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  • Winter Solstice Eve 2025: The Circle of Life

    I’ve had occasion to stay with a friend the last few months. In the spring when I stepped out of my room, the sun lit the hallway end to end. Through summer it was there every morning accompanying me as I started my day. I noticed how gradually after the fall equinox that beam of light began to narrow, falter and gradually fade.

    Since mid-November mornings have been dark, pitch black. I have to turn on the hall switch to find my way to the front door. But I have had the experience too now some mornings of walking out the front door of the building to see the sun rise (my friend lives on the river valley). And I can’t help but watch for a moment before going on with my day. It never fails to take my breath away.

    My mom died this fall. As a family we got to vigil with her in her last week and took turns staying the night. The first night I stayed she was restless and neither of us got much sleep. The sun wasn’t up yet but the first signs were there. It was morning. The room started to fill with light. She was still conscious but couldn’t speak much. Suddenly she pointed at the blinds. She kept pointing Up up! So I rolled them up and there was the sky, clear of clouds, red from rim to rim. She smiled. I babbled a bit. We both sat watching the sky, alive like a cinematic afterglow. It was one of the last conscious moments we had together.

    Later, going through her personal papers, I found a photo she had taken of the sun rising over our old farm yard and an account she had written about leaving the farm in 1983:

    In my heart I’m still a country person. To see the sunrise early in the morning, cows waiting to be milked and a greening shining crop in the fields!

    I think she was watching the sun rise all her life. The sun is there every day. Our lives pretty well revolve around it. Perhaps with climate change that awareness is starting to come home to us. But I know I don’t think about it enough or how much our world is shaped by it.

    I am glad to pause on this winter solstice to give thanks for the circle of life.

  • Fall Equinox 2025: Homing

    Hundreds of millions of birds are on the move, have been migrating through Alberta for several weeks now. First the landbirds (warblers, sparrows, flycatchers, vireos, hummingbirds and others) who left northern Alberta in early August. Next the shorebirds, the raptors, and the waterbirds. The last to go (as late as November) will be the waterfowl: the ducks, geese, and swans. You can follow them in real time here.

    Homing is a verb, the homing instinct an action: an ability to return home from a great distance. Usually associated with animals: salmon, caribou, especially birds returning to their place of birth. Or in this case, their winter shelter, a geographic memory from before the parting of the continents.

    I wonder how much we humans still have that instinct? To find our way home. And what does home mean in the 21st century? Do we know our origins?

    The last couple of years personal circumstances have challenged me to rethink the meaning of home. I’ve also been listening to the stories of many (human and more-than-human*) displaced this past summer by wildfires, especially Indigenous people. It has almost become an annual ritual in some parts of the country.

    There is a place, a piece of land that I go back to in my mind and sometimes still in the flesh, that place where I grew from a child into adulthood. A farm, north of Edmonton. Its creeks, swamps, fields, bushes; some of them gone now. Where I first connected with the more-than-human world. Where I had many of my formative experiences. There have been other places since where I’ve bonded too, maybe over years or only a moment, where I’ve felt connected to everything that is. That is home to me. Sometimes a particular air current, a scent, the right slant of light, a piece of music, a conversation, an image will bring me back there.

    My current physical home has so much of me in it: the wall colours, the window coverings, the flooring, the art, the greening courtyard out my front window. There is a balance and a beauty to the setting that visitors often comment on. But the feeling of “being at home” is much more than this. Feeling at peace in my own skin, home as a place of peace and sanctuary, a place of welcome. Home as a staging ground, a place to rest, renew, and draw energy and spirit for relationships, for work, for creativity. Home is in my relationships. This is my habitat. What about yours?

    At one time, before settlement, there were probably hundreds of billions of birds in skies at the fall equinox. Just like there were millions of bison on the plains.

    As we approach the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation or Orange Shirt Day for survivors of Indian Residential Schools, let us remember the relationships that bring us home.

    *Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions:2014)

  • Summer Solstice 2025: What We Know

    “To be native to a place, we must learn to speaks its language.”
    Robin Wall Kimmerer

    The land where I now live was known as River Lot 20 in fur trade and settlement times. But of the layers (the people and their stories) “before contact,” I know almost nothing.

    To show these layers on a page, this screen, I would need reams of blank space. A great silence. Not because there was nothing there but because so much was erased with colonization. So much forgotten. Or buried. In the earth but also buried in our psyche. Do I even begin to feel the loss? The land holds billions of years of story, most of it in pieces.

    Just metres below the surface of this city, according to the archeologists. Within walking distance of my home, on both the north and south sides of the river at Queen Elizabeth Park, Walterdale Flats, Rossdale Flats, Victoria Flats, Groat Road and more. What they’ve found.

    We know this: How these First Peoples cooked (from the ash and charcoal hearths left behind). How they processed their food (from the fire-broken rocks). How they hunted (from spear and knife points). We know some of what they ate; kin we can still recognize: seeds of kinnikinnick, bunchberry, pin cherry, and choke cherry. Bones of bison and ungulates (deer, elk and moose). Used for medicines, for food.

    We know some of what they traded with the first Europeans who came to this part of North America: lynx and beaver pelts for glass beads and clay pipes. We know where some of their bones lie, the Papachase Cree and the Métis, alongside the Irish, English, French and Scottish traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company Fort. But even this sanctioned graveyard, until it was uncovered by a utilities expansion, hadn’t survived the collective memory.

    There is so much we do not know.

    Yet there is a longer history to this land. Buried for centuries within Indigenous communities where language has been kept alive. Visions, ceremonies, sacred societies, and stories have been passed on, searched out, and sometimes shared. For myself I have learned from the work of so many Indigenous authors: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, Maria Campbell, Tomson Highway, Joy Harjo, Thomas King, Louise Erdich, Drew Hayden Taylor, Tommy Orange, Augie Merasty, Eden Robinson, Billy-Rae Belcourt, Tanya Tagaq, Patty Krawec. I can’t name them all.

    One project where I live has been gathering stories of the North Saskatchewan River, many of them told by Indigenous elders. The North Saskatchewan had many names before the Europeans arrived: the Kisiskâciwanisîpiy (Cree for the swiftly flowing river) and omaka-ty (the big river to the Blackfoot), to name just two. As we approach National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, Indigenous people have events planned everywhere across this land.

    They have prepared a feast for us. They are inviting us to the table.

    When we sit down to the first meal of this Summer Solstice, we too gather around food and story. Maybe we make kinnikinnick tea or have last year’s pincherry or chokecherry syrup on our pancakes. Perhaps we are gathering like the ancestors of this land, to give thanks for the greening of things and for the land that feeds us body and spirit. For what we know.

  • Spring Equinox 2025: Imagine Equal

    The word equinox comes from the Latin for “equal night.” It’s the point when the sun crosses the earth’s equator. In the northern hemisphere at this time of year, we celebrate the vernal or spring equinox; while the southern half of the world celebrates the autumnal equinox. On equinox, night and day are roughly equal all over the planet. Twelve hours of darkness, twelve hours of light. Another way of describing this: equinox is the only time when the northern and southern hemispheres are equally illuminated.

    A moment of illumination; a moment of balance. What does equinox (north and south) have to teach us at this time in the earth’s story?

    When I used to lead spirituality workshops, I would often start with a meditation called Flame of Love, probably an adaptation of a Buddhist practice. It begins where one is, in one’s body and one’s surroundings: a room, a backyard, a lake. And gradually moves the heart outward in a spiral across city lights or rural skies dark with stars; one’s region and landforms, rivers and lakes; one’s country, across borders, then multiple countries; over continent and continents, oceans, and finally the whole earth held within one’s mind. Sometimes I would simply play a short NFB video called Cosmic Zoom that does the same thing starting from the cells of the body and “zooming” out to the universe and back again.

    It is worth pausing to consider on this day the equal light and darkness that falls on the whole earth, our enemies and our friends, familiars and strangers alike, the light a gift to us all. On all the suffering places of the world: Palestine and Israel, Russia and Ukraine, Somalia, the Congo, South Sudan, Haiti. On the peoples of Syria, Myanmar (Rohingya) and so many others forced from home to wherever they find themselves including those camped on the highstreets and byways of our own cities.

    We each stand equal on this day in the gift of day and night. No one more or less. No one controls the sun in this universe. There are no borders on it.

    Maybe if we stand in that insight/in this moment, we can remember who we are. Remember our suffering land, what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the “more than human world.” Imagine the forests rising up, the oceans, inland lakes, the mountain ranges, prairie, steppe, and deserts. Imagine the wind. Imagine the volcanoes, earthquakes, clouds and storms, tornados and cyclones, so much more powerful than the voices of might and chaos ascendent in our human world right now (voices within us and those surrounding us). Maybe we can imagine equal.

