September 2006

Today is the second of October. Outside my study window, the sun shines so intensely on this autumn flower but it cannot fool us! Each morning we wonder if it has happened: the first shocking freeze of the season.

I am happy to be writing in these cooling temperatures. Last month I momentarily put aside the journaling of my project colleagues to consider a pressing ethical question too complicated to articulate here. Several of you generously added your voices to that conversation, and although we are now pausing a little, I imagine it is far from over.

I was grateful to have Susan Swim's dissertation within reach (Process Ethics: Collaborative Partnerships Within Therapeutic Conversational Communities, 2002). She describes content ethics as universal and fixed, in contrast with process ethics: communal, fluid, collaborative and intimate. Postmodern collaborative practitioners favour the 'local' over that which is distant and detached. Yet in this international project, I must ask, "Who's locality?" Local has so many locations!

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, what can I do but take my questions with me like new chattering companions! I return now to the last pieces of my responsive writing process.

But first, in the spirit of the upcoming Canadian Thanksgiving - my thanks to all of you dear readers, friends, family, colleagues, who find ways of sending support. You can not ever know what this means to me,

Janice