Anchored at Ruxton Island, peering into the Trincomali Channel across a submerged shoal.
As we cruise through these islands I am travelling with David Rozen’s 1985 Master’s thesis, Place-Names of the Islands Halkomelem Indian People. It’s a useful collection of knowledge he recorded with Elders from the Halkomelem communities in these territories and records the many dialects and names of places and some of their stories in these islands. We anchored last night at Ruxton Island, a place that doesn’t show up in Rozen’s study so I don’t know the original name for it. Ruxton is one of the islands in this archipelago that shows off the tectonic forces at play here, tracing long thin reefs and shoals along the direction of geological uplift. We anchored in a narrow bay at the north end of the island with all kinds of little reefs and shoals upon which rest seals and oystercatchers until the tide flows in and washes them away.
We are near the original village site of the Lyackson people which lies across the channel on Valdes Island. There is a great story in Indiginews about how this community has finally found land for their village.
Last night a tsunami advisory was issued for nearly the entire coast of BC except for this part of the Salish Sea, where these islands and shallow channels protect us from damaging effects of most trans-oceanic tsunami waves. Damaging tsunamis can happen here, but only from local earthquakes or landslides. Trans-oceanic waves do enter this region (the linked paper has some great examples) but not in any damaging way. Thankfully this morning I’m not hearing of damage or injuries here, and only a little in Kamchatka and Kuril Islands and Hokkaido and Hawaii where these quake took place. The advisories have all been cancelled.
One of the things I love about my adult son is that he works a job he is good at and fills the rest of his time by what he calls “doing fun stuff.” When we traveled together in England back in April, he was up for anything. Museums, visiting the places I lived as a child, meeting cousins. All these ideas were met with “sure! sounds good!” and truly not the dismissive “whatever” that one sometimes worries about. He was able to find the fun stuff even between the six football matches we went to in ten days. For him, in his life, “fun stuff” might be downhill mountain biking or skiing or going out with friends or ripping around in a small boat or getting into all manner of mischief. He is capable of enjoying himself almost anywhere. He’s nailed it. Brian Klaas would approve:
“To me, the good life has more aimless wandering, less frantic racing, more spontaneity, less scurrying. It comes with a slower pace that allows us to catch our breath, to soak up wonderful moments, to savor what we have. It gives us the space to do one of the most important things a human can do: to notice and relish the joyful, the fulfilling, or even the merely pleasant bits of life.”
Philip Meters writes a very thoughtful meditation on Chekov, happiness and misery and the need for the contented among us to be reminded that people elsewhere are struggling. As Ivan Ivanich says in “Gooseberries:”
“At the door of every contented, happy man,” Ivan says, as if appending a moral to the end of his story, “somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however unhappy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer.”
Meters also quotes from Martin Luther King Jr’s Christmas Sermon for Peace about the interconnectedness of the contentment and suffering of humans and how even before we have finished our breakfast we have become dependant on the people of the world.
Here in Canada the federal Liberal austerity program will go ahead. The CCPA published a piece based on this study which shows that austerity generally increases populism because it affects folks who are already disenfranchised to begin with. It is amazing the lengths that to which neoliberal politicians will go to ensure that rich folks aren’t taxed at the expense of a broad program of social welfare and decent services that can look after literally everybody in a society.
Our TSS Rovers men’s team had a brutal end to the season, having our title snatched away with a last minute penalty. I haven’t been able to write about it yet, but in the meantime my fellow Rovers owner Will Cromack has penned a beautiful piece on Socrates and the 1982 Brazilian side that hoped to deliver both politically and in footballing terms the revolution that Corinthians began in Sao Paolo.
The golfer Scotty Scheffler, who just won The Open Championship, has made some waves recently with the interview he gave before that tournament where he talks about what is fulfilling in life. It’s not winning golf tournaments. In fact he expresses a little astonishment and confusion about why he does what he does, even though he is one of the best in the world at it. “You work all your life for two minutes of euphoria…” As a musician I can relate. We puts hundreds of hours of practice into learning a piece, only to perform it once, perhaps, for a couple of minutes of interesting music. And that’s not even counting the lifetime of work that goes into the training the voice, the fingers, the ear, and the heart to be able to perform competently enough to even be on a stage in the first place.
