From the spring 2025 edition of Geist comes an amazing piece of writing from essayist Soraya Roberts, who documents a trip on the The Canadian, Canada’s only mostly trans-national train.
“This is about a transcontinental train, established 70 years ago, using the same cars to this day. It is about how trains became a relic in our national mind, which is how they came to be visibly trundling across the country, slowly connecting products rather than people, as the rest of the world surpasses us with better versions of what we left behind… This is about a vast country of people yearning for connection. But Canada has never, in its infinite practicality, accommodated yearning.”
You can read the full essay only in the print edition, so go buy one or grab it from your nearest Canadian library.
One of the my favourite blogs of all time was the daily commonplace book whiskey river. Whoever was behind that blog seems to have stopped posting in December. the last post was a quote from Louise Erdrich:
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book –
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
I have no idea who was behind this blog. It was a reliable and seasonable daily dose of incredible insight from a person who was extremely well read. The blog itself remains online and a collection of posts has been published as “whiskey river’s commonplace book.” The blog published from 2001 to 2024. The author remains deeply anonymous.
Early on in the blogging era many folks figured out this recipe: blogs as commonplace books. Mark Woods who lived in Perth, Ontario published “wood s lot: the fitful tracing of a portal.” Sadly, he died in 2017 but back in 2002 when he was struggling to find the money for a new computer so he could keep writing, Euan Semple all the way over in the UK sent him the money to buy a new PC. It was a lovely act, and reaffirmed what blogging always had been: generosity and connection. Another who blogged in the manner of whiskey river included Steve Laidlaw from Kamloops BC, who published the long gone “riley dog.”
I parked my car this morning in the village and walked down to my favourite coffee place for an espresso. Every one of the three conversations I overheard was about people discussing the pros and cons of ChatGPT. Pros seem to be that “it helped me to know what to ask for when I talked to my car insurance company” and cons are mostly “how do we know that any of this is real?” More seriously I’m sitting near folks who work in the arts and the looks on their faces are of the deepest concern. They use it. For ideas, for a writing prompt, but the times they have used it to write dialogue, they can spot how crappy it is. At the moment.
My earliest post about was Google was from 2002 when it was an insanely useful tool for searching the web. “Google cooking” was a simple game where one entered in a list of ingredients and it returned a list recipes. It was novel at the time. Great for weeknight dinners. Another game was called “Googlewhack” whereby one would try to construct a two word search term that resulted in only one result. You can’t play that one anymore.
The complete enshittification of search engines, combined with web content that has been generated by robots in order to sell stuff is increasing turning web-search an absolutely useless activity. I just use my search engine (DuckDuckGo) as a collection of bookmarks now. It is hard to do any meaningful research anymore, and so we turn to ChatGPT for answers. And ChatGPT is out there learning the questions we ask. Something sits weird with me when I think about how while Google learned the answers we like, and AI is learning the questions we ask.
The questions are important, as is the way we ask them and to whom we ask them. Sonja today writes about the questions that help us discern a direction, which is different from finding a way. Sometimes we don’t even know what the direction is although we can discern that wherever we are right now, somewhere else is better. Thinking about that and talking about it together is an essential human capacity and it’s a pretty fundamental part of how we work with teams facing complexity. There is an art to asking to right kinds of questions and thinking about them together that reveals a deeper level at which affordances and opportunities might exist. Sometimes getting unstuck means drilling down and not reaching out.
Collaborative outcomes are emergent properties of discrete human systems of encounter and meaning-making – “dialogic containers” I call them. If you are a leader seeking a course of action, you might get some good ideas by submitting notes and documents and harvests into a large language model to suggest possibilities. In fact, you could even have your team members do that on their own and bring the output to a meeting to talk about what they have found. My hypothesis is if you continue to do that without involving humans you will end up with an endless set of ideas and possibilities, but you will miss the co-creationi and co-ownership that makes sustained effort possible in a particular direction. I can’t yet see how large language models can surface a consensus that will inspire collaborative action. Deep meaning and commitment to one another is produced by the people within the container who discover something between them that is worth trying, worth pursuing together. Calls to action are far less sustainable than co-creation of a direction. Even if, and perhaps especially if, such a direction is deeply flawed to begin with. There is nothing better than failing together and then finding a way forward to build cohesion.
I might be wrong in the future but in this moment, systems-complexity and anthro-complexity are different and humans experience emergence differently from mechanical systems, even those that are capable of learning. Dialogue practitioners base their practice on this idea; that no matter how great the ideas are, nothing gets sustained in human systems without the intangibles of co-ownership, meaningful engagement, and dare I say, at some level, love.
