Savoring work and life celebrations from 2025

Hello and Happy New Year! If you got this post via email, thank you for subscribing to the “Listening Arts” blog. I recently wrote on LinkedIn about my gratitudes for 2025, yet wasn’t able to squeeze in all the folks I wanted to mention. Then, while writing this expanded version, I realized there are some […]

Listening through despair:

on Oxana Timofeeva’s“Energy and Extraction: A Philosophical Approach” Kosmos Lecture given on January 30, 2025, at the Humboldt University in Berlin Not being familiar with Prof. Dr. Oxana Timofeeva’s work, I was not sure what to expect in attending this presentation. Yet I ended up being so deeply moved, in an unexpected and very surprising […]

Love, Systemic Intelligence, & the Climate Crisis: What’s listening got to do with it?

I was recently blown away by a deeply powerful post on Linked In. Strategic leadership coach David Hutchens quotes Chilean bioethicist Humberto Maturana, who wrote: “Love is the only emotion that can increase the intelligence of the system.” Then David follows up on this by asking us, “Does that stop you in your tracks like […]

vTaiwan: activism, deliberative democracy, & social change

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 […]

Open Dialogue and the (helpful) power of (liberating) structures…

Next to conversations about Occupy Everywhere, some of the most alive conversations I’ve been having recently have been about Open Dialogue, an evidence-based, hugely effective approach for helping people heal from schizophrenia, developed by Jaako Seikkula and a community of practitioners in Finland. For those of us still learning about this, Ron Unger’s web post […]

The Listening Arts and Social Change…

I’ve been wanting to write for a while, on how I see the relationship between listening and social change. As much as I love dialogue… and as passionate as I am about mediation / facilitation (especially the transformative, non-linear, emergent varieties thereof…)  I also think it’s key to acknowledge that, on its own, facilitation is […]