Me and some friends “villaging” back in 1996 or so at a session at The Irish Heather in Vancouver. That’s me blissed out on the bottom right of this photo. We are playing traditional Irish tunes together.
Barbara Holmes today in a post at the Centre for Action and Contemplation:
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to survive. For many of us, villages are a thing of the past. We no longer draw our water from the village well or share the chores of barn raising, sowing, and harvesting. We can get … almost everything that we need online. Yet even though our societies are connected by technology, the rule of law, and a global economy, our relationships are deeply rooted in the memory of local spaces.
Villages are organizational spaces that hold our collective beginnings. They’re spaces that we can return to, if only through memory, when we are in need of welcoming and familiar places. What is a village but a local group of folks who share experiences, values, and mutual support in common? I’m using the word “village” to invoke similar spiritual and tribal commitments and obligations.… When there is a crisis, it takes a village to survive.
In each generation, we are tested. Will we love our neighbors as ourselves, or will we measure our responsibilities to one another in accordance with whomever we deem to be in or out of our social circles? And what of those unexpected moments of crisis, those critical events that place an entire village at risk? How do we survive together? How do we resist together? How do we respond to unspeakable brutality and the collective oppression of our neighbors?
Our lifelong efforts to map our uniqueness do not defeat our collective connections. Although I’m an individual with a name, family history, and embodiment as an African American woman, I am also inextricably connected to several villages that reflect my social, cultural, national, spiritual, and generational identifications. These connections require that I respond and resist when any village is under assault.…
— Barbara Holmes. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/a-collective-response/
I like this idea that connection alone doesn’t equal community. Connection alone is not enough to create spaces where we make meaning of our lives or generate meaning and life with and for others. Instead, there is a need to enliven the space of connection with purpose, shared identity, and meaning.
I am working on a book on dialogic containers, and it really comes down to the principle that what is “contained” in these kinds of contexts is “meaning.” I once heard Jennifer Garvey-Berger use the term “life-giving contexts” in a webinar, and it really struck me that THIS is what we are trying to do when we are working with “containers” in dialogue and participatory leadership work. It is not enough to hand each other a business card or place an organization’s pamphlet in the centre of a circle. That does not create a dialogic container; it does not create a life-giving context for action.
Villages, as Barbara Holmes points out, DO. And a village is not merely a collection of uninhabited houses. It is an emergent identity of a place of human life. You may live in an apartment building, but do you live in a village? What is the difference between your building and a village? What can you do to make it more village?
The answer to that question is the essence of dialogic organizational and community development. The answer to that question leads you to meaning-making together.
It’s Advent right now.
Although everyone talks about this being the “Christmas season,” liturgically speaking, the Christmas season begins on Christmas Day and lasts 12 days until Epiphany. In the Christian year, Christmas represents the incarnation of God into the world, and Epiphany represents the physical manifestation of Christ to humans.
These are times of joy and release that correspond with the return of light to the northern hemisphere and which come after a period of deepening darkness, which is Advent.
When you live on a small dark island in the North Pacific, this season, Advent, becomes meaningful. It is a time of rain and sometimes snow and a time of cloud and fog and the deepest darkness of the year. The sun is gone by 4:15 and doesn’t return until after 8 in the morning and because there are miles and miles of cloud stacked atop us, there are some days when it never really gets light at all. Everything that is not water is still and quiet. Creeks and rivers flow in torrents and the moody sea swings between calm and agitation at will.
It is a season of lingering. What lingers are the odd creature that should have left for warmer climes by now. A humpback whale that has decided to stay for the winter. A sea lion barking every night from its haul-out in the bay below my house is definitely out of time and place. The odd tourist who has wisely chosen to travel during a period in which they will have a whole mountain full of trails to themselves.
But what also lingers is the warmth of community. During the deep darkness of the Advent weeks, we move from event to event, experiencing light and warmth around the fires of other’s homes. We sing together, we visit and drink and eat and tell stories about our year and make plans for the future, and then we head out into the dark and rainy nights, flashlights in hand, careful with our steps, to make our way home. We travel between islands of light and warmth in a sea of darkness and cold. We linger on the memories of summer, or the impressions made by friends that we love. We linger on the memories of those who are no longer with us, who have died or who have moved away and who leave a little hole in our lives once occupied by the delight of a random encounter or intentional co-creation.
This is also the season in which traditions linger, in which a rhythm of community helps guide us and hold us through the dark season. The stringing of lights in Snug Cove and the annual lighting up of the village. The choir concerts and recitals. The reading of A Christmas Carol or A Child’s Christmas in Wales, performed yearly, as it was again last night, by the inimitable Martin Clark.
In the four Sundays of Advent, we reflect on the values and practices of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. We do so in the darkest month, mindful of a world full of darkness. We reflect on Joy and Hope in its absence, and we practice waiting for it to return. I think one of the reasons why December is so full of contradictory emotions for people is that this is the time of year when we most deeply feel the loss of hope and joy and peace and love. And yet all around us, the market has seized on hope and joy as the reason for the season and exhorts us to buy and give and fill the hole of longing.
