It is a quiet morning here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. The equinox has come and gone and the mornings are darker and cooler. We have stopped changing the clocks in this part of the world, so the mornings will only ever grow darker by the clock until the solstice.  I'll be walking in pitch black in a month or so.  My partner is the walking champion of our household, taking her morning and afternoon walks everyday as a non-optional part of her morning.

The Squamish welcome figure at Sw?aywi (Ambleside Beach) in West Vancouver Once a month I fill in to lead worship at our little Bowen Island United Church. I love the chance to do so, because I get to sit with a piece of scripture and reflect on it. Over the years here I've shared a few of my sermons and today, the…

Bring Active Living Upgrades to King George Park | 乔治国王公园 | ਕਿੰਗ ਜਾਰਜ ਪਾਰਕ !

Kelly Foscroft-Poirier hosts a session during an Art of Hosting we did at Tseshaht back in 2019. I had a lovely call today with Sean Andrew, a colleague in the world of hosting, complexity and systems change work. At one point we were both sharing stories about what the Art of Hosting workshop meant to us as experienced practitioners. We both came to the Art of Hosting approach after years of facilitation and practice in other domains.

One of the projects I'm engaged in is a rigorous exploration of my own theory-informed facilitation and hosting practice. I have been keeping extensive field notes of my work, in a hand written journal, that contains observations about myself and the group I'm working with in real time. It is an effort to refine my practice along the lines of the triangle I've been working on, to notice deeply the ways in which Structure, Interactions and Design coalesce into a container.

Bring Active Living Upgrades to King George Park | 乔治国王公园 | ਕਿੰਗ ਜਾਰਜ ਪਾਰਕ !

Snug Cove a few hours ago, looking over the Queen Charlotte Channel to the east wall of Atl'katsem/Howe Sound. It's a bright, warm September, and the light in the sound is softened by water vapour, condensing over the cold water. Humpbacks and seals are eating and resting and the birds are active, eating seeds and insects, preparing for, or stopping over on, their long migrations southward.

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

It sort of feels like summer is over although we are enjoying a warm stretch here in mid-September that has brought sun and warm temperatures and calm winds to the island. This is more typical of the summers I remember from half my life ago, before we experienced extreme heat and drought. There was always a dry patch between the middle of July and the middle of October with a bit of rain usually in August and more at the beginning of September.

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

New Bowen Island park will recognize and honour Japanese Canadians

Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of experience gives her lots of material from which to generate beautiful essays. And her generous engagement with commentators and connections is exemplary. Her latest post is about "making rules you are willing to be bound by"

We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.

Some good recent reads which didn't make it into full blog posts: Peter Levine offers a close reading of Wendell Berry's poem, September 2: "If his leaves are his writings, I do not think they will soon dissolve." A beautiful Guardian article about slime moulds and the people who study them: "So confounding were they that Carl Linnaeus, who spent his life taxonomising life, lumped them into a genus called “chaos”."

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

Pointing you to a recent podcast from The Hub, my favourite source of conservative policy opinion, on the role of private capital in public infrastructure.

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

A group’s capability is related to its internal differences. Work with those and all kinds of capabilities can be revealed.

One of the joys of my life is singing with my a cappella Renaissance choir, Carmena Bowena. For the past six yers we have worked on a repertoire of mostly Renaissance sacred music and madrigals and spreading into slightly later southern European folk music from places like Spain, France, Corsica and Italy. We have sung contemporary arrangements of songs by Sting and Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot and modern settings of old liturgical texts like Ubi Caritas, Ave Maria and O Nata Lux and O Magnum Mysterium.

I work with lots of organizations in transition, and always have done. Specifically organizations who leadership is leaving, often representing a transition from a founder to the next generation. These situations are fraught with new and unexpected emotions, states, and situations. The folks that remain find themselves relying on stuff that was invisible before the transition but which is missed now.

Dave Snowden publishes a post today thick with some interesting brain research and some musing about how we might structure organizations along the lines of what we know about how brains work: What would be different is an organisational design practice that treats cognitive profile distribution as an analogue substrate to maintain, not individual variation to manage toward a norm. It would assess tools, processes, and frameworks for their effect on that substrate — asking, in Clark’s terms, whether each is scaffolding or substituting, rather than measuring only their effect on output.

I spent a few hours this morning reading about the Oxford Praxis Lab. I know of Rob Poynton who is the director of the Lab, and whose book, Everything's An Offer was one of the seminal books I read 15-20 years ago as I was exploring improv and embodied exercises and the teaching and hosting practices that I was developing.

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

Anne Lamott, from an old post on Labour Day (which she spells in the American way): I guess it is a plank of the Christian right to be anti-union now. But remember, there are still a lot of us in the Christian left, and we don't feel that way. When I was growing up, everyone I knew was pro-union, just like everyone used public libraries and everyone in California was proud of the public education system and loved the state's natural beauty.

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

Back in 2001 I wrote a song about the end of summer here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island that contains the lines "The winds have turned southeast again/And the Sound is full of cloud." Today is that day, right on time. Blustery winds in the channel in front of my house, a steady blow in the tree tops and a sprinkling of rain.

Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we are working with complexity should truly reflect on our practice. At the heart of the challenge, as I took it on board, is the claim that a hosted container is a consequential intervention in a system, but it is not the system itself.

Wendell Berry has died. Patti Digh's was the first obituary I saw this morning. And so here is her brilliance, as she offers a characteristic take on his work and legacy: Most of us are not good at staying. We are trained for leaving—for the bigger market, the better opportunity, the next thing, the bright lights. Berry’s work is a patient argument that this training has cost us something we can barely name anymore: the knowledge that comes only from affection, and the affection that comes only from time.

Our annual community festival, Bowfest is happening today. AS I write from home, a kilometre and a half from the festival field I can hear the band Queer as Funk getting everyone dancing. It turned out to be a beatiful day - blustery and cool but bright sunshine and clear skies. It looked like rain was in the forecast but we dodged it.

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.