  • Winter Solstice 2024: The Sacred Tree

    Winter Solstice 2024: The Sacred Tree

    A Manitoba maple on what would have been the southwestern border of River Lot 20. December 20, 2024.
    A Manitoba maple on the southwestern border of what would have been River Lot 20, Edmonton, Alberta. Dec 20, 2024.

    Trees have always been part of our family. My father was a sawyer as well as a farmer. My mother grew up on the “Dust Bowl” prairies of the 1930s and for all her adult life planted and nurtured trees wherever she could. We still have a “quarter section” of boreal forest in the family. Though as a child I often tired of tree duties—watering, weeding, hoeing, not to mention filling the wood box for our stove (my daily chore at four years old)—trees are in my blood.

    Trees are considered holy in many cultures: rowan (Irish), oak (English), spruce (German), cedar (Coast Salish), ceiba (Mayan), bodhi (Buddhist), and kauri (M?ori), to name a few. Many outlive people, provide layers of habitat to birds, small and large animals. Provide shade, shelter and fruit to humans. Provide medicines. We still see the survivals of this reverence in the Western traditions of the Maypole and the Christmas evergreen. The Christian church tried to replicate the heights and majesty of ancient old growth forests in its European medieval cathedrals. The same feeling, I propose, that city planners and architects today attempt to reconstruct with skyscrapers.

    When I walk along the North Saskatchewan River kisiskâciwani-sîpiy or “swift-flowing river” in nêhiyawêwin (Cree); Omaka-ty or “the big river” in Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), I am always listening and watching for other creatures: the chickadees, woodpeckers, and nuthatches; the wind; the coyotes, hares, and squirrels; the grasses, the light; the bees, mosquitos, and butterflies; the bushes, the trees, the water; among others.  I ponder. Perhaps that’s how I started thinking about the Manitoba maple (acer negundo) growing all along the river edge in Dawson Park (which crosses over the old River Lot 20 where I live today.) Their pretty winged seed pods, pink-edged in fall, tan in winter. Their gnarly trunks and wizardly branches. Manitoba Maples are drought and flood tolerant, adaptable to any soil, form clumps (read: grow in community), have a tendency to find their footing on riverbanks and floodplains. Manitoba Maples have an average lifespan of 60 years, but it seems that some well exceed that. How did they get here? They’re not native.

    The notes on the 1882 survey of the Edmonton Settlement list four types of vegetation starting from the river flats to the heights: “prairie,” “brush,” “swamp” and “poplar timber.” That’s pretty much the description both sides of the river in all directions, with minor changes to the order. Good habitat for beaver, aka Beaver Hills House or amiskwacîwâskahikan (one of Edmonton’s earliest names). Also good habitat for Indigenous peoples for whom the prairie fed bison; brush and swamp meant berries, medicines, large and small game. We also know before settlement that Indigenous peoples practiced cultural burns to renew and replenish the land for these creatures.

    I have a theory that the Manitoba Maple were introduced by the Métis and others with a connection to the original Red River Settlement. And even though eye witness accounts say that the forests were practically gone from the Red River Valley by the 1870s, paintings and photographs from that time still show the odd shade tree in yards. What kind is not clear. But fossil records for the same period show that the Métis people still burned local Manitoba maples in their fireplaces at least some of the time. I wonder if the Métis chose the Manitoba maple as a testament to their survival and resilience? Both as a memory and a dream: a place they once loved, a place that held a vision of a different kind of Canada and the experience of a different kind of community?

    Métis Laurent Garneau migrated to Edmonton from St. Andrews Parish on the Red River and planted a single Manitoba maple behind his house on River Lot 7 on the southside of the river in 1874, where it presided until 2017. Richard Charles Hardisty, Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, first Métis Senator and advocate for Métis rights, planted a circle of maples around his garden at 106 Street and 97 Avenue in 1875, just outside the walls of Fort Edmonton. Mr. Hardisty grew up in the Red River Settlement. In 1906 David Latta planted the same tree on a corner of his riverside property at Jasper Avenue and 90th Street within the old confines of River Lot 20. Here he built a new house for his second wife, a Métis woman named Emily Decoteau, whose father fought in the Riel Resistance. Other settlers planted them too, but these were some of the earliest.

    These days the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy valley near where I live is a cacophony of flora from many other places and even continents, very much reflecting the people who live here. Domestic gardens and fields run feral, including the Manitoba maple: pine, mountain ash (rowan), green and black ash, elm, oak, false holly, lilac, caragana, goji berry from the Himalayas, buckthorn, Canada thistle, and burdock, grow alongside their native fellows: poplar, trembling aspen, birch, spruce, chokecherry, cranberry, gooseberry, saskatoon, wild rose, red willow, sage, wild onion, yarrow, and wild grasses. Their multiplicity, a lesson in human relations. To quote a Beaver Bundle carrier, Ryan First Diver, we are here to learn from plants and animals so we can mature as a species. Some dominate and destroy. Others work alongside their fellows. Together they’re holding this space for us. And this light.

  • Fall Equinox 2024: The Depth of Time

    I wonder sometimes at the dimensions of time. Seasonal like this Equinox and tied to movements of the universe. Linear or cyclical and tied to human history, the decisions and actions of individuals and communities. Or even the way we think of our personal age or lifetime, as in “length of time.But I think there’s another kind of time we might call thin or packed full, apparently random, where a split second can change everything in a life: ­­direction, plans, capabilities. Yes, there is shock, anger, and discouragement at times. But in this kind of time there are also moments I call grace, though someone else may call them fate and maybe they are both.

    Six weeks ago I was struck by a vehicle while riding my bicycle to the downtown farmer’s market. I am walking and talking, but it’s put me in the slow lane temporarily—slow of moving and slow of thinking. I find myself looking in on human goings-on as a semi-outsider. Watching and listening to the daily rush of life from the sidelines. Somehow I see and hear more in this state. Some of it comforting and some of it disturbing. Let me tell you about the comfort.

    The week after I was hit I saw our building janitor, Sahwa; I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment. After I told her what had happened she said to me, “You weren’t killed? How come you weren’t killed?” She thought for a moment. “In my culture we would give a big donation,” she said. “Give a big donation to something! That’s what I would do.” Her words stayed with me. Later that day, I came home and made some donations. Her name I would come to learn means, Angel, in Arabic.

    That first week too I attended a memorial for sexually exploited women in Edmonton. It’s something I try to do every year for women who go missing, are murdered or die prematurely because of their time in the sex industry. The organizers were handing out tobacco ties: loose tobacco tied up in little red pouches, an Indigenous tradition. “What do you do with them?” I asked? “Make an offering to the earth. It’s a way to give thanks. To pray.” I took one. I knew right away what I wanted to do. As soon as I could walk as far as my favourite lookout on the river, I shook the medicine free and gave thanks for the healing that had brought me there.

    A couple of weeks ago now, I was renewing my membership at the art gallery and an old workmate hailed me. He’s on long-term disability leave he told me. He had had a brain tumor. He showed me the crescent shaped scar on his scalp where they went in. He didn’t know if he would be able to return to work. What he was focusing on instead, he said, were people. People. People. He said it three times. I took that to mean relationships. We took some selfies together. He gave me pause: what am I focusing on at this time?

    Last week I met with a friend whose cancer has metastasized. When I asked her how she is, she was straightforward. “It’s progressing. But it’s okay. As I said to my husband, I can do everything I want to.” And that floored me. Can I do everything I want to? Maybe not in my current physical and mental state, but when I’m healthy, am I doing everything I want to? And even now, am I being everything I can? Am I choosing fully?

    My final revelation. I take little walks, a few times a day to gain strength. I was strolling by the St. Teresa of Calcutta school in my neighbourhood this week. The sign outside read, “With children comes hope.” I live in a very diverse neighbourhood. Children of every creed (Buddhist, Muslim and Christian), ethnicity, racial background. The students were on their lunch hour and they were in every corner playing. The older kids helping the younger ones on the swings, the boys and girls playing soccer together, football and basketball. Everyone getting along, having such raucous joy. Hope.

    And so these are my humble offerings to you this fall equinox, these messengers and messages, a small lesson on the depth of time.

  • Summer Solstice 2024: Land Acknowledgement

    Wild rose in mixed and poplar woods, Dawson Park, Edmonton, June 2024.

    Friends and taxi drivers are always getting lost trying to find my address in Edmonton. In Boyle Street, the streets and avenues seem squished together; there are no straight lines. I used to blame it on the bend in the river. Turns out, it goes much deeper than that. As we approach this National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, I want to offer a partial archeology of this place, a kind of cross-section from the archives. There are so many layers, so many Indigenous Peoples, so much wildlife, so much loss. But this Summer Solstice I want to focus on those times and people in-between the First Nations and the European settlers: the Métis and their footprints on this land. Specifically this small patch of ground beneath my feet, River Lot 20.

