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.
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.
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 Rowlandclaimed 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As I harvest my year this autumn, the experience that stands out for me most is my visit to the Valle dei Templi at Agrigento in Sicily in the spring.
Agrigento is an ancient pilgrimage site, at more than 2000 acres (3+ sections of land) probably the largest outside of Athens in Greek antiquity. A dozen temples run in a wide swath from east to west over a ridge that looks out over the Mediterranean sea on one side and the modern city on the other. The area was colonized by Greeks in the late 6th century BCE and many of the temples were built then, but many were built later and there is evidence that the rites of Demeter and Persephone were celebrated in the westernmost section as early as the 7th century BCE. Indeed the myth of the Mother and Daughter, of birth, nurture and separation is woven into the Sicilian landscape and coincides with the arrival of wheat in the region. In Sicily and much of the Mediterranean world, planting (death and germination of seeds) happens in the autumn, in time for the winter rains, while harvest happens in the spring. The rites of Demeter and Persephone also took place in spring (Lesser Mysteries) and fall (Greater or Eleusian Mysteries).
I spent two days at the Valle dei Templi. The first day I did not reach the western side until late afternoon. The eastern temples were so triumphalist, so impressive, engineered marvels of grand columns and arches, commemorating wars won and the labour of thousands of slaves, that I had to stop and look at everything. I took hundreds of pictures.
And then I crossed a bridge over a road and came out at the Fifth Gate, the area they call The Sanctuary of the Chthonic Deities. Chthonic meaning subterranean, underground, of the Earth. The Chthonic Deities are Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus.
At the Sanctuary, I came upon wild flowers, wild grasses, and only the scattered foundations of temples, small enclosures and the remains of old wells. I wandered and sat, wandered and sat until the middle of the evening, feeling hymns from the ground, feeling a presence, imagining women coming and going through the fifth gate at all hours, passing first by the row of craft workshops outside the gates where terra cotta votives were shaped and then climbing to the Hill of Temples with prayers and questions.
I returned on my second day to wander and wander again through the ruins of the Sanctuary. A wild and lonely place but also a place of joy. Small altars still stand, most with holes in the middle for offerings to the earth, a place for the clay bothros, cylinders, containers of so much longing, thanksgiving. Plant and animal sacrifices. Layers upon layers of prayers, dug into the earth with votives; archeologists have found statuettes of Demeter, Persephone, miniature clay body parts in need of healing, oil lamps everywhere. Evidence of rituals that connected the living world to the underworld and the world of the dead.
Today not much is known of the Eleusinian Mysteries except that initiates experienced a dramatic re-enactment of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. An ancient prophetess, Diotima, whose account of the Mysteries probably lives on in Plato’s Symposium, revealed one of its central teachings: that “the purpose of love is birth in the beautiful, both in body and soul.” From the same source, we know that birth in the beautiful for the initiates came through the experience of being loved and loving another human being. This experience was considered a direct experience of the divine. How that love was shown, we don’t know except that human birth and the Mother-Daughter relationship in all its stages were likely the models for it.
I sometimes think I may have caught strains of this birth in the beautiful in the singing of a Stabat Mater (Standing Mother) or walking in a procession with a Virgin’s bothros (crowned statue) or ascending to an underground sanctuary of a Black Madonna. In life passages, I’ve been shown the truth of this terrible beauty as a child in the near death of my mother. A couple of years ago, I witnessed this beauty in the funeral of a beloved and loving young woman and the grief of her family. I have had the privilege of being close by in the hours of labour before the birth of a niece. And just this year only understood with a dear friend’s passing that I was loved unconditionally. I wonder how much I have learned to return that love, that beauty? How much I have given birth in my life to other human beings? That is the call of the autumn Mysteries. To plant the seeds and to wait for rebirth.
On my route along 92nd street, past the Mother Teresa School, under the elm clad arches of 104th Avenue, along the wild gardens of Boyle Street plaza, the sunken hidden garden by the courthouse, through the piazza fronting city hall. Past the robin’s urgent mating yodel, the see-sawed whistle of the house finch, the white-throated sparrow’s O Canada Canada Canada, the chickadees Summer’s coming summer’s coming, the yellow warblers sweet sweet shredded wheat. Past all these, the calls, the hurry, the frenzy of spring have calmed to a steady hum, a conversation of clicks and clacks, of clucks, murmurs, or a simple chirp. Even the humans have quieted, the traffic thinned in the downtown core. This is the conversation of summer.
Lately I’ve been purposely stopping to listen to the quiet, to feel the warmth of the wind in my hair, to look at the wild roses blooming in the city on my way to work. (Have you noticed how pink the blossoms are when they first come out?) I go into the office buoyed by these small glimpses of joy, more generous-hearted, more at peace with whatever the day might throw me. I try in small ways to keep stopping and feeling. To look up from my computer screen and out my window for twenty seconds at a time. (Because it’s good for your eyes too.) But it’s hard to look at one thing for twenty seconds without wanting to fill the mind with some thought, something I must remember, some sentence I should write down, some phone call I should make. And when I get home, it’s sometimes hard to sit on my lovely new patio and simply look at the green, green courtyard and hear the wind in the poplars without reading or writing or rushing off to my next commitment. It’s sometimes hard to just be in my breath and breathe and breathe until the enough becomes clear. Yet, I’m convinced this is how the well of love is fed and so I keep trying and will keep trying to practice this open-heartedness to beauty that opens up my life.
About a week ago the daughter of an old friend of mine died of cancer. Joanna was 33 years old, smart, passionate, and full of life. A small tumour on her tongue eventually took over her body. From diagnosis to death was less than a year. She was just coming into the summer of her life, but in many ways it seems she was wise beyond her years. After the celebration of her passing on Saturday, I came away with this: the challenge is love. For Joanna that meant a constant curiosity about the world around her and the world inside her. She was always listening.
