Sweet rain has fallen over the past day. An atmospheric river has developed over the coast and is dumping healthy amounts of rain on our parched gardens and nearby wildfires. The low is clinging to the mountains, and everything is a beautiful side of grey and dark green. For a pluviophile like me this is manna from heaven. I’m high on petrichor and delighted by the change in palette. Summer is lovely here on the coast and I love the sunshine and calm days, but rain makes me feel alive.
It’s always refreshing to read jazz metaphors for facilitation and leadership from actual jazz musicians. My friend Amy Mervak is both and today she posted a little book of her writings and reflections on learning jazz and developing as a musician and how that relates to leadership. Give it a read.
Have you met Carisa Hendrix yet? She is a Calgary-based magician, who also performs as Lucy Darling. For some reason her shorts creeped into my You Tube recommendations, especially clips of her character Lucy Darling who is the vehicle for her social commentary in what she calls the “slowest moving artistic genre to address the zeitgeist.” Lucy Darling’s crowd work is lovely. It always starts with “What is your name?” followed by “And whhhhhhhhat do you do?” and it goes from there. She is smart and focused and absolutely dedicated to her craft and so thoughtful about what she is doing and why. Check her out.
Another slinky Internet character is Keystone the cat. Keystone lives in Deep Bay, a neighbourhood on Bowen Island near the Cove and he is the most extroverted and beloved cat on the Island. Keystone stories are legion. He loves people intensely, and he cheers up everyone that he meets, so much so that a friend nicknames him “The Seratonin Cat”. He has his own Facebook page. He even has place of pride on the mural of Bowen Island that greets visitors to our island.
Everyone’s offering their thoughts on enshittification these days. I notice this phenomenon…seems like there are conversations that go on which I tap into for a bit before the move along. Makes me wonder if I’m just being carried along in the river of thought. Well, Dave Pollard would argue that indeed I am, and today he has a post on the phenomena of eshittification, and true to his character he also has a useful analysis and remedy for it, in the form of some design principles and a recommendation to the excellent search engine, Kagi, which does what search engines used to do.
Every sector is caving to the enshittification. And every sector has its mavericks that are hacking it back to human-centred dignity. Philanthropy and youth sports are like that and Will Cromack is that maverick. Today his post at The Art of Football is a brilliant summation of what he has done to change both of these sectors (and to change them mutually) and it’s a summary of his life’s work. If you know me, you will know why I love this guy so much.
Sometimes we survive it all? To be clear, I think climate collapse is a different beast than the other collapses human beings have visited upon ourselves in our short history on this planet, but this piece by Luke Kemp at least gets me going into my day with a sense of “okay, but, maybe…” Good enough for now.
A little grey this morning as the Island recovers formats busiest weekend of the year. Saturday night was the infamous Bowen Island dock dance, staged by the fire fighters every year to raise money for the volunteer fire department. It’s a huge party with bands and dancing and lots of beer. The subsequent day, the island seems hungover (and truly a fair percentage of its residents are actually that way). I had a light day, cooking breakfast for my own visiting family members who were slow to get going. I walked to the Cove in the afternoon and on the way back picked blackberries and Oregon grapes to make jelly today. Today is a holiday in British Columbia, and the clouds have rolled in, lowering the sky a little. Rain is possible, and will be welcomed. There is a chill on the air. The seasons continue to turn over.
Elsewhere…
Matt Webb marks the seasons too. Today he reflected on the very special moment of the summer in which the Test cricket season comes to an end in England. I do think you have to love cricket to appreciate it, especially the metronome of summer hours ticking away that is the fall of wickets.
And more from Matt: the dream of crowd sourced information and citizen science is still one of the best things the internet has enabled. Matt has a mammoth post documenting six crowd-based efforts which reveal patterns of life in our atmosphere, biosphere and noosphere.
And something else to think about. Space hurricanes!
Cameron Norman has been blogging about his approach to Strategic Design all summer and he’s finally tied together all the posts into one big guide to doing it. It’s so good that I’m going to add it to my facilitation resources page.
On our recent sailing trip, we noticed that the return of the ochre sea stars has been knocked back. I have seen very few of our iconic purple starfish this year. It looked as if they were recovering from a bacterial wasting disease, but now it seems they are still suffering. The Tyee reports on what’s happening.
Two of our TSS Rovers made their professional debuts on August 2. Kirstin Tynan, who played for us from 2022-2024 and was signed in February to the Vancouver Rise of the Northern Super League got her first start in goal, stopping ten shots in a 3-3 draw against Ottawa Rapid. Callum Weir, our men’s team keeper this year got a short term call up to Valour FC of the Canadian Premier League but suffered a 5-0 defeat behind a team that offered very little defence in front of him. Callum will return to university at the University of Victoria for the winter. Watching these players leaning hard into their dreams and challenging themselves at the professional level of their games is way I continue to help build this little club of ours. It’s all about building better players and ultimately better human beings.
