Just Winter Fire

Just Winter Fire

It is only just winter,

One week since the solstice fire

We had by the house,

Calling back the sun

From its journey away from us.

In the just winter, too-early dark,

We sit once again by an open fire,

This time at the water’s edge.

Bundled up, huddled together,

We lean into its warmth,

Faces glowing orange,

Shadows dance over your coat

And inside my mind.

The tongues of flame lick the air.

Trees long dead, now dry wood, crackle and pop

Releasing the energy that they soaked up while alive.

Now releasing the sun’s stored fire as heat.

Fire to fire, heat to heat, energy to energy

Until only ashes are left.

We too are products of the sun’s fire

Eating plants that transform light into food

And animals that eat plants,

We children of the sun carry that light within us.

What will we do with it?

Will we release that energy as warmth?

Will we share that light before we too are ashes?

The wind roars in the tops of trees still standing.

It blows lake water in from Severn Sound

Making the channel rise.

You measure it against the dock, flashlight scanning.

We hear it in the dark,

Lapping at the bank,

Shore ice thinly tinkling

As the waves share

the wind’s energy with the land.

Darkness all around,

Fire licking the sky,

Waves washing the earth.

We are burning the dead,

Releasing the heat, soaking it in,

Releasing what had passed,

Grateful for the light, the warmth shared

Making space for what is ahead,

Making peace with what has passed.

The wind brings snow for a moment or two

Sky water falling, lake water lapping, hearts pumping blood,

Icy air, roaring trees, dancing fire, waving water

Wood smoking, scent of pine and cedar fleeting.

We huddle again, returning from our silences, reconnecting.

And talk about technology and how far behind we have slipped.

As long as you stay on the receding edge, you’ll be okay.

If the dust settles, you know you’ve slipped too far behind.

It is the world we have lived long enough, to live in.

At least some of the time.

But it is here in the dark, by the fire

With the just winter wind and the not-yet-ice water

Grateful for the warmth of our friendship

And the light we are for one another in the dark

That we feel most human,

That we know ourselves.

Shared World Stories

   If you clicked on the link in the Nov. 21, 2015 post, This is the World I Want to Live In you would have read about a young woman who helped an Arabic speaking older woman when her flight was delayed.  As she reached out and became friends with this woman, spoke with the woman’s sons, and got her own dad to speak to the woman, they became friends.  When the airline started to hand out juice, the old woman pulled out mamool cookies that she was taking to her son and shared them with the people sitting nearby.  Soon they all had icing sugar on their fingers and chins and were all laughing.  “This is the world I want to live in.  The shared world,” the young woman writes. I emailed this link to a few friends and one of them delighted with the story, emailed me back a whole page of recipes for these cookies. 

   My partner and I were having friends over to celebrate the winter solstice and I had asked people to bring a story to tell since that’s what people have done in the dark days of winter for a long time.  When my kids were growing up we celebrated every winter festival we could – Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Kwanza, and Chinese New Year by eating traditional foods for those celebrations.  I have started to do this with my grandson as well.  Making potato latkes for Hanukkah is now a tradition.  So in light of the Syrian refugees arriving in Canada I decided to make these Middle Eastern cookies.  I learned from the newspaper that they are called Ka’ak in Syria. 

   I checked out the recipes my friend had sent and found that I would have to search out rose water, orange blossom water and semolina flour.  Three stores in Midland left me empty handed but a Food Basics in Barrie had a Middle Eastern section that supplied me with the necessary ingredients.  It was actually really interesting to carefully go through all the international aisles and see what amazing things you can buy.

   I don’t really enjoy baking the way some people do but I was motivated by the idea of making mamool cookies.  The dough contains semolina flour, butter, rose water and boiling water.  The stuffing for the inside is ground walnuts, orange blossom water, cinnamon, sugar and dates.  I bent the finished cookies into crescent shapes and marked them with fork marks.  I sprinkled icing sugar on them while still hot just as the recipe called for.

   I had no idea if they were authentic tasting.  I kind of had to wing it.  I wished I had an older experienced person to teach me how to make them.  Perhaps I will meet someone from this area of the world and ask them how they make them.  I recently discussed potato latke recipes with a Jewish woman who later brought me a traditional jelly doughnut because it was Hanukkah.  Food crosses all borders.  And so does music. 

   A children’s choir in Ottawa chose in January of this year to sing a traditional Arabic song that welcomes Mohammed back from Mecca to Medina in their December concert.  Every year the French school choir chooses a culture to honor and this year they chose this Arabic welcoming song which coincidentally was sung just as the first Syrian refugees started to arrive in Canada under the new government’s open door initiatives.  Looking at all those young singing faces that reflect the immigration and diversity which is Canada cut through the nonsense of hate talk and fear.  

(Check it out on youtube and see how you feel:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STgmIT23XBw)

   But back to the cookies.  At our Winter Solstice celebration we had a roaring fire outside and the first story told was about fire and how the wood ashes from this fire would be placed around the apple tree to keep it healthy.  Another story was told about a miracle baby joining a young family.  And then the high winds and icy air drove us inside.

