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.
It’s late April on the coast. Huge flocks of geese are finding their way north making a beeline from their stopping grounds in the Fraser River estuary and heading straight over our island as they follow the inlets and mountains on their journey to Alaska. The sea lions are still out there barking and normally their presence would be a sure sign of spring as they come in with the herring, dragging all the mammal eating killer whales with them. But this year has been weird and we’ve had a herd (pride? flotilla? complaint?) of sea lions in Mannion Bay since November. Several docks have orange storm fencing around them so the lions won’t take refuge on the floats, but a couple of absentee dock owners don’t and so these amazing creatures encamp on the floats down below our house and bark 23 hours a day.
The only thing that frightens them off is a killer whale and the news came this week that 79 of them have been spotted in the Salish Sea this month, including a new baby for J-Pod, the group of orcas that are resident to the souther Gulf Islands. A grey whale has been hanging around English Bay and the humpbacks will soon be back. The abundance of Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, a combination of local recovery and globally warming waters, continues unabated.
This is a brief touch home, to try to get some crops in the garden, do a little maintenance work with clients and finish up some writing. My son and I were in England earlier in the month on a long awaited father/so soccer trip, and we had an epic time. We got to see our beloved Spurs in a rare patch of good form beat Southampton 3-1 and then draw Eintracht Frankfurt 1-1 in the Europa League quarter final. We also caught games at Watford, Charlton Athletic and Notts County before ending our trip as the guest of a friend at the Etihad in Manchester for an epic 5-2 victory for ManCity against Crystal Palace.
Getting to spend time with my 24 year old son is a gift and this is the longest we have spent together ever, just the two of us. I was able to take him around the places I lived in Herts as a kid, and we met some cousins and visited museums in-between football matches and early morning drives across the Pennines.
Soccer continued unabated, as we went to the inaugural match of the Northern Super League this past week, contested between the Vancouver Rise and the Calgary Wild. A couple of former TSS Rovers were in the squads for both teams, keeper Kirstin Tynan for Vancouver and defender Tilly James for Calgary. Our TSS Rovers women and men played on Friday night in a couple of disappointing losses to Langley United in League 1 BC, which is the second tier of Canadian soccer. Lots of soccer in my life these.
This has been a year of travel., so coming home to familiar things for a few moments is nice. A long awaited holiday in Italy awaits so I am savouring the coastal springtime as much as I can.
Detail from a quilt designed and made by the St. Andrews Anglican Church Women Quilter’s Guild. The quilt was made in 1967 in honour of Canada’s centennial year. Keen eyed observers will notice patterns in here that relate to that celebration. The quilt was on display at the Bowen Island Public Library earlier this year, on loan from Joyce Ganong whose mother, Isabel Faulks, was one of the quilters.
Another reflection from the Complexity Inside and Out course we taught yesterday…
Caitlin led us in a check in process that was about slowing down out seeing. Here’s a variation. Try it!
- Pick a view where there is some distance – looking out a window is best. If this is a familiar view, all the better.
- Notice the scene out there. Notice the colours, the landscape, the patterns. Notice movement and stillness. If the scene is familiar, look at what you know.
- You can close your eyes and remember what you see. How does that scene conjure itself up in your mind’s eye?
- Now open your eyes and look again at the scene. Try to notice something you’ve never noticed before or something that you’ve forgotten, or a change to the scene that you hadn’t noticed until now.
- Describe the scene now. Write down obersvations about what you see. What is the overall colour palette? What are the lines you see, of trees or buildings, horizon and sky. If you saw this scene in a flash, how would you recognize it?
You can add different variations to this exercise, but the point is to notice how we see things as patterns. Our mind conjures up a scene of large blocks in it and details aren’t always apparent. Sometimes we have to see things with new eyes, or a naive perspective.
I reflected yesterday that I was once walking through the forest here on my home island, following a path to the village with my brother who was visiting from Toronto. Bowen Island is very different from Toronto. He stopped us next to a very large Douglas-fir tree and said “Look at that! It’s huge!”
All the trees around here are huge, especially if you aren’t familiar with the forest. But I looked again at this tree – one I passed hundreds of times to and from the village – and noticed that it was actually an old growth tree. How could I tell? The pattern of bark is different, the branches are thicker and more gnarly and look like the trunks of younger trees. My brother’s eyes found anomalies in the pattern I had formed of my home forest, and I used my own pattern recognition skills to identify why the tree he spotted was an anomaly.