But that is not the purpose of Advent. Advent is the season in which we deeply feel the possibility of a world WITHOUT these things. And we acknowledge the pain and anguish of a world absent of light and love and peace and hope and joy. It is perfectly timed in the north to be a season of four weeks when we reflect on and embrace the darkness in anticipation of the return of the light.
We can be together in darkness if we hold each other there. We can have faith that moments of light will return, that love and peace will come back to the world. To people, to families, to whole nations. The liturgical seasons are both a symbolic representation of the reality of the heart’s topography and a container for practice. It is a aberration brought on by commerce that we are denied a chance to rest in sadness and despair together for a while. It is good medicine to do so.
As we approach the Solstice, I wish you days of subtle turning. That the fleeting moments of light that come into your life are grasped and held. That the sadness and despair you may feel at this time of year, in this time in history, can be acknowledged and held. And that joy and hope and peace and love may return to you and your beloveds.
Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
— From “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye
This is the start of a beautiful prose poem worth two minutes of your time to read, and just the kind of thing that I am happy to read today.
Geneviève Bergeron – Hélène Colgan – Nathalie Croteau – Barbara Daigneault – Anne-Marie Edward – Maud Haviernick – Maryse Laganière – Maryse Leclair – Anne-Marie Lemay – Sonia Pelletier – Michèle Richard – Annie St-Arneault – Annie Turcotte – Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
Matteo Polisi dives into the arms of The Swanguardians after scoring a goal for TSS Rovers in the Voyageurs Cup, April 19, 2023 . I am somewhere at the bottom of that pile. Photo by Maddy Mah
Our friends Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry interviewed Caitlin and me for their podcast From the Outside on the subject of community. It’s a really rich conversation.
In the podcast, we cover a lot of ground including really understanding the act and practice of crossing boundaries and thresholds to enter a community. There is a cost to crossing a threshold, a requirement to put something down before we take up the shared identity of community. That act is almost always accompanied by rituals and ceremonies that help to mark the liminal space through which we move when we change from what we are on the outside to what we become when we step inside.
These boundaries are important because there is no community without boundary crossing. Peter Block writes really well about this in “Community: The Structure of Belonging” and I refer to his work in the podcast. He talks about practices for entering and leaving containers, including creating barriers to participation that balance inclusion with commitment and also the practices of leaving a container. He suggests that when people leave a meeting, they let everyone know why they are leaving. Such an act is a kindness as it shows a concern for clarity in the space.
A couple of weeks ago I was reminded how important that practice is. I was having a lovely long coffee with my friend Bob Turner who is a former mayor of Bowen Island and has lived on our island since 1989. We were both sharing our experience as long-time islanders that we don’t recognize so many people anymore and nor are we recognized by as many people as used to. In the times we have lived on the island, the community’s population has turned over many times. In fact, we have probably experienced 50% turnover in the last five years alone. We are both open to change. Having devoted ourselves to living long-term in this community, we have seen it go through phases, epochs, and generational shifts. And while that’s fine there is a lingering sense of something – sadness? nostalgia? grief? – that is hard to put a finger on. And I think we named it
I was telling Bob that I was recently working with the Squamish Nation and their Language and Culture Department and I was very struck by how the Squamish people who work in that department are motivated in their work by the deep family histories they come from, rooted in the villages of the Squamish Nation. There is growth and change in those communities, but there are powerful rituals for acknowledging the losses of people.
Bowen Island is a settler community meaning that, other than a very small handful of descendents from original settler families, most people have only lived here for a maximum of two or three generations. People come and go, with very little tying them to the place. Squamish Nation people can’t do that. Your village is the source of your history and it spans back hundreds of generations out of remembered time. When someone is born or comes home or dies, there are important ceremonies that recognize that connection to the past. You might be given a name that was held by an ancestor or receive songs and responsibilities that are rooted to place. You are inextricably tied to the community
It’s just not like that on Bowen Island. Notably, while Bob and I were trying to put our finger on the melancholy feeling we were having, we decided that it came down to the fact that so many of the people we knew here and had close relationships with have just slipped away into other lives in other places. We don’t really hear from them anymore. They certainly don;t form the background of relationships and conversations that make up community. And unlike those who have died, there was no ceremony to acknowledge their passing out of our community. You just wake up one morning (or one post-pandemic year) and realize that person you played soccer with, or sang with or used to see on your regular walk is just no longer there. You don’t know why they left or where they went. There is just an absence and then a small space where they used to be that closes ever smaller until a person who was an unforgettable part of your life is suddenly “What’s his name, the guy with the brown dog that drove that old work van.”
There are boundaries we cross to join community and I wish for the boundaries to cross to leave it. When folks are leaving Bowen I love it when they tell me. I get to honour them, thank them, share some stories with them and then send them on their way. It gives all of us closure. It always a little sad when folks who have been a part of my life take off for their new chapters, but the ritual of saying goodbye makes it so much easier. Otherwise, we just imagine the slow trickle of voices flowing away into silence and nostalgia.