Just Between Us

If you think not much happens on Bowen Island, you haven’t read their weekly newspaper: the Undercurrent.

There’s the full-day kindergarten starting up in September, work beginning on a new seven-foot wood sculpture to go in front of the library, not to mention the hundreds of islanders who lined up before dawn last Wednesday to cheer for the Olympic torch on its way to West Vancouver.

And if that’s not enough, you can find out how Dot Crookall earned his spot in the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 1965 and what happened when David Cameron gave his wife a rock for Valentine’s Day. Well, you actually had to tune into the CBC’s Vinyl Café to find out how that story ended.

But it was the Undercurrent that let you know it would be on the air.

“This is what I thrive on,” says the Undercurrent’s new editor, Martha Perkins. “Time with people. I’m in the office, and somebody drops by with a classified, a pair of lost glasses, a source of new information. Feeling connected to what I spend so much of my day doing. It’s important to me.”

Novelist Carolyn Chute used to say that she spent eight hours a day talking to little people who weren’t there. Fellow writers in the audience would laugh—a little nervously. Because of course the little people are there. And they don’t go away—until we give them voice and a chance to make a mess of their very own lives and—who knows?—maybe even a chance to redeem themselves.

That’s what keeps us writing. We want to find out what happens next.

The novella I’m working on began with a voice in my head. A character was beginning to tell me her story. I couldn’t figure out where she lived, so I ignored her because I was at work on something else. But she persisted, and when I made my first trip to Quebec City, I realized she lived there. Everywhere I went, I found her story emerging—so fast and so vividly, that I had to drop what I was writing and attend to these places she had lived and worked.

I am not a writer of historical fiction, yet this character lived in a city I didn’t know at the end of World War II and spoke a language I speak poorly and read almost not at all.

When Julia James was working on her Masters Thesis in Physical Geography at UBC, she noticed that most of her best ideas came to her when she got up to use the washroom. A different quality of thought was available when she wasn’t trying to think at all. She was aware of  “the bigger picture, concepts, a shift in perspective.”

Later, when she became a life coach, she noticed that her clients—busy professionals—almost never took breaks.

“They didn’t relax at all—they were so restless,” she says. “They were highly educated, excited and passionate about their careers, constantly going, and they’d lose their sense of direction—where they were headed in all this going.”

Which is often why they hired James as their coach in the first place.

Along with helping her clients to set and reach their goals, James began to suggest ways in which they could renew their energy right on the job.

She developed and produced a series of CDs to help her clients to relax, but, she says, “the step to actually using the tool was too big—so a how to book was needed to coach them through the steps to take that space and time to retreat in their day.”

As supportive as her women’s group has been over the years, Vicki McLeod felt a need to extend her personal work into her professional life—and beyond. She also noticed that many of her colleagues and clients “were doing everything their MBAs taught them and the consultants told them, and it still wasn’t happening—things weren’t changing. Something else was needed.”

So McLeod, a local communications consultant and coach, started an Eldership Circle.

“I realized that if I was going to hold a space for change, I needed a place where I could do my inner work and be fully supported to take it out into the world. So I decided to put out a call.”

The group’s purpose is to create a space where women can help each other in “overcoming personal barriers and prejudices, [creating] conscious awareness of rank and privilege, and resolving inner conflict—all necessary to … heal our communities.” The circle is meant to go beyond personal growth and always points to service. It’s a place where personal development and social consciousness meet.