On contemplations ability to deliver awe. Richard Rohr:
We’re usually blocked against being awestruck, just as we are blocked against great love and great suffering. Early-stage contemplation is largely about identifying and releasing ourselves from these blockages by recognizing the unconscious reservoir of expectations, assumptions, and beliefs in which we are already immersed. If we don’t see what’s in our reservoir, we will process all new encounters and experiences in the same old-patterned way—and nothing new will ever happen. A new idea held by the old self is never really a new idea, whereas even an old idea held by a new self will soon become fresh and refreshing.
Back in 1985 kd lang came to Vancouver for a series of gigs and she showed up on Jack Webster’s phone in show charming the irascible commentator while being precocious and confident and solid within her own skin. And what follows is the most amazing half hour of banter and genius and fun ranging from reincarnation to old Scottish songs to feminist takes on go go dancing.
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Khelsilem reflects on his most valuable lesson from his first term of a Masters of Public Administration, and he hones in on insights from the Competing Values Framework relating to how good leadership holds tensions :
At the individual level, CVF is quietly demanding. It suggests that many leaders are not under-skilled, but over-specialized. Under pressure, they default to familiar patterns—control, inspiration, competition, or care. Leadership development, through this lens, is about expanding range: being able to support without avoiding accountability, to drive results without burning people out, to innovate without destabilizing the system.
Frameworks that help people hold tensions are useful in complexity. There are many, and here’s a collection of them from Diane Finegood who taught the Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. They can all be useful depending on context, needs, and intentions.
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I spent a beautiful Friday morning with colleagues and peers who were gathered through the Simon Fraser University Dialogue Community of Inquiry. One of the open space sessions I was in was about making space for dreaming and imagination, and coincidently, Interaction Institute has a blog post up this past week on dismantling fear with imagination, which is a short report on a recent gathering convened to talk about this topic.
People want transformative solutions, but decades of disinvestment, backlash, and political messaging have convinced many that big changes are unrealistic. When people don’t believe change is possible, they disengage or lower their expectations. The Hope Gap isn’t just a barrier to action, but a crisis in political imagination.
My friend Pauline Le Bel confronts the fear of dying in her new book of poems called “Becoming the Harvest.” If you live in Toronto, you might see one of her poems on the TTC. If you don;t you can hear her read it in this YouTube short, where she also talks about writing about death and becoming an ancestor.
Last night we had a real Pineapple Express. Winds gusting up to 90km/h flickered the power and brought down some smaller branches. We had about 80 mm of rain in the last 24 hours , but we are expecting another 100 or so today. Squamish has had 280mm of rain this week (150 yesterday alone), and the flooding continues in the Fraser Valley. Freezing levels are high, so whatever snow we have had, everything above 2500 meters has melted and flowed into the valleys.
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The rains came yesterday and last night with a persistent atmospheric river delivering over 100mm of rain to the communities like Agassiz and Chilliwack in the east end of the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, All of the eastbound highways out of the region are closed right now due to flooding and landslides, and while not as catastrophic as the 2021 floods that cut off this part of the country from the rest of Canada for weeks, it nevertheless shows how easy it is for us to be isolated here. The highway down the coast to Washington State is still open, but they too are dealing with flooding.
This was the first time that our region has had an orange level weather warning, and I would say that the system did well in predicting and warning residents of the eastern Fraser Valley about the impending danger. It validates the heuristics I attached to the colours when the system was launched a couple of weeks ago.
Coincidently, we woke up early this morning to the sound of water dripping inside the house. It had nothing to do with the rain, but rather a broken pipe in our ceiling. So my day began a bit early today. We filled the kettle and turned the main water off and now I’m just surfing and waiting for the plumber to come. He’s currently dealing with a flooded basement elsewhere on the island.
For the rest of the day I have enough water stored in my emergency containers to easily get us through a few days without running water. It’s nice to have emergency preparations validated by non-catastrophic events. The rain has stopped outside but it’s code orange inside our house today.
Anyway, here are a few links that caught my eye this morning.
An interesting read on Liberalism and its intersection with African political thought and economics The comments contains a good discussion as well.
Sports gives you a really tangible view of how the intangibles affect performance, which is one of the things that fascinates me about games like football and ice hockey. These rely on very subtle intangible connections between players to enable rapid adjustment in a dynamic environment. At the highest levels, skills aren’t all that different, but what often makes the difference in play and performance is culture. Manchester United went through a massive culture change after Sir Alex Ferguson left, from which they haven;’t recovered. It was wholesale changes that made a difference. It was the way new leadership handled the legacy of culture that was handed to them. The guys at Anecdote explore this more.
A project after my own heart, weaving music and ocean conservation together. Explore The Oceansong Project.
Every Thursday Patti Digh shares a few links she found during the week. This week there is a lovely collection of before and after photographs showing Czech people as both young adults and centenarians.
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Dave Pollard begins his new series of speculative non-fiction, looking at possibilities for post-collapse, post-civilization human life. It’s a very stimulating exercise and as he is very active in his comments, I encourage you to dive in with him and see where the journey takes you. He’s doing it because it is an interesting exercise to do, which strikes me as exactly the best reason to do it. His first post is on language and it reminded me to look again at the semiotics theory I studied in second year Cultural Studies back in 1988.
There are some great conversations happening about AI here on my blog and elsewhere. For me the interesting questions are about the nature of AI and today I saw a great interview with David Krakauer, the president off the Santa Fe Institute discussing this topic in the context of complexity and emergence. (It’s an interesting interview becasue of Krakauer, not because of Neil deGrasse Tyson, who constantly interrupts the most interesting points. He’s just not a very good interviewer.)