2017 is moving so quickly it has been difficult for me to seize any day as it has waxed, wholed and waned. The cultural markers of New Year, Presidential Inauguration, Family Day, and Valentines have already come and gone. Wars flare. Peace is threatened. Borders are breached. For me the world outside my doorstep has [...]
This is one of series of blogs that are a retrospective reflection on Integral City Community of Practice’s experience in taking the In This Together (ITT) course on basic facilitation The ninth and final class of the course focused on enjoying our roles as facilitators. We started with a reminder that facilitators do well to consider the old wisdom that [...]
This is one of series of blogs that are a retrospective reflection on Integral City Community of Practice’s experience in taking the In This Together (ITT) course on basic facilitation skills taught by Diane Musho Hamilton and Ten Directions. In the seventh module of the course we out of the “refiner’s fire” of conflict into the opportunity to give and [...]
If I were going to choose a month to celebrate City Day, I would propose September. Why? Because it is the start of Spring in the southern hemisphere and the start of Fall in the Northern Hemisphere. One season embraces new life and the other early harvest. Both seasons hold promise and natural impulses for celebration. [...]
If we created City Day to celebrate our cities, this celebration would bring a focus to the value of the city to the majority of humans world-wide. It has the possibility of connecting silos, stovepipes and solitudes within the city. Regular city celebration would create a pattern of aligning diverse individual intentions to a celebratory purpose, [...]
Lovelock has proposed that humans are Gaia's reflective organ and I suggest that, in fact, individuals are cells in the cities who are the actual organs of a whole organ system now alive on Gaia. So with those thoughts in mind, perhaps we are at the seminal moment for us humans to consider not just how we have [...]
City of Organs Traditional Chinese medicine embraces a geography of the human body that reflects an energy flow model of the body, where energy cycles through the body organs along meridian pathways in daily rhythms. The Chinese refer to the body’s organs as “officials”. Map 1: 4 quadrant 8 level Map of City Organs [...]
Celebration MIA On this fifteenth anniversary of both the infamy and redress of New York’s 9/11 World Trade Center attack, I look around the world at the many days we set aside as celebrations and I am struck by a major omission. We celebrate the planet with Earth Day. Most nations celebrate a Nation Day [...]
ZomBees? The Divine certainly has a sense of humour. Otherwise, I might not notice that in one week I read an article on the Zombie Cities in China – where the human hive has been built without a human to occupy them (yet) … and … An article on ZomBees – where the [...]
The hauntingly beautiful photographs by Caemerrer of China’s new – but empty – cities reminded me of Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial over-reach. Burtynsky Shipyard Burtynsky has recorded the disasters of the Modern industrial revolution in the form of photographs that display the patterns and textures of its very demise. But even in the [...]