Joseph Allard 1873-1947
From The Virtual Gramophone
The National Library of Canada has published hundreds of 78s of early Canadian music in their Virtual gramophone project.
Joseph Allard was a superstar in his day, recording dozens of traditional tunes on fiddle with a sparse and tasteful guitar accompaniment. Sample Reel du capitaine (mp3) and then head over to the audio page to hear more. Do what I did: spend the day there.
From Jack Ricchiuto’s Open Wiki comes notes on a talk by Ed Brown:
A beutiful meditation on Noticing Space from Ajahn Samedho:
Space is something that we tend not to notice, because it doesn’t grasp our attention, does it? It is not like a beautiful flower something really beautiful, or something really horrible — which pulls your attention right to it. You can be completely mesmerised in an instant by something exciting, fascinating, horrible or terrible; but you can’t do that with space, can you? To notice space you have to calm down — you have to contemplate it.
This is because spaciousness is not extreme, it has no extreme qualities. It is just spacious, whereas flowers can be extremely beautiful, with beautiful bright reds and oranges and purples, beautiful shapes — extremely beautiful shapes — that are just so dazzling to our minds. Our something else can be really ugly and disgusting.
But space is not dazzling, it is not disgusting, and yet without space there would not be anything else; we couldn’t see. If you had just this room, and filled it up with things so it became solid, or filled it up with cement — a big cement block — there’d be no space left in this room. Then, of course, you couldn’t have beautiful flowers or anything else; it would just be a big block. It would be useless, wouldn’t it? So we need both; we need to appreciate the form and the space, because they are the perfect couple, the true marriage, perfect harmony — space and form. We contemplate this, we reflect, and from this comes wisdom. We know how things are, rather than always trying to create things the way we might want them to be.
This comes by way of a tremendous set of Buddhist resources at BuddhaSasana.
The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation has a fantastic resources page which is worth checking out. There are dozens of pieces of material, links and book lists to support individuals and communities in engaging in the process of dialogue.
I have added some of these to the Cool Websites section of the Open Space Wiki. Feel free to add more sites there.
As an addendum to the story below on the flooding in the Pemberton area, my friends at the In-SHUCK-ch have sharedtheir story of the historical flood that dispersed the Lillooet people in mythical time.
No strangers to rain, eh?
