On May 1 we left for a month in France. When we returned we got the weekend at home which meant hastily harvesting spinach and making 15 spanakopitas for the freezer and a bunch of spinach pesto. Then it was off again on Tuesday morning and a few days of work in Toronto and then a lovely weekend with my brother and sister and nieces and nephew in Simcoeside, north of the city.
And then yesterday home in time for a Carmena Bowena rehearsal. The less said about that the better. I was dirt tired from the jet lag and the weekend, and as a whole, let’s just say it’s great to sound like that in rehearsal. We got to take a look at some deep holes that need patching up. We will be fine come June 27-28 for our concerts.
It is rainy and cool here on the coast, a little taste of what we call “Juneuary.” Stage 3 water restrictions have started on our island meaning that we can only water our garden by hand now. So despite a welcome steady drizzle, we are into summer gardening.
As the year is nearly half over I’m checking in on my quest to log 365 birds. When the year started with a trip to Costa Rica in January and knowing that we were headed to Europe and Eastern North America this year, I thought that might be an achievable target. Today I logged birds 300 and 301 – a Western Wood Pewee and a Western Tanager. So 64 birds to go for the year. The thing about the northern hemisphere is that there aren’t that many more birds I’m likely to see here. Migration season is pretty much over. There will be a window of birds coming back through here in the fall and then the winter birds that hang out will return. So even though it looks like I’m nearly there, there aren’t many I can add from here on Bowen Island. Most of my birding is on the coast, but I might do a trip or two to the Fraser estuary or towards the interior to see some different birds this summer. At this point, it’s about going to where the birds are.
I have one more work trip this season before finally being able to put my feet up until the fall. This summer I’ll be working through our Complexity Inside and Out materials which need some updating as we get ready for the fall 2026 offering. This is a course that is geared towards folks that are leading in complexity from an organizational position or as a consultant/facilitator/host. Given the amount of writing, thinking, and reflecting I’ve done this winter and spring prompted by Dave Snowden’s absolutely prodigious output, there is lots to say, do and clarify. Specifically I need to find clear ways to shape how my practice lies adjacent to hosting and, I hope, drives that practice into a deeper coherence with the challenges and imperatives complexity throws up for us.
A photo by Burns Jennings of a whale that surfaced near his boat in Seymour Bay in 2022. I’m on the shore in front of a garage door, watching through my binoculars.
Back in 2005, my friend Pauline Le Bel wrote a musical about the history of Bowen Island, starting with the Big Bang and coming up tot the present day. I was watching the video of the performance today and was struck by the scene where the protagonist, Duncan, learns about how Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound used to be home to 100 humpback whales. The narrator Raiva tells him that the last whale was killed in 1908 and their voice hadn’t been heard in the Sound since.
Back in 2005 this was pretty true. Humpbacks hadn’t visited our inlet since the last one was killed in 1908. But in 2008, when they returned. My friend Bob Turner made a video about this remarkable turnaround.
By 2022, there were 396 humpbacks in the Salish Sea, and the population has continued growing. Now baby humpbacks come with their mothers to spend the summers here, making this region their permanent home. When I asked Bob what was responsible for the remarkable comeback he said, “well, food of course, but mostly it’s amazing what happens when you just stop killing them.”
Watching Pauline’s performance made me remember that in 2005 we had no idea if this would happen. I remember thinking that if I could just see humpbacks back in the inlet in my lifetime I’d be a happy man. Three years later the first one returned. These days, once they return from their winter breeding grounds, they are almost impossible to miss.
A little hope-core for a rainy March Monday.
Back in 2007 I was working one week a month in Victoria, missing my family and needing to cleanse myself of some of the really difficult work we were doing while working on big systemic Indigenous child and family services issues on Vancouver Island. My evenings were spent trying to find things to do that would bring me joy and one of those was packing my flute and whistles and trundling along to one of Victorias vibrant Irish music sessions for a night of traditional tunes.
One of those sessions was led by Daniel Lapp at the Irish Times Pub. Daniel is a most generous session host, welcoming, encouraging, curious and full of joy. I remember a few evenings and Sunday afternoons where we shared tunes and variations and talked about the difference in repertoire between the Vancouver sessions and the Victoria sessions. It’s rare to meet a musician that treats everyone, from beginner to experienced hack to absolute monster professionals with kindness, encouragement, and fun.
Although I don’t remember playing with him, one of the kids that hung out there was Lapp’s student 10 year old Quinn Bachand. Quinn started playing with Lapp and had a meteoric rise, quickly becoming known as a prodigal young Celtic guitar player, and he’s only gotten better.
It has been 19 years or so since I saw Lapp, but last night he and Quinn graced the stage at Tir Na nOg on Bowen Island, as part of Shari Ulrich’s “Trust Me” series.
It was possibly the best show I’ve seen in the ten years or so that Shari has been curating that series.
Lapp and Bachand are a magical duo and are celebrating the release of an album of music they have just recorded together of a bunch of Daniel’s original tunes. The first set of the night was tunes from the new album written for friends and family members in styles ranging from traditional jigs and reels to cajun two steps and Normandy waltzes. Both players are virtuosos but it must be said that Lapp’s compositional range is incredible and Quinn brought a dense palette of harmonic exploration. These are tunes that seem straight forward on the surface, but can at times be complex and colourful, dippingg through unexpected key changes with Quinn’s reharmonization flying around beneath. All set on top of impeccable timing and groove.
From the very first set of tunes, the audience was hooked and the energy in the room was locked on intense joy, from which is never wavered. barely minutes into the show I think everyone could tell this would be a special night.
