Reweaving the Tapestry with the Threads of Relationship

A very long time ago, there was a giant tapestry.  It was all over the Earth and maybe even larger.  No one knew how large it was and at that time, it wasn’t the size that mattered.  What did matter was how strong it was and how it held everything in life.

Some of the threads were thick and some so thin that a human eye might not be able to see it, although a fly’s eye probably would.  The pattern was so intricate and complex that it was hard to see it all.  Seeing it all didn’t matter then as much as how it felt; how it felt to be held in that strong tapestry with everything else.

There were the usual ups and downs, comings and goings of life and some life forms disappeared from the tapestry while others appeared.  The tapestry needed constant attention from weavers.  Some say that the weavers were young women and some say old women.  Some say that the tapestry was woven by a spider.  I don’t know for sure.  But weavers were always creating new designs whenever the threads were damaged.  They were always repairing the tapestry so that it was strong and so that it held everything.  The life in the tapestry learned to weave as well.  Even the tiny helix threads that held the codes learned to weave new life. 

There was no higher or lower.  That came later.  There was no inside or outside of the tapestry.  That came later as well when some of the humans decided to use their imaginations to imagine that they were outside of the tapestry looking down on it.  The tapestry was so complex and intricate and captivating that they began to pull it apart to look at each strand.  As they pulled thread after thread out of the tapestry and then pulled each thread apart from itself, they learned many mysterious things and so they kept going.  The holes they left in the tapestry were repaired by the weavers and life went on.

But after hundreds of years of more and more humans pulling the tapestry apart, the weavers were no longer able to keep up with them.  Holes began to show in certain parts of the tapestry.  Still curious, those humans travelled to other places on the tapestry and pulled those areas apart as well.  The weavers were kept very busy repairing the damage.  More and more pieces of the tapestry were left lying about, unconnected.  More and more humans were left unconnected as well.   When they were no longer connected to the tapestry, they began to feel sick.  They tried to weave small tapestries of their own to fill the holes, but they couldn’t connect their small tapestries with the larger one and so they were not held when the ups and downs and comings and goings of life occurred.

The weavers could see that the curious ones were in trouble.  They could see that the holes could get larger and larger.  They remembered that the thing that mattered was the strength of the tapestry when it held all of life.  The curious ones had forgotten what mattered as they only followed the apparently insatiable curiosity in their heads. 

The weavers had many meetings.  They made sure to listen to all of life in order to reweave the tapestry.  Some of the weavers had forgotten what the tapestry used to look like.  They had to consult with the very tiniest threads in their cells that held the codes, the maps, the remembering.  They decided to work in the areas of the tapestry where they found themselves.  They took the strands of the threads that were lying about and patiently rewove them into thicker strands.  They patiently reconnected those threads to each other and to all of life.  What they found was that after some repair, other weavers appeared, weavers that remembered, weavers that listened to the coding in their tiniest strands. 

The weaving didn’t always look perfect.  Sometimes the colours didn’t complement each other.  Sometimes, knots stuck out.  But the weavers knew that they could keep on repairing and weaving as time went on.  They concentrated on putting the strongest threads in place first, like the threads between the humans and the trees.  The trees were expert weavers and once in place, they filled in the tapestry around them.

More humans learned how to weave as well.  They learned much from the trees and the spiders who had never stopped weaving.  They patiently found the strands and pieces of thread lying about.  They listened to the humans who still remembered what the tapestry looked like.  They listened to the coding in their cells.  They listened to the tapestry which amazingly began to weave itself as well. 

As more humans learned to weave, they remembered how to weave themselves back into the tapestry.  They loved the feeling of being held.  They loved the pull of the tapestry that told them of the ups and downs, the comings and goings happening everywhere.  They loved following the threads to parts of life that they were curious about.  But instead of pulling the tapestry apart to understand it, they were now able to understand the connections and how that affected all of life.  The humans began to feel healthy again.  They told stories from within the tapestry where they had been all of this time.

