Crystallized Knowing: A Winter Solstice Reflection

It’s as dark as it can be.

The days are at their shortest.

The news is even darker as

They feed us with fear

And greed and hate.

We look desperately for light,

Or distraction or addiction

To feed the fear.

But it is never satiated, no

It charges back like a grizzly bear

Wanting more.

Where is the light?

Oh bring us light, bring us light!

Let the sun return!

In the dark we feel alone,

Blind and invisible to the others

Huddling from the cold.

But then,

Walking up a snow covered winter hill

Into the setting sun

Ice crystals emerged, 
Magically it seemed,

From the cold air,

Caught the light of the sun

And floated, spun, danced, pirouetting 

In their slow enchanting descent.

And we were delighted, uplifted

Even enlightened (dare I say it).

A single photon,

a tiny packet of particles

Defined by our eyes’ ability to perceive it.

The smallest amount of light

Visible to a human

Appears.

And our DNA, our genetic codes,

The mastermind of our being

That infinitesimally small structure

Emits…. Wait for it….

You won’t believe it’s possible

But they say it’s true:

Our DNA emits photons!

What does this mean?

How do the photons get in there?

Do we create them?

Do we ingest them?

Are we beings of light?

Maybe we don’t know what we are.

Maybe we don’t know who we are.

Maybe we have believed the lies

That we are nothing, never enough

Powerless, alone, dark.

But the ice crystals remind me

Of who I am

Of my place here

Of my responsibility

To (and my mother would love this)

Let my light shine!

Celebrating moment by moment

This piece was written by my friend who shared it with me and I am sharing her story with you with her permission.

Spirals and flow trace patterns in my days.

I love watching/listening to the wind roar through the old pine tree tops on my hilltop home.  There is snow covering the land … sun bright in the sky, clouds high and moving quickly across the blue.  Some bush trees that have not relinquished their green leaves yet with red berries intact, the maples and elms show their skeleton branches swaying and bending this day. Brown leaves swirl in small spirals of gust and lift, revealing the unseen movement of the air. 

Recently I was walking in a conservation area and my path took me through a marshy area where the water was thinly frozen.  Looking more closely I marveled at the wind’s imprint on the ice.  In the moments the water turned to ice the wind’s touch left a pattern on the ice surface—graceful and light.   

Back in my snow-covered yard, chipmunks are curled warmly in their labyrinth of tunnels underground, birds of many colours and feather take turns at the feeder, a raptor glides overhead playing in the air currents high above.

Snatches of my days include learning /being with my aging Mom.  She is losing her words as it were—not always able to put together full sentences or even thoughts.  And then able to, clear as a bell, communicate what is essential for her.  What matters is relationship, love in the moment, family and friends, fairness in our world, birds, sunsets, dogs, babies. Sometimes I am sad that she is slipping and is losing touch.  What will the future bring??  I wonder about what I bring to time shared with her and her with me…and others?  I treasure our time shared and wonder how it will be going forward mother and daughter.

Another day I spend time enjoying/playing with my newest grandbabe, 7 months old.  She recognizes me and my heart sings….to smiles, and her quiet laughing face, her joy to pick up toys, roll, touch, eat…. She will sometimes play hiding games – “Ah boo!, and then not… “  And I see this wee girl’s happy observation and her growing strength and all of us that celebrate her place in our lives.  I look forward to what she brings into my days -- thinking about what I can bring to her life as she brings so much already to mine…and others.

My older granddaughter is 2+ and is talking in two languages, expressing herself in phrases and questions and answers…. remembering details is one of her things.  My daughter, her Mom recently shared with me that she has been starting her own sentences in questions and then answering (when she knows an adult would say “No” )  with “Sure,sure, sure”.  She is affirming her own choices, herself!  Of course, it is adorable and more importantly wonderful she knows what she wants…. What matters to her.

And then it occurred to me that all of these experiences of young and elder and in between can all be seen /understood through the same lens. 

Celebrating what is life-giving happens in the moment, by moment, by …. 

Whether wind and water, leaf dance and bird, elder or child, growing or waiting, struggling or flowing through….

Life is best lived without longing or regret, just moment by moment.  Present and connected by beauty and love.

If Women Rose Rooted

It is not accurate to say that I recently read a book called If Women Rose Rooted. It was more like a delicious meal that one takes small bites of and savours in the mouth, wanting it to last forever but knowing that it will eventually be consumed.  I wanted to keep every bit of it in my mind and breath and body.

