That statement will either mean something to you, or it will mean nothing to you. It might mean nothing to you if washy space-y pretentious prog rock wasn’t your bag in the 1980s. But it was mine.
I have always had an eclectic taste in music and back in the early 1980s when I was 15 my friend Aiden, who was a couple of years older than me got me into all the British prog rock bands like Yes and Genesis and Pink Floyd and Emerson Lake and Palmer who had all done their best work in the previous decade. As a devotee of Queen, I was a bit suspicious of synthesizers, but I have also always had a penchant for drones and atmospheric washes and mystical poetry and stuff like that. Bands like Rush were doing all that, even if Queen, until 1981 anyway, was explicitly rejecting it.
Anyway, my love of Jon Anderson’s voice and Vangelis’ notoriety for the Chariots of Fire and Bladerunner soundtracks led me to an album that for a couple of years was a staple in my Walkman. “Private Collection” was bliss to listen to through the headphones. The following year, they released “The Best of Jon and Vangelis” and that was the extent of their discography that I owned on cassette.
Here is “Horizon” from from “Private Collection” in all of its 23 minute long glory.
Headphones on. Bliss out.
It was in this day In 1992 that I started my first real job in an office, beginning work as a policy analyst at the National Association of Friendship Centres in Ottawa.
I can remember that day vividly. It was a lovely warm morning in Ottawa and I even remember wearing a light purple collared shirt (it was the early 1990s) and carrying my lunch in a newly purchased MEC fabric briefcase that served me for many years.
The NAFC was small at that time, just an Executive Director, Jerome Berthelette, a financial guy, Brian Stinson, our office manager Mel Maracle, Molly LaFontaine who was the receptionist and EA to Jerome and Marc Maracle who was in charge of different projects. I think my first day was Jerome’s last and Terry Doxtator started the same day I did as Executive Director.
As a student I worked as a researcher for David Newhouse at Trent University and the NAFC was the subject of a set of case studies we wrote on Indigenous-Government program negotiations. Through the work and the material I used in my honours thesis on organizational development I got to know the staff and when I moved to Ottawa with Caitlin in 1991 Marc gave me a chance to come and work for the organization.
Lots was going on in Ottawa at that time. There were events marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s journey with many amazing shows and exhibits and productions on Indigenous resistance. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal People was at work and we contributed research and testimony to that. The Charlottetown Accord negotiations were dominating the policy discussions in the city and the talk of what it means to implement Constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights in Canada was everywhere. The fallout from the Oka crisis was on everybody’s mind and the fading years of the Mulroney government and subsequent transition to the Chrétien government threw up many policy challenges and a few key opportunities to our movement.
I worked there for two and a half years. It formed so much of what I went on to do for the rest of my life. I was grateful for the learning I got in the job in facilitating collaborative policy making processes. It was exciting to be in Ottawa during historic constitutional discussions – watching the first draft of the Charlottetown Accord come over our fax machine! – and I got to contribute to things like the Royal Commission, the establishment of the Aboriginal Head Start Program and the renewal and restructuring of the Friendship Centre core funding program.
Thirty years is a long time. And the blink of an eye. And I’m grateful these many years later for all the guidance and support I received as a young guy starting out. I’m proud to still call myself a Friendship Centre supporter and that movement will always have my heart and thanks for helping me get going in the world.
This morning the wind and rain continue here in the islands of the south coast of British Columbia. It has been a wet fall and winter – perhaps the wettest since the time of the Flood stories – and this is the coldest May we’ve had for a long time, which brings its own hazards. It’s all down to an extended La Nina event that pipes cool water into the north Pacific and keeps the air masses cold and turbulent, resulting in reliable patterns of convection, instability and therefore precipitation and windy weather weather.
I live in a very rainy part of the world, and so to really love living here, one has to love the rain. This morning as I took my coffee to sit by the sea, I was struck by just how immersed I was in water. The sea of course, which bathes the shoreline and brings all kind of nutrients into our inlet. The creek beside me, channelling the rain from the mountain into the bay, delivering different nutrients back to the shore line. The rain that was falling into my coffee cup, spattering against my hood. And my breath, precipitating in small clouds that echoed their larger cousins across the channel, covering the mountains on the mainland. An entire symphony of sound all played on the same instrument.
For me, actually, water is my favourite image of God. If you are a spiritual or religious person, your engagement with the Divine is of course fraught with reductionist peril. As Lao Tzu wrote in the very first line of a book about the Tao, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” It’s a disclaimer. He says, “look, everything I am about to write here isn’t the things I am actually writing about, so take that under advisement.” One must be very cautious talking about images of God, the Creator, the Divine. Every name severly limits your experience of that which you are trying to talk about. Whatever name or image you have is like trying to watch Barcelona FC play through a tiny keyhole, in the outside door of the Camp Nou.
