Simon Goland describes an experience of travel that seems very common these days:
When my parents were finally able to travel and start seeing the world, their travel looked like checking off boxes of countries, places, cities, and museums. Arrive somewhere. Walk through a place without stopping much. Take some photos. Check off a mental box. On to the next place. And when I traveled with them, I too embraced that way of seeing the world.
I got good at it, actually. I could “do” a European capital in two and a half days and tell you, with some confidence, that I had been there. I had the photos to prove it. What I didn’t have – though it took me years to notice the absence – was any memory of my own body while I was standing in front of the thing I had traveled so far to see. I was present for the checklist. I was not present for the cathedral, the museum, or the funky little cafe nearby.
This speaks to something I have learned over my life, as I have been able to travel to all kinds of places for work and curiosity. Nowadays when Caitlin and I visit a place on holiday we go to walk: multi-day walks, day trips, walks to places where we sit for a while and listen to the sounds. Most of this travel happens in rural and wild places, and so even when we are in popular areas like Tuscany or Provence, we find ourselves alone in the quiet of the woods, the shoreline, or the fields that fewer people travel to. We tend to avoid the cities.
When I am in a city, instead of going to the tourist spots I like to try to find a football match to attend. Especially if I am in a place where the football is not one of the top leagues. Going along to a football match gives me the experience of what a community is like. The travel from wherever I am staying to the stadium, the culture of the place, the food, the walk, the chants, the style of play. All are much more interesting indicators of where I am than the curated experience of a place through its formal cultural institutions. It induces and requires the presence that Simon is talking about.
As a result my language of travel has become very explicit. I don't "explore" a place or "discover" something, unless what I am exploring and discovering is something about myself. Instead I am very clear that when I am away from home I am "visiting" a place, which places upon me a burden of respect for what is there. I try to learn enough of the language to be understood. I try to familiarize myself with places that visitors are not welcome, because many communities have fragile refuges from the influx of visitors and, living on an island that is a busy summer tourist destination, I know there are some places that the community needs to have for itself, for sanctuary and calm.
“Jet Kiss” a sculpture by Mike Ross at the Capital Hill metro station
I’ve just returned from a week or work in Seattle. As I get older I am noticing how exhausting it is to be socializing a lot, and this week was full on BE VERY PRESENT WITH PEOPLE energy followed by a need to spend time alone in reflection and restoration. I slept deeply every night I was there.
Sometimes when I do this work I find myself at a hotel on the outskirts of town, confined to the vast expanse of car-forward infrastructure that we are cursed with in North America. It makes wandering exhausting, let alone dangerous, and so one just camps in the hotel room or at a nearby franchise bar or coffee shop, pretending to experience human community in a mall owned by private equity.
But in Seattle two things worked against this. First, it is summer, which in this part pf the world means you go outside regardless because warm sunny and dry days are the exception, not the norm. And second I was ensconced in the U District near the university, which is quieter in the summer with no students around. So it all behooved me to take my chance and spend the few hours for I had for solitude after work and before dark out of doors.
I have been visiting and travelling to Seattle for decades. It’s only 250 kms or so south of here, but the border makes it further and longer. Pretty as the drive is for a lot of it, it’s exhausting to do after a week of work. US-Canada borders are not fun places at the moment, and the traffic in both Seattle and Vancouver is, in plain terms, a nightmare.
However, these days there is a constantly improving light rail system in the city and so for the last two trips there I flew from Vancouver. Where I stay in Seattle is kitty corner from the U District light rail station and suddenly it couldn’t be easier to get around the city. This time I noticed how much it changed my experience of the place.
The U District station is 45 minutes from the airport, which lies on the far side of downtown. I arrived on Sunday and dropped my luggage at the hotel and then jumped right back on the train and headed downtown to go to my first ever National Women Soccer League game. The Seattle Reign which includes a local Canadian player Holly Ward, were hosting Angel City at Lumen field, Seattle’s massive NFL Stadium. There were about 7000 people there, a generally quiet crowd, with a drum core marching band up above the supporters section and a game capo trying to get chants going in teh south end.
The match was entertaining, resulting in a 2-2 draw, both teams needing to adjust without their superstars, Jess Fishlock of Seattle and Jun Endo for Los Angeles. Tactically it was fascinating to watch teams trying to solve each other. My eyes were on the creative play of Mercado and Sentnor who were given the job of disrupting each other’s defences with surprise, trickery, vision and skill.
