Celebrating a victory with our women’s team in our last home game of the season.
Our little supporter owned football club, TSS Rovers played our last home games of the season last night against our local rivals from Burnaby FC. The women clawed out a 2-1 win while the men broke their rivals apart with a 7-1 win on the back of a four goal performance from striker Koji Poon. It was a much needed win for the men. Going into the last two games of the season for the men we sit on 29 points, two points above Langley United, who have a game in hand. We need them to slip up and we need to win out our season on the road to have a shot at retaining our title. But last night we made it a three-horse race for first place, as Burnaby can no longer catch us.
One of the sayings at our club is “you’re always welcome back but we never want to see you again.” This reflects our commitment to giving players a platform to move on to the professional game. But our players and supporters often retain a strong attachment to one another as we are the only club in our second division League 1 BC with an active and rabid supporters group. TSS Rovers is a community-owned club with 477 community owners many of whom invested in what we are doing because of what it means for the women’s game. This league structure sits below our new professional women’s league in Canada, the Northern Super League and several of our former players including League 1 BC players Stella Downing, Tilly James and Kirsten Tynan now play in that league.
Two of our current roster of women’s players, Erin van Dolder and Delana Friesen are headed back to Europe for next season. They played together last year at Treaty United in Ireland and they are on their way to a new adventure in professional football. Delana came to us in 2023, and rediscovered a love of the game in a stellar season in which she led the team in goals and was named our Swanguardians Player of the Year. In 2024 she went overseas to play in Limerick and united with Erin, both Calgarians. In the meantime the Northern Super League was formed and both came home hoping to land jobs on one of the six new professional women’s teams. It was not to be, so they joined our club and kept themselves playing and in the shop window. And after touching back home they are off again.
Coming home. We are a club where young players can take the step up to the next level, or where they can come home and reground to get out there again. Because football is poetics, it puts me in mind of this recent Patti Digh post:
And yes, sometimes home is what we make in the aftermath. After the fire, after the grief, after the leaving. Maybe we build it in the quiet companionship of a friend. In the rhythm of morning routines. In the poems we write when we don’t know what else to do with our hearts.
What I know now is that home doesn’t have to be perfect to be real. It doesn’t have to be whole to matter. It just has to hold enough of you that you can recognize yourself in it. And if it doesn’t? Then we write our way back. We build with what we have—memory, language, love—and make something sturdy enough to come back to.
I finished Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light last night. The book is an epistolary (I love epistolaries), composed of letters from Lucas Goodgame, a former school counsellor and teacher who is present for a mass shooting at his hometown’s movie theatre. I had no idea of the subject matter before I started reading it; I picked the book out from our community book share shelf, located in a shelter near the ferry dock. Lucas is writing to his Jungian therapist about his post-event trauma, and as the story progresses, reality seems to shift ever so subtly like watching the world through a window that increasingly warps. It’s quite a book, and has a significant twist in the tail too so worth following the story through the slow and bewildering turns it takes. I appreciate a story written from inside a PTSD mind, a character who is reaching out to find purpose and life again, experiencing moments of love and joy and absurdity while missing the chances he has to turn.
I was struck by the fact that the characters in the book have names that evoke characters from the Hebrew Scriptures. Eli, Isaiah, Jacob, and Lucas himself who immediately evoked for me the story of Lucifer, the fallen angel. This is almost certainly deliberate (the book explores Jungian archetypes) and reading these characters as having dual functions in the narrative really deepened the work for me. That Lucs/Lucifer has a central role in a book called “We Are The Light” is no surprise, but if you read it, do familiarize yourself with these Biblical characters first, and especially with Lucifer, who is not probably who you think he is.
It’s the time of year for short stories now and I’ll be diving into a collection I also found in our community free book shelf, Cork Stories. These are all stories by different authors set in the county and the city of Cork, Ireland. In the introduction to the collection the editors quote one of the greatest Canadian short story writers, Alistair MacLeod: “The best fiction is specific in its setting but universal in its theme.” Macleod’s own seminal collection of stories called Island is one of the best books I have ever read, a collection of 16 stories mostly set on Cape Breton Island in the 1970s and they are dark and moody and beautifully crafted. Short stories of the very best kind live in the world between a novel, poetry and a good joke. They establish a setting and characters quickly, use concentrated language and crafted cadence to move the story along and usually end with a twist, or a sting or a punch line that is unexpected, or perhaps inevitably foreshadowed. I plan on reading these Cork stories and then diving back into the Journey Prize collections for the summer to find more great gems of Canadian story writing, a form that, thanks to people like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, became associated with Canadian writing in the 1970s and 1980s when I was first discovering literary fiction.\
What’s on your bedside table this summer?
