Our back door, created by my friend and fellow islander Burns Jennings who died in February. We asked him to design a door that signifies a crossing into our family home. He was proud of this one.
"Every day is perfect if,
when you wake, you hear birds
in the garden..."
- Ann Margaret Lim, "Birdsong of Shaker Way"
That’s what we call it traditionally on Bowen Island, Juneuary. It is a traditional period of rain and cooler weather that drenches the coast for a while in June, around the summer solstice. Every year, there are a few hot days in May that fool us into believing that the summer has fully arrived and then most years, there is this period.
There is birdsong, but the spring dawn chorus of warblers and grosbeaks and rattling flickers has dulled a little. Instead there are the little questions that the towhees ask, and the resonant guttural calls of ravens going about their business in the tree tops. In the aftermath of rain, there is calm and settled grey that hangs over and before the mountains, sometimes sending wispy tendrils of mist across the ridge lines.
The ground smells amazing. Every flower releases its perfume to the damp air. The mock orange and the chamomile in our garden fills the space with scent. Raspberries demand to be picked, the final blush of spring’s peas swell with the rain. The lettuce is in its glory and the beans seem to grow while you watch.
On our little island a quiet grey weekend day like this one tends to dampen the number of visitors, except for those who are insistent on heading into the woods or up the mountain for a hike. That’s all good. It’s nice to have a bit of quiet in the Cove, and sometimes a cloudy grey day quiets the groups on the trails too. The rain brings reverence.
Yesterday we marked the passing of a well-loved Bowen Islander, Burns Jennings. Burns was a talented athlete, artist, craftsman and coach. He touched everyone around him all the time because he was one of the very few people I know who realized that his soul had been deposited in a time and place that allowed him to live life fully and completely. He feasted on opportunity to generate gratitude so that he could live with generosity. He never waited for a chance to act if it meant that he could create a thing of beauty, be it a piece of furniture, or a community based football club, or a perfect strike on a chinook salmon, or carving powder on bluebird day at Whistler.
His legacy was best captured by the fact that about 400 people showed up in the school gym to watch a slide show of his life and hear stories from close friends and families. And that was followed by a soccer tournament with 80 folks from 12 to 60+, including myself, which was a huge testament to the love of football he instilled in all of us.
Burns’ memorial was just one of a bunch of things happening on the island this weekend. Today, as I walked down to the village to get some supplies for making tortellini, there was an open house at the firehall, and our choir Carmina Bowena gave an impromptu flashmob performance of some of our repertoire. Yesterday a marimba ensemble was playing somewhere, there was a performance of Decho: River Journey by Theatre of Fire, there was a wedding.
Lots of little touches of community this weekend. Just the kind of thing for which Burns would have expressed deep gratitude.
Over the water from our little island is Horseshoe Bay, the bustling ferry terminal where boats sail to Nanaimo, the Sunshine Coast and Nexwlélexwm/Bowen Island, where I live. Last week a four-year-old boy, Leonardo Machado, and his mother were hit by a bus in a tragic accident while they were waiting to catch the bus home from their visit to Bowen. Leonardo was killed and his mother Silvana remains in critical but stable condition in hospital. There has been an outpouring of grief and love and support for Leaonardo’s family, and for Clineu, Leonardo’s father.
There is a fundraiser for Clineu and Silvana. Clineu recently posted a letter there that he wrote in his son’s voice. The letter will break your heart, but I’m posting it here in full, becasue in it, Clineu captures his little son’s love of buses and and trains – his best friends – and imports us to remember and care for the bus drivers in our lives.
Hi, my name is Leonardo, and I need your help if you can ! I was born to this beautiful city and country on October 27, 2020, at Saint Paul hospital and I’m a Vancouverite like many of you and I always loved this beautiful city !