A chonkster of a seal resting on logs at Wakes Cove
Happy Lunghnasa! Our last day out on the water. Caitlin’s observation is that being on a boat puts one deeply in touch with what living on the west coast is all about. Indeed until very recently all life on the coast was oriented to the sea. Historical names refer to sites accessible from the sea and — surprisingly to many settlers — islands don’t necessarily have names. Instead place like Valdes Island, where we anchored last night, are covered in names relating to bays and points and fishing spots and clam beds.
The waters around the north end of Valdes Island and the south shores of Gabriola Island are churning narrows full of rapids and upwellings and whirlpools when the tides squeeze through the narrow passages. That makes these waters rich in nutrients and full of seals and pigeon guillemots and kingfishers scooping up fish. The pier’s around here are covered in plume-nosed anemones and giant barnacles raking the currents for plankton. We are anchored in Wakes Cove which is connected to a provincial park. We walked yesterday through that park, on an old logging road that winds through coastal douglas-fir and arbutus and Garry oak forest until it reaches the gates of the Lyackson reserve lands. Along the eastern shore of the island there is a trail with views out across small rocky islets to the Strait of Georgia and an old midden site on the shore. Today we headed out through the narrows called Hwqethulhp in Hul’q’umi’num on our way to Nanaimo harbour. This passage was traditionally a place for the harvest of herring roe in the spring and oceanspray wood which is used for bows and other tools, including herring rakes. The passage marks the boundary between the Hul’q’umi’num speaking tribes and Snuneymuxw. Outside of Gabriola Island we came across four humpbacks feeding in the Strait.
Here are a couple of blog posts with useful questions and principles. Dan Oestreich shares some guidelines for giving and receiving feedback in the context of a more durable relationship. Lynn Rasmussen offers some questions to ask to see a system you are a part of a little more clearly.
I’ll never get tired of promoting RSS as a way to read blogs. Molly White provides a good introduction to RSS here. My own blog publishes an RSS feed and you can subscribe to the blog by email as well (it’s not a newsletter) and receive featured posts that I send to subscribers.
Richard Wagamese, from What Comes From Spirit:
True silence is more than just not talking. It’s responding to that deep inner yearning I carry to feel myself alive, to exist beyond my thinking, to live beyond worry and frustration. True silence is calm being. True silence is appreciating the moment for the moment. Every breath a connection to my life force, my essence. It’s the grandest music I have ever heard.
Richard Wagamese is the John O Donohue of Canada. In many ways.
“You can’t spreadsheet your way out of injustice” writes Coty Poynter in the Non-Profit Quarterly. This is a critical set of observations about how the neo-liberalisation of the non-profit world has undermined its ability to create lasting and participatory initiatives all in the name of accountability. I am struck by the way that the inappropriate measurement of “impact” and other things is itself never factored in to why initiatives fail. Jara Dean Coffey’s Equitable Evaluation Framework helps to address this.
Last nights anchorage was very near the reef of Kwuwmuqs in the little protected bay near the Thetis Island ferry dock. On the evening, seals fished on the reef, splashing and smacking the water. The electric ferry which serves Thetis and Penelakut glides between the smaller outlying islands and onshore we walked to the bakery at Telegraph Harbour, picked some blackberries and walked through some community trails.
Thetis and Penelakut Islands are barely separated by a thin passage of water called St’q’in but they are more than separated by culture and history. Thetis is an island of settlers and Penelakut is the home community for the Penelakut Tribe. It’s a quiet and serene place now but it was a site of violence from Indigenous raiders in 1861 and the British Navy who shelled it in 1863, and the Catholic Church. From 1890 to 1978 the Roman Catholic Church operated a residential school there which harboured abuse and sexual assault and a high profile case in 2002 saw one of the brothers charged with some of these crimes. Gaining control over their territory, culture, and community has been a long fight for the Penelakut. The Tribe now has a land code, a longhouse, an elementary school, and services for members, and like every other tribal community in this province is engaged in the long project of healing from historical trauma and enacted its rights and title over the land and seas.
More acts of local placemaking. My friend Emily van Lidthe de Juede labels weeds on our island so you know what you’ve got living around you.
A classic Cory Doctorow piece on why and how he blogs and one with which I strongly resinate. Writing every day, annotating interesting things I’ve found, sharing them out there, and asking questions is making me a better writer and a more prolific writer. I have a book on the go and several mini books in the hopper as well. These are all flowers that were seeded by blogging.
There’s lots to think about in this podcast from The Hub about Canada’s current trade negotiations with the US. My key takeaway is that all of US trade policy at the moment is a shakedown of trading partners. And I still think the US administration believes that Canada should be the 51st state and so weakening our economy badly with a slow crawl to stagnation may be part of a long game.