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The symphony of the spring morning

June 1, 2022 By Being, Bowen, Featured, Uncategorized One Comment

I live about 60 meters above the sea, facing southeast on the side of a mountain that is covered in Douglas-fir trees. My mornings at this time of year begin with light in my windows by 5am and the air full of birdsong. Up here, we are perched in the canopy of the forest and if I look out towards the sea, I am looking through to tops of tree that are 40 or 50 meters tall.

As I have grown older, my eyes are not as good as they once were and while I can spot movement in the canopy, it is hard for me to see details on little birds that live there. But becasue I am a musician, my ear is very good and I can hear and discern the many types of birdsong that fill the morning air. I am a bird hearer now rather than a bird watcher.

My mornings often begin with a 1.5 kilometer walk down to the sea through my local neighbourhood. And this time of year there are three distinctive movements to this walk.

In our canopy, Swainson’s thrushes, chickadees, the Townsend, Wilsons and Yellow-Rumped Warblers, sing from the tree tops. Ravens and bald eagles soaring above and through the forest, often silent expect for the wing beats of the raves. Robins are everywhere, towhees and juncos scratch on the ground in the garden and Ana’s hummingbirds visit the flowers. Pileated woodpeckers,northern flickers and red-breasted sapsuckers drum their mating calls on the trees above us on the mountain.

On my walk down to the sea, I descend along a road that has houses on either side, large ornamental trees like chestnuts and dogwoods and more gardens. The birds change midway down, and there is a small flock of starlings and a very large flock of pine siskins drawn to the bird feeders. Stellar’s Jays, patrol the mid-layer, chattering between the calls of song sparrows and white-crowned sparrows. Black headed grosbeaks at this time of year sing their rapid, nervous ringing song. A Pacific-slope fly catcher can be heard catcalling from the thick deciduous bushes and from out of nowhere comes the powerful rollicking song of the Pacific wren.

The final stretch of my walk takes me on a gravel path down to a beach. This is the territory of bald eagles who call and whistle from ancient perches and nest sites. In the little cove where i sit, there have been eagles for generations and beyond, and the bald branches at the tops of their look out trees are worn smooth by their talons. By the water there are sea ducks like scoters and goldeneyes, mallards, cormorants, glaucous-winged and short-billed gulls, and a crow that patrols the beaches and the cove and sometimes mimics the far off sounds of geese that softly honk as they forage around the rocks and beaches.

If I’m lucky here I might sea a seal of a sea lion coming up for air, or catch the call of oyster catchers moving around the rocks.

In a month or so, once the nesting is done and the warblers have begun to head south again, the sound will change and soften. Songs become calls, the resident birds (except, this year, the nuthatches) take over and the mornings are quieter with robins, towhees, juncos and chickadees providing most of the music.

Lessons from facilitating babies

May 29, 2022 By Art of Hosting, Community, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Flow, Stories, Youth 8 Comments

Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old.

It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content and the process while also demonstrating what it looks like when we build a system with children at the centre.

With the world increasingly full of people that are acting like babies, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons that actual babies bring to the game. Babies get a bad rap.

The clock doesn’t matter. Rhythm matters. When there are babies in the room, we learn to pay attention to natural rhythms. Babies that are constantly held and cared for are very quiet and happy. The two babies we had in the room with us loved being held by others and they were looked after by their older siblings and other participants in the meeting. This of course is common in Indigenous families and large families. The babies had a blanket in the middle of the room they could roll around on and their every need was looked after. If they needed holding, they were picked up. If they needed as nap they could cuddle up with someone. If they needed feeding, they were fed, if they started getting tired at the end of the day, we closed the meeting down. If they were late in the morning, then we started once everyone was present and settled. Babies do not obey a clock, but they do very well at reminding us of healthy rhythms. Watching Kelly facilitate an hour of reflective practice with a five month old baby curled up in her arms sound asleep was beautiful.

Put the children in the centre not around the edges. We had babies in the middle and we had smaller children who were offered many options for being present including going in and out of the room, being accompanied by different adults and contributing. But there was no child care offered for our meeting. The meeting was child care and the children had a place in it. We all took turns being with the children, and they were never out of sight or out of earshot.

Babies change the conversation. The meeting we were running was not full of conflict or high emotions but it was about tricky issues like cultural safety and non-Indigenous professionals meeting with Indigenous families and so there was some nervousness in the room as we were building the container and the relationships. But babies make excellent talking pieces and excellent centres for a dialogue circle and having them constantly in our space made the conversation about them all the time. Their presence helped ground and simplify the conversation and it ensured that we spent our time well so as not to tire them out.