This, it turns out is an excellent thing to do when you are looking for other patterns in familiar contexts, like your business market or your team culture or the school system you work in or the services you offer to community. Be careful not to assume that the patterns you can see is the sum total of the reality available to you.
This isn’t new. But you can never over-practice awareness.
There is a neat game called Geoguesser that is based on the Google Street View database. You download the app and get started and it throws up an image from somewhere in the world and you have two minutes to guess where it is. The closer you get to the actual spot, the more points you get.
You’re not supposed to cheat by using Google maps to look up land marks. It entirely depends on the pattern recognition that you bring to the game. What language is that on the side of a truck? What does that street sign say? What kind of palm trees are these? Is that dirt road red or dark brown? Is that a white ring around the power pole?
Really good players of this game have thousands of details stored meaning that they can discern the location using macro clues first, and then narrow things down with decision trees, like how the shadows are cast, entire websites have sprung up devoted to these pattern markers that help people quickly identify the location. There are competitions culminating in the GeoGuesser World Championship. You can watch these competitions live. They are amazing.
And the kind if undisputed champion of this game is rainbolt, a man full of so many patterns, that his guesses are almost always pinpoint accurate.
Watch him host five great players finding obscure locations. They are engaged in constant pattern finding. It’s kind of amazing and it’s very cool to have them articulate the way they are seeing these landscapes. Specific knowledge helps them make generalizations and they connect what they know and use abductive reasoning to guess the location.
Back when I first experienced Open Space Technology, at a conference in 1995, the thing that immediately caught my attention about the process was how it was a perfect, simple set of constraints to enable self-organization. It sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about self-organization and complexity and I became captivated with the patterns I saw around me, and specifically with dissipative structures.
Ilya Prigogine coined the term dissipative structure. In layperson’s terms it refers to a structure that persists in time despite its components constantly changing. The classic example is a whirlpool. When you pull the plug on a bathtub full of water, the water forms a whirlpool as it head down the drain. The whirlpool is an emergent structure and a pattern that persists over time, held in place by constraints such as gravity, the size of the drain hole, and way bigger forces like air pressure and where you are on the planet.
If you just look at molecules of water, you would have no idea that they could form a whirlpool. The water molecules that drain out of your bathtub all participate temporarily in forming the whirlpool but none of them initiate it. When they leave, they have no memory that they were in it. You cannot take a random water molecule and discover whether it has ever gone down a drain. And yet, the pattern persists and is real. What gets dissipated is the energy and matter that travels through the structure.
In human systems, we see related kinds of structures everywhere too. Learning about these kinds of patterns, which I did initially through Fritjof Capra’s book The Web of Life, made me seek out analogues around me. The pattern of “dissipating structure” was interesting, and because I had focussed extensively on culture in my undergraduate studies, I finally had a useful way of looking at cultures and how they seemed to exhibit both stability and constant change. People, energy and material flow through the culture but they are entrained to behave in a larger scale structure that has some persistence, but which is also sensitive to changing. This was how I ended up coming to complexity theory, through my exploration of these ideas.
Cultures are not dissipative structures in the technical sense that Prigogine describes, and there seems to have been quite a bit of controversy over the years about whether social structures qualify as thermodynamic structures. Because I’m not a physicist I will say they are not, but this idea makes a good metaphor and helps me to explain how we work with emergent structures and persistent patterns in organizational and community life.
Seeing this pattern led me into the margins of participatory leadership work, facilitation, and ultimately dialogical organizational development. These ways of working were all concerned with creating the kinds of containers that enable emergent meaning. Sometimes these containers are temporary, like meetings, and sometimes they are persistent, like organizations, teams and communities. If you’ve ever tried to change an organizations culture you’ll recognize that it is very much like sticking your hand in a whirlpool. You’ll get some temporary disruption, but unless you change the enabling constraints, the whirlpool will reestablish itself the moment you stop interfering.
If you were popping around here on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) over the past couple of days, you might have remarked to folks that the weather seems a bit weird. We’ve had a volatile week of spring weather, with heavy rain, different kinds of winds, a front of thunderstorms and clear skies.
It is interesting to listen to people talk about the weather. The patterns are different. The air is warmer, but has a bit of a chill on the breeze. The wind is coming from different angles and the trees are moving differently. In fact southerly and westerly winds on our part of the island blow against the trees’ natural leaning direction, and yesterday on a late afternoon walk, we hear a couple fall in the forest. The thunderstorms that passed over Vancouver Island were a clue to the weirdness.