    One thing about the pandemic is how it washed all our structures away, stripped us back to the essential relationships: family, home, immediate community and land. Allowed us to imagine a different present, a different future. To imagine not some kind of dreamy ideal but to know that things weren’t always like they are now and may not be tomorrow either.

    At one time (1906-1920) there was a federal penitentiary on the very spot of ground where I now live (p. 26) and just south of that along the river’s edge was a coal mine that the inmates had to work. Further south and earlier yet (1893), Mr. J. B. Little started his successful brick yard on the flats of the valley (Riverdale). But before any of this and the reason for all the angles in my neighbourhood has to do with the river lot system.

    The surveyor maps of 1882 show there were already forty-four river lots on the North Saskatchewan either side of Fort Edmonton; even numbers on the north side and odd numbers on the south. The lots on the south side ended at what is now University Avenue. The lots on the north (a mile long) ended at Rat Creek or 118th Avenue.

    There were river lots all over Alberta before settlement and after the Métis practice at the Red River Settlement (inherited from the French practice in Quebec). River lot settlements thrived for decades along the southern rim of Beaverhills Lake, at Laboucan on the Battle River Crossing, further up the North Saskatchewan near Smoky Lake (now Métis Crossing), out at St. Albert along the Sturgeon River and around Lac Ste. Anne to name a few. Several families moved west after the 1870s after the failed struggle for a Métis homeland in Manitoba. And while many of the names on the Edmonton river lots sound Scottish, the men often married Métis women or were of mixed Indigenous and European heritage themselves. Here is a just sampling.  

    In 1860 two brothers-in-law, James Rowland and Kenneth McDonald staked (respectively) River Lot 18 and River Lot 20. They were the first Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) men to live outside the Fort. Kenneth McDonald was a Scot from the Isle of Lewis who signed on as “middleman” (rower) to a York boat with the HBC at the age of 19 (1847). In 1886, after gaining legal title, he built a new house for his growing family on what is now 92nd Street and Jasper Avenue, a little south of me. The McDonald house still stands as part of Fort Edmonton Park. Just before his death in 1906 he sold a chunk of his property. Was it for the new penitentiary? Perhaps as a way to care for his remaining family?

    His wife, Emma, remained in their house until she died in 1929. Emma was a midwife, herbalist and healer; Indigenous knowledge. Besides James Rowland, her other brother, Fred, occupied River Lot 22. There were Métis with kin further east on the river too, at River Lot 28, John Fraser, the son of a Colin Fraser (Scottish) and Nancy Beaudry (Métis); the Fraser sisters Betsy and Flora resided with their husbands on lots 30 (William Borwick) and 32 (James Guillion). River lots 32 and 34 had further family and Métis ties: James and George were brothers from the Orkneys and George was married to a Métis woman, Marguerite Brazeau. These ties were the beginnings of Edmonton. The river lot system allowed each family to have access to needed resources: wood, water and game as well as land for grazing and planting. But perhaps more important for the Métis were the kinship ties the river lot system allowed them to maintain with all their relatives: human, water, land, sky, and forest.

    The river lots on the north side of the river had closer ties to the HBC than those on the south. And their land rights were more likely to be honoured after the Northwest Resistance. That conflict divided Indigenous families on all fronts. Three of James Rowland’s brothers (William, John and Alexander) served as scouts on the government side during the Resistance. Nothing is said about the other nine siblings involvement, but in 1885 their mother (and Kenneth McDonald’s mother-in-law) Elizabeth Rowland claimed Métis scrip at Edmonton as did James. One can imagine the talk of the Resistance around the kitchen tables all up and down the river. Especially among the women.

    But before the river lots? There is just a hint at an earlier time and earlier peoples in Kenneth McDonald’s obituary in the Edmonton Bulletin: “The east side of the village was then where the Grand View Hotel now stands and the district between that centre and his farm was a dense poplar forest.”

    A dense poplar forest… I’m imagining conversations now when I walk to the edge of the valley and look out on the dawn. The mix of cultures and languages and voices. The mix of species. How we could be together differently in this land.

    In gratitude.

  • Spring Equinox 2024: The Thing with Feathers

    You know how Bell has those billboards every January that say “Let’s talk?” That’s what this blog might be titled. Only it’s not only about the mental health and grief of the individual I want to speak, but the collective.

    I’ve been thinking about the word “depression” lately, from my own experiences of grief and those I know who live with chronic depression. Some of the words I’ve heard to describe that experience are instructive: Feeling hollow. Stuck. Empty. Enervating. Like energy being sucked out of a person. Darkness. A hole.

    I think we as a world are in a deep depression right now, the “mess of the world” as one friend put it to me recently, a painful reality of autocrats, vicious wars, increasing natural disasters, famine, failed states, and houselessness. Not to mention inflation, high food and housing costs!

    In the midst of this, I’ve been thinking about climate grief. There’s a scene etched in my mind of another el niño winter, standing on the doorstep of my younger brother’s home on Christmas Day, 1997, looking out on the gray-brown horizon of Edmonton from those heights, and wondering what it meant.

    Now I know what it means. I know that several days at plus 15 or 18 degrees (Celsius) is not “normal” for March in Edmonton. I know that the record low snowfall we’ve had over this winter means another year of drought. I know I’m not alone. Slowly we are starting to talk. Though the conversations are sometimes small and tentative. Whispered. Loud. And other times disjointed and contradictory.

    The friend who wrote to me this week: “Does your place have air conditioning. It is only mid-March and it is getting hot already. Scary.” I don’t have a/c, and I too am dreading summer in Alberta. Another year of extreme wildfires.

    When others say, “I know we need the snow, but I so wish spring would come.” A part of me wants that too. Or on a warm dry autumn day, another friend confides, “I know it’s bad for the forests, but I’m glad it’s so hot. The sun makes me feel better.” We know this is not logical, but we are trying to cope.

    This past winter I was conscious of how my own relationship to the seasons is changing. On one hand I was glad, even grateful, to be able to walk outdoors and breathe clean air under clear (smoke-free) skies. At the same time I know what this means about summer for me. A diminishing of those radiant days… I know there’s a disconnect.

    My mother grew up on the land in the Great Depression of Saskatchewan and Alberta. That connection to the environment is still imprinted on her, especially when it comes to trees.  A couple of weeks ago she told me she touched one of the apple trees at the seniors residence where she lives. She told me the bark at that time of year is usually filled with flecks of green among the brown. This year “there wasn’t a spec of green.” She felt guilty. Maybe she should have watered them more last summer. (She hauled a few pails in the heat one day but gave up after that—you can guess her age.) “They are so dry. I don’t know what is going to happen to them.” This too is climate grief.

    How do we build resilience? How do we adapt to our new realities? Psychologists say we have a lot to learn from the research on natural disasters—how people process their feelings or not, avoid pain or embrace it, build and connect more deeply to community in the aftermath or not. How we seek meaning and growth or seek distractions. How we draw closer to the land or distance from it.

    When I first moved to Boyle Street neighbourhood, I formulated a “safety plan” to manage my fears about the neighbourhood. I had been living in the suburbs for more than a decade and had taken on the stereotypes of the larger community about “downtown” as a “dangerous” place. Here was my simple plan: I had a few friends in the neighbourhood. And as I met more, I made a point of knowing where everyone lived, what block and what house along my walking route, so that if I had to, I could run to the nearest safe house.

    I smile at myself. Now that I’ve lived here so long, I know that most of the doors are safe doors and I could knock on just about any of them in a pinch. So far, twelve years and counting, I haven’t had to. But it illustrates how connection can help us positively adapt to our environment.

    How can we embrace our many feelings about climate change?

    “Hope” is the thing with feathers. (Emily Dickinson) It’s elusive. Inexplicable. Beautiful and magical when it happens. And born out of deep reflection.

    I have been contemplating a strand of mysticism, common to most spiritual traditions, sometimes called the apophatic way or the via negativa, the negative path. It’s an invitation to surrender to ambiguity, to not knowing, to darkness, to birth new meaning. It’s remarkable that Christian mystics from centuries past used metaphors so apt for the climate crises we are going through today: the inner desert (Gregory of Nyssa) and dark night (John of the Cross), mist (Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing) and women’s experience of pregnancy and labour (Meister Eckart): “this birth takes place in darkness.”

    If we could see this dark night as an invitation to rebirth… And the fruit of this via negativa? Compassion.

    Let’s talk.

  • Winter Solstice 2023: Green Point

    Winter Solstice 2023: Green Point

    Winter Solstice. It’s an ending and a beginning. A point in time and a repeating. At the crux of an old year and a new one, a journey around the sun both familiar and yet unfamiliar. Imagine 4.5 billion years. This is about how many times the Earth has been around the sun. Our piece of it as humans is so small.

    This past summer one of my sisters and I had the privilege of visiting the island of Newfoundland off the east coast of Canada. We hiked the east and west coasts and many points in between. The island is a place of contrasts. Boreal forest surrounded by ocean. Northern latitudes where Partridge berries* and bakeapple+ and semi-tropical rhododendron grow side by side. As islands go, it’s big. Count on at least twelve hours driving from L’Anse aux Meadows (where the Vikings first came) on the Great Northern Peninsula to the city of St. John’s.

