This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life. We do this by creating difficult …
My business year usually follows the wet seasons, running for September to June. I’m finally back home on Bowen Island, relaxing and recovering, feeling rather burned out from a very heavy year of travel and work. Here are a few links that crossed my path recently: Euan Semple on why flashmobs are beautiful. Johnnie Moore on change myths and “best” practice. Holger Nauheimer has a series of posts on skills and change worldviews. Dave Pollard‘s unschooling manifesto.
Back in Halifax after a few days on PEI staying at Rob Paterson’s place. Right next to the house we were in was a striking contrast in field ecology, comparing a monocultured wheat field with a former horse paddock which has become a meadow. Rob and I spent the better part of an hour talking about these two fields and drawing analogies between them and the kinds of organizations we work with: some are monocultures and some are communities. The above video is a five minute summary of some of the things we discovered on our own.
Inspired by spending a bit of time with Keith Webb this past week at ALIA West, I’ve been looking deeply at the patterns of the natural world for teachings and illumination on questions that I’m working with. Wlakiong through a forest with Keith is a revelation, as Susan Szpakowski points out in this blog post from ALIA West. He helps you to see patterns that are instantly recognizable but which you may never have noticed before, even for someone who knows his way around the woods a little. This week, along with Tennson Woolf and Esther Matte, I’m running …
Lovely day here in Marin County hanging out with friends and charting some interesting paths forward on a few projects. One highlight of the day was spending time with Amy Lenzo, who I have known for a while but met only one time previously when we were on an diverse and eclectic team of facilitators holding space at the Pegasus systems thinking conference a couple of years ago. Amy is, among other things, the web goddess for The World Cafe community and we spent a lovely lunch at the excellent Buckeye Roadhouse talking over the nature of our …