After the match I wandered over to Pioneer Square and with my knack for finding decent cheap eats, I went to Numero Uno Pizza. This looks like a regular gritty urban pizza slice place, but they have a half secret menu of Turkish flatbreads like pide and lahmacun. And so that’s what I had, a lamb lahmacun with a small green salad.
The second night I was out I again hopped on the light rail and headed to Capital Hill where one of my work colleagues was playing a recreational softball game in Cal Anderton Park, which is a whole scene. Seattle really is a whole scene in some many ways. There are so many subcultures that it’s not uncommon so see them reduced down to the level of individuals doing their own thing. While there was a softball game going on, there were folks elsewhere playing soccer, and groups of people hanging out with their besties. It was busy, diverse, and wild. The youth subcultures in Seattle have a distinctive combination of performative insecurity crossed with a fierce we-don’t-give-a-shit attitude. When I was there in June, during the World Cup, there were many Bosnia-Herzegovina supporters staying in my hotel, and they were completely flummoxed by the scene. It was funny to watch.
At any rate, my colleague’s game was a good excuse to wander down to that neighbourhood, which also afforded a chance to go to Elliot Bay Books, one the finest bookstores in the region. After spending a hour there, I grabbed a chicken tikka at Cafe Ashiana, a virtual food truck tucked into a small building down below Broadway. It’s an Afghan/Pakistani place, quiet at 9pm when I got there but absolutely delicious.
Tuesday night, it was another visit to a colleague who has a night job working at Bamboo, a sushi restaurant in the mall-as-if-it-were-a-village that is University Village. The restaurant was a 20 minute walk from campus to this strange outdoor mall. It was a lovely warm evening, and I sat on the patio and had a dish of crispy rice with spicy albacore tuna and a house roll featuring seared salmon, seasoned crab, tempura asparagus, white truffle ponzu, kewpie dill aioli, and crispy leek. Yum.
On my final evening, after our team went out for ice cream to celebrate our work I went to Magus Books, which is a fantastic used book store, bought an Ottolenghi recipe book, a collection of Alistair Macleod stories and a Blues harmonica method book and then walked up to Cedars where there was a Wednesday night butter chicken special.
Mornings, my walk down to the campus had me stopping at Cafe Solstice which pulls an EXCELLENT espresso (even by Seattle standards) and their breakfast wraps are “Canadian sized” portions which is appreciated. It’s now become my go to place for my morning solo prep time. In the early morning in summer, it’s quiet. Probably not like that at other times.
I document all of these places because for the first time, I have finally experienced Seattle as a walkable, accessible city. The light rail has changed everything, shrinking the city to a more human scale for those of us who are visiting.
On May 1 we left for a month in France. When we returned we got the weekend at home which meant hastily harvesting spinach and making 15 spanakopitas for the freezer and a bunch of spinach pesto. Then it was off again on Tuesday morning and a few days of work in Toronto and then a lovely weekend with my brother and sister and nieces and nephew in Simcoeside, north of the city.
And then yesterday home in time for a Carmena Bowena rehearsal. The less said about that the better. I was dirt tired from the jet lag and the weekend, and as a whole, let’s just say it’s great to sound like that in rehearsal. We got to take a look at some deep holes that need patching up. We will be fine come June 27-28 for our concerts.
It is rainy and cool here on the coast, a little taste of what we call “Juneuary.” Stage 3 water restrictions have started on our island meaning that we can only water our garden by hand now. So despite a welcome steady drizzle, we are into summer gardening.
As the year is nearly half over I’m checking in on my quest to log 365 birds. When the year started with a trip to Costa Rica in January and knowing that we were headed to Europe and Eastern North America this year, I thought that might be an achievable target. Today I logged birds 300 and 301 – a Western Wood Pewee and a Western Tanager. So 64 birds to go for the year. The thing about the northern hemisphere is that there aren’t that many more birds I’m likely to see here. Migration season is pretty much over. There will be a window of birds coming back through here in the fall and then the winter birds that hang out will return. So even though it looks like I’m nearly there, there aren’t many I can add from here on Bowen Island. Most of my birding is on the coast, but I might do a trip or two to the Fraser estuary or towards the interior to see some different birds this summer. At this point, it’s about going to where the birds are.