    Newfoundlanders are fond of calling their big island, “The Rock.” There is very little top soil anywhere, yet they love their gardens, rocky soil and all, and their root cellars. It’s not uncommon for people to use the ditches on either side of road to grow their vegetables. It’s here too that the northeast corner of the Appalachians, the oldest mountains in North America, emerge from the ocean floor. Where glaciers have cut fjords into the land and time has changed them from saltwater to fresh water lakes.

    The island is built on Cambrian rock five hundred million years old. And in some places, like the Tablelands at Gros Morne, the earth’s dark green mantle has pushed through and oxidized into an eerie rusty orange, a kind of moonscape telling the tale of plate tectonics, the formation of continents and mountain ranges.

    Geology comes from the Greek word for “earth” and “speech” or “word.” In other words, geology is earth talk or the story of the earth. The Desert Mothers and Fathers who lived in the deserts of Egypt in the 3rd century of the common era, often spoke of reading the Book of Creation. Creation was their everyday bible, their Divine Word. In some Indigenous cultures, rocks are honoured as grandfathers because they are old and hold stories.

    That’s how I felt encountering Green Point on the west coast for the first time, where the Cambrian Period moves into the Ordovician. One of those places on the Earth where the connection is primal. Being in the presence of, being close to the beginning of everything, the beginning of time. So many ancestors, their stories flung out like a scroll across the ocean shore, telling of other oceans, other species, other continents, other times. A glimpse into the Earth’s many changes, restructurings, sheddings and reformations. The way time builds layers, leaves a seam stitched and a trail. Leaves a story. The layers revealing the first signs of complex life, life forms long extinct and others adapted, evolved. Still others, like ours, geologically and spiritually speaking, just emerging.

    This photograph of my sister among the rocks captures how I felt about that moment at Green Point: Curiosity. Awe. But especially, humility (of the soil; of the earth). A context for all the changes I might live as an individual and the world’s changes in my lifetime and beyond. The realization that our time as humans on this planet is so fleeting, so recent. The land, so powerful. The miracle that is this Earth home. If we just listen to her story.

    * low bush cranberry

    + cloud berry

  • Fall Equinox 2023: Walking the River

     

    Kisiskâciwanisîpiy | North Saskatchewan River
    Kisiskâciwanisîpiy | North Saskatchewan River

    Last weekend I walked part of the Edmonton Camino, a five-day walk through the city’s North Saskatchewan River valley, from Devon (where the trail is still unfinished) to Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. The Cree have a name for this river, Kisiskâciwanisîpiy or Swift Flowing River and the trails that accompany it, Amisko Wacîw Mêskanaw, meaning Beaver Hill Road. Beaver Hill Fort being the original name for Edmonton. At more than 160 kilometres of public trails, Edmonton has the longest continuous river trail system of any city in North America.

    What started in 2018 as an annual event has branched out to include more than one Camino walk through the river valley (often near a change of seasons) and frequent Camino ravine walks.  The Camino Edmonton is done in 15 or 20 kilometre chunks. I did the first day this year.

    What I look forward to on these gatherings is the walking, the being in nature, but also the conversations. Conversations with people I’ve never met or friends I haven’t seen in a while or some people I only meet up with on the Camino. For me, it’s a celebration of the season.

    As pilgrims on this river Camino, we talk about our lives and the wider world. Our relationships, our work, our families, our health. The wildfires this year that have displaced so many, the floods halfway around the world or across the country. And yes, climate change; how each of us is coping or not. The conversation flows naturally as part of the pilgrim experience. None of it is scripted. We speak of things we were grateful for too—the clear smoke-free day before us, the beauty and the sounds as we pass through boreal forest and near the river. The land is talking too, although I’m not sure I am always listening as well as I could.

    Last September, just before that equinox, I had an encounter with a Cree elder in my neighbourhood. I was walking to the farmer’s market and he lay stranded on a City roadworks lot with a bad leg. He introduced himself as Henry Bosineau from Saddle Lake and he needed help. He told me he had slept on a bench in the nearby school yard that night and someone had stolen his cane. He had had to improvise. “I had to break a branch off a tree!” He held it up for me to see, shaking it. “The poor tree!” he said several times. He was truly mortified and furious. I was astonished and moved. He needed a ride to a local shelter. They would have an extra cane for him to use. I called the Crisis Diversion team for him and he was soon on his way.

    I pondered Mr. Bosineau’s feelings for the tree and my own astonishment for a very long time. I know I wouldn’t have hesitated to pluck a dead branch off a tree whether I needed to make a splint or start a fire. Even though in my Western mind I “know” a tree (or a branch) is never truly “dead.” Even when returned to the soil. There are always things living, sheltering and feeding off it, birds, insects and micro organisms. But Mr. Bosineau’s wisdom went deeper than “mind,” to something at the level of spirit. An Indigenous way of knowing. What if I approached a tree as a person, as one of my “relations” as Indigenous people like to say?

    As we celebrate National Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada this weekend, I’m reminded that righting our relationship with Indigenous peoples also requires righting our relationship with the land. I think there is hope in being together walking, together talking; in being together on the journey. If we don’t isolate. Whether it is on the big Camino or the smaller forays in our neigbhourhoods, we can in some small way begin to mend our lost connections: this rupture with the river, with the forest, with each other.

    Through it all–wildfires, floods, droughts–I believe if we listen, we will find our way.

     

  • Summer Solstice 2023: Wild Fire

    In early May when the smoke was so heavy over Edmonton, the air quality at 10 or 10+ for days, I was weighted by the reality. I stayed inside, used the gym, kept my windows closed. Waited for respite. Rains came but so did high temperatures. And then when wildfires gradually spread across the country and then back to Alberta again, I asked myself, Will this be our summers from now on? How will we live?

    The second time the wildfire smoke returned to Alberta, I put on a mask and went out walking anyways and what I saw were crows congregating on people’s roofs, croaking and visiting much like I’ve seen ravens up north in summer, more social than ever. In the river valley the wild roses were blooming. The poplars had fully leafed out. A young hare wandered the underbrush. Squirrels chattered, squeaked impatient, making hay with all the fresh spruce buds. I found chickadees dive bombing from tree to tree. Yellow warblers still singing, everywhere their quiet sweet sweet sweet shwheet. The white-throated sparrow cutting through all of it with its long clear echos. The forest was alive in spite of the smoke. And for the first time in weeks, I felt joy.

    That evening as I was walked out from the valley I met an Indigenous man at the top of the path. He greeted me in his own particular way. He had his possessions with him in a shopping cart, but he was holding a large black and white picture book close to his chest like a treasure. As I passed by, he opened the book wide and held up both pages as if he were practiced at reading to children. There were grotesque figures on the pages, gothic alchemists and clowns, perhaps something from Dante’s Inferno. Madness. The man kept trying to speak but the sounds wouldn’t form. These pictures were the only words he had, and I accepted them. He smiled; I smiled and nodded in recognition.

    It was as if he were holding up a mirror to me. The madness of our times. Mad in its priorities. The world we are living in right now, grotesque. Our distorted relationship with reality hanging in the air around us. Part of me wanted to look away. But this is what occurred to me. The certainty is change. I could react with fear or I could respond with curiosity. Like other living things, I could try to adapt. I thanked him. I wonder if this is how we begin the change?

  • Spring Equinox 2023: The Pull

    I was out walking on Saturday on the way to the grocery store, lost in thought, when I came alongside a young man (who from the looks of it was homeless), stopped for a smoke. He was excited, watching something above him. “Look at this!”

    I heard it first, in the poplars. The magpies talking (as they often do among themselves). And then I saw a pair of them flying back and forth, carrying branches in their beaks. Building a nest. Together.

    “I’ve never seen that before,” he said.

    I have seen that before, but there is something about the first time that stays with you. His first time reminding me of my first time, reminding me how every spring is a first time. And I thanked him. “Spring is here!”

    On this eve of Spring Equinox, it is hard not to think of those like this young man who find themselves roughing it on the streets. It is hard not to think of the families of the two police officers who were killed in Edmonton last week or the parents of the 16-year-old who shot them. It is hard not to wonder at the obstacles we have created as a society to that nest building among our own. The obstacles to education, mental health care, health care, and housing. The conditions needed for a human being to thrive. The tragedy.

    These past few months, I’ve had the privilege of being on campus at MacEwan University not as a student or an instructor, but as a guest and a companion on the journey. As writer in residence. To mingle shoulder to shoulder, walk hallways, talk over tabletops and laptops with dreamers, visionaries, and creatives across disciplines. To have a glimpse into their future.

