This quote from Richard Rohr, is one of the core principles of the Center for Action and Contemplation.
Humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.
It is also good complexity praxis, good leadership practice and good pedagogy.
I was on a coaching call this morning where this came up too, listening to a team I am working with describe the trap we often find ourselves in as consultants, tempted to provide the new things a group should be doing, often in the form of recommendations or lists of actions and projects to be managed. The idea is that we often try to get folks to learn and be different and then generate projects or plans that they can execute.
And that is not a good way to do it in emergent, complex and dynamic environments. If I want to learn to think differently I need to put myself in situations where the constraints afford me different possibilities to act differently. For example, I am currently learning to play jazz and I am currently without a teacher meaning that I am relying on lots of online resources to help guide me. The danger with this is that I can just learn how to play licks and lines and chord progressions or scale exercises based on what someone else is doing. This is not really making music, but rather making sounds. If I’m not careful all I will learn to do is ape teachers, master exercises or imitate recordings and that’s not why I want to learn jazz. I want to learn jazz to be able to express myself differently on guitar and for a myriad of other reasons that I play music.
Like any language, jazz has a grammar and a vocabulary. The grammar is the harmonic and melodic theory that underpins the style of music, some of which is shared with other musical forms and some of which is uniquely “jazz” in the same way that languages have different dialects which may even be mutually unintelligible amongst speakers of the same language. The vocabulary is made up of phrases and lines that one learns in context, much as you might hear a familiar word or phrase being spoken in a language you are learning. Using these phrases and lines, based in the common rules of grammar (or deliberately breaking them) requires, almost literally, speaking them out.
And the remarkable thing is that when I play this new material either against a backing track or, ideally, with another person, I learn to THINK differently about the music I am making. There is no amount of study of written notes and harmonic theory that will make me a jazz musician. Playing jazz is a way of thinking about music, expression, collaboration, culture, improvisation, order, tension, control and creativity. It must be lived into.
Or as I wrote down during my coaching call this morning, we grow through what we go through.
Teaching people to think differently is impossible without providing the affordances first for us to act differently.
You might not know that one of the things I have developed a deep passion for over the past 20 years or so is football. Soccer. Association football. Fütbol. It started when I lived in the UK as a kid and supported our local team Tottenham Hotspur. It waned a bit during the 1980s and 1990s when it was hard to watch games and no one in Canada really cared about the sport. But one of the great gifts of the internet was rekindling familiarity with the sport that I love.
I love it for so many reasons, not the least of which is that it is complexity practice embodied, that it is about community and belonging, that it is about accessibility and passion and love and activism and development. And you get to stand and sing with people in public, which is never a bad thing. It is a beautiful game and it truly is “life.” It is an expression of culture and place and time that embodies so much of the struggles that take place throughout society. And it has the capability to drive you into all kinds of emotional territory and gives us a chance to explore all of those topographies of being human.
So this past weekend was kind a distillation of all that and I just wanted to record it all for posterity to see what happens when 48 passes in life of a football supporter.
For me the weekend began on Friday night when TSS Rovers played two matches in the men’s and women’s divisions of League 1 BC. League 1 is a semi-professional tier in Canadian soccer and, on the men’s side, is the second tier. On the women’s side it is currently the highest level of women’s soccer as we don’t yet have a domestic professional league in Canada. We don’t have promotion or relegation in our soccer system at the moment, and so our teams exist so that we can develop players and move them into higher tiers of the professional game. They players get promoted not the teams.
TSS Rovers is a club I have been involved with since they fielded a team of all-Canadian men in the United Soccer League 2 which is the fourth tier of American soccer. We started a supporter group called The Swanguardians, which a radically inclusive group (anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic) inspired by similar groups in places like St. Pauli in Germany, and Detroit City FC in the USA. Over the pandemic years our support for the club developed into a few of us working with the club to create a supporters trust and this year we became the first club in Canada to offer up to 49% of it’s equity ownership to supporters. We have sold over 650 shares to 300 co-owners since December and our initial offer is still open.
