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Hope and despair and all points in between

December 3, 2025 By Community, Complexity, Democracy, Music No Comments

Start your day with some Karine Polwart, The News:

What if the news were nothing more
Than the secrets of seashells on the seashore
Whispering which way the wind will blow this night
And how everything’s gonna be alright?

What if the very first sound you heard
At dawn was a wild and wonderful word?
And what if a smile was your first sight?
Wouldn’t everything have to be alright?

Polwart has an edge to her music, don’t let these lyrics fool you. She is a biting and incisive observer of the world as it is.

We don’t have to have hope to appreciate a better future for our planet and our species. We should, if we haven’t already, probably get better at holding the two ideas of hope and despair in mind at the same time. My friend Dave Pollard does that in his writing and signals today that he is embarking on a post-collapse series on his blog which I can tell you in advance will be worth reading. Not because you will agree with it, or because it will give you hope, or validation or solutions. Just because it will help you cultivate a more complex perspective on the world around you. That’s what Dave’s writing does for me, and that’s what Dave in person does for me too. And maybe that what’s Mylène Farmer – who he references in his post – is doing too in her joyful performance of Désenchantée, which seems so at odds with the lyrics.

Another fella who is writing a great series of posts is Ron Donaldson who is signing off from a career in complexity, participatory narrative inquiry, and facilitation with a series of retrospective posts about his journey. Today he has one up on his work with Participatory Narrative inquiry. the whole series is worth a read.

One of the reason why I think we get deluded into believing that the world can be saved is that we place a big emphasis on stories about how the small thing that happened has big implications. Well, on Taming Complexity, there is a great story about how one public participation design on a NASA program to literally save the plant went awry. This is important reading. We need to get good at public participation and deliberation around technical issues as well as complex ones.

A collection of good reads I haven’t completely read yet

December 1, 2025 By Links No Comments

I have a little folder of starred articles in my NetNewsWire feed reader that contain links to pieces that deserve a little more thoughtfulness and which I haven’t had time to dive into. Here are a bunch from the last month or so. Maybe you could read one or two of them and share your thoughts here. I’ll get to these eventually.

Feeling the season of transitions and thresholds

December 1, 2025 By Being No Comments

Georges Island, in Halifax harbour, at the threshold of the Atlantic Ocean and historically a place of transition for prisoners of war and displaced Acadians.

I’m coming to the end of my year, and all my travel is finished. I have a few small paying gigs left this month, all of which are online. My autumn has been much busier than usual, with much more travel and in person hosting that has been the practice. I am entering into a delightful period of darkness and expansiveness. The secular world calls this time “Christmas” but the Christian world knows it as Advent, and it’s the perfect liturgical season for the rhythms of life in the northern hemisphere. And it invites us into the waiting, the not-knowing, the hope that light will return again, even as we have the knowledge that it indeed will, perhaps the faith that it will.

Simon Goland writes about thresholds and transitions today:

We often treat transitions like an inconvenient pause between the “real” parts of life. But in truth, these are the moments that sculpt us. When the familiar dissolves, we are invited into an apprenticeship with the unknown.

And the unknown is a surprisingly good teacher.

It teaches us to notice the small, quiet signs, the ones we habitually and often overlook. It teaches us to trust our deeper intelligence – the one that lives in the body, not the mind. It teaches us that clarity is something that emerges, not something we manufacture.

Transitions whisper, “Slow down. Something important is trying to find you.”

He and I share a love of these moments. In human life, there are few universals across cultures, but the deep meaning of times and spaces of change and transition seems to pass through every culture and community and every person I have ever met. The heart is triggered to experience grief and loss while also preparing to meet what comes. Faith is acute in these moments, and hope is born in these moments. There is nervousness, and a sense that we aren’t in control of what happens next. The art is to stay with it and that requires a practice. And that is why we don special clothing, sings special songs, engage in special rituals, to mark the moment as sacred, to hold on and to savour this incredibly special nature of time and space.

Peter Rukavina explores this is a grounded way with his description of going to a Chivas cup match in Guadalajara last week. Going to a big match in a new country is always an intimidating experience but even more so if football and football culture is totally new to you. It’s interesting to read all the ways he prepared for this threshold crossing so that he could rest in, as much as possible, the enjoyment of what was to come.

