The first time I ever experienced Open Space Technology was at the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners in Whistler, BC, Canada in 1995. It changed my life, to be hosted by a small team of beautiful facilitators who took a standard conference and opened space for the 400 of us to spend a day in deep practice, conversation, and community together.
The team was Anne Stadler, Angeles Arrien and Chris Carter. What an introduction to Open Space. I can still remember Anne lighting a candle and placing it at the centre of a huge concentric swirl of chairs. I figure I owe my path in life to the graciousness of Anne’s opening and invitation to Open Space. Over the past 28 years – for half of my life so far – that one experience has set me on my course, and I am forever grateful that I made the decision to go to that conference.
Anne died yesterday at age 92.
We have lost an Elder, a steward, a mentor, and a friend. Someone who always had our backs, someone who never wavered in her support of those who were dedicated to making the world a more humane, creative, and life-affirming world. She called this the “radiant network.” I feel so blessed to have walked a little on this journey alongside Anne’s wisdom, grace, and fierce support.
Matteo Polisi dives into the arms of The Swanguardians after scoring a goal for TSS Rovers in the Voyageurs Cup, April 19, 2023 . I am somewhere at the bottom of that pile. Photo by Maddy Mah
Our friends Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry interviewed Caitlin and me for their podcast From the Outside on the subject of community. It’s a really rich conversation.
In the podcast, we cover a lot of ground including really understanding the act and practice of crossing boundaries and thresholds to enter a community. There is a cost to crossing a threshold, a requirement to put something down before we take up the shared identity of community. That act is almost always accompanied by rituals and ceremonies that help to mark the liminal space through which we move when we change from what we are on the outside to what we become when we step inside.
These boundaries are important because there is no community without boundary crossing. Peter Block writes really well about this in “Community: The Structure of Belonging” and I refer to his work in the podcast. He talks about practices for entering and leaving containers, including creating barriers to participation that balance inclusion with commitment and also the practices of leaving a container. He suggests that when people leave a meeting, they let everyone know why they are leaving. Such an act is a kindness as it shows a concern for clarity in the space.
A couple of weeks ago I was reminded how important that practice is. I was having a lovely long coffee with my friend Bob Turner who is a former mayor of Bowen Island and has lived on our island since 1989. We were both sharing our experience as long-time islanders that we don’t recognize so many people anymore and nor are we recognized by as many people as used to. In the times we have lived on the island, the community’s population has turned over many times. In fact, we have probably experienced 50% turnover in the last five years alone. We are both open to change. Having devoted ourselves to living long-term in this community, we have seen it go through phases, epochs, and generational shifts. And while that’s fine there is a lingering sense of something – sadness? nostalgia? grief? – that is hard to put a finger on. And I think we named it
I was telling Bob that I was recently working with the Squamish Nation and their Language and Culture Department and I was very struck by how the Squamish people who work in that department are motivated in their work by the deep family histories they come from, rooted in the villages of the Squamish Nation. There is growth and change in those communities, but there are powerful rituals for acknowledging the losses of people.
Bowen Island is a settler community meaning that, other than a very small handful of descendents from original settler families, most people have only lived here for a maximum of two or three generations. People come and go, with very little tying them to the place. Squamish Nation people can’t do that. Your village is the source of your history and it spans back hundreds of generations out of remembered time. When someone is born or comes home or dies, there are important ceremonies that recognize that connection to the past. You might be given a name that was held by an ancestor or receive songs and responsibilities that are rooted to place. You are inextricably tied to the community
It’s just not like that on Bowen Island. Notably, while Bob and I were trying to put our finger on the melancholy feeling we were having, we decided that it came down to the fact that so many of the people we knew here and had close relationships with have just slipped away into other lives in other places. We don’t really hear from them anymore. They certainly don;t form the background of relationships and conversations that make up community. And unlike those who have died, there was no ceremony to acknowledge their passing out of our community. You just wake up one morning (or one post-pandemic year) and realize that person you played soccer with, or sang with or used to see on your regular walk is just no longer there. You don’t know why they left or where they went. There is just an absence and then a small space where they used to be that closes ever smaller until a person who was an unforgettable part of your life is suddenly “What’s his name, the guy with the brown dog that drove that old work van.”
