I found myself in Snug Cove today, the village centre of our island, and it was like night and day from this past weekend. As everyone who lives in a place that is overrun by visitors knows, the day after Labour Day is like the dawn of a new era. I knew almost everyone in the Village Square, and had enough time to have actual conversations with friends. I saw people I haven’t seen since the wet months, who finally ventured into the Cove for supplies. It has been a busy summer with people visiting the Island from near and far. Lots of folks coming from Vancouver and environs and even further afield in Canada, because people are avoiding travel to the USA these days.
Bowen Island is not an easy place to learn how to get around. We have an arcane ferry marshalling system that runs on a secret code of etiquette that not even islanders agree upon. Many maps and navigations apps don’t work on Bowen, and many people don’t know how to read paper maps, so it’s common to find folks far from where they want to go. E-biking is all the rage but we don’t have great bike infrastructure, and so the roads can get clogged. Restaurants are good, but they are slower than what you expect on the mainland, and folks that are already frustrated with their inability to have Bowen makes sense to them sometimes take it out on our servers and shop keepers. There is an energy of confusion, self-interest (“Influencers.” Please.) and speed in the summer that causes many of us to stay away from the village unless absolutely necessary.
But then Labour Day passes. Suddenly school has started, people have returned home, the only visitors are seniors who are slow enough to begin with that they have no trouble fitting into the island’s pace. And it feels like ours again.
On Sunday I led an impromptu group of Islanders in an annual ritual to sing off our visitors for another year. It was offered in good fun and received that way I think.
Today was a sweet relief.
My friend Amy Mervak, a great facilitator in Kalamazoo, Michigan, shares a bit about using Critical Uncertainties, a Liberating Structures method, that helps a group quickly design and discuss future scenarios.
Chris Mowles takes aim at the ratings culture that is creating yet one more way for folks to experience precarity in the world. 5/5 for the post!
I’ve just unsubscribed from a blog – well, a substack – which had some promise but let me down in two ways. It had promise becasue it was devoted to facilitation. Where it let me down is that I suspect the posts were mostly ChatGPT generated. The posts were shallow, used emojis liberally, and, the kicker, only allowed paid members to comment. Sorry, but no. The last post I read there, from today was entitled “When Your Virtual Co-Host Gets Smarter Than You” and I suspect that the AI wrote it unironically. I wouldn’t normally make a big deal about unsubscribing from a blog, but when you prompt a comment with “What helps you stay human, while tech manages the rest?” on an AI-generated post and then only allow paid subscribers to discuss, then you’re not really “facilitating” are you? We need to do better.
Today I learned about “kelping.” That’s when orcas or humpbacks tangle themselves up in kelp beds because it feels nice.
Orcas are more than just a charismatic mega fauna on our coast line. They are a population, and for First Nations, they are kin. For the people that live close to them, including researchers, the whales are chosen family. This week, I76 died. Here is the account of his death from OrcaLab. It contains these beautiful words:
At this moment the day shifted. Jared Towers had come out specifically in response to the previous day’s concerns about I76, the oldest son of I4. He was extremely thin and having difficulties. Jared found him on the Vancouver Island side of the Strait opposite to the entrance to Blackney Pass. The rest of his small family were further away. The day was grey, the ocean only slightly agitated. As several dolphins surrounded and overwhelmed I76, his mother came flying across to him. Jared said he had never seen a Northern Resident move so fast and that she was clearly upset. From that time on his family remained close to his side with the dolphins surrounding the entire family who were more or less stationary. This continued until just before 3pm when I76 took his last breath and sank out of sight into the depths. His family lingered near his last position, then began to call..
Ernest Alfred happened to be here and he and a few of us went out into Johnstone Strait. There next to the mountains of Vancouver Island, near to a few dolphins who still seemingly hovered over where I76’s had his last moments and not far from his family now slowly weaving their way east, Ernest sang in Kwakwala reminding us to shed our tears before nightfall, morning would bring another ceremony fitting with the time of day and a chance to say good-bye.
Read the subsequent posts to see how the humans and whales who knew I76 mourned his passing.