   I recently learned that people in Denmark are among the happiest people in the world.  They have long dark winters and have the concept of hygge (pronounced hoo-ga) which means cozy.  They love to gather with good friends, food and candlelight during the winter.  So, learning from the Danes, this is what we did and listened to each other tell stories while watching the candles flicker. 

   Canadian author Thomas King in the 2003 Massey Lectures entitled The Truth About Stories says that “stories are all that we are.”  We choose which stories to tell and which ones not to tell, he says.  So I was fascinated to hear what people had chosen to tell.

   That evening we heard stories of babysitting in the bush of Northern Ontario when the oil stove died, of going into the woods to get moss and plants for Christmas decoration, of riding in a horse drawn sleigh through the streets of Montreal as a kid, a fairy tale about a girl who travels to touch the stars, Thomas King’s Coyote Solstice in which the forest animals go to the mall, funny stories about roosters and pigs who all had names, the sensitive description of water and sky written by a spouse now gone but much loved, stories about the past when food was brought to the house by vendors, stories about past solstice lantern lit walks to the woods to leave edible treats for the forest birds and stories that were remembered after hearing someone else’s story. 

   How luxurious it felt, to sit and listen to each one speak without fear of interruption.  And we also ate warm stew from the wonder pot and bannock.  And when it was time for dessert, I told the story of the mamool cookies and then passed them around the circle for each person to take, just like in the story – we entered the shared world. 

   

   And one last poem by Kathryn Edgecombe was read aloud:

“Paint me a picture with your words/ Make the world a better place/ For small children and old women…”

(https://www.facebook.com/L.KathrynEdgecombe/ ) 

   Food and music cross all borders and so can stories.  Thomas King says, “If you want to change society, change the stories we tell.”

   We went back outside into the dark night, fire roaring like the wind and lit sparklers and a Chinese lantern that flew madly – lights in the darkness.  Huddled together around the fire, warmed by our time together, our hygge, we said our goodbyes and went back to our lives knowing we were part of the shared world.  Well, that’s the story I choose to tell.

more information about Thomas King: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/thomas-king/ http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-2003-cbc-massey-lectures-the-truth-about-stories-a-native-narrative-1.2946870

Imagining Nets and Webs

   One fall day when we were hiking, my partner and I suddenly entered a cedar grove.  For me a cedar grove is like walking into a cathedral.  A hush comes over me as I marvel at the ancient trunks and twisted branches of the Eastern white cedars.  The ground is reddish brown from the fallen needles and little else grows there except for baby cedars.  I love how the trees grow in groups that seem to be interconnected family members within a community of trees.  

They always feel friendly to me somehow and I feel welcomed in and protected.  I admit that some of my best friends are trees but there is something about cedar groves that you can’t miss.  I imagine that their roots are intertwined and that they communicate by touching their branches and sending messages along their roots.  I grew up with stories about fairies at the bottom of the garden and sentient trees and I become childlike in the woods, my imagination flows freely and my senses are wide open.  I feel connected by the trees to the earth and the sky.

   So imagine my surprise to find out from David Suzuki in one of the information emails from his foundation that there is actually an underground network of communication (The Many Marvels of the Mysterious Mushroom).  Apparently fungi have masses of underground threads called mycelia which form networks similar to the neurons in our brain.  

These networks connect plants and trees with each other. They help plants to absorb water and minerals and produce chemicals to resist disease.  Mycologist Paul Starnets calls mycelial networks “Earth’s natural internet” because they help plants communicate.  He finds them to be similar to brains with the use of chemical messengers and a cellular web.

   Recently we returned to the cedar grove and as my partner and I wandered through the trees I tried to imagine this mycelial network beneath my feet. I tried to picture the chemical messengers moving along the web spreading information.  This got me thinking about neurophysiology and how the mind is not just in the brain but is throughout the body.  Neurotransmitters connect physical information with emotions and thoughts between every cell.

  It also got me thinking about the internet and how people are using social media to create change in the world.  Just in the last month I have signed a petition for Mulala to take to world leaders about the rights of children to education (change.org), have joined with the Yinka Dene nations (Yinkadenealliance.ca, Holdthewall.ca) in protecting land in BC, have sent a letter to Justin Trudeau on climate change with the David Suzuki Foundation (www.DavidSuzuki.org) and the list goes on and on.  I just read a story in the Toronto Metro newspaper about a woman posting on Facebook the need for winter clothes for the refugee family from Syria that her group is sponsoring.  She hoped to get enough clothes for 5 families.  Instead she got enough for 120 families and volunteers to help organize it.  Global (globalcitizen.org) asks people to be a global citizen not a bystander.  I am connected by the internet to thousands, maybe millions of people who are working to make the world into a global family that takes care of its members.  It boggles my mind.

