“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.”
— from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros
I love writing born of direct experience, born of the insight of a moment, or generated from the passing inspiration of the glint of sunlight on the sea seen through an open window. I love writing that arises from the quiet encounter with spirit or the contemplation of a mind that finally slows down and stretches out. That is writing of authentic voice or even the super-voice that all writers know, the voice we chase for its clarity and ease. It sometimes takes a long pounding away at the keyboard or days of scribbled lines before that voice arises somewhere below consciousness. In that moment you become merely a vehicle for it, in service to something. Your word choice become less ham-fisted, the cadence of the words more natural, like a jazz musician, you become open, trading fours with the muse, offering a lick of style or form and being rewarded with an image or a connection that you could never see before.
I’m enjoying A Philosophy of Walking. It is a testament to obliquity in the arts and philosophy, about the way a walk frees the mind and opens the heart. Today I’m heading out on y first work trip since February 15 2020 and I’m appreciating the way my thinking slows down even as my body is in the stop and go rhythm of ferry travel. There is spaciousness, time to kill, time to read or write or just peer out at the sea and look for whales or sea lions. Travelling on the coast means moving at the speed of the ferry, and the best way to do that is to travel on foot, at a human pace, free of the frustrations of being confined to a car, presented with options at every turn; a crossword, a book, an album, a blog post, a nap.
Have a read this weekend of some cool things I’ve found on the web. I’ll see what ideas and thoughts bubble up from this little trip to Vancouver Island.
- The Limitations of “Performance.” With a great quote from Tim Galloway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”
- Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis. An account of a radically open community development approach from Tunisia called Tamkeen. Lots in this piece to think about. Ht: Marcus Jenal, whose newsletter always delivers fantastic stuff.
- The Northern Ireland Assembly met, this time with simultaneous interpretation of the languages of English, Irish and Ulster Scots. More on these languages and dialects in Ulster on this beautiful video playlist from the Open University
- The Sultans of String record “The Power of the Land,” a poem by Duke Redbird set to some great music and visuals of some pretty impressive landscapes, including, at 1:36, a view of Nexlelexwem/Bowen Island and the south end of At’lka7tsem/Howe Sound, which I live.
- A discussion of Orthodox Christianity and theosis within the natural world, courtesy of Dave Pollard’s monthly link post.
- A fantastic list of mostly books on encountering silence in the Christian Contemplative tradition from Carl McColman’s blog.
- Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith on the history and practice of Loving Accountability
Enjoy your weekend as we move towards midsummer. I heard my first Swainson’s Thrush today, which means the better part of the season has begun.
It’s an old post by Henry Mintzberg from 2015 but he tweeted it out today and the message is as current as ever. If Mintzberg is retweeting seven year old essays, it’s probably worth paying attention to them. Here’s the essence:
Someone I know once asked a most senior British civil servant why his department had to do so much measuring. His reply: “What else can we do when we don’t know what’s going on?” Did he ever try getting on the ground to find out what’s going on? And then using judgment to assess that? (Remember judgment? It’s still in the dictionary.)
Measuring as a replacement for managing has done enormous damage—undermining the souls of so many of our institutions (as discussed in last week’s TWOG). Think of how much education has been killed by assuming that we can measure what a child learns in a classroom. (I defy anyone to measure learning. You are reading this TWOG: please measure what you are learning.) Must we always deflect teaching from engaging students to examining them?
The principle of “bounded applicability” is one that I first learned from Dave Snowden (and one which Sonja expands on here). Measurement ticks all the boxes for pretending that the world is objectively knowable, and that anything can be quantified. in fact there are indeed probably HR consultants out that that will give you a quantitative analysis of your organizations culture.
Actually I just went down the rabbit hole looking for examples. I’ll save you the trouble. That is to peer into hell. Please do so only at your peril.