I was struck by the moment in his press conference where he says “am I making sense?” At that moment, I nodded, but clearly the golf and sports press gallery didn’t. And that is what separates artists from those who value the end line. As Alan Watts once said, if the result was everything people would only go to hear the final chord of a composition, or dancers would head to one spot on the stage and stay there. It’s a cultural error, which is what makes Scheffler’s comments seem so confusing, in a culture that worships the final result.
More patterns that are everywhere. Last week I shared a link about how the Golden Ration is over represented in our ideas about the universe. Today comes a beautiful article from Aeon which talks about the prevalence of the branching network (like a river valley or a bronchial passage) and the web (like neural networks or cosmic galactic clusters) and how they operate across scales. Interestingly in the article, the author Mark Neyrinck doesn’t seem to distinguish between networks with ends and those without. Networks where things arrive at certain places, and networks where they don’t.
I wonder if we are losing our ability to organize and work in networks at scale for social good. Here in North America we are very individual focused in terms of meeting needs and our current governments are most focused on creating the conditions for an efficient return on capital investments and concentration of wealth, following the long discredited trickle down theory of Neo-liberal economics. We are probably going to need networks of care, becasue the federal government is about to gut a number of public facing service personnel to pay for national defence spending and tax cuts. Most of these jobs are the liaison people that help folks with their federal pension plans, employment insurance, and federal taxation issues. The Department that serves First Nations communities and maintains Canada’s end of the bargain in terms of treaty benefits, stands to have substantial program cuts. This is one journey that is going to result in some dire destinations for vulnerable folks, newcomers, and Indigenous communities
Restorative justice is the promising pathway to restoring community, and my friend Sally Swarthout Wolf is in the final stages of finishing a book on the topic. This is a collection of stories from the field, and having had a first peek at the galleys, it is a promising illustrative collection to show and inspire what is possible when we put relationship at the heart of conflict resolution. Pre-order it now.
If you don’t live in Manitoba, PEI, British Columbia or Yukon, your provincial government has not yet enrolled in the national Pharmacare program and you are being left out of funding to support drugs and medications you are otherwise paying more for. All Canadians fund this program. All Canadians should have access to it, but it requires provincial governments to get on board. (Most of the provinces not yet enrolled are led by conservative and populist parties, who are not good on public health stuff, PEI being the refreshing exception).
My enduring curiosity about complexity and constraints extends every day to public policy realms. Looking through a complexity lens helps me to understand governance and how we might address public policy challenges (and why we get it wrong, so often). Brian Klass today has a really fascinating read on dictators, central bankers, decision-making and constraints.
My enduring curiosity also extends to the night sky, and I’m not the only one who looks up, obviously. What I didn’t know until now is that a species of endangered moth uses the Milky Way to guide its migration to a place it has never been before. They have been determined to be the first invertebrate discovered to use celestial navigation.
Growing little brain avatars by reversing time in skin cells to create the building blocks of neural networks sounds – possible? It’s being done right now at Stanford University. This is where complexity takes us, pure experimental research into living systems, and watching how self organization can enable researchers to discover new treatments for brain issues.
Summer nights at the football. Our little band of TSS Rovers ultras celebrates one of the 9 goals our teams scored on Wednesday night.
The summary of notes and links published on the Parking Lot blog over the past week:
- July 7: heavy lifting. A new phone, a new US political party and a new season
- July 8: annals of democratic renewal: political violence, democracy, youth engagement and the role of community foundations
- July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading: A review of Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light and short story season begins
- July 10, 2025: playing at home: my Rovers win big and send a couple of players off to the professional leagues.
- July 11, 2025: the Kanesatake resistance: personal reflections on the events of this day, thirty five years ago.
If you were popping around here on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) over the past couple of days, you might have remarked to folks that the weather seems a bit weird. We’ve had a volatile week of spring weather, with heavy rain, different kinds of winds, a front of thunderstorms and clear skies.
