Speaking for the Whole

I went to do my once-a-week grocery shop this past Sunday.  I have been going to the same store since the lock down in March and always on Sunday morning at 8 am.  This used to be the senior’s hour but that no longer exists.  I live in an area where there are full time residents as well as summer cottagers.  So far, Sundays at 8 am has worked well.  It is my way of avoiding people since I am going when they aren’t so likely to be there.  I follow the arrows, only touch what I am planning to buy, wearing a mask and gloves.  It has worked well until this past Sunday.

I had just come into the store, taken a cleaned cart and was turning to enter the produce area (according to the arrows) when I had to immediately stop.  There was a man standing in the narrow space between the tomatoes and the carts.  So I stopped and waited.  Nothing happened.  He didn’t appear to be shopping.  There was a woman shopping on the other side of the carts so I assumed he was waiting for her.  He suddenly noticed me and stepped back one step into the carts.  That is when another man started walking past him towards me.  He stopped and looked at me as if I was in his way even though he was going against the arrows.  I thought maybe he wanted to go past the tomatoes to the deli counter but no he wanted to go past me to the cash register.  There was nowhere for me to go except back out of the store.  He finally backed up a little bit beside the other man and I had to squeeze past them.  They refused to take another route or clear the area.  I  mentioned the arrows as I passed them.

Finishing in the produce aisle, then bread and meat I turned to go up the next aisle following the arrows.  There was another man standing in the middle of the aisle doing something on his phone which was in his hand.  I stopped and waited.  Eventually he noticed me and backed up to the food.  I said I would wait until he was finished.  He became agitated and told me to pass him.  If I didn’t, I would have to turn around, miss the next aisle, circle back and so I begrudgingly went past him.  I did mention that this was not the place to play on his phone as I passed him.

The rest of the shop was fine.  By the time I got to the check out and the clerk asked, “How are you?”  I told the truth.  “I’m feeling a bit frazzled from dealing with the cottagers,” I answered.  Of course, she didn’t actually want the truth so she remained silent.  I realized that I was very frazzled and told her about the man with the phone.  She gave me the answer that I’m sure her employers have told her to say.  “You have to be patient.  There’s no point getting angry.”  Well, I am an older woman and that sort of statement didn’t help. 

I got home, cleaned all the food coming in as usual and then went for a swim in the lake to cool off in more ways than one.  I stood in the deep water letting the waves move through me and thought about why I was so upset.  Gradually, it came to me.  I was raised to let men do whatever they wanted.  It was easier that way.  It was safer that way.  This is what my mother and other women of her generation taught me.  I was taught to work around men because they were difficult and sometimes dangerous.  Who knows what would happen if they got angry?

But now, I am an older woman and I am tired of keeping quiet and changing aisles and backing out of stores.  I have a voice and I am trying to use it.  I had used it in the store but I hadn’t actually got one of the three men to play by the rules.  They all stood their ground and I had to put myself at risk to get past them. 

Standing in the waves, I wanted to cry.  I felt as though I had broken the code, the code of placating men in order to stay safe.  The female clerk had given me the same code.  “Be patient.  It’s no use getting angry.”  But this wasn’t a case of being patient.  I wasn’t waiting until they picked their fruit or cans.  They were exerting their privilege of being able to stand and walk and do whatever they wanted without any thought for the rest of us.

Well that seems to me to be the same privilege that is destroying the earth and making this virus difficult to control.  Being patient and not getting angry has allowed this privilege to create un-safety or threat for the majority of people who don’t have this privilege.  My training advised me to risk my own health rather than upset these men past a certain point.

Perhaps it is time for women to start speaking up for the whole community, for the whole world.  I have been using the strategy of avoidance to keep safe.  I am staying out of stores except once a week, off of busy trails, off of public transit and away from groups.  But now, this strategy isn’t working as people are out and about and seemingly unaware of what they are doing.  The grocery store is staffed by teenagers on a Sunday morning and I have noticed that they are not going to take on people and point out the rules.  I know that some larger stores hire security guards to enforce the procedures.  But here, I am on my own.

It occurs to me that I need to speak out to protect myself.  I need new strategies to communicate.  Perhaps using sentences that include things like cooperation is a new skill I need to develop.  Perhaps, getting used to the discomfort of communicating the idea of cooperation to people who seem to find this an alien idea is another.  Perhaps this is where the difficult conversations will occur.  This virus will stay with us while we fail to cooperate.  Climate change will continue while we fail to cooperate.  Following the old code will not keep me safe and it will not keep any of us safe.

