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.
Not every facilitation gig goes great. The kind of work I do – and this is probably true of many of you – is usually novel. It is new to the organization I’m working with and often times new to me too, because every organization’s context is different and we design to what is needed.
This means that I often find myself involved in processes that folks have never done before. Moreoften than not, if we’ve done our preparation work well and folks are well invited to the gathering, the process is fun, engaging, powerful and results in good outcomes.
And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we get lost, don’t know where to start, flounder and find ourselves surprised. And at times like that I think about Tommy Flanagan.
Tommy Flanagan was one of the best jazz pianists who ever lived. His discography includes 40 solo recordings and some of the seminal jazz recordings of the 20th century: Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Kenny Burrell’s Swingin’, and numerous albums with Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, and JJ Johnson among others. Famously he appeared on John Coltrane’s 1959 album Giant Steps.
Now Giant Steps featured as its title track a now-classic tune of the same name which is diabolical in nature. Coltrane plays it very fast, and the chord progression is something that no one had ever seen before – embodying Coltrane’s radical approach to jazz harmony – with hardly any time to think between changes.
When Coltrane introduced the song to Flanagan a couple weeks before the recording session, he played it slowly so Tommy could get a sense of how the changes worked, and this left Flanagan with the impression that the tune was a ballad. Ballads are played at 60 beats per minute. When the band stepped into the studio to make the recording, Coltrane played it at nearly 300 beats per minute. Flanagan wasn’t prepared.
On the recording, you can hear Coltrane’s soaring solo of 11 choruses, before he drops and lets Flanagan comes in. Tommy Flanagan has five choruses to solo on and he starts scared and gets progressively more and more lost until by the fifth chorus he is just comping out some chords and probably thanking his stars he survived it.
His solo is perhaps the most famous example of a top jazz musician who tried something and failed. Lost, bewildered, out of ideas, but gamely getting through it.
Some days are like that. Folks loving using jazz as an example of what happens when teams of people really cook together, but they never seem to bring up Tommy Flanagan’s solo. Facilitation is like that sometimes too. You know you’re stuff, you are good at it, and then you find yourself in a context where things are not what you expected and you dry. It doesn’t mean you’re not good at your job. But, Coltrane’s recording of Giant Steps is perhaps the most relatable moment I can describe listening to jazz masters play.
Flanagan, by the way, had more than the last word on this piece of music. After Coltrane died he recorded a lovely version of it on a tribute album that has a solo that rivals Coltrane’s and is maybe even better for its lucidity and cohesiveness and swing.
Tomorrow is Bandcamp Friday, on which day the popular music site waives its revenue sharing agreement with artists. On the first Friday of every month, artists receive 100% of the revenues on their music.
So here’s what I’m buying this month:
- The Sweetest Homewrecker by Sarah Jane Scouten. Sarah Jane is a Bowen Island artist who now lives in Scotland and makes the most amazing roots music. Explore her catalogue tomorrow.
- Ever Now by Reg Schwager and Don Thompson. Over the past year, Toronto guitarist Reg Schwager has been placing some of his back catalogue on Bandcamp. This 2017 album is a brilliant set of duets with bassist Don Thompson, another Canadian jazz legend.
- My Truck, My Dog and You by Rusty Ford. Rusty is a friend and a great performer of alt-country music. This is a hilarious set of original songs inspired by a list of country song titles of “songs that should be written.” Rusty wrote ’em.
- Symphony of Mother and Child by Nova Pon. My next door neighbour Nova is a composer. This symphony is her musical documentation of mothering her daughter from new born through the first five years of her life. I personally love this piece of music because it contains references to bird song and the sounds of our neighbourhood and captures the character of my next door neighbours. Hyper local. I already own this album- I handed her $20 when I met her on a walk in the forest one day – but I encourage you to buy it and support her work.
- And if you want your Bandcamp purchase to support a good cause In The Heather is an album of traditional Irish music 14 friends and I made back in 2001 to raise money for the Portland Hotel Society in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. All proceeds from this album go to supporting services and housing for folks with complex physical and mental health issues.