Today, in our complexity inside and out course we taught a module on pattern spotting and working with constraints. Complexity workers know that all patterns in complex situations are held by constraints. Change the constraints and the pattern changes. So weather wise, in the last couple of days we had a strange set of constraints in the upper atmosphere that resulted in a lot of convection, meaning that warm air at the surface was mixing with cold air aloft and that is what drives thunderstorms and other volatility including strange winds.
These aren’t uncommon kinds of atmospheric conditions on the coast, but they are uncommon enough that folks sense that the weather is “weird.” And its gets to the point now where I can tell you that there is a lot of convection in the atmosphere by how many people are confused by the weather pattern. Forecasting weather using a mass perception of how people make meaning of the situation is exactly how we work in complexity.
The weather is indeed strange. a few days ago I made bunch of posts on my blog “private.” I have done this once before, when people I worked with in another country were detained in part because of work we had done together. In that case the ruler of that country is a known autocrat who had survived a coup attempt and was taking it out on his enemies and anyone he thought was organizing against him.
Here in Canada we have entered into a short election campaign and although the parties have not yet released their platforms I have already decided who I am voting for, and it is a party I have never voted for in my life. This is an election between two conservative parties. One, the Conservative Party of Canada, is the legacy of the old Progressive Conservative Party which merged with the populist western-based Reform Party (and lost “progressive” from it’s name) and then lost its most lunatic fringe to the further right People’s Party of Canada. Still, they are led by the populist Pierre Poilievre who is a career political party wonk, who has made his living off of immature name calling (a la the man to the south) and slogans like “Axe the Tax” which sound good when you chant them once or twice and then they start to get boring. Plus they are just covering up terrible policy.
The other conservative party is the Liberal Party of Canada which really hasn’t changed over the past 5 decades or so. They occasionally drift to the left on social policy, and we have just come out of a period of ten years where Justin Trudeau brought a Gen X approach to social policy and swung the party left on those issues. Everyone got tired of him though and after a fall of running on fumes with a hobbled House of Commons, he stepped down at the beginning of the year and made space for a short Liberal leadership campaign. The victor was Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He is an economist, a pension fund manager, a banker and a technocrat. His landslide leadership victory (more than 85% of the party members voted for him) instantly moved the Liberal back to their more traditional centre right position. They now have a banker in charge, with a fairly intact social conscience and a lot of experience leading government institutions and economies through rapidly changing crises. He was the BoE chair during Brexit. He knows how to play a bad hand.
One of these two men will be Prime Minister on May 1. Neither of them are true progressives; their campaigns both began with announcement of tax cuts. Carney has been prime minister for less than two weeks during which time he made a trip to Europe to shore up trading support and defence options against the unpredictable chaos coming from our south and then he came home and dropped the writ. Poilievre has continued to campaign against Justin Trudeau (who is long gone), he continues to rail against the consumer carbon tax (which Carney has effectively repealed) and he continues to promote a tax cut for the lowest tax bracket (which Carney also did, although at a lower rate and more tied to a policy decision to replace the carbon tax rebate, ANYWAY…).
Poilievre was standing 25 percentage points ahead in most polls until Carney was chosen as leader of the Liberal Party. He now sits 5 points behind Carney. The progressive conservatives who could never vote for Trudeau’s Liberals seem to have come home to the only conservative party will to occupy the centre of the political spectrum: Mark Carney’s Liberals.
So we have an election, but it is not to be one contested on progressive ideas. It will be one that will elect a party and a prime minister that can best respond to the unprecedented volatility and existential threat of this strange time. That is not the bellicose and sloganeering Conservatives. That party will be the Liberal Party of Canada. There is a lot at stake in this election and a lot of strange political weather happening now. Call it volatility in the upper atmosphere, but it is about to hail some.
A report today from Bowen Island’s marine steward extraordinaire, Adam Taylor:
2025 Herring Spawn started today in Squamish accompanied by Whitesided Dolphins feeding.
Herring spawn in Snug Cove was last observed in the +/- 1960s but you never know when nature decides to return.
Please keep an eye out for enthusiastic seabird or marine mammal activity along Bowen’s shoreline.
Will report back when I hear from folks monitoring Coal Harbour as that’s a bit closer to us.
A sure sign of spring! Slhawt’/Herring spawning season is the first big ocean activity to take place after the winter. So although it is cold and there is an Arctic outflow blowing for another few days, spring is just around the corner.
I did hear reports of about 20 dolphins way up the inlet yesterday. The first thing I thought of was that they were after the herring. The herring population in our inlet has made a remarkable recovery over the past 25 years. Well worth paying attention to.