Sharon Blackie

Author Sharon Blackie is a psychologist, writer and mythologist.  In her therapy practice and her writing she has explored myth as a path to transformation.  And she is intensely connected to the land in Scotland and Ireland.  In If Women Rose Rooted she explores the ancient Celtic myths that rose out of that land, in which women were protectors of the land and water.  She feels that by remembering these old stories, women today can find their voices once again and speak out for the land.

Blackie relates how Western women lost control of their stories when the Romans replaced the stories with those of Christianity.  She writes, “When I was a child, this cultural story about who we are as women made me feel small, insignificant, empty:  As I grew older it made me angry:  Angry, because it justifies a world in which men still have almost all the real power over the cultural narrative – the stories we tell ourselves about the world, about who and what we are, where we came from and where we’re going – as well as the way we behave as a result of it. “ (p. 6)

photo from Sharon Blackie's facebook page

She goes on to explain that she couldn’t even imagine a world in which women and men worked together in partnership to create a sustainable world.  After exploring these themes, she asks the all important question:  “What if women rose again?  Not in battle, but what if we could reclaim, somehow, that power and respect which women had lost?  What if we could somehow dismantle this planet-destroying patriarchy; and recreate a world in which we lived in balance?”  (p. 12)

Blackie writes, that in order for women to rise again, they need new stories or perhaps the old, old ones.  She explains the importance of stories, writing, "It’s not simply that we like to tell stories, and to listen to them; its that narrative is hard-wired into us.  It’s a function of our biology; and the way our brains have evolved over time.  We make sense of the world and fashion our identities through the sharing and passing on of stories.  And so the stories that we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, and the stories that are told to us by others about the world and our place in it, shape not just our own lives, but the world around us.  The cultural narrative is the culture.” (p.12)

The rest of the book has the pattern of first an old Celtic story, Blackie’s understanding of it from a psychological point of view and then a new story about a modern day women who exemplifies the message of the story.  This weaving of old and new stories is very powerful as it bypasses the story in the middle which has done so much damage.  She tells stories of the Selkie’s skin, the Wasteland, the Fischer King, Ceridwen, keeper of the cauldron, and the ancient creator goddesses.

Blackie outlines the heroine’s journey which differs from the familiar hero’s journey.  She describes the heroine’s journey writing, “…it was a journey in which men and women could become allies, and the stories which guided me arose from a culture in which both men and women were valued for the different things they brought to the world.”

I have become aware of other women in Great Britain who are using the old stories and who are embodying their messages.  And they are being joined by women in North America as well who want to do something about the state of the world.  TreeSisters, the group of women who want to reforest tropical areas through partnership with local reforestation groups is an example of this.  They are working to strengthen women in this way as well, so that they can remember who they are and find their strength in community, just like trees in the forest do.

The history that we know of the world has never seen women join collectively all around the globe before.  What if women do rise rooted?  What story will we tell then?

Rise and Root from Sharon Blackie's facebook page

Learning to Listening to the Beaver's Tale

A late November day, found us hiking on land near Washago, Ontario  that had just been donated to the Couchiching Conservancy .  The lower part of the trail wound through huge white pines, hemlocks and a few ash trees. We walked on the soft forest floor of reddish brown needles.  Then we began to climb a hill past errant glacier-placed boulders where the oak trees grew.  Most of the leaves had fallen but the forest floor was full of wintergreen leaves still succulent and dark green with their cheerful red berries.  We picked some berries to chew and savour the fresh wintergreen blast of flavour as well as some leaves to make tea with later on.

The ponds on the upper part of the trail had started to freeze and the curving, wavy patterns on the ice made me stop and look, imagining what currents or underwater plants caused the formations.  After awhile, we walked until we got to a little dock with one cottage chair on it.  I stood and breathed deeply, feeling peaceful in this serene place.  

Then I became aware of a sensation on my back as if a weight were draining off.  I felt wave after wave of tension wash down my back. I felt very grateful for this release that was seemingly just happening.  I had experienced the same sensation the week before standing in a different forest.  That time it felt as if I had laid down a big heavy backpack.  Perhaps my sixty-year-old body has learned to relax in the woods while my mind takes in all the sights and sounds and my artist’s brain begins to explode with ideas and images.

Beaver lodge

After awhile, we started to walk back down the trail but something in the opposite direction seemed to be calling me.  I walked off the path and through the trees, my feet crunching on the fallen brown oak and maple leaves, to the top a little knoll.  Childlike curiosity moved me onward.  My partner had come with me in my exploration and as I stood there trying to figure out what had pulled me forward, he pointed out an old beaver lodge just below me on the edge of the pond.  

