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.

Law and Good Order

A week or so ago, I was listening to the CBC radio on a Sunday morning and I heard Michael Enright interviewing Harold Johnson about his most recently published book, Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada.  Born from a Cree mother and a Scandinavian father, Johnson was raised in northern Saskatchewan where he worked in mining and logging.  He also served in the Canadian Navy.  He then earned a Master of Law degree from Harvard and worked as a defense lawyer and Crown prosecutor in northern Saskatchewan. He is the author of many works of fiction and non-fiction.

Now, in his sixties,Johnson is reflecting on his time spent in law, and so, he has written Peace and Good Order.  He states his case in a logical manner as any good lawyer would.  He reviews how the law was used to control Indigenous peoples in the territory we now call Canada.  For example the Pass System (1885 – 1951) meant that the Indian Agent on each reserve had to give Indigenous people a pass to leave the reserve to go hunting, fishing or gathering.  And between 1927 and 1951, it was against the law for Indigenous people or communities to hire a lawyer without the government’s consent to bring claims against the government to restore land or rights taken away by the government.  Johnson points out that everything the government of Canada did to Indigenous people was legal, because they made laws allowing themselves to do whatever they wanted.  He goes on to show how Canadian law is harming Indigenous people.

Johnson gives evidence to show that no matter what tweeking has happened to the judicial system over the years, the rates of incarceration for Indigenous people are skyrocketing.  He explains that the Canadian judicial system is based on deterrence instead of remediation.  And deterrence doesn’t seem to work.  He cites the US example.  The US incarcerates 700 out of every 100,000 people which is the highest rate in the world.  In other words, high rates of incarceration does not deter law breaking.  Instead it creates more criminals.

Harold R. Johnson

Johnson explains the links between intergenerational trauma, alcohol and crime.  The real problem is using alcohol to deal with trauma, he feels.  He developed a trial project in La Ronge, to get all the community members to work at decreasing the use of alcohol and the crime rate went down by 15%.  He invites other communities to do the same thing.

Woven throughout the statistics, is Johnson’s personal story and his remorse at working in the legal system without being able to change it.  He feels that it is too large and cumbersome to change and states a legal case for Indigenous people taking over judicial matters for themselves on reserves.  It is a compelling argument.

It was the death of Colten Boushie and the trial of the Gerald Stanley who shot him that instigated this book.  The interview starts with that.  The facts that Johnson reveals about Boushie’s death are somewhat different than the story that the media initially told.  If for no other reason, it is important to hear the actual story based on the evidence from the trial so that we can understand how Indigenous people are not getting justice in Canada.

This clear and well written book can easily be read in three or four hours.  I got a copy from my local library.  Or you can listen to the half hour interview here, where you can also read the transcript of the interview.  Check it out.  The last chapter of the book suggests a new story that would achieve better outcomes for all of us.

What If We Are White Blood Cells?

Well, it’s flu season again which got me thinking about viruses. Many of these are floating around in the air in homes, buses, offices and schools at this time of the year.  When we breath in a virus cell, it can enter a cell, say in the throat, where it highjacks the living cell and tricks it into reproducing more virus cells.  On its own, a virus cannot reproduce.  Once the new virus cells are formed, they escape from the cell and travel throughout the body.  Luckily most of us have good immune systems with white blood cells that recognize, ingest and destroy the virus cells until they are gone and we are well again.

Viruses (photo credit: https://www.quantamagazine.org/viruses-have-a-secret-altruistic-social-life-20190415/)

This reminded me of several things.  The number of scam phone calls that people are receiving seemed to mirror viruses floating around looking for cells to enter.  Some people I know don’t answer the phone now at all and wait for people to leave a message before returning the call.

Even bigger, some of the ideas that governments around the world are promoting seem obviously dangerous and yet there are representatives of those governments trying to sell the idea.  Just like a virus, they want the idea to take up residence in your mind where you can replicate it.  Some old school ideas like racism and sexism seem like well established viruses that are hard to eradicate.  But the ideas that lead to climate change seem more like cancer cells which will destroy the hosts entirely.

photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_blood_cell

Now in the body, our natural immune system fights intruders.  So, how might that apply to societies that are socially ill?  What if some of us were like white blood cells, recognizing harmful ideas and world views.  We can’t go around killing anyone who is a host to these world views, although some people seem to think that that is a good idea.  What about looking within ourselves and seeing if any of this thinking exists within us and if so, working to change that. For example, “Is any of my thinking colonial? How can I recognize that?  How can I decolonize my thinking?”  For this example, I have found that reading the perspectives of many Indigenous authors highlights my own colonial thinking and allows me to figure out how to decolonize those thoughts.

