I work with lots of organizations in transition, and always have done. Specifically organizations who leadership is leaving, often representing a transition from a founder to the next generation. These situations are fraught with new and unexpected emotions, states, and situations. The folks that remain find themselves relying on stuff that was invisible before the transition but which is missed now. It is a time when movement forward needs to be slow and deliberate.
Today I read a lovely and heart-filled post from Jasmine Williams at the Interaction Institute for Social Change describing this moment. It's a moment of aporia – "being at a loss" – and a moment which demands that a group and individuals be in a different way. Jasmine writes about the practices she is relying on in these moments including ,
**What's for us will find us
**This is one of those affirmations, mantras, that I keep on a sticky note attached to my computer. It’s a grounding reminder to myself that we will move through this in the way we were supposed to. Whether you believe in fate or some grand design or not, I believe there’s wisdom to be found in returning to a foundational trust in the winding path that leads to the abundant future (however different that future may be from current expectations).
A side benefit of rooting in this reminder is that it’s allowed me to hold on more gently and leave space for the emergent, unexpected, and confronting. How freeing it can be to release the tight hold on an outcome when you trust it will be the right one, reached at the right time, by the right people!
There is an art to this kind of waiting-to-be-found. It requires sensitivity and awareness. It requires quieting and emptying so that one is available to be found. And it also requires slow movement and lots of scanning for possibilities. If what is needed hasn't revealed itself yet, it's a sign to slow down. It will come. I love that these virtual friends are being so transparent with what they are practicing.
From volume IV of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle:
The world is not a calm sea, where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat… The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.
August has arrived and while we seem to be still waiting for truly hot and dry weather to arrive on the south coast of British Columbia, the community calendar moves on. This is the season in which three particular community events happen.
This August long weekend is a popular one for visitors to our island and that means traffic snarls in the Cove as people try to figure out our mysterious ferry marshalling procedures and village layout. The Cove is packed and bustling during the day but grows quiet and still at night. So still that as we lay in bed drift off to sleep last night we could hear a couple of humpback whales sighing out in the bay.
Saturday however was an exception to this rule as the annual firefighters Dock Dance took place with a terrific cover band playing all kinds of classic rock. The Dock Dance is a bit of a homecoming for many islanders who return to see old friends and drink a lot of beer and raise money for the volunteer fire department. It’s not my scene exactly, but it’s an important community event, and the music drifts up from the village, which we can clearly hear as we enjoy the evening on our porch.
In a couple of week the men’s 2026 Bowen Island Fastpitch League season wraps up with a tournament over three days in which the six teams of the longstanding fast pitch league compete for this year’s bragging rights. This year the league published a fantastic program which covers the history of the league and pays tribute to the life of one of its founders, Eddie “The Yeti” Weismiller, who died earlier this year.
At the end of the month, the weekend before Labour Day, our annual Bowfest Festival returns. The day begins with a parade down Government Road from the Community Centre to the ferry dock. Island kids line the curbs with bags ready to scoop up the candy that is traditionally scattered from the floats. From there we all gather in the Bowfest field for a day of local music, slug races, a community tug o war (kids vs parents) and whatever other activities are scheduled to take up the day. When we had young children, it was a busy day. Nowadays we mostly sit in the sun listening to the music, having the odd dance, and greeting old-timers that come by. It’s harder and harder to recognize faces every year as the island changes all the time. We’ve been here 25 years now, raised kids and sent them into the world, watched our Elders cash out and move away or die and leave behind another little piece of emptiness.
These events remind our little community of who we are, and, for many of us, who we were. These are markers in our community life that have stayed the same through multiple generations. That stability offers us the chance to see what is changing.
Not all change is bad. There are some amazing new people that arrived on the island in recent years, many of whom I count amongst my best friends and with whom I spend time, make music and share a coffee or a beer. But last year I found myself in a small circle of really old friends, most of whom were already living here when we moved here in 2001 and we had little to say to each other beyond just silently dancing together and appreciating the long standing connections we have, the stories we share, the struggles we’ve witnessed in each other’s lives and the implicit celebration that we are still here. Our kids have fledged, our health is good, and we are astonished by the new faces and activity all around us, sharing perhaps a slightly melancholic sense that the community is passing us by. And yet, if someone asks us if we’d like to run for Council or be on this or that committee, we demur. Nope. We’ve done that. Done our time. It’s time for others to find their own contribution.
