July 16, 2025: seeing the treasure

I love acts of local placemaking. Today, I caught up with a neighbour and asked how her daughter was doing. Here daughter, Tessa Goldie, a designer and animator, has a fun little line of T-shirts poking fun at some of the recent events of human/nature encounter on our little island: Bedtime Stories of Bowen Island. We are well endowed with local talents that do this sort of thing on Bowen, like Ron Woodall, who was a famous marketing executive in Vancouver before retiring to Bowen and becoming our local newspaper cartoonist. Every week we are treated to New Yorker level cartoons from this fella, and if you are a bit of a local, it’s likely that he’s done a portrait of you at some point, which he will religiously post on your birthday on our local Facebook page, with no comments. Mine is posted above. This kind of local placemaking serves as a beautiful reinforcing feedback loop of belonging.

There is something like the hunt for a deity in the way humans search for that one perfect thing in nature and seem to find it in a misapprehension of sceince. I’m no scientist, but I have long admired the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio. For mathematicians though, it must be frustrating to see people take work you know is clearly bounded and generally apply it to wildly inappropriate contexts.

Perhaps the deity is already here, and the prayers are tiny whispered pleas for approval.