    Mornings when I step out into the packed hallways, I often find myself pushed and pulled along in the tumult. Students streaming to and from classes, like fish swimming upstream to their spawning grounds in spring? What energy! Or birds migrating back north to their breeding grounds? I wonder for humans if this is our core impulse: this pull towards learning? Towards knowing?

    Alongside this energy, there is tension too. Staff and students told me how the initial euphoria of being back to in-person learning has waned. The pressure cooker of the academic year, returned. The reality of budget cuts tightened scarce resources even further: departments (and professors) having to do more with less. Students working and going to school, carrying more debt. The world and its problems (especially climate change) weighing particularly heavily on this generation.

    Yet in our conversations, I have found young people and the not-so-young are still imagining, still creating, still daring to risk, to literally bank on a better world. Against all odds, to swim towards that difference.

    Spring is here. And with it, hope.

  • Winter Solstice 2022: Imagine

    Winter Solstice 2022: Imagine

    Lately I feel a little like I’ve been walking through the streets of Charles Dickens’s London, with waifs on every corner and debtor prisons in the form of credit cards and food banks, or perhaps the byways and highways of John M Synge’s Ireland in the late 1800s and his accounts of tenant farmers turned out of their small huts to survive in the ditches when they couldn’t pay the rent. Or even better, walking through Maria Campbell’s account of growing up Metis on the prairies, as one of the Road Allowance People because these were the only places available to them to scrape together a living. Different times, different places, all of them people disenfranchised. Without the rights or privileges of a free person. Without place.

    But no, I go about my business—bank, bakery, grocery store—in Edmonton, Alberta. A dynamic, modern and civilized city by most accounts, part of a prosperous province and country. At three o’clock in the afternoon, I pass the single men’s emergency shelter off 97th Street, people already lining up for a bed for the night. I pass the young women trying to sell themselves for a meal or a place to crash. I stroll past the dozens of makeshift tents that line every available strip of public land between private fences and public sidewalks off 95 and 96 streets. I live in a building in Boyle Street, a mature neighbourhood just east of downtown Edmonton, the other side of the tracks from the same encampments. Some days people seek shelter between our front doors. Sometimes they are just trying to warm up. Sometimes they are reorganizing their meagre possessions or putting on some clean clothes. Sometimes they are doing drugs. Break-ins are not uncommon on our property.

    What to do? It’s a dilemma for all who live here. Call 211 for help? Ask them to leave? Call the police? Pass them a sandwich? Pretend we don’t see them? My response is never the same and never enough. Sometimes they don’t take help. More often than not there’s no help to be had.

    The number of people without a home in Edmonton has doubled (at 3000) since the start of the pandemic. More than fifty percent are Indigenous. The city only has 620 emergency shelter beds and just over 400 supportive housing units (most occupied) for those with addiction and mental health issues. This for a city of one million. Where are they going to go? It’s a debate within the neighbourhoods too, one that has been playing out in City Council meetings.

    Perhaps it is fitting that on the longest night of the year, we ask hard questions of ourselves; I have no answers except for stories.

    A friend reminded me recently that poverty is structural. Social problems are compounded when populations and services are disproportionately concentrated.

    Poverty too is a form of violence, a Chilean friend once patiently explained to me. As with any experience of violence, people respond as best they’re able. In Edmonton in 2022, that sometimes plays out in addiction, crime and anti-social behaviour.

    Maybe we need a new way of seeing. A good friend and priest, René Fumoleau, who worked with the Dene in northern Canada most of his life, told the story of a time when he asked a local artist to draw a scene for Midnight Mass. He wanted a picture of the holy family arriving in Bethlehem, only it would be a Dene village and they would have a tent and a dog team. The artist kept putting him off. Yes, he would do it. Yes, he was thinking on it. But as weeks, then months went by and still no drawing, René finally cornered him. That’s when the artist told him, he just couldn’t imagine Mary, Jesus, and Joseph left to fend for themselves. Why, if they had arrived at any Dene community, any one of them would have made room. They would have been welcomed.

  • Fall Equinox 2022: Harvest Moon

    Saturday, September 10th, just after 3 o’clock I got a call from my tailor, Kim. I’d left a couple of things for hemming. She was closing early. “We have a celebration tonight,” she told me. There had been some Chinatown festivities at the Farmer’s Market that day, with dragons and lions dancing in the streets, games of chance, a long table feast, music and vendors. Everyone was welcome to the long table. I noticed houseless and residents, settlers and Indigenous lining up for lunch, but I had been in a hurry. Now I hurried to search the Internet: the Moon Festival or the mid-Autumn Harvest Festival is celebrated across Asia. It’s a time when extended families gather to share food, hang lanterns, watch the moon and give thanks.

    Could I come and get my clothes now? I couldn’t get to her shop fast enough, so we agreed to rendezvous at her home (not far from mine) about five o’clock.  At the appointed time, I hopped on my bike, braved football stadium traffic (Calgary vs. Edmonton), skirted the road closures/barricades and arrived just after the hour, the house full of company. Kim was in the kitchen cooking. A daughter and then a granddaughter handed me my articles through the front screen door. This gathering, I thought, was its own passing on, generation to generation, the traditions that bind us; however we call them, to the land. I was grateful to glimpse this family’s celebration, even if just from the doorstep.

    That night, when I woke in the middle of the night and peered out the window, I found the full moon shining through the trees, joined by Jupiter and Neptune. The whole sky was lit up. I lingered in the glow.

    Ten days before I had experienced a harvest moon of my own, a re-aligning of the planets. A few months ago, I made a decision to leave my day job at the end of August to dedicate myself to writing full-time. I had been planning it for a long time. Leading up to the day, colleagues would ask what it felt like.

    Like falling off a cliff and not knowing what was on the other side.  

    Or jumping out of an airplane. I had a parachute, I’d done the training, but would I land okay?

    A kind of death, I told someone else. It is an ending, she agreed. But also a new beginning.

    Well, now I’ve landed and it’s as if I’m experiencing each day from a new angle as I find my way into new routines and new habits. Working full time and writing part-time, there was so much that I needed to cram into each minute. I was good at it: eating and working. Getting to work and getting exercise. Reading and commuting. A double, even a triple life, endemic in our culture, rich at times, but also exhausting.

    It is a blessing to be able to slow down, to do one thing at a time. Walking for the sake of walking. Rising later, more with my natural rhythms. Making lunch when I’m hungry. Doing the laundry any day of the week. Sundays were for so many years my writing shift, now I have whole weekends to enjoy like other people do! And regular work days to focus on my passion.

    Some days I wake with trepidation. Can I meet my many goals? Will I be as productive as I think? Most mornings on rising, I’m reminded of other times in my life when I’ve set out on a new adventures: moves, travels, studies. I feel exhilarated, reinvigorated and alive. The mundane still enters in: the pin valve that broke on my hot water heater last weekend, the neighour’s shower that (somewhat) overflowed into my suite last week. Life still happens. But there’s a simplicity that comes with being able to focus one’s life—a clarity in connection. Like looking at that full harvest moon in the night sky: pure joy, surrounded by all the world.

  • Summer Solstice 2022: Bridging Time, Place and Being

    Merriam Webster has two definitions for the word bridge. Bridge as structure and bridge as a time, place or way to connect or transition. Not here or there. Not now or then. In between. A co-worker told me she walks the High Level Bridge home every Friday from the office. It’s her way of marking the end of the week. A bridge is a liminal space.

    We have a new bridge over the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton. The bridge joins Cloverdale and Boyle Street neighbourhoods. It’s called Tawatina, a Cree word for “valley.” It’s a double bridge: the top deck is for the new LRT Valley Line and the bottom is for bicycle and pedestrian traffic. On the bottom, if you look up, the ceiling is filled with a collage of more than 500 images. I walked it this past weekend.

    As you walk, you move through the epochs (a mastodon stands under one end of the bridge), the stages of settlement to present day, and all the seasons. You walk under shapes within shapes. A winter river within a winter bear. Beaded flowers overlaying riverscapes, portraits of Métis ancestors. Bees against a blue sky. Stars within flowers. Clouds within clouds. Geometrics within arrowheads, within coyotes, within raindrops. Moose, bison, beaver, northern pike: the North Saskatchewan running through bodies divided first by river lots, then surveyed by sections, then each a checkerboard of neat agricultural settlement. A beaver holding spring water, lodge and forest within; a beaver wearing Hudson Bay stripes. Fish streaming: Sturgeon, northern pike, sturgeon, goldeye, walleye, sucker. Bees, dragonflies. Crows in flight; sandhill cranes ascending. Eagles. Holding landscapes. Swallows filled with fire. Canoes, York boats. A hearth, with a fiddle and dancing. The eyeball of every kind of animal from this place, two- legged and four-legged. All of it on the move: walking, falling, running, flying, dancing.

    And things I can’t describe. It’s an experience: to stand under; to under-stand. Another way of being.

