I am using Patti Digh’s title for this post. She posted today on Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, in which he had to perform on a piano that was far from ideal. But he accepted the constraint and played one of the most enduring and transformative jazz concerts of all time.
It reminded me of the time that Geoff Brown and I played with two Turkish musicians at the Applied Improv Network conference in Portland. The image above shows us in full flow.
I had just met Geoff, and we were beginning a friendship that has lasted nearly two decades despite having been together only three times – in Portland, working on a sustainability conference in Melbourne, and doing one on Indigenous Housing here in Vancouver.
The show in question was the gala improv show, held I believe at the Portland Schweitzer Concert Hall, which is a big venue. The four of us were invited to be the band for part of the show. Geoff had his guitar with him and the Turkish musicians had their instruments, but I had nothing. The show organizer said “my son has a really nice guitar. I’ll bring it for you.”
We showed up on the evening ready to go (this was an improv show remember, no rehearsals!) and the organizer handed me the guitar case. I opened it up and instead of “a really nice guitar” he handed me a battered beginner classical guitar that was missing the A string. “Oh shit,” he said.
His son had evidently swapped guitars at some point and dad just grabbed the case without checking and left.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I took one look at the guitar and, after three days of accepting every offer that came my way, I said “it’s good. I’ll play it.”
And that’s how I found myself playing onstage in a soft seat theatre in Portland in front of hundreds of people on a battered old five string guitar with an Australian blues man and two Turkish musicians. You can tell from the photo above that we had a ball.
Light up the Cove celebrations earlier this month here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island.
It has been dark and rainy on Nexlelexwm/Bowen Island these past few weeks. The Pacific storms have rolled through with rain and wind from the southeasterlies which we call the Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that brings warm temperatures and heavy rain. We’ve had the westerlies blow in their usually unpredictable ways, sometimes bringing rain and sometimes clearing, but this time toppling trees and kicking the power out for my neighbours on the west side of the island. And we have the frontal systems of low pressure travelling down from Alaska and sending cold fronts and waves of rain through our region. It has been dark and stormy and blustery. And I love it.
The darkness here around the winter solstice is the combination of low northern sunlight and thick cloud. When the day is over, it descends inky and thick over the island. If it isn’t storming, it gets deeply silent, with only the sounds of the sea lions in the bay reverberating along the shoreline. The darkness has an expectancy to it. The expectation of longer days, of warmth and dry spring days, and the knowledge that those days lie only a few weeks away around the beginning of February, spurs the expectation to life.
Here on Bowen there are many traditions that mark this time of year. Light up the Cove, on the first Saturday in December is celebration of the Christmas season. Thousands of lights doll up Snug Cove in almost random and beautifully gaudy ways. There is a parade of lanterns and lights and elves and Santa makes a visit, arriving at the Union Steam ship company to the delight of hundreds, this year in a golf cart. I sang Christmas carols along with a small diorama of wise men this year. Down in the Cove, local businesses set up little Christmas trees.
Following that there are craft fairs and book sales during the month, at Collins Hall, at the School, and al around the island. Artists open their studios, the Galleries all turn their walls over to local artists and artisans. This year Kingbaby Theatre mounted Mad Mabel’s Christmas for only the fourth time since 1999. It is a local story of a homeless woman who witnesses and enables the magic of the season through the transformation of the people around her. It’s a beautiful story about love and friendship and the beauty and awe of light in the darkness, made by our neighbours, featuring our neighbours.
Today, on the solstice itself, my friends Aubin and David van Berkel hosted a pagan solstice party during which participants dipped bread in apple wassail and threw it at the apple trees in their orchard to inspire the trees to return to life and produce their fruit again this year. Tonight I played with a little ensemble of Celtic musicians accompanying Tina Overbury in her production of Dagda’s Harp, her retelling of the story of the Tuatha De Danaan, the mythical Irish warriors. It is about how they recovered the stolen harp of their Dagda and in so doing restored the world to light and rhythm and music. It is a story delivered in a near sacred manner at sunset on the solstice.
Last night the Jewish community on Bowen celebrated the sixth night of Hanukkah with a lighting of the menorah candle in the Cove. 60 or 70 people took part. In the United Church today, on the last Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Love, we felt the beginning of the release of darkness and the anticipation of the return of the sun and the birthing of the light into the world as Emmanuel, the God who takes form as a human. On Christmas Eve we will gather in the Little Red Church again to sing carols and hear the story of the birth of Jesus, an outsider and refugee, whose rumoured birth sent the dictator of his day into a paranoid frenzy that saw thousands rounded up and hundreds of children killed. We celebrated the thin thread of love that conquers all, that weaves itself through the very fabric of the universe. Unconquerable, unrestrained, unconditional. Soon it will be Christmas. Not yet, not for another four days, not until we can be sure the light is really coming back. These are the days of faith.
