Light up the Cove celebrations earlier this month here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island.
It has been dark and rainy on Nexlelexwm/Bowen Island these past few weeks. The Pacific storms have rolled through with rain and wind from the southeasterlies which we call the Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that brings warm temperatures and heavy rain. We’ve had the westerlies blow in their usually unpredictable ways, sometimes bringing rain and sometimes clearing, but this time toppling trees and kicking the power out for my neighbours on the west side of the island. And we have the frontal systems of low pressure travelling down from Alaska and sending cold fronts and waves of rain through our region. It has been dark and stormy and blustery. And I love it.
The darkness here around the winter solstice is the combination of low northern sunlight and thick cloud. When the day is over, it descends inky and thick over the island. If it isn’t storming, it gets deeply silent, with only the sounds of the sea lions in the bay reverberating along the shoreline. The darkness has an expectancy to it. The expectation of longer days, of warmth and dry spring days, and the knowledge that those days lie only a few weeks away around the beginning of February, spurs the expectation to life.
Here on Bowen there are many traditions that mark this time of year. Light up the Cove, on the first Saturday in December is celebration of the Christmas season. Thousands of lights doll up Snug Cove in almost random and beautifully gaudy ways. There is a parade of lanterns and lights and elves and Santa makes a visit, arriving at the Union Steam ship company to the delight of hundreds, this year in a golf cart. I sang Christmas carols along with a small diorama of wise men this year. Down in the Cove, local businesses set up little Christmas trees.
Following that there are craft fairs and book sales during the month, at Collins Hall, at the School, and al around the island. Artists open their studios, the Galleries all turn their walls over to local artists and artisans. This year Kingbaby Theatre mounted Mad Mabel’s Christmas for only the fourth time since 1999. It is a local story of a homeless woman who witnesses and enables the magic of the season through the transformation of the people around her. It’s a beautiful story about love and friendship and the beauty and awe of light in the darkness, made by our neighbours, featuring our neighbours.
Today, on the solstice itself, my friends Aubin and David van Berkel hosted a pagan solstice party during which participants dipped bread in apple wassail and threw it at the apple trees in their orchard to inspire the trees to return to life and produce their fruit again this year. Tonight I played with a little ensemble of Celtic musicians accompanying Tina Overbury in her production of Dagda’s Harp, her retelling of the story of the Tuatha De Danaan, the mythical Irish warriors. It is about how they recovered the stolen harp of their Dagda and in so doing restored the world to light and rhythm and music. It is a story delivered in a near sacred manner at sunset on the solstice.
Last night the Jewish community on Bowen celebrated the sixth night of Hanukkah with a lighting of the menorah candle in the Cove. 60 or 70 people took part. In the United Church today, on the last Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Love, we felt the beginning of the release of darkness and the anticipation of the return of the sun and the birthing of the light into the world as Emmanuel, the God who takes form as a human. On Christmas Eve we will gather in the Little Red Church again to sing carols and hear the story of the birth of Jesus, an outsider and refugee, whose rumoured birth sent the dictator of his day into a paranoid frenzy that saw thousands rounded up and hundreds of children killed. We celebrated the thin thread of love that conquers all, that weaves itself through the very fabric of the universe. Unconquerable, unrestrained, unconditional. Soon it will be Christmas. Not yet, not for another four days, not until we can be sure the light is really coming back. These are the days of faith.
The time is pregnant with intense feelings and sentiments. The land and sea and atmosphere brings us to quiet and anticipation and reflection. We are invited indoors and encouraged to join together with others, friends new and old, sharing music and poetry and food and drink. Sharing stories about how this year seems darker than previous ones. We remember those we have lost, those who are struggling. Those who have fallen ill or who are recovering. We hold them in our hearts, bring them round our hearths.
And we wait. We wait in trust and faith and hope and love, prepared for the moments of joy that are coming, that are long anticipated, that are desperately needed. The solstice is a turning of time and attention.
From here, the light.
