Hope and atmospheric rivers

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.