It feels like a day of transitions. The weather is clear today, and a strong westerly pummeled Vancouver overnight. It is sunny now, but the cold air and sea level snow that is a hallmark of an El Niña winter is upon us for later in the week. So time to chop some more wood and harvest the last of my salad greens from the garden.
Canada’s men’s national soccer team lost to Croatia this morning our Alphonso Davies scored the first goal for Canada’s men’s team in world cup history and it was a beauty. The above photo is from his last game as a Vancouver Whitecap in 2018 before he headed to Bayern Munich where he has since set the world on fire. We have one game remaining and then this team will transition into the next cycle as we get ready to host the 2026 men’s World Cup without the likes of Atiba Hutchinson and Milan Borjan and some of those veterans that carried us for so long as we languished in obscurity. Today’s loss was tough, but we need this learning and tempering in the cauldron of global competition if we are to stay at this level. So one more game against Morocco and then after this tournament is over, attention transitions away to follow the women’s team who will be playing in the 2023 World Cup. I am keen to see how we do as the only major women’s soccer power in the world without a domestic professional league.
And it is the beginning of Advent today, a season I very much appreciate. The waiting for something to materialize, for the light to return…in all its physical and spiritual manifestations, this is a powerful season of transition into deep darkness and then out again. As if to embody it, Friday I went for a cliff top hike along the south shore of our Island, in a place known as Nicháych Nexwlélexwm, which is the very edge of the world in so many ways. I was looking for the humpback whales that have been hanging out there and after an hour of watching and waiting finally there were three, breaching and splashing and diving and feeding. The Sound is full of anchovies and herring at the moment and there is lots to eat. Even this morning, watching from the ferry as sea lions and gulls filled their bellies.
In the Art of Hosting world we have a few shared core teachings that show up in nearly all the learning workshops that happen. At some point we talk about complexity – we usually explore the Chaordic Path as a simple introduction into complexity – and we always touch on the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting.
Back in 2014 I was doing a project with the United Church of Canada looking at the different levels of their structure in British Columbia and imagining what they could also be. If there is one thing that Churches have consistently done from the beginning it is that they adopt new forms. At the moment the United Church, and many other mainline progressive Christian denominations, are going through a massive shift, probably the biggest one since the Reformation. And it’s affecting everything.
So as I was doing this consulting work I started meeting communities of people who were asking how could they live through these transitions. Not survive them necessarily, but go with the transformation that was happening. As a part of the work I was doing I started offering talks and workshops based in the Art of Hosting, but wrapped in the theology of the United Church, becasue it turns out that having a way to understand complexity and to host life community is both necessary in struggling churches AND is pretty much the basis of Christian practice.
Now for those who don’t know, the United Church of Canada is a progressive, liberal Protestant denomination committed to radical inclusion and social justice. I was raised in that Church and at one point had my heart set on becoming a minister in that Church. My own spiritual practice is grounded in contemplative Christianity and I am an active member of the Bowen Island United Church where I help lead worship and preach one Sunday a month so we can give our paid minister a break.
That is just context to help you understand the theology behind this talk.
This talk was a keynote for the Northern Presbytery of British Columbia annual meeting from 2014. That year the churches of northern BC were gathering in Prince George to be together and practice being a bigger community. They invited me to come and speak on the work I was doing around community building and I chose to share the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice and I relished the chance to share these ideas using stories and teachings from scripture.
So if you work with Churches or Christian religious communities and you are interested in the way the Chaordic Path and the Four Fold Practice basically help us use the teachings of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel in practice to build community, click here and have a listen.
It’s been a fair few interesting weeks. A heavy work schedule with some important in person facilitations, combined with steady online work and teaching and an extended family health emergency is stretching our resources around here. So here’s a little news.
Social media rethink
On the social media front I’m still active on Twitter, and just waiting to see what happens there. But I have also opened a Mastodon account and I like it better. Twitter was created in an era where the speed and interaction and brevity of text messaging met blogging. Mastodon feels much more like blogging in that we all have accounts that hosted in different places and you can follow each other. it’s like Twitter meets blogging plus an RSS feed. Consider your friends’ Mastodon accounts as mini blogs rather than twitter accounts. At its best, Twitter is great for banter and conversation and has a feel of a transparent text conversation. But it’s under the control of a single unstable genius at the moment and demonstrating why we should not trust critical infrastructure to single individuals or companies. Musk is messing with Twitter as if someone got hold of the power grid and decided to create a whole new type of power generation by firing all the hydro dam technicians and trying to find nuclear scientists to keep the old system going and also get a new one up and running right away.
Twitter was robust. Robust things fail catastrophically. Musk is in danger of taking the compancecy dive into chaos from which return is neight guaranteed nor cheap.
