An ochre sea star on the beach at Mannion Bay/Kwilakwm, on Bowen Island during one of this week’s midsummer low tides.
Most days I read through posts from my blogroll and other places on the web and publish a short set of links and notes. At the end of each week I roll these up into a post which is also sent to everyone who subscribes by email.
Here are this week’s notes. Click the links below to discover interesting places to explore:
- June 21: sounds of longing. One trans person’s experience in the USA and a beautiful new album of Persian music.
- June 23: black holes. Are we living in a real black hole? And what is the price of the cognitive black holes we live in?
- June 24: the long and the short of it. Seems people are enjoying longer cultural experiences, but having shorter collaborative ones.
- June 25: supporting creation. Freeing up time for play and creativity in life, music and sport.
- June 26: the deep history of meaningful work. Some quotes for inspiration and some long essays on how we evolved civilization from our big goofy brains.
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Thinking about how to think about work. Quotes are pithy, but that’s why they can hold such power. There are 77 to choose from here. You might find one that helps you get through the day today. Or perhaps you’re better off making your own list of instructions and inspiration like James Reeves did, which inspired Peter Rukavina to turn them into a little book. Gifts of wisdom and advice made beautiful by the giving.
Don’t squander the gifts. It took us 13.5 billion years to evolve these brains we have, 60,000 years of living with them in their current state and 10,000 years of organizing ourselves in way that requires us to list quotes and instructions to ourselves to remember what really matters.
History is much more complex than that of course, and this amazing article about “the gossip trap,” which is also about the myriad ways that our species has chosen to organize, or not organize itself, reminds me that I still haven’t read The Dawn of Everything. Anyone familiar with my idea that almost everyone in a complex systems has access to the constraints of connection and exchange will probably anticipate how delighted I am by the retrospective coherence I find in this piece!
How low can you go? Today is the lowest tide of the summer here on Bowen Island, during which the water will drop to 0.01m around noon. There will be lots of folks scrambling around on the mud flats looking for creatures that we never otherwise get to see. The lowest tide of the year is in December (which is also the most extreme tide this year) when we have a 0.0m low tide and a 5.0m high.
A propos of yesterday’s notes, Brian O’ Neill writes today about a similar topic, and I find myself trending in his direction with respect to how I am spending my time: more fiction, fewer news sites, no social media, hang out with humans.
UBI Caritas. That’s a pun. Buried in this excellent article in The Walrus about the death of the middle class musician, is a passing lament for the idea that a universal basic income would make our prosperous society truly amazing because we could support the artists in a meaningful way. I think it would be the hallmark of a society “winning” that it has created and sustained a UBI for all of its members. As it is, we are actually “losing,” given that in our society the trend is exactly the opposite: guaranteed income for fewer and fewer people, while everyone else gives up interesting parts of their lives in favour of scraping by.
Mark McKergow bucks that trend. I’ve know Mark for a while now, and not only is he a consultant, teacher, author and researcher, but he is also a community builder and a jazz musician. His last post of the season shares a classic paper he wrote on using the Solutions Focus approach for better decision making.
People are enjoying longer experiences, according to Ted Gioia, who has a keen eye for the trends in culture that are shaping our world and experiences. And while this is true for the individual consumption of cultural products.
BUT. As a person who spends time creating collaborative environments where people engage and co-create within organizations and communities I can attest that experiences of creating community together are becoming harder and harder, because people want to spend less and less time together. Clients who regularly asked for three-day -ong retreats now wonder if we can do the same amount of work in only one and a half. “Everyone is so busy” goes the line. But everyone is not busy. Everyone is retreating into individual immersive experiences. Even Taylor Swift shows, despite the fact that a fantastic community vibe emerges from her art and her fandom, is still a consumption experience. I worry that co-creative community activities are fading away, and have been for a long time. . The trends in consuming arts may be changing, but the trend in collaborative community is still fading away.
Spending time in deep community building activities matters. My friend Bob Stilger is championing Regenerative Responders, which is an initiative to build resilience in community from the ground up before crisis and emergency hits, so community can be ready to respond, not simply wait to receive help. The impetus for his work is in the stories he heard and witnessed from Japan after the March 11, 2011 Triple Disaster. Longform community practice develops the resilience needed for the times when it’s too late to do so. Movements like this exist all over the world, and I’ve written about Sarvodaya before, who came to my attention when they were first on the scene in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, long before the Red Cross arrived.
It shows up in sports too. My buddy Will Cromack posts today about how footballers are being deprived the immersive experience of just playing the game, long days spent kicking a ball around, training sessions that are just play, honing your craft becasue you have an endless horizon of the joy of co-creation stretching out before you. As he puts it:
Forgo the showcase tournament.
Go hit the ball against a wall.
Better yet, play 2v2 with friends.
More joy. More touches. More learning.The player’s work is to learn where to place their time and attention, and to seek challenges that invite growth. They must learn to welcome difficulty as a necessary step on the journey toward mastery, whatever mastery means to them.
There is no meaningful progress on the gentle slope with soft ground. The journey demands friction. And through that friction, players fall in love with the process.
I can get behind that: More joy. More touches. More learning. Consume good art. But create something too.
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.”