My neighbour Alejandro Frid is an ecologist and works extensively with Coastal First Nations in British Columbia. I love his work as a scientist and as an author and I love the way he shares wheat he is doing such as in this story on Kitaspo/Xai’xais fisheries management. Last night he spoke at Speak the Spark, a n every-two-months storytelling even here on Bowen Island where local folks share stories around a theme. It’s a bit like The Moth. Last night the theme was Faux Pas’s and Unexpected Turns and we heard stories about giving up wealth for happiness, photographing New York on the morning of 9/11. accidentaly dressing up as a clown for a school carnival, making an innocent comment to a friend on a train that was taken the wrong way, and we heard Alejandro’s story about how a handwritten request for computer help led to a decades long collaboration with his dearest research partner.
Cory Doctorow is travelling around discussing the history of, and the antidote to, enshittification. Here a transcript of a recent talk which is a kind of call to arms for our participation in the current and ongoing trade wars by creating and selling tools that liberate the users of technology of all kinds, lower fees and prices, and secure some degree of tech sovereignty for Canada and others.
A short story from Thea Lim about a private investigator, his technique and his subject and how it is that we all fade into the totality of a city. The story takes place near where I grew up in Toronto so the setting is vivid to me. Anyone Could Be Anyone is published in The Walrus.
Life in the vast lane. Doc Searles reflects on how the internet has changed over the past 25 years for those of us who create and share our own stuff here.
Anything that, as Mark McKergow puts it “offloads cognitive strain” is valuable especially when a person needs to bring all of their cognitive abilities to the task at hand. Not surprisingly then, you find that the situations where there is likely to be chaos or catastrophic failure, tools like checklists are everywhere: in operating rooms, flight decks, factories, fire halls, kitchens. Mark shares some solid thoughts on these humble tools.
A little section of the Litany of Becoming by m. jade kaiser and pointed out to me by Tenneson this morning.
To say, for the first time,
“This is who I am.
This is the truth of my body.
This is what I know about myself.
This is my name and this is where my path is leading me.”
And to have it heard. Have it received. Have it affirmed.
And then,
to say it again,
and again,
as we change
and as the world changes,
and to have each proclamation greeted with an open-armed embrace
New books to read from The Tyee.
Plus ça change, plus les mêmes choses. The Seven O’ Clock News from August 6, 1966 alongside Silent Night. We are in a collective noche oscura del alma.
Rick Rubin asks us to pay attention: “Creative is something you are, not only something you do. It’s a way of moving through the world, every minute, every day. The artist is always on call.” inspiration happens at fine granularity. The new comes from outside of what we know, at the very edges of our awareness. Novelty, by definition, strikes us with surprise. The ordinary is the fodder for the extraordinary. How could it not be?
Want a practical example? I spent a delightful 90 minutes on Friday with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper and some lovely folks who are using Participatory Narrative Inquiry in different ways in the work. And it reaffirmed to me how the work of PNI is so much about generating these oblique insights, these moments of clarity and novelty. Ron Donaldson continues to delight and inspire and share such valuable stuff in his year end reflective posts, and today’s is about insight. I’m so chuffed to have helped inspire these beautiful offerings.
My friend Holger Nauheimer is busy working on The Human-AI Facilitation Manifesto (LinkedIn link). Here is his most recent draft:
- Perception is plural. Humans sense emotions and atmosphere. Al sees patterns and structure. Together, they reveal deeper coherence.
- Meaning emerges in relationship. Al offers structure, but humans bring the stories that make sense of the structure.
- Belonging is human. Al can stabilize language – but trust grows only between people.
- Depth matters more than speed. Al adds value not by optimizing, but by making visible what is hard to say.
- Neutral clarity is a gift. Al can name tensions without judgment — offering safety without shying away from truth.
- Courage is shared. Humans bring vulnerability. Al brings steadiness. Together, they hold the uncomfortable without collapse.
- This is not a tool upgrade. It is a shift in attention. Hybrid facilitation expands what can be seen, said, and sensed.
- Clarity is not authority. Al can hold patterns, but humans must hold responsibility. Hybrid facilitation works best when projection is named and agency stays human.
