Meaning in Place
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009Again on my way to Greece and Axladitsa, the sixth time in 1,5 years. (I’m writing this on the plane) I could never ever have imagined that this was possible in my life!
This journey is part of the Powers of Place Collaborative, which is an international stew of people, all – in one way or another – passionate about the relationship between people and places.
These days many people are expanding their awareness in many different directions and being aware of place, of the land and the buildings we are in is one of them.
It all started with Sheryl Erickson, who – with here ability to sense what field of practice and study is coming to the surface – send me an email at some point.
If I knew people or places which showed a special interest in this people-place relationship?
Yes, I did! Immediately I replied with a few names and links, just from the top of my head.
Sheryl was totally on fire with the information she got… months later a project proposal was written and later a grant received from the Fetzer Foundation in Kalamazoo (I love that name!), in the US. Last January we met in person with the very diverse core team of this collaboration, both people from the US and Europe.
At this moment I’m sitting on the bus bringing me from Thessaloniki airport to the big bus terminal to take a regional bus to Volos. I just noticed that the wheat on the fields has ripened already and is ready for harvest. So different than in Belgium where we have to wait some more months for that to happen. How would these differences in seasons and weather play our in our inner being; both individual and collective… I wonder…
From Monday till Thursday we will plunge ourselves into a deep collective inquiry around Meaning in Place. Some of you, readers, might be familiar with the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations. This art, which favors self-organization and invites people to (re-)connect with their own passion and responsibility, is in some places used as the operating system. One of the questions we hold is what becomes possible is we use this art to create meaning – or meaningfulness – not just in conversations now and then, but in relationship with place. And place can be a rural retreat/seminar center, or an urban business innovation space, even a little Learning Village like Kufunda in Zimbabwe or even a whole region.
Oh my god, cherries are ripe her too!!! This little open van had them piled up in the back! Too bad I can’t get of the bus! It is first crossing through the busy, Greek center of the city before arriving at the regional bus station.
We will look in our four-day gathering at what is the common ground in all our different practices, and of course into how we can cross-fertilize and improve them. The purpose of the Powers of Place Collaborative is “to catalyze a new field of study and practice based on the premise that right relationship between people and place offers the potential for transformative action toward what is needed at this moment in history.”
I’m looking forward to it!