Since I was born my parents always use buses to go everywhere in this city with my stroller along and I started falling in love with buses and Skytrains. Every time a bus was coming or a Skytrain was showing close my father tells me: Look Leo … look the bus … the bus … and I laugh and laugh because I just love them so much. They became my best friends and they brought me everywhere around this beautiful city. I grow up quick watching the Cocomelon yellow bus and Thomas the train cartoons, my favorites. But I have to admit, lately I start falling in love with Mickey Mouse and Chase and Marshall from Paw Patrol.
When I start walking at the age of 2 years I started grabbing my mom’s hands or my father’s hands and then haul them to the near bus stop just a block from my home, just to see the buses driving by and I wave at them and laugh and laugh !
Every time she can my Mom brings me to the 374 Pavilion* and I never missed the year Celebration there when my big train friend comes out in full force ! I just love it and have been inside that locomotive so many times because my mom was a voluntary worker before too.
You must be sad and I’m too, when you heard about the Horseshoe Bay accident and one of my best friends, the bus, separate me from my best friend in life, yes … my Mom. We were inseparable and went everyday out to enjoy Vancouver.
Buses are made to connect people and not to separate them, right ? I don’t want you to be sad because one of my dearest friends separate me and my Mom, and I thought…together we can do something.
This campaign is not about money and you will see soon … it’s about love !
First, in order to help relieve some of the pain, if you can bring a flower to my friends that drove me around this beautiful city for almost 5 years ! Ask their names and how they are doing ! Buy them a coffee if you can because they are my heros !
My friends who drove me throughout the city are devastated and impacted by what happened with me, and I want to thank them for all the enjoyment they provided me, and help to bring back love and confidence into their hands and that they continue driving all of us safely and comfortably and lovely !
My Mom will miss me a lot if she gets better and I’m praying for her peace. Could you help me to help with her to stay alive, could you pray for her and maybe bring a flower to my new heros, the nurses and doctors at VGH ? She could not be in better hands but we need more prayers for her as soon as you can !
I hope I never have to use 1 cent that has been donated here for my mom and she gets better and happy as she always was everyday before ! This is what I want more than anything and for my father. He has suffered too much loss in his life.
I also would like Translink to help my friends, the drivers, to cope with all of this trauma, and together with us, we can make better bus stops with benches and covering (I got too much rain 265 days per year!), and may build a small memorial at Horseshoe Bay that will bring back happiness and joy to that beautiful Terminal.
I hope we can gather lots of help and if possible in the future I’ll donate part or all received here, victims of tragic accidents as I have learned there are changes to laws, and now sometimes they don’t help the victims as they should. Maybe that can be changed.
What I need more than anything is your pray for my Mom because I love her so much !
I would like you to visualize my Mom healthy, happy and walking again. And as you picture this image, you really believe this is going to happen and this makes you happy as well.
As you hold the happiness, and you can hold a photo of my mom if you need as she was always happy, manifest this as a future projection, and then join me in this old and original prayer translated from the Aramaic that a young and poor carpenter used to teach:
“Father-Mother …
… Breath of Life, Source of Sound, Action without Words, Creator of the Cosmos !
Let your light shine within us, between us, and outside of us, so that we can make it useful.
Help us to continue our journey by breathing only the feeling that emanates from You.
May ourself, in the same step, be with His, so that we may walk as kings and queens with all other creatures.
May your desire and ours be one, in all Light, as well as in all forms, in every individual existence, as well as in every community.
Make us feel the soul of the Earth within us, because in this way we will feel the Wisdom that exists in everything.
Don’t let the superficiality and appearance of the things of the world deceive us and free us from everything that hinders our growth.
Let us not forget that You are the Power and the Glory of the world, the Song that is renewed from time to time and that beautifies everything.
May your love be only where our actions grow.
So be it !”
As a fellow dad, I hold Clineu in my heart and, like so many others, send best wishes and prayers up for Silvana. I’m so glad that Leonardo and Silvana got to spend their last day together on our beautiful little island.
