audreywhitson.com

Category: Travel

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

     

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Autumn 2019: The Mysteries of Human Love

    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.

  • Spring Equinox 2018: Here for good

    Recently someone new to Alberta asked me, “When does the snow stop?” really meaning to ask, “When does spring come?”

    “It comes and it goes,” I replied. “And then suddenly it’s here for good.”

    My mom left a message on my phone a couple of weeks ago: “It’s running out there! You can hear the water. It’s running down the drains. It won’t be long now. Just a few more warm days.”

    The seesaw of melt and ice.

    Spring, like all seasons, is a transition state. Spring reminds us that there is growth in every season of our lives. Like all transition states, beginnings require careful navigation. It’s slippery. We’re not always sure of our footing.

    Early in February I celebrated Brighid’s Day, what’s sometimes called the Celtic spring, with about 20 other women. We took turns passing through Brighid’s crios. Brighid’s girdle was once a hoop made from the old year’s harvest straw; our girdle was made of strips of cloth found at Fabricland. Three times we passed through the crios. Circling left and then right and then left again and through. First to leave behind all that was ill, then to give thanks for all gifts of the year past and then to pray for new growth.

    We entered the womb of Brighid to be reborn.

    This spring I am conscious of new relationships emerging, not only in my personal life but in my community. I’m not always sure of my voice in these relationships and often feel as if I am taking two steps forward and one step back.

    In a close personal relationship I am exploring, there is a testing in the dialogue as we come to know each other’s edges and strengths, as we talk about what is really important to each of us, as we come to see our own vulnerabilities in the mirror of the relationship.

    In the same way, I’ve been witness this past year to an emerging dialogue in Canada between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, at work, in public gatherings, in the media and amongst friends. For me, the talking and the listening is cause for hope.

    So it was serendipitous this past February that I got to visit New Zealand with this person I am exploring a partnership with, a Pakeha, a person of European or non-Maori ancestry, who grew up there. That I had the opportunity to witness a different sort of relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples than one I am used to, a partnership grounded in mutual respect.

    Maoris were granted the same rights and duties as a British citizen with the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) as well as control of traditional lands. Like Canada, the treaty wasn’t always observed. Rights were trampled. Lands taken. Residential schools were imposed. The social effects of this are still evident to some extent. But the Maori have always been represented in parliament; the Maori have always had the vote. Their land claims process has largely been a fruitful one. They communally administer their lands; they also individually own sheep stations and tourist resorts, live on “lifestyle blocks” (acreages), and in villages and cities where they work alongside everyone else. Most of the towns have Maori names and many of the streets. This is a country whose educational curriculum is written in two official languages and incorporates not only Western content, but Maori principles. The consciousness is different.

    Like an Alberta spring, justice may come and go, but I do believe one of these days it will be here for good. If we keep at the dialogue.

  • If I were a writer in Cuba

    I often pondered this question when I was in Cuba. While there, I was able to attend the 24th International Festival of the Book in Havana, one of the largest book festivals in Latin America, founded in 1982. For ten days, the city diverts buses from their regular commuter routes to transport thousands of Haberneros to the festival site at the medieval La Cabaña fortress across the bay from central Havana. Launches are held all over Havana at cultural centres, libraries, and bookstores. (Cuba boasts more than 500 bookstores and I kept seeing them all over Havana.) Families flock to La Cabaña on weekends; school children attend readings during the day in all parts of the city as part of the curriculum. Publishers come from all over the Spanish-speaking world. After Havana, the festival goes on the road, with stops in every major city in the country. Many Cubans buy their books for the whole year at the festival.

    At this year’s festival 850 new works in social science and literature were launched, and two million copies were sold. I can attest to the people who carried armloads of books up to the till for purchase and the long lines formed throughout the festival site. For a city of 2.2 million people, that’s an astonishing number of readers. Ah, I thought my day at the festival, if I were an writer in Cuba, I would have an adoring public.

    Visual artists occupy a similar status. Havana boasts 22 galleries and at least 11 theatres. I visited several studios and workshops of painters, sketchers, and silkscreen masters. Their work seems fresh and inspired, and perhaps because of the political situation, they seem to have mastered the genre of the abstract. Theatre seems to occupy a similar status. I had the opportunity of attending a showing of Rent, the first full Broadway musical in Cuba in more than 50 years. It was a stunning show, on par and as professional a production as I’ve seen anywhere, including New York. I was reminded of a Chilean friend’s comment to me thirty years ago, when I visited his country and expressed naive surprise at the high education levels of the population, the presence of so much quality literature and music: “We are an economically underdeveloped country, not a socially underdeveloped one.”

    But there is another side to this, both practical and political. Books published in Cuba are worth about 10 to 20 pesos in moneda nacional; that’s between 50 cents and one Canadian dollar. A folklorist I met my first day in Cuba told me that a Cuban publisher had asked her to write a book on traditional folk songs, but she would be lucky to make a peso a book on the project. She declined. Her clothes, while stylish and carefully matched for colour, were torn along the seams in places, buttons missing, and were likely third or fourth hand. She works as an arts administrator in the city. I couldn’t help but think of our arts administrators too, with low pay and long hours.

