I’m giving Current a spin. It is an RSS feed reader that is built differently. It treats RSS feeds as readable treats rather than emails to be answered and processed. It deliberately seeks to remove the stressful and addictive interfaces that drive social media and productivity software, and it offers a clean interface for the words written by my friends and those I admire and follow. This might be the best way to get into reading blogs again for those of you that don’t do it yet.
Small town libraries save the world. I live in a small town. I spend more time at the library than perhaps any other single place in this town. I use it as an office, a place to rest, a place to meet people, to learn about things, to learn how to swing dance or listen to my friends and neighbours sharing stories. So enjoy Nick Fuller Googins’ essay on small town libraries:
Another library book introduced me to Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, a maverick scientist-artist who travels the world, collects mutated insects downwind of nuclear reactors, then documents the deformities by painting slides. How fascinating! How bizarre! What could be the subject of a book itself ended up as a side-plot in my novel, set in San Luis Obispo (downwind of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant), and ready to derail Josie’s ant dissertation and academic career.
Would I have stumbled across these odd tidbits online, or through AI prompts? Possibly. Doing generative research online, however, is like dipping a glass into the Pacific in hopes of finding an “interesting” cup of water. How do you know when you have one? How does Google or Grok sift and deliver results, compared with a living, breathing human at Belfast’s Public Library? They can’t.
One reason that small-town library research works so well is because of its natural parameters. Rather than an ocean of information to click through, you get a small stack of books. A small stack of books is manageable. It’s focusing. In our era of seemingly limitless data, I for one thrive on these boundaries. By constraining my initial research like this, oddly enough, I was expanding my results.
Just today I stopped into my own small town library to set up a meeting with one of the staff members and another friend, and I walked out of there with “A Psalm for The Wild Built” which my friend Marysia described as “HopePunk” (a genre I was thrilled to know existed!) and I was sold, especially after three of the staff there recommended it and Becky Chambers’ work in general. This author is new to me, but a sweet novel under 200 pages recommended by great people ticks all the boxes for me.
Louise Erdrich, courtesy of Maria Popova
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
Got it.
I spend so much of my time on Zoom in meetings and then trying to facilitate warm and engaging online spaces that it is hard to remember that Zoom is an incredible technology that was in place at just the right time to get an entire world through a global pandemic. I’m appreciating today Peter Rukavina’s reflections on how Zoom changed his life, and find myself silently nodding along with him. This one app kept food on my table when the future of my work was at stake.
And speaking of networking, here is an incredible list of links from Sonja Mikovic at Tamarack from 2025 all related to networks, connection and organizing. It’s going to take me a whole year to get through these!
I’m no fan of horror as a genre but I found this essay on how space functions in Japanese horror movies to be very interesting. From time to time in my facilitation world, folks discuss Japanese concepts of ma and ba, reflecting the nature of the temporal and spatial dynamics between us. This conversation is currently happening on social media between a few of us in the Art of Hosting community. It makes sense to me that the container has a personality in Japanese cinema.
That conversation coincides with this interesting piece from Emily Thomas on the history of time as a line. She traces the origins and implications of the image or metaphor of linear time (doing so in a linear way) to help understand where the western idea of linear time comes from.
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.