The Gifts of the Season

‘Tis the season of gift giving and I have been given some lovely gifts.  Some are gifts of sweetness which are so welcome as the days get shorter and shorter and the clouds get lower.  They show appreciation for the work that I do all year.  Some are gifts of beauty for those who know that I love artwork and animals.  And some are gifts of warmth and clothing to take care of my physical needs.  And then, there are the gifts of stories that are shared from the heart, stories of life experiences so out of the ordinary that they must be shared.  Stories of love shared, care given, community created.  Here are some of those stories.

At this Solstice time of the year in this extra cloudy fall, the gift of sunshine and hoarfrost is particularly bright.  Ordinary leafless brown stems are transformed miraculously by the building up of ice crystals, decorated by delicate constructions that emerge from out of “thin air”.  Water that goes from vapour to ice in the night.  Then when the sun shines on this multitude of magic you are transported into a kind of fairy world where everything is beautiful and bright.  I tried to take pictures to share with you but anyone who has seen this phenomenon knows that that pictures do not tell the whole story.  Somehow my heart opens, my imagination is ignited and life is suddenly exciting.  That is a gift.

In early December I had the gift of holding a three-week-old baby while he slept.  His perfect face was framed by his impossibly tiny hands.  Every now and then his face would contort just before passing gas which made me giggle.  His legs would occasionally stretch out and I could imagine him doing the same thing while still inside his mom who sat beaming beside me.  We talked about the miracle of a new person growing inside you and the amazement of giving birth.  This feminine story, as old as the human race is one that still does not have its due space in the collective story.  It is one that women tell to each other over and over.  It is one that new fathers tell in a different way, through the lens of their own fatigue and helplessness.  It is one that is told at this time of year in Christian celebrations.  But, if we truly regarded this as a miracle, if we saw this new being as the collections of cells that came together as magically as the frost, nurtured for nine months by a women whose body gave all it had to create a new being; if we saw how the light caught this lovely being and lit up the room; if we felt our hearts open and our imaginations ignite and we stayed that way, then we would create a different kind of world.

I heard stories this week of how women supported and were supported by the people they took care of in their service industries.   Women who while self-employed created communities of care where their clients could feel safe and nurtured.  A story of someone who is suffering from early dementia who asked her local bakery owner to remember her daily order so that when she can no longer remember it, she can still get what she loves.  A story of a woman who is creating safe spaces near her home where she can go despite a terrible tragedy and not have people ask the every day greeting of “how are you?”  She is struggling and just wants four safe place to go.

I have heard many stories in this season of loved ones who took the opposite journey from birth.  Some of these journeys were a long time coming and others were sudden.  They told me stories of the gentle gifts of palliative care teams and how they felt surrounded by support for the first time since their loved ones began falling ill.  Why do we wait for death to suddenly be gentle and caring?  We must have forgotten the teaching of the frost, that the water vapour that created the tiny kingdoms of ice, will return to the sky once the sun warms the air.  We are all beautiful collections of genes, cells, carbon and water that come out of thin air and return again.  We are all beautiful when the light of love shines on us and just as miraculous.  When we are seen as gifts, then we are gifts to those who have the eyes to see them.  We are appreciated, cared for and treasured.

Maybe Christmas reminds us of this, maybe Hanukkah does or maybe the it is the frost.  We all have our own stories. They surround us like the invisible water vapour.  This dark time of the year is the time to tell stories. It is the time to gather around fires and candles and listen to them.  It is the time to treasure what lights us, what warms our hearts and what ignites our imaginations.  Our stories will crystalize into the world we create.

The Forest Family

Sammy was walking through the forest with his dad, his Grandma and his Grandpa.  This was a very special forest that had been protected from logging for over a hundred years by one family.  You could tell that this forest had been much loved.  You could feel it. Some of the trees were so old and so big that it took Sammy and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa reaching their arms wide and holding hands just to circle the trunk.

After they circled a giant Red Oak, Grandma said, “I wonder how tall this tree is.”

“There’s no way of measuring it,” replied Sammy.  “It’s way too tall to get to the top!”

“Hmm,” murmured Grandma.

The Grant family had owned and cared for this forest until there was only one person left in the family.  That man had passed the land on to the Couchiching Conservancy to care for it from now on.  So, anyone who wanted to visit, could follow the paths and be a part of the forest.  And that is what Sammy, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa were doing.

They soon came to a giant tree that had fallen down.  Sammy tried to imagine how loud that crash would have been and what the crash would have felt like in his feet as the earth shook.  Grandpa thought it might be a maple tree judging from the bark.

