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June 30, 2025: life emerging from structure

June 30, 2025 By Notes, Uncategorized No Comments

We’re not too nuanced at appreciating sentience. Matt Webb traces our history of appreciating other-than-human sentience, with respect to aliens, AI and animism, and concludes with this thought: “Even if we don’t agree on chicken sentience, what about people who work in sweatshops, and they are definitely sentient, and they don’t get access to the same “robot rights” currently being debated for future sentient AIs.” Matt’s blog is a must read.

Perhaps I’m a process animist, but I do strongly feel the presence of a “life unto itself” when a good dialogic container emerges and relationally crackles within. Adrian Sager, who writes more than anyone on bring life to traditional conferences, has a post today which begins with a quote that is attributed to Eduardo Galeano, but cannot be confirmed to be his: ““We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.” I think it is a journey in the art and practice of facilitation that facilitators do fall deeply in love with their structures and processes at first. The tool is the thing, or as Franz Kafka once wrote (No. 16 in The Zurau Aphorisms) “A cage went in search of a bird.” There is a fetishization of structure, as Sager points out, and a belief that just the right structure will create the conditions for life. I’ll write more about this in an expanded post, but suffice to say, that ain’t quite it.

When we take this relationship between life and structures (yang and yin) into the spiritual world, we can see that the struggle for spiritual liberation is to tussle between the structure that has emerged to hold spirit, and the spirit’s desire to be free, but also held. A dynamic interdependence exists. This is a central tenet of Taoism of course, and also shows up in the liberation theology of Judaism and Christianity. It’s chaordic turtles all the way down.

This is one in s series of near daily notes and links I post on this blog. if you would like all of these delivered to your inbox, subscribe below and click the tag “notes.”

Resources for Participatory Narrative Inquiry

June 28, 2025 By Complexity, Featured, Stories, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Cynthia Kurtz has been working hard at distilling and releasing her body of work in Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) for the past few years. Her collection of four books on working with stories is the complete offering for practitioners, a highly detailed set of discussions, exercises and inspiration for putting this approach to work.

She describes the books this way:

Working with Stories is a textbook on Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). It explains the fundamentals of story work and explains how to plan and carry out projects that help groups, communities, and organizations work with their stories to discover useful insights, find new solutions to problems and conflicts, and make decisions and plans. 

Working with Stories Simplified is a quick guide to Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). It briefly explains the fundamentals of story work and explains how to plan and carry out projects that help groups, communities, and organizations work with their stories to discover useful insights, find new solutions to problems and conflicts, and make decisions and plans. 

The Working with Stories Sourcebook contains 50 question sets for use in Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects plus 50 descriptions of real-life PNI projects.

The Working with Stories Miscellany is a collection of 40 essays and other writings about stories, story work, and Participatory Narrative Inquiry.

Cynthia’s approach has been central to my work alongside the participatory practice frameworks I use from the Art of Hosting, the complexity theory and practice of Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang and dialogic practice as well. I deeply appreciate Cynthia’s gifts of this wisdom and knowledge into the world and especially appreciate NarraFirma, which is the software we use for larger scale narrative work. It is open source and easy to install, but invites a lifetime of practice to use well. I appreciate that platform because it is geared towards enabling stories to be used by groups for collective sensemaking, decision making and acting. We’ve done dozens of projects with this software and approach focusing on organizational culture, public health, branding, supporting learning communities, leadership development and community development.

Cynthia has been a generous mentor to my own work, challenging me and guiding me and encouraging me, and she has been invaluable to the work of many of my clients. I encourage you to support her through purchasing these books, whether by donation or when they are released on commercial platforms.

June 28, 2025: Truth, change and singin’ in the rain

June 28, 2025 By Notes No Comments

An interesting review about a novel about fact-checking, (Austen Kelly’s The Fact Checker), a story which surely can only end in nihilism. It looks to be a book about books and the truth about truth, and I like those kinds of stories. These are the kinds of things that literary fiction is for.

Singin’ in the Rain is also about truth. Friday night our local Bowen Island film society showed a program of films featuring Singin’ in the Rain on the big screen. I have never seen the whole film, and for sure the context of the times gave it a profound spin for me. Fundamentally the film is about major changes in the technology world from the silent movie era to the talkie era. It’s a parable of the two loops. And it was made in an era when television was coming into being. The technology revealed the truth of people’s deficiencies – Lina can’t sing or speak, but her looks alone carried her through the silent film era. When she railed against the changes and tried to coerce the studio into bending to her will, they exposed her, embarrassed her and cast her aside. She did everything expected of her. The world moved on, and kicked her to the curb.

Lina is cast as a villain, but in these days when artists are exploited and deposited in the scrap heap of history, her character arc is tragic. I found myself rooting for her at the end, despite her narcissism and the fact that she “complained to the manager” and got Kathy fired from her only acting job. The world is full of jerks, but when the wheels of moneyed power turn, there is no cruelty worse than simply being treated as disposable.

Twenty-four years an islander

June 27, 2025 By Being, Bowen, Featured, First Nations One Comment

I met my friend Aryana on the trail this morning heading to the pier for some coffee and a walk. She said “you’ve been on Bowen for a while now, right?” I looked at my watch and saw the date. Twenty-four years ago today we were busy packing up our three bedroom co-op townhouse in the West End of Vancouver, and bundling our 4 year old daughter and nine month old son into our 1996 Honda Civic. We were getting ready to follow the moving truck to Horseshoe Bay and then over to Bowen Island.

