I know, four months with nary a post and this is just a quick visit. If you are a champion for visual practices, Liberating Structures and collective sense making, take a peek at Barry Overeem’s wonderful post about the Liberating Structure, Drawing Together. I particularly appreciate his emphasis on the TOGETHER bit, because this LS can often be relegated to an individual activity.
I’m not sure this will ever get sent. I’m not sure where I have viable snail mail addresses to so many of you, so it may also end up as a blog post. (Yup, just became a blog post!)
I realize I SOOO enjoy getting cards and letters from many of you. (Well, fewer and fewer every year because like, why send a card to someone who never responds, right?) So it is time to repay the favor.
Wait, there is a hitch. I am trying a new AI-Assisted writing tool called LEX and I thought I’d let it enhance your reading experience. So what you are about to read in italics probably isn’t true! But it may give you a bit of entertainment.
I have moved around a bit since I last had a “normal” address. Larry and I got married in 2014 and we moved to his place in the woods outside Eugene, Oregon. In 2016 we decided to leave the US due to rising political tensions (Larry is Canadian) and we spent 10 months in New Zealand. We really liked it there, and we had every intention of making it our permanent home. But alas, the best laid plans… (LEX got this ALL wrong. But I like the idea of New Zealand!)
We are also more than full time grandparents. Our two grand people, Staley and Byrne, live with us Sunday nights through Fridays. Our two adults sons, Chris and Alex, live in Seattle. They clearly did not inherit their mother’s wandering genes. …
Life has been a bit unusual lately. In September, we took in a Syrian refugee family. It has been interesting, to say the least. We are definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto. The kids are great, but their parents are struggling to adjust to small town living in the US. And we are struggling to help them while still maintaining some semblance of our own lives. But it is all good, and we are all learning a lot. (Again, LEX has quite the imagination.)
We continue to deeply love and enjoy our little cabin on Skagit Bay. Living on an island (Fidalgo) is pretty great, especially one you can get on and off of via bridges. No ferries for us! I spend a lot of time in our garden up there, growing food that mostly gets snacked on by the wildlife. Our garden in Seattle has suffered in comparison.
The biggest personal news is I have semi-rewired. In other words, I’m barely doing paid client work, but still keep connected and practicing facilitation and group process, but mostly just for old clients/friends or pro-bono. Most of the latter is lazy, coaching stuff. I let others do all the heavy lifting.
I’m really enjoying this slower pace. I like having time to read, and to go on long walks with Larry and the dogs (we have two now… Maggie, the American Eskimo Dog shown in the picture, and Simon, a Shetland Sheepdog. They are both rescues, and they are both spoiled rotten.). (Nope, LEX, no dogs. I wonder if ChatGPT would have done a better job. Too bad their servers are overloaded. Non-geek friends, I apologize for this garbage!)
I also like having time to travel to see family and friends. We went to Vancouver Island in September to visit Byrne. (Hey LEX, Byrne has never been to Vancouver!)
I have picked back up my guitar and actually have calluses on my fingers! A couple of times I have been able to sing and play with Ellis, a friend of our friend Karen. I miss singing harmonies. My old bluegrass band, Nobody’s Bizness, was supposed to gather this year but, well… maybe 2023!
I also continue to read voraciously, both fiction and non-fiction. Currently I’m reading a book about North Korea and another about the history of medicine. (NOPE!)
Thank goodness our local public library makes e-books easy to get, so I can now start whittling down the piles of books that sit everywhere. I can. But will I?
So, that is enough about me. Please write and tell me about you. I would love to hear what is going on in your lives.
Happy holidays!
Love,
Nancy and Larry
Ping me if you want more family holiday pics! Holiday Fudge recipe here: https://fullcirc.com/2012/12/22/happy-holidays-and-make-some-great-fudge-candy/
It has been a while since I updated my little communities of practice (CoP) toolkit, which is essentially everything I have cribbed from all the smart CoP out there. It is part conceptual (what IS a CoP), and part operational (how to start/support a CoP). At one point someone wanted worksheets, so there are worksheets, but frankly, I think that is overkill 99% of the time!
What is new are the references to Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner’s use of social learning and social learning spaces as a container for things like CoPs. (See slides 12-14)
Have a peek, offer feedback!
One of my very treasured Liberating Structures is Ecocycle Planning. (I write about it a lot!) For quite a long time it baffled me entirely. Now it is indispensable to me to help suss out what to do in complex contexts. Some may even accuse me of finding any excuse to use it! 🙂
Lee Gimple, of the DC LS Community, invited me to do a session for them in January 2023 and I decided to offer a hands on exploration of Ecocycle by inviting everyone to ecocycle some aspect of their own life – personal, business, whatever. If you are interested in a bit of a different way of exploring ecocycle, you can sign up here. January 11, 2023 6:00-7:30 PM ET/4:30 PST and really really late for Europe. Mighty fine for the Antipodes!
P.S. The DC group has an email list too.
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, as you can see from the time stamp on this Twitter screen grab. The issue of safety in group interactions comes up so often and I feel this little devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. I can’t claim to make a space fully safe. And we can ask ourselves to co-create “brave space.” But there is never certainty.
I would love a different take, a different language around how we convene without doing damage to each other. In these post-election days here in the US, and two days after a child was shot at a local high school here in Seattle, I wonder a lot with a bruised heart.