Sometimes when I’m teaching Cynefin i will say something about the boundary between Complicated and Complex problems that goes something like this: “The line between these two kinds of systems is important because there is a strong urge to use methods from the complicated domain to “solve” problems in the complex domain, and if you do that, you can create a world that hates humans. There is actually a really easy way to reduce the homeless population to 0, but not if you have an iota or morality in your character.” The most dehumanizing thing to do is to treat cultures, and people, and living human systems strictly by the number, as empirical units of problem or success, to be increased or eliminated. The peril we are in if AI starts making decisions about our lives is that these ways of working are devoid of ethics, or more frighteningly, they are reliant on the ethics of those who program them. Elon Musk’s acquisition of twitter for it’s massive semantic database should have us all wary of technology that learns from that data set.
imposing the ruthless methods of the complicated work onto the complex world is one way we map colonization onto the Cynefin framework. In complexity, culture is what matters and culture is produced by the countless interactions between people creating shared meaning from their stories and experiences. To the complicated system, all this meaning is noise that contributes to an inefficient waste of time and energy. But the energy produced by inefficiency in the complex domains produces warmth, human connection, community, society, relationship Community is inefficient. Thank god.
Long live the inefficient community. And long live measurement by the numbers, firmly nestled into the complicated domain where it can do the most good. And the least harm.
I have a little more than a passing interest in the politics and history of Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular, from whence my father’s family of 17th century Scottish transplants emerged.
One of the blogs I follow on this subject is the Unionist blog Slugger O’Toole which offers very thoughtful commentary on Irish and British politics from a Unionist – but not sectarian – perspective. It is very hard not to conflate the two when discussing Northern Ireland, Glasgow or Liverpool-based football, or Canadian history (yes they all have a Protestant v Catholic underlying animosity). This is especially true if you only know a little bit about what you’re talking about. The more you know, the more nuance you will find.
And so here this morning, buried in this review of a new personal history of Ireland by Fintan O’Toole is a really nice succinct quote about sectarianism:
…here we have the essence of sectarianism, the inevitable by-product not of misunderstanding, but of understanding to the point of caricature without compassion and human respect. Such an environment could only fail to foster a political culture able to sustain the give and take of a mature democracy. It made the recourse to violence more immediate and appealing.
That is really a good and useful description of a dynamic that usually unnecessarily complicates the already complex politics of colonization and conflict. It strikes me that overcoming dynamics like sectarianism is work that can be done by each of us personally in order to engage with the bigger issues of policy and politics that affect all us collectively.
I want to invite you into a story about TSS Rovers FC, a little soccer club I am involved in that is doing amazing things. We are about to become the first semi-pro soccer club in Canada to have a significant amount of supporter ownership. Our initial share offering closes on March 9, and you buy into to this club now here: https://www.frontfundr.com/tssrovers. But read on to find out why i think this matters.
On the morning of August 6th, 2021 I sat glued to my TV screen absolutely riveted by the possibility of Canada winning a gold medal in women’s soccer at the Tokyo Olympics. After a tournament in which the team had dug deep against better teams and bitter rivals, they stood poised to capture a gold against Sweden. Nothing was certain as the match went to penalties, and as a long time supporter of Canadian soccer I found myself consumed only with hope, pleading with the soccer deities that our surse would be lifted.
And then when Julia Grosso scored the winning penalty, she ran into the arms of Jordyn Huitema and I burst into tears of relief, joy, pride, and astonishment.
On May 25, 2018 these same two women had appeared in a match between TSS Rovers and the Whitecaps women’s academy. Both women were on our roster, but Huitema had been loaned back to the Whitecaps for the match, as Bev Preistman was warming up her side for a U20 National Team match. The football was magnificent, and despite Rovers dropping a 3-2 result, the small groups of us there knew we were watching something special.
This country has been begging for a moment like what we witnessed on August 6, or indeed what we have witnessed this year as the Men’s National Team has found itself at the top of the table half way through the final round of CONCACAF qualification for the 2026 World Cup., Unless you were the parent of a player or one of the few involved in the development of talent in this country, all we had been able to do was stand by and watch, cheering from the sidelines, supporting where we could.
