here and play for a while with the ToneMatrix.
Share:
When I read this Neruda poem, I thought of my wife.
Sonnet XVII
I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.
via Neruda.
Share:
To some it may seem that we are simply cast about like so much cosmic flotsam and jetsam – and on a day when the partner of the moment is dark chaos that is surely the experience. But partners change and the dance moves on – light creative order enters our experience. How wonderful it might be to hold that moment for ever. . .
The ecstacy is not in the moment,
But in its passage.
To hold the moment is to destroy it –
The ending of the dance.
I think we are all dancers who live fully when we dance. There is no abstract right, wrong or perfect way to dance, for each dance is perfectly what it is. It is not about “shoulds,” “musts,” or “oughts,” but only the dance in this, and every, present moment. We are called to the dance and in the dance we experience ourselves as a loving whole – at one with ourselves and all that surrounds us.
via Work-In-Progress: Job’s Problem.