    I heard David Garneau, the lead artist, interviewed. The Garneaus were a prominent founding family of the City and Métis from the Red River Settlement. A neighbourhood is named after them and a Manitoba Maple still grows on the University of Alberta campus at the site of their original homestead. David Garneau is a direct descendant. For this bridge project, he worked with local elders and knowledge keepers who told him what images to draw; he wasn’t always given the meaning of the stories behind them.

    In a way, I think it’s better that way. Some will know the origin stories, some will bring their own stories to the work. But overall, as I overhead someone else say on the bridge, Sunday: “Everything here is connected to the land.” And that’s all we really need to know.

    This bridge is not only a structure, but a place to connect across time and everything living in this place, to heal from our shared history and to move forward together into a new vision. To move forward, on this National Indigenous Peoples Day, in a good way.

  • Spring Equinox 2022: Infectious and Muddy

    I have been thinking for weeks, How to speak of spring in the face of war, of death? How to speak of spring in the face of another migration, a mass migration of almost three million Ukrainians and counting. Where the birds themselves are likely changing course?

    I live in a neighbourhood in Edmonton that is ground zero for opioid deaths. Tragedy is everyday in my community. Coming home one day from work on a recent warm day, on a street I often walk, a small girl waved at me from a main floor window, delighted, smiling, her smile growing when I returned the wave. Such power in a smile! I glanced ahead, two doors down, roughed out behind the glass of a transition house, in folded sticky notes, were a heart and a smiley face. I smiled again and looked across the street. There, on the second floor of a large condominium complex, a resident had used green painters tape to etch out the Facebook symbol for heart <3 and a smiley face with a wink.

    Spring is like that. It just is. Joyous. Infectious. Unstoppable. Subversive. Muddy.

    And so is the best art. A subversive act. Spontaneous. It cannot be controlled. And why the people in Kyiv are singing in the subway stations as they shelter from Russian bombing. Why some of the company of the historic opera in Odessa sang as ordinary citizens filled sandbags to shore up the defences in that city, with shelling going on in the distance. Why Ukrainians are keeping vigil in prayer and worship. Why a pair of Russian activists got married anyway on Invasion Day, him with a bomb of his own against the war, in red all-caps on the back of his white shirt.

    Sing we must. Speak we must. Love we must.

    I chuckled when I read that the Russian tanks got stuck in the mud. Nobody considered the earth. No one counted on the rain. Or the season. The Ukraine is fifth largest producer of wheat in the world, much of it exported to vulnerable countries. No one in Russian command calculated the fierce resistance of the people.

    This is not the first war in spring. Nor the only war in progress. Nor the first mass migration. Almost seven million Syrians were displaced by the civil war just a handful of years ago; almost two million made their way towards Europe, and many are still displaced. There are many struggles for human rights, people reckoning with violence in the world and on our own land today.

    This spring I was part of a mass choir for the SkirtsAFire festival, an all women arts festival in Edmonton. For the first time, we sang a piece by an Indigenous composer, Sherryl Sewepagaham, called The Journey, in Woodland Cree. Ipimoheteyêan meskanaw kawên’timeyan, which she translates “I am walking on the road that I will follow.” As Sheryl explained it, the road is the wisdom, traditions, teachings, stories and rituals of the ancestors.

    What is the journey we walk on this land? What is the road we’ve been given? Do we remember it? Are we in right relationship with this land and with each other? May this outrage we feel for the people of Ukraine spur us to compassion and solidarity for all suffering injustice and violence in our world, near and far.

  • Winter Solstice 2021: A Pot of Green Lentils

    As I set out to write this midwinter reflection, I cook a pot of lentils. (This is our earth.) Cooking my way to clarity. Or as Montreal writing friend Kate Henderson said in her Christmas card to me the other day, “writing” these days “takes the form of thinking.” Thinking. Cooking. Reading. Listening. I’ve been eavesdropping on many conversations: Indigenous-Ukrainian Relationship Building Initiative on the Canadian movement for Truth and Reconciliation (no I am not Ukrainian, but it doesn’t matter). Jonathan Franzen and Greg Jackson on climate action. Margaret MacMillan and Roy Jacobsen looking back on the paradoxes of war, the aftermath: both the benefits (the way positive societal change is accelerated) and the destruction (how people and species are destroyed and displaced).

    And so in this season of peace, their questions mix and mull in my mind: What happens when we share our stories of this land, human being to human being? What healing, what joy, and what partnerships are born? What if we approach the climate fight like a war, investing all of our resources in it, all of our labour, accelerating innovation, and recovering a common purpose as we do so? What if the climate war is already lost and the way forward instead is to build stronger, more resilient communities, finding hope through smaller victories? Tackling the battles we know we can win now: stopping the overfishing of the world’s oceans; eliminating plastic waste; preventing the desertification of arable lands; halting the destruction of boreal forests; rainforests and peat bogs; welcoming the displaced of our own and other species (offering sanctuary to the migrant, conserving and rebuilding habitat); supporting our local farmers market; starting a community garden?

    I wrote in my journal the other day: “Dreams are trying to force their way to the surface of my mind.”

    I wonder if this pandemic, as it drags on, is a preparation (Rest, Renewal, Dream) for this much greater struggle already upon us?

    My pot of Green Lentil Soup with Curried Brown Butter is done.  I serve myself a bowl and give thanks. This is our earth. In a year of drought, fires, and flooding: water from the North Saskatchewan River, du Puy lentils from southern Saskatchewan, salted butter from the interior of British Columbia; yellow onion, chili peppers and Russian garlic from Edmonton farms. Aroy-D Coconut milk from Thailand (my haircutter says it’s the best). Indian curry powder from who knows where. Hands passing to hands passing to hands, from picking, to packaging, to shelves: my vision of “supply chain management.” My vision of the networks, human and otherwise that have been laid bare by this pandemic, urging us to reach out and take hold as we welcome a new year.  

  • Autumn Equinox 2021: Living Tween

    I have a friend who is living with a chronic and progressive illness. It is difficult to communicate at times, especially since the pandemic. The illness impairs speech and movement. The last time I phoned, I asked how he was doing. For a moment his words were surprisingly lucid: “It’s like I’m here, but I’m not really here, if you know what I mean.” Then he laughed.

    Many years ago, when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I visited an exhibition of Chagall’s work. It seemed as I walked into the hall that there were paintings everywhere: sitting on easels, suspended from ceilings and fixed to walls. A room full of canvases with beings in motion: flying, floating, hovering. Winged beings. The colours singing. The air shimmering with presence. Giving not just the impression but the reality of transcendence.

    What does it mean to be here? And not here? “Be-tween”—to live in two states at the same time, to span two points in time or space. To live double. Two fold. Midway. Suspended.

    We live in in-between times. In between being vaccinated and not being vaccinated. In between a world before the pandemic and a world after the pandemic. In between climate crisis and climate catastrophe. In between democracy and tyranny. In between human rights and human traffickers. We are a world in motion.

    It is not easy to hold presence here and not here at the same time. But many, like my friend, have been living “the between” and all that comes with it for years, perhaps their whole lives: feeling a part of society yet isolated; aspiring to human agency yet fundamentally trapped; connected within yet separated without; housed yet in many ways homeless; a citizen yet finding oneself, in small and large ways, nationless. Perhaps like Chagall, who lived his life as a Jew/not-Jew, exiled, displaced, and citizen of the world, always returning to dance that in-between dream space of the artist. And like my friend who all his life has written visions into text, now continues that work of imagination in his body, with self-deprecating humour and grace.

    Change is the challenge; yet between life and death lies the transformation.

  • Summer Solstice 2021: Waking Up

    The 14th century German mystic Meister Eckhart said that spirituality is waking up.

    On the brink of this Summer Solstice and National Indigenous Peoples Day, the longest day, this day of light, I want to acknowledge the sorrow of the families of the 215 children whose graves were found in Kelowna in May, and the generations of Indigenous families whose relatives were forced to go to residential school and never came home emotionally, spiritually or bodily.

    In 2006 when I worked with Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission (AADAC), I travelled with an Indigenous colleague to visit some of our community partners in northern Alberta. I remember driving by the site of one of the residential schools and my co-worker telling me that during the demolition of the building, they had found the skeletons of infants. That was when I first knew there were skeletons in those schools.

    When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) came to Edmonton in March 2014, I wasn’t sure at first if it was open to everyone, but I had a Cree friend who said, Yes, of course it was; she was going and I could go with her if I wanted. We spent the days sitting in packed rooms with the lights turned low. Those who spoke were seated in the centre circle, held by the wider circle, taking turns at the microphone. Always opening with prayer and smudging, then the stories, and the tears. We all cried. At the end of each session attendants gathered our used tissues at the doors in big paper bags to be burned outside in the sacred fire that was lit through the whole weekend. There were many revelations for me, but the biggest came at the end of the last day, with my friend’s family as we ate supper. I said how powerful the gathering had been for me, how glad I was that I had come, probably feeling a little pleased with myself too. One of the people at the table, agreed. It had been powerful. But in a quiet voice, she said she wished that there had been more non-Indigenous people there too. I looked around the room and felt ashamed. Reconciliation between parties can only happen if both sides are present and the truth is heard. That is when I realized that what Indigenous people want most from non-Indigenous people is to be listened to.

