A swim tonight in the cool waters at Bowen Bay beach, but this time with a difference. I don't know why it has taken me so long,. but I finally swam around the bay with a snorkle and mask and was treated to an amzing array of life. The usual crowds of ochre stars stuck to the rocky sides of the bay where surrounded by hundreds of little perch, who were gleefully ripping barnacles from the rocks and fighting over them. Cruising around the beach, in water maybe ten feet deep, I took a few dives to the frigid bottom and chased flounders and crabs.



Why haven't I stuck a mask to me face before? This was an amazing thing to do. Read more about real diving in Howe Sound here.

The Ecotone community is blogging about weblogs as place today.



Look very closely at these words. If you lean into your monitor you will see that they flicker a little. Peer even closer and you see that each letter is made up of little squares. Take a magnifying glass to the screen and you notice that there is space between the pixels.



This weblog is about a place, but it lives everywhere. At the moment it lives right in front of you, little more than light shining in your eyes. Reading it may invoke a feeling of being here on Bowen Island, but it is not Bowen Island itself. It lives only on your monitor. Once I publish the words, they reside as tiny 1s and 0s on a server in Vancouver. When you reach them via a URL they fly at the speed of light to where you live and they embed themselves in your context.



Edward Hall and Marshal McLuhan and others talked about how technology extends our bodies from one place to another. The phone moves our voice boxes thousands of miles, past ears that are travelling in the other direction. Weblogs do the same with our thoughts. Those that I get down onto the keyboard become thoughts that you can read, thoughts you can interact with.



In as much as I believe that landscape lives in the mind, it is possible that what you are staring at is actually one kind of Bowen Island landscape. I recognize this, which is why I have mapped this inner landscape onto the maps of stories at the Bowen Island GeoLibrary.



But are weblogs places in themselves? I don't believe so. Come to Bowen, swim with me in the phosphoresence on a late summer evening with crickets and nighthawks chirping away and you will know what it is like to be consumed by place. The next click you make will take you away from this weblog, but it's not that easy in real life. When we are in place, we are rooted. We cannot leave without some part of us remaining behind, stretched out behind us, eventually catching up to where we now find ourselves. But with this weblog, perhaps with any weblog, we skim the surface, reside in the moment perhaps even try to peer into the depths.



And all we see when we do that is light.

Crickets, juncos, flying termites. All of these are signs of fall, and all are upon us now. Very strange. After a dry year and a half, it seems as if an early autumn might be upon us, given these signs. Plus the salal and blackberries were several weeks early, and both crops were HUGE.



Not a good huckleberry or thimbleberry year though. Small dry berries, not like last year. Salmon berries were probably average.



So what does this tell us? We had a dry spring and early summer, but fall is fast approaching?



Maybe.

Days of peace and light here on Bowen. Mark blogs the Dog Days events and the Men's League Fastball Tournament, Michael Herman (now a summer resident) blogs some Open Space Technology work we cooked up, and adds some strange pictures of what looks like me getting my head shaved, but is in fact Michael playing with Photoshop.



Avner Haramati, from Jerusalem, was here with his family for a few days and we just had the best time together. We kicked off his visit with a talk at Ashoka House, Jim and Anne Ironside's place. Avner spoke about his work in Israel facilitating dialogue and Open Space between Palestinians and Israelis. We then enjoyed a community Kabbalah Shabbat and capped it off last night with a third potluck in the field at Collins Farm followed by late night swimming in the most intense phosphorescence I've ever seen at Tunstall Bay. The glow was so bright that when I swam under water the light around my eyelids was so bright that I couldn't see anything else. It was unbelievable.



Two years ago, Avner asked me what it was like to live here. Caitlin was trying to tell him her version of the answer. She mentioned that hardly anyone seems to get angry here. "Really? asked Avner. "Well," she said, "someone got angry last month over the new ferry marshalling. It was in the paper."



Avner was incredulous. "Someone gets angry and it makes the newspaper." He slapped his brow. "What kind of place is this?"



