Johnnie Moore tagged me to reveal eight things about myself you probably didn’t know and then tag eight others…alright then.
- Since 1987 I have worked with the I Ching as a way to understand the pattern language of change, using it to sharpen my seeing about all kinds of situations. I don’t use it as a fortune telling device, rather as a user’s manual to change. It is one of my oldest practices, although by no means a daily one.
- Since January 1986 I have kept written journals which have recorded 22 years of living. They are less diaries and more just notebooks of many shapes and sizes. I have only lost one, spanning a period of nine months or so during which a close friend was murdered. It was in a bag I had stolen at a gig.
- All eight of my great-grandparents were born in Canada, and most of my 16 great-great-grandparents were born here too. For a country of immigrants, and considering that most of my ancestry is European, that is a remarkable stat. In 2001 only 4% of all Canadians had all four of their grandparents born here. My wife is South African by birth, so my kids and grandkids will be firmly in the other 96%.
- I have only owned two cars my entire life, but too many bicycles to count. Because I grew up in Toronto, I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 24.
- I wear a signet ring that has a phoenix on it. It was given to me by my paternal grandfather in 1989 when I turned 21. He mused that it was a crest that had been in our family since the 1300s, and was a common symbol that Christian crusaders adopted from their time wrecking havoc in the middle east.
- My first job for which I was paid was working in a cemetery. During high school I earned money lifeguarding, working at a self-serve gas station and selling tropical fish at AAA Aquarum on Yonge Street in the days before the big box pets stores did in the little guys. The owner of that shop died from AIDS-related pnuemonia in 1986. He was the first person I knew who had HIV.
- I was a teenage stamp collector.
- Although I have met many bloggers in my life after reading their blogs, Johnnie was the first one to offer me a safe harbour and a spare bed to crash on for a couple of days when I was travelling through London last summer. It was a generous gesture born out of a uniquely 21st century trust relationship. Out of gratitude for imposing on an otherwise perfectly good weekend of getting lost in WoW, I have responded to this tag…Thanks again, mate!
So that’s it. I’m leaving Regina tomorrow for Calgary and Seattle to do a little work with the Quinault Nation and catch up with Harrison Owen, who is breezing through town. To pass on the meme I’m tagging the last eight bloggers I’ve met face to face with: Tenneson, Ashley, Christie, Jeff, Andy, James, Nancy, and Andre.
From my friend Ria, who advanced a little in her inquiry on holding space:
When I am holding space, I connect in my body with the unmanifest potential of this person, this group or this place. It asks for an emptiness and a deep stillness inside to be able to carry this potential. Maybe it is better to say to be a container for it, and I mean it in a very physical way. I open my body to be this container in service of something that wants or can become manifest.
Photo by Darwin Bell
Hyperlinks –
follow these leads
a thread.
- Haiku resources
- My friend Thomas Arthur, who weaves with gravity, posts Wooshclang!
- Richard Sweeney weaves with paper.
- A beautiful and complete list of what the world is made of.
- Does your disaster plan include conversation to mobilize quickly? Or is it still expert driven?
- Nice summary of Senge’s core concepts on Learning Organizations
- You, and many other living creature, have a billion and a half heartbeats to change the world.
- Change management myths. (Not including the myth that change can be managed, but still…)
- Doug’s blog: Footprints in the Wind, which I read all the time, and so should you.
- From Nancy…the power of a line.
From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work. We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt. There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work. But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate. People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold.
Doubt hunts us on the trail. It picks up our scent and dogs our heels ntil we find ourselves running faster and faster away from it. We expend our energy avoiding it and become exhausted and depleted.
In these moments what is needed is a stand. We must stop running from it, turn around on the path and face it down. We need to muster up the courage and confront the energy of doubt unless we wishe to have it erode our efforts from within.
Large scale change is never certain. Our running from the doubts simply feeds the fear of that uncertainty. IN the worse case, we become consumed by it and look outside of ourselves for confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do. The truth of it is that the certainty we need is not outside of us. If it is not within us, we will never find it. We must generate it in the field of our work together or abandon our work to the poisonous cynicism that wants to consume it in the end. At some point we choose to confront the predator or become its prey.
Just back from an amazing Art of Hosting in rural Pennsylvania. Found this in my email box upon my return, send to me by my friend Toke:
Not just any talk is conversation
Not any talk raises consciousness
good conversation has an edge
It opens your eyes to something
It quickens your earsAnd good conversation reverberates
It keeps on talking in your mind later in the day;
The next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said
The reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness
Your mind and heart have been moved
Your are at another level with your reflections.— James Hillman
This is what it is all about.