Here are some thoughts I have on this, simple thoughts, thoughts off the top of my head. Starting points.
First of all, I’m not loving the “AI does this, humans do this” construction of this manifesto. I think we shouldn’t put humans and AI on the same footing. If we want a manifesto to talk about how AI can be an aid to facilitation and sensemaking, we should talk about what it can do, and what it currently cannot do. I think there is always a place for human beings to talk about facilitation and also what OUR role is in it, because honestly, some forms of what passes for facilitation (especially the wrong processes used in the wrong contexts) can be more damaging than just letting AI ask you a bunch of questions and leaving your group to talk about them.
So given that…thoughts on these points.
Perception is plural. I don’t think AI “perceives.” At least not the AI that most of us are using in 2025. It analyses, and uses algorithms and probability tables to auto complete thoughts. It can be trained to be agreeable or be contrarian or be a nazi or whatever. But it doesn’t “see”. It offers material that becomes one more part of the information load that humans take in. But how humans perceive AI output matters a great deal. Some might dismiss it. Some might give it a kind of divine appreciation. I’m already seeing lots of blog posts starting with “I asked ChatGPT, and this is what it said…” as if ChatGPT is somehow more perceptive, or smarter or has access to better facts than anyone in particular. Perception is something human beings do. We do it individually, and we do it together in groups. Computers don’t perceive. And computers don’t understand depth. See below.
Meaning emerges in relationship. Yes. 100% yes. AI offers structure the way a banana offers structure, or a photograph, or a stray feather. AI does not offer the kind of relational meaning making that humans experience together because it does not have the same cognition that humans do. Human beings can take any object and use it to craft a ritual and stimulate new thoughts and experiences. This can be very helpful, in that it can introduce oblique stimuli into an environment and help us find new thoughts and ideas through association, metaphor, interpretation, cultural norming or culture breaking. We use tools like Visual Explorer or poetry and art for this in group work, and AI is an excellent source of obliquity and ambiguity precisely because it is capable of NOT being in relationship. We are capable of actionable insight that triggers a particular process in our brains that not only makes meaning, but does something to the relationship and the relational field as a result. Builds community, friendship, love. Or hate, and despair and panic. AI isn’t doing that.
Belonging is human. Which follows from the above. AI has no role in belonging. A person belongs when they are claimed by others. if you find yourself being “claimed” by AI, be careful. You are being manipulated.
Depth matters more than speed. Sometimes. Sometimes not. It depends. To AI, everything is speed. Has anyone asked AI to take its time and let its thought process really deepen? To go for a walk and let its brain tense and relax in ways that open new pathways? Nope. AI delivers things fast. I’m not sure it is capable of what we mean by “depth.” We perceive depth as a vertical axis of meaning. We order thoughts and experiences by whether they are shallow or deep. It has nothing to do with speed. AI, I suspect, uses flat semantic structures. It is associative. It would not understand depth the way you understand depth, as perceiving something being more meaningful in this moment to you and your context than not. If you say the word “John” right now it might mean nothing to you. But that was my father’s name and as I type it I look up at the picture I have of him I drinking our last whiskey together, a dram of Ladaig 10 year old malt, chosen because it was the distillery closest to Iona where I finished a pilgrimage in 2018, and because we were talking that evening about spirituality and remembering the drams we shared together on our trip through Ireland in 2012. But to ChatGPT 5, what does “John” mean? ““John” feels like an everyman name. A placeholder for the ordinary person — anyone and no one in particular” (emphasis the robot’s, not mine). Oof.
Neutral clarity is a gift. It is very hard for a human being to offer neutral, clear feedback to another person. But AI will not spare your feelings. My favourite use of LLMs is to critique my writing and ideas, tell me where I am wrong, where others will disagree with me. Tell me where I am about to make a fool of myself.. This is a helpful function.