    In the past couple of years one of my writing projects has brought me into contact with more Indigenous writers, artists and community activists. In many ways the project has become secondary during this process, set aside. The most important thing to Indigenous people I am learning is the relationship: how to go forward “in a good way.” That and the need to listen also to the joy, the humour and the gifts Indigenous people hold for all of us. Or as one Cree artist challenged me to consider, “What about some cultural appreciation?”

    And so in these pandemic times I have been trying to seek out and follow Indigenous voices on social media, taking in Indigenous-non-Indigenous public dialogues, watching Indigenous documentaries and cooking shows! meeting regularly with a new Indigenous friend and collaborator on Zoom, reading and rereading Indigenous history and literature (some old, with new eyes; some new, from contemporary voices). I am still waking up, still learning.

    I see there are virtual celebrations over the next week in Treaty 6 territory. How will we celebrate National Indigenous Peoples Day?

     

  • Spring Equinox 2021: A doodle on the balance point

    This week my yoga teacher said, Think about your relationship with time… and what occurred to me in these COVID times is to wonder at our relationship with place, how relationships need to meet in real place as much as real time, something the online meeting has yet to master, because as humans everything we come to in this world is through the body: speaking, eating, seeing, hearing, breathing, moving, believing, knowing, but especially touching. This is presence. And how there’s a vague sense of displacement in all my relations right now, a sense of imbalance as we approach the balancing promise of Spring Equinox. And how excited, how heady, how giddy I become at the prospect and the reality of meeting someone, anyone in the flesh.

    Time keeps moving through space: water, wind, fire. It’s what defines life. Perhaps what it means to be human.  No matter if our land masses were separated by oceans millions of years ago, separated and reconstituted how many times? Birds, mammals, fish, humans: we keep migrating, we adapt. The earth recreates herself, hemisphere by hemisphere, season by season but especially in spring. Chooses to sprout, to root, to give birth to another round of life.

    There was a heart meditation I used to do with groups, “heart” for compassion, Buddhist in inspiration. Sometimes I would do it accompanied by a video from the National Film Board of Canada called Cosmic Zoom: Hold this moment in your heart: this body, breathing, alive, moving. In your mind begin to widen the circle of view, imagine yourself like a bird lifting from the ground, your home/your neighbourhood receding below, broadening wider and wider, the whole city/the whole countryside floating into view. See it in all its fullness: pain and expectation. Soon whole provinces, then countries, borders dissolving, rivers running into oceans. Holding more and more of it in your body. Continents slipping, becoming one green-blue-smoky whole, the lights of cities, the hum of rainforests. We move through time and back into space, Earth, one of a multiplicity of planets whirling, taking flight as we pass; moons in orbit; solar systems; stars and comets streaming by us. The galaxies we know and the galaxies we don’t know. Black holes and worm holes. The universe within us and around us, darkness and light.

    Until we stop to hold all of it, all of the displacement that precedes new growth: forests on fire in the Amazon, shrinking glaciers, and breaking icebergs. Oil patch labourers caught in the eye of climate change. Black Lives Matter protests, the small farmers protesting Big Agriculture in India, the democracy activists in Hong Kong, in Burma, the abandoned prisoners of war in the deserts of Syria, the memorials for missing and murdered Indigenous women, black women, women of colour and all women who die by violence. Seniors stuck inside long term care longing for connection, the frontline workers exhausted and the hospitality workers waiting for the end of COVID. People lining up for vaccinations. Tulips and perennials pushing up from the soil in our own backyards. Migratory birds getting ready to sluff off their southern wintering grounds and the child refugees of Central America massing on the southern US border. We hold all of it in this body. This heart. And then we let it all go. As so many struggles surge forward to come into the light.

     

  • Winter Solstice 2020: A Deepening

    Growing up I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of going to bed at night. I was afraid of going down into the corners of the basement in the middle of the day, where I would often get sent to fetch things. Mostly I was afraid of the unknown. What I might find there.

    I have come and left, come and left in my Edmonton neighbourhood three times in the past 30 odd years. The first two stays were short: a summer break spent in a heritage home near 97th Street, a year and a half near 95th Street in an Italian bungalow built like a bunker, and more recently 8 plus years off 92 Street, east of the LRT tracks.

    When I first started living here those many years ago, I had an imaginary security system in my head. Day or evening, it didn’t matter, I had an elaborate map of homes of friends and acquaintances on each block, and I would time evening walks and trips to the grocery store to coincide with some of these locations. If something should happen to me down this block, I reasoned, I could knock on this or that person’s door and someone would let me in. I never had to use it in all the years I’ve lived here.

    Something changed in the decades of my coming and going in the neighbourhood. This section of town still has a high transient population and a high crime rate, but somewhere within, something changed in me. I kept being drawn back by the differentness, by the diversity. The Other no longer seems other or perhaps I recognize the other in me too. When I go for walks in the neighbourhood now, I don’t scout out the safe doors. I go without expectation of any kind. This doesn’t mean I live without fear. But I’m getting better at accepting my fears, at accepting the risks of living. This is a metaphor for how I feel in the world now, venturing further and further each day, and feeling at home in it. I imagine someday I will feel so at home, it will be time to go.

    Loss comes to us sharply at this time of year and this time in human history. This pandemic has demanded a deepening, a going inside the self, with nowhere to hide, no defenses, or distractions but unadulterated reality. This is the reckoning. What is important? What feeds my soul? What starves it?

    Night is not without light or colour: Planets. Stars. Galaxies. The moon in all her phases. For those of us in the higher latitudes, the northern lights.  What if darkness and light are not necessarily opposites, but mirrors of each other, real by contrast, fundamentally connected?

    Some limits we grow through. Some are temporary and we learn to weather them. Some spur creativity and innovation. Then there are losses which are irretrievable. The loss of a child, a loved one. A people. A language. Species loss.

    Perhaps this season is most about Mystery. The reality of death and the continuance of life and the dance between them. Because there is space, story can enter in. Memories of people and place. Imaginings of what could be.

     

     

  • Fall Equinox 2020: The Birds Are Sentinels

    Where I usually walk: along the North Saskatchewan River with smoke from the West Coast wildfires (Sept 17, 2020).

    The last couple of days walking by the river, I’ve run across a flock of robins, country robins, judging from the way they spook on seeing me. Maybe they’ll be there tomorrow; maybe they’ll be gone. It’s one of their migration strategies, to stop and refuel every so often. Most migrating birds fly at night. Birds have a compass of sorts in their eyes. They take bearings from the stars, the moon, the setting sun and the land itself. They can actually see the Earth’s magnetic field. They often fly north and fly south on different flyways, routes that arc to follow food sources. These robins may fly to the mid-States, or the Gulf coast, or as far as southwestern Mexico before they’re done.

    Equinox anywhere in the world, is migration. Compelled by a mysterious memory, an ancient faded connection to a lost half of planet home. Most bird species will go in waves, first males, then adult females, and then the young, who somehow find their way to the same location as their parents without ever having seen it before. Scientists call it, “site fidelity.” There are always obstacles: skyscrapers, storms, fires. There is always death, but this year is different.

    Birds are a sentinel species. Harbingers. Sensitives some might say. The literal canaries in the coal mine.

    As the smoke wafted north to my home province of Alberta this past week and human tragedy unfolded along with the west coast wildfires,  the birds may be telling of an even greater tragedy on the horizon: catastrophic climate change. This year, migrating birds are dying in “unprecedented” numbers, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Reports started coming out in the middle of August from Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, and four northern states of Mexico. Small birds, songbirds: western bluebirds, swallows, flycatchers, warblers, sparrows. Starving some said, no fat reserves left. Acting odd, dying in the open. Dozy. Disoriented. Falling out of the skies; many of their faces dented as if they had flown right into the ground. No one knows for sure the cause yet or if there is any one cause (drought, freak snowstorms in New Mexico, wildfires all down the west coast, habitat loss, delicate lungs) but so far most of it points to one common root: climate change.

    Scientists say some birds have already started to adapt to climate change, shifting their nesting grounds further north and beginning to migrate earlier than 30 years ago. There’s also fewer of them: some scientists say we’ve lost three billion birds since the 1970s. There’s a place for fire in the ecosystem: habitat that’s recovering from a burn is at its peak for diversity, flora and fauna. Burned habitat can lead to a greater diversity in the very “language” (the calls, the songs) of some bird species. But can this diversity be sustained through successive, back-to-back fire events? Scientists think some birds are inextricably tied to a particular place. Once it’s gone, can they ever return?

