Begin with Light, Connection and Beauty

Here is an extremely beautiful video.

It was created by Enra,  a Japanese motion graphics performance group which mixes physical performance and complex digital graphics  This perforemance piece was published in 2013.

Nobuyuki Hanabusa founded Enra in 2012.  He "wanted to challenge different ways of expression and to create more complex works with a different outlook on the world."(Enra website)   Enra has a wide variety of members including those who specialize in Kung-fu, acrobatics, ballet, juggling, rhythmic gymnastics, and animation dance.  Hanabusa wanted to use the diversity of the group along with animation to create something new.

This piece is called Pleiades named after the constellation of seven stars.  As the two dancers move, they are accompanied by bursts of light like stars.  The light seems to be one of the dancers as it interacts and reflects their movements.

I thought that this was a good way to start the new year, with beauty, light and connection.  I hope it inspires you to dream outside of the box, to feel your connection to everything and to look for the beauty that is all around you.

Gifts of the Solstice

Today is the Winter Solstice.  It is the shortest day and the longest night of the year.  We felt it coming.  These days, the light seemed to end too soon. The leaves have mostly fallen from the deciduous trees and the migratory birds are now gone to warmer places.  The lake is practising freezing over and the chipmunks haven`t been seen for a while now.  We gave them lots of corn and peanuts in the fall and we imagine them now hunkered in their underground dens sleeping and eating.  We feel like hunkering by the fireplace and doing the same.

Traditionally at this time, people have festivals that feature light and fire.  They gather to feast and celebrate and tell stories with family and friends.  Somehow we are more open to the kindnesses and needs of strangers at this time of year.  Somehow at this transition from getting darker to getting lighter, the mundane becomes magical and our guards are lowered.  We allow the joy and the pain of others into our own hearts.

I read a story in the newspaper about Mike Mallard, a homeless man in Toronto.  At this time of year he collects cans and bottles to exchange for money which he uses to buy Christmas ornaments from the dollar store.  Then he decorates a tree in the local park for everyone to enjoy.  He said that it makes him think of home and his 91 year old mom who lives up north.  Readers responded with offers to help Mike go to see his mom for Christmas.  It was easy for people to understand his desire to see his mom.  Most people have had a mom at some time and moms know they would like to see their children.  Mike responded that he would like to see the money used to help other homeless people.  “That would be so much better,” he said.  “But I`d also love to see my mom…” he mused. (Metro News, Dec. 14, 2017). 

I am at that age when I and some of my friends have aged parents as well as grandchildren.  We watch our parents become more fragile, more vulnerable and move in to fill the gaps.  It is a delicate balance between helping and taking over.  It is a dance to offer assistance to make life enjoyable and to take care of physical, mental and emotional needs as our parents let go of abilities, responsibilities and memories while not treating them as children. Honouring the wisdom they have gathered through their lives and respecting their rights to live their lives in their own ways invites us to lower our guards, open our hearts and grow more comfortable in our own skin while we prepare ourselves for our own aging and the inevitable loss of our parent. 

It seems to be the opposite of caring for a new baby.  The eyes of a new born suggest that they have come into this world with all the wisdom of the universe.  There is a knowing in their wide open gaze.  We offer them welcome and often feel what seems to be an surprising if not seemingly  unreasonable amount of joy at their arrival.  Families rally, especially if the baby is early or has special needs.  From out of seeming nowhere, comes strength, love and patience.  These tiny beings draw out our best.  They help new parents to grow up overnight.  Grandparents remember their own babies who are somehow these new competent parents and still their own babies all at once.  How did that happen so fast, they wonder. Life seems brighter and more hopeful as we delight in every new accomplishment of this new one.

I was pondering these things as I recently walked through the forest, newly covered in snow.  The forest is a wonderful place to work things out.  It is quiet and beautiful and the trees offer their own wisdom.  Tiny saplings, fallen ancient trees, and mighty adults all have their interconnected place in the life of a forest.  I began thinking of life as a straight line with a beginning and an end but that didn`t seem to fit at all. It didn`t accurately describe what I was seeing all around me.

