A couple of years ago – back when I had long hair – I was doing some work in Estonia, where I was part of a team of people that were leading a week long workshop learning about leadership, complexity, dialogue and belonging. I was interviewed under a tree one afternoon about some of the concepts and the deeper implications of what we teach in the Art of Hosting workshops, which itself is, at its simplest, a set of practices to help facilitate participatory meetings better. I talked a bit about what the Art of Hosting means, the need to dance with chaos and order and the learning from the deeper patterns of how life works.
A lot of what I have learned about living with change has come from living on Bowen Island. The bulk of this ten minute interview is basically my operating principles when it comes to living in my community, dancing between chaos and order, welcoming change and bringing helpful form and cultivating the belonging that the heart truly desires. This quiet reflection, spoken out in a period of my life when I was wobbly and reflective, captures something of how I see the world deep down. It’s a bit sentimental, especially at the end, and I don’t apologize for that. It’s from my heart.
From time to time, I’ve made notes about my working set up, noticing that things change a lot over the years. Inspired by my friend Peter Rukavina, but with substantially less detail, here is my current set up.
Infrastructure
My office is located in a dormer on the upper floor which faces south and is surrounded on three sides by windows. to the west I can see the Queen Charlotte Channel, the waterway that separates Bowen Island from West Vancouver. To the west is the forested slopes of Mount Collins, and in front below me are my neighbours in the Seven Hills neighbourhood of Bowen island. In the dsitance Apodaca Ridge rises on the other side of Snug Cove.
I have a standing desk and an Ikea stool that i occasionally rest on. Our internet comes through Shaw, a switch I made this week after months of deep disappointment in the service levels and technical assistance of Telus.
Hardware
My workhorse is a mid-2013 MacBook Air and a 1Tb Seagate external drive for back up and file storage. I have an iPad 2 which I mostly use for reading magazines at breakfast, and as a cook book for cooking. I have an iPhone 5c and a Kindle Paperwhite for reading. I have gone back to taking notes in a Moleskine and photographing them for posterity.
Things get printed on a wireless Canon printer.
An old iPhone 4 sitting on a Bose system provides high quality tunes and I have a set of Bose headphones for serious listening in the evening.
Elsewhere in the house we have a XBox and an iMac, both of which are used for Netflix viewing and gaming.
Desktop software
Everything runs through Evernote. To do lists, meeting notes, web bookmarks, pdf’s, articles and blog drafts. Evernote is my word processor, where I compose the first drafts of anything I’m working on and is my brain. If I need information I check there first to see if what I’m looking for is something I’ve forgotten. Next to that Safari, MacMail iCal and Skype are my most used desktop applications. Itunes of course for music and podcasts.
Web software
Mostly I’m off google these days with two exceptions. Many of my colleagues and my partner use Google Docs and I run my mail through Gmail mostly for the great spam filtering ability. I rarely use the web interface for Gmail, but am grateful for it when the laptop fails. Dropbox is my file storage system, containing a complete backup of everything I am working on, synched to my devices. I use WordPress on my main web site and Blogger for Bowen Island Journal. Lately we’ve been using Weebly for quick and dirty site set up and we’ll probably be relaunching our corporate site on Weebly as well. Inreader is my current feedreader on both the Mac and the iPhone.
Phone software
I’m a heavy smartphone user. When I was a kid I dreamed of owning the eponymous device from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and when I got my first iPhone I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Apps that get heavy time there include:
- Calendar
- iTunes
- Accuweather
- Podcasts
- Sticher
- CBC Radio
- Songza
- Genius Scan
I’m still trying to decide what to do with my photos. Currently they are automatically uploaded to DropBox and I periodically go through them and cull, saving the best ones in nine different folders where I have a collection of pictures of family, friends, Bowen Island, and some of the adventures I get up to, sorted by year. I am wanting to keep these more in the spirit of how we held onto photos in the old days, and have an intention to print these out for safe keeping as hard copies.
Social infrastructure
I get out everyday here on Bowen. Regular morning espresso at The Snug, and lunches at Rustiquie, The Snug or Artisan Eats. Sometimes I bring my laptop and work through email. At some point I like to get out for a walk or a paddle. I like to end my day when I can with something marking a threshold. Sometimes this is an hour of contemplation and meditation at Rivendell, a pint at the pub or a walk with my partner around the lake here on the island. I try not to work evenings when I’m home, saving that time for cooking, hanging out with the family or socializing with friends. I exercise by walking and hiking, and it’s no trouble for me to walk the two miles round trip to thew Ruddy Potato for fresh food for dinner. I’ve been trying to travel less the last few years and making the most of my time when I’m here at home is important to me.
I love working from home and working as a consultant, but I do miss having a regular schedule. I play in a local co-ed soccer league and sing with a couple of choirs as well as making music with friends when I can. I find myself too often turning down invitations because I’m travelling or working, and have to work hard to limit my commitments. Recently I’ve been appointed to out local Economic Development Committee so that is where I am putting my volunteer attention these days.
The only regular commitment I have in Vancouver is to the Vancouver Whitecaps FC, with whom I have been a season’s ticket holder for four years and a dedicated member of the Southsiders supporters group. Otherwise I try not to leave here unless someone else picks up my ferry fare.
That’s the set up. It all makes my work possible. What’s yours?
We have an Art of Hosting event coming up in February 23-26 on Bowen Island. This is my home based offering, which I have been doing for nearly ten years with friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Caitlin Frost, and lately with our new colleague Amanda Fenton. All of these folks are incredible facilitators and teachers and great humans.
Every Christmas Day, our nuclear family heads off Bowen Island to travel into Vancouver and celebrate with cousins and grandparents, feasting, gift giving, hanging out and catching up. The weather is always different. Some years the ferry ploughs through a fierce Squamish wind blowing down Howe Sound from the north and freezing salt spray covers the cars on the ferry deck. Other years it is rainy and blowing from the southeast, as it was much of this month. Once – only once in thirteen Christmases of doing this – did we have snow, and that was back in 2008 when the whole country experienced it’s first completely white Christmas in 37 years. Alas, our little pocket of green on the west coast of BC is usually the reason why the whole country isn’t covered in snow.
This year, the weather was sunny and calm, about 8 degrees and the Queen Charlotte Channel between Bowen Island and Horseshoe Bay was like glass. I stood at the front of the car deck on the soon to be overhauled Queen of Capilano and shot this little time lapse of the voyage, which normally takes under 20 minutes. This is the first leg of every trip I do to anywhere in the world: across this gorgeous fjord.
The bench at Killarney Lake on Bowen Island that looks out across a rock and the calm surface of this afternoon’s gloaming. I love the word “gloaming.” It refers to the dusky twilight that is practically what passes for daytime now, so close to the solstice, when the grey clouds that envelop us dim the already weak northern daylight even further. I love the cool air and the damp and wet, I love the contrast of walking into a friend’s house full of the smells of spiced ginger tea and welcomed with warmth. I love that we can huddle together against the chill to sing, as we did tonight with our local men’s and women’s Threshold Choirs, wrapped in blankets in a yurt, singing chants we practice for singing to the dying, accompanied by the random percussion of the rain.
I am built for gloaming of Advent, a northern soul, a winter lover, one who can wait and wait and wait for the returning of the light, for the summer’s long in breath that begins a 2:03 on Sunday afternoon.
Until then, enjoy some other amazing gloaming.