There are boundaries we cross to join community and I wish for the boundaries to cross to leave it. When folks are leaving Bowen I love it when they tell me. I get to honour them, thank them, share some stories with them and then send them on their way. It gives all of us closure. It always a little sad when folks who have been a part of my life take off for their new chapters, but the ritual of saying goodbye makes it so much easier. Otherwise, we just imagine the slow trickle of voices flowing away into silence and nostalgia.
After the wedding by Leanne Romak
My friend Leanne Romak – the person who designed this very website back in 2014 – has a show at The Hearth, the Bowen Island Arts Council gallery. Along with artist Sonya Iwasiuk, the two artists have a small but lovely show called “Reflections: Stories of Ukrainian -Canadian ancestors” on until October 23.
Leanne’s pieces in the show are painting based on photographs taken by her uncle the 1940s. She found them poking around in the attic of an abandoned farmhouse in Manitoba in the 2010s. She has created fine paintings from these photos that have a kind of softness that blurs the shapes and places them in a kind of always-time. These uncles standing around at a wedding drinking hommade vodka could be from anytime, and the flask they are drinking out of reminds one of a contemporary water bottle, perhaps used to smuggle the contraband into the wedding reception. This particular image is accompanied by a little story of how the alcohol was made, by distilling it from soaked grain or potatoes. Little stills were set up along the North Duck River near Cowan, Manitoba and from the fire tower there you could see “all the little fires by the river.”
Images of prairie ancestors attract me. My own family on my mother’s side were settlers in Saskatchewan, some farming around Lumsden and others building houses in Regina. Prairie history is full of the memories of settler communities, many of them Eastern European communities whose cultures burned like little fires across a landscape that – especially in the case of Ukrainians – reminded them of the steppes of home from which they were driven by invasion and oppression, or lured by promises of farmland and prosperity. The conditions they found in Canada were cold and isolating and in time very tight knit communities sprang up and the little fires of co-operative spirit created the conditions for these communities to survive many decades.
Leanne’s work in this show captures the little fires of social and family life and Sonya Iwasiuk’s focuses on the images of houses, simple, functional structures on an open landscape. These buildings portray stability and community. There is only one of her paintings in the show of a single house alone. All of the others are little clusters of homes some standing side by side, some inexplicably turned away from each other, some surrounded by little unfinished ghost houses, each facing its own direction, but each inextricably linked to others. Unique and yet inescapably connected, the houses in every painting are etched with barely readable text, like the whispers of stories almost forgotten, as if the plain and standard houses are nevertheless illuminated by memory and meaning.
Both collections in this show invite us to reflect on our own stories of ancestor and community, on what is stable and longer lasting, and what is ephemeral and slips from our grasp, only to be rediscovered and reawakened by chance encounter or stray snippet of story or image.
It’s a lovely show, and it opens with a party on Saturday. Well worth checking out if you are on Bowen in the next couple of weeks.
From a lovely video post from Johnnie Moore: “
Sometimes giving instructions, offering advice and explanations or information may not be the best way to help people to progress and grow.
And that sometimes what’s needed is a spirit of playful experimentation and a sense of companionship.
When I coached kids at football, I was the third coach on our team. I am not a great player, so I couldn’t teach the kids deep strategy and techniques. But I was able to help them understand how they were learning the game. We had rotating subs, so when kids came off the pitch, I asked them what they noticed out there and what they wanted to try when they went back out. Sometimes, we debriefed their failures or looked at how they succeeded or what surprised them. Still, because we never had too much time, and 10-year-olds are not into deeper reflective conversations, we would land on simple rules to ground them in what they were trying.
For example, my son, who was playing keeper, came up with the statement “magic hands” to focus on the ball at every moment. He held his hands out in front of him between his eyes and the ball and had the thought that he could pull the ball onto his hands like a tractor beam. His ability to make saves and focus increased because he was always ready to get a hand on the ball, and he found it a very satisfying strategy. I used it myself playing goal in an adult rec league and it also improved my keeping. Partly, I think these strategies are down to obliquity, breaking up the patterns we are trained to do.
Having coaches yelling advice to kids on high alert who are focused on the game around them is never more helpful than having the kids themselves remind themselves what they want to try out there. There is a movement in youth soccer to stop doing this and have silent touch lines. You work on things in practice, and when it’s time to play, you let the kids go out there and solve the problems and learn the game. The debriefing and reflection strategy is really helpful, as are the simple rules – the heuristics – that help a person stay focused on an experiment.
