Those of you who don’t live in Canada probably haven’t yet heard of the stand-off between Iroquoian peoples and developers in Ontario. The dispute concerns a piece of land called The Haldimand Tract, the jurisdiction of which is under dispute. The Six Nations people who live nearby, and on whose traditional territory the land lies, moved to stop a housing development there five months ago, with the idea that until ownership over the land is settled, building houses wouldn’t be a good idea. The dispute has been angry and a little violent, but recently, the provincial government and …
I haven’t posted much music lately, but here’s a track I was listening to last night. Gathered into this play list at Motel de Moka is a beautiful track from Alex Cline called Wreath of Rain. And here it is, an mp3 for your listening pleasure on a summer day when rain threatens. mp3: Alex Cline – Wreath of Rain
A beautiful photograph of a beautiful sculpture made of paper, by artist Peter Callesen. I love this because it is about flow and it required the same for its production. And it’s quite something to see where that little canoe is going! PS. This is my 1000th post here at Parking Lot, give or take a few. Thanks for reading along!
Serendipity. Nancy White posted yesterday about why we seem to be suffering from a lack of innovation in the world, and whether it was all about the culture of control and fear. To which I replied – in several hundred words now – look at schools. And then today, AKMA has a nice post on a talk he is due to give to some Christian anarchists about his family’s experiences with homeschooling, and it’s lovely and concise and carefully thought through and all that stuff that I love about AKMA’s writing. Something’s in the air, eh?
Pema Chodron, a well known Buddhist teacher, is one of my favourite teachers on facilitation practice. She has enhanced my understanding of dealing with tricky situations and scary places with practices, advice and stories which are beautifully rendered. In this article, “The Answer to Anger and Agression is Patience” she writes about her own struggle to cultivate a practice of patience as the antidote to anger and aggression: Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the …