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Dark Skies and blurred edges.

September 19, 2024 By Being, Collaboration, Community, Culture, Featured, First Nations, Learning

HFN guide Qiic Qiica, wearing his Three Stars vest, leads us across the beach at Kiixin, the ancient capital of the Huu-ay-aht Nation, and a site that has been occupied for more than 5000 years.

Two hours to kill in the Departure Bay ferry terminal because I forgot to reserve a ferry. Missed the 4pm sailing by three cars. But it was worth it to stop in and have lunch with my dear friend and colleague Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier in Port Alberni. I’m grateful for my friends. And for the time to reflect on my week.

I drove through Port Alberni on the way back from Bamfield, or more accurately, the Huu-ay-aht territories, where I was invited to lead a little debrief session at the end of a two-day Dark Skies Festival. The festival was inspired by and connected to the Jasper Dark Sky Festival. It was hosted and organized by the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and Foundry Events from Calgary. I was invited by my new friend Niki Wilson who is one of the organizers of the Jasper Festival and a science communicator with a growing interest in how dialogue can help us get past polarization. We both have an interest in that, so I would say we are co-learners because these days, polarization ain’t what it used to be.

There were 30 or so of us at this event, a pilot project designed to explore the feasibility and challenges of doing dark sky events at Huu-ay-aht. Present was a mix of folks, including amateur and professional astronomers, Indigenous cultural workers, leaders and territorial guardians, folks working in Indigenous and local community economic development and Indigenous tourism. The mix and diversity meant that we could absorb presentations and conversations on topics as diverse as exoplanets, Huu-ay-aht history, marine stewardship, economic development, astrophotography, Indigenous sovereignty, and economic development. Hosting becomes very basic when a diverse group of people is collected with a shared curiosity for both offering their expertise and learning from each other. Create containers in which people are connecting and, as councillor n?aasiismis?aksup, Stella Peters remarked to me on our first afternoon, the principle of Hišuk ma c?awak comes into play, and we begin exploring connections and relationships. Everything is connected.

Huu-ay-aht history begins with the descent of the original ancestors from the sky and so the skies are important, just as the land the sea and the mountains are, to the core identity and principles of Huu-ay-aht life. I quickly got enamoured with the idea of ensuring that the sky had a matriarch to govern and guardian that part of creation. With Elon Musk polluting the very skies over our heads with an infrastructure of connectivity and delirium, the sky needs a protector.

Over the days and evenings we spent together we were absorbed by story, guided through ancient Huu-ay-aht history and culture by Qiic Qiica, through the deep passion of Emma Louden for her research on exoplanets, to the astrophotography of Jeanine Holowatuik and her despair at the sky pollution of satellites and ground light. We toured the territory by foot and by boat, and spent the night around the fire talking and drinking tea and hoping for the fog to life so we could catch a glimpse of the starry sky, the partial lunar eclipse or the auroras.

Alas, the starry night evaded us as we were blessed with two foggy days, but for me the Dark Sky experience was only enhanced by being socked in. I am lucky enough to live in a relatively dark place, but darkness is a luxury for many who live in towns and cities. I have seen folks equally awed by the thick, inky darkness of the forest under cloud and fog as they are under a sky full of stars on a clear, dark night. Darkness is another of our diminishing commons in this world, and in this respect, the fog and cloud are a blessing, restoring a healthy circadian rhythm and deepening the rest we need. There is perhaps nothing better for understanding how arbitrary the boundaries between living things, landscapes and the universe are than a dark, foggy night where every edge is slightly ambiguous, and you are unsure if the sounds and sensations you feel are coming from inside or out.

I have long felt that on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in all the Nuu-Cha-Nulth communities in which I have been fortunate enough to travel and work. The west coast is one of those places where experiments like the Three Stars Dark Sky Festival seem more possible. First Nations have important and intact jurisdictions in these territories and are actively engaged in massive cultural resurgence. This means that relationships are constantly being reimagined between colonial governments, settler communities, foundations like the Clayoqout Biosphere Trust and Indigenous governments and communities and people who are governing, directing and stewarding their lands and resources with more and more of the recovered authority that was wrested from them over the past 200 years.