It is interesting to listen to people talk about the weather. The patterns are different. The air is warmer, but has a bit of a chill on the breeze. The wind is coming from different angles and the trees are moving differently. In fact southerly and westerly winds on our part of the island blow against the trees’ natural leaning direction, and yesterday on a late afternoon walk, we hear a couple fall in the forest. The thunderstorms that passed over Vancouver Island were a clue to the weirdness.
Today, in our complexity inside and out course we taught a module on pattern spotting and working with constraints. Complexity workers know that all patterns in complex situations are held by constraints. Change the constraints and the pattern changes. So weather wise, in the last couple of days we had a strange set of constraints in the upper atmosphere that resulted in a lot of convection, meaning that warm air at the surface was mixing with cold air aloft and that is what drives thunderstorms and other volatility including strange winds.
These aren’t uncommon kinds of atmospheric conditions on the coast, but they are uncommon enough that folks sense that the weather is “weird.” And its gets to the point now where I can tell you that there is a lot of convection in the atmosphere by how many people are confused by the weather pattern. Forecasting weather using a mass perception of how people make meaning of the situation is exactly how we work in complexity.
The weather is indeed strange. a few days ago I made bunch of posts on my blog “private.” I have done this once before, when people I worked with in another country were detained in part because of work we had done together. In that case the ruler of that country is a known autocrat who had survived a coup attempt and was taking it out on his enemies and anyone he thought was organizing against him.
Here in Canada we have entered into a short election campaign and although the parties have not yet released their platforms I have already decided who I am voting for, and it is a party I have never voted for in my life. This is an election between two conservative parties. One, the Conservative Party of Canada, is the legacy of the old Progressive Conservative Party which merged with the populist western-based Reform Party (and lost “progressive” from it’s name) and then lost its most lunatic fringe to the further right People’s Party of Canada. Still, they are led by the populist Pierre Poilievre who is a career political party wonk, who has made his living off of immature name calling (a la the man to the south) and slogans like “Axe the Tax” which sound good when you chant them once or twice and then they start to get boring. Plus they are just covering up terrible policy.
The other conservative party is the Liberal Party of Canada which really hasn’t changed over the past 5 decades or so. They occasionally drift to the left on social policy, and we have just come out of a period of ten years where Justin Trudeau brought a Gen X approach to social policy and swung the party left on those issues. Everyone got tired of him though and after a fall of running on fumes with a hobbled House of Commons, he stepped down at the beginning of the year and made space for a short Liberal leadership campaign. The victor was Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He is an economist, a pension fund manager, a banker and a technocrat. His landslide leadership victory (more than 85% of the party members voted for him) instantly moved the Liberal back to their more traditional centre right position. They now have a banker in charge, with a fairly intact social conscience and a lot of experience leading government institutions and economies through rapidly changing crises. He was the BoE chair during Brexit. He knows how to play a bad hand.
One of these two men will be Prime Minister on May 1. Neither of them are true progressives; their campaigns both began with announcement of tax cuts. Carney has been prime minister for less than two weeks during which time he made a trip to Europe to shore up trading support and defence options against the unpredictable chaos coming from our south and then he came home and dropped the writ. Poilievre has continued to campaign against Justin Trudeau (who is long gone), he continues to rail against the consumer carbon tax (which Carney has effectively repealed) and he continues to promote a tax cut for the lowest tax bracket (which Carney also did, although at a lower rate and more tied to a policy decision to replace the carbon tax rebate, ANYWAY…).
Poilievre was standing 25 percentage points ahead in most polls until Carney was chosen as leader of the Liberal Party. He now sits 5 points behind Carney. The progressive conservatives who could never vote for Trudeau’s Liberals seem to have come home to the only conservative party will to occupy the centre of the political spectrum: Mark Carney’s Liberals.
So we have an election, but it is not to be one contested on progressive ideas. It will be one that will elect a party and a prime minister that can best respond to the unprecedented volatility and existential threat of this strange time. That is not the bellicose and sloganeering Conservatives. That party will be the Liberal Party of Canada. There is a lot at stake in this election and a lot of strange political weather happening now. Call it volatility in the upper atmosphere, but it is about to hail some.