
Anyone who knows the Salish Sea in the summertime will recognize this image of still, flat water at slack tide reflecting every imaginable colour at sunset.
This week we were travelling by sailboat through the Hul’q’umi’num speaking territories of the Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea. The posts this week reflect both my usual monkey-mind reading habit and some travel notes from the trip.
- July 27, 2025: systems and cycles: economics and other system
- July 28, 2025: quiet, prayers, and landscapes of war and peace: some theology, a book to read and blessed quiet
- July 29, 2025: place noting and place making: noticing place, making notes and making trade.
- July 30, 2025: connected through tsunamis, contentment, austerity and football: we weather a tsunami advisory, and I think about the good life, suffering and how football advocates.
- July 31,2025: a miscellany of things about time and pay warm water begs us to stay at anchor, and so I read about time and getting paid.
- August 1, 2025: leaving Hul’q’umi’num territories and good questions to ask: a really cute seal to wake up to, humpbacks in the Strait and some questions worth asking.
We’re on the ferry home from Departure Bay to Horseshoe Bay and then from Horseshoe Bay back to our own home island, where a weekend of fun is about to unfold featuring the annual Firefighters’ Dock Dance, and a remounting of the classic Bowen Island play The View, in which every possible island archetype is skewered by the ingenious satire of David Cameron and Jackie Minns. It’s a long weekend in British Columbia and the beginning of Lughnasa, the Celtic season of harvest and generosity.
I hope you enjoy reading these posts.
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A chonkster of a seal resting on logs at Wakes Cove
Happy Lunghnasa! Our last day out on the water. Caitlin’s observation is that being on a boat puts one deeply in touch with what living on the west coast is all about. Indeed until very recently all life on the coast was oriented to the sea. Historical names refer to sites accessible from the sea and — surprisingly to many settlers — islands don’t necessarily have names. Instead place like Valdes Island, where we anchored last night, are covered in names relating to bays and points and fishing spots and clam beds.
The waters around the north end of Valdes Island and the south shores of Gabriola Island are churning narrows full of rapids and upwellings and whirlpools when the tides squeeze through the narrow passages. That makes these waters rich in nutrients and full of seals and pigeon guillemots and kingfishers scooping up fish. The pier’s around here are covered in plume-nosed anemones and giant barnacles raking the currents for plankton. We are anchored in Wakes Cove which is connected to a provincial park. We walked yesterday through that park, on an old logging road that winds through coastal douglas-fir and arbutus and Garry oak forest until it reaches the gates of the Lyackson reserve lands. Along the eastern shore of the island there is a trail with views out across small rocky islets to the Strait of Georgia and an old midden site on the shore. Today we headed out through the narrows called Hwqethulhp in Hul’q’umi’num on our way to Nanaimo harbour. This passage was traditionally a place for the harvest of herring roe in the spring and oceanspray wood which is used for bows and other tools, including herring rakes. The passage marks the boundary between the Hul’q’umi’num speaking tribes and Snuneymuxw. Outside of Gabriola Island we came across four humpbacks feeding in the Strait.
Here are a couple of blog posts with useful questions and principles. Dan Oestreich shares some guidelines for giving and receiving feedback in the context of a more durable relationship. Lynn Rasmussen offers some questions to ask to see a system you are a part of a little more clearly.
I’ll never get tired of promoting RSS as a way to read blogs. Molly White provides a good introduction to RSS here. My own blog publishes an RSS feed and you can subscribe to the blog by email as well (it’s not a newsletter) and receive featured posts that I send to subscribers.
Richard Wagamese, from What Comes From Spirit:
True silence is more than just not talking. It’s responding to that deep inner yearning I carry to feel myself alive, to exist beyond my thinking, to live beyond worry and frustration. True silence is calm being. True silence is appreciating the moment for the moment. Every breath a connection to my life force, my essence. It’s the grandest music I have ever heard.
Richard Wagamese is the John O Donohue of Canada. In many ways.
“You can’t spreadsheet your way out of injustice” writes Coty Poynter in the Non-Profit Quarterly. This is a critical set of observations about how the neo-liberalisation of the non-profit world has undermined its ability to create lasting and participatory initiatives all in the name of accountability. I am struck by the way that the inappropriate measurement of “impact” and other things is itself never factored in to why initiatives fail. Jara Dean Coffey’s Equitable Evaluation Framework helps to address this.