Today I learned about “kelping.” That’s when orcas or humpbacks tangle themselves up in kelp beds because it feels nice.
Orcas are more than just a charismatic mega fauna on our coast line. They are a population, and for First Nations, they are kin. For the people that live close to them, including researchers, the whales are chosen family. This week, I76 died. Here is the account of his death from OrcaLab. It contains these beautiful words:
At this moment the day shifted. Jared Towers had come out specifically in response to the previous day’s concerns about I76, the oldest son of I4. He was extremely thin and having difficulties. Jared found him on the Vancouver Island side of the Strait opposite to the entrance to Blackney Pass. The rest of his small family were further away. The day was grey, the ocean only slightly agitated. As several dolphins surrounded and overwhelmed I76, his mother came flying across to him. Jared said he had never seen a Northern Resident move so fast and that she was clearly upset. From that time on his family remained close to his side with the dolphins surrounding the entire family who were more or less stationary. This continued until just before 3pm when I76 took his last breath and sank out of sight into the depths. His family lingered near his last position, then began to call..
Ernest Alfred happened to be here and he and a few of us went out into Johnstone Strait. There next to the mountains of Vancouver Island, near to a few dolphins who still seemingly hovered over where I76’s had his last moments and not far from his family now slowly weaving their way east, Ernest sang in Kwakwala reminding us to shed our tears before nightfall, morning would bring another ceremony fitting with the time of day and a chance to say good-bye.
Read the subsequent posts to see how the humans and whales who knew I76 mourned his passing.
What is going on? My friend Alison shared this story on Mastodon with this intro “Fake news features about things that didn’t happen in places that don’t exist written by people who don’t exist is pretty much what we expect from AI journalism.” Read on about the elusive Margaux Blanchard.”
Dave Pollard shares a thoughtful post on the intelligence of crowds, in which he explores both the wisdom and the incoherence of large groups of people and asks good questions about the characteristics of a crowd that contribute to it’s thoughtfulness in acting. It makes me think of the “intelligence” of crowds, as in the emergent property that creates a set of constraints that directs action in certain ways. This seem to co-arise with the emergence of the quality of a a collection of people that makes it a “group” or a “mob” or an “assembly.” There is intention behind those words – we want a team and not a gang – and it’s worth asking the question how do we create coherence that guides the emergence of the form and intelligence we want froths group, without the pitfalls of too much coherence so that what alos emerges is a cult. This is something I’mexploring in the container book I’mchipping away at.
Back in 2018 a Whitecaps Academy grad and former WFC2 player, Patrick Metcalfe joined TSS Rovers for the season. He appeared in 10 games as a defensive midfielder and helped us on to winning our first piece of silverware as a club, the Juan de Fuca Plate. Following that season he signed a professional contract with the Vancouver Whitecaps where he made 20 appearances in 2020 and 2021. The Whitecaps cut him after 2022 and he went to Norway where he found a job with Staebek and helped them get promoted to the Eliteserien. He was cut again at the end of that year and signed on with Fredrikstadt, who were in the second division. Again he helped a club to promotion and after a great 2023, the club did well in their first season in the top flight and won the Norwegian Cup, meaning they qualified for European play in the Conference League. Patrick played 70 matches over those two seasons and had his contract renewed in March just before the season started. Today he started for Fredrikstad against English FA Cup winners Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park and played the whole match in a defensive masterclass that held the Premier League team to a 1-0 win in the first leg of their two-leg qualification tie.
Patty’s is one of those players, like our former defender Joel Waterman – who just got transferred to Chicago Fire in MLS – who make their own way in the world of professional football. They travel to find a place they are wanted, where they can make a contribution. They know their talent alone is not enough to keep them in the professional game, and so they work hard, stay true to themselves, and give as much as they can wherever the end up. In as much as it’s great to have the flamboyant heroes of the pro game for younger players to look up to, I’m always lifting up the likes of Metcalfe and Waterman and Tynan and Friesen and Haynes, all players who have stopped in with out little club, the TSS Rovers, and seen it as the step they needed on their own journey. When they come through us though, they pick us up as well, so that even 7 years later a small group of people in Vancouver are watching a far flung European tie and can’t take their eyes of the number 11 from the Norwegian underdog.