And what about when we encounter world views that we find harmful, being expressed by other people.  It seems to me that world views are brought into peoples’ minds unconsciously and then they replicate like viruses.  Even in the face of evidence to the contrary they may stick to their beliefs.  This is one possible explanation for the continuing popularity of the leader to our south.  Getting into shouting matches or facebook wars seems only to lead to polarization and strengthening of world views. It does not seem to achieve a white blood cell’s task.

I had an interesting experience recently that may shed some light on this idea.  I was taking part in an organized circle of people.  We were using an object as a talking stick which is an Indigenous way of ensuring that the one who holds the object gets to speak and the other people listen.  It is a way of preventing people from butting in with comments and questions as is so often the case in Western culture.  On the first go around of the circle, the leader who was an older man decided that one woman was going on too long and he cut her off saying that he wanted to give other people a turn.  This was surprising as we still had an hour and a half left of the two hours allotted.  In this man’s mind, the goal was to go around the circle twice in two hours even though there were quite a large number of people there. 

On the second round, he decided that I was taking up too much time and he cut me off.  Surprised, since I was in the middle of speaking, I nevertheless passed the stick to the next woman who had been cut off in the first round.  She passed the stick without speaking, as did the next ten women.  One woman spoke briefly and then passed it on.  It turned out that we finished early and the circle just kind of fizzled out.

I took some time to process this experience.  It was certainly not the first time that a man had silenced me.  I felt sad that he had, by shutting down two of us, effectively silenced all the other women in the group.  It was during the night that the deeper feelings bubbled up.  Although this man was trying to give everyone two turns by hurrying everyone, he actually took away the women’s voices.  How did this happen?  I felt my feelings and became aware that the strongest one was that he was in effect saying that my speaking was taking time away from someone else.  That is one good way to silence women.  We are taught not to take up space and certainly not to take up someone else’s space.  He had his eye on the clock and some idea of fairness but it backfired. 

I wrote out my feelings and came to understand that although we were supposed to be working in a paradigm that was circular and had a talking stick, he had supplanted his own paradigm of linear time and his own hierarchy on top of the circular paradigm.  When the two paradigms clashed, I am imagining that it didn’t feel safe for the other women to take a chance of having this happen to them as well and they simply chose to not participate.

So, when it was my turn to lead this group with my friend, I didn’t attack this man or even talk to him about what he had done.  Instead, I designed a way of making people feel safe, of honouring the talking stick and the circle.  I thought that it was important that everyone spoke once if they wished and then let the circle end after the two hours with whoever the last speaker was.  It worked well. 

If I had stayed in the man’s paradigm, which is after all the dominant paradigm in this part of the world, I could have fought him for space and finished what I was saying.  I could have embarrassed him.  This would have strengthened the paradigm or virus of competition.  These responses actually didn’t occur to me at the time as I was simply surprised by his actions.  I could have sent him an angry email, or complained to the organizers.  But that would be replicating the virus so to speak.  Instead, I chose to act out of the paradigm that I think is more helpful, banishing the virus and allowing the whole group to flow in a healthy way.  Maybe that is what imagining myself as a white blood cell looks like.

This is not a new idea.  Gandhi is famous for saying, “Be the peace you want to see in the world.”   I don’t think that I could have changed this man’s world view with arguing.  What I did instead was give the group the experience of working in another paradigm and see how they enjoyed that.  Sometimes, we just can’t imagine a new way of getting things done until we experience it.

So perhaps, by reflecting on our own thinking and our choices, we can ground a new paradigm here, now.  One white blood cell can’t fight millions of virus cells, but enough of them can restore the organism to health. 

So, when I see the posters on the train and subway about viruses being “everywhere” I will think of myself as a white blood cell, not replicating the virus but deactivating it and allowing health to flourish.