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Re-memory lane

November 26, 2025 By Being No Comments

Inspired a bit by Seth Godin’s post this morning on why blogging still matters, I’m going through the blog rolls of two of my favourite discontinued blogs of the past 25 years, whiskey river and wood s lot and checking the blog rolls and adding the ones still going to my RSS feed. And as I do so, sipping some excellent coffee from Weird Harbour in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I’m coming across a thing or two to share. Here you go:

  • Via Negativa is a poetic dialogue with poets from long ago and between two poets of today who riff off each other. It’s less a blog and more an ecosystem of meaning-making.
  • The EcoTone Wiki, a trip down memory lane to an experiment I nearly forgot about, where, from 2003-2005 a bunch of us place bloggers decided to write blog posts on a set of shared topics.

It is beautiful to read these old blogs and very melancholy to see the ones that discontinued more than a decade ago in the great Facebook/Twitter pandemic, when walled-garden social media stole our creativity and connection. I know of that some of the people who wrote these blogs died, and others just stopped. There is something very poignant about the last blog post, especially if it comes with no warning of the blog’s discontinuation.

Reading blogs in a feed reader is a slower and gentler way to find inspiration and beauty in the world. I recceomend it over any social media feed.

At some point before the new year, I’ll update my blog roll and you’ll see the ones I’ve added.

AI and the need for your authentic voice

November 25, 2025 By Being, Featured, Stories No Comments

Some thoughts on why we need to write with our real voices.

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Entanglement

November 25, 2025 By Uncategorized No Comments

With more and more whales living in the Salish Sea, encounters between humans and humpbacks have increased. There have been several whale strikes this year, and a number of whales killed as a result. So I’m always looking for good news. November is the time most of the humpback whales head south to Hawaii and Mexico to give birth and breed. Today I came across this amazing story of a whale that will now get to make that journey without the 140 feet of fishing gear she was tangled up in. It’s a great example of how a bunch of good people are using technology and cross-boarder cooperation to protect these creatures and why citizens science matters as well.

Dave Snowden and Nora Bateson are both helping people to work in complexity. Last night I settled in to watch them discuss a number of quite simple and important ways to approach complex situations. Especially resonant from this talk:

  • the need to change interactions, and not change people;
  • approach complex situations with inquisitiveness and curiosity
  • working with obliquity and the adjacent possible
  • relational work and messy coherence.

I might make a slightly more expanded post on this becasue I think they offer some quite direct and accessible things to do in this discussion.

My neighbour Emily van Lithe de Jeude is a wonderful artist and observer of the world and she is deeply entangled with our shared space, the forests and shorelines of our island. Here is a reflection from her on bones and the invisible processes that generate the beauty all around us. I think Emily embodies much of what Nora talks about in the above video, meeting the world with curiosity and inquisitiveness and leaving more beauty than she found.

Rengeneration

November 23, 2025 By Uncategorized No Comments

There is a very cool exhibit on at The Hearth Gallery on Bowen Island, a virtual reality experience called “Texada.” The show features a 17 minute documentary VR film about time, rock, islands and our place in it all. It’s immersive and absorbing not just becasue of the medium, but also the story, a meditation on this small moment in time in the context of the biggest cycles of time that we are a part of. The show is on until November 30, and well worth a visit.

I spent this morning resting at home after an exhausting week of facilitation and design work, and in preparation for a week of travel to Halifax to do even more. At noon I headed up the hill to the Legion where the Bowen Island Fixit Fair was going on. It was cool to see people talking about regenerative economy with their hands on repair tools and fixed items after hosting the Business Summit on Wednesday where circular economy was the topic of the evening.

Vancouver sports continues to be unbelievable. I haven’t watched a single MLS game this season, but I tuned in to watch the Vancouver Whitecaps play Los Angeles FC in the quarter final of the MLS Cup playoffs. It was as unhinged a game of football as I have ever seen, and that’s saying something after a couple of weeks in which we had a snow bound Canadian Premier League Final, and Vancouver Rise’s road to their first ever Championship, won after two come from behind wins. Last night the Whitecaps took an early 2-0 lead and then blew it in the second half on the strength of tow goals From Son Heung-min (who about half of the 53,000 people in the stadium seemed to be exclusively cheering for. The game went into extra time with the Whitecaps down a player, and then down another as an injury necessitated that they see out the game with nine men. And so it went to penalties. Son missed his first, the ‘Caps went on to keep their nerve and ended up winning a totally improbable victory. It felt like a Cup Final. It was in reality, just the next stage with two more rounds to go, but Vancouver shook off some demons.

