Wordle

This neat site lets you take a block of text and it turns it into word art. I like it because it gives a different perspective on things you've written or work you've done. I think it could be an interesting exercise for teams working on projects. I wonder what would happen if my work team ran a new policy under development through Wordle, for example. We'll try it and I'll keep you posted. Here's one of mine from something we wrote a couple of years ago. Recognize it?

Solution Oriented Five-Year-Olds

Phew! Now the sheep won't escape!

Five-year-olds and Face Paint

We were cleaning out the garage yesterday and found some face paint we'd bought years ago for some early King's Bridge event. Probably the Stampede events we used to have when we were at the Cambrian Heights Community Centre. (Those were great events!). Emily & Kaylee decided they'd like to paint my face. They actually didn't do too bad.

Buffet Breakfasts and Social Media

Don't you hate it when you hit the buffet line just as the food is running out, but there are still a number of people behind you? Then no matter what you take it's the last scoop of something, last muffin or the last pat of butter. You can feel all the eyes behind you boring into your back with each thing you take. It was too much stress for a Thursday morning last week.

But on the bright side we heard a great talk on social media. I've heard so many talks on this subject now, they are all starting to sound the same, but I really liked Rob Cottingham's talk that he gave to the communications staff at The City of Calgary. Here's link to one of his video presentations. Check it out.

Driftwood sculptures

Kaylee was sticking pieces of driftwood in the sand in their sandbox. We collected these pieces of driftwood from near our lake - probably lake Kucanusa - on some excursion when I was in my early teens. They lived on a banana rack in the backyard of my dad's house for years. When we cleared out dad's house this past year, the pieces of drift wood wound up in the sandbox in my backyard.

Unaffected

We all want to be cool. Being cool means being unaffected. I find myself working at being unaffected. It seems often to be effective you have to be. Sounds odd, I know, but think off all the compassion professions where the professionals depend on remaining somewhat detached to be able to do what they need to do well. Councilors, doctors, social workers, aid workers etc. If they get too affected by the people and situations around them they loose the objectivity they need to do a good job. But there seems to be some kind of catch 22 there. Those who care less, do better? Doesn't seem right. Shouldn't it be that you are only at your best when you are fully engaged, plugged in and on fire? Isn't that where the impetuous for greatness comes?

Maybe I'm just all flustered because something started to get under my skin and just as I was trying to ignore it and remain, you know, cool, I walked past graffiti on a bridge railing that said, "Stop settling for what is wrong."

I don't really know what it means. It just affected me.

Done Dad's House

It took us over a year to empty the contents of Dad's house and do some "minor" renovations to the interior. New paint, flooring, tub & shower, venting the bathroom vent properly, trimming trees and a list of minor repairs and touch-ups. Shannon, Will, Rob and I have all worked pretty hard at it with a number of friends and family members pitching in along the way. The final weeks were a bit crazy as we coupled getting ready for Shannon & Will's wedding with a looming deadline on the house. Rob was there every day this past week when I was at work, as Nicole baby-sat the girls.

Yesterday evening our manager handed over the keys to the place to the new tenants. Yesterday morning Rob and the girls and I were there cleaning. It looked pretty good. There were some things that weren't perfect and there is more work needed. Especially on the outside, but I thought we were providing a nice place for the new family.

We had two cars with us for some reason. Rob took the girls and left first. I wandered from room to room making sure everything looked okay and thinking. There were some emotions. I wished my dad could see how the place looked now. I wonder what he'd think. He built the house for he, Shannon and I when my parents were divorced 30 years ago. He'd lived there until four months before he passed away.

Everything was mopped, dusted and polished. I collected our last items and glanced at the gift basked we'd left on the hearth for the new family. The little girl is not much younger than Shannon was when we first moved in. I felt a familiar mix of happy and sad as I pulled the locked door shut behind me. The house I grew up in is someone else's home now. I hope it's as much a blessing to them as it was to us.

Fractal funny

Found this. Even uses my fun new blue fractal!

The Most Important Meal of the Day

I made this for breakfast the other day and it was so beautiful that I almost couldn't eat it...but then I did.

Who comes to who

I was impressed today by a colleague - a member of my client team who greatly outranks me. He sent me a note with a request. I had a couple of questions and emailed him a note to that effect saying I'd come find him to talk to him later in the day, as I knew he was busy prepping for a meeting. (I'd already looked for him and he wasn't around.)

Ten minutes later he was in my office. "You had a question?"

There are all sorts of little power plays that take place in daily interactions in the workspace. Who sits where in the room, on what side of the desk, who waits for who, and definitely, who comes to who's office. Higher ups can summon common folk. "Please see me."

I've never held rank. I always find people and respond to summons. It rose to my awareness a few weeks ago when another colleague and I were talking but she had to go. "Can we work on this later?" "Sure," I said. "I'll come find you."

"No, I'll find you," she said. I was mildly humbled.

I was mildly humbled again today when this other colleague came to find me to respond to my question. Funny how just little things like that make a difference. At least to me.

Fractals are cool

My new favourite thing is fractals. Fractals are geometric shapes that are very complex and infinitely detailed. You can zoom in on a section and it will have just as much detail as the whole fractal. They are recursively defined and small sections of them are similar to large ones. They blow my mind and as a cool byproduct - they are beautiful.

Almost Lent?

