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Category Archives "Featured"

Notes and links from the week

June 27, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Notes No Comments

An ochre sea star on the beach at Mannion Bay/Kwilakwm, on Bowen Island during one of this week’s midsummer low tides.

Most days I read through posts from my blogroll and other places on the web and publish a short set of links and notes. At the end of each week I roll these up into a post which is also sent to everyone who subscribes by email.

Here are this week’s notes. Click the links below to discover interesting places to explore:

  • June 21: sounds of longing. One trans person’s experience in the USA and a beautiful new album of Persian music.
  • June 23: black holes. Are we living in a real black hole? And what is the price of the cognitive black holes we live in?
  • June 24: the long and the short of it. Seems people are enjoying longer cultural experiences, but having shorter collaborative ones.
  • June 25: supporting creation. Freeing up time for play and creativity in life, music and sport.
  • June 26: the deep history of meaningful work. Some quotes for inspiration and some long essays on how we evolved civilization from our big goofy brains.

You can subscribe to this blog by email and good old fashioned RSS. I use NetNewsWire to follow interesting writers on the web. It works with most blogs, including those published on Substack and Medium.

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It’s not the silence that is awkward

June 26, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Containers, Conversation, Culture, Facilitation, Featured No Comments

This is an interesting article from Rebecca Roache Aeon today: “What’s so awkward about awkward silence?“

“…conversations are shared endeavours. A conversation is something we’re creating with whoever we’re talking to, and this is undermined if one or other of us is silent for too long. In a 2011 study on conversational silences, the psychologists Namkje Koudenburg, Tom Postmes and Ernestine H Gordijn compared conversations to dancing: the ‘harmonious exchange of information through smooth turn-taking’ in a fluent conversation is satisfying in a way similar to coordinating one’s movements with those of a dancing partner. Dancing, like conversation, becomes awkward when it’s malcoordinated. Koudenburg and her colleagues found that people experience rejection when silence disrupts the flow of conversation. They explain: ‘people are, due to the evolutionary importance of group membership, highly sensitive to perceiving exclusion’. In other words, silences are uncomfortable when they make us worry that we don’t belong.”

I have two unresourceful patterns when I’m engaging in conversation. One is that I spend a lot of time listening and thinking about what is being said. I often have thoughts during these silences, but the conversation moves too fast for me to get them in. I am deeply sensitive to interrupting others and being interrupted and so I am loath to do so. So I sit on my thoughts and sometimes chain them together into the questions or ideas that I offer. I might write notes with me pen to track my thoughts. And sometimes they never come out, and other times they flood out as I try to catch up to everything that has flowed past. I don’t think either of those moves are helpful!

Other times, you can’t shut me up and I will go on and on stringing together thoughts and ideas and questions as they tumble out of my brain when it gets locked in the default mode network. Ideas associate themselves like a Glass Bead Game and they all come out, probably in a not so helpful way. These downloads are often met with confusion in my conversational partners. When I am in this mode it is very hard to regulate my verbiage. I have learned to ask for space and will say things like “I need to just think out loud here for a minute, can you indulge me?” Other times I will invite interruption, welcoming it like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man.

But I generally relish the silences in conversations when we are all in the sam flow. I love conversing in circle where we deliberately slow down the conversation and explicitly use silence as a tool that everyone has access to. In circle there can be unfamiliarity with silence as a part of the conversation, but there is minimal awkwardness per se, because the silence is ritualized and normalized.

Of course I live in a culture much like the one that Rebecca Roache lives in. Silence in conversation – well, in small talk really – is awkward because it isn’t the norm of the ritual of small talk in many Anglo-American cultures. While I understand and enjoy small talk, I like to be in a place with someone where we get deep enough that some silence is welcomed. This morning I ran into a friend on the trail who I ahdn;t seen in a while. We connected with a hello and how-are-you-doing but both of us have history together of going deep around life issues and it quickly went there. We paused and became quiet together and shared important news with one another in a loving, connected way. There was nothing awkward in the silences. The container changed and the silence became a critical part of the conversation.

Roache summarizes her article with the set of thoughts that became clear to me as I was reading her essay:

“Something that emerges from all this is that it’s not silence itself that is awkward (or not). The capacity of silences to be awkward or comfortable is set against our efforts to connect with and understand other people, to be seen by others in the way we wish to be seen, and to be accepted. Running through all the aspects of awkward silence we’ve explored here is a common thread of anxiety about how well we’re engaging in connection and understanding with the people we interact with. In a comfortable silence, like the ones you enjoy with those you know and love, that anxiety isn’t there. With them, you don’t struggle to connect and understand. You’re already there.”

That is the essence. It’s hard to tell what part of this is me and what part is the culture I am soaking in, but I notice the chatter that happens oftentimes becomes a shield against connection. Our world right now is suffering from a deficit of trust. It takes a long time to cultivate connections across differences and early moments of connection – through small talk, mostly in my culture – are so influential in whether or not a channel of openness emerges.