The time is pregnant with intense feelings and sentiments. The land and sea and atmosphere brings us to quiet and anticipation and reflection. We are invited indoors and encouraged to join together with others, friends new and old, sharing music and poetry and food and drink. Sharing stories about how this year seems darker than previous ones. We remember those we have lost, those who are struggling. Those who have fallen ill or who are recovering. We hold them in our hearts, bring them round our hearths.
And we wait. We wait in trust and faith and hope and love, prepared for the moments of joy that are coming, that are long anticipated, that are desperately needed. The solstice is a turning of time and attention.
From here, the light.
Start your day with some Karine Polwart, The News:
What if the news were nothing more
Than the secrets of seashells on the seashore
Whispering which way the wind will blow this night
And how everything’s gonna be alright?What if the very first sound you heard
At dawn was a wild and wonderful word?
And what if a smile was your first sight?
Wouldn’t everything have to be alright?
Polwart has an edge to her music, don’t let these lyrics fool you. She is a biting and incisive observer of the world as it is.
We don’t have to have hope to appreciate a better future for our planet and our species. We should, if we haven’t already, probably get better at holding the two ideas of hope and despair in mind at the same time. My friend Dave Pollard does that in his writing and signals today that he is embarking on a post-collapse series on his blog which I can tell you in advance will be worth reading. Not because you will agree with it, or because it will give you hope, or validation or solutions. Just because it will help you cultivate a more complex perspective on the world around you. That’s what Dave’s writing does for me, and that’s what Dave in person does for me too. And maybe that what’s Mylène Farmer – who he references in his post – is doing too in her joyful performance of Désenchantée, which seems so at odds with the lyrics.
Another fella who is writing a great series of posts is Ron Donaldson who is signing off from a career in complexity, participatory narrative inquiry, and facilitation with a series of retrospective posts about his journey. Today he has one up on his work with Participatory Narrative inquiry. the whole series is worth a read.
One of the reason why I think we get deluded into believing that the world can be saved is that we place a big emphasis on stories about how the small thing that happened has big implications. Well, on Taming Complexity, there is a great story about how one public participation design on a NASA program to literally save the plant went awry. This is important reading. We need to get good at public participation and deliberation around technical issues as well as complex ones.
I’ve had many conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the long term cost of isolation that is exacerbated by the ease of online connection. But, as folks who know my complexity work will know, connections and exchanges are two different things. I can engage in all kinds of people and bits and digital entities now. But why then are we more lonely than ever before? And why are we losing the ability to be in real life conversations? Harrison Moony. catches the moment in this article from The Tyee.
But how do you commit to a discourse when you can’t be sure that the person you’re talking to even exists? The tech libertarians don’t even want us. We’re too hard to manage, too human, and that’s why they’ve flooded their sites with fake people, more likely to say what they want, and much easier to reconfigure, like Grok, if they don’t.
Seeking human connection online today feels like being the last one who hasn’t been body-snatched.
That’s a good analogy.
Paul McCartney is also addressing this head on and trying to show that it’s not just an analogy. Actual bodies of work are being snatched up by AI and he has spearheaded an initiative to protest this with an album of the sounds of creativity when the artists have disappeared. The project is called “Is This What We Want?” and it’s a question worth asking. As usual, Ted Gioia, whose blog pointed me to the work, does a masterful job of unpacking the cultural implications of this moment. It’s one of the things I love about live sports to be honest. You need actual people to play it, it’s a form of creativity that is very somatic and body based and the outcomes are always unknown. That’s perhaps a post for a different day, but it’s certainly an overriding concern for me these days.
For what it’s worth, This blog is always hand written. If I ever use AI here I’ll let you know.
A different disappearance in the Canadian cultural milieu happened this week in the world of sport. Valour FC, the Canadian Premier League team in Winnipeg announced that it is wrapping up operations. They were part of probably the biggest sporting moment of my life in 2023, when our TSS Rovers became the first semi-pro team to eliminate a professional team from the Canadian Championship.. We’ve been rivals since then, playing them again in May in Winnipeg where they nicked a 1-0 win against us in the preliminary round. Nevertheless, it absolutely sucks for supporters to lose their club. It sucks for players and other workers to lose their jobs. Like the rest of the global economy, soccer is a billion dollar thing only at the very highest levels in the 0.01%. Everywhere else it’s about community and connection and hopes and dreams. People make it possible. Intangibles are essential. When it dies, a little bit more community dies with it. Support for your local clubs matters because it will keep it viable AND because you will experience connection and belonging and friendship and purpose. The billionaires want to sell those to you on their own terms. Resist and make community in spite of them.
