This is what our inlet looks like these days. Grey, wet, cold, and lovely.
Fridays are for me. Since I turned 55 a couple of years ago, I’ve set aside Fridays for – whatever. Since my ADHD diagnosis last year, I’ve called Friday my ADHD day where I can just let my mind carry me into an unplanned day. Sometimes that means reading, sometimes it means spending the day outside, doing errands, seeing friends, playing music…lots of options. And it’s important to give myself permission to do whatever and not feel guilty for not being “productive.”
So today, the cloud is starting to build as a 2800km long atmospheric river is set to deliver up to 90 mm of rain over the next 36 hours, then tapering off to a steady 2-4 mm of rain every day for the early part of the week. It is a good day to hang out at home, drink some lovely Guatemalan coffee from Moja and read through some interesting articles from my feed reader. Here’s a bunch of links for you to enjoy:
Last night I spent a couple of hours playing euchre up at the Bowen Island Legion where every Thursday night is games night. Euchre is not typically a BC game, but it’s played extensively in Ontario, Michigan and Alabama. Becasue our local euchre players mostly bring their variations of the rules from other places, we have to agree on the rules before playing. As a folk tradition, the evolution of card games in fascinating, and conversation last night sent me to checking out euchre’s history today on Wikipedia.
There is a cost to a lifetime of coerced performance, whether it is due to insecurity, the need to code switch or deeper concerns for safety and protection. And the good news is as you get older, you really have fewer fucks to give which, to my mind, makes you a more interesting person. Travelling through my mid-fifties, I stand in awe as many my peers find this freedom and just let the venneer slip. They become true, real and authentic. Sometimes that means they take off and find new purposes and friends and people that get them, and sometimes I get to be one of those friends and the more I see of them the more I fall for who they are.
Time for a little magic. I came across Dani DaOrtiz’s craft today for the first time and I’m impressed by how he so thoroughly and delightfully wow’d Penn and Teller. I’m less impressed by how he blew away Donny Osmond, as that seemed to be like hunting fish in a barrel.
My favourite Canadian band, Rheostatics, released a new album today called The Great Lakes Suite. It’s a meandering ode to the Canadian view of the Great Lakes, reminiscent of their album of Music Inspired by the Group of Seven. It’s like a soundtrack for static things. This album includes poetry (Anne Carson, Liz Howard, Chief Stacy Laforme), guest musicians (Tanya Tagaq, Gord Downie, Laurie Anderson) and audio snippets. I can’t help feel that somewhere deep behind this band’s approach to these uniquely Canadian icons was inspired originally by Glen Gould’s experimental sound composition, The Idea of North. Rheos are having an album launch party in Toronto tonight with Alex Lifeson accompanying them.
It’s one thing to look north and another to look west. The CCPA publishes a useful summary of the resource projects that our provincial government is pursuing in their “Look West” strategy. Some of these are potentially catastrophic, including the idea that we can ship oil by tanker across the north coast of BC, or the idea that exporting natural gas is a good thing to do in a world that is dying from fossil fuel consumption. And what about jobs? Marc Less covers that as well, as these kinds of projects tend to hire large numbers of workers from elsewhere to build them and rely on as few as possible to run them. And these companies just aren’t great neighbours, as our local LNG terminal owner is demonstrating against the Town of Squamish.
Resource development in BC has effects on salmon, which is one of our charsmatic fauna in this region. Salmon are very sensitive fish and their story is the story of the attitudes and effects that humans have on our environment, even when we can’t see it. Salmon make things visible to us. Getting a handle on the story of salmon and the story of humans and salmon is important for getting a handle on how we manage to screw things up by segmenting the management of our environment.
Segmenting our approach to things is a things we humans do. And then we develop tools that, in the words of Nicholas Carr, create “dissimilarity cascades.” this is good interview to watch or read.
I think I will go outside today in the rain to see if there are any transient orcas about. A pod was hunting seals off the west side of our island earlier this week. They might still be around. This time of year, going outside means thinking carefully about how you dress, and this podcast episode on cold weather layering is the absolutely best discussion of dressing oneself for the weather that I have ever come across. I’m a bit obsessed about this topic, and it’s both important, and hard, to get it right.
And when I come home? I’ll make myself some dinner and settle down to watch the Vancouver Goldeneyes begin their history as Vancouver’s new Professional Women’s Hockey League team. Led by Canadian hockey legend Sarah Nurse, is it possible that this team will bring another pro women’s sports championship to Vancouver this year? Let’s see!