But the call has gone out to support Canadian soccer as we take the next step into the international game. Whether it is the call of the women for a professional league in this country, or the glaring deficit of BC-born and developed players on our men’s national team, the time is now to up our game.
When Colin Elmes, Brendan Quarry and Will Cromack had the idea to create TSS Rovers as a USL League 2 and later a WPSL franchise back in 2016, it was a thought based on a dream and a desire to meet this challenge with whatever tools they had. The idea quickly became a reality and it caught my imagination and that of a few local soccer supporters in the Vancouver area, who had long dreamed of investing in something tangible, of meaningfully supporting a team that was committed to do everything it could to build the Canadian game. Determined to play their games at iconic Swangard Stadium, the home of so many National team and Vancouver Whitecaps memories, the dream caught fire. I was astonished at the audacity of what TSS Rovers was doing, and I just had to be a part of it.
It was clear from the beginning they knew that if nothing else, this Dream would only succeed if supporters also saw the need and were given a way to make it happen.
On the basis of this simple and open invitation, The Swanguardians were formed, from a group of die-hard Canadian soccer supporters who could finally taste meaningful involvement in this effort. From the very first match in 2017, when the players assembled the supporters’ section themselves, the club has doubled down on what it means to offer supporters meaningful partnerships in the effort. They included the voices of supporters in the work of the club. Some of us were appointed to the TSS Rovers Advisory Board and in 2019 we began to imagine what it would be like to create a meaningful supporter stake in the Rovers Dream.
After three years of work, imagination, hard yards, and due diligence, we finally arrived at the idea of creating a Supporters Trust to seek an ownership stake in the club. The owners saw the opportunity to offer all supporters a chance to put their money where their mouth is and they made 49% of the ownership of the club available. Through much of 2021, the club and the nascent Trust worked hard to make this next dream a reality.
And we did it. On December 9 I purchased 4 shares in Rovers Football Club Ltd, and our Dream became a reality. Our initial offering runs until March 9 and you can be an owner too.
We have now made history as the first club in Canada to have actual equity ownership offered to supporters. We are one of a handful of clubs in North America that have catalyzed their communities into getting behind the dream of developing local players and moving them into the professional and national team ranks. There is no more tangible way to make a difference for Canadian soccer than investing in it and being a part of directing it, and this is the way to do it.
Until now, supporters of Canadian soccer could only stand by and watch as a small group of Canadian players, coaches, technical staff and investors tried to build the success that our national program has currently found. The establishment of the CPL has given a boost to the men’s game and the women are now loudly and rightly calling for a league of their own.
With the establishment of League1 BC, we now have a semi-professional environment in BC and a place for the Rovers Dream to continue for both women and men. And with the sale of ownership equity in TSS Rovers, the door is wide open for every person who said “we need to do more” to get on board, build on our success and deepen the pathways for players to take our country to the next level.
It is one thing to watch from the sidelines and cheer on our players, and another thing entirely to be tangibly invested in success for the future.
Whether it is that powerful blast of emotions I felt when Grosso and Huitema won their medals, the surge of pride I experience watching Jordan Haynes and Matteo Polisi lift the CPL Championship Shield, or the satisfaction of watching Joel Waterman winning a Voyageurs Cup and playing against the top teams in CONCACAF, that pride is born from the fact that over the past four years, I watched and sang for all of those players in the red and black of TSS Rovers. They answered the call and their success is just the beginning. And we who are connected to them, are riding the energy of their success.
We used to joke that “we don’t know what we are doing” But that has changed. We know exactly what we are doing. We are behind the calls of our national team players to get involved. We are meeting the hunger that supporters have to own a stake in the future. We are serious about the work now, and we couldn’t be more proud to be breaking the ground.
Join us now and be a part of history. There is space on this train for everyone to participate in what we are doing at TSS Rovers. And when we open our inaugural League1 BC season at Swanguard in May, we will do so in front of hundreds of people who are not just ticket buyers, or fans of the game or supporters of the club, but real owners who have purchased a stake in the future of Canadian soccer.
See you there.
