Just a picture of the ordinary full moon I took a few years ago through my binoculars.
The moon will rise tonight, about the same time the sun sets, hence tonight is a full moon. This happens every 28 days or so. It will be a “supermoon” because about three or four times a year, the moon’s orbit carries it to a point where it’s closest point to Earth coincides with a full moon – as it will tonight – making this full moon appear a little bigger in the sky than the 9 or 10 other full moons. And it will be a “blue moon” because in this case, it is the third full moon in a calendar season that contains four full moons, which is one of the two definitions of a blue moon, the other being “the second full moon in a calendar month,” which this one isn’t.
Take away the calendar and here is what happens. The moon rises every day at different times an in different phases. Every time the moon orbits the earth it does so in a little wobble that carries it between about 405,000 and 363,000 kms from us. The solar seasons also happen every year, as the earth tilts on its axis and oscillates between the June and December solstices and the March and September equinoxes.
So that’s what is happening, but it’s only when we import meaning on to these different events are colliding at the same time that we end up with some mild excitement about a “rare blue supermoon.“
So first, what is rare about the moonrise tonight? Well, this particular seasonal blue moon, actually happens about every 18-24 months. The next one after tonight will occur on May 20, 2027.
Supermoons occur about 3 or 4 times a year. Super seasonal blue moons occur on average about every 10 years, but the next one will happen in March 2037. So what is physically happening is pretty rare, in terms of human lifetimes. But unless you knew all this it’s unlikely you will notice anything different or care.
The whole origin of the term “blue moon” is worth diving into because it’s a mix of colloquial expressions, etymology, misheard and misunderstood words, and superstition. It is in fact this history of meaning that makes tonight’s moon exciting. All your news feeds today will be full of articles, like this one you’re reading, explaining what is happening. You’ll also come across lots of other meaning making, especially in the realms of astrology and other meaning-making endeavours that project all kinds of singular and special effects on this moment, making it a special time. The search for causality never rests!
Try a little experiment today. Get really excited with people about the super blue moon and see what happens. See who cares and who doesn’t. See what the different responses are. Notice your own reactions to people who have different reactions to what you are telling them.
As I was reflecting on the extremely mild delirium around this rare blue supermoon, it reinforced once again how much human behaviour is influenced more by the meaning we make of what is happening rather than the events that are actually happening. Understanding how we make meaning of things is critical to understanding why we behave in certain ways. The physical events will all coincide right now as I am writing this, at 11:26 Pacific Time. As the moment came and went I noticed nothing different happening in myself. I can’t even see the moon right now because it is midday. The only effect this whole thing has had is to make me think enough about why our sensemaking frameworks have such power over us to make meaning of things that are otherwise run of the mill physical events in the world in which we live. So I wrote a blog pots.
Humans impart meaning constantly. To understand our individual and collective behaviours, we need to understand that meaning making part of us. And then we need to go have a look at the beautiful moon.
One of our TSS Rovers Women’s team players, Sofia Farremo, signing an autograph for a young fan while standing in our supporters section at a TSS Rovers game this summer. Supporter culture at our club is HSL.
About 20 years ago, I first met Dr. Mark R. Jones. It was either at The Practice of Peace gathering or one of the Evolutionary Salons called at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, Washington. At any rate, Mark was an interesting presence. He sat in silence for most of the time near the room entrance as a kind of gatekeeper, watching the threshold and seeing what happened there. He occasionally played classical guitar and offered insights and reflections to anyone who sat and talked with him.
At some point, I heard the story about his work. He was a senior corporate executive, working in technology and defence-related companies for most of his career. He was also a long-time Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. He once visited the Dalai Lama and was challenged by him to build a practice of compassion based on the idea that “people need to be seen, heard, and loved, in that order.”
Mark took that work and built an approach to compassionate communication based on that heuristic. He called the work “hizzle” based on how he pronounced the acronym of heard, seen, and loved: HSL. I remember being taken by his description of what happens when people aren’t heard, seen or loved. If they are not heard, they shout and raise their voices. If they are not seen, they make a scene so you notice them, or they engage in bullying and toxic power dynamics. If they are not loved, they play a toxic game of approach and avoid that, which creates and then sabotages relationships and connections.
Mark’s insight was that these behaviours were signs of suffering and that when HSL was missing, “mischief occurs.” In this practice, he connected suffering to fear and offered the antidotes to these behaviours with a very simple and powerful way to let folks know they are heard, seen or loved.
To really hear, see, or love others, Mark insists that we have a practice in which we hear, see and love ourselves and become familiar with all of the ways we personally express fear and suffering when our own HSL is thwarted. It’s a practice.
I’ve used this insight for most of my career in situations where folks are exhibiting these fear-based behaviours. It has been a really useful shortcut and reminder for my own practice.
I was reminded again of how powerful this set of insights is when my friend and colleague Ashley Cooper shared some work she is doing to bring this work into the context of supporting parents of children, something at which she is incredibly gifted.
