Regina, Saskatchewan
I love it here…big open prairie sky meets wide expanse of earth. And over it all, the air is chilled, so cold that I actually succumbed to the spit test. I spat on the sidewalk and immediately poked at my saliva with my boot. It had instantly turned to ice powder. The thermometer in my ride’s car said -41. By this afternoon it had warmed up to -28, which is the current temperature. If the warming trend continues, it’s supposed to be a balmy -14 by tomorrow afternoon. That is a 27 degree difference: the difference between a freezing fall day and a too hot summer afternoon.
I can’t imagine how people survived out here in the old days. Getting to the fire, as Chistina Baldwin says, is indeed a life and death situation.
In a training workshop today with some lovely community leaders and tomorrow we run a day long Open Space for the community. Exploring hosting and getting ready to harvest leadership for community change.
Those of you interested in exploring the Art of Hosting, our pattern language for working with conversational leadership in living systems, might consider joining Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf, Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea and I at teh Whidbey Institute near Seattle in the New Year.
Invitation and information is here. You presence is desired!
A combination of quotes from two different emails today on certainty. First from Ashley Cooper, quoting Daniel Sielgel:
“When we are certain we don’t feel the need to pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion.”
And then this, from Tenneson Woolf, who currently has my copy of Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. From that books is this is a story of Keetsa, an Ahousaht whaling chief who runs into trouble when the space is no longer held for him:
Every protocol had been observed between the whaling chief and the spirit of the whale. Keesta had thrown the harpoon, and the whale had accepted it, had grabbed and held onto the harpoon according to the agreement they had made through prayers and petitions. Harmony prevailed, whaler and whale were one, heshook-ish tsawalk.
All of a sudden something went wrong, some disharmony arose, some disunity intruded, and the whale turned and began to tow Keesta and his paddlers straight off shore. Keesta took inventory. Everyone in the whaling canoe remained true to the protocols – cleansed, purified, and in harmony. Prayer songs intensified. Still, the great whale refused to turn toward the beach, heading straight off shore. Keesta and the paddlers had kept true to their agreements, and now there seemed nothing left to do except to cut the atlu, the rope attached to the whale.
Keesta took his knife, and as he moved to cut the rope, Ah-up-wha-eek (Wren) landed on the whale and spoke to Keesta: “Tell the whale to go back to where it was harpooned.” Keesta spoke to the whale, and immediately the great whale turned accourding to the word of Wren, the little brown bird, and returned to where it was first harpooned, and there it died.
After the whale had been towed ashore, Keesta discovered, as he had suspected, that the disharmony and disunity had intruded at home. When his wife had heard that the whale had taken the harpoon, she had roused herself and prematurely broken away from her ritual in order to make welcome preparations. At the point when she began to go about her life in disharmony from the rest was exactly when the great whale had begun to tow Keesta and his paddlers off shore.
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 Vik Nanda
Some things popping up and absorbing my attention this week.
- Mushrooms + human hair = oil spill cleanup
- Customizing big flying spaces. What will the future archeologists say? The economics and ecologics of such endeavours stagger me.
- Wow. Ashley dreams of flying,by putting all that space on the OUTSIDE.
- An old friend from Peterborough, Andy Quan, comes back on my radar with a new book of poems edited by another old friend, John Barton, with whom I was a associate editor of ARC magazine in the early 1990s. I love the web.
- Good media (page 1, page 2) from a recent Open Space event at WOSU in Columbus Ohio run by my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart.
- Garret Lisi’s theory of everything and some useful discussion.
- “At the root of the music industry’s transformation is a rediscovery, or a renewed appreciation, of the communal origins of music-making and listening. As MP3 players and online video have grown in popularity, so has an appreciation that music isn’t just something that goes on between your ears.” Yes. And. The answer is to write songs about your place.
- The story of stuff and Regenerosity. Two from Pollard.
- Viv’s looking at facilitation too.
- My favourite web radio station at the moment: Groove Salad. Try it with mushrooms!
PS…somehow my annual December 6 post got saved to a drafts folder. I’ve republished it below.