We’ve just completed our 17th annual Art of Hosting here on Bowen Island. For 17 years I have welcomed nearly 1000 people to our home place through more than 50 workshops we have conducted here. I always appreciate seeing the island through the eyes of our visitors. And so, coming fresh off of that experience, I responded today on our community facebook page to a question posed by a long time Islander, Rob Wall: What is “The Bowen Way.”
This was my answer.
It changes over time and with waves of people who come and go. As a person who has been here for 18 years, I’ve been here long enough to see our culture goes through at least one major wave. Of course, I have no idea what it was like before I moved here or how I and others changed it when we came in the early 2000s. Whatever The Bowen Way is, it is both good and bad, positive and negative, visible and invisible. Every small community has its way, and over time, all ways change.
A long time ago I committed to living here for the rest of my life, and that means paying attention to the changes and embracing what is good and helpful, and rejecting what isn’t. And as waves of new people have arrived (more than 30% of our population has turned over in the past five years, and we have lost many elders who have died or cashed out and moved away) new ways emerge. For those of us that have been here for a long time, sometimes those new ways are as confounding as the old ways are to newcomers. As long as I have lived here there have been these kinds of funny tensions and confusions between old-timers and newcomers. If we can have a sense of humour about ourselves, and remember that really nothing makes sense, then it eases the tensions between folks that believe that THEIR way of seeing things is the right way. We’re all guilty at some point of becoming a bit precious about our views of the world.
I have learned that if I can’t embrace change, then I am liable to be encased in suffering as my projections of how things “should be” fall away to be replaced by stuff I don’t understand. I am so grateful for the many “new” people that have arrived here since I have, who have added immeasurably to this place, and also grateful to the “oldtimers” who keep the traditions I love alive and remind me what is uniquely beautiful about our community.
Bowen Island will never perfectly be the place you think it is or want it to be. It will always delight and disappoint you. Like any long term relations, you will fall in and out of love with it, and your view of it will change over time. Stuff you thought was essential to the place will fade away and be replaced with new cool things that you never dreamed of.
The character of a place is always in flux and change, like the seasons and weather, like the cycles of the forests and sea around ourselves, like the people we know and the ones we haven’t met yet. That is is the real Bowen Way, lives that come and go in waves, all linked into a complex mix of friendships, animosities, and surprises, on 20 square miles of rock surrounded by the Salish Sea.
Enjoy the ride. It’s easier that way.
It feels like Christmas Eve around here. I am sitting at home on Bowen Island and our house is full of friends and colleagues Amanda Fenton and Kelly Poirier who have now retired to bed. Along with Caitlin, we have completed a long and productive day of planning and design for what will be the 17th annual Art of Hosting on Bowen Island. This evening I am sitting by my fire, finishing a dram of Laphroaig and remembering the first one in 2003 when Toke Moeller and I sat by this same fireplace discussing teaching and learning and what this practice is really all about.
Back then the Bowen Island gatherings were hosted at Rivendell, a beautiful contemplative retreat centre on a small mountain above the village of Snug Cove on Bowen Island. That first one in 2003 was hosted by Myriam Laberge, Brenda Chaddock, Toke, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony (if I recall correctly) and supported by Marks and Marg McAvity, who we (and still are) stewards of Rivendell. That was the first Art of Hosting for me, and it was really a coming home.
For years I had been working as a facilitator specializing in large group participatory methods and I had a strong sense that there was a leadership practice in the way we hosted Open Space and World Cafe, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Luckily Toke and his partner Monica Nissen and friends Jan Hein Nielsen and Finn Voldtofte and others had done the ahrd thinking and realized that great participatory meeting had four characteristics: people were present, they were all participating, they were being hosted and they were co-creating something. The Danes postulated that increasing these patterns would bring more engagement, more dignity and more emergence in conversations and so they articulated the four-fold practice of theArt of Hosting, which are the four simple touchstones of presence, participation, hosting and co-creation.
In 2003 I came home to this and was invited the next year to come as an alumni and then the following year where I was invited to be on the hosting team . Every year since 2005 I have been pleased to welcome people to our island, known as Nex?wle?lex?wm in the Squamish language, to experience the Art of Hosting. SInce that time I have been privileged to be on nearly 100 hosting teams for Art of Hosting gatherings around the globe in places as diverse and far flung as Japan, South Africa, Estonia, Ireland, Turkey, and all over Canada and the US. I have worked with dozens of stewards of this practice, and thousands of practitioners, learning every day more and more about how to create social processes that truly affirm human dignity, invite folks into all kinds of storywork, and help people listen to each other in a way that makes it easier and maybe a little more possible for them to co-create the futures they need.
A couple of years ago my friend Scott Macklin caught the spirit of our gathering in a short film. It reflects the kind of pace and deep learning that characterizes the Bowen Island gathering, and is a beautiful record of our 2017 team. Have a watch:
So, as I get ready for bed tonight, I’m feeling deep gratitude for my teachers, especially Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen who guided me onto this path of my life’s work, and who have supported me over these 15 years with love and care. And I’m looking forward to meeting these folks that are coming, each of them like a little Christmas gift, full of surprise and delight and curiosity and possibility.
I Love the rain. The fall rains here in Bowen Island come heavy and steady starting in mid September and going through to December. They fill creeks and create the conditions for the salmon to return. You never know how many will return every year but without the rains they can’t taste their home stream or in ocean.
For some reason I have been really craving the rain this year. Waiting for it like people in the North wait for the ice to break up in the spring. It feels like a release somehow. Todayt we are expecting about 50mm of rain and this morning I headed out in it to cast my votes in our federal election. The forest is luminescent with fungus and lichen and the forest floor is covered in mushrooms. This weekend I fasted on fresh boletes and oyster mushrooms and spent time drying some.
