When you’re talking about tides and currents, the relationship between course and heading, wind and waves, you’re talking science. For the most part, anyway. It’s formulas and angles, time and distance. Organizational navigation has a lot of the same elements, data that can be measured and filed, milestones that can be tabulated, experiments that can be replicated. It’s a lot about numbers, a lot about variables, all of which can be used to determine organizational direction. That is how the Ikkatsu Project has been organized from the beginning, around the science, because science has the advantage of being true, regardless of who believes in it and who doesn’t.

But navigation is an art as much as it is a science, whether we’re talking about sea kayaks or small non-profits, and the art is much more difficult to define. There it is a gut feeling quotient, there are hunches and there are decisions made that may not seem to make sense at the time and yet, still turn out to be the right thing to do. Science, as it turns out, will only get you so far in the direction that you want to go, and that is a hard truth that I have had some trouble coming to terms with.

So what is the art of navigation when it comes to the present situation? Next moves for the Ikkatsu Project as the new year unfolds will be, what?

Well, while continuing some of the existing programs, the overall emphasis is going to change, at least for now. These are challenging times, for human beings as well as the environment they live in, and in order to meet those challenges, I think it’s important to really know what they are. Not just the kind of knowledge that lives in our cerebral cortex, but the kind of knowledge that is held deep inside, that comes from experience and identification with something larger than ourselves.

One of the priorities for this year’s programs is going to be facilitating that immersion, that understanding of the connections between what we do, where we are going, who we are, who we want to be, what the future will hold, and what the intermediate steps are in the process. Look for opportunities on the Washington coast and in southeast Alaska that will be coming onto the 2025 calendar, opportunities to not only clean a beach or sample for microplastics, but to spend time in the environment and to let the outside in.

Moving through nature while nature is busy moving through us. Navigating.