The tapestry now looked different than it had before the holes appeared.  And it kept on changing as it was repaired and renewed and it was always beautiful.  I still don’t know how big the tapestry is.  But I do know that its size doesn’t matter.  What matters is its strength and how it holds all of life with the threads of relationship.

How Empowering Women and Girls Can Help Stop Global Warming

In this TED talk by Katharine Wilkinson from Project Drawdown, Wilkinson makes the link between creating gender equity and changing global warming.  Project Drawdown has looked for the best ways to draw down heat-trapping, climate changing emissions. Wilkinson mentions the obvious ones such as renewable energy, sustainable diets as well as the less obvious ones such as the education and empowerment of women.  She outlines three key areas in which we could secure the rights of women and girls, shore up resilience and divert emissions as well, all at the same time.

These three areas are agriculture, education and family planning.  These are connections you may not have thought of before but this is part of the new story that is emerging.

Check it out:

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Walking on Wet Ice

My eyes followed the black trunk and branches of the Maple tree outside of my window on Saturday morning.  The January rain made the wood black and the foggy light behind the tree created a striking silhouette of connected lines. Everything was simplified into black and white.  This made the pattern more obvious and beautiful.  The only movement I detected were two Grey Squirrels that despite their name, were black.  They ran along the network of tree branches and trunks like highways, like nerve impulses along the dendrites of the brain.  Ideas ran along the dendrites of my brain as I gazed at the simple scene outside.

The day would be all about temperature and precipitation.  In the morning it was raining but, as the temperature was predicted to fall, that rain might turn into ice pellets, freezing rain and eventually snow.  So, we went out for our usual Saturday morning breakfast and then a wet hike through the woods of our usual hiking area.  We wore waterproof boots, pants, coats and hats and set off into the woods.  But the deep snow was transforming into deep pools of water on top of ice, so we stuck to the berms and boardwalks around the marsh instead.  Where there are usually dozens of Trumpeter Swans, only three remained.  The flock of ducks flew off as we approached.  Perhaps the other swans are nestled under Cedar trees, or perhaps there is lots of open water for them to feed from somewhere else.

As I carefully watched the ground ahead of me for ice I placed my feet on solid ground, or carefully on wet ice.  I wondered what the land had to teach me that day.  We were the only ones out there on the trails and some might think us foolhardy.  But, it is important for us to renew our relationship with the land by walking on it, by listening, by paying attention so out there we were.

I thought about how we dislike and fear transitions.  Talk of freezing rain makes people think of car accidents, power outages and broken bones.  We don’t like having to pay attention to the weather changing in order to navigate our days.  We prefer to plan from inside our heads with no negotiating with the land, with the elements.

As I picked my way carefully along the trail, I had to negotiate with ice, wet snow, pools of water, my boots, my walking sticks, the speed of my gait, and, the way I put each foot down on the land.  It reminded me of a mindfulness walk in which you are present in your own body and conscious of what is going on inside of you and around you.  I had to walk carefully, thoughtfully on the land to keep myself safe.  In “good” weather, I can walk mindlessly on the land, deep in my own thoughts about things far away.

I wonder if transitions demand more mindfulness and since we are addicted to being fairly unconscious, this demand on our attention is seen as an irritant.  Our world is in transition at the moment as well.  Does that demand more attention, more consciousness as well?  It would seem so.

When I was younger, I used to fall a lot.  Now that I am older, I try not to, but am not always successful.  I use hiking poles to walk in slippery conditions.  I use the information that I get from the feel of the pole as I plant it in front of me, to understand the nature of the surface I am on.  Even in the dark, I can detect ice or concrete under a thin layer of snow.  This helps me to know when to slow down and be more careful.  Without them, I am trying to feel the surface through the thick soles of my boots.  I end up bending over slightly, unconsciously lowering my centre of gravity.  With the poles I stand upright and listen to what I feel through my hands.  If I start to slip, the poles give me more stability as well.

