I read a couple of Peter Levine’s posts that resonated strongly this morning about undoing reckless damage to important government and democratic institutions and redefining the call to service for public servants. I don’t know very many other people that publish so widely and so freely on the topics of civic life and democracy, but Peter is one of the ones with whom I find myself nodding in agreement over almost everything. I think I retain an enduring love/hate relationship with government, but my years as a public servant were rewarding and I would recommend it to anyone, even with all of the attendant frustrations. Institutions are essential to democracy.

If you are in the public service and need some inspiration, Thea Snow has shared some resources she likes from a systems thinking lens; (h/t Benjamin) and if you are more inclined to work within the public service as a complex system, Chris Mowles reports on a talk by Carolyn Pedwell that does just that.

Service, of course, knows no bounds, and today Peter Rukavina paid tribute to his friend Stephen Southall’s mom Carol and family and Stephen’s incredible service to his mom through her long illness and death. I knew Stephen 35 years ago in Peterborough where we would often jam blues songs, him on his harmonica and me on the guitar and us making up nonsense lyrics. Facebook kept us in proximity in recent years. The whole post from Peter is a beautiful read and ends with this quote: “I hope death is like being carried to a bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on a couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” I think that was a quote was from Carol. Worth remembering.

Tenneson Woolf reminds us that we can always start again: “We learn, we humans. I’m so impressed by the courage that people have. To stay the course. To let go the course that doesn’t serve. To nuance the daily. To trust the simple. To open to love. To be unflinching.”

It reminds me of something I once heard Thanissaro Bhikku say. Something to the effect that when you are first learning to meditate, you catch yourself again and again drifting away from the breath. You can catch yourself 50 times in a 20 minute setting, but each time is a practice of waking up. Practicing waking up 50 times is excellent. Start again.

Starting again is a key skill. If you don’t get it right the first time, you start over, with collaborations, with ideas, with commitments. It’s a complex world. We don’t live in it perfectly. It requires humility. It requires grace. It needs a breath, a second chance, a sacrifice of some resources. It helps to be able to frame it as a learning, but not to hold on to it as a lesson. You see that difference?

“Human perception excels at detecting subtle pattern breaks” writes Cameron Norman over at Censemaking. Spotting the exception to the pattern can reveal the pattern. It can also reveal the hint of an affordances that can take you elsewhere. That boring staff meeting that happens every week? Think about the delightful surprise that comes when something interesting actually happens. And then the insight “oh wow…I dion;t realize how humourless this whole enterprise had become…” A key question for querying the patterns we are trying to understand is “what the hell was that?” Dissonance and novelty shocks us into seeing the mundane and normal.

Starting over is essential to reconciliation. Not slightly-embarrassing-land-acknowledgement “reconciliation” but the real deal, where lands and material resources are returned to Indigenous Nations so that we can all start again. Like the Yurok have a chance to do in California. Remove dams, invite the salmon back home, restore health and stewardship and start the relationship over. These are not about us and them. They are about the potential of we together, starting with the first people and the first principles and the land’s own direction about how to build and maintain health and stability and relationship.

Let’s go. The land welcomes you to try.

And in the doing over, you discover. I’ve been at it for a couple of days, but these little notes posts, based on my daily reading, seem to gather around themes. Perhaps I’ll post a summary of the themes each week or so.

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From the spring 2025 edition of Geist comes an amazing piece of writing  from essayist Soraya Roberts, who documents a trip on the The Canadian, Canada’s only mostly trans-national train.

“This is about a transcontinental train, established 70 years ago, using the same cars to this day. It is about how trains became a relic in our national mind, which is how they came to be visibly trundling across the country, slowly connecting products rather than people, as the rest of the world surpasses us with better versions of what we left behind… This is about a vast country of people yearning for connection. But Canada has never, in its infinite practicality, accommodated yearning.”

You can read the full essay only in the print edition, so go buy one or grab it from your nearest Canadian library.

One of the my favourite blogs of all time was the daily commonplace book whiskey river. Whoever was behind that blog seems to have stopped posting in December. the last post was a quote from Louise Erdrich:

Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book –
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.

I have no idea who was behind this blog. It was a reliable and seasonable daily dose of incredible insight from a person who was extremely well read. The blog itself remains online and a collection of posts has been published as “whiskey river’s commonplace book.” The blog published from 2001 to 2024. The author remains deeply anonymous.

Early on in the blogging era many folks figured out this recipe: blogs as commonplace books. Mark Woods who lived in Perth, Ontario published “wood s lot: the fitful tracing of a portal.” Sadly, he died in 2017 but back in 2002 when he was struggling to find the money for a new computer so he could keep writing, Euan Semple all the way over in the UK sent him the money to buy a new PC. It was a lovely act, and reaffirmed what blogging always had been: generosity and connection. Another who blogged in the manner of whiskey river included Steve Laidlaw from Kamloops BC, who published the long gone “riley dog.”