The first place I ever visited in BC was Hot Springs Cove in Hesquiaht territory back in 1989. We flew, drove and boated from Toronto to Hot Springs without stopping in Vancouver or anywhere else along the way. I think from that moment, my view of possibility for what could happen in this part of the world has always been informed by the week I spent, staying with my friend Sennan Charleson’s family, fishing herring, listening every night to Simon and Julia Lucas tell stories of all kinds. Coming out here wakes up those experiences in me, and I always return from the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worlds, which are a little different and a lot better for being there.

I hope this Dark Sky Festival thrives. There were so many ideas generated and so much goodwill created between folks this week. So much good can come from that.

On the road again and other notes

September 17, 2024 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Community, Culture, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations 2 Comments

Dry Falls, Washington, which is where the Missoula Flood waters poured over the rim of the Grand Coulee and created lakes from the plunge pools at the bottom of the cliffs.

It’s feeling familiar. After four years of mostly working from home and staying fairly close to my home place, I’m travelling more. The difference is that I’m doing it more with Caitlin, as we are working together with groups and organizations on longer-term projects that we are holding together with others. Much of our work together is around building deeper capacity in hosting and participatory leadership with larger institutional organizations such as universities, human services networks, unions, quasi-government organizations and the like. On top of that, we have been doing some Art of Hosting workshops in Vancouver and Manitoba and I have two more coming up in Ontario this fall.

Last week we were in Central Washington State working with a group called Thriving Together which helps build networks of health care providers for whole person health and health equity. This is the second year we have worked with a cohort of folks from that network. We met in Soap Lake, Washington, which in September is quiet. The kids are back in school, the tourists have all left and the town has very little buzz. Soap Lake, which is known as Smokiam (Healing Waters) in the local nxa?amx?ín language is a small, muddy, and very alkaline lake at the southern end of the Grand Coulee. The mud and waters are said to have healing properties and many visitors, especially from northern Europe and Israel, flock to the tow in the summer to partake.

The town itself is not affluent. Soap Lake does not have the water resources or the connection to the interstate to make it rival the towns in the rest of the county. Quincy, about a half hour to the south, is on the Columbia River and is a hub for big agriculture food processing and data centres, both of which use the river to power and cool their operations. Computing “in the cloud” is a misnomer. The cloud needs to rain, and the rain needs to be captured, and the water needs to be swirled around hundreds of thousands of computers that have a real live footprint on the ground. Cloud computing makes it sound so ephemeral. The reality is much more material.

To the north, in the town of Grand Coulee, also on the Columbia River, stands the great dam built during the 1930s to contribute to the two systems change points everyone needed to haul themselves out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl: water and cheap electricity. In a country where almost every public service is privatized, the Bonneville Power Authority remains a public utility and sells the electricity generated by the dozen or more dams on the Columbia. These dams did their jobs, immortalized in song by Woody Guthrie, (he wrote these songs in less than a month, keeping in line with massive events that happen in a short period of time in these parts) who placed a limited and naive optimism in the people’s power and water, but they also flooded out dozens of Indigenous communities of the Colville Tribes and destroyed the Columbia River salmon runs. The landscape is stunning and captivating and has been radically changed by human hands.

Those human hands worked upon a foundation that was laid down by catastrophic flooding at the end of the ice age, when somewhere between 40 and 100 megafloods cascaded across central Washington, carving deep canyons from the volcanic basalt that had coated the bedrock millions of years before in thousands of feet of lava. the sheer scale of geological processes in this region are mind-blowing, and I found myself absorbed by YouTube videos of the Missoula Floods that carved out features on the land in as little as 48 hours as hundreds of meters of water flowed across the plains and carved the Columbia River gorge on its way to the sea.

