As a traditional musician schooled primarily in the Celtic tradition, I am fond of traditional themes and devices for communicating messages. On our home island right now there is a sometimes fierce debate occurring about the future of the Crown lands, that involves the possibility of creating a national park. Today I was thinking about the complexities of the debate, and how it has seemed to me that those leading the opposition to the park are speaking on the one hand out of a concern for protecting something dear about our Island, but it has felt a little off to me. Like a father who won’t let his daughter grow up. That, it turns out is a a very old story, and so I made a little song today about our place, telling a little story that captures I think how I feel about the park, and the partnerships that we would enter into to make it possible.
the short answer is that, given everything, the option of establishing a national park on Bowen excites me. While I have been carefully weighing the pros and cons, and while I could happily live with either option, I am increasingly finding many of the articulated reasons for voting no to such a future to be riddled with pessimism, fear and clingy attachment. For me, a park offers Bowen a chance to be creative, interesting, beautiful and innovative in the way we move forward in the future. And so, here is the song:
Come gather round you islanders, a story I will tell
About a gorgeous maiden within whose midst we dwell
Whose beauty and whose presence was coveted as well
By her negative and ever doting father.
“I raised you from a baby,” he was wont to say.
“I saved you when an evil man came to steal you away,
I preserved the beauty that is yours for you to wear today
And I’d do the same again in an instant.”
Now the maiden had her suitors, who came from far and near
And every one her father met left her home with fear.
They sought her hand in marriage but left her place in tears
And her father only ever issued no.
One day as she sat watching the latest suitor leave.
Her heart began to fail and her breath began to heave
She felt herself imprisoned and she began to grieve
For the fading of the promise of her beauty.
She went to search the country for a partner for her life
A stable man who loved her, and who would take her for his wife
Who would stay beside her through the victories and strife.
And she found him and she brought him back to father.
With deep suspicion in his heart he looked him up and down
He accused him of an evil plot to usurp his crown
He met the maiden’s one true love with a stony frown
And he issued forth a stern and solid no.
Now the maiden didn’t stand for this and she looked him in the eye.
Said she “it’s time you stood aside and hold your strident cries
This suitor will be with me long after you have died.
And I know I’ll finally come to life beside him.”
Her father had no answer for this surprising turn
He showed so little interest in what she’d come to learn
His anger boiled over and he became more stern
And demand that she prove to him she loved him.
She sat down by her father and took him by the hand
She broke it to him gently so he would understand
His overbearing attitude and selfish reprimands
No longer had a claim upon her choices
For if the maiden were to stay within her father’s range
Her future would be grim indeed for as the world changed
She would stay forever in her father’s gilded cage
And her life would wither down to nothing.
Islanders you’ve strongly heard the tales others tell
You’ve seen the paranoia of the coming living hell
But surely you must know that a maiden can live well
If her partner helps her build a life of beauty.
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Last week I was in a number of conversations about the role of governments and their relationships to citizens. I heard a common metaphor in these conversations, one which sounded familiar to me from my days working in the federal public service: people were speaking of citizens as customers.
In their desire to provide good services and meet community needs, governments often consider citizens as customers. Big consulting firms, perhaps re-purposing their commercial processes, sell this idea. Conservative commentators and those who import business ideas into the realm of public administration are enamoured by the simplicity of the metaphor. The problem is not only that it’s not true, but it’s also the wrong metaphor.
For starters, citizens are citizens and not customers. The art of governance is not the same as leadership in a business setting. Communities are not strategic entities with goals and mission statements – what is the the strategic objective of your neighbourhood? So much community planning confuses processes and measures aimed at organizational efficiency and applies them to community building. The purposes are different. The purpose of community is belonging, happiness, a sense of security, wellbeing, resiliance. Communities are not efficient, they are not a good use of resources, they do not exhibit directionality. People who live in communities rarely think of themselves living in a strategic entity, but they often think of applying strategic planning to other people’s communities.
Citizens are not customers. They are citizens. And as such they are entirely responsible for the community they create or choose not to create.
