A little section of the Litany of Becoming by m. jade kaiser and pointed out to me by Tenneson this morning.
To say, for the first time,
“This is who I am.
This is the truth of my body.
This is what I know about myself.
This is my name and this is where my path is leading me.”
And to have it heard. Have it received. Have it affirmed.
And then,
to say it again,
and again,
as we change
and as the world changes,
and to have each proclamation greeted with an open-armed embrace
New books to read from The Tyee.
Plus ça change, plus les mêmes choses. The Seven O’ Clock News from August 6, 1966 alongside Silent Night. We are in a collective noche oscura del alma.
Rick Rubin asks us to pay attention: “Creative is something you are, not only something you do. It’s a way of moving through the world, every minute, every day. The artist is always on call.” inspiration happens at fine granularity. The new comes from outside of what we know, at the very edges of our awareness. Novelty, by definition, strikes us with surprise. The ordinary is the fodder for the extraordinary. How could it not be?
Want a practical example? I spent a delightful 90 minutes on Friday with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper and some lovely folks who are using Participatory Narrative Inquiry in different ways in the work. And it reaffirmed to me how the work of PNI is so much about generating these oblique insights, these moments of clarity and novelty. Ron Donaldson continues to delight and inspire and share such valuable stuff in his year end reflective posts, and today’s is about insight. I’m so chuffed to have helped inspire these beautiful offerings.
Dave Pollard begins his new series of speculative non-fiction, looking at possibilities for post-collapse, post-civilization human life. It’s a very stimulating exercise and as he is very active in his comments, I encourage you to dive in with him and see where the journey takes you. He’s doing it because it is an interesting exercise to do, which strikes me as exactly the best reason to do it. His first post is on language and it reminded me to look again at the semiotics theory I studied in second year Cultural Studies back in 1988.
There are some great conversations happening about AI here on my blog and elsewhere. For me the interesting questions are about the nature of AI and today I saw a great interview with David Krakauer, the president off the Santa Fe Institute discussing this topic in the context of complexity and emergence. (It’s an interesting interview becasue of Krakauer, not because of Neil deGrasse Tyson, who constantly interrupts the most interesting points. He’s just not a very good interviewer.)
So many of the principles for work and community I use in my life have come through the people I met and who supported me back in the early 2000s when I started consulting (it’s the only job I’ve had this century!). One of those networks and collections of people were the folks associated with the Berkana Institute with whomI worked for many years. My buddy Tennesson, one of the OG Berkana guys and still one of my best friends, pulled up a set of principles that Berkana used back in the early days, and I’m grateful to notice how they continue to inform my practice today:
- We relay on human goodness.
- We depend on diversity.
- We treasure the power of community.
- We trust life’s capacity to create order without control.
- We nourish our relationships and ourselves.
A few others I gained from Berkana include, “no matter the question, the answer is community” and “proceed until apprehended.”
Your algorithm may be giving you a false sense of confidence about what you know. I find this anecdotally true. Stuff I learn about through facebook or LinkedIn seems to make me feel knowledgeable especially on quicker moving issues, like the North Coast tanker ban. But stuff that comes through Bluesky, Mastodon or my RSS feeds are much more nuanced because of who I choose to follow.
Football is a game played with principles, becasue it’s a complex game and requires players to react and respond to a constantly changing environment. It was a joy watching Tottenham today cover some sense of purpose after a series of poor results, especially at home. Visiting Brentfod was no match for Spurs, and we dominated possession and played incredible defence off the ball. Van der Ven and Romero are probably amongst the best centre back pairs in the world when they are on their game, which they were today. Xavi Simons finally got the start at the number 10 position and generated the first goal and scored the second. Spurs were positive and exciting to watch and won 2-0. More of that would be much welcomed.
Elsewhere in the football world, today the Vancouver Whitecaps will play Inter Miami for their first MLS trophy in the MLS Cup Final. I used to be a huge supporter of the Whitecaps and for all kinds of reasons I stepped back from supporting that organization. But many of my friends are core parts of the Whitecaps supporters movements and they are having the time of their lives. Vancouver has played their best season of football in their 41 year history and have made every final they have competed in, winning the Canadian Championship and losing in the CONCACAF Champions Cup down in Mexico. But today they have a chance to make it two from three. They beat Miami on the way to that continental cup final, and the likes of Messi and Suarez will be side-eyeing the ‘Caps today who are on a wonderful run of form. We will see what happens.
My view for the next ten days or so.
We are settling in for one of the biggest rainfall events in years. Today it started raining and the expectation is that a series of increasingly intense atmospheric rivers will be delivering rain to the west coast in increasing amounts over the next couple of weeks. In some places there will be 300-400 millimetres of rain falling, some of it as snow on the mountains. It won’t be very windy, which is a good thing.
The atmospheric beast responsible for this is a set of stable systems out in the Pacific, a low to the north the north and a high to the south of us that are generating a trough of moisture between them and extruding it right at us. By the time what Cliff Mass calls the Godzilla Atmospheric River arrives next week, the flow of moisture will be almost 5000 kms long, originating in a part of the Pacific Northwest of the Hawaiian Islands, near Midway. It’s amazing to look at the modelling.
This kind of pattern produces lots of flooding, so we’ll have to be on the look out for that. The land is saturated with water now, so everything will run off. Waterfalls will be spectacular, gullies and culverts will overflow, our reservoirs will be full, and probably a little murky with the tannins and suspended particulates. There may be landslides in some places. It’s gong to make for some very wet events here on Bowen Island, like Light Up The Cove on Saturday.