And yet, the image that works best for me is “water.” It brings life, and it can sweep it away. It can induce terror and soothe the soul. One can go for a hair raising boat trip from which you barely escape alive and then heal yourself with a soothing cup of tea and a bath. Water also has a characteristic of non-duality which gives it an important characteristic as it relates to my spiritual practice. As our atmosphere is made of water vapour, and so are we, it is true to say that “I am in the water and the water is in me.”
To end, here is a poem by William Stafford that I used in our fifth Complexity from the Inside Out course this morning, borrowed from a blog post by my buddy Tenneson. It points towards this non-dual whole I am talking about.
Being a Person
William Stafford
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
One of the birds that lives on our island and can be heard almost year round is the red-breasted nuthatch. These little birds call out with a soft “meep-meep-meep’ and spend most of their time upside down on trees trucks and seed cones. Around here they are common all year round.
Except this year. I haven’t heard a nuthatch for months. On the back of a record wet autumn and winter with some record cold spells and a persistent Lan Niña effect keeping the ocean cool, I wonder what is going on. Red-breasted nuthatches are ubiquitous in our forest and now they are silent. I don’t know why. I’m a bit worried actually.
As I was out this morning listening for one, it occured to me that it isn’t easy to spot what is not there, and what has stopped happening. It’s easy to be seduced by the presence of the Townsend Warblers who have been singing in the morning for the last few weeks. But to notice things that aren’t there, you need to have a more deeply embedded sense of place, have lived through multiple repetitions and iterations and know the rhythms to be able to see what isn’t there and what has stopped. I’m not sure I can even remember the last time I heard a nuthatch.
As a consultant coming in to work with organizations and communities I have to remind myself that what I see in front of me isn’t the whole story. People often ask questions like “Who isn’t here?” and “What aren’t we doing?” but I can’t remember every asking, “What has stopped happening, or hasn’t happened in a while that surprises or concerns you?” I’ll have to start.
There is much that is unseen, much that has stopped. Am I talking to the people who are embedded enough in the context to notice that? Are we entranced by the latest creative initiative such that we don’t know when certain things stopped happening. In healthy organizations, does anyone remember when the painful interactions stopped? Does anyone remember why?
In a world that is transient with attention and rootedness in place, we lose the capacity to notice what is strangely absent. Make sure you work with people who can tell you both what is present and what is absent. We are losing many things that are important. Can we notice when they stopped and why?
My favourite places to walk are along coastal paths, preferably along cliff tops or wild shorelines. On my home island we have very few places where one can take an extended stroll along such a place as most of the shoreline is privatized and even though in Casnada all shore up to the high water mark is public right of way, much of the Nex?wlélex?wm/Bowen Island coast line is steep and rocky and access to the intertidal zone is restricted.
But there is a glorious walk along the shoreline at Cape Roger Curtis and it is my favourite place on the island. For about a kilometer and a half, the trail winds along the shoreline, part of it even crossing a cantilevered boardwalk, pinned into a sliff side maybe 20 meters about the rocky shore below. From that trail, it is common to see marine mammals such as seals and sea lions, and I have spotted harbour porpoises, killer whales and even a humpback whale from the trail.
in living systems the most important and interesting zones are the ecotones, the place where two ecosystems meet. This tends to be where the most life is. Where the forest meets the sea is a rich area of nutrition and growth. And Cape Roger Curtis is doubly special and edgy becasue it is the point where Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound meets the Strait of Georgia which makes up the half of the main body of water that is the Salish Sea. It is here that currents swirl and meet, with the salty ocean water meeting the fresher water that flows from the glacier and streams that rise above our inlet. The coastla trail winds down the west side of the island, around the Cape and along the south shore, which in the Squamish language is called Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, a name which captures the edges of the forest and the sea, which is also the edge of Squamish territory. From here on out is the big wide world.
Today that churning seas with its 4 meter tides is nurturing schools of anchovy and herring which have draw sea lions back for their annual feed. They have been hauling out in large number on one of the unused docks at the Cape over the past several years. At times there are as many as thirty around – especially when the Biggs Killer Whales are out hunting them – but today there where only four or five. Offshore there was a large raft of surf scoters, number 5-600, and gulls and cormorants were similarly hunting and diving into schools of these rich feed fish. In the nearby forest townsend warblers and song sparrows were calling, while in the skies above a battle was raging between a pair of ravens and an eagle. It appeared as if the eagle’s appetite had disrupted the ravens’ family plans and they were angry.
Much of my spiritual practice comes through a tradition of monastic and contemplative practice that was formed in places like this, on the edges of continents, on the edges of territories, on the ecotones between the known world and the mysterious beyond. It is a place where the heart is awakened and the senses sharpened, and the power of the natural world is so strong that it overwhelms the temporary intrusion of a human.