But if you do insist on using a metaphor from the commercial world, then try changing the conversation from citizens as customers to citizens as owners. What if citizens were considered the owners of their community and their governments? What if it was their role to create plans and ideas about their future and to invite development, amenities and services to meet those needs? If you are an elected official or a community planner or a developer, how would things change if you approached citizens as the ownership group of the enterprise you are involved in? Citizens are owners in the fiscal sense, the property sense and also owners of their future. This is not about just owning land and paying taxes, this is about the commitment of time and energy you invest in a great community. That makes you an owner and gives you a responsibility for the future. It is up to governments NOT to rob communities of this responsibility, but help enable them to exercise it.
Peter Block’s six conversations and his reframing of community are immensely important in this respect. As are many of the tools you can find at the Orton Foundation’s website which looks at the role of heart and soul in community planning and sees citizens as owners. These are not “soft” tools or touchy-feely processes: rather they are powerful ways to engage with communities and citizens to create the kinds of resilience that sustains communities through good times and bad, and that makes development possible and relevant.
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Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
~ Lisel Mueller
found at the excellent panhala
My eyes are getting worse. Not just the worse that comes with age but the worse that comes with a degenerative eye disease called keratoconus. I have had keratoconus since I was a teenager, and I’ve become well used to seeing the halos and double images, blurring and other illusions. My eyesight varies with weather and rest and a multitude of other factors but unless I’m wearing my hard, gas permeable contact lenses, my eyesight is pretty bad. Not debilitating, but far from good.. At a distance, even with glasses, I can’t make out faces, and that combined with my aging memory serves to create weird situations, when I call one person by another name and so on. I’m not that old, only 42, but old enough to notice how things have changed.
As my memory gets worse, I can reframe it as living more in the present, but until I found this poem, I had no way of reframing the decline of my eyesight, which is not serious yet by the way, but bad enough that I get sad about it from time to time. I recently had a consultation to see if there was any chance at a new procedure called cross-linking, which is an alternative to an eventual corneal transplant, but the verdict was that I don’t have enough cornea left to make such a procedure possible. Science and technology are constantly advancing though, so perhaps in the future things will change. But for now, I take a lot from this poem, from Monet’s protestations in this poem and especially “I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see.”
Stunning.
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- Wrapped in birdsong this morning. Sent in my way with the thin light of fog filtered sun. #
- Fiddleheads and blackberry leaves for tea http://post.ly/1vlxb #
- One way to get off the ferry http://post.ly/1vlxg #
- “@thichnhathanh: Understanding Our Mind: No Mud, No Lotus http://t.co/oRRekXv” westcoast spring version: no swamp, no skunk cabbage. #
- When I need to come back to the centre of practice, I love to revisit this video of some of my best friends from 2008: http://t.co/ErLftO8 #
- Sunshine. Warmth. Football!
WHITE!
CAPS!
- Teutur just tweeted ad so am I.
Go #WhitecapsFC #
- Ooo eee Hassli! Ooo eee Hassli! (to the tune of the ManU Cantona chant). We r Singing it in sec 228. Join us! #WhitecapsFC @southsiders #
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- Cold air, sea fog and rain. And the faintest scent of flowers on the wind. #
- http://yfrog.com/h2f33doj sunrise over the Inner Harbour in Victoria. Off to Royal Roads Uni to work with health system leaders today #
- http://t.co/oLVuklz #
- “@ChairFNHC: Our time is short; make it count… You have a purpose in life, so achieve it.”. Doing my best, Doug! #
- When the wind dies down the sea becomes glassy and everything is reflected in it. Same with the thinking mind. #
- My ears are woken up. I am pulled from complacency. A loon calls out on Mannion Bay this morning. #
- Rest finally in peace John Bottomley. A great and tormented musical mind is gone. #
- A peal of thunder last night and a bright clear morning dawned today. #
- Little bit of April snow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Eo_kj-auQ #
- The breath of my beloved swirling up into the chill morning air. #
- The cedar house rules: Haida Gwaii’s land-rights revolution. This is what is possible: http://t.co/rlNw8O3 via @globeandmail #
- Teitur just tweeted and so am I
Let's
Go
Whitecaps!
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