Babies have something to offer. Find a way to include them. Babies offer lots of things to a meeting, including feedback and insight and a kind of checking of the ego. All of the children in te meeting were included in every conversation sometimes in small groups, sometimes in the larger group. They offered their own answers to the questions we were asking because the questions were simple enough that a five year old could contribute “What do you like about your worker?” is a question everyone can answer and the children will often find ways to add to an adult’s story or tell it in their own voice. Additionally the two smaller children we had in our meeting were both excellent singers and when offered the chance to do so, they shared songs with us to end our meetings or bless the food, which is a common practice in Indigenous meetings on the west coast with adults usually offering songs before eating. There is nothing better than a child who loves singing being invited to share their gift with others in services of a genuine need rather than a cute performance.

Babies will tell you what’s happening in the room. Babies are very sensitive to the energy of a group. I learned this years ago, that they will sometimes express the emotions that are in a room in more subtle ways before the audults become aware. If things get tense they will get squirmy or begin crying from worry. It’s a signal to take it easy and take a little break. The baby is the first one to become unregulated in a setting and usually the first one to become regulated again. Babies don’t carry a lot of stories about what is happening in the room, so I pay close attention to their sounds and movements and it gives me information especially in setting like this one where the primary purpose was building a relational field and sharing and making sense of stories.

The baby reveals the truth of the system. If you are developing a model of care centered on children, watch what is actually happening with the children in the room. They way they are included and respected and lifted up so they contribute tells you a lot about how ready the people are to bring a truly child centered approach to their work. I have seen systems where the babies and the children gave us warning signs in the room that much more work had to be done. This weekend though was very special.

What’s in the Parking Lot #2

May 27, 2022 By Being, Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Featured, First Nations, Flow, Learning, Links, Practice One Comment

“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.”

— from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros

I love writing born of direct experience, born of the insight of a moment, or generated from the passing inspiration of the glint of sunlight on the sea seen through an open window. I love writing that arises from the quiet encounter with spirit or the contemplation of a mind that finally slows down and stretches out. That is writing of authentic voice or even the super-voice that all writers know, the voice we chase for its clarity and ease. It sometimes takes a long pounding away at the keyboard or days of scribbled lines before that voice arises somewhere below consciousness. In that moment you become merely a vehicle for it, in service to something. Your word choice become less ham-fisted, the cadence of the words more natural, like a jazz musician, you become open, trading fours with the muse, offering a lick of style or form and being rewarded with an image or a connection that you could never see before.

I’m enjoying A Philosophy of Walking. It is a testament to obliquity in the arts and philosophy, about the way a walk frees the mind and opens the heart. Today I’m heading out on y first work trip since February 15 2020 and I’m appreciating the way my thinking slows down even as my body is in the stop and go rhythm of ferry travel. There is spaciousness, time to kill, time to read or write or just peer out at the sea and look for whales or sea lions. Travelling on the coast means moving at the speed of the ferry, and the best way to do that is to travel on foot, at a human pace, free of the frustrations of being confined to a car, presented with options at every turn; a crossword, a book, an album, a blog post, a nap.

Have a read this weekend of some cool things I’ve found on the web. I’ll see what ideas and thoughts bubble up from this little trip to Vancouver Island.

  • The Limitations of “Performance.” With a great quote from Tim Galloway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”
  • The Sultans of String record “The Power of the Land,” a poem by Duke Redbird set to some great music and visuals of some pretty impressive landscapes, including, at 1:36, a view of Nexlelexwem/Bowen Island and the south end of At’lka7tsem/Howe Sound, which I live. 

Enjoy your weekend as we move towards midsummer. I heard my first Swainson’s Thrush today, which means the better part of the season has begun.

LIving through tourist season as gracefully as possible under the circumstances.

May 24, 2022 By Bowen, Travel 8 Comments

Oh I remember this. Tourists.

I live on a very accessible island very close to Vancouver and it’s very easy to get here. Unlike other islands in our archipelago, we are mostly a place of full time residents, with a smaller number of summer families that come over. We have A LOT of short term rentals here which are very hard to track because they kind of hide behind a “contact the host for more details” in the VRBO and AirBnb listings, and like everyone living in a tourist spot with big housing affordability and accessibility issues, I have many opinions about that. Some contradictory even!

We have just had our first long weekend of the summer and as usual, there is the litany of complaints about tourists who just can’t seem to figure out the simple things that we all take for granted. It’s fun to share some stories I suppose, but it is disturbing to see friends and neighbours openly describing how hostile they were, yelling at groups of people or impatiently chewing out people who weren’t able to figure out our – to the untrained eye – totally mystifying ferry marshalling system.

