Don’t build beautiful things that need to capture life before they are functional. Start with life.
Celebrating a victory with our women’s team in our last home game of the season.
Our little supporter owned football club, TSS Rovers played our last home games of the season last night against our local rivals from Burnaby FC. The women clawed out a 2-1 win while the men broke their rivals apart with a 7-1 win on the back of a four goal performance from striker Koji Poon. It was a much needed win for the men. Going into the last two games of the season for the men we sit on 29 points, two points above Langley United, who have a game in hand. We need them to slip up and we need to win out our season on the road to have a shot at retaining our title. But last night we made it a three-horse race for first place, as Burnaby can no longer catch us.
One of the sayings at our club is “you’re always welcome back but we never want to see you again.” This reflects our commitment to giving players a platform to move on to the professional game. But our players and supporters often retain a strong attachment to one another as we are the only club in our second division League 1 BC with an active and rabid supporters group. TSS Rovers is a community-owned club with 477 community owners many of whom invested in what we are doing because of what it means for the women’s game. This league structure sits below our new professional women’s league in Canada, the Northern Super League and several of our former players including League 1 BC players Stella Downing, Tilly James and Kirsten Tynan now play in that league.
Two of our current roster of women’s players, Erin van Dolder and Delana Friesen are headed back to Europe for next season. They played together last year at Treaty United in Ireland and they are on their way to a new adventure in professional football. Delana came to us in 2023, and rediscovered a love of the game in a stellar season in which she led the team in goals and was named our Swanguardians Player of the Year. In 2024 she went overseas to play in Limerick and united with Erin, both Calgarians. In the meantime the Northern Super League was formed and both came home hoping to land jobs on one of the six new professional women’s teams. It was not to be, so they joined our club and kept themselves playing and in the shop window. And after touching back home they are off again.
Coming home. We are a club where young players can take the step up to the next level, or where they can come home and reground to get out there again. Because football is poetics, it puts me in mind of this recent Patti Digh post:
And yes, sometimes home is what we make in the aftermath. After the fire, after the grief, after the leaving. Maybe we build it in the quiet companionship of a friend. In the rhythm of morning routines. In the poems we write when we don’t know what else to do with our hearts.
What I know now is that home doesn’t have to be perfect to be real. It doesn’t have to be whole to matter. It just has to hold enough of you that you can recognize yourself in it. And if it doesn’t? Then we write our way back. We build with what we have—memory, language, love—and make something sturdy enough to come back to.
I finished Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light last night. The book is an epistolary (I love epistolaries), composed of letters from Lucas Goodgame, a former school counsellor and teacher who is present for a mass shooting at his hometown’s movie theatre. I had no idea of the subject matter before I started reading it; I picked the book out from our community book share shelf, located in a shelter near the ferry dock. Lucas is writing to his Jungian therapist about his post-event trauma, and as the story progresses, reality seems to shift ever so subtly like watching the world through a window that increasingly warps. It’s quite a book, and has a significant twist in the tail too so worth following the story through the slow and bewildering turns it takes. I appreciate a story written from inside a PTSD mind, a character who is reaching out to find purpose and life again, experiencing moments of love and joy and absurdity while missing the chances he has to turn.
I was struck by the fact that the characters in the book have names that evoke characters from the Hebrew Scriptures. Eli, Isaiah, Jacob, and Lucas himself who immediately evoked for me the story of Lucifer, the fallen angel. This is almost certainly deliberate (the book explores Jungian archetypes) and reading these characters as having dual functions in the narrative really deepened the work for me. That Lucs/Lucifer has a central role in a book called “We Are The Light” is no surprise, but if you read it, do familiarize yourself with these Biblical characters first, and especially with Lucifer, who is not probably who you think he is.
It’s the time of year for short stories now and I’ll be diving into a collection I also found in our community free book shelf, Cork Stories. These are all stories by different authors set in the county and the city of Cork, Ireland. In the introduction to the collection the editors quote one of the greatest Canadian short story writers, Alistair MacLeod: “The best fiction is specific in its setting but universal in its theme.” Macleod’s own seminal collection of stories called Island is one of the best books I have ever read, a collection of 16 stories mostly set on Cape Breton Island in the 1970s and they are dark and moody and beautifully crafted. Short stories of the very best kind live in the world between a novel, poetry and a good joke. They establish a setting and characters quickly, use concentrated language and crafted cadence to move the story along and usually end with a twist, or a sting or a punch line that is unexpected, or perhaps inevitably foreshadowed. I plan on reading these Cork stories and then diving back into the Journey Prize collections for the summer to find more great gems of Canadian story writing, a form that, thanks to people like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, became associated with Canadian writing in the 1970s and 1980s when I was first discovering literary fiction.\
What’s on your bedside table this summer?