I apologize in advance for the weird brain-dump to follow.

My cousin Sarah is doing a PhD thesis on something about ecology, something and the archetype of initiation. (Due apologies to Sarah for not being able to remember the whole topic properly.) At Christmas she was telling me about it. It was interesting. That mixed with some things I was reading, working on, and watching that made me think a few perhaps random but seemingly related thoughts.

Part of the deal with the "archetype of initiation" is that at many times, in many cultures, young people went through some kind of initiation rite. Like, the Native American Sun Dance ritual, for instance. Most initiation rituals had some fairly high level of intensity to them - discomfort and pain - but experiencing that and pushing through it lent to healthy individual growth, realization, or sometimes revelation, and in many societies signaled the entry into adulthood.

Although we have many accepted "rites of passage" now in Western culture, I speculate they tend to lack the intensity and perhaps effectiveness of some more traditional versions. We're not really big on discomfort in our society. We try to avoid it. At all costs. We even avoid people who are experiencing it.

I was trying to piece together how ecology fit in, and thought of bit of trivia I heard about forest fires. It is now well understood that forest fires are important to the healthy life-cycle of the forest. The fire clears out death and decay leaving room and fertilizer for new life. I'd heard an example from the 1970's were our collective wisdom on forest fires was that they were bad and should be avoided. If any started they were stopped asap. This, it didn't turn out was good for forests. In one instance a forest fire finally took hold in an area that natural fires hadn't been allowed to burn in for many years. The fire burned so long and so hot that is scalded the earth and new growth won't be possible for decades.

At work I have a poster a colleague gave me that creatively looks as the process necessary for innovation to take place in a team or organization. There was a phase in the fairly complex process that spoke of a sense of "misfit" then "pain" that often proceeded innovation. Something form that connected in my mind to this idea of initiation or need to walk through some kind of uncomfortable process for something good to grow.

Some bit of pain, discomfort, or degeneration is necessary for healthy growth, in individuals as well as ecologies, it seems. Probably it's important in organizational as well as societal systems. In the back of my mind I'm developing a hypothesis that our cultural distaste for discomfort is going to cause some kind of 'total burn out' in western culture unless we get better at adjusting to, understanding and even embracing the pain that comes with shift, and decay. Even in our economies.

My cousin Sarah asked about my faith in connection to this. It was a surprising question, but I was perhaps even more surprised to realize that there was a link. At first baptism came to mind symbolizing death and rebirth. Later as I thought about it, I realized much of Christianity revolves around the need to experience death as a prerequisite to new life. We don't focus so much on the death part in much of western Christianity, but it is clear and ubiquitous in scripture.

I'm not sure where all that came from, or what it means. Perhaps it's because it's almost Lent.

On my knees...

I was wondering what would take to compel me to my knees. I don’t know why, but I think about from time to time.

I remember the very first time I knelt at an alter to receive a blessing. I was 18 or 19 and just exploring the new ideas I was discovering through Christianity. I was at a Communion service and had never taken Communion, nor could then, being neither baptized nor in any legitimate way conceding to these new ideas. Not yet. I understood and respected that I wouldn’t be allowed to take the wine and bread, but the priest presiding offered an alternative. Congregants could come forward and receive a blessing. That sounded cool, and scary.

Now if you’ve ever seen a liturgical Communion or Mass, you’ll know there are some logistics involved. There’s a pattern to how people approach the alter rail, kneel, receive and return to their sets. There’s an order, so the servers don’t get confused and no one crashes into each other. I was nervous about messing up this well practiced choreography – new to the dance as I was. But I made it up there okay and knelt.

Immediately something in me reviled the action. I was surprised. I had been feeling victorious in making so far without crashing into anyone or generally embarrassing myself by messing up the process. Safe at home plate. But as soon as I landed at the alter rail I felt an intense response. It was a clenched teeth, quite, slowly enunciated reprimanded from somewhere. Almost a hiss.

Get. Off. Your. Knees!

I know for some it’s hard not to assume some diabolical creature was whispering to me (it’s my own fault I guess for using the word “hiss”), but I really think it was 100% me. I’d never before knelt in any kind of sincere act of submission to anything or anyone. Of course I stayed put and received my blessing, but I’ll never forget that spontaneous and venomous resistance to coming to my knees for the first time.

As the years passed the ritual of Holy Communion became familiar. I came to take the bread and wine, but there was less and less reaction on my part. As important as I knew and believed it was, it’s hard for those things not to become a familiar and easy action lacking any intensity – good or bad.

But I’ve often wondered what kind thing, what kind of feeling, experience, revelation or realization would cause me – compel me – for real, to my knees. Outside of a ritualized context. I imagine what it would take, what it would feel like. I think I can almost sense it. But it seems too immense, too complex, but I still feel compelled to try and imagine it. I don’t know why.

Something wrong here?

I took this picture on a missions trip to Nicaragua. The participants on the trip were a group of Canadian teens and I was tagging along to capture a story for our organization's magazine. Also along with us, was a camera crew from the U.S. head office.

This picture is taken in the main dump of Managua. Families live around the outskirts of the dump and they work collecting refuse and selling what they can to try and make a living.

Here a couple of Canadian team members stop to talk to a woman and two boys. Our camera crew finds it photo worthy and capture the moment on film.

Is it just me or is there something disturbing about this photo? I can't quite put my finger on it.