The other day on the Art of Hosting facebook group, my friend Cedric Jamet asked folks for some materials about the four fold practice, which is the basic essence of the Art of Hosting. Toke Moeller weighed in with his latest posters from a session he was leading with graduate students in sustainability leadership. Toke was, of course, one of the originals who put the four fold practice together and like all good generative frameworks, it has changed over time and it gets expressed in different ways depending on context. But the essence is that it balances self-awareness and focused …
This morning this quote came through the email via Richard Rohr’s daily meditation. it’s Thich Nhat Than writing on the Christian practice of communion. The bread that Jesus handed to you, to us, is real bread, and if you can eat real bread you have real life. But we are not able to eat real bread. We only try to eat the word bread or the notion of bread. Even when we are celebrating the Eucharist, we are still eating notions and ideas. “Take, my friends, this is my flesh, this is my blood.” Can there be any more drastic …
I want to invite you into a story about TSS Rovers FC, a little soccer club I am involved in that is doing amazing things. We are about to become the first semi-pro soccer club in Canada to have a significant amount of supporter ownership. Our initial share offering closes on March 9, and you buy into to this club now here: https://www.frontfundr.com/tssrovers. But read on to find out why i think this matters. On the morning of August 6th, 2021 I sat glued to my TV screen absolutely riveted by the possibility of Canada winning a gold medal in …
Our Complexity Inside and Out course is now in full swing and after 3 of 7 sessions we have covered some of the basics that make up our understanding of complexity theory and some of the core practices to affect change in complex systems, both inner and outer. One of those strategies of course is through shifting constraints. To work with self-organization and emergence in a system, finding the constraints that enable behaviour and creating different ones can have the effect of shifting the behaviour. Not always of course – we have to pay attention and monitor what we are …
Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking …