Sunday, October 25, 2009

LGMS Takes Action on 350

I was so proud of the students at Lawrence Grassi Middle School on Friday. Nancy Pollard and Lee Luders classes joined forces to call for hard caps on CO2 emissions. The Mayor, Ron Casey, and Councilor Pam Hilstad joined the students and media in the first 350 action in Canmore Alberta! Leadership in action. See all about it on Flickr stream or YouTube.

I brought the chalk & rustled up the banners before breakfast.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Heath Bunting's Day Planning


At Interactive Screen this year, I met Heath Bunting, along with a bunch of really inspired folks.
Heath's a retired artist who's artfully living his life. While in Banff, he built a rope swing, got really good at throwing rocks, and joined me on a paddle down the Bow River as well as a hike to Bourgeau Lake. On the hike we talked about his Day Pl
anning approach and I downloaded his little book. I highly recommend grabbing it.

http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=31

He makes a great point that if you plan your day and execute effectively, you can spend more time the way you intend, "A day plan can be used to ring fence time and place for personal pleasure and growth." Isn't that much better than a work To Do list as long as your thigh?

What I really like is that Heath encourages thinking about the landmark or locations where you want to be, as well as the actions. Something that makes
huge sense in the mountains where I live, is having a day plan for good weather and one for bad.

The location thing is great because certain places evoke certain actions and moods. Mapping the locations and your movement through them helps to make the day seem real before you execute it, and helps pre-experience what your intention will deliver. Try it!
Map out what you want to do, and get to it.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Red and Pink Day with Tessa

My 5-year old neighbour has become my new best friend. She came over a few days ago and I couldn't play with her as I was deep into something. So I suggested that we plan a play date the next day. We themed it Red Day--all items worn, ingested, used, needed to be red.

I was so excited that night as I purchased strawberries, watermelon, red-berry juice, and strawberry wafer cookies for us to munch on! The next day, while Tessa was taking her big sister to school, I ran over to her house and drew a big chalk arrow on the sidewalk to my house along with the words, "Tessa, go here for fun...keep going....almost there....turn here..." Well, imagine the fun we had!

We went hunting for beavers on the Bow River, threw rocks in the river for the dog, paddled across an estuary in the kayak for a picnic only to get our boots sucked off our feet by the shoreline's mud monsters. So we turned around later eating lunch while sitting riverside on top of the red table cloth we threw over top the giant Flat Rock before searching for signs of fairies using magic fairy dust my mom sent me a couple years ago. Fantastic! We had a blast.

It's soooooo important to have recess.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Vanity

I've been re reading The Valkyries by Paulo Coelho. I visited his blog today and he asked for submissions about the up side of Vanity. It got me thinking. This is the comment that I left on his blog:

30 years ago, while in high school, my vanity gave me an inflated sense of my worth. I had mistaken my self to be more important, greater than my friendship with a gentle, shy girl who had befriended me on my first day.

I publicly betrayed her and hurt her with unkind words. And I felt smaller, not larger as I had expected. I shrank before the eyes of my classmates, and my soul shriveled like an over-dried fig.

In that moment, I found something I had missed, that became my greatest friendship: Empathy. Without Vanity, I might have never found Empathy.