Clouds continue to hang around here in the wake of our first Pineapple Express storm of the season. The Music By The Sea Festival wrapped up late last night (I was home again after midnight) after three full days of community music-making, with a few professional ringers thrown into our midst. It was a multi-generational event which sprang out of a group of local Bowen Island families who were long time regulars at the Nimblefingers Festival in Sorrento, BC. As a result there was a strong core of bluegrass and Americana music-making at MBTS, which suits me fine. Bluegrass is like folk jazz. Simple chord progressions and beautiful melodies and harmony singing, but incredible virtuosity on the instrumental side, including a strong value on improvised breaks and solos. It is massively accessible music, but for the performer the sky is the limit in terms of technique and creative possibilities.
Importantly, the gathering brought together many Bowen Islander, including several who left the island years ago. The music scene when I moved here was rich and vibrant and diverse and it withered a little as we made the transition between the 1970s-1990s nearly intentional community of interesting characters to a place where property became a financial investment. Since COVID, our demographics have radically shifted and there is more of a feeling of intentional community again. People are moving here for something other than what might be a decent return on a real estate investment. Make no mistake, this is still a massively unaffordable place to live, and our best efforts to address it are swallowed in a context of general inaction and apathy about structural policy solutions. But. There is a revival of community going on here, and I met many people this weekend who are my neighbours and with whom I know I will be making music this year and into the future.
I love short forms of writing. Poetry, short stories, short novels. And aphorisms. There is something about the pithy wisdom contained in a single sentence that can make it powerful. A well crafted aphorism has a rhythm to it as well. It swings, like a jazz lick. And like a lick, it evokes something timeless and connected to an ecosystem of meaning. Peter Limberger lives aphorisms too and here he writes about two medieval aphorists, Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), a Jesuit priest who wrote The Art of Worldly Wisdom and Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French nobleman who wrote a collection of Maxims, while also pointing to his favourite, Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
Sometimes questions are like aphorisms. One has to be careful asking questions that are beautiful in their own right. Questions occasionally try too hard to impress. They aim too much for a response that is in awe of the question itself. Mary Oliver’s “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is one of those. But asking “What time is it?” Is a question that dances ever so lightly on the fence between genuine curiosity and profound insight in its own right. Tenneson writes “I used to see people more often resist these kind of questions. It was resistance that saw some fluff and said, “let’s get to the real work.” These days, oh gosh, so many more people recognize these questions are the real work. Or are the real contexting that helps us get to the real work.” Amen.
Life is just a long conversation that we drop into for a bit. Patti Digh:
Life, then, is less about owning the discussion and more about showing up to it. Listening well. Speaking honestly. Departing graciously. And trusting that the conversation—like life itself—will carry on.
Perhaps the real measure is not how loudly or how often we speak, but how we change in the process. We arrive thinking we understand the argument; we leave having been shaped by the voices around us. We are participants, yes, but also apprentices to the human story—learning from those who came before, influencing those who come after, even in ways we’ll never know.
Some day, someone else will walk into the same parlor after we’ve gone. They’ll hear the echoes of our words, softened by time, folded into the larger chorus. They may not know our name, but they will inherit a conversation made—if we’ve done our part—slightly kinder, richer, and more open than when we found it.
A decent start to the Premier League season for Tottenham. After an early goal from Richarlison, Spurs were a bit disjointed for the rest of the first half. They came out ganagbusters in the second though and Richarlison scored his second from a beautiful scissor kick off a Kudus delivery. Kudus impressed with his flair and quickness. Brennan Johnson scored the third for an emphatic win in the end.
The latest TSS Rover to turn pro is Aislin Streicek, who played for us in 2022 and 2023 and who was signed by Celtic FC to a two year contract. She made her first appearance yesterday coming off the bench in a 2-1 win over Hearts. Watching and helping young players turn professional is why we do what we do at our little second division Canadian club.
A little grey this morning as the Island recovers formats busiest weekend of the year. Saturday night was the infamous Bowen Island dock dance, staged by the fire fighters every year to raise money for the volunteer fire department. It’s a huge party with bands and dancing and lots of beer. The subsequent day, the island seems hungover (and truly a fair percentage of its residents are actually that way). I had a light day, cooking breakfast for my own visiting family members who were slow to get going. I walked to the Cove in the afternoon and on the way back picked blackberries and Oregon grapes to make jelly today. Today is a holiday in British Columbia, and the clouds have rolled in, lowering the sky a little. Rain is possible, and will be welcomed. There is a chill on the air. The seasons continue to turn over.