I have one more work trip this season before finally being able to put my feet up until the fall. This summer I’ll be working through our Complexity Inside and Out materials which need some updating as we get ready for the fall 2026 offering. This is a course that is geared towards folks that are leading in complexity from an organizational position or as a consultant/facilitator/host. Given the amount of writing, thinking, and reflecting I’ve done this winter and spring prompted by Dave Snowden’s absolutely prodigious output, there is lots to say, do and clarify. Specifically I need to find clear ways to shape how my practice lies adjacent to hosting and, I hope, drives that practice into a deeper coherence with the challenges and imperatives complexity throws up for us.
Travelling and working in Arlington, Texas this week. Here are a few things that caught my eye.
On reading at random:, Elspeth Wilson notes:
Just before Christmas 2019, a friend told me that the less they know about a film, the better. If they see a trailer or read too much about it, it makes them less likely to want to watch the film. They explained that there’s something about encountering a piece of art with as few preconceptions as possible that makes you meet it where it’s at, on its own merits. This also basically made them uninfluenceable, I realized. Why not try it with books?
I started off by picking up books from the library in the tube station near my house, swapping ones I’d read for whatever caught my eye. I might glance at the blurb but considering I was choosing from a limited selection, I usually had no choice but to pick something I wouldn’t normally gravitate towards. I asked family members—often older with different interests—if they’d got any books they were looking to pass on. I joined a book club with people with different taste from me and made myself read the books, even the ones I didn’t like the sound of.
My reading has certainly got less aesthetic as I have read more randomly. My shelves don’t always look beautiful but they are a lot more varied than they were before.
A bunch of my reads from last year came from little free libraries scattered around neighbourhoods, or as is the case on Bowen Island, the waiting shelter at the ferry dock. The book I’m reading now is from my local library’s “give away” shelf.
Patti Digh reflects on a trip she took to East Germany as a student and an uncomfortable stop by the East German police.
I did not yet know what a wall could hold in place. Only that the air felt heavier on that side of the border, as if weather itself were governed. Rules applied not only to movement but to posture, to appearance, to how long one could be looked at without flinching. At twenty, I mistook compliance for safety. I believed that if I followed instructions closely enough—kept my hair where it belonged, my hands visible, my answers brief—I would pass through unchanged.
The post is called “Close enough to share weather” and it’s a pretty powerful story.
Patti is always good for some insight a couple of times a week! Here she is talking about imperfectly tending a garden – which I can relate to – and drawing it into a reflection on the stewardship of we can do:
Tending the garden you can touch does not require mastery. It requires that we return to it. It asks only that we keep coming back to what is in front of us, willing to notice what failed, what survived anyway, and what might still grow with a little more care.
One of the profs I met this week at University of Texas Arlington is Desiree Henderson. She’s teaching a course called Literature and The Good Life. It’s designed to cultivate a love of reading in students. The featured novel is my favourite book of last year, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, but it also features which features works by George Saunders. I don’t know Saunders’ work but Open Culture has me covered with links to ten of his short stories available online.
Another professor I met is Tim Richardson who teaches English and dives into his passions around ambient sound and music. We had a great conversation about radio, the artist Chainsaw and our various artistic endeavours over the years using sound and music in multimedia performance contexts. Our conversation reminded my that somewhere I may still have a recording I made of a flute and guitar improvisation recorded in a squash court at Peter Robinson College at Trent University. I made it with Todd Hildebrandt, one of the original members of the Born Again Pagans.
We met these folks through participatory leadership training we have been doing at the university. This is our fourth cohort of senior leaders from UTA and one can imagine all kinds of conversations that we are having these days. Over lunch today a group of us were discussing assessment, compliance and the bigger purpose of higher education. This afternoon I came across this interview with Jennifer Frey from the University of Tulsa. Worth a read and a think. We need an active conversation about this stuff outside of the academy.
Final boarding. I’m travelling back on American Airlines. When you check in the ask if you’d like to check a bag which we needed to do for one of our small otherwise-carry-ons. The charge is $25. You pay it and the next screen says “would you like to check your carry on bags for free?” That represents the shittiest behaviour of customer facing businesses who see their customers as eternal ATMs. So word to the wise. Try checking in first WITHOUT paying for a small checked bag on American and see if you get the free screen.
Some very cool places I’ve only just visited for the first time at YVR. #FirstNations #Musqueam #Autusm #Neurodiversity #YVR