After a break, the second set of the night was looser, more tunes called on the fly, more improvisation. Daniel got to talking more about his life going project to gather and publish his collection of the extensive BC fiddles tunes repertoire, which consists of more than 3000 tunes. He drew on much of this tradition in teh second half, which began with Quinn and him playing tunes on harmonica and which also featured a lovely new song Daniel composed, in which he accompanied himself on trumpet. A firy collection of BC tunes followed before Lapp called for an Irish set that meandered through tunes that he and Quinn played together 20 years ago. They explored these tunes together at pace, barely holding on, drifting into improvised patterns, calling up snippets of memory that put me back on that stage with their session at the Irish Times. It was like watching clouds fly past a mountain top. Hints of melody, a tunes started and then abandoned, the pair carried by spirit and flow.
The verdict at the end of the show was the loudest round of applause I’ve yet heard in that theatre which elicited an encore of gypsy jazz, showing of the Berklee-educated Quinn’s swing chops.
The room was full of Bowen Island musicians last night and we all filed out into the night infected with astonishment and joy. Nights like that make you simultaneously want to give up music altogether while inspiring you to go home, pick up your instruments and play all night long. Nights like last night remind you what music is for.
Carmina Bowena warming up before our concert on Monday
I sing in a choir here on Bowen Island called Carmina Bowena. We focus our attention on Rennaisence European music, singing sacred music, madrigals and modern inspirations of the same. We also sing folk music and more traditional music from Italy, France, Spain and the British Isles. We are an impressively eclectic group of people, under under the leadership and joy of our director, Nicole Thomas Zyczynsky.
We like to craft an atmosphere with the music we sing. It’s already transcendent music to begin with but when we perform we want to make it less about a concert and more of an immersive experience. We usually perform in small theatres or churches with good acoustics, from a stage, to an audience.
Monday night though was the first of what I hope will be a series of contemplative experiences that we co-created with the congregation of Cates Hill Chapel here on Bowen Island. We sat in a circle in the centre of the room, which has phenomenal reverb, and around us were a couple of circles of chairs. Candles lit the room and the participants were invited to be in silence for an hour as we sang four sets of music interspersed with poems about light and dark. It was not explicitly a religious experience, but for a contemplative person like me, it was a very good way to be in Lent.
The program began with a couple of Gregorian chants and went through songs by Byrd, Palestrina, Duruffle, Rossi, Lauridsen and Gjello. There was no applause between pieces, just a transition from one to the next, as we stood and sang in candlelit darkness. My friend Kathy played a beautiful clarinet solo a set of variations on a theme by Kodlay. I played a slow air one my flute from the Irish tradition called “The Fire in the Hearth” from an album by John Skelton.
The experience was co-created. Asking the audience to hold silence throughout the hour or so, in a resonant room light by candles, created an atmosphere of deep compilation. More importantly it was an atmosphere that was held by all of us, the choir, the readers, the hosts and the “audience.” It doesn’t;t even feel right to call them an audience.
To me this is the high art of participatory container work: when people all have a role in creating something together. To paraphrase Christina Baldwin, it is not one person’s job to create a container, but a group creates a dialogic container together. And when there is some coherence in that group – perhaps some shared experience, or a shared aspiration or even a shared curiosity – the container can be one in which transcendent experiences happen, where beauty emerges, or novelty, or flow. When we get out of our own way, feeling that it is our job solely to host and create, something else becomes possible. These are communal experiences can be full of beauty, like our concert, or of intense emotional joy like I have experienced when my teams have won important matches. They can be collectively healing, as my friend Linda Tran has begun to discover in her sound bath practice. Today we were talking about the way in which a sound bath session – where she plays crystal bowls and offers gentle meditative and awareness guidance – becomes a powerful collective experience when the participants have all done it before and have set aside their anxieties and worries and deeply rest in the experience. Something else is possible.
We live in a world of performance and consumption. Being an audience member in most places assumes a detachment from the experience. The fourth wall is intact. We passively consume what is put in front of us. We forget that we are also participants. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we NEED to find places of the participatory and collective practice of beauty, even in what is traditionally thought of as as an audience-performer context. May we never lose that ability.
Since the mid 1990s, a local directory has been published on our little island containing local phone numbers and featuring articles and information about island life. It became known as the Gold Pages and at first contained just phone numbers, and often just the last four digits, as everyone shared the 604 area code and the 947 exchange. The directory is mailed to every islander in May each year, and becomes a treasured companion for the year ahead.
The latest custodian of the Bowen Book is my friend Claudia Schaefer, a local artist who works in a variety of media including epoxy, paint, and photography. That’s one of her pieces above called “Ocean Waves” made from mica pigments and epoxy.
In 2021, Claudia took over the Gold Pages from Barb Wiltshire who took it over from the Chamber of Commerce, and she has faithfully produced an annual collection of phone numbers, email addresses, business pages and informative articles. The book is a local resource, deliberately not targeted at tourists. It has its own web site which is quite substantial. You can find a bunch of articles there focused on stuff that us islanders find interesting, on subjects like the best sea kayaking routes, great hikes, 99 things to do as a local, and an extensive gallery of New Yorker quality cartoons on local issues, and loving portraits of islanders and island life past and present, from our resident editorialist, Ron Woodall.
You can learn about gardening with native plants and what kind of birds frequent our forests and shorelines.
Until I stumbled across Claudia’s site today I really had no idea it was out there and how extensive it is.