Bekkevoort, Belgium Arrived here last night in preparation for the first gathering of Art of Hosting practioners in Europe, the first Art of Hosting on the Art of Hosting. I’m staying with my friend Ria Baeck, in a small converted stable on an old farm in the countryside outside of Brussels. Tom Hurley joined us this morning from San Francisco (he’s sleeping right now) and Toke, Monica, George Por, Maria Scordialos and Sarah Whitely and others are all arriving this afternoon. Tomorrow we start in a learning centre about 15 minutes away from here called Heerlijckyt. The flight from Vancouver, …
I’m back from Bella Coola, and reflecting on the remarkable three days of learning and Open Space we did there. Saturday, we held a small community Open Space gathering around the issue of what the community needs to do to prepare for assuming full responsibility over child and family services. This is a provocative question in the Nuxalk Nation. The Nation is a strong and independent community and putting children and families in the centre of any conversation brings heart, passion and commitment. We had a small group of people present for our Open Space. 20 people began the day …
Yesterday, in preparing for two days of teaching and training I spent the morning over breakfast reading some of th stories of Clayton Mack, the grandfather of my friend and client Liz Hall. I was reading about the way in which Nuxalk people gathered food from the land, whether it was the fish, game or plants and berries. He talked about the way the amlh – the spring salmon – were harvested using fishtraps. At one time there were 22 traps on the river. These traps would form barriers that the salmon would need to jump. When they jumped they …
Bella Coola, BC I’m up in Bella Coola this week working with the Nuxalk Nation. I am running some facilitation training and then on Saturday, an Open Space meeting here in the community on the subject of reclaiming Nuxalk child and family services. This place is out in the middle of virtually nowhere. It’s 450 kms west of Williams Lake, but only an hour and a quarter by plane. However, the Bella Coola valley is surrounded by the tallest mountains in the Coastal Range and man are they huge. We flew PAST them this morning, over …
Seattle, WA There is a creation story we tell in the art of hosting workshops called “The Chaordic Path” which describes the dance of chaos and order in the service of generative emergence. Today, in Seattle many of us good friends and mates sat in the audience as our friend Thomas Arthur told this story through his production of Luminous Edge. The show is about a wizard who is responsible for juggling into existence the orderly patterns of our human world and then fixing them in place with his spiral of integration. He is assisted by an …