We are navigating through difficult, confusing times.  Perhaps we need tools other than our thickly clad feet to find our way.  Perhaps, we need support systems and communities in place in case we start to slip.  Perhaps we need to be in closer relationship with our world to keep us safe.  Sliding into unconsciousness probably won’t do the trick.

Well, the freezing rain did pass through, then ice pellets and then a kind of sugary snow.  The next morning, we had to melt the ice off of the car windows, scrape, move snow and then off we went again.  This time we took our cross country skis to the same forest.  We had to set trail on the ungroomed forest trail and we took turns doing this.  Now, I had to read the amount of glide that my skis had on the snow to judge the amount of power to use.  My ski poles told me about the depth of the snow and if ice lay underneath.  My face told me that it was close to -20 degrees Celcius with the wind chill as my face burned. 

The same forest looked totally different with the snow covering it.  We stayed on the higher trails in case the puddles of the day before were still not quite frozen.  Squirrels, rabbits and deer had already been moving about that morning.  Their foot and hoof prints told their story.  We had to pay attention to which trails to take.  As we climbed a few small hills, we had to pay attention on the angle to put our skis so we wouldn’t slide backwards.  It was easy going as the snow wasn’t very slippery.

I marveled at how different the two days were due to a change in temperature.  Different skills were required to navigate the trails.  Our attention was fully on being where we were.  And so, we didn’t get lost out there, we didn’t get wet, and we arrived back at the main building a while later.  We were able to give a report of the trail to the front desk person to share with subsequent skiers.  The trail was “broken” and others would find it easier to navigate.

Perhaps, in being conscious of what is going on around us, we can find ways to navigate changing conditions.  Perhaps, we can share that information with other people.  Perhaps, we can take turns, like Canada Geese do, in breaking trail, making the trip easier for those following.

That is the story that the land shared with me.  I will see how it applies to life when I am not in the woods.  I will let the story work inside of me and change me and it will create new stories.

The Witness Blanket

Carey Newman

Vancouver Island artist Carey Newman has created a large installation called The Witness Blanket.  Newman created this piece in response to the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2010.  His father was a Residential School survivor.  Newman decided to gather artifacts from Residential Schools and then find a way to string them together.  He worked with a team that asked survivors to share pieces and their stories.  They visited 75 -80 communities and spoke with over 10,000 people.

Drawing on his Kwakwaka’wakw and Coast Salish heritage in which people are wrapped in blankets for ceremony and for support as well as his Settler heritage in which women made quilts, Newman chose the idea of a blanket to display and tie together over 600 objects and belongings.

Bricks, wood, braids of hair, Bibles, shoes, moccasins, hockey skates and other artifacts  are brought into one piece that is 12 meters long.  From a distance, it looks like a giant quilt but as one gets closer, the details become obvious.

The Witness Blanket

The original Witness Blanket is going through preservation procedures at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg after touring for several years.  However, a true-to-scale reproduction has begun touring again along with an in-gallery film, interpretive panels and a digital interactive capacity.

You can hear an interview that Rosanna Deerchild did with Newman here on CBC's Unreserved. 

In the interview, Newman explains that “…this collection [The Witness Blanket] of memories and those memories have the potential to unlock the memories of non-Indigenous people and draw them into this story and learning more about the colonial history of Canada.”  He feels that once you have had a personal experience of something, then you can begin to care about that subject.

On the CBC website linked above, it says that “Newman hopes that the belongings that make up The Witness Blanket will give people ‘a sense of that tangibility of residential schools’.  ‘All of those objects were in schools.  All of them are witnesses,’ he said.”