    Birds are harbingers. Humans and birds are among the few species that can make song.

    When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962 about the environmental fallout of DDT and other pesticides, it was the stories of dead birds and the thought of a planet without bird song that compelled her. After Carson’s book and the legislative and regulatory changes that were made, many bird populations did start to recover. And humans were better off for it.

    Birds are sensitives. During this time of COVID, when I’ve had to slow down, travel closer, consume less and contemplate more, it’s harder to avoid the questions: What would the world be without a place to nest? To hunker down? To call home? And what would Equinox be without migrating birds?

  • Summer Solstice 2020: The Fullness

    COVID-19. One word with so many contradictions: death, innovation, anger, selflessness, anxiety, adaptation, depression, creativity. The fullness of life! To date, at least 8,457,305 infections; 453,882 deaths. We hear the counts every night like reports from a war zone. We know it is not gone. The financial fall-out we haven’t begun to comprehend. The isolation affects all of us differently. For me the last few months have been like living in slower motion.

    Focus sharpens in times of illness. We come face to face with mortality. We have time to think. We see and hear in ways we haven’t before. This slowed down time, this slower motion has revealed itself to me like a kaleidoscope, the changes going on around us and within us. We see the turn of the seasons close up. A birds-eye view, this time of concentrated inward reflection in the world. This time of intentional watching has revealed the contrasts and contradictions: Black and Indigenous lives matter! People can work at home and be productive. Children and parents have more time to bond. Those already isolated find they have more ways of accessing the world online. We can cut greenhouse gas emissions, just like that.

    We have to be still. We have to listen. We have to be.

    I offer three strategies for COVID, think of them as spiritual practices. From my own experience: Walk. Walk more. Give thanks.

    Walk or whatever movement you can manage. I had a sprained ankle for the past six weeks, so sometimes that movement has been guarded, sometimes limited to watching the movement of light, wind, and life outside my window.

    In the river valley, I’ve found my way around paths I was afraid to follow before. The Dawson-Kinnaird parks are riddled with animal and human trails in hidey-hole places. I’ve taken them, daily, sometimes twice daily, and learned their routes as I’ve followed my feet. When there was still snow on the ground and long before the leaves, I followed the trails, winter into spring, spring into summer, knowing them one layer at a time, when I knew I couldn’t get lost. And now I can’t. (For the full unfurling I’ve witnessed this spring, visit my twitter feed @audreyjwhitson)

    Walk more. Make a pilgrimage where you live, another practice I’ve taken up. A pilgrimage in honour of Saint Brighid suggested by a friend of mine in the neighbourhood with Irish heritage, Kate Quinn. I set out on this walk at least once a week early in the morning. During COVID, the streets are quiet. I see the occasional fellow drinking coffee on their deck, smoking a cigarette, searching for bottles in the dumpster or walking like me. Everyone is friendly. I don’t remember a time when I felt so comfortable talking to “the stranger.” We know we’re all in this “unprecedented” time together. I stop at the homes of neighbours I know and pray a blessing over the hedge, “May the cloak of Brighid flow over this house.” Occasionally they see me or I see them through the window, but that is not the point. The point is to be present in the void. The point is to ground myself in my world and to come home feeling more connected than when I left.

    Give thanks. The final strategy for COVID is something I’ve learned from another friend in the neighbourhood and have adopted as my own. I’ve kept gratitude journals over the years and prayed lists too. But this is simpler and means more to me. At the end of every day I write down one thing that has made the day extraordinary: some encounter, some event, some exchange. For me that might mean crossing paths with wildlife; experiencing a piece of art in word, image, or sound; a rich conversation with a friend or receiving a comment from a complete stranger. Often something small in the scheme of things.

    Savour the fullness in the nothingness of this time.

  • Spring Equinox 2020: Pregnant with Possibility

    I did not go to Spain this spring. It wasn’t easy to make the decision; I left it till the 11th hour. The Canadian Government (as with most governments) was still giving a Level 1 travel advisory for most of Europe: “Travel and take precautions.” It wasn’t until the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the infections in Spain doubled in a day, and work told me I would have to self-isolate when I returned, that I saw the writing on the wall. Sometimes it’s a battle to see the trends. Sometimes we don’t want to believe what seems an extreme outcome. This spring equinox a microscopic virus has halted all our best laid plans: our RSPs, our jobs, our studies, all our strategies for economic growth, and our travels. All we want is to go back to “normal.”

    There’s another crisis we are facing in the world right now: climate change. Something we’ve known about since the 1970s but have had a harder time coming to terms with. Something there will be no simple vaccine for. Some scientists call our age the Anthropocene for the huge impact humans have had on planet Earth. A friend, referring to COVID 19, said to me, “Maybe this is how it happens, the death of the carbon economy. With the drop in oil prices and the rise of the tech sector, the rise of the new economy.” Though not without cost.

    It’s worth remembering the roots of the word “economy” come from the Greek meaning home or household and meaning to manage. What does it mean to manage our household and our home, the Earth? Maybe this is the meteor of our epoch. Maybe we have an opportunity in this moment of solitude, of renewed family ties and friendships, cyber work and learning environs, to birth something radically new.

    In Alberta, where I live, spring is like a battle every year: a see-saw between temperature and precipitation. One day it snows, the next it melts. Back and forth, a tug-a-war; the coming of spring can take months. It’s a limbo time, a liminal, in-between time, pregnant with possibility. Change may have many false starts and then seemingly, miraculously, come like an avalanche all at once. Every spring in many ways, a whole new world.

    The day after my decision to postpone my trip, a friend said to me, “Barcelona will still be there next year.” It will and so will we, together.  Another friend forwarded me a note she’d had from a friend of a friend (the wondrous side of social media) quarantined in Barcelona. The contact described the sound, around 8 o’clock in the evening, coming from the street on the first day of the lockdown. Something loud and popping, something exploding and boistrous like the sound of firecrackers. But it wasn’t firecrackers. It was the sound of citizens, everyone out on their balconies, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands; everyone clapping for many minutes. Clapping, the neighbours said, for frontline healthcare workers as they battle COVID 19.

    We need to stand together. We need to applaud the heroes on the frontlines of COVID 19 and on the frontlines of the climate crisis. We will survive and we can birth something new, together.

  • Winter Solstice 2019: Death and Life

    Mnajdra Temple and the front door where morning light enters each solstice and equinox.

    There are always thresholds to cross. And there are always choices to make. Every season opens a door. I don’t think it’s a contradiction that people mark midwinter as a major anniversary of loss as well as a time of gratitude. Winter solstice holds both death and life for us.

    When I was in Malta this past spring, I would rise every morning. Walk the two blocks to the public transit station in Buggiba (pronounced BOO-jee-ba), get on one of the many public buses and ride with the Maltese on their way to work into Valetta or across or around the island, along with other tourists speaking French, German, Italian and English. Sometimes I was the only tourist on the bus. Sometimes the bus drivers knew where I was going; sometimes they didn’t. That’s when they would reach out to their seasoned Maltese passengers “Do you know where x is?” or even assign them to me: “Here I entrust this lady to your care.” I would show them my map, mispronounce the site I was looking for. Without fail the locals would get me to my destination.

    I would visit at least one archeological site a day. Some of the sites were more remote, less noteworthy, nothing more than a reconstituted pile of weathered stones. I preferred these lonely sites and could linger for hours among the rocks and the wildflowers, only me and the friendly security guard watching from a nearby trailer. Who were these people who built these monuments to the universe? Malta has some of the oldest surviving temples and necropoli in Europe, some of them aligned to the solstices and the equinoxes. The earliest temple, Skorba, dates to 3600 BCE, older than pyramids, older than Stonehenge, older than Newgrange.

    It’s not magic that attracts me to these sites, but it is their makers’ presence. Like any places in the world where many people have prayed, wept, and sung over the centuries, the earth has a memory. The ancients didn’t conjure the solstices and equinoxes, but they observed and honoured the patterns: the path of the sun in relation to the passage of animals (four-legged and two-legged), the rise and fall of temperature and moisture with the planting and growth of crops, the death and rebirth of souls. These were their compass bearings in time.

    In 2019 as the seasons shift and bleed into each other, as glaciers melt and birds drift into new habitat, as fish forget to migrate, there is something urgent in remembering not a perfect time, not a better time, necessarily, but a time of deep human awareness of our interdependence with the Earth.

    In the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum (3300 BCE), an underground necropolis where some walls still bear the marks of red ochre, the signature of Neolithic burials; no one is allowed to take photographs. In this vast multi-hived chamber, filled with the sound of trickling water, hewed out of live stone, with nothing but antlers, chert, flint and obsidian. The winter solstice sunrise enters through a window in the roof and illuminates another open door cut into the face of an inner temple, a door within a door, within a door. It is this inner temple I look for on my travels and on my journey. It is this inner door that beckons us outward.