While only an occasional blogger at best, this has been quite a hiatus for me: it’s been a year since my last post here. In addition to work with facilitation and coaching clients, and a concerted effort to make progress on my doctoral studies, there were several months of working as a volunteer with Marianne […]
Recently, I’ve been working with colleagues on a revision to the Wise Democracy Pattern Language. We are about to publish a 2.0 card deck which will soon be available for purchase, unlike the previous version which was only available in a do-it-yourself, download-and-print format. It’s been a real pleasure to be working on this […]
In the last few years, I’ve been exploring the use of Empathy Circles with some of my organizational clients, with facilitator learning groups, and in communication workshops. I’ve been finding that it is a great introduction and warm-up for Dynamic Facilitation, one of my core practices, as it offers everyone in the room the opportunity to […]
For this blog post, I wanted to share an edited version of a letter I wrote recently, to some climate change activists whom I know and love. I’m thinking that its contents may be relevant, beyond those for whom it was originally intended… Dear friends, I am writing to you in response to some […]
Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a Council on the Uncertain Human Future. It was an extremely rich and rewarding experience, contemplating the existential implications of climate change, in the context of deep community — and I am still planning to write a full-length post about it, soon. However, I got a bit […]
It’s just been a few days since I wrote my last blog post, “Open Carry Love“. I’ve been a fairly infrequent blogger, so I was not planning on posting again so soon. Yet last night, I attended an online webinar sponsored by some of the organizers of the Women’s March. There were eleven thousand participants […]
On Saturday at the Four Freedoms rally in Pittsfield, MA, I saw a poster that said: “Open Carry LOVE between my BROTHERS and my SISTERS ALL OVER this LAND…” Wish I had a pic of that one to share with you! In the meantime, here’s another favorite: As for myself, I did not make a […]
I’m writing this blog post primarily for those of us who identify as somewhere on the liberal-to-progressive spectrum, as that’s the broader community whose political views I know best. Since these are the folks whom I tend to expect to ‘get it’, it’s also where I can get most disappointed. Recently, some commentators have been […]
I’ve been thinking about something these days…. given the way our society is set up, it’s no wonder that many of us don’t think of listening as a powerful activity! The way things are currently structured, listening is usually what the powerless are forced to do, and what the powerful refuse to do. I get […]
This can seem like an impossible thing, these days… even as it’s clear that we, especially here in the U.S., need it more than ever! Yet many of us know from experience that it is indeed possible, though it often takes real incentives to bring people to the table in the first place. And even […]