I publish posts like this a few times a week, but I don’t send them out to my email subscribers. Every few months I send out posts like this to everyone so you can see what else has captured my attention. Every post on my blog always gets cross posted to Bluesky and Mastodon and sometimes LInkedIn, but the best way to get notified is with an RSS reader. With an RSS reader like NetNewsWire, you can subscribe to anyone who publishes an RSS feed through their blog, Substack, Medium, or other publishing platform. Facebook and LinkedIn don’t publish RSS feeds, so if your good writing is happening there, the rest of the world won’t see it and there’s not much point in folks outside those sites sharing. Several times I have seen things go through my LinkedIn feed that looked interesting and then the app refreshes and lost the content. It sucks. Also it’s algorithmically influenced meaning that these sites feed me what they want me to read and not the other way around. Imagine sitting down to read a newspaper and someone puts People Magazine in your hands. If you are writing there, I strongly encourage you to also publish on a blog somewhere. Use a free service like WordPress so that the whole world can read and share what you are offering. And when Meta or LinkedIn finally go dark, you will have a record of your thoughts, contributions and development for all time and we all will have benefitted from them.
Stay dry!
Local Bowen Island businesses tucking into dialogue on the circular economy last night.
Almost through a really busy month of travel and work which has been punctuated by some local volunteer work here on Bowen Island. It’s always a tricky thing, to work as a facilitator in one’s own home town, but I think it’s important to do especially as I spend a lot of time coaching and supporting others to do so. Working in your own home town, especially if its a small town like ours, comes which a special kind of peril if you are hosting conversations that are particularly fraught, as I have done over the years. When things don;t go well, it can make it awkward when you run into people at the General Store or on the soccer field, or on the trails.
Luckily for me these last two gigs have been more fun than that. One was working with our local Arts Council on some purpose and high level planning, and the other was last night when I facilitated a World Cafe at our local Business Summit during which 50+ businesses talked together about issues and opportunities for applying circular economy principles to our local context. Our municipality has decided that these principles will be embedded in the next iteration of our Official Community Plan, which is exciting, but it needs local businesses to get excited about it to in order for it to work well. Last night was really interesting, and I’m still working with the materials to look through what the Community Economic Development Committee can work with to provide really good information to the Council and the planning process, and to support local businesses in what they need.
In ten days or so I’ll co-host our bi-annual Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound Biosphere Roundtable which meets twice a year to talk about bigger issues around the governance of our local Biosphere Region. This is a cross sectoral group that comes together to share perspectives and offer ideas about how the Biosphere can help support emerging activities within the inlet.
When your basic operating principle is “leave more community than you found,” doing local work takes on a doubly important mission. I always want it to go well, and last night seemed to result in people wanting more good dialogue and deliberation and actually opportunities to come together and strategize about things they could do. That checks the boxes for me. After all I have to live with the consequences too!
What’s your experience working locally? Do you do it, avoid it, embrace it…?
We’re getting soaked with a prime October Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that is delivering wind and rain from down near Hawaii all the way to our coast, filling the streams, dusting the mountains with snow and welcoming the salmon home. I absolutely love this weather and this morning I’m sitting in my favourite cafe, window wide open and the full force of the rain falling on the pier and the sea. Ahhh.
Complexity delivers mind-blowing things all the time. In addition to, well, everything, the evolution of the universe has created both more entropy and more forms of order. When Margaret Wheatley wrote “Leadership and the New Science” she implored us to move on from the Newtonian model of the universe – linear, knowable, predictable – to embrace the quantum physics and living systems approaches that were the philosophical legacy of the 20th century. Using these big frames of how scientists understand reality as stories and metaphors for the systems that operate all around us is an all consuming cultural project as we seek to make sense of realities. In this video from Quanta Magazine, Robert Hazan and Michael Wong discuss their theory of information as they try to explain how evolution seeks to fill every possibility space that it creates. There are multiple stories that flow from this work including the idea that functional information is what powers evolution and increases the number of ways things can be organized, and that in turn increases resourcefulness and possibility. This flows from diversity and capacity and from life working to fill every affordance it encounters. I picture a vine probing every crack in a wall and finding new pathways to get a foothold, new creatures to evolve, new ways to combine the basic building blocks of the universe, even as it all happens with a stability of constrained possibility. Anyway, watch the video.
The most complex things I have ever encountered are my own toddlers. If you have parented a toddler, Tim Urban has your back. He perfectly describes the utter mystification of parenting a two year old. Read it in the rain.
Have s good weekend. Go Blue Jays.
Here comes community!
