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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:

You can subscribe to this blog by email and good old fashioned RSS. I use NetNewsWire to follow interesting writers on the web. It works with most blogs, including those published on Substack and Medium.

June 26, 2025: the deep history of meaningful work

June 26, 2025 By Notes No Comments

Thinking about how to think about work. Quotes are pithy, but that’s why they can hold such power. There are 77 to choose from here. You might find one that helps you get through the day today. Or perhaps you’re better off making your own list of instructions and inspiration like James Reeves did, which inspired Peter Rukavina to turn them into a little book. Gifts of wisdom and advice made beautiful by the giving.

Don’t squander the gifts. It took us 13.5 billion years to evolve these brains we have, 60,000 years of living with them in their current state and 10,000 years of organizing ourselves in way that requires us to list quotes and instructions to ourselves to remember what really matters.

History is much more complex than that of course, and this amazing article about “the gossip trap,” which is also about the myriad ways that our species has chosen to organize, or not organize itself, reminds me that I still haven’t read The Dawn of Everything. Anyone familiar with my idea that almost everyone in a complex systems has access to the constraints of connection and exchange will probably anticipate how delighted I am by the retrospective coherence I find in this piece!

It’s not the silence that is awkward

June 26, 2025 By Containers, Conversation, Culture, Facilitation, Featured No Comments

This is an interesting article from Rebecca Roache Aeon today: “What’s so awkward about awkward silence?“

“…conversations are shared endeavours. A conversation is something we’re creating with whoever we’re talking to, and this is undermined if one or other of us is silent for too long. In a 2011 study on conversational silences, the psychologists Namkje Koudenburg, Tom Postmes and Ernestine H Gordijn compared conversations to dancing: the ‘harmonious exchange of information through smooth turn-taking’ in a fluent conversation is satisfying in a way similar to coordinating one’s movements with those of a dancing partner. Dancing, like conversation, becomes awkward when it’s malcoordinated. Koudenburg and her colleagues found that people experience rejection when silence disrupts the flow of conversation. They explain: ‘people are, due to the evolutionary importance of group membership, highly sensitive to perceiving exclusion’. In other words, silences are uncomfortable when they make us worry that we don’t belong.”

I have two unresourceful patterns when I’m engaging in conversation. One is that I spend a lot of time listening and thinking about what is being said. I often have thoughts during these silences, but the conversation moves too fast for me to get them in. I am deeply sensitive to interrupting others and being interrupted and so I am loath to do so. So I sit on my thoughts and sometimes chain them together into the questions or ideas that I offer. I might write notes with me pen to track my thoughts. And sometimes they never come out, and other times they flood out as I try to catch up to everything that has flowed past. I don’t think either of those moves are helpful!

Other times, you can’t shut me up and I will go on and on stringing together thoughts and ideas and questions as they tumble out of my brain when it gets locked in the default mode network. Ideas associate themselves like a Glass Bead Game and they all come out, probably in a not so helpful way. These downloads are often met with confusion in my conversational partners. When I am in this mode it is very hard to regulate my verbiage. I have learned to ask for space and will say things like “I need to just think out loud here for a minute, can you indulge me?” Other times I will invite interruption, welcoming it like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man.

But I generally relish the silences in conversations when we are all in the sam flow. I love conversing in circle where we deliberately slow down the conversation and explicitly use silence as a tool that everyone has access to. In circle there can be unfamiliarity with silence as a part of the conversation, but there is minimal awkwardness per se, because the silence is ritualized and normalized.

Of course I live in a culture much like the one that Rebecca Roache lives in. Silence in conversation – well, in small talk really – is awkward because it isn’t the norm of the ritual of small talk in many Anglo-American cultures. While I understand and enjoy small talk, I like to be in a place with someone where we get deep enough that some silence is welcomed. This morning I ran into a friend on the trail who I ahdn;t seen in a while. We connected with a hello and how-are-you-doing but both of us have history together of going deep around life issues and it quickly went there. We paused and became quiet together and shared important news with one another in a loving, connected way. There was nothing awkward in the silences. The container changed and the silence became a critical part of the conversation.

Roache summarizes her article with the set of thoughts that became clear to me as I was reading her essay:

“Something that emerges from all this is that it’s not silence itself that is awkward (or not). The capacity of silences to be awkward or comfortable is set against our efforts to connect with and understand other people, to be seen by others in the way we wish to be seen, and to be accepted. Running through all the aspects of awkward silence we’ve explored here is a common thread of anxiety about how well we’re engaging in connection and understanding with the people we interact with. In a comfortable silence, like the ones you enjoy with those you know and love, that anxiety isn’t there. With them, you don’t struggle to connect and understand. You’re already there.”

That is the essence. It’s hard to tell what part of this is me and what part is the culture I am soaking in, but I notice the chatter that happens oftentimes becomes a shield against connection. Our world right now is suffering from a deficit of trust. It takes a long time to cultivate connections across differences and early moments of connection – through small talk, mostly in my culture – are so influential in whether or not a channel of openness emerges.

In facilitation practice making space for silences can be important because it may both lead to, and reinforce a deeper connection between people. This is much easier to do in small group facilitation than it is is large group process work, but it can be a useful way to use the power one has as a facilitator. I remember one large gathering I did with about 120 people, and many diverse and simmering conflicts that were rising to the surface. I called for 15 minutes of silence. These people did all have spiritual practices and asking them to be silent was a call to their practitioner selves, but even so many told me how difficult it was to sit in that silence. The result, however, I believe, was a general ability to be willing to slow down and reflect for the rest of the gathering and let the silence do the work of opening up resourcefulness between them.

The awkwardness is information. The response is trust. If trust can grow, the silence can become a powerful part of the dialogue, and the space can do its work.