ChatGPT made this image of a cranky psychology professor playing soccer while a bellicose commentator looks on and the players stare bewilderingly at the proceedings that are not a part of
Imagine a scenario in which a well known radio host with a penchant for American sports talks with a Jungian psychologist weirdly obsessed with the culture wars, about football tactics. Neither one knows what the hell they are talking about, but they have large social media followings so somehow we should listen to their opinions. ChatGPT helped me out here, because I’m incapable of writing this dialogue without losing my mind.
Chuck Dugan:
Welcome back to The Morning Yardage, I’m your host Chuck Dugan—gridiron guy, diamond devotee, and, uh, recently inducted into the world of world football! That’s right, we’re talking soccer. And with me today is a real thinker, Dr. Leonard Ambrose Penwright, a Jungian psychologist and… well, something of a European football aficionado?Dr. Penwright:
Thank you, Charles. It is both a privilege and a burden to speak into the void that modernity has fashioned around our ancestral games. Soccer—what the Europeans call “association football”—is, fundamentally, a sacred reenactment of the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus.Chuck:
Yeah. And that’s why they play it on grass.Penwright:
Precisely.Chuck:
So, let’s get into it. There’s been a lot of talk about this whole “false nine” business. What is it, Leonard? I saw it on a YouTube video, and I gotta say, I didn’t see anything false about the guy wearing number nine. He looked real enough.Penwright:
The “false nine” is emblematic of post-Freudian identity collapse. It’s a striker who refuses to strike—like a lion who meows or a Protestant who dances. He descends into the midfield, displacing the masculine telos of the goal. It’s essentially a Jungian shadow figure, disrupting the natural order.Chuck:
So… is he like a tight end?Penwright:
No, he is less than a tight end. He is an archetype of the dispossessed prince. Tactically, this was pioneered by the Belgians during the Crimean War. Or possibly the Dutch during the Enlightenment—it’s disputed.Chuck:
Right, right. And that brings me to the diamond midfield. Everybody’s talking about it. You stack your midfield like a fantasy football draft: you got the quarterback, the wide receiver, and then two guys hanging back to clean up spills. I think that’s how Real Manchester beat Liverpool United in the Champion’s Bowl back in ’96.Penwright:
You’re close, Charles. The diamond is a sacred symbol—four points, representing Carl Jung’s four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensing, and… something else. When deployed correctly, the diamond midfield becomes a psychic mandala. This is what separated the 1934 Prussian national team from the decadent Hungarian Romantics of the same era.Chuck:
A classic rivalry! I remember my dad telling me about that match. Ended 2-2 in overtime, right?Penwright:
It ended in ideological fracture, Chuck. The referee was a Catholic. That was controversial.Chuck:
Well, switching gears here—everyone’s talkin’ about the high press. I assume that’s when the goalie comes out with a lot of pressure? Like a blitz package?Penwright:
Incorrect, but spiritually adjacent. The “high press” is an attempt to enforce rigid cultural hierarchies. It’s when every player acts as the superego, suffocating the id of the opponent. It is, in many ways, fascist.Chuck:
Love a good fascist play.Penwright:
Indeed. That’s why the Italians did it best in 2006.Chuck:
Okay. One more thing—what’s your take on VAR? You know, the video robot referee thing?Penwright:
Ah, VAR. An insidious manifestation of late-stage digital panopticism. It neuters the spontaneity of the masculine heroic quest. It is Orwellian in scope and TikTokian in attention span. When a man cannot dive theatrically in the penalty box without being surveilled, what is he but a serf?Chuck:
So you’re against it?Penwright:
I’m against what it represents. The end of myth. The death of story. Also, I don’t understand how the offside rule works.Chuck:
Me neither, pal. But hey, that’s soccer! Stick around, folks—we’ll be back after this with more tactical analysis and possibly a Jungian interpretation of corner kicks.Penwright:
Ah yes, the corner kick—the final protest of the oppressed ego against the collective unconscious…Chuck:
We’ll be right back.
Now, Imagine Chuck is Joe Rogan and Penwright is Jordan Peterson and remind me again why their conversation on climate science is relevant to anything at all?
The conversation between these two influencers is as absurd as the one I had a robot create. Being open to other points of view does not require you to listen to complete nonsense in the service of somehow expanding your worldview.