I could read poems, stories and blog posts about thresholds all day long. I have always been entranced by crossings and how people make sense of them. An obsession like that means that you see them everywhere. I would almost say that the impetus to write stems from confronting a threshold. It brings us to a creative moment. If you are an artist, you make sense of that moment with your medium of choice. So, here is yet another reflection on thresholds, from more than a year ago, from my Bowen Island neighbour Shari Ulrich.

Canada’s week of oil pipeline talk and how we can all help to rid our country of Scott Moe

November 30, 2025 By Democracy No Comments

Oil pipelines Scott Moe and getting rid of the cruelty.

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Canada’s new weather alert system

November 29, 2025 By Bowen No Comments

Canada has a new weather alert system and I’m writing this blog post because I know I’m going to need to share it with folks in the future.

The systems categorizes weather events based on the above matrix, which represents an intersection of the forecasted impact of the event and the confidence of the forecast. I like the simplicity of the colour coding, because that gets my attention and will always cause me to read more in the forecast description. I like that they have factored confidence into the determination. I alos know that most folks will just see the colours without knowing what’s behind it.

Environment Canada has a very helpful page that explains how the system works. They also have a very helpful page that lists the types of weather effects that help them make a determination of the level of impact. These are important resources and worth bookmarking.

However, severe weather is not a spectator sport in Canada and so I’m making my own set of heuristics to deal with it when I see these alerts based on the impact guide.

From reading the guide, it is very clear to me that red alerts are going to be few and far between but if I see one it will likely be accompanied by notices sent through the provincial and local emergency messaging systems, including Alertable. I will immediately stop what I am doing and take steps to secure my safety. Orange events are likely to be very damaging and should cause me to take immediate action to prepare for impacts. Yellow events will be the most common and will probably only require me to make a contingency plan.

A second set of heuristics comes into play, especially here on the west coast where sever weather effects can be very local. I’ve relied on these practices for most of the last 24 years that I have lived on this island.

  • When there is a warning of any kind it triggers me to monitor the situation using a variety of information sources, starting with Environment Canada. I supplement this information with the ensemble modelling forecasts used on apps like Windy, which aggregates many different forecast models.
  • I immediately look to local meteorologists like Chris Doyle who shares his insights at Ensembleator on Bluesky. Losing twitter was a big blow to having access to real time weather scientists working in our local areas. Chris has moved to Bluesky and he is my go to.
  • I pay attention to actual weather conditions around me and notice changes. There is no substitution for local knowledge. I find all the time on Bowen Island that, for example, newcomers who live on south facing slopes see warnings for severe outflow winds, experience nothing more than a few gusty breezes and then complain about how inaccurate weather forecasting is. Meanwhile folks on the north end of the island will have lost power or had tress come down.
  • I check things frequently because reality changes often and forecasts are not 100% accurate, especially on the coast. No forecast on teh west coast will be local enough for your particular situation so you HAVE to rely on a variety of information.
  • I DO NOT rely on the bevy of other phone apps to guide my decision making in any one given moment. These are largely modelled forecasts and not subjected to local interpretation by humans unlike the Environment Canada forecasts. For longer term warnings such as expected wind storms, rain or snow fall, I watch the trends as the forecasts are released every hour or so, using the information that comes through Environment Canada, Accuweather, Windy and the Weather Network. Watching how a forecast changes across many different apps gives you a better sense of what might happen than looking at one event 36 hours away and assuming that is the truth. Reality and forecasts converge over time, but they always start differently. That is the nature of complexity.
  • And of course, understand that weather predictions begin to vary wildly beyond three days, especially for changeable weather. These are not predictions. They are probabilities, verging into possibilities, verging into assumptions made fqrompast climate data. There is no such thing as a long term forecast that guarantees conditions.

These actions are, of course, on top of the base level of preparedness I have for damaging events from weather, wildfire and earthquakes. This includes having go-bags and first aid kits in our home and cars, having 60 litres of freshwater stored, and having agreed upon out-of-region phone contacts through which we can coordinate communication if we are separated during an emergency.