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.
When he was Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney presided over the release of a remarkable report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” which skewered the idea that governments print money and create inflation when it is actually private banks that do that. David Graeber’s 2019 paper “Against Economics” came at a time, perhaps the last time, when I think we could have retooled economics to redistribue wealth through policies more in line with the ones that created the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. Alas. The populists and oligarchs have now combined to divide up the world and everyone else is scrambling for cash. Carney knows better, but the coming federal government austerity is just what the richest want: make credit cheap so that more money is created that eventually ends up in their pockets. We are not on a track to create a prosperous society let alone use the money we have to reverse the social, educational and climate crises that require resources and public infrastructure investment to address. (H/t to Harold Jarche for the links).
While following a thread about systems thinking I was led to this blog called Perspicacity from cognitive researcher John Flach. Flach has recently co-authored a book called “Do Systems Exist: A conversation” which I am interested to read. I think there is a lot more to say about this, but if you were to ask me the question right now I would say “yes and no.”
I’m in Canoe Cove this morning which is a small boat harbour near Swartz Bay on the northern tip of the Saanich Penisula near Victoria, BC. This is a popular destination for the road bike riders who come up the peninsula from the City on a weekend morning. While having an espressos I. The very good Fox and Monocle bakery cafe, I saw a woman in a bike shirt that read “Samsara” on the sleeve. I am unsure if this is an ironic branding.
Links to explore from this week:
- July 21, 2025: knowledge sharing as legacy. Joanna Macy and sharing facilitation wisdom.
- July 22, 2025: barely hanging on to the world wide web, Finding each other, slowing down, and deeply connecting
- July 23, 2025: points of view,. Women’s football and how AI might give us a different perspective on democratic practice.
- July 24, 2025: destination and direction. It’s the journey, as usual.
- July 25, 2025: doing the little things right. Making beauty by paying attention to the small things right in front of us.
Enjoy the weekend.
Close relationships and small adjustments to stay together make it easier to address changes that might lead to catastrophe. Johnnie Moore posting about the more boring and competent of the two famous Antarctic explorers, Amundsen, and how his matter of fact competence led him to safety. But also in this post, Johnnie talks about a self-led choir that relies on intimacy, close listening and weak signals to make music without their conductor. Musica Intima here in BC also does this. From my own experience singing like that it is the small moments, relationship and adjustments that are everything.
My TSS Rovers are in Kamloops tonight for the final matches of the League 1 BC season. The women’s division was settled a couple of weeks ago and we will finish fourth for the fourth year in a row. But there is drama with the men’s division. We sit in first place two points above Langley United. Our fate is in our hands meaning that if we win tonight we clinch (and defend) the men’s division title. Any other result puts us in peril and opens the door to Langley pipping us at the line if they win tomorrow. It has been a season of bumps and twists and turns, and my heart will rest a lot easier at 9:30 tonight if we put it to bed. Forza Rovers!!
…and also doing the little things wrong. Like how a country disappears into a fascist dystopia. Never all at once, only gradually. In small intimate ways.
The golfer Scotty Scheffler, who just won The Open Championship, has made some waves recently with the interview he gave before that tournament where he talks about what is fulfilling in life. It’s not winning golf tournaments. In fact he expresses a little astonishment and confusion about why he does what he does, even though he is one of the best in the world at it. “You work all your life for two minutes of euphoria…” As a musician I can relate. We puts hundreds of hours of practice into learning a piece, only to perform it once, perhaps, for a couple of minutes of interesting music. And that’s not even counting the lifetime of work that goes into the training the voice, the fingers, the ear, and the heart to be able to perform competently enough to even be on a stage in the first place.
I was struck by the moment in his press conference where he says “am I making sense?” At that moment, I nodded, but clearly the golf and sports press gallery didn’t. And that is what separates artists from those who value the end line. As Alan Watts once said, if the result was everything people would only go to hear the final chord of a composition, or dancers would head to one spot on the stage and stay there. It’s a cultural error, which is what makes Scheffler’s comments seem so confusing, in a culture that worships the final result.
More patterns that are everywhere. Last week I shared a link about how the Golden Ration is over represented in our ideas about the universe. Today comes a beautiful article from Aeon which talks about the prevalence of the branching network (like a river valley or a bronchial passage) and the web (like neural networks or cosmic galactic clusters) and how they operate across scales. Interestingly in the article, the author Mark Neyrinck doesn’t seem to distinguish between networks with ends and those without. Networks where things arrive at certain places, and networks where they don’t.
I wonder if we are losing our ability to organize and work in networks at scale for social good. Here in North America we are very individual focused in terms of meeting needs and our current governments are most focused on creating the conditions for an efficient return on capital investments and concentration of wealth, following the long discredited trickle down theory of Neo-liberal economics. We are probably going to need networks of care, becasue the federal government is about to gut a number of public facing service personnel to pay for national defence spending and tax cuts. Most of these jobs are the liaison people that help folks with their federal pension plans, employment insurance, and federal taxation issues. The Department that serves First Nations communities and maintains Canada’s end of the bargain in terms of treaty benefits, stands to have substantial program cuts. This is one journey that is going to result in some dire destinations for vulnerable folks, newcomers, and Indigenous communities