In facilitation practice making space for silences can be important because it may both lead to, and reinforce a deeper connection between people. This is much easier to do in small group facilitation than it is is large group process work, but it can be a useful way to use the power one has as a facilitator. I remember one large gathering I did with about 120 people, and many diverse and simmering conflicts that were rising to the surface. I called for 15 minutes of silence. These people did all have spiritual practices and asking them to be silent was a call to their practitioner selves, but even so many told me how difficult it was to sit in that silence. The result, however, I believe, was a general ability to be willing to slow down and reflect for the rest of the gathering and let the silence do the work of opening up resourcefulness between them.

The awkwardness is information. The response is trust. If trust can grow, the silence can become a powerful part of the dialogue, and the space can do its work.

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Remembering Burns on a Juneuary morning

June 22, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Being, Bowen, Featured No Comments

Our back door, created by my friend and fellow islander Burns Jennings who died in February. We asked him to design a door that signifies a crossing into our family home. He was proud of this one.

"Every day is perfect if, 
when you wake, you hear birds
in the garden..."
- Ann Margaret Lim, "Birdsong of Shaker Way"

That’s what we call it traditionally on Bowen Island, Juneuary. It is a traditional period of rain and cooler weather that drenches the coast for a while in June, around the summer solstice. Every year, there are a few hot days in May that fool us into believing that the summer has fully arrived and then most years, there is this period.

There is birdsong, but the spring dawn chorus of warblers and grosbeaks and rattling flickers has dulled a little. Instead there are the little questions that the towhees ask, and the resonant guttural calls of ravens going about their business in the tree tops. In the aftermath of rain, there is calm and settled grey that hangs over and before the mountains, sometimes sending wispy tendrils of mist across the ridge lines.

The ground smells amazing. Every flower releases its perfume to the damp air. The mock orange and the chamomile in our garden fills the space with scent. Raspberries demand to be picked, the final blush of spring’s peas swell with the rain. The lettuce is in its glory and the beans seem to grow while you watch.

On our little island a quiet grey weekend day like this one tends to dampen the number of visitors, except for those who are insistent on heading into the woods or up the mountain for a hike. That’s all good. It’s nice to have a bit of quiet in the Cove, and sometimes a cloudy grey day quiets the groups on the trails too. The rain brings reverence.

Yesterday we marked the passing of a well-loved Bowen Islander, Burns Jennings. Burns was a talented athlete, artist, craftsman and coach. He touched everyone around him all the time because he was one of the very few people I know who realized that his soul had been deposited in a time and place that allowed him to live life fully and completely. He feasted on opportunity to generate gratitude so that he could live with generosity. He never waited for a chance to act if it meant that he could create a thing of beauty, be it a piece of furniture, or a community based football club, or a perfect strike on a chinook salmon, or carving powder on bluebird day at Whistler.

His legacy was best captured by the fact that about 400 people showed up in the school gym to watch a slide show of his life and hear stories from close friends and families. And that was followed by a soccer tournament with 80 folks from 12 to 60+, including myself, which was a huge testament to the love of football he instilled in all of us.

Burns’ memorial was just one of a bunch of things happening on the island this weekend. Today, as I walked down to the village to get some supplies for making tortellini, there was an open house at the firehall, and our choir Carmina Bowena gave an impromptu flashmob performance of some of our repertoire. Yesterday a marimba ensemble was playing somewhere, there was a performance of Decho: River Journey by Theatre of Fire, there was a wedding.

Lots of little touches of community this weekend. Just the kind of thing for which Burns would have expressed deep gratitude.

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Notes June 16-20

June 20, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Notes No Comments

The aftermath of a goal celebration in the TSS Rovers men’s 2-1 win over the Whitecaps Academy on Wednesday at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby.

I’ve started – for now anyway, read the June 20 note for why this might only be a passing fad! – to post a daily or nearly daily set of notes drawn from my readings and surfing of the day. Call it a “web log” if you will. This is partly a strategy to return to the origins of blogging and it’s also a way to keep my dopamine seeking brain from hanging out on my phone and its library of scrolls, where it’s easy to read things and just post them on social media. I’m really, really trying hard to kick social media.

And so every day this week I’ve posted these notes, but they don’t get pushed out to email subscribers becasue I don’t want to overwhelm you with a daily email from me. Those who read blogs in traditional ways, through feedreader for example, will see these, as will those that just hang out here and check the recent postings. (Are there any of you that do that?)

At any rate, the enteries in these posts are loosely themed every day, with a theme that emerges from my reading. Every week or so, on a Friday, I thought I might send you a little digest of these notes because they contain some really interesting readings and links that you might want to check out for your weekend.

  • June 16: Notes
  • June 17: Accomdating yearning
  • June 18: Starting over
  • June 19: Service
  • June 20: Desire lines

Enjoy.

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Designing for Open Space (and other large group facilitation methods)

June 20, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Collaboration, Complexity, Containers, Conversation, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Invitation, Leadership, Open Space 2 Comments

Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.

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