Day zero here at the Shambhala Summer Institute here in Halifax. The staff of the ALIA Institute have been working hard to get everything ready for us, and today people started to arrive. Over the past could of days the faculty have been meeting in a little pre-institute retreat, building our own field and grabbing the chance to have conversations with one another. We’ve been getting a little taste of each other’s modules, playing with some of the creative process that is going on and generally catching up with each and getting a sense of our field.

Today we held a little open space and one of the things we were invited to do was give some thought to what is alive in the field of the Institute this summer. Sensing like this helps us to be able to pay attention to the collective experience and gives voice to what is showing up, and what we can serve. At the conclusion of the Open Space, we checked out and I harvested a little poem that captures something of the flavour or what we’re in. Part of the set up for this poem is knowing that today the weather has been wild with high winds and driving drizzle, and even though the air is warm, there is a sense that the winter/spring part of the year is keen to leave its legacy on the summer/fall part.

Here’s the poem:

What’s alive in this field

We’re going to be at home.

The depth of passion that we own
expands out to connect
the alternatives that sing, circumspect,
from the hill tops,
that reach the ears of the young
who stand in the storm, sung
songs of drenched longing,
wanting to tap creative energy
to quiver with the joy that
lives in the edge of death and life
the light that redraws the breath of summer.

The directions are called,
the integration invites a falling into place
a space of compassionate embrace
of all we are related to.

My daughter – an image held in the hand,
at arms length, on a touch –
there is much that is held here,
much that isn’t here.

What is clear is not-knowing –
uncertainty growing like the clouds
of drizzle that shower our container

Can you feel the wind?
Can you feel the breath?

Settle down. Then step.

Morsels for chewing upon from the RSS pantry and the tap of tweet:

• Viv McWaters goes open source with her facilitation methods.
• Tweeting the revolution

The sun is shining here on Bowen Island and I am relaxing on the porch enjoying my 41st birthday. Hope all is well where you are

Harvesting things from the RSS fields:

• Rob Paterson begins a series on The Natural Organization which uses a model of systemic change that is very similar to the one we are using with the Berkana Institute in Art of Hosting learning events.
• Geoff Brown‘s new blog design looks great, and his link to Kaki King is a bonus.
• Euan Semple finds a film that describes what it’s like sometimes to be a consultant.
• Time on how twitter can be used in conference settings.

Well, among other places, hosting and teaching at ALIA West this past week, and on my way to Cornwall Ontario this week to work with Tenneson Woolf and Esther Matte and a team at the Canadian Labour Congress as we explore the Art of Hosting Conversations with folks from many different unions.

In transit I have stumbled on some great links this week, so here’s what I am reading:

• Dave Snowdon has an important post on measuring impact rather than outcomes.
• Drawball is worth a look for the way it takes chaos to community with art.
• Myriam Laberge on helpful interventions for tricky group dynamics
• Ashley Cooper shares the film she and Thomas Arthur made as a harvest from Leadership in a Self-Organizing World.
• Wendy Farmer-O`Neil says change is dead in a lovely provocative way.