Some photos are just sketches, like a note jotted on a half used page of a Moleskine, or a quick line drawing. This is one of those kinds of photos, snapped as the sun rose behind Mount Baker as I was crossing the Lion’s Gate Bridge on a bus this morning. Spring is coming to the west coast. Flying to Victoria, we passed over a flock of snow geese heading north from Reifel Sanctuary to begin the last leg of their journey to the nesting grounds in the Arctic.
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Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to
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A moving radio piece about killing a homegrown turkey
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A study of medieval Islamic art has shown some of its geometric patterns use principles established centuries later by modern mathematicians. Researchers in the US have found 15th Century examples that use the concept of quasicrystalline geometry.
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Attention pessimists! For optimists, this just means we have to get on with it.
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Ever wondered why sleeping on a problem works? It seems that as well as strengthening our memories, sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day.
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A great article on how to use wikis for solving large problems
Good old whiskey river:
Witness
Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
– Denise Levertov
The photo above was from my walk today, through the forest and meadows near my home on Bowen Island.
My friend Jeff Aitken has been a strangely influential person in my life. He has been an interesting guide across intercultural spaces, helping me to frame and see my own journey as a person of mixed ancestry facilitating cross-cultural groups and helping to find the creative spark in the space that are created when we all claim our centres and show up whole. Jeff and I met in 2001 and have had a few conversations over the years, but I’ve always felt very close to him.
Now at his blog rio grand-i-o, he is posting his doctoral thesis which documents his journey to his complex and liquid centre, as a man of mixed ancesrty cultivating an indigenous relationship with the land upon which he lives. Worth a read, worth subscribing to and worth following if you are interested in how white people can participate in the decolonization process on this continent.