Inspired by Doc Searls I’m going to try some more frequent notes based blogging, using Wordland to post directly to my blog. I use to post much more frequently to this blog, when I first started it in 2002. It was my digital thinking space, and it has always been a useful and searchable archive of what I’ve been thinking at a certain time. In the late aughts and early 2010s I got seduced by the enclosed spaces for doing this. largely through Facebook and Twitter and now both of those are gone to me and no longer useful . So what about returning here, to notes and links and a little commentary? The interface I’m using for this post is from Wordland, which is an extremely clean, stripped down interface for WordPress that makes it dead easy to post. I think I have my blog settings set up so that these notes posts don’t get shipped to my email subscribers. They won’t be too exciting for folks and I want to keep that list largely populated with more thoughtful writing. Bit I like the idea that those of you who have stumbled here or are reading through your newsreader get to see some of this stuff. It will be random, each note will contain the date as a title. There is no fixed schedule, but I’m hopeful it will get me in the mood to write more frequently as I won’t worry about audience.
So here goes. Test one.
Over the water from our little island is Horseshoe Bay, the bustling ferry terminal where boats sail to Nanaimo, the Sunshine Coast and Nexwlélexwm/Bowen Island, where I live. Last week a four-year-old boy, Leonardo Machado, and his mother were hit by a bus in a tragic accident while they were waiting to catch the bus home from their visit to Bowen. Leonardo was killed and his mother Silvana remains in critical but stable condition in hospital. There has been an outpouring of grief and love and support for Leaonardo’s family, and for Clineu, Leonardo’s father.
There is a fundraiser for Clineu and Silvana. Clineu recently posted a letter there that he wrote in his son’s voice. The letter will break your heart, but I’m posting it here in full, becasue in it, Clineu captures his little son’s love of buses and and trains – his best friends – and imports us to remember and care for the bus drivers in our lives.
Hi, my name is Leonardo, and I need your help if you can ! I was born to this beautiful city and country on October 27, 2020, at Saint Paul hospital and I’m a Vancouverite like many of you and I always loved this beautiful city !
Since I was born my parents always use buses to go everywhere in this city with my stroller along and I started falling in love with buses and Skytrains. Every time a bus was coming or a Skytrain was showing close my father tells me: Look Leo … look the bus … the bus … and I laugh and laugh because I just love them so much. They became my best friends and they brought me everywhere around this beautiful city. I grow up quick watching the Cocomelon yellow bus and Thomas the train cartoons, my favorites. But I have to admit, lately I start falling in love with Mickey Mouse and Chase and Marshall from Paw Patrol.
When I start walking at the age of 2 years I started grabbing my mom’s hands or my father’s hands and then haul them to the near bus stop just a block from my home, just to see the buses driving by and I wave at them and laugh and laugh !
Every time she can my Mom brings me to the 374 Pavilion* and I never missed the year Celebration there when my big train friend comes out in full force ! I just love it and have been inside that locomotive so many times because my mom was a voluntary worker before too.
You must be sad and I’m too, when you heard about the Horseshoe Bay accident and one of my best friends, the bus, separate me from my best friend in life, yes … my Mom. We were inseparable and went everyday out to enjoy Vancouver.
Buses are made to connect people and not to separate them, right ? I don’t want you to be sad because one of my dearest friends separate me and my Mom, and I thought…together we can do something.
This campaign is not about money and you will see soon … it’s about love !
First, in order to help relieve some of the pain, if you can bring a flower to my friends that drove me around this beautiful city for almost 5 years ! Ask their names and how they are doing ! Buy them a coffee if you can because they are my heros !
My friends who drove me throughout the city are devastated and impacted by what happened with me, and I want to thank them for all the enjoyment they provided me, and help to bring back love and confidence into their hands and that they continue driving all of us safely and comfortably and lovely !
My Mom will miss me a lot if she gets better and I’m praying for her peace. Could you help me to help with her to stay alive, could you pray for her and maybe bring a flower to my new heros, the nurses and doctors at VGH ? She could not be in better hands but we need more prayers for her as soon as you can !
I hope I never have to use 1 cent that has been donated here for my mom and she gets better and happy as she always was everyday before ! This is what I want more than anything and for my father. He has suffered too much loss in his life.
I also would like Translink to help my friends, the drivers, to cope with all of this trauma, and together with us, we can make better bus stops with benches and covering (I got too much rain 265 days per year!), and may build a small memorial at Horseshoe Bay that will bring back happiness and joy to that beautiful Terminal.
I hope we can gather lots of help and if possible in the future I’ll donate part or all received here, victims of tragic accidents as I have learned there are changes to laws, and now sometimes they don’t help the victims as they should. Maybe that can be changed.
What I need more than anything is your pray for my Mom because I love her so much !
I would like you to visualize my Mom healthy, happy and walking again. And as you picture this image, you really believe this is going to happen and this makes you happy as well.