So just stay here by subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed or subscribing by email over there on the right sidebar, or add me at Mastodon @chriscorrigan@mastdn.ca. I’m still on Facebook and LinkedIn but I don’t interact much in those places.
What I’m doing besides work
I might start sharing some different content here, and probably will do so as well at Mastodon too, so in addition to posts here on complexity and facilitation and working with groups, you might start seeing some stuff relating to other passions I am interested in. That includes building Canada’s first ever supporter owned semi-pro soccer team, TSS Rovers, who won a men’s championship in our fourth season and are on our way to play pro-teams in Canada’s national championship for the Voyageur’s Cup. If you are in Canada you can buy a share here and be a part of history. Our teams play in the third level of men’s soccer in Canada and the highest level of women’s soccer.
You may know I am a long time amateur musician and I sing and play liturgical music, folks songs, Irish music and popular music and I have started expanding my guitar chops by studying and learning jazz guitar over the past few years. That has married two passions – jazz and guitar – that I have kept separate for most of my life because the thought of getting them together was overwhelming. But I’m having the time of my life playing this music. Enjoy what I am enjoying. Here’s a Canadian guitarist I am studying, Reg Schwager and legendary bassist Don Thompson playing Everything Happens To Me.
So those are a couple of things that might seem to pop up here out of the blue.
Some cool stuff to share
Finally, I continue to read and earn about my professional craft and lately I have come across some hight quality recourses that I HAVE to share with you all:
- A snapshot of REOS’s scenario planning methodology recently used in Australia and Aotearoa to address future wildfire issues. With thanks to my mate Geoff Brown, a member of that team. It’s so good I’ve added it to the Facilitation Resources page.
- A toolkit for starting up communities of practice from my friend Nancy White, who is just the best there is at this stuff.
- A reader-focussed report assessment tool from Fresh Spectrum that will help you keep your audience in mind so that the reports you are writing get used. This is a great harvesting tool.
- A nice six step process for strategic planning from my Aussie Art of Hosting mates at the Jeder Institute.
- A for you theory-heads, a paper by Albert Linderman on Sense-making Methodologies and Ethnography published at the Spryng.io website. I’ve started in on some of Dervin’s work on this. It’s heavy going in a good way.
So there you go. What have you been up to?
My shoes are covered in dust. The entire island is dry and crackly underfoot. We have had no significant rainfall since July 8 here ibn Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound which is highly unusual for us. After a very wet fall and spring last year, we had a lovely summer but it is as if someone left hom without unplugging it and a persistent ridge of high pressure offshore has ensured that any low pressure systems trundling across the North Pacific have been diverted north.
This is our rainy season here on the west coast. By now we typically would have a fairly consistent set of front and lows that would have passed over us dropping rain and more importantly filling the creeks and capping the mountains with the first brushes of snow. A steady flow of rain in the creeks and rivers gives the returning slamin something to hone in on as they find their way back to their creeks to spawn and die. We have had nothing. The land is dry. The lakes are shrinking. The rivers are a mere trickle.
in the last few days our inlet has been filled with smoke from wildfires burning to the south and east of us. The GOOD news with that is that the wind is changing and a shift in the weather patterns is in the offing; by Friday we should have our first 100mm rainstorm of the year. The fires will not survive that rainfall, but I’m curious to see how the land does. The soil is loose and dusty. Trees are drought weakened and the wash of the soil into the rivers will make it hard for the fish. Silty stream beds are not good for salmon spawn.
In the seas around us the waters are full of humpbacks and orcas. We have seen a gradual resurgence of marine mammal life in our inlet over the past 40 years, a phenomenon that has been enabled by good marine stewardship and documented by my friend Pauline Le Bel in her book Whale In The Door.
On Sunday, taking a deep day of rest, Caitlin and I chased some humpback whale sightings along the shoreline. A friend was out in his boat sending me texts about a pair if humbacks that were moving fast along N’chay’ch Nexwlelexwm, the south shore of our island that represents the boundary between the Squamish Nation territory and the rest of the world. The whales were travelling around that edge and rounded the corner of Cowan Point heading into Seymour Bay where they stopped and rested and fed for a while. We watched them for about an hour. The bay had a few boats who were being respectful and compliant with the marine mammal regulations. there was a sea lion spyhopping along, a pair of marbled murrelets, migrating geese and mergansers and both short bill and glaucous winged gulls. It was divine. Quiet, calm, full of life.
At one point the whale came up next to my friend’s boat and he snapped this photo above. That’s me on the shoreline in front of the leftmost garage door, watching through my binoculars with awe and reverence and respect. My buddy was in tears as this whale blessed him with its presence.
These times we are living in.