Mark’s work isn’t that easy to find online. His company, Sunyata Group is where you can find him as he is leading teams in creating Beloved Community. His HSL approach has been adopted and modified by the Liberating Structures crew (I believe Henri Lipmanowicz and Ashley were both at the same gathering I was at when we met Mark and learned about his work). Years ago, Phil Cubeta wrote a bit about Mark’s work and included a workshop handout that Mark must have provided him at some point.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writing to his son, in the book, Between the World and Me:
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren.
h/t to the Centre for Action and Contemplation, from today’s Daily Meditation.
I was reflecting today with a friend on the nature of the world right now. We were discussing some of the story collections I have from the early part of the pandemic when I was running Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects with organizations seeking to understand the effects of the pandemic on their services. It’s hard to remember that time, and it’s very hard to remember the “before-times,” as people call them. But reading these stories reminded me of what we all did together all of a sudden. It was meant to be a short-term intervention in our lives. It wasn’t.
I think the pandemic has fundamentally altered our reality. I remember the 2010s as a time when we were starting to get some things right, and for me, that positive aspect of the decade really took shape in the way public transportation was developing in the Vancouver region. During the 2010s, Vancouver built a light rail extension to the airport, began building a subway across the Broadway corridor on the west side of the city and rapidly increased the number of express bus routes and connections, even out to the suburbs. This whole era seemed like one where the focus was on connecting people for a larger public good. It symbolized a collective and concrete commitment to our region’s well-being.
But when the pandemic began, much of that progress halted, and we lost many of those public services because people stopped commuting and meeting in person. On our little island, a successful community-operated express bus ceased running downtown. Our late-night water taxi service disappeared. Deep in the city, streets were taken over for patios, and folks started living outside a little more leading to the establishment of more bike infrastructure. But the return to public transit was slow and still hasn’t reached pre-pandemic levels (as of last year, anyway). People are Uber-ing and using car share programs like Evo, but we’re not getting in the bus. We don’t have to. Lots of us work from home now. It is getting more and more individual.
And that’s what seems to have captured the shift for me. I have no data to back this up – maybe you do – but this shift has led to a diminishment of shared public experiences, replaced by individual, isolated realities. Ironically, while we aimed to work together to to protect each other from the virus, the measures we took dissolved the sense of collective public good into fragmented personal experiences. In fact, I think the reason that so many people feel manipulated and react with a strong desire for “freedom from the government” has to do with the fact that the response to the pandemic required us all to participate but left no space for us to co-create, at least not by the second half of 2020. The early weeks and months were full of community effort locally and our skills were all called into action. Being a person with online hosting skills meant that I could offer a weekly zoom call for local businesses here to keep folks apprised of the supports that were available to them and help them connect to efforts that were ongoing to keepbrikcs and morter businesses solvent during the March – June closures.
That began to change towards the end of the year when folks started getting fed up with the restrictions. We longed to be left alone. We resented governments telling us what to do. We started to see a massive rise in the rhetoric of separation, whether it was deeply individualistic calls for action or movements that pointed fingers, blamed others and backed into relationships to form movements, like the Freedom Convoy in Canada.
As we slowly emerge from this period, it’s evident that our minds and ways of thinking have been irrevocably changed. The information we consume through our devices hasn’t helped us make sense of this transformation; instead, it often exacerbates the confusion and sense of disconnection. We don’t want anyone telling us what to do. We are forgetting how to make things together, other than networks of outrage.
On top of the health crisis, we’ve faced a kind of psychological and cultural trauma. This hyper-individual experience of a global event has left many feeling helpless and detached. Change-making, which requires us to act together to serve a public good, often fails to recognize the deeper, collective nature of our challenges. We see many individual actions without much organizing, connection or collective effort to work with power, policy and resources. Outrage is close at hand. This disconnection and frustration manifest because people feel they’re doing something significant, yet it’s hard to see how these actions fit into the larger picture of systemic change.
Moreover, this period’s grief and unresolved emotions linger in our collective psyche. Many of us were forced into self-reflection during the lockdowns, confronted with who we are and what our lives mean. There is a ton of lateral violence out there right now: people taking out anger and aggression at others for small or even presumed transgressions. We can probably all tell stories of being on the end of a tirade from someone, and probably many of us have stories where WE lost it against someone out of proportion to whatever irritation provoked the outbursts. This unresolved grief remains within our systems as we try to “return to normalcy,” highlighting the need for deeper healing and integration of these experiences.
We were never going to return to normalcy, though. We are in a different place than we were and I cannot put my finger on it. I’d love to hear your reflections on what it has been like. Many of us who work with groups as facilitators have noticed a difference in how groups work. I see fear and reluctance to engage. I think lots of us are regressing in our ability to sit face-to-face with one another and have conversations, especially around hard issues. While I have experienced tremendous healing in hosting conversations and participatory initiatives, I have also seen initiatives fizzle. Folks are increasingly asking me to host Open Space meetings because they just need to put ideas out there and talk about them.
