It’s 11:30 and I’m about ready to tuck into bed. Through my open window I can hear the roar of the surf rolling on the beaches a mile away. The surf report says that the swells are coming in at 9 feet but are going to rise to 17.5 feet by tomorrow. The roar is deafening, but it is a sound that has been heard on these beaches from time immemorial. The Nuu-Chah-Nulth, upon whose territory I am working, have lived here as long as the sound of the waves has been heard, and they’ll be here until those waves …
Writing from Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island which is about as far west as you can go without leaving North America. I’m here this week to run an Art of Hosting training with a number of community coordinators for 14 Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities around Clayoquot, Barkley and Kyuquot Sounds. We’re going to be learning together about methods for community engagement and participatory leadership and all of it based very deeply in the concept of Tsawalk (from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth principle of “heshook ish tsawalk” meaning “everything is one.”) Last night I drove out here across the spine of Vancouver …
My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa. He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building. He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim …
This group we are working with in Estonia is cracking a lovely design for a six month learning journey around hosting, harvesting and participatory leadership. They began in September with a little Art of Hosting retreat, are together now in the Art of Participatory Leadership and in February they will gather one more time. In between workshops, they are working on projects in their organizations and communities, deep in real practice and real life. As a result they have much to share with one another and it is only up to Toke and I as teachers to offer a few …
Toke and I along with our Estonian colleagues, Piret, Robert and Ivika, began our three day participatory leadershipworkshop today. We were join at Altmoisa by 20 young-ish leaders who have been training together since the summer in the Art of Hosting and who have been using participatory meeting methodologies in the places of work. Tis workshop is intended to take the exploration of those practices deeper, and extend the learning that comes from hosting into the realms of leadership. This is the first Art of Hosting workshop I have done in a language different from mine. Although most participants speak …