Coming into the afternoon session of day two, the weaving between Tom Hurley and Sharon Eakes started to thread together the themes of emerging patterns.

Tom talked about the challenge of holding the moment of stillness – presencing – in a reality that is constantly changing. He referenced his aikido master who is not always in his center, but – crucially – knows how to return to his center when he loses it. So, nurturing the practice of returning to source on the banks of the river while engaging in the flow of the stream.

Juanita’s afternoon session, Conversation as a Radical Act, hosted in collaboration with Nancy Margulies and Nancy White was incredibly powerful and held a truly radical role for the conversational arts in the transformation of social issues. Because of its relevance to so many other conversations, I am giving it its own post to make it easier to link to, and going directly on to Van Jones’ talk here.

I was unable to make the afternoon keynote by Van Jones, who is co-founder and chair of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, California, which was one of those talks the whole conference was buzzing about from that moment onwards. Like other inspiring and thought-provoking conversations being generated here, you can almost see the effects from Jones’ work rippling out from here, far into the future all across the land.

I had the privilege to have seen Van Jones very recently at the Bioneers conference, so I know first-hand how paradigm-changing his passions are – "Green Jobs, not Jails", how we are leaving whole populations behind in our ‘progressive’ moves into a better future, and how a idealogical collaboration between economics, environmentalism and social justice is necessary for there to be real change in any of them.

Again, I defer to Nancy  Margulies’ deft harvesting of the key points of Van’s talk:

If you want to read my harvest of Van’s session at Bioneers, click here.

To continue reading chronologically, click here for a harvest of Tuesday night’s co-hosted reception .