I like Bowinn Ma a lot. She is the British Columbia Member of the Legislative Assembly representing North Vancouver-Lonsdale. She’s a good person, attuned to local urban needs, and has all the right approaches to policy making. in her second term, she is now the Minister of Infrastructure, a perfect job for an engineer with an abiding interest in how people move around well. She has recently been the champion of some legislation that I vehemently disagree with, but that’s politics. On June 27, her constituency office was bombed at 4:15 in the morning. It was a small device that went off. It happened a week after Minnesota state speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated, and another left wing Minnesota state senator was also shot. I have not heard any ongoing conversation in my circles about the fact that one of our MLAs had her office bombed during a time of political violence in North America. This strikes me as NOT OKAY.
Barak Obama spent an hour talking to Heather Cox Richardson, during which he dropped this line that “the system has been captured by this with a weak attachment to democracy.” Here’s the clip. Here’s the full interview. I appreciation Richardson’s commitment to the grass roots, but it’s not just the case that bottom up is the only way we make change. Bottom up vs top down is not a moral position. Bombing an MLA’s office and assassinating democratically elected representatives is also “bottom-up” change making. Democracy moves very slowly, which is its feature. But the public square has developed incredible potential to reinvigorate that, except that the tools of democratic engagement and grass roots conversation have alos been captured by “those with a weak attachment to democracy.” I don’t have answers, and Obama’s ideas sound old now, but in essence, I don’t know what other choice we have. We are quickly losing the ability to deliberate together, and that is the essence of democracy.
The guy who inspires me the most in this space of democratic renewal these days is Peter Levine, whose work I often share. Here he is in conversation with Nathaniel G. Perlman on The Great Battlefield podcast. He recently shared work on trust in institutions from CIRCLE which studies youth engagement in civic life. There are some good lessons in here for people working to keep robust democratic engagement alive, and especially making the generational hand off. I’m of the mind that one way to generate trust from citizens in democratic institutions is to bootstrap it by institutional leaders working from a basic stance of trust in citizens. The CIRCLE study is important work. If you work in a democratic institution, including education, media, government, and other organizations essential to a functioning pluralistic society, it’s a must read.
Community Foundations are a powerful group of civic institutions in this country. I have worked with many, including my own local one here on Bowen Island, and the Vancouver Foundation, the largest in Canada. Their work is important, influential and essential, especially as we enter a new period of austerity. A story this past week surfaced on how community foundations in Canada are working to support local journalism so that news on local issues can be properly covered. As a person who lives in a community with a great local newspaper, this is fantastic to see.
Summer is here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. After some unsettled weather the annual summer high is doing its best to get established over the north east Pacific Ocean. That weather feature brings us long stretches of sunny, hot, and dry weather, usually starting in mid-July and going until mid-September with very little rain. It’s our drought season here on the edges of the temperate rainforest of the Pacific coast. We launched the kayak today, realizing that its a heavy beast and we’re probably going to need a little set of wheels to get it to and from the kayak rack by the beach where we store it.
Elon Musk wants to start a new political party. US politics is no longer amusing. I guarantee he will do none of the work required to create a democratic alternative. In starting his new party the richest man in the world said “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.” The irony is at ridiculous levels, given Musk’s recent scraping of all kinds of the government data on its citizens and his own heavy reliance on government funding to keep his businesses solvent. Elon Musk is not likely to build a democratic alternative to the two parties of oligarchy in the US. When the biggest grifter of them all, who now knows your social security number, tells you you are getting your freedom back if only you will join his own charismatic movement, run in the opposite direction.
I got a new iPhone last week and set it up yesterday. It took all of 20 minutes of my phones sitting next to each other to transfer everything from my old phone to my new one with about five minutes of me tapping buttons and answering questions along the way. Once done, the new one looked exactly like the old. A very very nice user experience. No heavy lifting involved.