*The 374 Pavillion is a permanent exhibit at the Roundhouse Community Centre in Vancouver that contains engine 374, the first steam engine to travel across Canada.
A photo of the STEVE I saw last night. If you are reading this as an email, click the post title to see the image.
You have to chase the beautiful things sometimes. Be in the right place, have a bit of luck, being open to a bit of surprise.
On Sunday I was really sick with some kind of blow-through flu/cold that laid me out all weekend. But I managed to drag myself out of bed later in the day and get a walk in. One of my favourite walks on my home island takes me down a little road below my house that hugs the north shore of Mannion Bay above the waterfront houses and then leads into Miller’s Landing, where you can choose a couple of options for places to sit and look at the sea. For me, it was Miller’s Landing beach, which was deeply exposed for the super low tides we get at this time of year. When I got down to the little bench above the beach there was a family of four standing at the railing looking out to the water. I recognized the look of people who had just seen whales.
There’s a special stance that happens when whales appear near enough that you can hear them breathe. I always find myself standing up quickly, at attention, with a shiver down my spine, because there are very few sounds in my life as profoundly moving as the breath of a whale. I asked them if they were seeing whales and they said that a pod of 5 or 6 orcas had just passed by a few minutes before. They had rounded the point and were now out of sight. I congratulated them on their luck and secretly wept a little inside that I had just missed them.
However, last night I had a chance at the only other thing that makes me shiver like that. There has been a massive series of geomagnetic storms rocking the earth’s atmosphere over the past few days and that means we get a chance to see auroras. Even though at this time of year we don’t actually get a completely dark sky, if the auroras are bright enough, they still show up in June, and they never fail to make me stand in profound awe.
I went out to my favourite spot with a view looking straight northward up Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound. Last night there were auroras, but they were fairly diffuse; a quiet green glow arcing across the head of our inlet far off to the north. Still beautiful, though. I watched them for a while wondering if it would dark enough to see any structure or movement. I was fixated on the diffuse glow, and the sounds of sea lions splashing in the dark sea below me. Nothing else was happening and so I lifted my gaze to see if I could see some planets, just in time to see a STEVE stretching across the sky. And I got that same feeling – stood at attention, chills running down my spine, watching a ribbon of super hot ions for 10 minutes stretch across the upper atmosphere hundreds of kilometres above my head.
STEVE is a phenomenon that accompanies geomagnetic storms, but is not the same as an aurora. As Aurorasaurus.com puts it, “if the ambient aurora was a symphony, STEVE would crash in with an electric guitar riff.”
STEVE has only recently been identified and scientists still don’t know exactly what they are, but it’s possible you’ve seen them. They stretch from east to west across the sky, further south than the aurora typically does. It’s not obvious what they are when you see them. The one I saw last night stretched right over my head at 49 degrees north, while the aurora appeared far away over the northern horizon. This is the second time I have positively seen a STEVE, the first time being probably 2017 or 2018 when I stepped out onto a friends deck during a party and saw what looked like a narrow concentrated band of the aurora overhead stretching away to the west. It didn’t make sense that there was no other aural activity so I thought it might be just a high cloud or a contrail illuminated by the moon and perhaps the lingering twilight. But then it began to dance and twist like the aurora. My friends at first didn’t believe me when I told them it was up there, but they were soon convinced and a whole party of people that had been dancing and carrying on stopped and grew silent at the appearance of this strange river of light flowing above us into the western sky.
I love those moments of awe. I never get used to seeing whales and auroras. And STEVE.
It’s late April on the coast. Huge flocks of geese are finding their way north making a beeline from their stopping grounds in the Fraser River estuary and heading straight over our island as they follow the inlets and mountains on their journey to Alaska. The sea lions are still out there barking and normally their presence would be a sure sign of spring as they come in with the herring, dragging all the mammal eating killer whales with them. But this year has been weird and we’ve had a herd (pride? flotilla? complaint?) of sea lions in Mannion Bay since November. Several docks have orange storm fencing around them so the lions won’t take refuge on the floats, but a couple of absentee dock owners don’t and so these amazing creatures encamp on the floats down below our house and bark 23 hours a day.