“Maybe you could measure how tall that tree is by walking along it,” said Grandma.  So, Sammy and his dad figured out how long a stride was and then they climbed up on the log.  Carefully balancing, they stepped along the log counting their strides.  As they walked along the log, Sammy noticed that some parts of it were starting to rot.  The wood felt spongy and soft under his feet.  It was being eaten by insects.  On the side of the log were lots of mushrooms and fungi growing.  The dead tree was feeding them too.

When they got to the end of the log they figured out that it was about 35 metres long.  And that tree wasn’t as wide as the really big one they had found earlier.  Beside the end of the log, they found the stump that was still rooted to the ground.  In the rotted wood at the centre of the stump grew a tiny little White Pine sapling.  A seed had landed in the stump and the rotting wood gave it the perfect protected place to start its life.  Sammy thought it looked so cute growing there.

As they continued their hike they came across a dead tree trunk that was still standing.  The branches had all fallen off.  Grandpa called it a snag and told Sammy to look way up.  There were large holes that had been chipped out of the trunk.

“Do you know who made those holes?” asked Grandpa.

Before Sammy could answer, they heard a loud tapping sound and from behind the trunk hopped a big black and white bird with a bright red head.  It started to peck away at the hole making it bigger.  Wood chips fell to the ground.  The bird stopped every now and then to eat something.

“What’s it eating?” asked Sammy.

“That Pileated Woodpecker is looking for bugs that live in that dead tree.  And when he finds one, his super long tongue will flick it into his mouth.  That bird is a master woodcarver.  He’ll carve a hole big enough for his family to nest in, or maybe a squirrel or a pine marten.  That tree is still giving food to the birds and a home to other creatures.”

The family walked further into the woods and they stopped at a Yellow Birch tree.  Its roots looked like long legs and there was a space under the trunk as though the tree could just walk away.

“Do you know why that tree has roots like that?” asked Grandma.

Sammy shrugged.

“Well, once upon a time,” said Grandma, “this birch tree was growing in a dead stump, just like the one you saw back there.  Over time, the roots grew over the stump to reach the ground.  Eventually, the stump decayed and became part of the forest floor and now there is a space where the stump used to be.  The big old birch is telling you a story about when it was a young tree.”

Farther along the path, they came to a grove of Beech trees that were about 3 metres tall.  Their graceful branches dipped close to Seb’s head and their bright green leaves made him want to touch them.  They were thin and soft in his hand.

Attached to one branch, Sammy saw a little nest.  It was made from twigs and birch bark.  Dad lifted him up and inside, Sammy could see dead pine needles lining the nest.  “Where are the birds?” asked Sammy.

“I guess they grew up and flew away once they were big enough,” said Dad.  “But these pieces of the pine and the birch trees and little sticks from other trees kept the babies safe and warm while they were little.”

“These small trees are still just kids themselves,” said Grandpa.  “Let’s look for their mama.”

Sure enough, near the young trees was a big beech tree that reached up to the top of the forest canopy.

“This is the mama tree,” said Grandpa.  “She dropped her seeds hidden in beechnuts onto the ground and they grew into the trees you see here.  The forest floor is made up of all the dead leaves and insects and branches and trunks of the trees that become soil.”

“The earth sends up these trees and when the leaves die and fall, they become part of the earth again and then all that life becomes new trees,” added Grandma.

“I wonder if we can find a Grandpa tree,” said Sammy.  So, they all began searching the woods and it was Sammy’s dad who found a really, really, big beech tree.  They all joined hands to reach around the trunk. 

“Maybe this is the Grandpa tree,” said Dad.

Sammy touched the trunk of the tree.  “Hi Grandpa Tree,” he said softly.  Then he took one of his goldfish crackers from his pocket and wedged it into a crack in the bark.  “So, he knows that he’s loved,” he said.

After a few quiet moments, Sammy asked, “Will he fall down too someday?”

“Yeah, maybe insects will eat too much of him, or a disease will weaken him and then a big wind will come or maybe an ice storm and he will crash down to the ground,” said Dad.

“And then he’ll feed insects and mushrooms and be a part of a nest and keep baby trees safe?” asked Sammy.

“Yeah, he’ll still be part of life, but in a different way.”

“Hmm,” murmured Sammy.

Mural Honours Amazonian and Andean Protectors

A giant 160 foot mural was painted on this prominent building in Quito, Ecuador to honour the Indigenous and Andean women who are defending their land from oil, mining and agricultural laws that threaten food sovereignty and ancestral culture.