Central Washington is no stranger to catastrophic shifts in fortune in the human time scale either. While Quincy and Wenatchee have done well, the further you get away from the Columbia, the harder it is to make a living. Agriculture held a lot of promise in Woody Guthrie’s time and irrigation canals crisscross the whole landscape. But like most industries, agriculture has been largely concentrated in a few hands, and automation has eliminated the jobs Guthrie was so optimistic about. While we were in Soap Lake, except for a single bottle of local wine, none of the food we ate was locally grown. If it was, it was only because it was part of a Sysco order that threw it together with Florida oranges, California lettuce, and bananas from God knows where. Someone is making a killing in agriculture, but it wasn’t the local folks I saw around me.

Instead, what Soap Lake had in spades was community, although it wasn’t obvious to the visiting eye. After spending a week there, we started to meet folks like Simon, the window washer who was sent by the drinkers at the local pub across the street to come and find out what we were up to. Or Nels Borg, who is the defacto golf pro at the Lava Links golf course, which has to be seen to be believed. Nels was in our workshop and is an undaunted community booster, even long championing the funding and construction of the world’s largest lava lamp, something which has very much remained the concept of a plan for 25 years. Like all small towns, Soap Lake has a long story for every “why?”

It’s political season in America and Grant County is a pretty conservative place in general. While there were plenty of Trump signs up (and a bunch of Harris/Walz signs, too), my experience working in the US during these times is that there is just too much work to do for the large-scale silliness to be top of mind for folks. When you are working with people who are caring for folks with addictions, childcare issues, educational challenges, and access to health care and housing, politics and policy are very real. We aren’t in weird arguments about people eating cats. We’re trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people and build public support and collaboration for health and well-being.

The work is real. Caring for veterans, fair housing policies, providing resources for neurodivergent middle schoolers, inclusive economic development, and peer-based support for people in recovery and active addiction. All of it is real and requires collaboration and multiple approaches to meeting needs. The participatory approaches and practices we are called to teach in these settings help set people up to lead in more open and participatory ways, even in a world where public conversations are coming apart and being subjected to lies, intimidation and ideology.

This group is really drawn to the methods we teach – Open Space, World Cafe, Circle, LImiting Beliefs Inquiry – and the theories and tools that help us think about creating participatory work and responses to really complex challenges that overwhelm people and systems. Sometimes, when the questions are just too big, the answer is – at least in the beginning – community. In our rush to do SOMETHING to respond to urgency, it is very easy to create situations that disempower and degrade connections. Organizations like Thriving Together play an important role in supporting the social infrastructure that builds community resilience. They can convene conversations that help diverse groups of people share knowledge and make sense of their conditions, leading to collaborations and resources. Without organizations like that and practices rooted in participatory work, agencies and organizations become siloed, disconnected and lonely.

Soap Lake is really no different from thousands of other communities around the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. It is a small town looking around for help and not necessarily finding it from higher levels of government or the corporate world that has extracted so much of its wealth and talent. It has to rely on its own resources to keep going, and remember what is essential about being a community: connecting, knowing each other, devoting a bit of time and energy to something a bit bigger than yourself because you know that when some are suffering, all are inhibited from full wellbeing.

I love working with groups like this. I admire their work and their undaunted commitment to solving absolutely diabolical problems. I learn so much about the imperative of participatory work from places like this, and I’m grateful for the reciprocal relationships of learning and change-making that we create together.

A replacement for Jamboard

September 5, 2024 By Facilitation, Featured 2 Comments

Ever since Google repurposed their slide app for Jamboard, I’ve been a heavy user. Jambaord is a stripped down whiteboard that allows you to post sticky notes and add images to slides. It’s very simple and always worked quite well for a basic, low-ish tech way to collaborate online.

As Google is wont to do, however, the app is being discontinued, and as of October 1, it will no longer be available. Your existing Jambaords will be kept around as read-only.