… i search for a form of reconciliation ecology … inventing, establishing and maintaining a new habitat designed for a diversity of living, working and playing … a place which possesses anima meaning breath, spirit and soul … at first, in the leaving, i imagined a radical break … on arrival have learned to accept a certain amount of conservation of the past needs preservation … perhaps even restoration … the challenge is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are required … i consciously accept the self-organizing complexity of this odyssey …
… i once dreamed of a place for a vibrant exchange of active creation and researching ingenuity … my formative experiences in Wroclaw & Vienna helped grow roots in my beloved prairie … the dream was transformed in a beautiful way yet in time a restless disquiet emerged … even discontent & disconnect … rootlessly committed to this place accompanied with my dearest companion i wander the communities …
He is writing here on a reflection about moving to Korea. And his reflections prompted some reflections from me too, about what is essential to preserve, what we see, what choices we make.
Here in Canada there is an interesting phenomena of preserving “heritage” buildings for some level of posterity. It’s interesting to think about what “heritage” means, and whose heritage we are talking about. In the urban environment it usually refers to examples of historical architecture but, as is the case here in Vancouver, that is largely settler architecture from a certain time period, usually between 100 and 150 years ago. There is an underlying assumption that we should protect these buildings, which means really restricting their uses. There is an underlying assumption about what “heritage” means and whose heritage we are talking about.
Where I live, on a small island, there is a heritage group that works to protect structures and the character of the place dating back to the period of the early 1900-1960s. This is a period folks call “the Union SteamShip Company era” in which the Union SteamShip Company not only serviced the island, but owned a resort and delivered hundreds of tourists and cottagers on the summer to what was known as “The Happy Isle.” There are a few structures and an orchard preserved from that time including our magnificent library building and a number of cottages that were used by families and later by a vibrant community of hippies and squatters in the 1960 and 70’s before they were all finally evicted in the 1980s. Following the end of the USSC era, the island fell very quiet and was just a bit too far away for a regular commuter community. A few hundred people were left, working hard to preserve the school and the post office. Many of them were formerly residents of the now abandoned cottages and they were the ones that seeded what has become the most recent era of Bowen Island history that began with a concerted effort to save the island from rapacious growth and then bring in essential services and finally incorporate as a municipality, which happened in 1999.
How does heritage act as a mirror? What image does it return to me when I gaze into it? What parts of it are relevant to my life today?
There are no permanent Squamish villages here today, but there are some unmarked and unprotected architectural sites on the island. A few descendants of some of the original settler families still live here, but for most of us our “heritage” is really an experience of gazing into a past we were never a part of. It’s not a mirror of my personal history but it is a reminder of the layers of history upon which I am living and from which I derive my life. I have only been here 21 years. What I have done is lived atop the infrastructure and history that has preceded me in this place and that includes the outright theft of the land from the original owners who were sustained completely by this land and sea for more than 10,000 years, and the establishment and building of infrastructure by settlers to eek out a living which feels now like it may actually become too much for us to afford, being a small population of 4200 living in a serviced community that is about the same area as Vancouver, with pipes and systems that were haywired together 50 years ago.
So as a settler, it’s important to me that we acknowledge the historical Squamish presence and continued contested ownership of this island. They have never sold it, ceded it, given it away, lost it in a war or otherwise allowed another people to claim it. In that sense, the history of squatting here is pretty interesting!
In places I have travelled to and lived in like the UK and Estonia, heritage of the everyday is about the continued use of a place. In the UK as a kid I lived in a 400 year old cottage (pictured above) that had been added to and renovated at least four times, including the complete incorporation of the hayloft on the adjacent barn in the 1970s as a master bedroom. The structure just grew along the lot adding indoor bathrooms, a few extra bedrooms, a modern kitchen and a garden. In other places, like Estonia, where the medieval city in Tallinn is intact at 800 years old, every building is used and changed. Coffee shops punch holes through walls to expand their space, the apothecary still exists, but with modern technology in place, and the medieval feast hall is an overpriced tourist restaurant that operates within the bones of the old structure with up to date kitchen equipment.
Conservation is a question of morals and ethics. Here in Squamish territory, I think the restoration of Howe Sound’s natural environment is a powerful statement that shows that we have a choice in what we declare “heritage” and worth of conservation. There is a contested view that says that Howe Sound was an industrial area and should remain so, by building an LNG plant or a gravel quarry at the mouth of a critical salmon stream, for example. And there are those of us who feel like not everything should be preserved. The mine at Britannia Beach almost completely destroyed the ecosystems of this place and it took decades of citizen action with occasional government support (and complete neglect by the companies that were just allowed to pollute take the profits and leave) to restore healthy marine ecosystems here.
Conservation and preservation is first and foremost, as Raymon says, “is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are required …” We have to answer questions about whether preserving is about stability of structure or continuation of use and by whom ein what way. These questions never leave us, and the choices we make reflect how we see who we are and who we will become, based on the history we choose to preserve or transform.