Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student
Another two friends died yesterday. They were well known men in our community and both part of the hosting world on our little Bowen Island, integral to providing experiences for visitors that allow us to provide well hosted learning experiences for people here. They didn’t always do it loudly, but they left legacies that are so important to what we are able to do here.
It has been a really strange few months with 9 deaths of people I know to various degrees; from close friends to intimate strangers. Two from suicide, one from a heart attack, the rest from cancer. Several “before their time.” It’s numbing. There are moments I’ve lost count of who has died since July.
I have been thinking lately – especially reflecting on the suicides – that perhaps my job might be to pick up the unclaimed portion of joy that my friends left in the world. It is a crazy world. There is suffering all around us and I understand the idea that “remaining normal in an insane world is insane.” Yet I feel strongly how life moves in me and through my friendships, and communities. I feel immense gratitude for fleeting moments and I realize that I am at times a fierce practitioner of play. Whether I’m playing soccer with my son in our local recreational league, playing music with my daughter and friends, creating workshops, supporting my local soccer teams by singing with hundreds in support of our players – I feel the intense surge of life that comes with the portion of joy that is left to me to claim.
These days I sing for Kay and Dan, the two Shannons, Kieran and Chris, Matthew and the three others (wow, I just remembered one more.) I sing and play for me, find sensemaking in a crazy world in the presence of connections with friends and strangers over the long cadence of lives intertwined or the fleeting moment of random encounters on the buses, sidewalks and trails.
Bernie de Koeven, a master practitioner of play, who himself is dying publically, shared this quote from a comment on his blog followed by his own reflection:
“Speaking of the very end, I recently read a modern classic, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. It explains culture (which I think includes play) as an outcome of this denial. In a sense then, we should not “be calm and carry on” to the very end, but arbitrarily, playfully, insistently dedicate ourselves to the never-ending. I think this is what many people mean by “love” and maybe what Bernie means by play.”
So we have on one side love and play; and on the other, the dead and dying; the somber and despairing. We mustn’t let ourselves get confused by any of these. Love and life, after all, are manifestations of each other. Love is the invitation to life. As is play. It’s all a matter of perspective, don’t you know. From this side, it’s all so obvious: love, play, life. Fear. Dread. Death.
You stand here. The rest there.
Feel the embrace.
So that’s where I am these days. I know the world is crazy right now. I know it’s hard to find the good in the news but you won’t find it there because the news asks you to be only a passive consumer of the world’s pain and joy. What we need to do is rise from our seats and participate in the world as fully as possible. Life is the ultimate infinite game. The joy we seek is located in the little interactions and small kindnesses initiated or received; in play.
My wish for all of us is that we can claim the portion of unclaimed joy that others have left for us, and especially those who rode who claimed more than their share of suffering and rode it to their their end. I know clearly what they want for us, those they loved and whom they left behind. It is to continue living.
I’m here, playing, hunting joy, embracing it when it comes. Not always finding it, but cultivating the eye that sees it in the small and subtle currents of living. And you’re there too, doing your thing, but now reading this and playing along, at least in this moment.
Isn’t that beautiful image? Here on the west coast of Canada the Douglas-firs and cedars and hemlocks that cover the mountains and islands rake the sky for moisture. As the rains return in the fall, the trees help the forest drink. Rain showers pass through and for hours afterwards, the trees drip water onto the forest floor, feeding all the understory and the mushrooms that keep them alive.
That image was one given to me by Chris Weaver, a fellow Open Space Technology facilitator and a poet and a friend who spent years on this coast, south of me, in Washington State. I say friend, in a particularly 21st century way. We never met in person, but the beauty of his words, our shared professional growth and our email exchanges from 1998 to 2006 were rich and playful and full of depth. He brought out a part of myself that I loved.
Chris died the other day, the second of my friends this summer to succumb to suicide from depression.
He is being remembered by friends and colleagues the world over, because his death was untimely and his life was one that touched many people very deeply, even if we were not always at his side.
When my father in law died in 2004, he consoled me this way:
my whole heart descends with you to that place of grieving, all interlaced withthe joy of life well-lived – the test so finely and passionately played insun and rain and mud.
He was referring to Test cricket in that blessing, a sport about which he knew nothing but he enjoyed witnessing the banter between me and Alan Stewart about the Australia-India test series of 2004. He could take something like that and, yes, weave it into a consolation.
