The rain and fog has rolled into Howe Sound. Autumn on Bowen Island is really divided into two halves. The first begins August 1 when the harvest gets going, the crickets start chirping and the slightest chill comes into the air. The days begin to grow shorter, but there is still lots of warm heart and summer calm. The second half begins around the end of September, when the rains arrive and the southeasterly flows of the low pressure systems in the Pacific bring cloud and rain and powerful fall storms. This weekend the rain has started in earnest, and I awoke to a grey and foggy morning, which set a perfect mood for a few hours of watching sport.
I do love watching rugby. I don’t follow it closely, but I’ll usually make time in the winter to watch the men’s Six Nations matches. The women’s World Cup concluded today with a dominating England performance over Canada, a 33-13 result in front of more than 81,000 at Twickenham. Until this morning, I didn’t watch the tournament at all, to my slight regret; one can’t follow every sport, and I was away a lot this month. Canada is a top international team despite a patchy infrastructure for the game, and the final clearly wasn’t representative of Canada’s play through the tournament. National pride aside, rugby is the only sport that can regularly get me out of my seat as a neutral. There is nothing more tense that a persistent drive towards the try line with a team going through phase after phase of play, with a rhythmic cadence of relentless attack and a defence putting everything into stopping them. It’s thrilling stuff.
Closer to home, AFC Toronto has won the inaugural Northern Super League title. Calgary beat Montreal 0-2 in a bit of a shocker in Laval, and that win secured the title for Toronto. Coming into today, the final playoff spot was still up for grabs, with Vancouver needing only a draw to secure it after Calgary won. They got it with a Holly Ward equalizer 78 minutes into the match against Halifax. Toronto. has run away with the league title on the strength of several players who were developed in British Columbia by the Whitecaps academy programs, including three players who played with our TSS Rovers inaugural women’s team in 2018: Emma Regan, Ashley Cathro and Kaelen Hansen. It is an ongoing puzzle as to why the Vancouver Rise weren’t willing or able to lock up those players.
Meanwhile in North London I set my eyes on the Tottenham match with some dread. Wolves have been terrible, but had a decent cup result against Leeds this week. That team has always done well at Tottenham, and I recall a game in 2012 which I attended with my dad, in which Luka Modric saved a point with a beautiful goal from outside the box. I think that one dismantled our chances for the title and we weren’t the same despite being top at Christmas. Wolves’ shirts are the colour of banana skins. Today was typical in the pattern. Spurs dominated the chances in the first half but scoring nothing from it, and Sam Johnston in goal can take a bunch of credit for that. A ragged Wolves goal at 54′ led to substitutions of Bentancur and Spence for Johnson and Porro a few minutes later. Paling, who has had a terrific week, left it to nearly the last kick of the game to score a beautifully sculpted equalizer to salvage a point from the match. 1-1 draw.
If nothing else, the deep divisions and culture wars in the US, and here in Canada too, are providing us with an opportunity to engage in deep practices of listening across difference. It’s harder now that it has ever been Dan Oestrich, who knows a thing or two about this, explains why.
Process artistry also has its place. Arts and well-hosted conversation are at work in Alberta where a group of researchers have initiated the Common Ground project to address stereotypes in the province. It is providing some useful lessons.
Depolarizing conversations is an initiative of my friends and colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum. It arose in 2021 during COVID when social media had divided families and small towns and disagreements had devolved into violence, assaults and the tearing of the social fabric. They have published some really helpful tools and resources on hosting these kinds of conversations. Get them while you can (and support them in continuing their work).
Irreconcilable difference is inevitable in a complex society but not every issue is an irreconcilable difference. Some are just conflicting perspectives. As long as we conflate conflict with war, we will maintain a tendency to want to avoid conflict instead of courting and supporting difference. Conflict transformation has long been the approach used to create a resilient container for what I call conflict preservation. We need this more than ever. And so do the orcas and the salmon.
One of the tools I use for working with polarities where there is a strong both/and situation is polarity mapping. I’ve written about it before but I love the way Kai Cheng Thom weaves it into her Loving Justice framework.
For more tools and training I can recommend Lewis Deep Democracy as one deeper approach to this work. It’s based in Arnold and Amy Mindel’s processwork. In Canada, I can recommend Camille Dumond and her colleagues at the Waterline Co-op. You’ll see my testimonial on their website. It’s accessible and practical training, even for experienced practitioners, and it will take your own practice deeper.
The hairiest road in British Columbia was built by the citizens of the Bella Coola valley back in the 1950s and it isn’t much different today then it was back then. A 1200 meter descent over 18 kilometres on a gravel road with no guardrails and the occasional 1000 meter drop to the creek below. The Tyee has published a terrific oral history of the tricky end of Highway 20. It’s such a story of its time, and even evokes the age old “free enterprise vs. socialist” trope that dominated BC politics for decades before everything became privatized and financialized.
Anyone driving that road needs a pep talk and although I haven’t driven it, I know that almost everyone who has relates contemplating their mortality at least once. Here is a poem by Rosemary Trommer about letting go.
A Little Pep Talk
The swirling ash
doesn’t try
to be become
log again.
The flying leaves
don’t attempt
to return
to the tree.
The girl
can’t untwist
her genome
back into
separate strands.
The flour
in the bread
can’t return
to the sack,
can’t undo
the kneading
of hands.
In all things
lives a memory
of letting go
and the chance
to transform
into what
it can’t know.