This is a great way to teach people how to thrive in complexity.
Átl’ka7tsem, the fjord in which I live, in a photo I took in November 2014
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is coming up in Canada.
Every person in Canada lives in a place that, from time immemorial, has been occupied, used, loved, protected and cherished by an Indigenous culture. In Canadian law, settler governments and citizens have a special relationship with these Nations, and it has been thus since the Crown of Britain elbowed itself into the already fully occupied territories of North America. It was encoded into common law in 1763 through the Royal Proclamation and, subsequently, through treaties and later in the Canadian Constitution.
Despite a couple of centuries of focused efforts to eradicate Indigenous cultures across Canada, we still retain the obligations and responsibilities of that special relationship. Settler governments have always been hungry for the lands and resources of this place and have often acted in immoral and illegal ways in the pursuit of those resources. Even the Supreme Court of Canada has, over decades, chastised and reined in the rapacious appetite of colonizing governments to remind Canada that it is bound to the agreements it has made and to enforce Canada’s own laws on its governments.
Despite that set of obligations and responsibilities, all of which invite Canada and Indigenous Nations and people into ongoing and permanent relationships, Canada and the Provinces and the former Colonies of Britain long pursued policies like the banning of the potlatch, the prohibition of legal action regarding land claims, and residential schools and worse, through deliberate acts of genocide, like the preventable 1862 spread of smallpox across the entire coast which decimated the Indigenous Nations of coastal British Columbia.
These events aren’t news. This history is well documented, and that paradox that Canada has on the one hand, relied on this relationship to sustain its jurisdictional claims on the continent and on the other has sought to destroy the partners with whom it has a relationship in different ways.
Resetting the relationship happens on a variety of levels and ways, and one of the best ways for non-Indigenous people to do that is to take the time to deepen and appreciate the place where you live and the culture that has been nurtured in that place for thousands and thousands of years. It is, as my friend Pauline and I discovered, about Knowing Our Place.
The place i live in is called Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. I live on an island whose historical name is Nexwlélexwm, above a bay called Kwilákm, in an inlet called Átl’ka7tsem. The names of these places are difficult for English speakers to say, but easy enough to learn, but they are beautiful sounds, guttural and rhythmic and when you hear them spoken by Skwxwú7mesh speakers they are musical. They contain meaning and relationship to other words, to other times, to stories.
It can be hard to learn about your place because Indigenous knowledge is tricky to share. There is knowledge that is held only by specific families and that is proprietary, there is knowledge that relates to legal claims in which large amounts of money are at stake. There are places that are deeply sacred to the culture and need to be protected for cultural practices to continue on the land. On top of all that, Elders, and staff in these Nations are often overwhelmed with requests for information, and they often don’t even have the capacity to respond to the needs of their own communities. Cultural and language revitalization takes time and attention and effort.
The Indigenous government of this land where I live, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwmixw, along with the knowledge keepers in the Nation are deeply focused on recovering from the systematic efforts of the Canadian government. But they have also shared some remarkable resources publically to increase knowledge and awareness of the history, culture and language of the territory and the people. If you live in this territory, perhaps this week is a good time to soak in these resources and learn more about where you live.
An atlas created by Chief Ian Campbell that contains links to many stories about the territory.
A project developed by Kwi Awt Stélmexw (now the Sníchim Foundation) to locate Squamish place names along with some pronunciation guides and a bit of history.
A set of videos of Squamish language terms and expressions from the Nation’s Language and Cultural Affairs Department.
A foundation set up to support the revitalization of the Squamish language. I am a regular donor to this foundation, and this is a good way to support effective efforts to revitalize the language. The Foundation has had a powerful effect in bringing along dozens more speakers at higher levels of fluency through it’s immersion programs and resources. Every time we are asked to do a territorial acknowledgement in this territory we donate a portion of our fees to this work. This is a good and tangible way to donate if you are participating in this year’s “One Day’s Pay” initiative, which advocates providing material benefit to Nations to put meaningful action to intentions for reconciliation.
I hope as September 30 approaches that you take the time to learn about and support the efforts to repair relationships and grow strong partnerships with the Nations in whose lands you reside.