Elsewhere…
Matt Webb marks the seasons too. Today he reflected on the very special moment of the summer in which the Test cricket season comes to an end in England. I do think you have to love cricket to appreciate it, especially the metronome of summer hours ticking away that is the fall of wickets.
And more from Matt: the dream of crowd sourced information and citizen science is still one of the best things the internet has enabled. Matt has a mammoth post documenting six crowd-based efforts which reveal patterns of life in our atmosphere, biosphere and noosphere.
And something else to think about. Space hurricanes!
Cameron Norman has been blogging about his approach to Strategic Design all summer and he’s finally tied together all the posts into one big guide to doing it. It’s so good that I’m going to add it to my facilitation resources page.
On our recent sailing trip, we noticed that the return of the ochre sea stars has been knocked back. I have seen very few of our iconic purple starfish this year. It looked as if they were recovering from a bacterial wasting disease, but now it seems they are still suffering. The Tyee reports on what’s happening.
Two of our TSS Rovers made their professional debuts on August 2. Kirstin Tynan, who played for us from 2022-2024 and was signed in February to the Vancouver Rise of the Northern Super League got her first start in goal, stopping ten shots in a 3-3 draw against Ottawa Rapid. Callum Weir, our men’s team keeper this year got a short term call up to Valour FC of the Canadian Premier League but suffered a 5-0 defeat behind a team that offered very little defence in front of him. Callum will return to university at the University of Victoria for the winter. Watching these players leaning hard into their dreams and challenging themselves at the professional level of their games is way I continue to help build this little club of ours. It’s all about building better players and ultimately better human beings.
When we published our Cultural Master Plan for Bowen Island back in 2017, I had the observation that the best way to make a living as an artist on this island was to sell Bowen Island to Bowen Islanders. It seems that every household has paintings of the scenes that lie just outside their windows. Songs I have written about life on the island have been taken up as markers of our collective experience. Poems about the place always make people nod with approval about the beauty and deep currents of the place.
And then there is The View.
Jackie Minns and David Cameron are two of our cultural treasures (link opens in Facebook). They are playwrights and actors with a particular knack for capturing the absurd and funny and the tender in their satires about island life. These last two weeks they have remounted their production of The View, originally staged in 2007 at the Legion, before we had a performing arts centre to work in. This week, finally – after 30 years or so on the island and numerous productions staged in pubs, parks and pop-up venues – they brought it home to our new performing arts centre. Under the direction of their son Andrew Cameron and featuring two other stalwart Bowen Island actors, Kat Stephens and Fraser Elliot, The View was unleashed upon us.
The play is about neighbours. A new couple from well to do West Vancouver, Deborah and Kenneth, begins building a house on the west side of the island and find themselves next door neighbours to Zorg and Angel, long time islanders who practice tantric yoga, chakra healing and chainsaw sculpture. The fifth character in the play is the never-seen Douglas-fir that grows on their property line. Zorg and Angel love the tree, Deborah say it blocks her view of the sea and wants it gone. Kenneth just goes along with whichever person is yanking his chain at the moment.
Somehow, on a single set, with merely four actors, the cast finds a way to skewer almost everyone on Bowen. The old timers, the newcomers, the artists, the community builders, the wealthy and the just-scraping-by. The developers and the eco-greenies. The stoners and the sophisticates. It is a feature of the play that every single person in the audience has at least one little squirm, all the while having a good belly laugh at who we are.
There was truly something for everyone. Little cultural anomalies like “Just take my truck. The keys are in it and you can leave it in the Cove…” The cast themselves aren’t spared either. Ironies such as the fact that the hapless Kenneth, the stunned but up-for-it newcomer to the island is played by local real estate agent Fraser Elliot. Jackie Minns is a yoga teacher. David does many of the things that Zorg does for a living. Kat is the furthest thing from her character. She grew up on Bowen, acted since she was a little kid, babysat the director Andrew when he was small, and survived as the only girl a well-loved family of fastball-playing brothers.
Every community needs its bards and storytellers. On Bowen we are lucky to have these ones. They capture a little piece of our character, tender self-deprecation, that lightens the sometimes intensely specific conflicts that can divide a small community. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you aren’t doing it right. These folks help us do it right.