If you have followed along at this blog and others, you will know that I began writing about my experiences of the island almost right away. There was a few months of hand coding html pages for the Bowen Island Journal before I switched over to blogger. That blog kept a good record of the first 15 years of our time here. In about 2017 I consolidated all my writing and just starting writing Bowen Island blog posts on this blog with their own tag.

I love the occasional dive into these archives. They remind me of my curiosities and what had my attention even in the swirl of change that a small community experiences. Perhaps for my 25th anniversary on Bowen I’ll draw these together into some kind of publication. My friend Pauline LeBel would love that.

Bowen Island these days is very different than it was 24 years ago. There are more marine mammals around: sea lions, orcas and humpback whales are now regular residents in our waters. The businesses in the Cove have come and gone, but at the moment there are some wonderful cafes (Like Tell Your Friends on the pier) that are my regular haunts. The Pub is in a new building, The Snug and Docs are where they always were. The library long ago moved to the old General Store. The Ruddy Potato is where it was when it opened the weekend I moved here.

There are new neighbourhoods and new trails and some places I used to go are now fenced off. Some other things never seem to change much. People still complain about the heavy toll tourism takes on our village. The ferry runs at a relatively random schedule. No one likes it when various layers of government do things, except now that we have to build long neglected infrastructure, there is a tenor of discontent that we didn’t do it sooner. Facebook has replaced the Phorum, but the same songs are sung by the chorus.

We have a new municipal hall and community centre, where I will be going tonight to watch Singing In The Rain complete with cartoon and short film trailers, just like in the old days. Tomorrow I will be singing with my choir at Tir-na-nOg, a theatre school for young people that found a home about 20 years ago after rambling across various space on the island.

We have a cougar now, as evidenced by the numerous sightings reported by Islanders and the deer carcass that was stewing in the ditch near my house (but which was thankfully relocated today). The last bear to visit here was about 14 years ago, but there are coyotes and racoons and skunks in addition to the endemic wildlife. The barred owls are breeding like rabbits.

This morning on my way to the Cove, I had my usual June trail breakfast of salmonberries and huckleberries plucked from the bush. We’ve made some amazing moves to protect lands that were long fought over, especially the Cape Roger Curtis lands that now sport a lovely waterfront trail that winds along the shoreline in front of a couple of huge houses that no one will ever live in and a few slightly more more modest houses lived in by actual Islanders. The Bowen Island Conservancy has protected a bunch of south shore waterfront in perpetuity and Metro Vancouver has bought the rest as parkland. They have also done a marvellous job on a waterfront park on Dorman Point. We have also been encompassed by a UNESCO Biosphere Region and we are developing relationships with our hosts, the Squamish Nation, who blessed the name of the island on our sign in a ceremony back in 2020. We live on Nexwlelexwm, and Sempuliyan, one of the family that held us in ceremony on that date, referred to us as Nexwlelexwm uxwimixw, the villagers of Bowen Island.

Affordability has only gotten worse here, but the Bowen Island Resilient Community Housing Society is in the processes of building an affordable rental building with 27 units behind our new amazing community health centre, which sits next to our new amazing fire hall and emergency operations centre. A seniors building, Snug Cove House, is going up across the road meaning that long time islanders like me might have an option to live a long life here as our mobility decreases and our needs increase.

We still have a local newspaper, with its own cartoonist, the inimitable Ron Woodall. Visual arts are still a huge part of life here and there is live music most weeks to listen to at the pub or in the various venues around the island.

Years ago, there was a swan that lived in the lagoon by Mannion Bay. Everyone loved this swan from a distance but also everyone hated meeting this swan up close. My daughter called it “the ornery swan” becausee it nipped and bit people and made a bunch of noise when its perfect little world was disturbed in any way. But from a distance, the swan struck a beautiful image, a still white bird floating majestically on the still dark waters of the bay or the lagoon.

When the swan died, we held a little memorial for it and I wrote a song with a call and response chorus that somehow captured why we loved that bird and how he was so much one of us.

Islanders now gather round
The swan, the swan was swimming
The swan lays dying on the ground
And the swan swims here no more.

Gathered on a wintery day
The swan, the swan was swimming
On the rocky shores of Mannion Bay
And the swan swims here no more.

Where salmon leapt upon the weir
The swan, the swan was swimming
Where ducks and geese all lived in fear
And the swan swims here no more.

All who came to know that bird
The swan, the swan was swimming
Defied the warnings they had heard
And the swan swims here no more.

Islanders have come and gone
The swan, the swan was swimming
We had the swan to reflect upon
And the swan swims here no more.

A stately bird of grace and poise
The swan, the swan was swimming
Beautiful and mute of voice
And the swan swims here no more.

For this wild creature was one of us
The swan, the swan was swimming
A mute and silent blunderbus
And the swan swims here no more.

Who are we without the swan?
The swan, the swan was swimming
A part of us is dead and gone
And the swan swims here no more.

The tide rolls in and fills the Bay
The swan, the swan was swimming
But the waters here are still today
And the swan swims here no more.

Now eagles chase the gulls away
The swan, the swan was swimming
And things have changed on Mannion Bay
And the swan swims here no more.

That kind of gets at the red thread of this place. Twenty-four years.

Notes and links from the week

June 27, 2025 By Featured, Notes No Comments

An ochre sea star on the beach at Mannion Bay/Kwilakwm, on Bowen Island during one of this week’s midsummer low tides.

Most days I read through posts from my blogroll and other places on the web and publish a short set of links and notes. At the end of each week I roll these up into a post which is also sent to everyone who subscribes by email.

Here are this week’s notes. Click the links below to discover interesting places to explore:

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