Then the idea of a circle came to me.  I imagined my partner`s new baby grandson on the circle. And then his parents and grandparents a little further on and even further on his great grandfather who was now very close to the newborn on the circle in my imagination.  I thought of all of them travelling this circle, circumnavigating life together and that seemed to work for me.  It seemed to fit with what I was seeing as I walked down the snowy wooded paths.

As the earth circumnavigates its ancient pathway around the sun there are transitions points which we mark; spring and fall equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices.  They are an opportunity for us to pay attention to the bigger celestial picture.  Just like the transitions of birth and death, they take us outside of ordinary time.  They invite us to be present, to enter the transitions of others and walk with them, learn from them and understand how we are connected as we travel together. Transitions offer us gifts.  Not the kind you wrap and put under a tree but the kind that you carry with you always.  These are the gifts I wish for you this solstice.

First Light Lights our Way

Sainte Marie Among the Hurons  is a re-creation of a 17^th century French Jesuit Mission in Midland, Ontario.  Built on the foundations of the original mission, Ste. Marie tells the story of the Jesuits, the French laymen who joined them and the Wendat (the French called them Huron) people who were the original inhabitants of the area. Nearly four hundred years later thousands of people come to Ste. Marie on the last weekend of November and the first two weekends of December to celebrate First Light. 

The village is surrounded by a wooden palisade and contains many small buildings that each house separate functions such as the chapel, the barn, the blacksmith, the cookhouse, living quarters and armories.  The modern main building has theatres, a museum and a restaurant. 

For First Light Ste. Marie is lit by 5000 candles in lanterns and jars.  Visitors arrive at dusk.  The entry is lit by torches and lanterns.  People bring food for the food bank which is placed in a twenty foot voyageur canoe that is eventually full to the gunwales.  Inside the theatres, local children’s and adult’s choirs sing seasonal music.  Local artisans sell their wares inside the museum for those who want to shop for Christmas gifts. There is everything from wood carving to knitting, from Indigenous artwork to preserves. The restaurant is transformed into the French Café where one can buy tourtiere, pea soup and hot apple cider.  Local Franco-Ontarian musicians entertain visitors with foot tapping French fiddle tunes.  The joie de vivre is infectious.

Going outside, one travels through the dark night along pathways edged by lanterns.  If there is snow or a full moon, the night is bright but if not, you lose your sense of time and place and simply follow the lit path.  Entering one of the rustic buildings, you are suddenly bathed in candle light and the warmth of a roaring fire in the fire place.  You may encounter a guitar player singing Christmas songs, or a Franco-Ontarian singer with a harmonica and guitar singing in French.  

Entering the chapel, you are greeted by a harpist playing old Christmas songs amidst hundreds of candles and another roaring fire.  Jean de Brefeuf who composed the Huron Christmas Carol is buried inside this building.  "Twas in the moon of wintertime, when all the birds had fled," suddenly comes to life.

Illustrations from Huron Christmas Carol book

Another building has crafts for children to make, or hot chocolate, or freshly baked cookies.  Outside, a blacksmith heats metal over a fire and then pounds it into tools, bright orange sparks flying into the night sky.  Occasionally, historical re-enactors fire off muskets nearby.  Another building is the stable with sheep and a donkey.  A crèche is appropriately set up there.

Inside the two Wendat longhouses, Indigenous drummers sing songs passed down for centuries.  Inside one of them, an Indigenous drum maker and educator, passes out drums to the kids and teaches them how to sing an Anishinaabe river song.  Sitting in the longhouse with the fire’s smoke escaping out of a hole in the roof, singing and drumming, one again loses a sense of time and place.  Being there feels timeless as your imagination allows you to be a part of history and of the present at the same time.  The drum maker, John, tells everyone when the singing has ended that now that we have sung together, we are no longer strangers.  “Feel free to be kind to one another once you leave,” he tells us.

