Just beautiful weather here the last week. We have been living under a high pressure system that is forcing some wonderful meterological phenomena. Notably, the high pressure traps cold air near the sea and creates an inversion, meaning that the moisture can’t escape and form clouds, so it lingers at sea level forming think banks of fog that fill the Strait of Greorgia and Parts of Howe Sound.
Last night the fog bansk were as thick as they can get and all night long we were treated to the soothing symphony of dozens of different fog horns sounding out in the dark. the Point Atkinson lighthouse, which is miles away at the entrance to English Bay has a classic two tone deep “eeeee-ooooo” and the whistles and horns from moving ships in the night answered the call.
This morning in the bright sunshine on Bowen, the fog did it’s best to fill the Sound, but we somehow escaped the cool, and we are being treated to an incredible display of light and blue sky and grey fog flowing in from the Strait. There is something to be said about how bright the sun is when it rises out of the fog and reflects off the tops of what previously obscured it.
Yesterday, the kids and I went skiing at Cypress and the view from Mount Strachan shows the way the fog coats the city and eases part way into Howe Sound. It made for beautiful views, and a gorgeous sunset.
Just in from an hour SUPping around Mannion Bay and Miller’s Landing. It is sunny and warm today – 5 degrees C – and there is not a breath of wind out. The water is so calm there isn’t even any swell in the Queen Charlotte Channel. Everything is flat and calm and quiet, like a long sigh.
I started out from Pebbly Beach and rounded the north point. Headed out towards Miller’s Landing for 20 minutes, and then sat on my board, bobbing on the sea. Out in the channel, a seal was splashing. No sign of the huge pod of hundreds of dolphins that had been spotted earlier this week of Cowan Point. Utter calm. Utter, utter calm.
It could have been a summer evening on the water except that there were no boats around. I had the whole of Howe Sound to myself.
Coming up from the beach I ran into Norma Dallas who owns the Bowen island Marina and we talked about what it feels like to be out on the water all alone on days like this. We agreed that the words to describe it are “humility” and “gratitude.” That we are alive to experience this is simply a gift. To have snow capped mountains and a calm ocean to hold me, is an incredible thing. To feel my smallness in all of that timeless beauty is a fine teaching.
Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power. We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars. Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world. We might hate the implications of a fossil fuel economy, but everything we do is firmly embedded within it. We might despise colonization, but we know that we are alos guilty of it in many small ways,
The reason challenges like that are difficult to resolve is that we are embedded within them. We are a part of them and the problem is not like something outside of ourselves that we apply force to. Instead it is like a virus or a mycellium, extending it’s tendrils deep into our lives. We are far more the product of the problems we wish to solve than we are the solutions we long to develop.
Social change is littered with ideas like “taking things to scale” which implies that if you just work hard enough, the things you will do will become popular and viral and will take over the world. We can have a sustainable future if “we just practice simple things and then take them to scale.” The problem with this reasoning is that the field in which we are embedded, that which enables us to practice small changes is heavily immune to change. Our economy, our energy systems, our governments are designed to be incredibly stable. They can withstand all kinds of threats and massive changes, This is a GOOD THING. I would hate to have the energy system that powers my life to be fickle enough to be transformed by every good idea that comes along about sustainable power generation. So that is the irony. In the western world, the stability that we rely on to be able to “make change” is exactly that which we desire to change.
We are embedded in the system. We ARE the system. That which we desire to change is US. You want a peaceful world, because you are not a fully peaceful person – violence has seeped into your life, and you understand the implications of it. This is also a GOOD THING. Because, as my friend Adam Kahane keeps quoting from time to time “if you are not a part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.” Real change in stable societies like Canada comes only from catastrophic failure. That may be on our horizon, but I call you a liar if it’s something you desire. It will not be pretty. Living on the west coast of Canada, I sometimes think about it because a massive earthquake will strike here – possibly in my lifetime – and it will change everything instantly and massively and forever. So, while climate change and economic collapse are probabilities, earthquakes are certainties.
So let’s forget about prototyping new things and “taking them to scale.” But let’s not forget about prototyping new things. Because one of the big lessons from the living systems world view is that change happens in an evolutionary way. It happens deep within the system and it requires two resources we all have – creativity and time. It does not require hope. Living systems do not hope. They just change.