As you hold the happiness, and you can hold a photo of my mom if you need as she was always happy, manifest this as a future projection, and then join me in this old and original prayer translated from the Aramaic that a young and poor carpenter used to teach:
“Father-Mother …
… Breath of Life, Source of Sound, Action without Words, Creator of the Cosmos !
Let your light shine within us, between us, and outside of us, so that we can make it useful.
Help us to continue our journey by breathing only the feeling that emanates from You.
May ourself, in the same step, be with His, so that we may walk as kings and queens with all other creatures.
May your desire and ours be one, in all Light, as well as in all forms, in every individual existence, as well as in every community.
Make us feel the soul of the Earth within us, because in this way we will feel the Wisdom that exists in everything.
Don’t let the superficiality and appearance of the things of the world deceive us and free us from everything that hinders our growth.
Let us not forget that You are the Power and the Glory of the world, the Song that is renewed from time to time and that beautifies everything.
May your love be only where our actions grow.
So be it !”
As a fellow dad, I hold Clineu in my heart and, like so many others, send best wishes and prayers up for Silvana. I’m so glad that Leonardo and Silvana got to spend their last day together on our beautiful little island.
*The 374 Pavillion is a permanent exhibit at the Roundhouse Community Centre in Vancouver that contains engine 374, the first steam engine to travel across Canada.
A photo of the STEVE I saw last night. If you are reading this as an email, click the post title to see the image.
You have to chase the beautiful things sometimes. Be in the right place, have a bit of luck, being open to a bit of surprise.
On Sunday I was really sick with some kind of blow-through flu/cold that laid me out all weekend. But I managed to drag myself out of bed later in the day and get a walk in. One of my favourite walks on my home island takes me down a little road below my house that hugs the north shore of Mannion Bay above the waterfront houses and then leads into Miller’s Landing, where you can choose a couple of options for places to sit and look at the sea. For me, it was Miller’s Landing beach, which was deeply exposed for the super low tides we get at this time of year. When I got down to the little bench above the beach there was a family of four standing at the railing looking out to the water. I recognized the look of people who had just seen whales.
There’s a special stance that happens when whales appear near enough that you can hear them breathe. I always find myself standing up quickly, at attention, with a shiver down my spine, because there are very few sounds in my life as profoundly moving as the breath of a whale. I asked them if they were seeing whales and they said that a pod of 5 or 6 orcas had just passed by a few minutes before. They had rounded the point and were now out of sight. I congratulated them on their luck and secretly wept a little inside that I had just missed them.
However, last night I had a chance at the only other thing that makes me shiver like that. There has been a massive series of geomagnetic storms rocking the earth’s atmosphere over the past few days and that means we get a chance to see auroras. Even though at this time of year we don’t actually get a completely dark sky, if the auroras are bright enough, they still show up in June, and they never fail to make me stand in profound awe.
I went out to my favourite spot with a view looking straight northward up Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound. Last night there were auroras, but they were fairly diffuse; a quiet green glow arcing across the head of our inlet far off to the north. Still beautiful, though. I watched them for a while wondering if it would dark enough to see any structure or movement. I was fixated on the diffuse glow, and the sounds of sea lions splashing in the dark sea below me. Nothing else was happening and so I lifted my gaze to see if I could see some planets, just in time to see a STEVE stretching across the sky. And I got that same feeling – stood at attention, chills running down my spine, watching a ribbon of super hot ions for 10 minutes stretch across the upper atmosphere hundreds of kilometres above my head.
STEVE is a phenomenon that accompanies geomagnetic storms, but is not the same as an aurora. As Aurorasaurus.com puts it, “if the ambient aurora was a symphony, STEVE would crash in with an electric guitar riff.”
STEVE has only recently been identified and scientists still don’t know exactly what they are, but it’s possible you’ve seen them. They stretch from east to west across the sky, further south than the aurora typically does. It’s not obvious what they are when you see them. The one I saw last night stretched right over my head at 49 degrees north, while the aurora appeared far away over the northern horizon. This is the second time I have positively seen a STEVE, the first time being probably 2017 or 2018 when I stepped out onto a friends deck during a party and saw what looked like a narrow concentrated band of the aurora overhead stretching away to the west. It didn’t make sense that there was no other aural activity so I thought it might be just a high cloud or a contrail illuminated by the moon and perhaps the lingering twilight. But then it began to dance and twist like the aurora. My friends at first didn’t believe me when I told them it was up there, but they were soon convinced and a whole party of people that had been dancing and carrying on stopped and grew silent at the appearance of this strange river of light flowing above us into the western sky.
I love those moments of awe. I never get used to seeing whales and auroras. And STEVE.