I do use Miro, which works well if I am working with a group over time, and we can take the time to learn it and use it. It can be frustrating for folks with low patience for learning new tech. When we just need a quick and dirty workspace, I want something simple. Zoom has a simple whiteboard feature, which I have also used, which is like a stripped-down version of Miro with some Jamboard features. The advantage of this is that it can be opened directly inside a Zoom meeting, but of course, it doesn’t work if you are using another videoconferencing tool.

My friend Amanda Fenton, who is my go-to partner for hybrid facilitation and large-scale online engagement work, swears by Padlet for her work, and we are currently using it for some engagement work we are doing with the Squamish Nation on developing their Constitution. Padlet is easy to use, is accessible and works well on mobile. Recently, they produced an app called Padlet Sandbox that is a good replacement for Jamboard. While it still can’t export yet (a feature that is coming), and it’s not free beyond a very basic use, it is a really good replacement for Jamboard, and it looks and feels very much like Jamboard does. For people accustomed to using Jamboard, this is a good replacement. It can also accept your exported Jamboards.

Amanda has made a video tutorial exploring Sandbox and comparing it to Jamboard, which is worth watching if you are looking for something to use after October 1.

Watch Amanda’s video here, and check out her list of facilitation resources for in-person and online meetings, with a special emphasis on accessibility.

From the Parking Lot

September 4, 2024 By Links One Comment

A collection of links I found interesting last month. I have been collecting and sharing these on Mastodon, so if you have any interest in seeing these in real time, give me a follow over there. I’ve been using it as a microblogging platform, which is what Twitter used to be. These links cover a wide range of things that caught my eye during the month.

  • This is an example of “exaption” in the human and technological sphere, a key practice in how humans respond to emergence in complex and rapidly changing systems.
  • Educator Sharon Murray shares her principles of teaching, rooted in her love and scholarship of Shakespeare.
  • An important interview with TSN’s Rick Westhead who has done much to uncover scandals, abuse, and governance issues with organizations like Canada Soccer and Hockey Canada.
  • In England, the FA Cup began last month. As one of 440 owners of a Canadian semi-professional football club, I have an active interest in the fates and fortunes of small teams in this competition. The prospect of giant-killings abound and having experienced it once and almost twice with my TSS Rovers FC, I can say there is almost no greater victory for a club of semi-pro punters than taking down a proper professional team.
  • It has become clear to me that during the Olympics nearly everyone with an opinion on sex and gender and what women athletes have to go through. has no idea what they are talking about. You should listen to Tested with Rose Eveleth to better understand the history and complexities of sex testing and athletics.
  • I would love some insight into the psychology of lawmakers who are so frightened and underdeveloped as adults that they ban books by Judy Blume. It’s like we’re being governed by nine-year-old Minecraft mods.
  • A very straightforward tool for moving through complex transitions from Mirjam Hope and Sonja Blignault (@sonjabl).
  • A beautiful tribute from Shireen Ahmed to our Canadian Women’s Soccer Team who had an emotionally wild Olympic tournament as they battled a six point deduction brought on them by their cheating coaching staff and won every game in their group before falling in the quarter-final.
  • An interview with my friend Bob Stilger on his reflections on philanthropy and regenerative systems in the midst of collapse, from a trip he did to Brazil this summer.
  • CBC ran this article about workers dismantling a pro-Palestinian camp at Vancouver Island University and in the caption on this photo failed to mention that one of the workers made friends with a bunny.
  • Facilitated Workshops Create the Problems They Try to Solve. This one hits uncomfortably close to home.
  • I am a Subaru owner. What does it mean?
  • Kanaka Bay on Saysutshun (Newcastle Island) near Nanaimo. The bay is named for a Hawaiian man, Peter Kakua, who is buried there. But his story and the story of those he killed and what it all means is incredible. It took 150 years for someone to give it a proper airing and that someone was Noelani Goodyear-Ka’?pua and you need to read her piece.
  • Vancouver has a new professional women’s soccer team. Welcome Vancouver Rise to the world.
  • This is outstanding, a crowdsourced interview with Laurie Anderson and the last question is delightful. She recently did an episode of The Documentary Podcast for BBC which told a bit more of the story of her new recording.
  • RIP to jazz guitarist Russell Malone. He played with such space and inspired by singers, a singular committment to extracting feel out of every line. Here is an older piece about his lineage.
  • The BC Conservatives want to remove access to harm reduction resources because they feel unsettled about people being able to use them. And the BC NDP is letting them. We are failing folks with addictions. And there is no party willing to govern on the basis of good evidence. Citizens need to be properly educated on addiction and governments shouldn’t let polls dictate health science decisions.

