I was struck by Daniel Miller’s research on Skerries, a small seaside town in Ireland which he discussed on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed podcast this week. The town he is describing is almost EXACTLY a match for Bowen Island, where I live right down to the demographics, the community dynamics and the fact that we don;t have a swimming pool, a theatre or a hotel and we do drink A LOT and have a cocaine problem. He wrote a book about his research but I was struck by the deep parallels between our two villages. In thinking about the commonalities …
Folks in Mitchell County, North Carolina, working with stories of substance use to discover patterns and generate ideas for supporting folks in active addiction and recovery and prevention. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on what participatory leadership really looks like. I use the word a lot in my work – teaching participatory leadership and participatory decision-making – and of course, “participation” is one of the four practices of the Art of Hosting. Hosting meetings and contexts for large-scale work means creating the conditions for participation. And it means learning how to be a good participant. Words like …
My neighbour Raghavendra Rao Karkala has a show up at The Hearth on Bowen these next couple of weeks that is a captivating look at the images of dissent in the world. Spanning movements from around the world and from the late 20th century right up to the present day, Raghu has captured images of dissent, many of them portraits of dissenters in action. It is an unusual show for Bowen Island, in that it is explicitly political. I’m sure folks will resonate with some of the dissenters and not others. Maybe none at all. The show portrays named and …
After the wedding by Leanne Romak My friend Leanne Romak – the person who designed this very website back in 2014 – has a show at The Hearth, the Bowen Island Arts Council gallery. Along with artist Sonya Iwasiuk, the two artists have a small but lovely show called “Reflections: Stories of Ukrainian -Canadian ancestors” on until October 23. Leanne’s pieces in the show are painting based on photographs taken by her uncle the 1940s. She found them poking around in the attic of an abandoned farmhouse in Manitoba in the 2010s. She has created fine paintings from these photos …
I asked DALL-E to make this image, because I can’t find the great photo i took of streams converging on a beach. This is one of the things I love about my daily RSS feed. The first thing I see today on my NetNewsReaders list is this blog post from my fiend Mark McKergow in Edinburgh who shares his framework of time, which he has articulated in the Uers Guide to the Future. I like this conception of time, because of the big hole in the which he calls “Ant Country”. Ant Country is that time when the context you …