When you live on an island like ours, Nex?wle?lex?xwm/Bowen Island there are rhythms that are like breathing. They come and go over time on cycles as short as an hour or as long as geological epochs.
Most mornings I begin my day on my covered porch, drinking a coffee, reading a meditation, spending some time in silence and contemplation. At this time of year the mornings are dark and, more often than not, wet. This morning we are in day four of what is called an atmospheric river, a massive steady plume of rain that extends from the Hawaiian Islands north-east to our coast. Such a pattern is like a long exhale of moisture, a plume of breath from the tropics that brings warm air and rain and sometimes fronts with gale force winds, which we call the Pineapple Express.
From my morning perch I can see the ferry coming and going, every hour or so, our connection to “the continent.” The early ferries – 6:20 and 7:30 – are commuter runs, with workers heading to the city on the earlier boat and high school students off to school on the later one. As the ferry approaches, the intensity of traffic on my road increases, and the closer we get to sailing time, the higher the speed of cars racing to make sure they don’t miss the boat, or to deliver a sleepy bus-missing teenager to the dock. There is a period of stillness and then the flow reverses and the labourers from the city who have made an early start travel in their work vans and pick-up trucks through the arteries and capillaries of our island road system. As the ferry leaves, things become still and quiet again.
It is very much like the tide that comes and goes twice a day, sometimes bringing as much as 3.5 meters of water to our shoreline, lifting the logs off the beach and floating them on the currents and eddies of Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, the inlet in which we live. This time of year we are coming into our highest tides, and the beaches will be cleared of the boom logs and torrent debris that has cascaded off the mountains into the sea during the past few months of rain and erosion.
And there are the longer period rhythms here as well. The world breathes birds on to our island all in season. Right now there are the winter residents having their run of the place, and with a mild and possibly snowless winter at this altitude near sea level, the towhees, juncos, song sparrows, chickadees, nuthatches, and wrens are spoiled for choice. large flocks of siskins and kinglets swirl in the grey air and occasionally at night you can hear the calls of snow geese flying high above the coast line in search of their estuary winter feeding grounds south of here at the mouth of the Sto:lo/Fraser River.
Winter is short here, and the new year brings with it a month of rain and grey, with gradually brightening skies and then the first hints of spring weather in early February, in line with the Irish seasons more so than the Gregorian ones. But of course there is already a calendar here, the Squamish calendar,that relates to the seasons of food and harvest. The land never really rests in warm winters like this, with the forest extracting as much as it can from the dim light but the mycelial networks in the forest floor working overtime to breakdown nutrients and keep everything fed and flowing in the moist and nutrient rich humus. The forest itself breaths a rhythm of feed from the sky and the earth, continuously growing the giant trees for which our coast is known.
Everything is geared around natural rhythms here, and they care little for the smoothing out of human life brought about by a pandemic. Our community rhythms have become a faint signal in the past 10 months, the peaks and troughs of gatherings, festivals and commemorative events flattened into mere bumps and barely acknowledged remembrances. In this sense it feels very much like our village has been holding its breath, but I also have a small worry that with another year of lock down we will become severed from the rhythms of community life. It only means that we will have to create new ones, or resurrect the former ones in new forms. But it does remind one of how easy it is to break the fabric of community life and set people adrift with one another, a dynamic that was sued against the indigenous population here over generations, through the pandemics of smallpox and colonization, which ravaged community life and stole even the waiting breath.
And in my own life, a turn has been taken as my youngest child has moved out, into an apartment in the city where his 20 year old life is also on hold. He has a job and will start a new set of university classes online this winter, but being 20 and living in a city for the first time is supposed to be a time of socializing, living life fully and enjoying oneself, and that’s just not possible at the moment. Back on the island, Caitlin and I have become empty nesters, and have just spent a couple of weeks in quiet and still recalibration of our lives in a shared space that, after 23 years of parenting, is once again just the two of us. Another exhalation, a deeper one, and an intake of breath for what the next third of life will hold.
Happy New Year to you all. May you continue to breathe and find life in the rhythms of breath that surround you.