    Writers and writing have been tightly controlled in Cuba. As recently as last summer, Cuban poet Rafael Alcides Perez, considered one of Latin America’s most renowned living poets, publically resigned his membership in UNEAC, the government-sanctioned writers and artists association in Cuba, because his books (published abroad) were not allowed into the country. An early member of UNEAC, in recent years he has been vocal about the country’s issues. While I was at the festival, I heard the Cuban American, Uva de Aragón, read from her novel about the experience of Cuban-American exiles in Miami. While she was allowed to attend the festival, she wasn’t allowed to sell or leave her books behind.

    Media outlets are government monitored and controlled. This becomes evident when you watch the 8 o’clock national news as I tried to most nights. While there are interesting stories from other parts of Latin America that often don’t make our newscasts in the northern hemisphere, much of what is reported on internally is news of the Party more than a debate of the issues. This pattern transfers to the internet too. Very few Cubans can afford or are allowed access to the Web. You will find cable television with CNN and internet access in many high end hotels, and you might be allowed unfettered access to the Web for research purposes if you are an academic, but the general population cannot dream of this privilege.

    Finally, La Cabaña itself, in the early days of the Revolution was the site of a notorious political prison. Most of those held here were former members of the brutal Batista regime, but not all. There were many, perhaps hundreds, of executions without trial. One might say that this was understandable, given the history and the war. But Cuba has had its own concentration camps, the Isle of Pines, for example, where stories of prisoner abuse were on par with those of Russian gulags. With 57,000 inmates (by 2012 numbers), Cuba has one of the highest prison populations in the world. There are those in for the standard crimes: drugs, murder, theft. There are those who are arrested for having no job and keeping bad company, what the system calls “pre-criminal dangerousness.” Finally there is a third category, political prisoners, less than in previous years now that they can choose exile, but according to Human Rights Watch, at least “dozens.” Dissidents, bloggers and journalists among them, are still harassed, either through public shaming, the termination of employment or arbitrary arrests without trial. I encountered a small hint of this while I was in Cuba. My folklorist friend told me in a lowered voice that she was invited to join and even publish with a group of dissident writers in the city, but where would that leave her? she asked, hinting there would be consequences she and her family could not afford. I wondered what I would do in similar circumstances.

    It was these whispered conversations, though, the fact that they are taking place at all, that gave me hope for change. While in Cuba, I often found my travel to a destination and not the destination itself the most revealing. I had conversations with other writers, teachers, painters, musicians, taxi drivers, people I met on the bus and in the street along the way, that gave me the sense that Cubans on every side of the debate about US-Cuban relations are holding their breath, wanting to believe but waiting to see if their future will be different.

    I left with the sense that this moment in Cuba is a beautiful and fragile one, that social development has continued in spite of political repression, and its urgency made only more acute by being drawn against the canvas of a vibrant cultural life. Oh, that artists could play as important a role in the social fabric of my own country!

    As I shouted out !Bravo! with the rest of the audience the night I saw Rent, I want to shout out !Bravo! to all who write, paint, act, sing and speak. Sigue marchando adelante. Continue marching forward.

  • The doors of La Habana Vieja

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    I’ve just returned from two weeks in Cuba. What struck me first were the doors. Most are from the colonial period. Huge, double doors, sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, often about 15-feet high. Solid magohany. Sometimes they haven’t been painted in a long, long time. Sometimes the aprons of the walls out front or inside (like those along the staircase in this photo) are covered with the remains of Moorish tiles, the floors in simple but prized Cuban limestone. The front step, a cut paving stone or nothing but the narrow sidewalk, where come evening, no matter how small the space, grandparents, parents or friends will sit and children will play in the street.

    Sometimes there’s a business tucked inside: a confectionery, a barbershop, a shoemaker bent over an old black and gold Singer industrial sewing machine, a small produce market with plantains, mangos, guayabas, tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers on offer. A private telephone service with chairs lined up ready for the queue, a motorbike repair shop, a car park. Sometimes there are workers making and pouring cement, a restoration underway. Sometimes the front door opens immediately into the family kitchen or sitting area, the stove in use or the sofa in view. Clotheslines full of sheets, the family laundry in all its colour taking in the breeze from the sea.

    A tall front, desk where colonial servants would have received guests, now supports residents waiting for rides, passing the time of day. Often one can glimpse into the courtyards beyond, the fruit and flowering trees, probably a couple hundred years old, and in the shade, women having coffee with their neighbours, families relaxing in the evening. It is not uncommon to find stained-glass windows overlooking these inner gardens, in the style of tropical art nouveau.

    Other times one looks into a cavern, empty, yet full of possibility. A grand cast iron staircase winds up towards a second, third, fourth and even fifth floor. Or, like these in the photo, a straight staircase of Italian marble, worn but serviceable still.

    “What did you think of Cuba,” my host asked me on my last night in La Habana. “Fue impresionante,” I said, by this time having found the right word to express the weightiest of experiences in Cuban Spanish. Impressive. And this is what I meant: the open door, the space for invention, the re-purposing of the old with the new. Most of all, a country and a people that has done so much with so little and against great odds.

    No, Cuba is not a utopia. It has its share of problems. But it also has this: many, many lovely city parks; ambitious reforestation and eco-restoration projects, now world heritage sites; an original music born of contrast that is celebrated everywhere; an innovative health care system; a population of avid readers; and an amazing dearth of homelessness. Oh, I could go on, but for now, Cuba, !Le saludo! I salute you!

    And, oh yes, the sign over the grill says, Careful, there’s a dog, with a flair in the calligraphy, that almost puts a smile on Beware of the dog. So Cuban.