I’m on a flight home to Vancouver from Ontario. It has been a mix of family and business on this trip. This past weekend I joined my colleagues Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. Thirty-one people in total gathered at the Queens University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario on the most beautiful fall weekend. The leaves were bright yellow and a little red – more muted this year from drought than usual, but still beautiful. The water and air was warm enough for swimming and canoeing. And the skies offered us moments of crystal clarity during the night. The land was – as it always is – the first and final host.
While we were teaching the chaordic stepping stones yesterday, a very powerful conversation broke open in the group about invitation. In my practice the whole point of using the chaordic stepping stones is to slow down the conversation about process design to really name the shared urges necessity and purpose of a meeting. It is from this place that a quality invitation arises. And when a person is deeply and sincerely invited to a meeting, it makes all the difference for how they show up.
The conversation yesterday contained a thread of grief. Participants were sharing how painful it is to have to go through meeting after meeting in their day without any genuine invitation. Many meetings aren’t even necessary and, like weekly staff meetings sometimes, just occupy a regular hour every week on the calendar help with minimal intention. Because so many of these gatherings are on line now it is becoming common practice for participants to divide their attention between what is “mandatory” and what is more interesting or more pressing. My heart breaks when a participant in a meeting says hello and then turns of their camera, mutes their audio and never appears again. What a waste of their time.
This bleeds into community life too, and I was especially moved by one of our participants, an Elder who cares very deeply about her community, who witnesses public meetings, community gatherings and politics as being hurtful, disenfranchising and a place where people come and work out their own pain and trauma often in laterally violent ways. There is no healing, no restoration, no creativity, no sense of shared purpose and no call for people to offer something. The meetings are corrosive and toxic. We talked about the kinds of room set ups in meetings like that – rows of chairs, no one looking at one another, exchanges only between “the people at the front” and “the audience” as if citizens were actually a mix of paying customers and school children.
When this Elder was speaking, she was expressing the grief of this state of affairs. It occurred to me that this grief is everywhere. Very few of us in any public or community setting feel invited to community work. We might go along to a public information session. Or we might go along to a Council meeting and make a presentation. We might take part in a shouting match over a controversial decision or course of action. But I think many people are mourning the fact that we are never invited into active, creative community with one another. Some don’t even believe that is possible. “Oh a community meeting,” they will often say, folding their arms. “That’ll be…interesting.”
(As an aside, “that’ll be…interesting” is one of the most Canadian ways I know of saying “that whole thing is going to be a complete disaster.”)
Communities are full of talent and resources. How many times have you been asked to serve your community with what you know or what you do? Where are the opportunities for people to participate in community work that also builds community? At the very least, can we do this work together without poison relationships and eroding the promise of democratic and community participation.
The erosion of democracies, the professionalization of decision making and the capture of legislative bodies by huge commercial interests has been going on for my whole life. But when I look around my own home community – which has seen its fair share of divisive conflicts – I can see initiatives that were citizen-led that built things that we need. We now have a health centre on our island, a credit union, a recycling depot and second hand store, and playing fields for fast pitch, soccer and ultimate. We have preserved forest and coastline with the Nature Conservancy. We have institutions like the Arts Council and the Fabrc Arts Guild and the Nature Club and community choirs and the Legion and the Food Bank that all bring us closer together and weave our connection to one another and the place.
In small communities the chance for that kind of thing is higher because we know each other a little better and we can put our finger on the folks that can contribute, and ask them to show up. And we can do it in a way that invites the community to come along and be a part of something. Not every small community is this lucky. Some are in terrible moments of division and conflict that are violent, harmful and probably irreconcilable.
Peace and reconciliation at any scale is not possible without people being genuinely invited into it. The dehumanization of our world in conflict, at work, and in governance leaves us mourning for something that we may not ever have experienced: a genuine invitation to form and join a field of belonging that gives our lives meaning and connection.
I think this is why dialogic work is so important. Anywhere people gather is a chance to correct that tyranny of dehumanization that sees persons as cogs in the machine, to be counted, corralled, manipulated, avoided, lied to or disposed of. As Christina Baldwin has said, you treat a person differently once you know their story. You invite them, you get curious with them, you wonder what they have to offer and you might even make something together.
I have a lot I love for my local library here on Bowen Island. Today I’m deeply appreciating the rotating display of works from our local fabric arts guild. The Annex, my office away from home, is adorned with a selection of quilts that change every couple of months or so. Currently there is work from Karen Van Schie on the walls. The details and quality of these pieces is extraordinary.