Courage is shared. I feel like relying on AI to give me courage is foolish. I feel like I need courage NOT to rely on it. For example, this blog post. I’m writing it and dashing it off so Holger and others can reflect on it, and so OI can thinking out loud on these issues. And I’m not going to give it to ChatGPT for feedback. I am noticing that THAT requires more courage than hiding behind something that might polish it up. If I was publishing in a journal, I’d want that (and a good editor). But right now I’m wanting to write a fully human post in my own voice, so YOU all can weigh in and tell me what YOU think too, without using your LLM to critique it.
This is not a tool upgrade. Indeed. It’s just another tool. Not THE tool. Not a phase shift in how we do facilitation. I have seen facilitators discover a new tool like Open Space Technology and evangelize the hell out of it, saying that it should be used everywhere all the time and in exactly the same way for everything. Humans can be very good at creating and using tools, but we have also evolved practices of apprenticeship and mentorship in using and then making tools. AI doesn’t replace that. We need good mentors to apprentice to as facilitators. And then we can think about how to use our tools well.
Clarity is not authority. I don’t think AI offers any special clarity, and I do not think it has a lock on seeing patterns. Humans are exceptional at spotting patterns. Our brains are possibly the most complex things we know of in the universe (although as Steven Wright once said, you have to think about who is telling you that!). We are built to spot patterns. And we are full of filters and biases and inattentional blindness. We are prone to enacted cognition. We are neurodiverse and cognitively gifted in different ways. And so working with others helps us spot patterns and validate useful ones. If AI is part of your pattern spotting family, so be it. Just realize that it lacks all the tools we have to make sense of patterns in complexity. It can only work with what it has got. Its processes of insight are reducible. Ours are not. They are emergent.
That’s me. What do you think?
Georges Island, in Halifax harbour, at the threshold of the Atlantic Ocean and historically a place of transition for prisoners of war and displaced Acadians.
I’m coming to the end of my year, and all my travel is finished. I have a few small paying gigs left this month, all of which are online. My autumn has been much busier than usual, with much more travel and in person hosting that has been the practice. I am entering into a delightful period of darkness and expansiveness. The secular world calls this time “Christmas” but the Christian world knows it as Advent, and it’s the perfect liturgical season for the rhythms of life in the northern hemisphere. And it invites us into the waiting, the not-knowing, the hope that light will return again, even as we have the knowledge that it indeed will, perhaps the faith that it will.
Simon Goland writes about thresholds and transitions today:
We often treat transitions like an inconvenient pause between the “real” parts of life. But in truth, these are the moments that sculpt us. When the familiar dissolves, we are invited into an apprenticeship with the unknown.
And the unknown is a surprisingly good teacher.
It teaches us to notice the small, quiet signs, the ones we habitually and often overlook. It teaches us to trust our deeper intelligence – the one that lives in the body, not the mind. It teaches us that clarity is something that emerges, not something we manufacture.
Transitions whisper, “Slow down. Something important is trying to find you.”
He and I share a love of these moments. In human life, there are few universals across cultures, but the deep meaning of times and spaces of change and transition seems to pass through every culture and community and every person I have ever met. The heart is triggered to experience grief and loss while also preparing to meet what comes. Faith is acute in these moments, and hope is born in these moments. There is nervousness, and a sense that we aren’t in control of what happens next. The art is to stay with it and that requires a practice. And that is why we don special clothing, sings special songs, engage in special rituals, to mark the moment as sacred, to hold on and to savour this incredibly special nature of time and space.
Peter Rukavina explores this is a grounded way with his description of going to a Chivas cup match in Guadalajara last week. Going to a big match in a new country is always an intimidating experience but even more so if football and football culture is totally new to you. It’s interesting to read all the ways he prepared for this threshold crossing so that he could rest in, as much as possible, the enjoyment of what was to come.
I could read poems, stories and blog posts about thresholds all day long. I have always been entranced by crossings and how people make sense of them. An obsession like that means that you see them everywhere. I would almost say that the impetus to write stems from confronting a threshold. It brings us to a creative moment. If you are an artist, you make sense of that moment with your medium of choice. So, here is yet another reflection on thresholds, from more than a year ago, from my Bowen Island neighbour Shari Ulrich.