The project began with community meetings in the Amazon and in a small Andean community where the artists, Mona Caron and Raul Ayala met with women who were actively protecting their land.  Through interviews, storytelling, being defended by these women: the water, land, air, and biodiversity as well as the cultural and spiritual wholeness at stake in the defense of their sovereignty.” ( Mona Caron website)

Community mural meeting

Base of the mural.

The women are Zoila Castillo, Gloria Ushiqua, Cristina Gualinga, Rosa Gualinga, Alicia Weya Cahuiya, Dominga Antun, Bianca Chancosa, Carmen Lozano and Josefina Lema.

Each one was invited to come and paint their traditional face markings on their own portraits as is seen in the photo below.

You can watch a beautifulshort video of the mural here.  And you can read more about this project on Mona Caron's website.

This is an exciting and inspiring story of what women can achieve when they work together.

What Happens When You Mix All the Colours?

When I was about ten years old, my father told me that if you mixed all the colours together, you would get white.  He was an electrical engineer and he was talking about light.  When I asked my best friend’s father what would happen if you mixed all the colours together, he told me you would get black.  He was an artist, a painter.  Two opposite answers to the same question.  Two fathers who lived on the same street.  I have pondered these answers for most of my life.

I later studied physics and the electromagnetic spectrum.  I understand about how white light can be separated into the various colours.  I love rainbows and prisms and anything else that bends light, coaxes, tricks it into revealing its strands.  I am aware that there is beauty hiding in light and that there is more than our eyes can see at any moment.  I am always on the lookout for magic, brilliant beauty revealed at any moment, anywhere.

I also studied painting and how to mix colours to get any colour you want.  I am aware of how combinations create something together which none of the colours is on its own.  Instead of using separation to reveal colour, painting taught me how combining reveals colour.  When I see the colour black, I think of what is hiding there.  Black feels full and abundant to me.  When I look at the feathers of a crow or a raven, I look for the iridescent colours of blue and purple to appear as they do on a grackle.  I am still on the lookout for magic, for what is not immediately seen with the eye.

When is see a crow or a raven flying, my heart soars to the sky and my eyes are glued to its flight until I can no longer see it.  I can’t explain this.  It just has always been true for me.  So perhaps, it is not surprising that she appeared to me in the liminal space between dream and waking.  I call her Corva from the latin genus Corvus for crow and raven. 

Corva is a trickster, a teacher, a crow, a crone.  She flies into my dreams and reveals herself as an old wise woman who gives guidance and then refeathers and flies away.  She has a sense of humour, a sense of irony.  She sees the twists and apparent contradictions that are actually part of the same continuum of life.  She likes shiny things, things that reflect the light.  She is not afraid of the light, she knows that she carries all the colours of the world in her own feathers.  She knows that her DNA emits photos. She knows that she is black because her feathers absorb all the colours of white light.  She knows that death is a transformation as is birth.  As a crow, she eats carrion and eggs.  She allows them all to fly as the muscles that make her wings beat.

Corva reminds me that in between beginnings and endings is the time to live.  It is the time to love, it is the time to hold, the time to learn, the time to teach, the time to share, the time to grow, the time to tell stories. Corva reminds me that all things end, so it is important to show up and appreciate them while they are here.  She reminds me that all things begin and new beginnings are possible every day.  She reminds me that all the colours together are white and black.   She reminds me to be grateful to life, to have an open heart, and to look for magic.

I met her yesterday, at a funeral.  I saw her in the black clothes of the family and friends.  I could feel the density of all the experiences, the stories, the love mixed together like paint.  The black feathers of Corva were adorned by silver necklaces, earrings, watches, bracelets.  She loves shiny things.  I could feel the knowledge that love is what sustains us in the embraces, the holding onto one another, the physical contact that connected us like the bones in one body, to walk together through a ceremony that felt unreal, surreal, of another time. 

Each older woman that I hugged was Corva to me.  We had all seen enough to know what love is, what loss is, to know the magic of children, the delight of new beginnings, the need to pour out love and the bottomless ability of 2children to absorb it.  We could see the darkness and all its richness and we could see the light and all its hidden secrets.  We know that we will walk together through the darkness and the light.  We know that we will transform death and that we will soar as well.

If you mix all the colours, the stories of lives lived, what do you get?  Do you get a blur of vibrant reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues and violet?  Do they compress into a beam of white light?  Do they meld into a rich dark black, full to the brimming? Two men told me that the stories were opposite, they were black or white.  Corva showed me that they are the same.