Later that month, our mutual friend Ashley Cooper hosted a small conversation on her blog about how we all wanted to be remembered, and Chris shared this:
it’s funny, i have two pieces of music that are back-to-back on a cd called “the gentle side of john coltrane,” and for some reason when i listen to them, i often think, those two songs are all i need for my memorial. they are about feeling it all, and releasing it all into joy. track 11 is “in a sentimental mood,” duke ellington’s tune, a rare time when coltrane and ellington recorded together. track 12 is called “dear lord,” with mccoy tyner back on the keys, & if my life has a theme song, that’s it.
since you’re taking notes for the event ash, they’re both slow-dances
Well, the time has come for us to remember Chris, and so, here are those two pieces of music.
In that post I shared a vision for my own memorial in which I said that I’d love an Open Space with everyone who knew me to be gathered together to talk about good work they could do in the world. To that idea Chris Weaver simply replied:
“i’ll be there, chris (even if my own memorial comes first!)”
Chris’ words are spanning the globe right now as his colleagues and friends remember him. Cherish these drops of rain. Long after the storm has passed, they continue to slake our thirst.
Godspeed friend. See you at my memorial.
One of the things I am learning reading Stuart Kauffman’s book “Reinventing the Sacred” is just how powerful and pervasive the phenomenon of creative emergence is at every level in our world. From the very tiny chemical interactions that begin to define what life is, up to the order of the planetary biosphere and noosphere to the cosmic scale, emergence from pre-adaptions is a pattern that is everywhere, that offers a counterpoint to the reductionism of physics and yet does not violate the laws of physics at all. This paragraph sums up his premise:
“We are beyond the hegemony of the reductionism of half a century ago. We have seen that Darwinian natural selection and biological functions are not reducible to physics. We have seen that my law of collectively autocatalytic sets in the origin of life is also not reducible to physics. We have seen creditable evidence that science is moving forward towards an explanation for the natural emergence of life, agency, meaning, value, and doing. We have, thus, seen emergence with respect to a pure reductionism. Thanks to the nonergodicity and historicity of the universe above the level of atoms, the evolution of the biosphere by Darwinian preadaptations cannot be foretold, and the familiar Newtonian way of doing science fails. Such preadaptations point to a ceaseless creativity in the evolution of the biosphere. If by a natural law we mean a compact prior description of the regularities of the phenomena in question, the evolution of the biosphere via preadaptations is not describable by law. We will soon find its analogues in economic and cultural evolution, which, like the biosphere, are self-consistently self-constructing but evolving wholes whose constituents are partially lawless. This is a radically different scientific worldview than we have known. I believe this new scientific worldview breaks the Galilean spell of the sufficiency of natural law. In its place is a freedom we do not yet understand, but ceaseless creativity in the universe, biosphere, and human life are its talismans. I believe this creativity suffices to allow us to reinvent the sacred as the stunning reality we live in. But even more is at stake. Our incapacity to predict Darwinian preadaptations, when their analogues arise in our everyday life, demands of us that we rethink the role of reason itself, for reason cannot be a sufficient guide to live our lives forward, unknowing. We must come to see reason as part of a still mysterious entirety of our lives, when we often radically cannot know what will occur but must act anyway. We do, in fact, live forward into mystery. Thus we, too, are a part of the sacred we must reinvent.” (from “Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion” by Stuart A. Kauffman)
Now I want to be clear that despite my interest in theology, I am not reading this book from a theological perspective. In fact I am wondering a bit why Kauffman insists on tying his amazing proposition to the idea of “the sacred” because it actually makes for something of a distraction in his narrative. And as we get into the extension of his ideas into the economic and cultural realms, the idea of the sacred seems less and less interesting. What is more interesting is to see the parallels between the physical and biological acts of creative emergence and the way in which our cultural, social and economic lives are intertwined with natural processes.
To me this is the good part about this book. It validates that approaches to complexity and emergence are necessary parts of human social life and we need to relearn them (perhaps even re-place them as sacred epistemologies alongside the religion of reductionism) and put them to use to counter the dark stuff that has crept into our human world through our cleverness and addiction to a method of analysis that reduces the world and it’s problems to mere parts.
More from the Kauffman book:
“The wondrous diversity of life out your window evolved in ways that largely could not be foretold. So, too, has the human economy in the past fifty thousand years, as well as human culture and law. They are not only emergent but radically unpredictable. We cannot even prestate the possibilities that may arise, let alone predict the probabilities of their occurrence. This incapacity to foresee has profound implications. In the physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s definition, a “natural law” is a compact description beforehand of the regularities of a process. But if we cannot even prestate the possibilities, then no compact descriptions of these processes beforehand can exist. These phenomena, then, appear to be partially beyond natural law itself. This means something astonishing and powerfully liberating. We live in a universe, biosphere, and human culture that are not only emergent but radically creative. We live in a world whose unfoldings we often cannot prevision, prestate, or predict—a world of explosive creativity on all sides. This is a central part of the new scientific worldview.”
(from “Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion” by Stuart A. Kauffman)