I like Bowinn Ma a lot. She is the British Columbia Member of the Legislative Assembly representing North Vancouver-Lonsdale. She’s a good person, attuned to local urban needs, and has all the right approaches to policy making. in her second term, she is now the Minister of Infrastructure, a perfect job for an engineer with an abiding interest in how people move around well. She has recently been the champion of some legislation that I vehemently disagree with, but that’s politics. On June 27, her constituency office was bombed at 4:15 in the morning. It was a small device that went off. It happened a week after Minnesota state speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated, and another left wing Minnesota state senator was also shot. I have not heard any ongoing conversation in my circles about the fact that one of our MLAs had her office bombed during a time of political violence in North America. This strikes me as NOT OKAY.
Barak Obama spent an hour talking to Heather Cox Richardson, during which he dropped this line that “the system has been captured by this with a weak attachment to democracy.” Here’s the clip. Here’s the full interview. I appreciation Richardson’s commitment to the grass roots, but it’s not just the case that bottom up is the only way we make change. Bottom up vs top down is not a moral position. Bombing an MLA’s office and assassinating democratically elected representatives is also “bottom-up” change making. Democracy moves very slowly, which is its feature. But the public square has developed incredible potential to reinvigorate that, except that the tools of democratic engagement and grass roots conversation have alos been captured by “those with a weak attachment to democracy.” I don’t have answers, and Obama’s ideas sound old now, but in essence, I don’t know what other choice we have. We are quickly losing the ability to deliberate together, and that is the essence of democracy.
The guy who inspires me the most in this space of democratic renewal these days is Peter Levine, whose work I often share. Here he is in conversation with Nathaniel G. Perlman on The Great Battlefield podcast. He recently shared work on trust in institutions from CIRCLE which studies youth engagement in civic life. There are some good lessons in here for people working to keep robust democratic engagement alive, and especially making the generational hand off. I’m of the mind that one way to generate trust from citizens in democratic institutions is to bootstrap it by institutional leaders working from a basic stance of trust in citizens. The CIRCLE study is important work. If you work in a democratic institution, including education, media, government, and other organizations essential to a functioning pluralistic society, it’s a must read.
Community Foundations are a powerful group of civic institutions in this country. I have worked with many, including my own local one here on Bowen Island, and the Vancouver Foundation, the largest in Canada. Their work is important, influential and essential, especially as we enter a new period of austerity. A story this past week surfaced on how community foundations in Canada are working to support local journalism so that news on local issues can be properly covered. As a person who lives in a community with a great local newspaper, this is fantastic to see.
Coming home across Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound last night, with a working tug boat carrying a log boom to the mills on the Fraser River.
Parking Lot is actually the name of this blog, a partial reference to the facilitation tactic of listing issues not germane to the current conversation thread. These lists are stored in a “parking lot” for later, although often these become “wrecking yards” when the issues never resurface again.
At any rate, here is a summary of the links and notes I’ve posted in the past week. Dive in and explore some of the interesting stuff.
We’re not too nuanced at appreciating sentience. Matt Webb traces our history of appreciating other-than-human sentience, with respect to aliens, AI and animism, and concludes with this thought: “Even if we don’t agree on chicken sentience, what about people who work in sweatshops, and they are definitely sentient, and they don’t get access to the same “robot rights” currently being debated for future sentient AIs.” Matt’s blog is a must read.
Perhaps I’m a process animist, but I do strongly feel the presence of a “life unto itself” when a good dialogic container emerges and relationally crackles within. Adrian Sager, who writes more than anyone on bring life to traditional conferences, has a post today which begins with a quote that is attributed to Eduardo Galeano, but cannot be confirmed to be his: ““We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.” I think it is a journey in the art and practice of facilitation that facilitators do fall deeply in love with their structures and processes at first. The tool is the thing, or as Franz Kafka once wrote (No. 16 in The Zurau Aphorisms) “A cage went in search of a bird.” There is a fetishization of structure, as Sager points out, and a belief that just the right structure will create the conditions for life. I’ll write more about this in an expanded post, but suffice to say, that ain’t quite it.
When we take this relationship between life and structures (yang and yin) into the spiritual world, we can see that the struggle for spiritual liberation is to tussle between the structure that has emerged to hold spirit, and the spirit’s desire to be free, but also held. A dynamic interdependence exists. This is a central tenet of Taoism of course, and also shows up in the liberation theology of Judaism and Christianity. It’s chaordic turtles all the way down.
This is one in s series of near daily notes and links I post on this blog. if you would like all of these delivered to your inbox, subscribe below and click the tag “notes.”