I have a growing desire to understand this state of affairs and put my finger on it in a way others recognize. I have been reading novels set in other pandemic times, but it seems that none of the brilliant authors I have read have caught on to the psychological effects of the pandemic on the collective psyche. I’m not seeing it in films or TV shows, either. It’s as if what we went through has been erased or skipped over in our collective history. We aren’t really telling the story of it, nor are we telling stories that acknowledge it. Has anyone read a novel that spans the years 2019 to now? Let me know. How are you seeing what’s happening?
I’m back in Tlaoquiaht territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This is a place I once described as The Land of Tsawalk as it is the cradle of a philosophy and cosmology of interconnection and interdependence that has been refined by centuries of Nuu-chah-nulth philosophers, leaders and families. We’re here to do an Art of Hosting with the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust and 40 or so local leaders and organizers. This will be the fourth Art of Hosting I’ve done here and they are always different, responsive to the land and the ocean and the people and the way time works here. We will plan tomorrow and then we will allow things to happen, and it will be, as it always is, a rich and abundant experience.
On the way here, Caitlin and I listened to some podcasts. Two of these had moments that spoke to the place and the quality of time and landscape, and this is the real purpose of this post.
The first is. A Radiolab episode called “Small Potatoes” is about how observation and reflection can transform the most mundane of things in our daily experience. One segment of this episode featured a clip from Ian Chillag’s podcast Everything is Alive in which the philosopher Chioke l’Anson plays “a grain of sand” in conversation with Chillag. l’Anson brings an incredible perspective to this interview, including these gems:
CHIOKE:
Yeah, I mean, I think that if there’s one difference between them and I… Sorry, I’m just having
trouble with the pronouns, you know, we’re doing this interview and I’m a grain of sand.
IAN:
Yeah.
CHIOKE:
But that’s not really the way I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, “We are sand.”
IAN:
OK.
CHIOKE:
So, you see that there’s the mass noun thing happening and it’s weird to talk to you because you
don’t have a mass noun thing. Or you don’t seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So, you say
yourself that you’re a person, right?
IAN:
Yeah, I would say I’m a person.
CHIOKE:
So, like why aren’t you a grain of person?
IAN:
Like why do I not consider myself as like a fraction of all of humanity?
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like that makes more sense. It just seems to me like if you recognise the degree to which you
owed your existence to other people you might also be nicer to other people.
Or then there is this meditation on time and change:
IAN:
Right. Do you know how old you are?
CHIOKE:
Not exactly, no. I think, it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of
years. Like, I mean, I wasn’t always sand, right? Like there was a time when I was a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, yeah.
CHIOKE:
Yeah. So, you know, like do you know about the myth of Sisyphus?
IAN:
Yeah
CHIOKE:
Yeah, that’s a funny one to me because Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity,
but really the boulder would eventually erode. I mean, a hundred thousand years or so. It would be
like a little pebble. Like, just stick it out, Sisyphus. You’ll be done in no time, you know?
IAN:
Eventually it’s just going to be sand.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, exactly. And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus after some time
would have a flat plain instead of a hill and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, so, yeah. So, he’s cursed for eternity, but really, he just needs to get through I don’t know
50,000 years or something.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like he should really stick to it. And then that’ll show the Gods.
Amazing.
In another podcast we listened to, a To The Best Of Our Knowledge episode on deep time, Ann Strainchamps interviews geologist Marcia Bjorneru about changes to our earth and climate:
AS: Do you think the perspective of deep time can help with any of the existential fear and dread that comes with an awareness of climate change and global warming? Does being aware of the many long ages of the planet put climate change in perspective? Or make it more frightening?
MB: From a scientific point of view, I can say that Earth will be fine. The Earth will deal with the changes in climate that we’re causing and eventually, new ecosystems will emerge.
But the human part of me mourns what we’ve done and the rapidity with which old, well-established ecosystems and landscapes have been changed. And I worry for humanity, for what the next decades or century will bring as we cope with a new set of rules. That’s the scary thing to me. We’ve been able to understand the way the planet has worked through the Holocene, but now we’re changing the boundary conditions and parameters, and so many of the models we’ve developed aren’t going to be very relevant as we go further into the Anthropocene.
The past won’t necessarily be a key to the future. And there’s real sadness there. Our cultures have grown up with a certain version of Earth, and it’ll be radically different.
These insights seem to hit so much deeper out here in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth territories, where a deep sense of time and a deep connection with the ancient marine and forest ecosystems are responsible for thousands of years of occupation and well-being. Indeed, Bjorneru’s observation about the new boundary conditions of life on earth brings added importance to preserving intact large amounts of wild and ancient ecosystems. In 300,000 years as a species, humans have never lived in an environment that is as heavily degraded as it is now. We were nurtured in the complex life-giving cradles of the very ecosystems out of which we arose. We have changed those conditions of life, and who knows what effect it will have on our survival, the survival of millions of other species and the evolution of new forms of life on Earth.
Out here, on the edge of the world, the principles of tsawalk compel us to engage these questions. The perspective of deep time and deep interconnection lies all around us.