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.
The aftermath of a goal celebration in the TSS Rovers men’s 2-1 win over the Whitecaps Academy on Wednesday at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby.
I’ve started – for now anyway, read the June 20 note for why this might only be a passing fad! – to post a daily or nearly daily set of notes drawn from my readings and surfing of the day. Call it a “web log” if you will. This is partly a strategy to return to the origins of blogging and it’s also a way to keep my dopamine seeking brain from hanging out on my phone and its library of scrolls, where it’s easy to read things and just post them on social media. I’m really, really trying hard to kick social media.
And so every day this week I’ve posted these notes, but they don’t get pushed out to email subscribers becasue I don’t want to overwhelm you with a daily email from me. Those who read blogs in traditional ways, through feedreader for example, will see these, as will those that just hang out here and check the recent postings. (Are there any of you that do that?)
At any rate, the enteries in these posts are loosely themed every day, with a theme that emerges from my reading. Every week or so, on a Friday, I thought I might send you a little digest of these notes because they contain some really interesting readings and links that you might want to check out for your weekend.
- June 16: Notes
- June 17: Accomdating yearning
- June 18: Starting over
- June 19: Service
- June 20: Desire lines
Enjoy.
Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.
I parked my car this morning in the village and walked down to my favourite coffee place for an espresso. Every one of the three conversations I overheard was about people discussing the pros and cons of ChatGPT. Pros seem to be that “it helped me to know what to ask for when I talked to my car insurance company” and cons are mostly “how do we know that any of this is real?” More seriously I’m sitting near folks who work in the arts and the looks on their faces are of the deepest concern. They use it. For ideas, for a writing prompt, but the times they have used it to write dialogue, they can spot how crappy it is. At the moment.
My earliest post about was Google was from 2002 when it was an insanely useful tool for searching the web. “Google cooking” was a simple game where one entered in a list of ingredients and it returned a list recipes. It was novel at the time. Great for weeknight dinners. Another game was called “Googlewhack” whereby one would try to construct a two word search term that resulted in only one result. You can’t play that one anymore.
The complete enshittification of search engines, combined with web content that has been generated by robots in order to sell stuff is increasing turning web-search an absolutely useless activity. I just use my search engine (DuckDuckGo) as a collection of bookmarks now. It is hard to do any meaningful research anymore, and so we turn to ChatGPT for answers. And ChatGPT is out there learning the questions we ask. Something sits weird with me when I think about how while Google learned the answers we like, and AI is learning the questions we ask.
The questions are important, as is the way we ask them and to whom we ask them. Sonja today writes about the questions that help us discern a direction, which is different from finding a way. Sometimes we don’t even know what the direction is although we can discern that wherever we are right now, somewhere else is better. Thinking about that and talking about it together is an essential human capacity and it’s a pretty fundamental part of how we work with teams facing complexity. There is an art to asking to right kinds of questions and thinking about them together that reveals a deeper level at which affordances and opportunities might exist. Sometimes getting unstuck means drilling down and not reaching out.
Collaborative outcomes are emergent properties of discrete human systems of encounter and meaning-making – “dialogic containers” I call them. If you are a leader seeking a course of action, you might get some good ideas by submitting notes and documents and harvests into a large language model to suggest possibilities. In fact, you could even have your team members do that on their own and bring the output to a meeting to talk about what they have found. My hypothesis is if you continue to do that without involving humans you will end up with an endless set of ideas and possibilities, but you will miss the co-creationi and co-ownership that makes sustained effort possible in a particular direction. I can’t yet see how large language models can surface a consensus that will inspire collaborative action. Deep meaning and commitment to one another is produced by the people within the container who discover something between them that is worth trying, worth pursuing together. Calls to action are far less sustainable than co-creation of a direction. Even if, and perhaps especially if, such a direction is deeply flawed to begin with. There is nothing better than failing together and then finding a way forward to build cohesion.
I might be wrong in the future but in this moment, systems-complexity and anthro-complexity are different and humans experience emergence differently from mechanical systems, even those that are capable of learning. Dialogue practitioners base their practice on this idea; that no matter how great the ideas are, nothing gets sustained in human systems without the intangibles of co-ownership, meaningful engagement, and dare I say, at some level, love.
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.