I think he had a good time. Same goes for his wife and daughters, who were a treat to have on the island. I can't quite put into words how lucky I feel we are to be living here, eating flowers at potlucks, and swimming in light.

Catch it while you can! CBC recently did a special show on the artists and musicians of Bowen Island and you can listen to it here. I'm not on this program, but I am on a new CD of music recorded by a bunch of Bowen Island musicians. The idea was to write a tune, stick it in a hat and pass it around between about eight bands. I got a tune by Teun Schutt and Wayne Kozak, who are brilliant jazz musicians. I am not a jazz musician, although I have a jazz ear. But the keys on my flute don't lend themselves to harmelodic exploration.



Undaunted, I enlisted my good friend Chris Coon, a brilliant drummer and a refugee from the San Francisco punk scene of the 1970s and early 80s (he lived with Jello Biafra for a year...although the memory is hazy). We recorded the tune as a flute and drums duet with a wonky off kilter solo in the middle. I then pulled in my friend Randy Vic and we recorded a straight ahead Irish slow reel that I wrote for our friend Paul Hawtin.



The Bowen Island music exchange project CD will be out in time for BowFest on Auguist 23rd. We're playing there, so come on down and hear the results.

Yay! Another Bowen Islander joins the blogging fold. John Dumbrille is now online, and with his perspective on life here on the rock, the laughs are sure to follow. Welcome aboard John. Go visit him at Bowen...Bowen... Bon.

My contribution to this week's Ecotone collective blogging project on trees and place:



Have you ever seen an orange forest?



There is a moment every fall in Ontario when the maple trees turn orange and red and the sky becomes deep blue, the deepest blue you have ever seen, and the air sharpens up a little. I lived for that moment every year for about the first 26 years of my life. For me, living in Ontario was epitomized in many ways by the experience of that moment. When I ask the question to folks out here on the coast and describe the experience, I am met with genuine awe.



The year I moved to British Columbia, I was surprised by how overwhelmed I felt by missing this scene. Here the fall progresses through deeper and darker shades of grey, and the forests become greener and wetter and more pungent. Mushrooms sprout everywhere and the trees seem to sigh and draw a breath to gird themselves against the winter wind storms to come. I was sorely disappointed when my mid fall moment never materialized. I remember feeling totally dislocated.



It took me a couple of years to anchor myself to the moods of the trees on the coast, and it happened in 1995 on Cortes Island, about 150 kilometers north of here. One hot day in July I was sitting on the porch of the cabin we frequent, reading and writing a little when I suddenly noticed that everything had stopped. There was no bird song, no wind, and strangest of all, the tress had stopped moving. Not so much as a Douglas-fir needle stirred. I became acutely aware of a feeling that the season was turning; that everything that had grown and sprouted to this point in time had reached its peak and was now turning towards decay. It was a profound moment, as narrow and fine as a knife edge, and just as palpable.



I have a new relationship with trees, and they certainly define my place here. In the fall there are days when the term "rainforest" seems so appropriate. The rain falls and when it stops, the trees keep it going. They drip and spray water on the forest floor for hours afterwards.



And in the winter, when the Pineapple Express winds blow at speeds exceeding 80 km/h, it's the threat of a Douglas-fir limb coming through the ceiling that puts the profundity into the moment.



So surrounded are we with the big trees of the coastal Pacific rainforest - the Douglas-firs, hemlocks and red cedars - that I almost take them for granted. I don't think of them much on their own, neither their overwhelming presence or huge size.



Once in a while though, like last week when my brother was here from Toronto, the sheer breathtaking girth of them is brought to my awareness again. Out on a walk in Crippen Park last week, my brother pointed to an old Douglas-fir that rose straight and cylindrical out of the forest floor up a couple of hundred feet and said, very quietly, "Look at that."



And it truly is an amazing thing. a tree so huge, five people can't join hands around it. So tall that it rakes the clouds for moisture. So green that the light beneath it takes on a permanently cool hue.



As amazing as an orange forest against an azure autumn sky.