The replica is continuing its tour across Canada.  It will be at:  Mount Royal University, AB March 9 – April 30, 2020; Winnipeg Airport, MB  June 1 – Aug. 31, 2020; Simcoe County Museum, Minesing, ON Sept. 28 – Nov. 10, 2020; Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford, ON Dec. 21, 2020 – Feb. 26, 2021 and other places across Canada. More dates can be found here. e

A Blessing for the New Year

John O'Donohue

A Blessing for the New Year is by Irish poet John O'Donohue who is probably my favourite poet.  Recently, I discovered that he was the favourite poet of a neighbour and she loaned me the book To Bless the Space Between Us which is a collection of blessings that John O'Donohue wrote.  It was there that I reconnected with this Beannacht that I love so much.  So, here it is for you at the beginning of 2020.  If ever we needed a blessing, it is now.

Beannacht

On the day

When the weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you tumble,

May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

the gray window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colours,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue

Come to waken in you

A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

In the curragh of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the Earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the oceans be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.  


And here is a short New Year's message from Clair DuBois of TreeSisters.  In it she invites us to see the beginning of 2020 as a threshold to explore what we are capable of when we work together.  Claire acknowledges that despair is available to us, but so is courage, so is fierce love and so is determination.  Have a listen:

The Gift is in the Sharing

This past fall, my partner and I decided to walk parts of the Tay Trail that we don’t normally go on.  In sections, we walked from Waubaushene to Midland and back and then to Coldwater and back.  In all, we walked around 50 km.   We discovered new plants and plants that we already knew.  All along the way, we encountered wild grapes hanging from vines that clung to bushes, trees and fences.  They were a beautiful blue purple and they seemed to beckon to us.  We began to take plastic bags with us on our evening walks, but the offerings of the grapes were so abundant this year that we returned with buckets to some locations.  We always left lots for the birds and wild animals as well.  My partner steamed and pressed the grapes, strained the juice and froze it in batches as we picked the grapes over a number of weeks.  Depending on the light available, they ripened at different times. So, we walked some sections of the trail repeatedly, waiting for them to turn purple.

And then, one cold, November Saturday, we made five batches of wild grape jelly and put it in sterilized jars.  We wanted to share the delicious grape juice with all of our friends and family.  Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass that when nature shares its abundance with us, then it is a gift.  And gifts are meant to be shared.  And so, we wanted to share the delicious abundance of wild grapes with other people who didn’t walk that same trail or didn’t see the grapes, or saw the grapes but didn’t know that they were edible.

We are having a lot of fun dropping in on friends and bringing them a jar of wild grape jelly.  It tastes really good and we love it ourselves.  We made it a few years ago in another bumper year and remember the taste vividly.  It tastes like Welch’s grape juice which we both loved as kids.

In this season of gift giving, which apparently happened long before Christmas was celebrated, we are sharing the gift that the grape vines shared with us.  We are bringing the vibrancy of the summer into people’s homes and mouths. For some people who have never heard of, or tried wild grapes, we are connecting them to this lovely plant.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about gifts from nature. She writes, “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. (Braiding Sweetgrass,p.25)  In her Potawatomi culture, gifts from the earth should never be sold because they are gifts.  This makes sense to me.  The wild grapes were abundant and calling to us from the vines.  It makes sense that we share their gift with the people in our lives.  Kimmerer writes, “A gift creates ongoing relationships.” (Braiding Sweetgrass,26) 

Robin Wall Kimmerer

She writes about how she and her siblings picked wild strawberries to make strawberry shortcake for their father’s birthday each year.  “That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, p27)

This proved to be true in our case.  We were gifted in reciprocity by those we shared the jelly with.  We received strawberry and peach jam, muffins, a wonderful scone recipe, bows of Fraser Fir, colourful prayer ties and even some venison from a Metis hunter.  As we were attending an Indigenous celebration, my partner made venison stew to take to the feast.  The value of the gift became greater with the sharing.  One woman told us that she used the whole jar of grape jelly in the sauce for meatballs for a holiday get together.  “Everyone raved about the flavour,” she told us.