More seriously, tourism is a mixed blessing for communities like ours. Day visitors do provide an massive injection of revenue for the businesses we love that can’t always make it through a dark wet winter on local trade alone. But day trippers can create huge impacts on the land here, and recently the artist who created the lovely piece of public art pictured above which was hidden away in the forest, removed it because too many people were wandering around on private land trying to find it and it was contributing to a lot of erosion and a heightened fire danger. (Also it was a piece about extinction and the fact that it is gone now is a poignant denouement)

Having people come and stay for longer stretches was always a goal we tried to pursue when I was on our Economic Development Committee. We wanted people to sink into the place, come for retreats and be hosted here. I myself have hosted hundreds of people here at our retreat centres at Xenia, Rivendell, the Lodge at the Old Dorm and the Bowen Island Lodge. The advantage of this is that as hosts we get to help people visit here by giving them some local advice and knowledge to help deepen their experience of the place, and also help them understand our local culture. This is a beautiful and special place and it works it’s magic on you if you are hosted into it well. When you are visitor in another place it helps to have a sense of the context in which you are temporarily living.

In the last 10 years however, like almost everywhere, Instagram and AirBnB/VRBO have created a situation where people are coming to this place to have context-free experiences and that creates a lot of issues including environmental impact, fire danger, unsafe situations on the roads, loud stuff happening in quiet places, conflict, and a litany of smaller irritations that make daily living here harder during a busy weekend. Our grocery stores sometimes run out of staples. Local staff are treated horribly at local eateries as they cope to deal with HUGE numbers while simultaneously getting slagged for slow service. Visitors then experience long waits for their food and leave shitty reviews on yelp. It really can be a nightmare.

There is no curing this, really. We try hard to give some fleeting context to visitors who are rushing to find the perfect Instagram spot or the woodfired pizza they heard so much about. Instagram in particular creates a kind of weird cult of personal branding that casts all experiences as a good time, without maybe explaining how you spent the day tramping through a local’s backyard to find the mastadon, irritating dozens of people along the way, getting frustrated and annoyed when people wouldn’t tell you exactly where it was. Instead,a perfect phot of a majestic creature perched atop a bluff. Instagram promotes outcomes based tourism. If that is your approach, save your energy and just steal my photo of it. The thing is gone now.

So what to do? Well, I try the remember that I’m a tourist every time I leave this little island. I have travelled extensively for work and pleasure and I’m aware that I do so many dumb things when I visit other places with a complete lack of awareness of my own impact. I have no idea what places the locals consider “theirs” or how different local cultures work. And of course it’s even worse when I find a lovely little spot off the beaten path, which is full of the delightful locals you won’t meet in the regular tourist haunts. I make sure to share my experiences with friends and family on social media. (I know this sweet little restaurant in southern Estonia run by a Seto family who will comp you food and drink if you start a singing session of folk songs. And they will bring out the good liquor too!) But I have no idea whether they enjoy me renting a little house in their neighbourhood or not. I can’t read Estonian, so I’m not sure what firestorm we have stirred up on the local Facebook page, but I know I must have at some point! I’ve certainly been yelled at by people who assure me that the path DOES NOT GO THROUGH THERE even when it OBVIOUSLY does, and given dirty looks and audible eyerolls as I spend 10 minutes in front of a ticket dispenser on the Frankfurt or Tokyo metros trying to figure out the simple act of buying a ticket from a machine, a task which requires extensive implicit knowledge and is different in every city. (And eventually out of sheer impatience, someone steps up to help, but sometimes not)

In as much as we need to help visitors understand their impact on our little place, we have long been a draw for weekend and summer visitors and living with tourists fumbling through our community is nothing new. I try to be that “friendly helpful local” that gives them some insight into what it’s like to live here. And if I’m feeling riled up or likely to be driven to anger or frustration, I avoid our village on busy weekends unless I manage to prepare myself to meet people acting like I do when I trample through lovely little Mexican villages and Scottish Islands and Hawaiian farming settlements.

All I can offer is a heuristic: assume good intentions and try to be kind. And if you come over to Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island, give me a call beforehand and I’ll let you know how the ferry marshalling works.

(ETA: Nancy has written a nice post that links to this one, and I want acknowledge her wisdom and nuance on the use of the phrase “assume good intentions.” That works in this context and is advice for me to use when meeting tourists who may be unaware of their impact. It is wise not to use this as advice for others to take, especially in contexts of injustice,oppression and trauma. I’ll leave my original wording in, but my practice is to use that heuristic personally.)

One nuthatch returned

May 23, 2022 By Being, Bowen 2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the nuthatches have disappeared from my home island this year and how I was missing their little calls.

Today,fromt he other side of the world a friend shared with me a watercolour he made inspired by that post. And so, through relationship and connection across time and space, one nuthatch has re-appeared on Bowen Island, , early on a holiday morning.