Although we were given a paper map upon entering, it is too dark and my eyes are too old to read it.  So we simply wander around through the dark and into the light and warmth.  Back out into the cold and dark, but now there are stars above us mirroring the candles.  Once again we come into a lit building and hear more music.  At an outside area, a man is making cedar tea with white cedar branches simmered in water.  He offers us a small cup of it and the flavour is soothing, the warmth welcome.  In another building a boy hands out fruit tea while his mother supervises.  

We are well and truly lost but we don’t care.  We follow the candle edged path like a river.  It leads us into the buildings, into the longhouses and we enter and exit Indigenous, French and English culture.  We taste tea and food and flow along the river of history.  We sing, tap our feet and sometimes feel like dancing.  Hundreds of people flow along with us and everyone is polite, patient and kind.  It feels magical.

As we move along and experience the dark and the light, the cold and the warmth, the various cultures, we are changed.  We understand more about the history of this land, about the Wendat people who were eventually wiped out, about the French missionaries who were also killed and driven away and about the people who now live here and call it home.  And we are somehow, just as John said, not strangers anymore.  We have sung and drummed and walked together through the dark and the light, with  candles and stars to light our way. We just have to remember to be kind to each other out there in the river that we are all a part of.

In this high tech world of constant change, it is heart warming to see families, people of all ages, people from all across the province gathering to take part in the simple, low tech experience of sharing in First Light.

If you want to join in the feeling of this celebration you can watch these videos on youtube: Longhouse drumming and  Overview of First Light .  

Some of the food that was donated to the food bank

One Thing

The largest single living organism in the world is 106 acres big.  Named Pando which is Latin for “I spread”, it is also called the Trembling Giant.  It weighs approximately 6 million kilograms which also makes it the heaviest known organism  It is among the oldest known living organisms as well.

Pando is a clonal colony of a single male quaking aspen tree.  The massive underground root system which keeps on sending up new saplings that turn into trees is an estimated 80,000 years old. There are approximately 40,000 trunks which arise and die and are replaced by new trunks.  The trunks are all genetically identical proving they are all a part of one organism. Quakng aspens reproduce by sending out suckers that send up erect stems that look like individual trees although they are all form one single tree.

This amazing tree clone is found in south-central Utah. It was told to the world by researcher Burton Barnes in 1968. You can get a visual overview from a short video  on youtube to get a sense of the size of it.

Pando is in trouble because both the young saplings and the root system are under attack and there is an absence of juvenile and young stems now.  These are vital for the ongoing survival of the clone.  Scientists are trying to find solutions to save Pando.  They are employing students as “citizen scientists” to monitor and study the clone. You can see a video of Pando and some of these students here.   Parts of it are now fenced off to keep deer and elk from grazing the young shoots.

I learned about Pando when a friend lent me a CD of a singer songwriter named Roy Hickling.  He wrote a song about Pando called One Thing. Here are the lyrics:

A grove of Quaking Aspen trees

Alive for eighty centuries

Fifty thousand side by side

From one root they’ve lived and died

-      One thing

A dab of colour trembling leaves

Is it all or one you perceive?

Never know how high they’ll climb

Each one in their own time

-      One thing

-       

From borrowed earth we arise

With borrowed time, live our lives

The Aspen trees, the globe and us

All connected by the dust

-      One thing

A “Need to Know”  video on youtube concludes that what we can learn from Pando is that “life is strong when the individual is in community.”  This amazing aspen clone may have witnessed the world during most of human development.  It has survived many environmental stresses without any notice from most of the world.  But now it is beloved by those who visit it, live nearby and just hear about it.  And now some of those people who find it so inspiring, such an example of community and cooperation are working together to help it continue.  And they are building community with each other and with all the things that live where Pando lives. This is a very old story and also a new one.