The only thing that frightens them off is a killer whale and the news came this week that 79 of them have been spotted in the Salish Sea this month, including a new baby for J-Pod, the group of orcas that are resident to the souther Gulf Islands. A grey whale has been hanging around English Bay and the humpbacks will soon be back. The abundance of Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, a combination of local recovery and globally warming waters, continues unabated.
This is a brief touch home, to try to get some crops in the garden, do a little maintenance work with clients and finish up some writing. My son and I were in England earlier in the month on a long awaited father/so soccer trip, and we had an epic time. We got to see our beloved Spurs in a rare patch of good form beat Southampton 3-1 and then draw Eintracht Frankfurt 1-1 in the Europa League quarter final. We also caught games at Watford, Charlton Athletic and Notts County before ending our trip as the guest of a friend at the Etihad in Manchester for an epic 5-2 victory for ManCity against Crystal Palace.
Getting to spend time with my 24 year old son is a gift and this is the longest we have spent together ever, just the two of us. I was able to take him around the places I lived in Herts as a kid, and we met some cousins and visited museums in-between football matches and early morning drives across the Pennines.
Soccer continued unabated, as we went to the inaugural match of the Northern Super League this past week, contested between the Vancouver Rise and the Calgary Wild. A couple of former TSS Rovers were in the squads for both teams, keeper Kirstin Tynan for Vancouver and defender Tilly James for Calgary. Our TSS Rovers women and men played on Friday night in a couple of disappointing losses to Langley United in League 1 BC, which is the second tier of Canadian soccer. Lots of soccer in my life these.
This has been a year of travel., so coming home to familiar things for a few moments is nice. A long awaited holiday in Italy awaits so I am savouring the coastal springtime as much as I can.
Detail from a quilt designed and made by the St. Andrews Anglican Church Women Quilter’s Guild. The quilt was made in 1967 in honour of Canada’s centennial year. Keen eyed observers will notice patterns in here that relate to that celebration. The quilt was on display at the Bowen Island Public Library earlier this year, on loan from Joyce Ganong whose mother, Isabel Faulks, was one of the quilters.
Another reflection from the Complexity Inside and Out course we taught yesterday…
Caitlin led us in a check in process that was about slowing down out seeing. Here’s a variation. Try it!
- Pick a view where there is some distance – looking out a window is best. If this is a familiar view, all the better.
- Notice the scene out there. Notice the colours, the landscape, the patterns. Notice movement and stillness. If the scene is familiar, look at what you know.
- You can close your eyes and remember what you see. How does that scene conjure itself up in your mind’s eye?
- Now open your eyes and look again at the scene. Try to notice something you’ve never noticed before or something that you’ve forgotten, or a change to the scene that you hadn’t noticed until now.
- Describe the scene now. Write down obersvations about what you see. What is the overall colour palette? What are the lines you see, of trees or buildings, horizon and sky. If you saw this scene in a flash, how would you recognize it?
You can add different variations to this exercise, but the point is to notice how we see things as patterns. Our mind conjures up a scene of large blocks in it and details aren’t always apparent. Sometimes we have to see things with new eyes, or a naive perspective.
I reflected yesterday that I was once walking through the forest here on my home island, following a path to the village with my brother who was visiting from Toronto. Bowen Island is very different from Toronto. He stopped us next to a very large Douglas-fir tree and said “Look at that! It’s huge!”
All the trees around here are huge, especially if you aren’t familiar with the forest. But I looked again at this tree – one I passed hundreds of times to and from the village – and noticed that it was actually an old growth tree. How could I tell? The pattern of bark is different, the branches are thicker and more gnarly and look like the trunks of younger trees. My brother’s eyes found anomalies in the pattern I had formed of my home forest, and I used my own pattern recognition skills to identify why the tree he spotted was an anomaly.
