Halifax, Nova Scotia

What a hairy day of travel that was.

I’m here in Halifax for the 13th annual Open Space on Open Space conference. In an hour or so, 100 of us from all over the world will gather in in a church hall on Barrington Street, for our annual gathering, wherein we take stock of practices and the state of things Open Space. And of course we do it in Open Space.

Yesterday it took me a long time to get here. My 7:00am flight was cancelled by the Air France crash in Toronto which backed up traffic all over the country. When I finally did get on a plane (after a few moments of grief when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to) we left seven hours later, and arrived in Halifax at 2:00am. I missed the reception, but I’m just now wolfing down some breakfast and about to head over to the hall. If there’s wireless about, I’ll post notes from session topics as they emerge.

Now this might seem a tad trite, but I heard an interview on CBC this morning with the David and Nanelle Barash, the authors of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature, a book that uses evolution as a lens for reading literature.

On preview, I thought this was a silly idea, but it seems that what they have done is to review the western literary canon and note how prevalent Darwinian ideas have been over time. This, the authors claims is simply evidence that the best and most enduring pieces of literature come from very accurate observations of nature. Evolution is all around us and informs many of our behaviours and so why wouldn’t the authors of the western canon not encode this awareness in their works?

The Barashs are not saying that authors from Virgil to Mark Twain were all about a literary program of encoding the idea of evolution in everything they wrote. Far from it. They are saying that the best writers can really see what’s going on, and if you read literature with an eye to this, then you will see it too.

This led me to two thoughts. First I wondered what other lenses people use to look at literature. How do you read? I read novels only occasionally and my eye is tuned to the hero’s journey and the moments of transformation within people, where they come into their own power. What are yours?

My second thought was somewhat more profound. If it true that Darwinian ideas permeate our best cultural products, even those that predate Darwin, could a saturation in such a culture have somehow tuned Darwin’s eyes to pick out the patterns in nature that eventually became his theory of evolution? I guess I see this as an integral question: science is so preoccupied with observing and measuring the world, are not the inter-subjective roots of theory not the encoded lessons that are transmitted through a culture’s stories? This is why stories are so important it seems to me. Tell stories and let listeners discern the patterns that lead to renewed observations of the world, informed both by observation and interpretation. I wonder what the Barashs would think of this question?

It certainly leads support to the idea that a balance of the arts, literature and science might create the conditions for profound innovation. A call for a little less specialization and a little more widening and deepening of engagement with the world.

It seems often that I am asked by clients to create a safe space, by which I think they mean a safe emotional space (and I’m never REALLY sure what they mean). As a facilitator I bristle at this request for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that there is no way I can guarantee that a space will be safe. The problem has always been how to tell this to a client.

Yesterday, reading Christina Baldwin’s excellent “Calling the Circle” I got some good language around this question:

That’s a brilliant encapsulation of what a functional group is doing.

I’m very much enjoying this book by the way, and I’ll try to post a few more thoughts triggered by her writing before I take off for Halifax next week. If you want to learn more about Christina’s work, visit her site, PeerSpirit.

You are no doubt aware of the varities of Asian throat singing whereby musicians produce overtones with their voices giving haunting and eerie sounds (see this mp3 for example).

Today I stumbled on a couple of tracks from an American cowboy singer called Arthur Miles who seemed to have developed this style of singing all on his own. These two tracks are from the late 1920s and come from an excellent page of throat singing links.

Colin Morley

I’ve returned from my break to find the confirmation of Colin Morley’s death. Colin was an Open Space facilitator and although I never met him, I had several email conversations with him about Open Space, blogging and empowerment. His weblog is Empowerment Illustrated, and he was active in London with an initiative called Be The Change. If you visit there, you will find a memorial page for him.

Colin died in the July 7 bombings in London.