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.
My first facilitation teacher, Bruce Elijah.
I have told this story for decades but finally wrote it down today.
Back in 1992 I was working in Ottawa for the National Association of Friendship Centres. One of the Elders that worked closely without Board and staff was Bruce Elijah. Bruce is a wonderful Elder, brilliant leader, and teacher, raised in his traditional Oneida culture. His heart is unlimited in its goodness.
There was a day when I needed to facilitate a conversation on creating a domestic violence prevention program with a number of our member organizations from across the country and representatives of the federal government who were responsible for funding the effort. I was dreading the conversation, both because of the emotional weight of the conversation and the high stakes nature of the day. I turned to advice to Bruce. He gave me the briefest of facilitation trainings. He handed me the eagle feather that our organization used as a talking piece and he said “The Creator gave us two gifts — circle, and story. Use them.” And that was it.
When I arrived in the meeting room at a hotel in downtown Ottawa, it was set up with tables arranged in a hollow square, water and notepads in front of each chair and all facing one small table that I was supposed to sit at. With Bruce’s words in my ears, I did the unthinkable and had the staff reset the room with just a circle of about 24 chairs. When the participants arrived for the work, they were slightly taken aback by the room set up, but many of our members who had travelled from their communities expressed relief that the room looked different from traditional federal government consultations.
When we were ready to begin, an Elder gave us a prayer to bless our day and I introduced the day with a short speech about how we had gathered to generate ideas about a domestic violence prevention program and I knew that everyone in this room had some stories to tell about what that kind of program might mean to them and the people they served. I then invited people to share those stories and passed the feather to the person on my left.
By the time the feather got back to me, it was lunch time. Over three hours we heard stories of deep despair, of hope, of desperate need. We heard personal stories of violence and abuse, and stories of relatives and loved ones who had suffered at the hands of their intimate partners. We had humour as well, jokes and asides and situations so absurd that they were laughable. By the time lunch rolled around it was impossible to tell who were community workers and who were federal government workers; the issue was pervasive and crossed every line.
After lunch we repeated the process although this time I asked “we heard these powerful stories this morning. What then should we do about this?” Again the feather travelled its slow journey around the circle and this time everyone shared ideas about how such a program would look in their community, what it would enable, what kind of change it might make.
During these conversations my only job was to capture pages and pages of notes that I later turned into a report that informed the establishment of the off-reserve portion of the Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was a powerful way to make policy and also a powerful way to create commitment between people. We watched the bones of a federal government program emerge out of an empty circle and a collection of stories. Bruce was right: this indeed was the gift of creation.
That was some years before I stumbled on Open Space Technology and more formalized processes of large scale dialogue. But it taught me that simple constraints — a circle, a feather, a question — could result in profound outcomes. It taught me to make space for stories of the heart and deeply personal experiences. It taught me that attending to relationality was as important as attending to outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that there is hardly anything more powerful and profound than a group of human beings making meaning together in a life-giving context.
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.
I met my friend Aryana on the trail this morning heading to the pier for some coffee and a walk. She said “you’ve been on Bowen for a while now, right?” I looked at my watch and saw the date. Twenty-four years ago today we were busy packing up our three bedroom co-op townhouse in the West End of Vancouver, and bundling our 4 year old daughter and nine month old son into our 1996 Honda Civic. We were getting ready to follow the moving truck to Horseshoe Bay and then over to Bowen Island.
If you have followed along at this blog and others, you will know that I began writing about my experiences of the island almost right away. There was a few months of hand coding html pages for the Bowen Island Journal before I switched over to blogger. That blog kept a good record of the first 15 years of our time here. In about 2017 I consolidated all my writing and just starting writing Bowen Island blog posts on this blog with their own tag.
I love the occasional dive into these archives. They remind me of my curiosities and what had my attention even in the swirl of change that a small community experiences. Perhaps for my 25th anniversary on Bowen I’ll draw these together into some kind of publication. My friend Pauline LeBel would love that.
Bowen Island these days is very different than it was 24 years ago. There are more marine mammals around: sea lions, orcas and humpback whales are now regular residents in our waters. The businesses in the Cove have come and gone, but at the moment there are some wonderful cafes (Like Tell Your Friends on the pier) that are my regular haunts. The Pub is in a new building, The Snug and Docs are where they always were. The library long ago moved to the old General Store. The Ruddy Potato is where it was when it opened the weekend I moved here.
