A fantastic comment on what it means to lose access to care for and what life is like right now in the USA for one trans person.

A new album from Australian band ZÖJ, Give Water to Birds.  TO my ear they are to Persian classical music what The Gloaming is to Irish traditional music. From this interview, I can relate to this quote.

“For me, the music of nature is not only sound; it is also movement, light, colour, smell, texture, and temperature. The most powerful and inspiring sound in nature for me is its deep silence and stillness. 

To  this day, the most powerful sound in nature for me is the stillness of snow fall. This silence has been my most favourite sound since I was a child. I’d lay on mountains of snow in northern Tehran, gaze into the sky and let the snow lay on my skin. Everything covered in snow, quiet but alive, like a big orchestra playing the most beautiful song, in pianississimo.”

It’s probably no surprise to my friends, but last year I was diagnosed with adult ADHD and I have been living and working with that SUPER helpful diagnosis ever since. A couple of weeks ago, CBC Ideas ran a two part series on ADHD and the Myth of Normal. Well worth a listen, especially for the part where neurodivergence is discussed as an evolutionary advantage. I especially appreciate that Edward Hallowell features in this series, as his book (with John Ratey) ADHD 2.0 has been massively helpful to me. I keep it close by as a user manual for my brain.

Speaking of books, I’m currently reading The Beekeeper’s Question by my friend and mentor Christina Baldwin. It is a beautifully written novel, and contains typically Christina turns of phrase and observations. The beekeeper’s actual question is so very Christina that if you know her it will break your face into a wide grin of recognition. The book attacks deeply important questions about our current society with a story set in the 1940s, long enough ago that the patterns are repeating again, and the lines connect then to now.

Chris Bolton’s lovely meditation on desire paths introduces a new term to me: Sneckdown. “Sneckdown” is a relatively new word used to describe the patterns of affordances that cars leave when driving in snow. This has to be one of the most Canadian words you can imagine but all those who live through urban northern winters know what this means.

We do indeed desire better futures, better societies, better ways to work together, right? I keep holding out hope, but this important piece tells us what the constraints are if we want to rebuild and reimagine democracy, let alone build a world where care and support are there to build wellness and prosperity. Is it over? It’s kind of over. What could be next?

To wrap up this week, my first as a 57 year old, I feel seen.

I read a couple of Peter Levine’s posts that resonated strongly this morning about undoing reckless damage to important government and democratic institutions and redefining the call to service for public servants. I don’t know very many other people that publish so widely and so freely on the topics of civic life and democracy, but Peter is one of the ones with whom I find myself nodding in agreement over almost everything. I think I retain an enduring love/hate relationship with government, but my years as a public servant were rewarding and I would recommend it to anyone, even with all of the attendant frustrations. Institutions are essential to democracy.

If you are in the public service and need some inspiration, Thea Snow has shared some resources she likes from a systems thinking lens; (h/t Benjamin) and if you are more inclined to work within the public service as a complex system, Chris Mowles reports on a talk by Carolyn Pedwell that does just that.

Service, of course, knows no bounds, and today Peter Rukavina paid tribute to his friend Stephen Southall’s mom Carol and family and Stephen’s incredible service to his mom through her long illness and death. I knew Stephen 35 years ago in Peterborough where we would often jam blues songs, him on his harmonica and me on the guitar and us making up nonsense lyrics. Facebook kept us in proximity in recent years. The whole post from Peter is a beautiful read and ends with this quote: “I hope death is like being carried to a bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on a couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” I think that was a quote was from Carol. Worth remembering.

Tenneson Woolf reminds us that we can always start again: “We learn, we humans. I’m so impressed by the courage that people have. To stay the course. To let go the course that doesn’t serve. To nuance the daily. To trust the simple. To open to love. To be unflinching.”

It reminds me of something I once heard Thanissaro Bhikku say. Something to the effect that when you are first learning to meditate, you catch yourself again and again drifting away from the breath. You can catch yourself 50 times in a 20 minute setting, but each time is a practice of waking up. Practicing waking up 50 times is excellent. Start again.

Starting again is a key skill. If you don’t get it right the first time, you start over, with collaborations, with ideas, with commitments. It’s a complex world. We don’t live in it perfectly. It requires humility. It requires grace. It needs a breath, a second chance, a sacrifice of some resources. It helps to be able to frame it as a learning, but not to hold on to it as a lesson. You see that difference?

“Human perception excels at detecting subtle pattern breaks” writes Cameron Norman over at Censemaking. Spotting the exception to the pattern can reveal the pattern. It can also reveal the hint of an affordances that can take you elsewhere. That boring staff meeting that happens every week? Think about the delightful surprise that comes when something interesting actually happens. And then the insight “oh wow…I dion;t realize how humourless this whole enterprise had become…” A key question for querying the patterns we are trying to understand is “what the hell was that?” Dissonance and novelty shocks us into seeing the mundane and normal.

Starting over is essential to reconciliation. Not slightly-embarrassing-land-acknowledgement “reconciliation” but the real deal, where lands and material resources are returned to Indigenous Nations so that we can all start again. Like the Yurok have a chance to do in California. Remove dams, invite the salmon back home, restore health and stewardship and start the relationship over. These are not about us and them. They are about the potential of we together, starting with the first people and the first principles and the land’s own direction about how to build and maintain health and stability and relationship.

Let’s go. The land welcomes you to try.

And in the doing over, you discover. I’ve been at it for a couple of days, but these little notes posts, based on my daily reading, seem to gather around themes. Perhaps I’ll post a summary of the themes each week or so.

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