For us, it’s all about those moments of listening to the band echo up the valley, hearing the ping of an aluminum bat smashing a softball into the blackberry bushes over the left centrefield fence , standing aside as kids rush to the chocolate that has fallen at your feet during the parade, or just lying in bed, revelling in the darkness, the stillness, and the quiet, and perking up from the edge of sleep when a humpback whale surfaces out in the bay.
A raining morning, connecting some readings and the hard work of seeing ourselves for who we really are.
I am sitting on the pier, fuelled by an espresso, just having completed volume 2 of Solvej Balle’s story On the Calculation of Volume. Volume 3 is sitting next to me ready to be cracked open as I wait for a friend to arrive from the mainland.
Balle’s work has been lauded for its beautiful writing (beautiful in translation too, thank you Barbara Haveland) that moves at a measured speed and is very clear and incisive. This is a story about noticing, set as it is on an eternally repeating 18th of November, charting the narrator’s exploration of her world. It sits very comfortably beside Samantha Harvey’s Orbital; a short novella that is saturated with gorgeous passages of writing, a novel way of seeing time and space, and an almost imperceptible pace.
As the title suggests, this is a book that investigates depth. Towards the end of the second volume comes the clue that unlocks the plot device: “Time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a pool, a container.” Volume 2 ends with a beautiful three page meditation on the world as containers, which I can only invite you read for yourself.
Locked in this container of time, the narrator Tara Selter has to discover depth in order to give her life some meaning. The story meanders between longer explorations, that include trying to solve her problem, seeking an experience of seasons, exploring the history of the land in which she finds herself. As she goes she records notes about what is important to her. It’s not clear that there is any reason for that other than that she is consigned to this single container of time as a human, she seeks deeper and deeper meaning in it.
One passage that stood with me is a conversation she has with a meteorologist she meets, who explains to her what season are:
“…the meteorologist then began to reflect on our strange relationship with the seasons. She talked about astronomical seasons, and meteorological seasons. About the calendar years division into spring and summer months, about people’s surprise when meteorological phenomenon did not occur with the calendar, even though everyone knew that any attempt to synchronize the weather with the predictability of planets and calendars was pointless.
She did not believe, however, that seasons could be regarded as meteorological phenomenon. Temperature and precipitation are meteorological phenomenon, she said. Cold and heat, cloud burst and drought, but seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomenon. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps. People ask if it won’t soon be summer, even though we are well into July, simply because the summer has been on the cool side. As a meteorologist one is almost expected to deliver particular weather conditions at particular times of year, she said. A proper summer. A proper winter. As if you hadn’t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather. We going to have a winter this year? As if the seasons were a concept of sorts that we dragged around with us. From childhood perhaps, she said, with winter snow and summer sun. Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps the human seasons really only existed in films or in our photo albums. Especially if you have children. She did it herself: took pictures of typical seasons. She had noticed that she took more pictures from the seasons that lived up to our expectations of them: pictures of snow in winter and bright sunshine in summer, a hot day on the beach, red and yellow leaves and a child in rain boots in autumn – and always snaps with sandals in the summer, even in summers when most days were rain boot days. As if we had templates for the seasons, and when everything fits, we take a picture. As if it is an event in itself that the weather has gotten right. If it is winter in a film, there is always a little snow, she said. Or frost. Even if the film is set in southern Europe, there will always be a sprinkling of white, to let us know that it is winter.”
Containers and constraints generate the spaces inside which we make meaning. What we choose to see, what we fit with our predetermined ideas, or what emerges as we explore things that aren’t implied by the constraints themselves. Containers are emergent. Meaning arises within them and about them.
Balle’s work is a gorgeous meditation on this, with a gently travelling plot line that takes sudden turns into new landscapes contained ointment the experience of a single day.
Volume 3 sits beside me. Volume 4 has just been released in English. There are seven volumes in total. All calculated.