Friday night professional women’s hockey arrived in Vancouver. The Vancouver Goldeneyes kicked off their history starting with a puck drop by Christine Sinclair and then a 4-3 come from behind overtime win. It was the third game in a row that a professional Vancouver women’s sports team has won from behind if you go back to the second leg of the NSL semi final and the final of the NSL. This win happened in front of a packed house at Pacific Colosseum and. Vancouver became the first PWHL team to have its own logo permanently marked at centre ice. It’s a very special time in women’s sports in this city. Both the Northern Super League and the PWHL strive to be top tier leagues in the world of professional women’s sport. The PWHL already is. NSL has made a strong start, based on the “state of the league” address that founder Diana Matheson gave prior to the Cup Final last week. It remains to be seen how profitable and sustainable the league can be over the long term, but it is walking and talking like a top five global league after just one season, and that’s probably well ahead of schedule.
Jane Siberry last night
There were things I saw last night that I may never see again. The first was the stunning conclusion to the World Series, in which the situation arose at the end of the game where any one pitch would win or lose an entire season. A base hit and the Blue Jays win. A double play and the Dodgers win. I think I awoke in the timeline where the Dodgers won, but it did indeed have the feeling of one of those situations in which a timeline splits into two. Somewhere in a parallel universe, the Blue Jays won and the baseball gods took a shine to this particular Cinderella and granted her an inch or two of leeway, for a ball stuck under a wall, a bounce off an outfielders glove in a collision at the warning track, a zephyr to deflect a line drive an inch or two further away from a third baseman who happened to be in the way, the ever so slightest dip on a pitch that would have sunk a fastball in the strike zone and resulted in a ground out instead of a towering home run.
I have never seen a sporting contest come down to minuscule twists of fate in such strange ways.
When the game was over I took advantage of the extra hour of time change to watch all the post game interviews with the Blue Jays players. All they could talk about was the love they held for one another. Professional athletes don’t always have the broadest emotional vocabulary and you could see every single one of them struggling to find words to describe the depth of relationship they have with their colleagues, and their families and the staff of the organization. They were pleading with the cynical corps of sports reporters to have them truly understand the depth of love that they all experienced. It was a once in a lifetime experience. It was transformational. They didn’t win the World Series, but they can never forget the love – the utter agapé of it all – that flows between them. It is love that transformed them from a last place team to a team that missed their destiny by a whisper. It is love that left them changed as people. It is, I might say, the love that we should all have a chance to experience once in our lives. We are built for it. It does something to us. I’m not shy in saying there is a theology about it.
And that brings me to the second thing that happened to me last night, which I may never see again, and that was going to see Jane Siberry perform live and solo at the Motel Chelsea up in the Gatineau. It is a surprising and lovely little venue, a place of vision, stuck on a side road by an off ramp from the Highway 5 that winds its way from the city of Gatineau across the river from Ottawa up into the Gatineau hills and beyond in the wilderness of southwestern Quebec and the Kitigan Zibi homelands.
Jane Siberry is one of the people I count among the pantheon of psalmists in my life, along with Bruce Cockburn, Dougie McLean, Martyn Joseph and Ani DiFranco. She opens me up and can make me cry at the drop of a hat. Her performance last night was a ceremony of liberation, a woven story where lyrics and images flowed and churned like a river, coming back around in back eddies of meaning and imagery. A consistent tone centre, an entire first half hour played on guitar in a diatonic scale of open E voicings, the words “light” and “love” and “mother” coming back again and again, deepening each time.
I turned to the friends we were with at the end and said “this is a liturgy.”
She finished with “Love is Everything” and if you didn’t know the truth of these lyrics before, then you might have had a chance to witness them in much more stifled words from the mouths of the Blue Jay players in the locker room last night. And so, here they are. Because I hope that everyone who witnessed that journey – who witness the deep journey of being human, in fact – at some point comes to the realization that Jane Siberry and Ernie Clement et. al. have come to. May you live this.
maybe it was to learn how to love
maybe it was to learn how to leave
maybe it was for the games we played
maybe it was to learn how to choose
maybe it was to learn how to lose
maybe it was for the love we madelove is everything they said it would be
love made sweet and sad the same
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leavingmaybe it was to learn how to fight
maybe it was for the lesson in pride
maybe it was the cowboys’ ways
maybe it was to learn not to lie
maybe it was to learn how to cry
maybe it was for the love we madelove is everything they said it would be
love did not hold back the reins
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leavingfirst he turns to you
then he turns to her
so you try to hurt him back
but it breaks your body down
so you try to love bigger
bigger still
but it… it’s too lateso take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
and know you’ll never be the same
and find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn’t I?
and I gave it big… sometimes
and I gave it in my own sweet time
I’m just leavinglove is everything…