Ensconced at the head of an inlet in what has to be the most beautiful valley in BC. My commute yesterday to get here was a one hour flight from Vancouver over huge icefields, 9000 foot peaks, high mountain lakes and deep forested cirques. The landscape here is forbiddingly raw, and when the morning sun catches the blue glint of glacial ice in the cracks and crevacies on the icefall you are flying PAST (not over!) your heart just sings.
In this tight little valley – now rain soaked and cloud choked – a few thousand people live cheek by jowel. At one end, where the long inlet terminates, is the Nuxalk Nation where I am doing a little work, trying to bring some hasitily organized participatory process to a couple of pressing needs in th ecommunity. Today is basically about trying to host a community conversation that sees the good and the possible in a desperate and fractious context. In most First Nations communities, hurt runs deep and the kinds of dynamics that are at play here are deep currents that carry away optimisim, creativity and possibility. And yet, everyone I talk to here wants something different, a different conversation, a different wnay of looking at things. So today and tomorrow, using Cafe and Open Space, we are going to try that.
We haven’t had much time to prepare, and there is much working against making this an ideal situation, so I truly don’t know what will happen. I am just entering today as open as I can be to what’s possible, trying to embody what others are longing for.
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Facts from the longest business trip of my life
- Number of days on the road this trip: 20
- Number of seperate projects worked on: 5
- Total number of people hosted: 835
- Customs officials spoken to: 4
- Number of those officials who wished me a good flight: 1
- Number who welcomed me to their country: 3
- Number who have said “Welcome back to the United States, sir” to me in the past ten years: 0
- Number who did on Sunday: 2
- Aircraft flown on: 12
- Airports landed at: 8
- Number of these I visited on more than one separate occasion: 3
- Number of Kazakh pickerels eaten in Manitoba: 1
- Estimated distance travelled in kilometers by that fish: 8771
- Distance between my plate and the Red River, where pickerel can be found, in meters: 200
- Colleagues I collaborated with: 26
- Gray whales seen: 5
- Porpoises seen: 1
- Minutes it took to fly over the flood waters south of Winnipeg: 10
- Number of times pulled over for running a red light: 1
- Number of tickets received: 0
- Hours I played a talking drum and got paid for it: 2
- Number of passengers who snarked rudely at an Air Canada flight attendant when the captain of the plane was an hour late due to HIS flight being delayed: 7
- Minutes by which the delay was reduced thanks to these interventions: 0
- Approximate number of rock balancing sculptures set up by a group of us on the Pembroke, Ontario riverfront: 30.
- Number of local senior citizens who said they were going to go home and try that: 3
- Age, in years, of Highland Park Orkney whiskey served to me by Allistair Hain: 25
- Minutes it took me to drink it: 30
- Number of juggling balls I left home with: 7
- Number I returned home with: 1
- Indigenous languages heard spoken: 4
- Number of these I understood enough to talk to the Elder about it: 1
- Different guitars played: 3
- People spotted wcearing paper face masks during a three hour wait in San Francisco: 7
- Number of poems I wrote and read out as part of my professional duties: 2
- Number of pieces of olive and sundried tomato pesto stuffed calamari that come served on a roasted cauliflower and fennel salad at RauDZ in Kelowna: 6
- Number of beds slept in: 9
- Percent of annual rainfall that fell in Hoopa, CA during the two days I was there: 4
- Number of elk heads on the walls at Cinnebar Joe’s in Willow Creek, CA: 7
- Number of hockey sticks on the walls: 1
- Number of times my credit card was returned to me by a cab driver who drove 20 minutes out of his way to do so: 1
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Yesterday was a day of travel. Coming off a fabulous Art of Hosting in Pembroke Ontario that was a deep personal exploration of source and the spirit of hosting for many who were there. Thursday evening we gathered at Alastair Haynes’ home in the east end of Ottawa for a curry dinner followed by hours of music and whiskey, all of which wrapped up at 1am. Friday morning my mate Kathy Jourdain and I left ofr the airport, she to fly to Halifax and me to set out on a milk run across the country.