Chris Mowles has a lovely post on the perils of an unquestioned commitment to directionality in complexity. Our work is never starting from scratch, and what does “going forward” even mean in a non-linear context?
…maybe there is more to uncover about complex experience than talking as if there is only one tense which is important, the future, and only the individual’s rationality and will to map it out. The future is important, and we are oriented towards it, but this shouldn’t prevent us from thinking about how we have become who we are, and what matters to us. What remains of the embers of the past from which we can still derive succour and find resource?
Rosa Zubazarreta has long been a curious “pracademic” – as she calls herself – about facilitation and deliberation. We have met a few times in the past, but I consider her a close colleague in the work of constantly trying to learn about how to host conversations and design group spaces in which dialogue and listening is maximized. She recently had a peer-reviewed article published called “Listening Across Differences” about deliberative “mini-publics” which are small democratic fora hosted in Austria. Her most recent blog post explores the role of AI in group facilitation, a topic about which she is deeply passionate, and about which I am very curious.
It’s happening and I’m certainly willing to explore it more in deliberative contexts. I have run a couple of small experiments using AI to summarize vast amounts of narrative information and advice submitted by citizens to create high level summaries of advice, high level articulations of dissenting opinions and so on. This becomes material for further deliberation. I have been toying with a design where members of a group all spend time feeding information to different GPTs, querying the data in different ways and bringing their insights to a conversation. It’s about how to make vast amounts of opinion accessible, and generate a learning conversation that everyone can participate in.
This is becoming an interesting field and I notice the twin poles of curiosity and resistance in myself. My friend Jeff Aitken sent along a link to Metarelational.ai which feels like a true TRIP to explore. There are several varieties of trained chatbot there. I have seen and explored some of these, each one cultivated like a garden, each one designed to do something a bit different. Honestly, after a hour or so in a session with these tools, it’s hard to know what terms like “relational” mean. I am firmly in the world of knowing and working with human-to-human relationality. The work at Metarelational seems to at times to evokes a kind of eschatology of human relationships stemming from our own design, and a sort of surrender to AI and machine intelligence that feels religious. It uses religious and spiritual terms and language like “agape” and “right relationship” and “interbeing.” I joked with Jeff the other day about when a new religion might sprout up around an AI chatbot. It’s a joke, but given the proclivity for human beings to seek a higher intelligence that has all the answers, and to be led in a course of action “forward” at any costs, I think there is a serious question here.
Clouds continue to hang around here in the wake of our first Pineapple Express storm of the season. The Music By The Sea Festival wrapped up late last night (I was home again after midnight) after three full days of community music-making, with a few professional ringers thrown into our midst. It was a multi-generational event which sprang out of a group of local Bowen Island families who were long time regulars at the Nimblefingers Festival in Sorrento, BC. As a result there was a strong core of bluegrass and Americana music-making at MBTS, which suits me fine. Bluegrass is like folk jazz. Simple chord progressions and beautiful melodies and harmony singing, but incredible virtuosity on the instrumental side, including a strong value on improvised breaks and solos. It is massively accessible music, but for the performer the sky is the limit in terms of technique and creative possibilities.
Importantly, the gathering brought together many Bowen Islander, including several who left the island years ago. The music scene when I moved here was rich and vibrant and diverse and it withered a little as we made the transition between the 1970s-1990s nearly intentional community of interesting characters to a place where property became a financial investment. Since COVID, our demographics have radically shifted and there is more of a feeling of intentional community again. People are moving here for something other than what might be a decent return on a real estate investment. Make no mistake, this is still a massively unaffordable place to live, and our best efforts to address it are swallowed in a context of general inaction and apathy about structural policy solutions. But. There is a revival of community going on here, and I met many people this weekend who are my neighbours and with whom I know I will be making music this year and into the future.
