It was an awesome, intense and crazy week.
Working Monday from home and meeting Y’s new teacher for this year formed a normal enough start. On Tuesday I traveled to Sesimbra in Portugal, for a three day training with all my The Green Land colleagues about ‘systems convening‘.
The training was provided by Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, and took place in their home. (I’ve known Bev for over 20 years from my knowledge management days and Etienne’s work on communities of practice I have used a lot since the late 1990s. Doing trainings in their home took inspiration from Bev’s 2008 participation in E’s birthday unconference.) Three very intense and awesome days. Bev and Etienne were amazing hosts, and I am very grateful we could do this. I took over four thousand words of notes, so the coming week I will need to reflect quite a bit on all that took place.
The craziness took place during the taxi ride back with two colleagues to the airport Saturday early morning. While crossing the almost empty red 25 de abril bridge over the Tagus river at 6:30 in the morning a police car overtook us, cut us off to get behind the car in front of us, tried to box it in and opened fire on it to shoot out a tire. When we were all stopped the two police officers came out guns drawn and fired warning shots to get the driver of the other car to obey. Our driver slowly backed out and went around, it all happened so fast there wasn’t enough time to push through the suprise and get scared or react in some other way. But we were all awake.
Arriving at Schiphol airport with some delay, I took a train straight to Assen in the north of the Netherlands, where my brother in law picked me up to go to a campground for the yearly weekend meet-up and bbq party of E’s extended family. The weather was like high summer, and it was good to see everyone again.
We returned home early evening today.
Tomorrow starts the process of reflecting on everything that happened the past seven days.
Colleague M. taking a moment of reflection at the edge of the pool at Bev and Etienne’s home, looking out over Sesimbra and the sea.