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, …
Drawing by ritwkdey I have been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the living systems vs. the mechanical systems worldviews. It’s interesting that there is a clear distinction between these two kinds of systems – a system is alive or it isn’t, at least in this point in time – and yet the way we humans think our way through being in these systems seems to fall on a continuum. My conversation with Myriam Laberge here has pointed this out. I initially wrote a post that put facilitating up against hosting as two words to describe different ways …
Burlington, Vermont Opened Space this morning along with my colleague Lenore Metwon with around 150 community planners who are interested in the heart and soul of place. You can follow along on the conference wiki at CommunityMatters07.
I’m on the road again, travelling to Burlington Vermont to Open Space at the CommunityMatters07 conference. This is a great conference, working with really interesting people focused on innovative and artistic practices for community planning. It seems that I’m doing a fair amount of work these days with artists and with those who see themselves as practictioners of an art, whether it is my colleagues in the Art of Hosting, the community artists from the Art of Engagement or these community planners. I have a sense that there is an emerging consciousness around work: that people increasingly see …