Anchored at Xwth’itsetsen. A fire burning in the Nanaimo River valley provides the accents.
I’m travelling this week, through the Gulf Islands with friends on a lovely Catalina 35 sailboat. This is a trip we do every year, not so much sailing (there isn’t usually much wind at this time of year) but rather to hunt for the little anchorages and warm swimming water of the central Salish Sea. I live amidst magnificent Islands, what I call “the Canadian Hebrides” not so much for their geography but more for the fact that every island has it’s own little culture, different from the island I live on, and these cultures are both settler cultures and deeply historical. In our travels north from Swartz Bay to here, a journey of about three hours motoring on a flood tide with a steady wind behind us, we passed through the territories of Tseycum, the Cowichan Tribes, and we are now anchored in a little bay off Xwth’itsetsen, a small island in Penelakut territory. On our way up here we passed through some incredible historic sites, including Hwtl’upnets, known in English as Maple Bay, where a massive tribal battle was fought in the early 1830s between local Coast Salish Tribes and the Lekwiltok who hail from further north. This battle ended a long standing conflict, and mostly ended the Lekwiltok raiding era. The ripples of this battle still resonate today in traditional relationships, governance conversations, and protocols between these tribes.
My friend Cal is an Anglican priest. I adore their theology, their inquisitiveness, their infatuation with music and Sufi teachings and the deep spirituality of good Christian practice, not that shit peddled by Christian Nationalists. There comes a time when a preacher writes their sermon on prayer, and Cal hits it out of the park with this one: “Perhaps prayer is not saying, “This is what I need,” but “This is what I am: yours. Please let me tell you about what is on my heart. I want to, because I love you.”
Patti Digh is reading, and at least one of the books on her list, A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michell Porter is on hold for me at the library for my next read. I am well taken with books that challenge traditional narrative structures and where a bit of magical realism is at play. I enjoy artists who use their forms and media to do things uniquely suited to their art and genre.
I’m going to go read now. One of the things I most cherish about be able to get onto the land or the sea is the spaces of true quiet one can find. This is an increasingly important issue in urban areas. Silence is disappearing, and not just because people can’t afford expensive bluetooth devices to connect to their phones (yes this is an issue). Guardians of silence in urban spaces need to be vigilant.
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
Mindfulness, awareness and the move from confusion to aporia to resourcefulness in the Cynefin framework.
One of our TSS Rovers Women’s team players, Sofia Farremo, signing an autograph for a young fan while standing in our supporters section at a TSS Rovers game this summer. Supporter culture at our club is HSL.
About 20 years ago, I first met Dr. Mark R. Jones. It was either at The Practice of Peace gathering or one of the Evolutionary Salons called at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, Washington. At any rate, Mark was an interesting presence. He sat in silence for most of the time near the room entrance as a kind of gatekeeper, watching the threshold and seeing what happened there. He occasionally played classical guitar and offered insights and reflections to anyone who sat and talked with him.
At some point, I heard the story about his work. He was a senior corporate executive, working in technology and defence-related companies for most of his career. He was also a long-time Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. He once visited the Dalai Lama and was challenged by him to build a practice of compassion based on the idea that “people need to be seen, heard, and loved, in that order.”
Mark took that work and built an approach to compassionate communication based on that heuristic. He called the work “hizzle” based on how he pronounced the acronym of heard, seen, and loved: HSL. I remember being taken by his description of what happens when people aren’t heard, seen or loved. If they are not heard, they shout and raise their voices. If they are not seen, they make a scene so you notice them, or they engage in bullying and toxic power dynamics. If they are not loved, they play a toxic game of approach and avoid that, which creates and then sabotages relationships and connections.
Mark’s insight was that these behaviours were signs of suffering and that when HSL was missing, “mischief occurs.” In this practice, he connected suffering to fear and offered the antidotes to these behaviours with a very simple and powerful way to let folks know they are heard, seen or loved.
To really hear, see, or love others, Mark insists that we have a practice in which we hear, see and love ourselves and become familiar with all of the ways we personally express fear and suffering when our own HSL is thwarted. It’s a practice.
I’ve used this insight for most of my career in situations where folks are exhibiting these fear-based behaviours. It has been a really useful shortcut and reminder for my own practice.
I was reminded again of how powerful this set of insights is when my friend and colleague Ashley Cooper shared some work she is doing to bring this work into the context of supporting parents of children, something at which she is incredibly gifted.
Mark’s work isn’t that easy to find online. His company, Sunyata Group is where you can find him as he is leading teams in creating Beloved Community. His HSL approach has been adopted and modified by the Liberating Structures crew (I believe Henri Lipmanowicz and Ashley were both at the same gathering I was at when we met Mark and learned about his work). Years ago, Phil Cubeta wrote a bit about Mark’s work and included a workshop handout that Mark must have provided him at some point.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writing to his son, in the book, Between the World and Me:
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren.
h/t to the Centre for Action and Contemplation, from today’s Daily Meditation.