A Pineapple Express, music, and keeping meaningful things going

Silvery light this morning at play on the east wall of Átl’ka7tsem this morning

A Pineapple Express swooped in yesterday and doused our area with more than 66mm of rain, setting a new record for the rainiest August 16th in history. That’s basically a month’s worth of August rain in 24 hours. Coming home down tha Sunshine Coast and across Howe Sound the air was foggy and grey with high winds on the exposed parts of the inlet. Our ferry back to Bowen was stopped for two humpbacks who swam by. They out in an appearance along the shore at a small music festival we have going to is weekend – Music By The Sea.

My friends Ted and Dyan Spear have been hosting this gathering for a few years now. Very small and mostly local and intimate held on their property beneath tents and tarps this year!

I was able to unpack and head over there for the last set of the concert (a lovely set from Kip Johnson, including some very nice originals and The Witch of the Westmereland by Archie Fisher, a favourite of mine). The concert was followed by a contra dance called by my friend Becky Liddle and then we got stuck in for a couple of hours of jigs and reels. It’s been a long time since I played Irish music in a good free flowing session and playing with Neil and Keona Hammond is always good for the soul.

Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi’s short story “The Archive” published at The Hinternet is a moving piece about the way subtleties of meaning slowly drift away:

I slipped solastalgia into an acid-free envelope and filed it under “Algorithmic Casualties”, between beefbrain and paracosm. I logged its last known public appearance: a blog post from seven years ago, archived only in fragments, the photographs long replaced by blank gray squares. The author, anonymous, had written about watching their childhood valley transform into a mining pit. Without the word, their grief became harder to name. And without a name, grief becomes harder to notice at all.

Tom Atlee reports on a citizen-led assembly in Norway which discussed the future of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.