A couple of years ago – back when I had long hair – I was doing some work in Estonia, where I was part of a team of people that were leading a week long workshop learning about leadership, complexity, dialogue and belonging. I was interviewed under a tree one afternoon about some of the concepts and the deeper implications of what we teach in the Art of Hosting workshops, which itself is, at its simplest, a set of practices to help facilitate participatory meetings better. I talked a bit about what the Art of Hosting means, the need …
From time to time, I’ve made notes about my working set up, noticing that things change a lot over the years. Inspired by my friend Peter Rukavina, but with substantially less detail, here is my current set up. Infrastructure My office is located in a dormer on the upper floor which faces south and is surrounded on three sides by windows. to the west I can see the Queen Charlotte Channel, the waterway that separates Bowen Island from West Vancouver. To the west is the forested slopes of Mount Collins, and in front below me are my neighbours in the …
We have an Art of Hosting event coming up in February 23-26 on Bowen Island. This is my home based offering, which I have been doing for nearly ten years with friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Caitlin Frost, and lately with our new colleague Amanda Fenton. All of these folks are incredible facilitators and teachers and great humans.
Every Christmas Day, our nuclear family heads off Bowen Island to travel into Vancouver and celebrate with cousins and grandparents, feasting, gift giving, hanging out and catching up. The weather is always different. Some years the ferry ploughs through a fierce Squamish wind blowing down Howe Sound from the north and freezing salt spray covers the cars on the ferry deck. Other years it is rainy and blowing from the southeast, as it was much of this month. Once – only once in thirteen Christmases of doing this – did we have snow, and that was back in 2008 when …
The bench at Killarney Lake on Bowen Island that looks out across a rock and the calm surface of this afternoon’s gloaming. I love the word “gloaming.” It refers to the dusky twilight that is practically what passes for daytime now, so close to the solstice, when the grey clouds that envelop us dim the already weak northern daylight even further. I love the cool air and the damp and wet, I love the contrast of walking into a friend’s house full of the smells of spiced ginger tea and welcomed with warmth. I love that we can huddle …