At the Giving Conference Ruthann Prange convened a session which looked at creating a gather of facilitators for the common good. Her inspiratino for this was the tremendous offers of help from professional facilitators who showed up to facilitate the Listening to the City project in New York after 9/11. Now a nice synopsis of this has been published at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation newsblog. I’ve had it in the back of my mind to perhaps undertake a conference in the Vancouver area of facilitators for the common good. Anyone out there intersted in getting something going? …
Aung San Suu Kyiback in 1999: “We cannot drift along in any imaginary world. There will have to be great sacrifices, tremendous hard work and effort . We will have to wrestle with all our might to catch up with those countries that are ahead of us. Look at the two countries that lost the war – Germany and Japan. How they suffered and sacrificed the war. We have read about the hardship they went through. Because they made those sacrifices, they are the two leading countries in the world today. Similarly we will have to go through the same …
Last month I was blogging about stories and I mentioned sitting in on a teaching with Nuu-Chah-Nulth Elder Julia Lucas who was using traditional stories to talk about contemporary sexual awareness with First Nations youth. This happened at an Open Space meeting I facilitated last year. My friend Crystal Sutherland, who was in that session, just phoned me to talk about an idea coming out of that gathering. She is musing about finding someone to produce these stories on video and use them to reach street kids and other kids at risk. We kicked around the idea of animating these …
Rebecca Ryan notes that thought is not the most productive form of work. She has spent a day playing with her family… And an amazing thing happened: I returned to work this morning with more energy than I’ve had in months. I had a clear idea of what was important (clients and partners) and what wasn’t (reading back issues of newspapers.) I finally took action on creating the office space I really want, instead of settling for the one I have. I’m renewed. It was like someone hit CTRL ALT DEL on my creative cortex. Of course this is known …
I’ve talked a little about teachings as gifts and recently corresponded with folks about the authenticity of various “Native American” teachers. For the real deal, check out Wisdom of the Elders, an archive of stories and teachings from Native American life that is being broadcast on public radio in the States and American Indian Radio on Satellite (which you can listen to online).