After 10 or so years of devoted support to the Whitecaps, I stopped following them in 2019 for reasons associated with the sexual abuse cases that they covered up. I put my effort into TSS Rovers at that point, and haven’t looked back. The Whitecaps impact on soccer in Canada, and indeed on the trajectory of development in Vancouver is really interesting though, and a recent Copa 90 documentary beautifully uncovered this. As a migrant who moved to Vancouver in 1994, I don’t feel the impact of the Whitecaps quite the same way as people who lived here through the 1970s do, and despite having been a deep fan for many years, there was stuff in this documentary I didn’t know. It’s really worth a watch.

What wasn’t worth the watch was my other two teams in games against their closest rivals. I wasted two hours this morning watching Tottenham play Arsenal with a set of tactics that seemed completely bereft of ideas about how to win the game. the only redeeming feature was a long range Richarlison lob that found the net. Other than that it was just a morning of humiliation from the foot of Eze, who was rumoured to be signing with us in the off season but who chose Arsenal instead and today scored the first hat trick in the North London Derby in Premier League history.

And last night the Leafs dropped a 5-3 result to the Montreal Canadians as the continued to drift purposeless in the becalmed waters of the non-playoff positions in the NHL. Ugh.

Cultural body snatching

November 22, 2025 By Community, Culture, Football, Music, Notes No Comments

I’ve had many conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the long term cost of isolation that is exacerbated by the ease of online connection. But, as folks who know my complexity work will know, connections and exchanges are two different things. I can engage in all kinds of people and bits and digital entities now. But why then are we more lonely than ever before? And why are we losing the ability to be in real life conversations? Harrison Moony. catches the moment in this article from The Tyee.

But how do you commit to a discourse when you can’t be sure that the person you’re talking to even exists? The tech libertarians don’t even want us. We’re too hard to manage, too human, and that’s why they’ve flooded their sites with fake people, more likely to say what they want, and much easier to reconfigure, like Grok, if they don’t. 

Seeking human connection online today feels like being the last one who hasn’t been body-snatched.

That’s a good analogy.

Paul McCartney is also addressing this head on and trying to show that it’s not just an analogy. Actual bodies of work are being snatched up by AI and he has spearheaded an initiative to protest this with an album of the sounds of creativity when the artists have disappeared. The project is called “Is This What We Want?” and it’s a question worth asking. As usual, Ted Gioia, whose blog pointed me to the work, does a masterful job of unpacking the cultural implications of this moment. It’s one of the things I love about live sports to be honest. You need actual people to play it, it’s a form of creativity that is very somatic and body based and the outcomes are always unknown. That’s perhaps a post for a different day, but it’s certainly an overriding concern for me these days.

For what it’s worth, This blog is always hand written. If I ever use AI here I’ll let you know.

A different disappearance in the Canadian cultural milieu happened this week in the world of sport. Valour FC, the Canadian Premier League team in Winnipeg announced that it is wrapping up operations. They were part of probably the biggest sporting moment of my life in 2023, when our TSS Rovers became the first semi-pro team to eliminate a professional team from the Canadian Championship.. We’ve been rivals since then, playing them again in May in Winnipeg where they nicked a 1-0 win against us in the preliminary round. Nevertheless, it absolutely sucks for supporters to lose their club. It sucks for players and other workers to lose their jobs. Like the rest of the global economy, soccer is a billion dollar thing only at the very highest levels in the 0.01%. Everywhere else it’s about community and connection and hopes and dreams. People make it possible. Intangibles are essential. When it dies, a little bit more community dies with it. Support for your local clubs matters because it will keep it viable AND because you will experience connection and belonging and friendship and purpose. The billionaires want to sell those to you on their own terms. Resist and make community in spite of them.

Friday night professional women’s hockey arrived in Vancouver. The Vancouver Goldeneyes kicked off their history starting with a puck drop by Christine Sinclair and then a 4-3 come from behind overtime win. It was the third game in a row that a professional Vancouver women’s sports team has won from behind if you go back to the second leg of the NSL semi final and the final of the NSL. This win happened in front of a packed house at Pacific Colosseum and. Vancouver became the first PWHL team to have its own logo permanently marked at centre ice. It’s a very special time in women’s sports in this city. Both the Northern Super League and the PWHL strive to be top tier leagues in the world of professional women’s sport. The PWHL already is. NSL has made a strong start, based on the “state of the league” address that founder Diana Matheson gave prior to the Cup Final last week. It remains to be seen how profitable and sustainable the league can be over the long term, but it is walking and talking like a top five global league after just one season, and that’s probably well ahead of schedule.