I love short forms of writing. Poetry, short stories, short novels. And aphorisms. There is something about the pithy wisdom contained in a single sentence that can make it powerful. A well crafted aphorism has a rhythm to it as well. It swings, like a jazz lick. And like a lick, it evokes something timeless and connected to an ecosystem of meaning. Peter Limberger lives aphorisms too and here he writes about two medieval aphorists, Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), a Jesuit priest who wrote The Art of Worldly Wisdom and Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French nobleman who wrote a collection of Maxims, while also pointing to his favourite, Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
Sometimes questions are like aphorisms. One has to be careful asking questions that are beautiful in their own right. Questions occasionally try too hard to impress. They aim too much for a response that is in awe of the question itself. Mary Oliver’s “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is one of those. But asking “What time is it?” Is a question that dances ever so lightly on the fence between genuine curiosity and profound insight in its own right. Tenneson writes “I used to see people more often resist these kind of questions. It was resistance that saw some fluff and said, “let’s get to the real work.” These days, oh gosh, so many more people recognize these questions are the real work. Or are the real contexting that helps us get to the real work.” Amen.
Life is just a long conversation that we drop into for a bit. Patti Digh:
Life, then, is less about owning the discussion and more about showing up to it. Listening well. Speaking honestly. Departing graciously. And trusting that the conversation—like life itself—will carry on.
Perhaps the real measure is not how loudly or how often we speak, but how we change in the process. We arrive thinking we understand the argument; we leave having been shaped by the voices around us. We are participants, yes, but also apprentices to the human story—learning from those who came before, influencing those who come after, even in ways we’ll never know.
Some day, someone else will walk into the same parlor after we’ve gone. They’ll hear the echoes of our words, softened by time, folded into the larger chorus. They may not know our name, but they will inherit a conversation made—if we’ve done our part—slightly kinder, richer, and more open than when we found it.
A decent start to the Premier League season for Tottenham. After an early goal from Richarlison, Spurs were a bit disjointed for the rest of the first half. They came out ganagbusters in the second though and Richarlison scored his second from a beautiful scissor kick off a Kudus delivery. Kudus impressed with his flair and quickness. Brennan Johnson scored the third for an emphatic win in the end.
The latest TSS Rover to turn pro is Aislin Streicek, who played for us in 2022 and 2023 and who was signed by Celtic FC to a two year contract. She made her first appearance yesterday coming off the bench in a 2-1 win over Hearts. Watching and helping young players turn professional is why we do what we do at our little second division Canadian club.
Lund harbour, taken last year, when the skies were clear of smoke and rain.
The little town of Lund sits pretty much at the end of the road near the northern tip of the Sunshine Coast. It was established by two Swedish brothers who opened a store in 1889 right on top of the historical village of Tla’Amin, from which the surrounding First Nation derives its name. It is a town that now sits surrounded by Tla’Amin treaty settlement land, and which is still very much a working port. There are a few fish boats, but mostly it caters to marine services and adventure tourism for people living on and visiting the outlying islands and nearby Desolation Sound.
It was rainy and smoky yesterday so instead of a planned hike into the mountains we canned blackberry jam in the morning and walked around Lund in the afternoon. Along the way we visited Ron Robb and Jan Lovewell at Rare Earth Pottery. We met these two about four years ago, and we have mutual friends. Over the years we have bought a piece or two from them, and today left with a tea bowl and mug. Ron makes tea bowls using the Japanese method of kurinuki rather than throwing clay on the wheel or building pots from coils. Kurinuki means “hollowing out” in Japanese. The potter begins with the shaping of a solid block of clay and then scoops out the centre and takes away clay until the final item is produced. The result is a unique piece that has arisen from stillness, rather than the motion of the wheel, and is shaped from emptying out, and that very much resonates with me.
It’s worth a visit to their gallery if you are ever in Lund, and perhaps you will even find them in one of the twice-annual kiln firings. But if not, there is a wonderful video of them firing a wood kiln in Earl’s Cove with two other potters.
From Ron and Jan’s place we wandered down to Finn Bay where the Tidal Art Centre sits in an old forestry station. The gallery is currently hosting a beautiful solo exhibit of the work of Donna Huber. Huber’s work is inspired by everything from Chagall to Inuit printmaking and it shows in her use of space and perspective.
To cap off our afternoon, I had a stroke of good luck. While shopping for a lemon at The Stock Pile, I spied a copy of Phil Thomas’s Songs of the Pacific Northwest on a display carousel. Copies of this book used to be very hard to come by, but it seems it has now been reprinted by Hancock House. There is a playlist on YouTube with all of these songs, many of them sung by Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat, of whom I wrote last week.