The gentleness after the storm

The view from my porch this morning, looking east to the line of storms that obscure the sunrise.

It’s a very still and quiet morning here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. A line of thunderstorms passed over the island a couple of hours ago, and as they have slowly made their way east, there are lingering rumbles coming from up the inlet. Lightening is striking the mountain tops of the Brittania Mountains. The ground at my house is a little wet, so at least some rain is falling in this little system, and I hope that means that there are fewer fires likely to start as a result.

In the quiet of an August Friday morning, very few commuters are rushing for the ferry. The Queen of Capilano slid into Snug Cove a few minutes ago. There is no wind at all, nor any kind of swell in the bay, so the sounds of the morning are five or six nuthatches in the forest around me, some chickdees in the Saskatoon bushes along our garden edge, crows far off on the ridge top maybe bothering an owl or an eagle, and the plaintive rumbles of thunder rolling down Howe Sound.

The air is very damp, and the sky to the east is pink as the sun has risen behind the wall of cumulonimbus clouds that are languidly crossing the region. Away to the south it’s hard to know where the blue of the sky begins and where the grey sheen of wildfire smoke ends. The atmosphere is a blended mix of watervapoour and woodsmoke.

Me, I’m pouring my morning coffee, home from a trip to Seattle to work with the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance and their community- and University-based partners. We delivered an Art of Hosting there, which forms an important part of the way the Evans school promotes community and democratic engagement.

My mind is tired from the week. Holding the evolving needs of the room against a core set of learning objectives while alos pushing ourselves to do new things is exhilarating in the moment, but produces a rush of release when it’s over. Travelling home yesterday was fraught with the usual busyness of a drive through Vancouver and the chaos of a ferry schedule bent out of reality but the summertime. Sleep was sweet, and long.

The next three weeks will be about seeing out the summer with rest, reading and retreat. I have a lot of writing to do, processing this year’s worth of learning. I have learned a lot this year about my practice and have taken my facilition/hosting work into deeper territory. This has been the year in which the combination of anthro-complexity, the Art of Hosting, Participatpry Narrative Inquiry, pedagogy, and coaching have all all finally blended into a rich set of practices for the work I do. It’s as if a distiller took a sophisticated blend of whiskies and let them age together for 15 years. This year has been the first bottling of that new expression. It probably represents the single biggest learning that I have Dione in my practice since 2012.

Over the year of strategic work and teaching I have pushed myself in practice more than I have done for a very long time. I have kept detailed notes along the way, in an effort to observe my work, and make sense of what different choices and actin=ons have meant. The next few weeks will afford me the chance to reflect on mornings like this, combing through the field notes and writing out what I have learned. It will all be shared here, in snippets and in long form essays, unpolished, but with an eye to dropping them in public for public reaction and response and polishing and challenging.