I had a lovely call with Cynthia Kurtz on Friday, discussing all manner of things including an upcoming retreat with a client where we will explore complexity and use Participatory Narrative Inquiry and a NarraFirma capture to explore an important issue for the organization. Like me, and a few others, she has gone back to her blog and has relaunched it, so if you had her in your feedreader, you'll need to update her RSS feed.
Two years ago a young male cougar swam to our island. Its not clear where it can from, but most likely it crossed the Collingwood Channel from Keats Island, as distance of nearly 2 kilometres at its shortest point. The cougar took up residence on Mount Collins and the west side of Mount Gardner, and has made Bowen Island its home. Until recently it has been surviving on deer, of which there are plenty on Bowen. It has kept to itself and very few people have seen it, although hit has been captured a lot on camera. Those that encountered it have often been deeply moved by the animal.
In the last month or so it has turned its attention to livestock and has killed three sheep. Its shift to domesticated animals means that it is now targeted for removal by conservation officers. It won't be relocated. It will trapped and killed. Eating sheep has sealed its fate and soon we will be cougar-less again on Bowen.
There is also at least one black bear on Bowen at the moment. Possibly two. They will not be long for this world either, as this is not a very bear-safe community, meaning that we don't generally have good practices around securing garbage and other common practices to make it safe for bears to cohabitate with humans without become fatally attracted to our stuff.
We are a wild-feeling place, but not a wilderness. It's not possible for wild predators to live safely here. Nevertheless, I feel blessed in a strange way that the cougar and these bears have chosen to be with us, even though it was always a death sentence for them. They put the question about who we are, what we have done to this place, and what we can really say about how we live in respect of the island, the sea, and the flora and fauna which we live amongst.
I am sitting on the pier, fuelled by an espresso, just having completed volume 2 of Solvej Balle’s story On the Calculation of Volume. Volume 3 is sitting next to me ready to be cracked open as I wait for a friend to arrive from the mainland.
Balle’s work has been lauded for its beautiful writing (beautiful in translation too, thank you Barbara Haveland) that moves at a measured speed and is very clear and incisive. This is a story about noticing, set as it is on an eternally repeating 18th of November, charting the narrator’s exploration of her world. It sits very comfortably beside Samantha Harvey’s Orbital; a short novella that is saturated with gorgeous passages of writing, a novel way of seeing time and space, and an almost imperceptible pace.
As the title suggests, this is a book that investigates depth. Towards the end of the second volume comes the clue that unlocks the plot device: “Time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a pool, a container.” Volume 2 ends with a beautiful three page meditation on the world as containers, which I can only invite you read for yourself.
Locked in this container of time, the narrator Tara Selter has to discover depth in order to give her life some meaning. The story meanders between longer explorations, that include trying to solve her problem, seeking an experience of seasons, exploring the history of the land in which she finds herself. As she goes she records notes about what is important to her. It’s not clear that there is any reason for that other than that she is consigned to this single container of time as a human, she seeks deeper and deeper meaning in it.
One passage that stood with me is a conversation she has with a meteorologist she meets, who explains to her what season are:
“…the meteorologist then began to reflect on our strange relationship with the seasons. She talked about astronomical seasons, and meteorological seasons. About the calendar years division into spring and summer months, about people’s surprise when meteorological phenomenon did not occur with the calendar, even though everyone knew that any attempt to synchronize the weather with the predictability of planets and calendars was pointless.
She did not believe, however, that seasons could be regarded as meteorological phenomenon. Temperature and precipitation are meteorological phenomenon, she said. Cold and heat, cloud burst and drought, but seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomenon. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps. People ask if it won’t soon be summer, even though we are well into July, simply because the summer has been on the cool side. As a meteorologist one is almost expected to deliver particular weather conditions at particular times of year, she said. A proper summer. A proper winter. As if you hadn’t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather. We going to have a winter this year? As if the seasons were a concept of sorts that we dragged around with us. From childhood perhaps, she said, with winter snow and summer sun. Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps the human seasons really only existed in films or in our photo albums. Especially if you have children. She did it herself: took pictures of typical seasons. She had noticed that she took more pictures from the seasons that lived up to our expectations of them: pictures of snow in winter and bright sunshine in summer, a hot day on the beach, red and yellow leaves and a child in rain boots in autumn – and always snaps with sandals in the summer, even in summers when most days were rain boot days. As if we had templates for the seasons, and when everything fits, we take a picture. As if it is an event in itself that the weather has gotten right. If it is winter in a film, there is always a little snow, she said. Or frost. Even if the film is set in southern Europe, there will always be a sprinkling of white, to let us know that it is winter.”