What do you say
to that, heart?
Good self,
what do you say
to that?
My memory is not what to used to be. Leaning into my ADHD, and then noticing changes over the years associated with the experience I had last year with COVID (and possibly right at the beginning of the pandemic too). That plus the way I now connect to people, having many important and meaningful conversations on the same screens week after week, with no difference in context to delineate or anchor our insights. But I’m developing some strategies. I rely on automated transcripts to help me remember what we are talking about, and to later recall conversations. I have stopped writing elsewhere on the Web, and focused here, where I own my words and they are gathered in a searchable archive. You won’t find me writing on any social media platforms and only occasionally will I comment elsewhere. Even then I will make a note here too, where I will always have access to it. Aeon today published an essay about recording everything, and on the face of it is seems dystopian, and with respect to the poem I just posted, it seem counter-productive to my own spiritual liberation. But then again, the worst experience for me is to know that I know something but I cannot recall what it is. I go blank and feel empty when I am in a position of needing to be in service. It’s embarrassing and makes me sad. I have no answers, just strategies to try, and I’m doing my best.
Dave Snowden has been hard at work diving into the complex domain (just one of the domains in Cyenefin, remember) as he unpacks how to work with anthro-complexity around strategy, risk, and change. Yesterday he published an important blog post on a new framework called WRASSE Have a read of it.
Tottenham faced Doncaster Rovers in the third round of the EFL Cup today, and it was a decently entertaining match. Spurs had some squad rotation at play, resting our centre-halves and replacing them with Danso and Palinha. Tel, Johnson, Simon, and Gray started in the midfield, around Bentancur and Odobart on the wing. Doncaster played well, especially in the opening of both halves, but Palinha’s bicycle kick and an own goal generated by our trademark wing play set the visitors on the back foot. Johnson was great, Gray was his usual reliable self and Tel had two glorious chances but got his feet tied up. It was a set piece clinic with Danso’s long throws steaming into the box and Simon’s corners causing havoc. Johnson made a solid claim to be a regular starter in a crowded field with terrific outside play and a late goal. Late in the match Luca Williams-Barnet made his first team debut, at 16 years old. He’s a bright young talent and received a very warm ovation when he came on at 86′. He scores at a rate of a goal a game in the U21 side. 3-0 in the end.
Yesterday I was working with a client who receives a federal government grant to do its work. The grant supports the coordination of a national network of organizations who are working with vulnerable people in communities across Canada, to support the work of a number of federal government policies. Over the past few years, these local organizations have been tasked with a an increasingly hard job, in a culture that is not providing them with much support. While I have been working with them, the support from the federal government has been declining, even as need is increasing.
We are planning a gathering of the network, one which many fewer people can attend than in previous years becasue of funding cutbacks. I’m working for a much reduced fee. The gathering we are planning is an important place for the network to connect and organize and the subject of our conversations together will be how to strengthen the connections between local initiatives in an era of coming austerity.
Yesterday, as we were planning, my client told me that the government funder expects that we provide them with evidence from this gathering that the conversations between people were “meaningful.” We are somehow being asked to collect data and write a report that shows this. This is not in our budget. The extraction of this harvest is not in the conference plan, and not what anyone desires to do with their precious time together.
A million thoughts swirled in my mind and a few came out of my mouth. Meaningful to whom? By whose standards? At what level? What does this sponsor aim to do with this “meaningfulness” metric and data? And what if the conversations we are having are meaningful because they are organizing the network IN SPITE of the funder? Because actually, that’s the reality. Everyone knows that this funder, despite their helpful contributions to the cause, are actually imperilling the work of the network with funding that isn’t even enough to get every member into the same room so we can talk about what happens next.
And then I got angry at the federal government’s audacity of austerity. How dare they ask us to do MORE while also cutting back core funding for this network that provides services to support federal government policies. Who is sitting in Ottawa saying “reduce their budgets by xx% and also ask them to do more things that are just for our own edification and confidence that they are spending the money well?”
Of course I am not going to release the identity of this group of people, but I can assure you that they do excellent work across Canada on issues that very few other people or organizations are able to handle. They provide safety, security and wellbeing for people that need it. And they are largely staffed by folks with lived experience of the issues that are at play. It’s a wonderful client.
We are heading into an era of austerity. If you are a government funder, I want you to know that the funding you are now providing to organizations needs to be used by them to organize for a future in which you are not a viable partner, and in some cases, you might even be the problem that needs to be organized around (“oh, you already get government funding? Our Foundation only grants to organization that have no other funding”). Years of funding cutbacks have ceded your authority to tell people what to do. And no amount of evidence based evaluation has stemmed the funding cuts, so you’ll forgive people who don’t believe that you need data to make decisions. It is clear that this is not how most program funding decisions are made, especially in an era where flat rate percentage cuts are being applied across the board. That is not to say that organizations that do essential work will not continue to advocate for themselves. But it does mean that, as a “partner” in the work, you won’t be at the head table any more. Folks will use what they have to try to survive you, not appease you. And when, in some bright future, funding is restored, it will be to a network that survived in spite of your “support” and not because of it.
It breaks my heart that folks who are just barely holding on to their jobs and doing essential work are being asked to spend time and money to provide funders with fawning thank you notes that their funding produced “meaningful” conversations. I can assure you that every conversation that folks in this network have is meaningful. Leave it at that.