Walking in the heavy rain is wonderful when you have the right gear. Layers of clothes with a water proof outer layer and good goretex boots does the trick. Walking quietly in a rainy forest whilst remaining sheltered from the water is a cozy and almost spiritual experience. It brings one into a contemplative mind, tucked beneath a hood, rain spattering on my head,, the constant sound of water flowing all around. Returning home to dry by the fire or tucking into the pub in the late afternoon for a quiet chat with the regulars now that the tourists have all gone. All of it is west coast spiritual practice.
Today we have a classic southeasterly wind and heavy rain. And tomorrow skies will clear and the winds will back strongly from the northwest, making it a good day to head over to the west side of our little island and watch the waves crash on the Cape after travelling 100 kms down the Salish Sea. It’s not a long fetch and not a heavy swell but the wind fills the face, the sun is glorious out over the Strait of Georgia, and the blue of sea and sky is flecked with brilliant white foam from crashing waves and chaotic seas.
It’s nice to be home.
A couple of years ago, my friend Pauline LeBel and I were discussing ways to increase learning about indigenous peoples amongst our neighbours on Bowen Island where we live. We live squarely in the traditional territories of the Squamish Nation, and in thinking about how as settlers we should all orient ourselves to our indigenous hosts, the phrase “knowing our place” came up. Pauline employed it as the title for a series of readings and events that she has curated for a number of years now on Bowen Island. I use it as a kind of heuristic to answer the question of what is the role of settlers in supporting the struggles and aspirations of the First Nations within whose territories we live and work.
When I first arrived in Vancouver in 1994 I was working for the BC Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres. I attended a meeting at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre at which Leonard George, then chief of Tsleil-Waututh, opened with his father’s well known prayer song. He introduced the song as “the Coast Salish National Anthem” and told the story of how his father, Chief Dan George, has gifted the song to the Chiefs of the various Salish-speaking Nations around the Salish Sea, where we live. It made a huge impact on me, and I instantly understood what it meant to be living here. A few years later, when I asked if it was a song I could sing for others, to help them understand in whose country we are really standing, his eyes lit up and he said “of course!”
Leonard was an incredible singer and anyone who heard him sing this song before his voice changed due to cancer will attest to how it made the hairs on your arms stand up and sent a shiver through the spine. It is an incredible song, and in Leonard’s hands, it was a profound spiritual experience. Here he is singing it to open the International AIDS Conference in Vancouver in 1996:
From time to time, I get to sing this song for others and it is almost always the case that they have never heard it, no matter how long they have lived in these territories. On Friday I was asked to come to Rivendell Retreat Centre (where I am on the board) to sing it for a group of refugee families that were having a Thanksgiving weekend retreat. There were six families from Eritrea and two from Syria and they had all been in Canada for less than two years.
About two thirds of the group were children, mostly elementary school and younger. When I pulled out my drum to sing the song, several of the Eritrean kids cam running over and started singing what sounded like this song. When I played a verse of the song and asked if that was what they were singing they said yes. Apparently they had been taught the song in school and they all knew it.
So yesterday was the first time I ever sang Chief Dan George’s prayer song – the Coast Salish National Anthem – for Vancouver area residents accompanied by people that knew it off by heart: eight refugee kids from Eritrea who sang with great gusto and enthusiasm and pride. They knew where they were and they knew why we were singing that song.
A couple of days I ago I shared a link on twitter from Rob Hopkins about a community meeting held in Totnes in the UK which brought together the community to discuss what to do now that the town had declared a climate emergency. The design of the meeting was highly participatory and I’m grateful that the organizers took time to document and share the results.
The design had all the hallmarks of an effective participatory gathering, including having a well thought through harvest strategy so that the gathering was in service of the work and that it left people engaged, enthusiastic about participating in community work and more importantly trusting one another.
These kinds of gatherings are not uncommon, but it’s unlikely that you’ve ever been to one in your town or city. I’ve been lucky enough over the years to do a few really interesting gatherings in my home community of Bowen Island, including a nearly year long series of monthly Open Space events which ran parallel to our Official Community Plan update and a participatory design session for the future of some of our community lands.
This morning, when asked on twitter what I though contributed to building trust in community meeting I answered with a few thoughts. I’ve written a lot about this before, but it’s always interesting to see what I would say differently at any given time.
So here’s today’s version. As design principles, I think these should be at the centre of design for participatory processes if you want to do things that increase trust:
- Trust the people. Invite them because they care about the issues and they have something to say, and invite them to engage in questions you don’t have answers to. Don’t spend a lot of time lecturing at them. You invited them, treat them like honoured guests.
- Let them host and harvest their own conversations. My core practice here is “never touch the people’s data.” If they are recording insights and clustering themes and writing session reports simply give them the tools or the process for that and let them get on with it. Provide a clear question for them to work on, and let them use their own words to rerecord the answers and insights. Be very careful if you find yourself synthesizing or sense making on behalf of a group. Those are your insights, not theirs.
- Use small groups and mix them up. Put people in proximity to many different ideas and perspectives and let them struggle with difference and diversity. Mix them up. Not every conversation will be great. Let people move on and discover better things in different conversations.
- Work from stories and not opinions. If you want to know about the future of a community ask people to tell stories that somehow capture the change they are seeing, rather than “what do you think is going to happen?” try not to have abstract or aspirational conversations without first grounding the participants in a process that helps them to also see what’s happening in the system.
- Ask people to act within the scope of their agency. Be careful asking for recommendations for other people to do things if you don’t have the resources to undertake those recommendations. Be clear with participants about what you can support at the end of the meeting and what is theirs to do, and don’t ask them for actions that they have no ability to undertake.
If you ask me again in a few months what I would say, it would probably be different, but this is a pretty reliable set of principles to guide design.