With the way the world is – connected and interdependant – from time to time disasters from afar touch me from half way around the world. In Australia, around Melbourne, bush fires have ravaged communities this weekend, leaving 83 people dead and untold millions of dollars in damage. Viv McWaters posted a call to action today and I pass it on. Wnatever you can do to help, especially if you know people there, would be good.
A couple of days ago I headed across the northern United States on a Boeing 757 on United airlines – the hungry skies. United is a quirky airline. They have three classes of seating on their domestic flights: executive, economy and then what I call the “hole in the bagel class:” Economy Plus. Economy Plus consists of a third of the rows of the economy cabin with four inches more legroom than the back two thirds of the economy cabin. In practice, Economy Plus seems to offer pretty much the same legroom as every other airline, but the economy cabin …
Off to Kalamazoo, Michigan to attend a retreat with the Fetzer Institute on Indigenous leadership. We’ll gather together 24 or so folks from around the US who are working with leadership in Indigenous communities, organizations and governments and ask some interesting questions about the kinds of worldviews that drive our current practice of leadership, moving us away from traditional collective leadership capacities and towards individual leadership and scientific management models. The photo above is the scene I just watched, the sun rising over Mount Baker. My friend Dustin Rivers says that the [e Sḵwxwú7mesh word for this time …
Thinking today about the challenge of engaging community for real change, and I am playing around with two simple on the surface, but difficult to execute ideas. I think though that if these ideas are executed, it creates the best possible conditions for sustained action and transformative change. The ideas, expressed as patterns, are: operate from a clear centre, and embody your future now. I was riding the ferry with my friend Patti DeSante who is at the moment in deep Zen training with Roshi Joan Halifax and exploring many aspects of embodied practice in the world. We were discussing …
Friends who fed me this week: Ashley Cooper on a piece by Parker palmer on teaching with heart and soul. Rob Bailey writes the owner’s manual on the coconut. Tenneson Woolf uses Wordle to produce a harvest whiskey river on the emotional mechanics of inspiration Mark Woods celebrates Edward Abbey’s passing with some excerpts from his work and meditations on deserts Peter Rukavina‘s unorthodox diary of his day without digital technology. Peter Rawsthorne on the ways we are shaping citizen eGovernment on Bowen Island.