Enjoy these reads and listens and let me know in the comments if you were struck by any of these.

Rare blue supermoon? It’s about sensemaking.

August 19, 2024 By Being, Complexity, Featured, Stories One Comment

Just a picture of the ordinary full moon I took a few years ago through my binoculars.

The moon will rise tonight, about the same time the sun sets, hence tonight is a full moon. This happens every 28 days or so. It will be a “supermoon” because about three or four times a year, the moon’s orbit carries it to a point where it’s closest point to Earth coincides with a full moon – as it will tonight – making this full moon appear a little bigger in the sky than the 9 or 10 other full moons. And it will be a “blue moon” because in this case, it is the third full moon in a calendar season that contains four full moons, which is one of the two definitions of a blue moon, the other being “the second full moon in a calendar month,” which this one isn’t.

Take away the calendar and here is what happens. The moon rises every day at different times an in different phases. Every time the moon orbits the earth it does so in a little wobble that carries it between about 405,000 and 363,000 kms from us. The solar seasons also happen every year, as the earth tilts on its axis and oscillates between the June and December solstices and the March and September equinoxes.

So that’s what is happening, but it’s only when we import meaning on to these different events are colliding at the same time that we end up with some mild excitement about a “rare blue supermoon.“

So first, what is rare about the moonrise tonight? Well, this particular seasonal blue moon, actually happens about every 18-24 months. The next one after tonight will occur on May 20, 2027.

Supermoons occur about 3 or 4 times a year. Super seasonal blue moons occur on average about every 10 years, but the next one will happen in March 2037. So what is physically happening is pretty rare, in terms of human lifetimes. But unless you knew all this it’s unlikely you will notice anything different or care.

The whole origin of the term “blue moon” is worth diving into because it’s a mix of colloquial expressions, etymology, misheard and misunderstood words, and superstition. It is in fact this history of meaning that makes tonight’s moon exciting. All your news feeds today will be full of articles, like this one you’re reading, explaining what is happening. You’ll also come across lots of other meaning making, especially in the realms of astrology and other meaning-making endeavours that project all kinds of singular and special effects on this moment, making it a special time. The search for causality never rests!

Try a little experiment today. Get really excited with people about the super blue moon and see what happens. See who cares and who doesn’t. See what the different responses are. Notice your own reactions to people who have different reactions to what you are telling them.

As I was reflecting on the extremely mild delirium around this rare blue supermoon, it reinforced once again how much human behaviour is influenced more by the meaning we make of what is happening rather than the events that are actually happening. Understanding how we make meaning of things is critical to understanding why we behave in certain ways. The physical events will all coincide right now as I am writing this, at 11:26 Pacific Time. As the moment came and went I noticed nothing different happening in myself. I can’t even see the moon right now because it is midday. The only effect this whole thing has had is to make me think enough about why our sensemaking frameworks have such power over us to make meaning of things that are otherwise run of the mill physical events in the world in which we live. So I wrote a blog pots.

Humans impart meaning constantly. To understand our individual and collective behaviours, we need to understand that meaning making part of us. And then we need to go have a look at the beautiful moon.