I received another interesting gift this week from a friend.  She made a donation in my name to Indspire, a national non-profit group that helps to fund post-secondary education for Indigenous youth.  I had not heard of this group before so I looked it up and was very happy to think about sharing a gift with them as well. I am trying to imagine how that gift will grow in value as some young person learns and shares what they have learned.

I recently spent time reflecting on the nature of gifts in order to share the idea with my 11-year-old grandson.  I was thinking about the gifts we are born with, those attributes or abilities that come easily to us.  I believe that since these are gifts, they are meant to be shared with the world.  I reflected with him what I thought his gifts were and that the world needed him to share those gifts so that the world could work well.  At my grandmotherly age, I am reflecting on what my own gifts are in order to decide how I should best spend the time I have left on the Earth.

This week, I was also gifted with Richard Wagamese’s final posthumously published book One Drum: Stories and Ceremonies for a Planet.  It is his final gift to the world.  In One Drum, Wagamese wrote, “In the Ojibway way of seeing, a gift is an empowerment, something that allows us to travel further on our way to the highest possible expression of ourselves.  In this way, even difficulties are gifts, even hardships, even sorrow or the perception of loss are gifts because they all have the energy within them to teach us something vital about ourselves and the nature of our lives in this reality.”

And so, it seems that gifts are meant to be shared. They are meant to create relationships and they are meant to empower us to be our true selves which we can then share with the world.  Economists are starting to write about gift economies and sharing economies.  The gift fatigue that occurs at this time of year is based on a growth economy, one of taking, one without reciprocity.  It is time that we rethink giving and share our gifts with the Earth.  Think of how the value of those gifts will increase with the sharing.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Richard Wagamese (2019). One Drum: Stories and Ceremonies for a Planet. Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre.

Finding a New Way Home

Commuting is a part of my work life.  Twice a week I travel from my little town north of Barrie to Toronto.  It takes between two and a half and three hours each way.  I have been commuting to the city for over twenty years and have used cars, buses, trains and subways in a variety of combinations.  Currently, I drive a half hour to Barrie, park my car and take the train to Downsview Park where I switch to the subway for the last half hour.  Unfortunately, the first train back to Barrie is at 4pm so if I finish work early, I can’t get back easily.  There is a series of two buses that together take three hours just to get to Barrie if you make the connection.  I live in a part of the world that is still geared to cars, not public transit.

The other day, while waiting for a client, I went on line to check out the train and bus schedules to see if there were any new options for getting home early.  I couldn’t actually read the fine print on the screen so I printed it out and with reading glasses, tried to make sense of it.  There is a northbound train from Downsview Park at 2 pm but it only goes to Aurora.  However, I noticed that just below the entry for King City, the stop before Aurora, another possibility emerged.  It seems that on Fridays only, there is an express bus from the King City train station to the Barrie GO train stations.  I studied the map and it appeared that this 68C bus went up Hwy. 400 to Barrie.  There was a second bus an hour later for the next train that went all the way to Bradford.  And that was it.  Just two buses and only on Fridays.

It seemed too good to be true.  I wrote down precise instructions for myself.  I have never been off the train at the King City stop and had no idea where to catch the bus.  The schedule indicated that the bus left ten minutes after the train arrived and its only purpose was to take people from that train to Barrie.  Sounded good.  But what if there was no bus?  Well, I reasoned, I could stay at the King City train station for an hour and take the next train (which still didn’t go to Barrie) to East Gwillimbury where I could catch a bus that does the milk run to Barrie and still arrive a half hour earlier than if I waited to take my usual train at 4 pm. 

The sun was shining on the snow that had been falling all morning when I left my office just after 1pm.  I took the subway to Downsview Park and was happy to see lots of people waiting for the train.  I tried to read the screen with the schedules but the sun was shining on it and it was impossible to read.  A young woman stopped to ask me where to catch the northbound train.  Was she on the right side of the track?  I explained that there was only one side and only one track.  If the train was going to the right, it was northbound and if to the left then southbound.  That was all the information she needed and she thanked me.  Commuters are known to help each other sort out the ever changing transit systems.

