A colleague passed last week. Laurel Doersam was my co-host for the Open Space on Open Space in 2001 in Vancouver. We met originally when she sent me an email asking about Open Space and after connecting, she decided to go to Berlin in 2000 to OSonoS where she made the offer on behaf of the both of us to come to Vancouver in 2001.
Laurel ran the business end of the operation, which was not something either of us really had passion for, but she took it on and made sure we didn’t lose any money or any people that wanted to come. During the event itself I opened and closed space on the first and last days and she held space for the evening and morning news sessions, lending us a casual but intentional presence which supported the processing of the day’s work. After the conference was over, she hosted many friends including Lisa Heft, Nuran Yurgit and John Engle among others, showing them a little bit of BC and a lot of her heart and hospitality.
Shortly after OSonOS, Laurel was diagnosed with the cancer that took life last week. I heard from her a couple of times after OSonOS and tried to hook up with her and Rick the few times I was in Victoria, to no avail. I think the last time I saw her was actually at OSonOS, when I handed her a small gift of a medicine bundle to show my appreciation for her partnership in co-hosting the conference.
I have lost loved ones to cancer, and I know what Rick and Chelsea and the others are going through. I wish them peace and solace over the next weeks, months and years as Laurel’s spirit flies.
Here is a link to my opening comments at OSonOS IX in Vancouver. Laurel was there in the room with us all, as she is now.
[tags]Laurel Doersam[/tags]
“The secret of life is to have a question or task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day of your whole life and the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do!”
— Henry Moore
With thanks to my friend Patti DeSante, and also Michael Jones, who uses this quote in “Artful Leadership” (.pdf).
[tags]Henry Moore, Michael Jones, secret of life[/tags]
Photo of Henry Moore sculpture at Hakone Open Air Museum by Nemo’s Great Uncle
I have just finished posting a collection of 21 stories of Open Space events I have facilitated over the past 6 years. Most of these stories are about community-based events in Aboriginal communities here in Canada, but I believe they have lessons about the practice of Open Space that are more widely applicable in different settings and for unconferences too.
I hope you may find the collection useful.
[tags]unconference[/tags]
I was trolling through some old emails tonight and I discovered a note I had written to the OSLIST on the birth of my son five and a half years ago. I thought I’d share it here:
It’s funny thing. The smallest spaces need the most attention.
Sometimes, the smallest are the largest.On Tuesday (and for all of Monday and most of Sunday) I was opening
space for my second child, a boy named Finn Sinclair Corrigan-Frost, who
entered the world singing before he was fully born — the Elders call it
“bringing greetings from the spirt world” — on Novemer 7.He was born at home in the company of two midwives, a doula, my
partner’s mother and our 3 year old daughter, Aine, who cut the cord and
officially brought him into our world.It was a good birth and a long, but good labour. He is healthy and my
partner Caitlin is doing really well. As we were walking around down by
the ocean on Monday, with Caitlin in labour and a long day and night
ahead of us, she turned to me and said “it’s a funny thing being in
labour. The old world has passed away and the new one has yet to
begin. I feel like a spirit, invisible to everyone, dwelling in the
boundary between the two worlds, holding space for what is about to
come.”
Those words have had a profound impact on me, and I recently wrote a song in which I used Caitlin’s line without remembering it at all.
And the boy? Just a beautiful young man, with whom I am currently enjoying hours and hours of playing Pokemon and Dungeons and Dragons.
Apart from the wedding of Michael and Jill last weekend in Chicago, I had a great time hanging out with old friends, new friends and Open Space colleagues from around the States. But of all the things that happened on the weekend around the wedding the best had to be meeting Al Camp.
The wedding took place at Pleasant Home, in Oak Park. The house is situated in a lovely little park and in true Buddhist fashion, Michael had strung up strings of Tibetan prayer flags around the place with the Guru Rinpoche mantra on them. In this little park, during the afternoon I lounged on the grass with Daniel O’Conner, Karen Sella and Ted Ernst in the warm sunshine. Thinking I should practice a little before the wedding, I pulled out my flute and started playing some Irish tunes. After a few minutes, a man rolled up in an electric stroller and expressed astonishment that here was live Irish music, right here in his own park!
He stopped to listen and then engaged us in conversation saying that he had been a pilot of bombers and cargo planes and that many times he had stopped over in the Shannon airport. I asked him when that was and he said it was during the Berlin airlift, after the wall was erected in 1948-49. He flew B-29s and C-47s full of coal from England to West Berlin and crashed twice doing so. Daniel, the economist, immediately set to work calculating the massive efficiency waste of this exercise.
Al later flew B-29s in Korea.
Al continued to tell us the story of his life, interspersed with enthusiastic demands for more sets of tunes, which I happily obliged. He told of skipping school to go to Al Capone’s wake, and the way his taste for bourbon ruined his life and caused his divorce from a woman he still loved. He had tears in his eyes telling us about the love he still held for his former wife.
He told us stories of crashing weddings in all the top hotels for almost three years, during which he was only caught twice and fined $50 each time. He heard the famous L-train derailment of 1977 in which 11 people died, and rounded the corner of Lake Street to witness first hand the damage. It happened after work on February 4, 1977 and Al was on his way to the Merchandise Mart to drink. At that time, the Chicago Transit Authority was in that building, right on the river, and Al ran into a friend of his at the bar who was a high-up executive in the CTA. Al asked him what he was doing at the bar when an L-train had derailed. His friend hadn’t heard about it. He rushed upstairs to confirm the news and then came back down to the bar 15 minutes later. “Say, you’re right Al,” he said before Al encouraged him to catch a cab and maybe go see the wreck for himself.
After Al took his leave from us, we debated the truth of these stories and I think the consensus was that any man who still cried in public over his long lost love had to have more than a little truth in his story telling. And ultimately, what really mattered was the stories themselves. Whether the man was telling the truth or not, I had a marvellous experience of hearing history told as a wonderful personal narrative set against one man’s struggle with his own life. We all left knowing more about these events than we had ever known, and for that, here’s a big thanks for Al Camp.
And in honour of Al, and all my American friends on your Independence Day, here is an mp3 of the Chicago Reel.
mp3: Finnvarra’s Wren – Chicago Reel
[tags]Berlin airlift, al capone, chicago, L-train, Ted Ernst, Karen Sella, Daniel O’Conner. Al Camp[/tags]