Oh, I thought, the beaver has something to tell me.

I stood and waited, breathing in the forest air.  After a few moments, it came to me in a strange sentence.  “Beaver pelts were the currency of colonization.”  I was keenly aware of this piece of Canadian history because my partner and I have been auditing a MOOC (Massive Open On-line Course) from the University of Alberta called Indigenous Canada.  The 12 week free course has expanded our knowledge of this history by including the perspective from Indigenous people.  We have been learning things we never were taught in school about the fur trade, treaties and current issues and working to integrate this new knowledge into our sense of the history of this land.

Fresh beaver cuts

We had learned that beavers were nearly hunted to extinction because of the demand from Europe to make hats from their pelts.  The decline in the fur trade once the animals became scarce set the Indigenous people up for poverty, starvation and then once weakened, being forced by the government of the time into signing treaties that were never honoured and into moving onto reserves that were too small and too separated from each other.  I remembered seeing Kent Monkman’s painting The Massacre of the Innocents (you can see this painting by clicking on the title) in which Europeans are killing beavers everywhere.  For Monkman, the beaver s in this painting are actual beavers as well as a symbol of the Indigenous people who were slaughtered through disease, and starvation. 

It used to be that when I saw a beaver, I thought of the animal on the nickel, of hard work, of pristine nature, of some vague notion of being a proud Canadian.  That beaver was the symbol of what  author Junot Diaz calls "Canada’s narrative of innocence."  But now the beaver told me a different story.  Extirpation, species extinction, genocide are the hard truths and legacies of the colonialism brought by my ancestors.  The reasons they did this are I suspect, part of the bigger European history of invasions, imperialism and war.  That history radically changed this country and perhaps seemed "business as usual" to the colonizers.  Justice Murray Sinclair has pointed out that even though genocide only became illegal in 1948, not being illegal doesn’t make something right.

Beaver trail on the soft ice

And here, now, was a beaver lodge, off the marked path, hidden from view.  The beavers came back.  We see evidence of them all the time. The assimilation and genocide of Indigenous people was equally unsuccessful.  Indigenous people are healing, recovering their cultures, languages, traditions and becoming a strong voice for protection of the land and water. 

As I learn more about the history of this land, I try to imagine not just 150 years and not just 400 years of the French coming to this area of Ontario.  I try to imagine thousands of years of Indigenous presence here in relationship with all of nature.  When Canadians go to Europe they come back impressed with the thousands of years of history that they can imagine since temples, roads, buildings, archaeological digs and museums give them a visual example of past human presence.  

Here in Canada, there are some archaeological digs whose contents get put, often disrespectfully, in glass cases in museums.  But we have to imagine thousands of years of human presence on this land that was in so much harmony with nature that virtually no physical evidence remains for us to see.  The history is in the stories, in the culture, in the languages, in the traditions that were passed down for all those years.  Perhaps we can’t “see” the evidence of the history of this land.  Perhaps we have to listen to it instead.  Listen to the sound of the languages that came from this land.  Listen to the stories that came from this land.  Listen to the worldview that came from this land.  It is not what we were taught in school.  It is a different way of knowing, of connecting with the past. Somehow, standing by the beaver lodge, some of this knowing came to me as I stood quietly and listened to the land, to the water, to the lodge. 

Evidence of a beaver breaking through the ice

We hiked back down the hill, through the oaks, through the white pines and balsam firs to the car that we had left parked beside the old cabin.  There were two women sitting on folding chairs on the porch eating their lunch.  One of them called out to us and introduced herself.  She was one of the people who had donated the land to the conservancy.  We went over to chat with her and learned that she lived in the nearby town now.  She shared stories of her time on this land, of carrying the canoe up each spring and back down in the fall. She told us the story of how they built the dock, carrying the wood up the hill to the pond.  We were eager to hear her stories.   We told her how much we loved this property and we told her the story of seeing a trumpeter swan on the pond on our first visit.  She had never seen a swan there before.  She hadn’t seen any other people visiting the land so she was happy to see us enjoying being there.   It was good to connect with one of the people who had turned this piece of land into public property again.  Land that was taken from the First Nations with treaties that were never honoured and sold numerous times was now available for anyone who wanted to visit it.  This is not repatriating the land to the original people although one woman in Ontario is trying to do just that, but perhaps it is the next best thing or perhaps it is a stepping stone in a history that we are not only writing but righting.