Once the 2pm train came, I decided to sit in the accessibility coach because that is where the customer service person is.  He or she opens the doors, makes the announcements and is the only crew member that passengers can talk to.  I wanted to ask this person where to catch the bus at King City.  After a short twenty minute ride, we came to the King City station and he announced that there was an express bus to Barrie available.  Wonderful!  The plan was working.  I asked him where to catch the bus and he gave me some vague instructions about walking past the station and catching the bus on Keele Street.  He made another announcement and explained to the whole train that the bus was on the east side of the track on Keele Street.  Orienting myself to north I looked out the window to the east and saw a street.  “Is that Keele Street?”  I asked.  “Yes,” he replied.  A man asked him about the bus as well.  Great, I thought, I’ll follow that man.  The customer service rep told me I would be able to see the bus from the platform.

We got off of the train and I asked the man I had noticed on the train, if he was heading for the bus.  “Yes,” he replied.  “I’ll just follow you then,” I said.  “Well, I don’t know where the bus is,” he answered.  Another man chimed in that he was looking for the bus as well.  “The guy on the train said we could see it from here,” I said.  None of us could see it at this point.  I don’t have great long distance vision with the glasses that I was wearing.

Then suddenly, I saw the bright green bus on the other side of the parking lot.  I pointed it out to my new companions and we trudged through the snowy parking lot, through the deep snow on the side of the road, across Keele Street and through more deep snow on the other side of the road.  “This seems like a bad idea,” commented one of the men.  We got to the door of the bus, and there were the happy numbers 68C.  We made it!

Climbing up the steps I noticed that in front of the bus was a crosswalk and a set of traffic lights which was now obviously the correct route to take to the bus.  People who took that route took a little longer to get to the bus but the driver waited for the assigned ten minutes and then took us to Barrie.

So, why am I relating this fairly mundane story?  Well, it actually took some courage to try a new route home in the winter.  What if I was stranded for an hour at King City with no promise of a warm place to wait?  I wore my warmest boots and mitts, hat, scarf, and big coat in case.  Part of me was prepared to kill two hours in Toronto rather than take the chance on a new way, maybe a better way.  I had to force myself to go on this little adventure.  And so did some of my companions.  One man told me that the woman at the ticket booth at Union Station told him about this bus.  “But she didn’t seem too sure,” he added.  Another of my snow trudging companions worried that the bus would leave without us.

It turned out I got to drive home in the light and got there two hours earlier than usual.  What a nice treat on a Friday afternoon after a long week.

It strikes me that we can, especially as we get older, get stuck in ruts.  We get used to things being hard and can’t believe that anything better can exist.  Even when it is front of us, we might just not take the extra effort to try something new.  This felt like an adventure because no one wants to get stranded at a train station far from home.  Just like an actual adventure, I prepared with warm clothing, the printed schedule and map and two back up plans in case it didn’t work.  And then I surrendered myself to the adventure.  I enlisted the aid of three men who I had never met before and together, we found our way.  Our common bond was our ability to take a chance on something new.  We navigated together and then separated into our individual seats and the silence of the commuter bus.

It surprised me how hard it was to try something new.  I made myself do it as a kind of exercise in lateral thinking.  Luckily it worked out well and I will be more inclined to try new things instead of being traumatized!  I thought about the steps to finding a new path.  There was the curiosity to see if anything new was available, imagining myself doing it, preparing for the unexpected and then connecting with helpers along the way.  Oh, yes, and celebrating the outcome!

It occurs to me that this is a skill which is needed at this time; the ability to find new routes, to try new ways of getting from here to there.  So, I will keep my new route mentality exercised as I find new ways to get where I’m going.