Readers who have been with me for a while will know that I have taken great inspration from Vaclav Havel over the years. An artist, playwright, dissident and peaceful democrat, his writing on totalitarianism and post-totalitarian ways of being have influenced much of my work and thinking on working towards post-colonial First Nations communities and organizations. Yesterday in the Globe and Mail there was a great interview with Havel and it was rich with quotes about what it takes to move from the idealistic state of a dissident to the hard work of institutionalizing large scale social change. …
Seattle, WA There is a creation story we tell in the art of hosting workshops called “The Chaordic Path” which describes the dance of chaos and order in the service of generative emergence. Today, in Seattle many of us good friends and mates sat in the audience as our friend Thomas Arthur told this story through his production of Luminous Edge. The show is about a wizard who is responsible for juggling into existence the orderly patterns of our human world and then fixing them in place with his spiral of integration. He is assisted by an …
There is a lovely new translation of the Tao te Ching online, which I discovered thanks to the ever mercurial wood s lot. From the introduction to the Book of the Forest Path: I am trying to accomplish a couple of things in the translation that follows. First of all, I have a particular philosophical interpretation of Taoism, and I am trying to see how far it can be reflected in a translation. I think it is not compatible with the translations I’ve seen. Second, I’ve tried to make it plain and cool English. My objection to the existing …
My friend Kathy Jourdain out in Halifax recently published a nice set of thoughts on inclusion prompted by an experience she had at a leadership network meeting: …we need to stop patting ourselves on the back about how inclusive we think we are being and begin to look at our own assumptions and beliefs and look into where the tension resides within each of us around this topic. When asked, how will we know we are being inclusive there were quite a range of responses. To me, it’s becoming very simple. We will know we are better at …