Years ago I was inspired by Michael Dowd’s ideas captured in “Thank God for Evolution” in which he talks about mutations as the vehicle of change in evolving systems. Of course this is a widespread thought, but it was quite liberating to me when I first discovered it because it compels us to use our own creativity to make change. Practicing something different, as some small level, is not a useless endeavour. There is no way to know what will happen when you mutate the system. And so that is a reason for practicing. That is why I love Occupy and #IdleNoMore and other social gathering practices. They are creative mutations of the status quo. And they are undertaken without any expectation of massive change. Instead they seed little openings, the vast majority of which don’t go anywhere. In an evolutionary system, mutations may introduce new levels of adaptability, but they might alos kill off the organism. But to survive and evolve, an organism needs to mutate. Remaining the same is also suicidal, because everything else is mutating and changing, and you will lose your fitness if you don’t also change.
So the second resource we all have is time. if you are beholden to making change along a strategic critical pathway, especially in a complex living system, you will suffer terrible delusions. Very few of us have that kind of time. The kind of time we do have is the time to let whatever we do work or fail. To orient yourself to this kind of time, you need to practice something with no expectation of it’s success. The moment you cling to a desired result is the moment suffering creeps into your work, and the moment you begin to lose resilience. Adaptability is reliant on creative imaginations working resourcefully.
So changing from within has something to do with all of this. Watching #IdleNoMore is to witness a celebratory mutation in the system of colonization. It is impossible to say if it will have the desired results that people project upon it. But of course it will “work.” We need to sit and watch it work as a mutation in a living system. And the bonus is that we get to round dance while we do it!
Several little realignings in my life have meant that this blog has gone through one of it’s periodic wanings. Also, I have been enjoying some time off and some time developing projects which aren’t ready to be written about yet. But I’m still here, watching calendars tick over, watching the rhythms of light and darkness oscillate in everything, and committed more than ever to a kind of gratitude of the present moment that seems helpful in a world where we are increasingly disenfranchised from everything that lies outside the skin (and some that lies within as well.)
Meg Wheatley has a new book out, and her message is pretty resonant with what I have been thinking lately: that spiritual warriorship is essentially doing the right thing anyway. Doing it in spite of the fact that nothing might work, in spite of the fact that we know no certainty for our effectiveness in the world, that we are small and human and able to do what we are able to do. I have appreciated that.
I don’t like making new year’s resolutions, but in these temporal turnings my thought turns to what is alive in me that may take shape in the next year. At this point I’m refining a new spiritual practice, trying to fit some stuff about what I know into some old stories that I know pretty well. It is engaging my mind and heart and making me more compassionate, but the path is a confusing one and I think being knocked around by it is helpful, for to have certainty in a spiritual practice while swimming in uncertainty is a dangerous thing. I am appreciating a spiritual practice that is chaotic and confusing and demands my attention to inconsistency and struggle. It wants me to be rational and compassionate, exploring new frontiers and rooting myself deeply in old stories. So…
This year too, I’m trying to figure out how to work with power. I mean real, brutal, cold and independent power. Power that doesn’t need me or doesn’t care about me, but might occasionally invite me to engage with it. How do you work WITH the system that you hold blame for? How do you work from within? This comes from a place of occupying, not moving against. It comes from an idea that if we occupy exactly where we are at the moment, we are in good shape, doing what we can. I love the flashmob round dances that #IdleNoMore is putting on. What does that look like when you are bringing that kind of serious play to questions like “how do I bring more life to my work in the bank? Or with a land developer? Or with the establishment?”
My friends Tim Merry, Marguerite Drescher and Tuesday Ryan-Hart and my beloved Caitlin Frost are deepening this inquiry at ALIA this year. Consider joining us.
And I think this is the year I look at the practice of participating, as one of the core Art of Hosting practices. What does it men to be a participant in different contexts? Whose responsibility is it for a good experience? Is cynicism just a way of not participating? I feel this one deeply in my bones, thanks to a lovely inquiry into the nature of the sacred with my friend Tenneson Woolf.
Travel-wise, I’m lucky to have a lot of local work lined up for this year. Nevertheless, I’m off to Ontario and Quebec next week and will travel to Sweden, Denmark, Chicago, calgary and around British Columbia a little this year. I may also visit Estonia and Zimbabwe as well. And who knows what else will come my way. i’m trying to reduce my travel and have happily lost my Air Canada Elite status for the coming year, which was a goal of mine from a couple of years ago. It means that I am travelling less and working closer to home.
Elsewhere, this will be a year of all season stand up paddleboarding, continued music making in sacred and secular contexts (it’s all sacred actually!) and being close to the natural world. Something about a paddle in my hand, a song in my heart and a lung full of forest air.
And I may even return to this space more frequently.
See you out there.
Working with groups is not easy. This is Ian McGeechan, manager of the British and Irish Lions before a dead rubber test.
My friend Kathy Jourdain was quoted yesterday as saying “our power comes from our vulnerability.” This video reminds me of how that feels some days.