One endearment of this season, is how it lays bare to view all that is hidden. The sunken garden I pass in the centre of Edmonton that most would never see in summer, shrouded as it is in pine, basswood, and maple, now stands open to the light. The night sky stands just as revealed. The bright stars I’ve been seeing in the dawn sky on my way to work these past weeks are not stars at all but the planets Venus, Mars, and Jupiter.
I find the darkness of this season demands of me a certain stillness and a certain maverick joy. All that is essential is brought into sharp relief, particularly with those close to me. For example, last weekend I spent an afternoon with my 87-year-old mother learning how to make cream puffs from a 1903 recipe. And if you’ve ever made cream puffs, you’ll know what I mean. Throwing half a pound of butter into a pot of boiling water and stirring in the flour on a hot stove, I felt for a moment like we were baking in the Middle Ages over an open fire, part of a long line of mothers and daughters, held together by these simple actions and a desire to feed those we love something sweet.
Friday night, one of my nephews came over to put together a new piece of furniture for me (a small Christmas favour, he said), and we fell to talking about his future, all the choices that a twenty-year-old must make, drawing me back to my own memories of being twenty and forward into a time that doesn’t yet exist for either of us. Those decisions tying us together, generation after generation, asking the same questions: What shall we do? Who shall we be?
There are other mysteries, too, that I ponder. Friends and family who have suffered losses this year: poor health, marriage breakdown, or unemployment. Mysteries that require a tougher faith. Questions that I can only stop and hold like the ancients, who a thousand of years ago wondered if the sun would be reborn. Somehow, but perhaps not in ways that we can always imagine.
I am neither Persian nor Ukranian but I am curious, and I have found that curiosity is one of the best passports you can have for travelling into another culture or, indeed, another world. Years ago a friend gave me three pysanky, Ukranian Easter eggs. The practice is called pysanky or writing because the symbols are a language, one that pre-exists Christianity, and the practice of decorating them called writing. The instrument used is a stylus; the materials: fire, beeswax and vegetable dyes. Pysanky are only made for Easter and in pre-Christian times, for Spring.
Ukranians aren’t the only ones who write eggs at this time of year. People all over Eastern Europe have variations on this tradition. An Ismaili Muslim friend told me last week that her community too will be painting eggs this weekend in honour of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, marked at the Spring Equinox. Some say that the two traditions have a common origin in the Zoroastrian sun cult 2500 years ago. But like the pysanky itself, the layering is a multitude.
Both traditions rely on fertility; the egg, a near universal symbol of rebirth. Eggs are set out on home altars and given as gifts. The designs for both are abstract, geometric, many of them survivals from Paleolithic and Neolithic times. One of the most popular is the eight-pointed star for the everlasting sun, in the pysanky sometimes shown with fir branches radiating from the centre. Other motifs are waves for water, triangles etched like a sieve or net (a mark of prehistoric Goddess worship), rounding bands to represent eternity, meanders and spirals for protection against evil, plowed fields and soil marked out with diamonds, and seeds shown by dots.
Though they are a work of art, what I like most about these honourings of the egg, is what they can teach us about how to live. I treasure what one commentator had to say about the tradition of writingpysanky: one had to come to the task at peace, at the end of the day; the day holy…lived without argument, accusation or sin. Writing pysanky is really a form of moving meditation, the way that walking is to sitting meditation. My friend who wrote pysanky told me each egg would take hours. When one moves the hand in a creative way, one immerses oneself, sinking into a world beyond, an older world. For her it was a form of prayer. I think this is true of all creativity, whether it is cooking supper or writing a piece of music or passing through a major change in life. It forces us to leave ourselves and recreate ourselves at the same time.
Lately, I’ve been reading The Arabian Nights, or what has been traditionally calledThe Thousand and One Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy from a 14th century Syrian manuscript, the oldest there is. Haddawy grew up hearing theNights around his grandmother’s hearth on long winter nights in Baghdad.
The book could easily be called The Thousand and One Doors. Doors open: doors to Kings’ palaces, doors to the street, doors into the earth or into lost worlds. Strangers, trusted advisors, the sons and daughters of kings, even demons, enter. Stories enter: three one-eyed dervishes, a lake with fish in three colours, a woman turned into a cow–fantastic stories–and a young woman named Shahrazad presides over their telling.
The Nights have got me thinking about the uncanny resemblance between doors and books. Medieval book covers looked and felt a lot like doors. Book covers were usually made from wood then covered in leather and had the same shape and a similar function, opening the reader to worlds, sometimes familiar, sometimes not. An article at the Getty Museum even describes one medieval book that has a miniature medallion at its centre, made of parchment scraps arranged and dyed to look like stained glass. A window? And when you think of it, isn’t that how life often presents itself? A series of doors and windows? Opening in and out, again and again, to the unknown? Unpredictable and upside down from how we imagined it? When I visited Andalusia in 2009, what the Moors once called Al-Andalus, I was enthralled with the doors, so like medieval books. I came upon the one shown, here, with the eight-pointed star, a sun symbol, inside the Alhambra.
And so comes a familiar door. The longest night of the year is upon us again and the shortest day, when the sun stands at its lowest point in the sky; stands still, then turns. For the ancients, this day was a door, an opening into a new year.
May you grasp hold and find blessing in that opening. May you find strength to face any woe. May a labyrinth of stories sustain you.
September 26, an exciting night: sixty-one people in attendance, an abundance of wine, stories and questions. Sixty books were in stock. Last week I couldn’t resist checking to see how many were left on the shelf: 4:) Thanks to my niece, Alana Whitson, for the photos.