This, it turns out is an excellent thing to do when you are looking for other patterns in familiar contexts, like your business market or your team culture or the school system you work in or the services you offer to community. Be careful not to assume that the patterns you can see is the sum total of the reality available to you.
This isn’t new. But you can never over-practice awareness.
There is a neat game called Geoguesser that is based on the Google Street View database. You download the app and get started and it throws up an image from somewhere in the world and you have two minutes to guess where it is. The closer you get to the actual spot, the more points you get.
You’re not supposed to cheat by using Google maps to look up land marks. It entirely depends on the pattern recognition that you bring to the game. What language is that on the side of a truck? What does that street sign say? What kind of palm trees are these? Is that dirt road red or dark brown? Is that a white ring around the power pole?
Really good players of this game have thousands of details stored meaning that they can discern the location using macro clues first, and then narrow things down with decision trees, like how the shadows are cast, entire websites have sprung up devoted to these pattern markers that help people quickly identify the location. There are competitions culminating in the GeoGuesser World Championship. You can watch these competitions live. They are amazing.
And the kind if undisputed champion of this game is rainbolt, a man full of so many patterns, that his guesses are almost always pinpoint accurate.
Watch him host five great players finding obscure locations. They are engaged in constant pattern finding. It’s kind of amazing and it’s very cool to have them articulate the way they are seeing these landscapes. Specific knowledge helps them make generalizations and they connect what they know and use abductive reasoning to guess the location.
Back when I first experienced Open Space Technology, at a conference in 1995, the thing that immediately caught my attention about the process was how it was a perfect, simple set of constraints to enable self-organization. It sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about self-organization and complexity and I became captivated with the patterns I saw around me, and specifically with dissipative structures.
Ilya Prigogine coined the term dissipative structure. In layperson’s terms it refers to a structure that persists in time despite its components constantly changing. The classic example is a whirlpool. When you pull the plug on a bathtub full of water, the water forms a whirlpool as it head down the drain. The whirlpool is an emergent structure and a pattern that persists over time, held in place by constraints such as gravity, the size of the drain hole, and way bigger forces like air pressure and where you are on the planet.
If you just look at molecules of water, you would have no idea that they could form a whirlpool. The water molecules that drain out of your bathtub all participate temporarily in forming the whirlpool but none of them initiate it. When they leave, they have no memory that they were in it. You cannot take a random water molecule and discover whether it has ever gone down a drain. And yet, the pattern persists and is real. What gets dissipated is the energy and matter that travels through the structure.
In human systems, we see related kinds of structures everywhere too. Learning about these kinds of patterns, which I did initially through Fritjof Capra’s book The Web of Life, made me seek out analogues around me. The pattern of “dissipating structure” was interesting, and because I had focussed extensively on culture in my undergraduate studies, I finally had a useful way of looking at cultures and how they seemed to exhibit both stability and constant change. People, energy and material flow through the culture but they are entrained to behave in a larger scale structure that has some persistence, but which is also sensitive to changing. This was how I ended up coming to complexity theory, through my exploration of these ideas.
Cultures are not dissipative structures in the technical sense that Prigogine describes, and there seems to have been quite a bit of controversy over the years about whether social structures qualify as thermodynamic structures. Because I’m not a physicist I will say they are not, but this idea makes a good metaphor and helps me to explain how we work with emergent structures and persistent patterns in organizational and community life.
Seeing this pattern led me into the margins of participatory leadership work, facilitation, and ultimately dialogical organizational development. These ways of working were all concerned with creating the kinds of containers that enable emergent meaning. Sometimes these containers are temporary, like meetings, and sometimes they are persistent, like organizations, teams and communities. If you’ve ever tried to change an organizations culture you’ll recognize that it is very much like sticking your hand in a whirlpool. You’ll get some temporary disruption, but unless you change the enabling constraints, the whirlpool will reestablish itself the moment you stop interfering.