Containers and constraints generate the spaces inside which we make meaning. What we choose to see, what we fit with our predetermined ideas, or what emerges as we explore things that aren’t implied by the constraints themselves. Containers are emergent. Meaning arises within them and about them.
Balle’s work is a gorgeous meditation on this, with a gently travelling plot line that takes sudden turns into new landscapes contained ointment the experience of a single day.
Volume 3 sits beside me. Volume 4 has just been released in English. There are seven volumes in total. All calculated.
Flags flying on the waterfront at Shearwater BC. There are two standard Canada flags and two of Curtis Wilson’s 2005 Indigenous Canada flag
I spent yesterday, Canada Day, with my friend Pauline Le Bel inside the common room at our municipal hall. The room was filled with the “Canada Day Re-Imagined” part of the program. Michael Yahgulaanas‘ recent works were on display, there was a full collection of posters of the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we were there to solicit donations for the Welcome Figure Project that we are championing.
I appreciate how Canada Day is celebrated on our island. It is a celebration and invites a thoughtful reflection on what it means to live in this country. National holidays don’t need to be excuses for blind nationalism, but they don’t need to be blindly critical of the nation either. They need to be complicated and nuanced reflections on where we live, what we love about it and a celebration of the ways we can make it better, by building community, advancing justice, and listening to the varieties of experience that surround us.
In last week’s Undercurrent (vol. 52, no. 26), our excellent local newspaper, one of our renowned local poets, Jude Neale, offered a Canada Day poem that, in a quiet way, names some of this. I’m sharing it here with appreciation:
Canada Day on Bowen Island
By Jude Neal
On Nexwlélexwm, morning arrives by ferry.
The ramp lowers with a groan of metal,
and Bowen Island opens itself to the day,
green and salt-bright, waiting.
Children spill onto the dock
with paper flags in their hands,
red and white flickering like small flames
against the blue harbour air.
Their laughter rises first,
light as gulls,
carried over the water
and caught in the cedar branches.
Strawberries come next,
stacked in cardboard trays,
ripe and shining,
little summer lanterns
held carefully between two hands.
Along the shoreline, the day gathers colour.
Coffee steam curls above paper cups.
Dogs nose the grass and shake seawater from their coats.
Voices drift between picnic blankets,
folding chairs, coolers, bicycles,
the soft shade of trees.
Families settle on the grass.
Friends wave from across the field.
Someone makes room at a table.
Someone pours lemonade.
Someone laughs and calls a neighbour over.
And Canada appears, quietly.
Not only in the anthem,
not only in speeches or flags,
but in the ordinary grace
of people making space for one another.
In a shared plate of berries.
In a hand offered onthe dock.
In stories carried here
from prairie towns, northern rivers,
Atlantic kitchens, Pacific rain,
and all the long roads between.
It is there in many voices,
many histories,
many ways of belonging.
It is there in courage.
In care.
In the work of welcome.
In the hope that a country.
can keep learning how to hold its people well.
Above this small island,
the summer sky opens wide.
Far beyond it, the north remembers its green fire,
aurora ribbons loosening across the dark.
The prairies breathe gold.
The mountains keep their snow.
The Atlantic throws light against stone.
And here, on Bowen,
the sea folds all of it into one shining afternoon.
A child pauses at the harbour's edge.
Her flag flutters softly in the breeze,
a red maple leaf against summer green.
For one still moment,
the island seems to hold its breath.
The ferry waits.
The water glimmers.
The cedars stand tall.
And through this small bright scene,
the whole country seems to shine.
Thanks Jude.
When the US government took down its climate science site a group of scientists put all the material back online at Climate.us
Dave Snowden has been at his favourite knowledge management conference and offers blog posts with many reflections that caught my eye on intergenerational management cultures (older workers attend to contexts; younger workers to rules), the inability to preserve implicit knowledge through compression, the fundamental question of what is lost between wisdom, knowledge and information, and the journey of the experiences practitioner who has won wisdom through wading through the maze of transactional work.
Alice Jing Shan was there too!
It is always helpful to see how the long arc of history often bends towards justice. The fight to protect west coast ecosystems and Indigenous rights and title has spanned my entire life and I will tell anyone who will listen that Clayoquot Sound and Haida Gwaii (and the north coast of BC) are some of the best examples of what can happen when First Nations assert their rights authority and recover the ability to properly govern their territories.