Oh I remember this. Tourists. I live on a very accessible island very close to Vancouver and it’s very easy to get here. Unlike other islands in our archipelago, we are mostly a place of full time residents, with a smaller number of summer families that come over. We have A LOT of short term rentals here which are very hard to track because they kind of hide behind a “contact the host for more details” in the VRBO and AirBnb listings, and like everyone living in a tourist spot with big housing affordability and accessibility issues, I have many …
It is apparently International Tea Day, and my friend Ciaran Camman sent along this beautiful twitter thread describing tea culture across the Muslim world. It put me in mind of some memorable cups of tea I have had in my time: I fell in love with Turkish tea culture sipping tea from tulip glasses in Istanbul, during summer downpours in Taksim, by the side of the Bosphoros, or in the quiet back alleys of the old town as the calls to prayer echoed through the streets. Or on a gullet in the quiet waters off Demera, or in the mountains …
We are going to be living with this virus for the rest of our lives I think. So for a person like me who works with people in groups and has traditionally travelled globally to deliver workshops, I have to start thinking about considerations related to the health on me and my colleagues and team members and the adherence of public health measures around the world. We know we can do good work online, so that is always an option. But for work in which clients expect me to travel and become exposed to COVID 19, I am considering using …
Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking …
Slack tide in the Salish Sea. These are the Olympic Mountains across the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the body of water that links in inland parts of the Salish Sea to the open Pacific Ocean. So much water flows through this passage twice a day with the ebb and flow of the tides, that the Strait takes on the quality of a slow river, flowing in two directions, in and out, two great long breaths a day, taking in cold North Pacific water, and exhaling the fresh water from the mountains and snowpacks of the Coast and …