Rogue black holes, hacking LinkedIn and playing the birth lottery.
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On contemplations ability to deliver awe. Richard Rohr:
We’re usually blocked against being awestruck, just as we are blocked against great love and great suffering. Early-stage contemplation is largely about identifying and releasing ourselves from these blockages by recognizing the unconscious reservoir of expectations, assumptions, and beliefs in which we are already immersed. If we don’t see what’s in our reservoir, we will process all new encounters and experiences in the same old-patterned way—and nothing new will ever happen. A new idea held by the old self is never really a new idea, whereas even an old idea held by a new self will soon become fresh and refreshing.
Back in 1985 kd lang came to Vancouver for a series of gigs and she showed up on Jack Webster’s phone in show charming the irascible commentator while being precocious and confident and solid within her own skin. And what follows is the most amazing half hour of banter and genius and fun ranging from reincarnation to old Scottish songs to feminist takes on go go dancing.
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Khelsilem reflects on his most valuable lesson from his first term of a Masters of Public Administration, and he hones in on insights from the Competing Values Framework relating to how good leadership holds tensions :
At the individual level, CVF is quietly demanding. It suggests that many leaders are not under-skilled, but over-specialized. Under pressure, they default to familiar patterns—control, inspiration, competition, or care. Leadership development, through this lens, is about expanding range: being able to support without avoiding accountability, to drive results without burning people out, to innovate without destabilizing the system.
Frameworks that help people hold tensions are useful in complexity. There are many, and here’s a collection of them from Diane Finegood who taught the Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. They can all be useful depending on context, needs, and intentions.
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I spent a beautiful Friday morning with colleagues and peers who were gathered through the Simon Fraser University Dialogue Community of Inquiry. One of the open space sessions I was in was about making space for dreaming and imagination, and coincidently, Interaction Institute has a blog post up this past week on dismantling fear with imagination, which is a short report on a recent gathering convened to talk about this topic.
People want transformative solutions, but decades of disinvestment, backlash, and political messaging have convinced many that big changes are unrealistic. When people don’t believe change is possible, they disengage or lower their expectations. The Hope Gap isn’t just a barrier to action, but a crisis in political imagination.
My friend Pauline Le Bel confronts the fear of dying in her new book of poems called “Becoming the Harvest.” If you live in Toronto, you might see one of her poems on the TTC. If you don;t you can hear her read it in this YouTube short, where she also talks about writing about death and becoming an ancestor.
Last night we had a real Pineapple Express. Winds gusting up to 90km/h flickered the power and brought down some smaller branches. We had about 80 mm of rain in the last 24 hours , but we are expecting another 100 or so today. Squamish has had 280mm of rain this week (150 yesterday alone), and the flooding continues in the Fraser Valley. Freezing levels are high, so whatever snow we have had, everything above 2500 meters has melted and flowed into the valleys.
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Dave Pollard begins his new series of speculative non-fiction, looking at possibilities for post-collapse, post-civilization human life. It’s a very stimulating exercise and as he is very active in his comments, I encourage you to dive in with him and see where the journey takes you. He’s doing it because it is an interesting exercise to do, which strikes me as exactly the best reason to do it. His first post is on language and it reminded me to look again at the semiotics theory I studied in second year Cultural Studies back in 1988.
There are some great conversations happening about AI here on my blog and elsewhere. For me the interesting questions are about the nature of AI and today I saw a great interview with David Krakauer, the president off the Santa Fe Institute discussing this topic in the context of complexity and emergence. (It’s an interesting interview becasue of Krakauer, not because of Neil deGrasse Tyson, who constantly interrupts the most interesting points. He’s just not a very good interviewer.)