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Anne Stadler has died

October 29, 2023 By Featured, Open Space 7 Comments

The first time I ever experienced Open Space Technology was at the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners in Whistler, BC, Canada in 1995.  It changed my life, to be hosted by a small team of beautiful facilitators who took a standard conference and opened space for the 400 of us to spend a day in deep practice, conversation, and community together.   The team was Anne Stadler, Angeles Arrien and Chris Carter.  What an introduction to Open Space.  I can still remember Anne lighting a candle and placing it at the centre of a huge concentric swirl of chairs. …

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The thresholds of community

October 29, 2023 By Being, Bowen, Community, Featured, First Nations

Matteo Polisi dives into the arms of The Swanguardians after scoring a goal for TSS Rovers in the Voyageurs Cup, April 19, 2023 . I am somewhere at the bottom of that pile. Photo by Maddy Mah Our friends Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry interviewed Caitlin and me for their podcast From the Outside on the subject of community. It’s a really rich conversation. In the podcast, we cover a lot of ground including really understanding the act and practice of crossing boundaries and thresholds to enter a community.  There is a cost to crossing a threshold, a requirement to …

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Seeing ourselves in other’s histories

October 12, 2023 By Bowen, Culture, Featured 2 Comments

After the wedding by Leanne Romak My friend Leanne Romak – the person who designed this very website back in 2014 – has a show at The Hearth, the Bowen Island Arts Council gallery. Along with artist Sonya Iwasiuk, the two artists have a small but lovely show called “Reflections: Stories of Ukrainian -Canadian ancestors” on until October 23. Leanne’s pieces in the show are painting based on photographs taken by her uncle the 1940s. She found them poking around in the attic of an abandoned farmhouse in Manitoba in the 2010s. She has created fine paintings from these photos …

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Obliquity as a strategy for learning

September 27, 2023 By Complexity, Learning 2 Comments

From a lovely video post from Johnnie Moore: “ Sometimes giving instructions, offering advice and explanations or information may not be the best way to help people to progress and grow. And that sometimes what’s needed is a spirit of playful experimentation and a sense of companionship. When I coached kids at football, I was the third coach on our team. I am not a great player, so I couldn’t teach the kids deep strategy and techniques. But I was able to help them understand how they were learning the game. We had rotating subs, so when kids came off …

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Knowing our Place

September 22, 2023 By Bowen, Featured, First Nations 2 Comments

Átl’ka7tsem, the fjord in which I live, in a photo I took in November 2014 The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is coming up in Canada. Every person in Canada lives in a place that, from time immemorial, has been occupied, used, loved, protected and cherished by an Indigenous culture. In Canadian law, settler governments and citizens have a special relationship with these Nations, and it has been thus since the Crown of Britain elbowed itself into the already fully occupied territories of North America. It was encoded into common law in 1763 through the Royal Proclamation and, subsequently, …

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