One of the initiatives our Swanguardians supporter group has undertaken, is a a Prideraiser, which is an event done by North American supporters groups throughout Pride month. Pledge an amount per goal and every goal scored raises money for a charity. This year we are supporting Rainbow Refugee in Vancouver. The club is also raising money for its newly minted Foundation, to provide funds and scholarships to kids who want to play soccer and develop their game. We kicked off our Prideraiser campaign on Friday and our women’s team scored 7 goals right out of the gate. Subsequently they scored another 2 yesterday and the men’s team scored 3 yesterday to to bring our 48 hour total up to 12 goals with 8 matches left to play in June! Over $600 raised.
Saturday the Vancouver Whitecaps played at home and although I have been an active supporter of that team for 14 years, I gave up my season’s tickets over the way they have handled numerous sexual abuse scandals over the years. Until there is a leadership change there I won’t be attending live matches, but I still follow the team and have many many friends who are active in the various supporters groups. On Saturday the contracted security force at BC Place where the Whitecaps play, made a complete botchup of a situation and ended up ejecting one of my close friends who is the President and lead capo of the Southsiders on the basis of provably false accusations. BC Place security has been plagued with issues for many years now relating to general security theatre and under trained staff being given too much policing authority, and this event was a real nadir. Football and life collide in all the ways.
Yesterday I was excited to celebrate my birthday with my family by all going into Vancouver to watch our National Men’s Team play a World Cup preparation match against Panama. I started the day by watching Grimsby Town secure promotion to the English Football League (and there is a whole other story why that matters to me) and then went into the city to meet our kids and their partners for the game and a birthday dinner.
Our men’s team has been amazing in this World Cup qualifying cycle, ranked 38th in the world now after moving up from 119th. We won our Confederation qualification tournament and qualified for our first world cup since 1986. We have immense talent on the team right with the likes of Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David, Cyle Larin, Atiba Hutchinson, Stephen Eustaquio, and many others. This is our golden generation of men’s players, and they are finally starting to show their stuff on the world stage. I would argue they are beginning to reach to the levels that our women’s team have occupied over the past ten years!
Unfortunately our National Soccer Association has been dithering on negotiating a contract for them and after hoping for discussions to take place since March, the Canada Soccer Association finally met with them on June 2 and tabled an offer that was far below what the players considered fair. As a result the players refused to train and then at the last minute, without an acceptable contract in place for their service, refused to play the Panama friendly. There are a million nuances to this situation, but as always I back the players who have devoted their lives to this game and to representing Canada and growing the Canadian game. It is their bodies that do the work, their lifetime commitment that has secured history and while of course they are supported by lots of folks, ultimately in Canada we do a poor job of supporting our men’s and women’s teams. They have carried the country on their backs, have been willing to negotiate and did not deserve to be treated with so much disrespect.
There is lots you can read about this evolving situation (and its wider implications for our fledgling national professional men’s league), but it is one more example of how fütbol is life. And in life I almost always support the workers in these situations, and especially where health, safety and long term injury and disability are the price of playing for your country.
People often say that sports and life should be separate. That there is no room for politics in sports or that it doesn’t matter. But not only is that not true at all, but football in particular is a broad canvas on which the entirety of the human experience is painted. In the last 48 hours, I’ve been amazed to witness just how varied that canvas can be, and so, that’s probably worth recording here for posterity.
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.
“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.”
- Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis. An account of a radically open community development approach from Tunisia called Tamkeen. Lots in this piece to think about. Ht: Marcus Jenal, whose newsletter always delivers fantastic stuff.
- The Northern Ireland Assembly met, this time with simultaneous interpretation of the languages of English, Irish and Ulster Scots. More on these languages and dialects in Ulster on this beautiful video playlist from the Open University
- 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.
- A discussion of Orthodox Christianity and theosis within the natural world, courtesy of Dave Pollard’s monthly link post.
- A fantastic list of mostly books on encountering silence in the Christian Contemplative tradition from Carl McColman’s blog.
- Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith on the history and practice of Loving Accountability
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.
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.