There are new neighbourhoods and new trails and some places I used to go are now fenced off. Some other things never seem to change much. People still complain about the heavy toll tourism takes on our village. The ferry runs at a relatively random schedule. No one likes it when various layers of government do things, except now that we have to build long neglected infrastructure, there is a tenor of discontent that we didn’t do it sooner. Facebook has replaced the Phorum, but the same songs are sung by the chorus.
We have a new municipal hall and community centre, where I will be going tonight to watch Singing In The Rain complete with cartoon and short film trailers, just like in the old days. Tomorrow I will be singing with my choir at Tir-na-nOg, a theatre school for young people that found a home about 20 years ago after rambling across various space on the island.
We have a cougar now, as evidenced by the numerous sightings reported by Islanders and the deer carcass that was stewing in the ditch near my house (but which was thankfully relocated today). The last bear to visit here was about 14 years ago, but there are coyotes and racoons and skunks in addition to the endemic wildlife. The barred owls are breeding like rabbits.
This morning on my way to the Cove, I had my usual June trail breakfast of salmonberries and huckleberries plucked from the bush. We’ve made some amazing moves to protect lands that were long fought over, especially the Cape Roger Curtis lands that now sport a lovely waterfront trail that winds along the shoreline in front of a couple of huge houses that no one will ever live in and a few slightly more more modest houses lived in by actual Islanders. The Bowen Island Conservancy has protected a bunch of south shore waterfront in perpetuity and Metro Vancouver has bought the rest as parkland. They have also done a marvellous job on a waterfront park on Dorman Point. We have also been encompassed by a UNESCO Biosphere Region and we are developing relationships with our hosts, the Squamish Nation, who blessed the name of the island on our sign in a ceremony back in 2020. We live on Nexwlelexwm, and Sempuliyan, one of the family that held us in ceremony on that date, referred to us as Nexwlelexwm uxwimixw, the villagers of Bowen Island.
Affordability has only gotten worse here, but the Bowen Island Resilient Community Housing Society is in the processes of building an affordable rental building with 27 units behind our new amazing community health centre, which sits next to our new amazing fire hall and emergency operations centre. A seniors building, Snug Cove House, is going up across the road meaning that long time islanders like me might have an option to live a long life here as our mobility decreases and our needs increase.
We still have a local newspaper, with its own cartoonist, the inimitable Ron Woodall. Visual arts are still a huge part of life here and there is live music most weeks to listen to at the pub or in the various venues around the island.
Years ago, there was a swan that lived in the lagoon by Mannion Bay. Everyone loved this swan from a distance but also everyone hated meeting this swan up close. My daughter called it “the ornery swan” becausee it nipped and bit people and made a bunch of noise when its perfect little world was disturbed in any way. But from a distance, the swan struck a beautiful image, a still white bird floating majestically on the still dark waters of the bay or the lagoon.
When the swan died, we held a little memorial for it and I wrote a song with a call and response chorus that somehow captured why we loved that bird and how he was so much one of us.
Islanders now gather round
The swan, the swan was swimming
The swan lays dying on the ground
And the swan swims here no more.Gathered on a wintery day
The swan, the swan was swimming
On the rocky shores of Mannion Bay
And the swan swims here no more.Where salmon leapt upon the weir
The swan, the swan was swimming
Where ducks and geese all lived in fear
And the swan swims here no more.All who came to know that bird
The swan, the swan was swimming
Defied the warnings they had heard
And the swan swims here no more.Islanders have come and gone
The swan, the swan was swimming
We had the swan to reflect upon
And the swan swims here no more.A stately bird of grace and poise
The swan, the swan was swimming
Beautiful and mute of voice
And the swan swims here no more.For this wild creature was one of us
The swan, the swan was swimming
A mute and silent blunderbus
And the swan swims here no more.Who are we without the swan?
The swan, the swan was swimming
A part of us is dead and gone
And the swan swims here no more.The tide rolls in and fills the Bay
The swan, the swan was swimming
But the waters here are still today
And the swan swims here no more.Now eagles chase the gulls away
The swan, the swan was swimming
And things have changed on Mannion Bay
And the swan swims here no more.
That kind of gets at the red thread of this place. Twenty-four years.
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.