We left Ottawa at 12:35 on a nice CRJ705 (a better plane than the little CRJs that Air Canada also flies) headed for Winnipeg. It was cloudy over most of Northern Ontario, but clear over Lake Superior, the skies opening up over Whitefish Bay. And hour later we were descending over the flood waters of the Red River Valley into Winnipeg where I changed planes to a small CRJ bound for Calgary and Kelowna.
At Calgary, we landed for a station stop and a crew change, but what was to be a half hour pause turned out to be more than an hour when the plane carrying our captain failed to arrive on time. Eventually he was spotted rushing across the tarmac, and we set off on the third leg for Kelowna, out over the magnificent and clear Rocky and Kootenay Mountains. We entered the Okanagan Valley from the north and landed in Kelowna 40 minutes later.
After all that travel the best thing to do was to hook up with Jeremy Hiebert for some animal protein and hops, malt and barley juice. We jawed awhile about his evolving ice book, homeschooling, a little father to father talk about raising curious and lively kids. Funny that we didn’t really talk about music, except to note that we would both meet again in Princeton this summer for the 2nd annual Princeton Traditional Music Festival.
Here only for today, running an Open Space for the annual Assembly of BC Arts Councils and then it’s off early tomorrow morning to California, for the last leg of the epic journey of work and travel.
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I was talking to my daughter tonight on the phone. I was walking out of The Forks in Winnipeg where I had just eaten a pickerel (that I learned was from Kazakhstan…W.T.F!) and my daughter requested that I get a GPS that could beep and show where I am on this epic trip. After being on the road for eight days already, with another 12 ahead of me, I don’t even know where I am sometimes.
Yesterday I was wrapping up the 2009 Good Food Gathering in San Jose and I took a CalTrain up to SFO, hopped an Air Canada flight to Calgary, spent the night there, and flew to Winnipeg early this morning where I joined national gathering of Aboriginal youth who are meeting to thinking about how to renew a very successful federal government program. That’s a lot of travel, but it doesn’t stop there. I fly to Ottawa tomorrow and spend most of the week at an Art of Hosting in Pembroke, Ont. before flying to Kelowna for a one day Open Space and then down to California again, this time to Hoopa, to work with a small Native radio station, KIDE. I get home May 6 after 20 straight days on the road split between five different gigs.
The Kellogg gathering was a lovely experience, and I was especially tickled by how we dissolved the traditional conference model. Day one was all speakers and plenary panel presentations, with a little bit of conversation built in around the ballroom set up with six foot rounds. Day two, we got rid of the tables and held the whole day in Open Space. Day three, a day that we deliberately left free for an emergent design, featured us getting rid of the chairs. When the participants arrived, the room was empty save for a few pieces of tape on the floor. Although half the participants called it a day right there, about 250 stayed on to engage in a beautiful piece of intergenerational work. Led by our youngest team members, Norma Flores, Manny Miles and Maggie Wright, the participants self-organized into a spiral by age, with the youngest person at the centre and the oldest on the outside. Looking around that spiral was to see the journey of a person growing in the Good Food movement.
We then people gather with the ten people closest to them on the spiral and figure out a song, chant, slogan, sentence or movement, that captured what their small demographic had to say to the whole. The next 20 minutes consisted of people bot speaking to the centre and speaking from their place. A voice and story of life in the movement unfolded all the way from the energy and optimism of the youth to the stretch of middle aged people to the tired, but persistent presence of the movement’s elders. After we took a breath we moved to another room and ended it with a drum circle.
Fun.
Tomorrow, a day of Open Space with youth who are designing the future of the Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres Program and then it’s off to Ottawa to run this Art of Hosting with dear friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Kathy Jourdain and a great local team.
I’m twittering more than blogging these days. The microform works well. If you’re interested (yes Aine, YOU!) my twitter feed is here.
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I’m stranded in San Fransico, sitting on standby for a flight home after narrowly missing my flight yesterday evening due to a big accident on the Golden Gate bridge. So sitting the lounge, guiltily hoping every two hours that someone has some minor misfortune or change of plans that will open up one seat on a day when every flight home is full.
Found a poem by Denise Levertov at the excellent Panhala:
A Gift
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.~ Denise Levertov ~