 Try as I might I can’t really picture the mycelian network or the neural pathways in my own brain or the internet.  However, I can see the tree trunks and people who look like they are physically separate so maybe that seems more true on the surface.  But it is only part of the story.  If I look deeper it is amazing how we are all connected.  Standing in the cedar grove I could feel how amazing that is.  And just like the trees and fungi I can choose to connect with like-minded people even though we are physically separate to learn from each other and to bring support and resources wherever they are needed.  It takes some imagination.  We have lots of that.  We can use it to imagine horror or we can use it to imagine health.  The systems are all designed for health.  Imagine that!

The Meeting

   The band playing at the summer Blues Festival in Orillia, ON wasn’t really working for me, so I wandered off to find out who the statued man at the top of a huge monument was.  He stood astride, cape flowing, looking out over Lake Couchiching.  

Climbing up the cement stairs that led to the base of the statue I read the bronze plaque.  “1615 – 1915  Erected to commemorate the advent into Ontario of the white race under the leadership of Samuel de Champlain the intrepid French explorer and colonizer…”   I have never seen the phrase “white race” in print on a plaque before and I was shocked.  But it got worse.  At the base of the statue on two sides were groups of men.  The Canada Parks sign explained that they represented “Commerce and Christianity.”  On one side was a European fur trader standing above two Indigenous men who sat at his feet.

  On the other side was a priest, cross held high with another two Indigenous men crouching below. 

   Horrified, I found my partner and showed him.  We learned that the statue was created in 1915 by English sculptor Vernon March to celebrate the 300^th anniversary of Champlain’s arrival in the area and to be a “symbol of goodwill between the English and French speaking people of Canada.”  The colonial and racist attitudes of the time and the paradigm of hierarchy were plain to see.  I remembered seeing the statues of Saddam Hussein being toppled over in Iraq and pictured the same thing happening here.

   Later that summer (2014), at the Mariposa Folk Festival, I listened to Sherry Lawson from nearby Chippewas of Rama First Nation (www.mnjikaning.ca) tell engaging, informative and funny stories about her life which she has included in her books (www.sherrylawson.ca).   She also talked about the statue of Champlain.  She felt the same way about it as I did and she pointed out that the cannons at the base are actually pointing at the Rama First Nation just to make things worse.

  

   This summer (2015) heralded the 400^th anniversary of Champlain’s arrival and the area was abuzz with preparations.  I was reluctant to attend in case it was anything like the statue in Orillia.  That was until my friend, Ojibway artist Paul Shilling (www.paulshilling.ca), told us that he was attending the celebration with his beautiful paintings and prints.  He showed us the statement he had prepared for the event.  It read, 

“Samuel de Champlain: 400 year celebration of his introduction to the first nations, first people of this continent.  Champlain had a mission.  The rest is his story.  History. Personally, I don’t celebrate his arrival but I do celebrate the gathering of all people of Champlain’s descendants and all the beautiful, colourful people that make up this world. Underneath the brokenness of most people there is an extraordinary spirit. This is what I celebrate. Dazaunggee”

   With this attitude, I felt I could also go and celebrate the people that had gathered.  My partner and I visited with First Nations artists, saw old canoes and boats, people dressed up in old fashioned French outfits and Metis groups.  When we walked down to Penetanguishene Harbour (part of Georgian Bay) we came across a new statue to commemorate the meeting of Bear Tribe Chief Aenon of the Wendat people and Samuel de Champlain. 

This bronze statue created by Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz is called “The Meeting”.  In contrast to the statue in Orillia, in this statue the two men are meeting face to face as equals.  According to Raymond J. de Souza writing for the National Post on August 3, 2015, for Schmalz, this is an apology for the earlier depictions of Indigenous people (ews.nationalpost.com/full-comment/father-raymond-j-de-souza-a-tribute-to-two-cultures-and-their-twin-spiritualities).

   The artist also included elements of the two cultures such as the Three Sisters (corn, squash and beans), Christian symbols, Sky Woman and Turtle Island and French explorers with Jesuits.  Aenon and Champlain hold a wampum belt between them which is the agreement or contract for how they would deal with each other. The wampum belt is about the relationship between groups of people.  We know that most of these agreements and treaties were not kept by the Canadian governments and were used instead for cultural genocide.  The attitudes that formed the Orillia statue are still alive and well to this day.  So what to make of this new statue?

   Schmalz has created a physically balanced visual representation that tells some of the stories of the people that now live in Huronia.  He seems to be bringing the past to the present while giving us hope for the future.  If the Orillia statue is in the paradigm of hierarchy and competition, this new statue is in the paradigm of cooperation and communication.  Despite my reluctance, I think The Meeting could be a vision of what we can co-create together.  My eyes were drawn to the hands and the wampum belt.  They speak to me about the healing of damaged relationships. Damaged relationships are bad for all of us.

  There is a lot of work to be done. There is listening and learning for people who never knew any of this history. There is governmental change that is drastically needed. And so much more.  It seems huge.  Paul Shilling always says that he wants to be part of the solution not part of the problem.  So do I.  We may not always know exactly what that looks like but I do believe that it is possible for all of us to be part of the solution in our own ways.  This is work for all of us and the ways will emerge once we begin to look.