After I swam, we went for a walk in the forest.  Due to the mosquitoes, we haven’t met anyone in the bush for weeks.  There was one car parked at the entrance but it is a big forest.  I started to calm down as I walked under the trees but my nervous system was still on high alert.  I could feel it buzzing.  We followed the trail down the hill to the river which we always do and stopped to look at the Partridgeberry patch to see if any berries were forming yet.  We were just about at the river when I heard a sharp dog’s bark very close by.  I startle easily at the best of times and I was still on high alert, so I made a startled cry.  Then I saw a young woman through the trees by the river just before a barking black Lab ran at us.  I am not usually afraid of dogs and I wasn’t afraid of him.  But he was sure afraid of us.  He was growling and barking at our legs as the young woman called out, “Don’t worry, he’s a friendly dog.”  Trusting the evidence before my eyes, I did not try to pet him.  I talked calmly to him and stood still as did my partner.  The young woman called the dog to no avail.  Then she started to walk towards the dog and us.  She was about six feet away from us and still moving when I ordered, “Don’t come near us.  Social distance!”  She caught herself and took an arc towards the dog instead and put him on a leash.  She then led him and the other off leash dog away down the path. 

The message was becoming clearer.  I can’t expect other people to keep me safe and apparently avoidance is not working very well.  I can use my voice and my body language to do so however.  I usually make myself smaller so as not to inconvenience other people.  But, this needs to change.   It seems that I need to become larger and remind people to think of the whole group.

I have had to do this occasionally on the walking and biking trail that runs through our village along Georgian Bay.  Hundreds of people have been driving to the village, parking their cars and getting on bicycles to cycle on the trail.  We only attempt to take a walk at supper time.  But even then, people riding two abreast come straight towards us or even worse from behind with no warning.  We can step off of the paved path for about a foot before we encounter thick poison ivy.  The trail is about 7 feet wide.  Even without a pandemic, it would be polite for the cyclists to ride in single file when passing pedestrians since we are sharing the trail.  But not these days.  I have found myself standing in the middle of the trail and directing them to ride single file using my hands like those men that direct jets to park.  Some cyclists comply but some refuse and then I remind them about sharing space.  I do not say anything about them as people, just about the actions that would make it safe for all of us.

What would happen if all of we older women started to take on a leadership role in the community from within its midst?  Most of us don’t care what other people think of us.  This is not about being liked.  If we were valued by society, these people would not be putting us at risk.  So, what if we took our nurturing energy that was once used to raise children and used it to help our society grow up and think of the whole?  What if we embodied our power and found ways to speak, not out of anger or fear, but out of wisdom?  What if the world needs our voices?  Perhaps it is time for us to speak for the whole.

Heart-of-the-Earth

Ever since the lock down stage of this pandemic, I have been walking in a section of the Simcoe County Forest near my home.  When I started, there was ice and snow and only a few plants emerging from the forest floor.  Now, there are thousands of plants, trees and mosquitoes.  And, on every visit, the forest community shows me something new.

A patch of Heal-all in bloom

A week ago, I discovered a lot of Self Heal or Heal-all (prunella vulgaris) plants that were in bloom.  These members of the Mint Family don’t grow very tall.  They have square stems and lanceolate leaves that grow in an opposite formation.  The large square flower head have multiple purple lipped flowers with fringed bottom lips.

Close up of Heal-all flowers

This plant can be found in lawns or on the edges of forests, abandoned fields, and disturbed areas.  The subspecies Prunella vulgaris vulgaris is native to Eurasia but has made its way around the world and is considered invasive in some areas.  It is also called Lawn Prunella as that is where it is found in this part of Ontario. It grows very close to the ground.  The subspecies Prunella vulgaris lanceolata grows upright and is native to this area. The young shoots and leaves are edible and the plant has been used medicinally for a long time for a variety of conditions. 

I first noticed the purple flowers of these plants last week which are likely the native subspecies.  They were popping out all along the edge of one section of the trail.  I had never seen so many all in one place.  They seemed to vibrate and wave to get my attention.  I knew their name but not the uses and so I wanted to go home and read up on them before picking.

By this past Saturday, I had done some research and had decided to pick some leaves to dry.  A tea made from these leaves is good as a gargle for sore throats or an eye wash for conjunctivitis.  The other uses such as, anti-cancer or HIV didn’t interest me at the moment.  I did take note that the crushed fresh leaves had an antiseptic quality that might come in useful however.

And so, after asking permission to pick from the plants and giving an offering which is a way to show respect and build a relationship, I was given the go ahead.   Since the plants are short and don’t have a lot of leaves, I decided to just pick one leaf from each plant that got my attention.  Some of the plants were surrounded by what we call The Guardians (Poison Ivy).  I left those alone. 

Once I reached the end of the first trail, I felt that I had enough.  But, turning the corner, there were more plants that I hadn’t noticed last week and they seemed to be offering themselves to me, so I kept up the pattern of one leaf per plant.  This seemed like a sustainable way to harvest and there are few other people even visiting the forest these days thanks to the mosquitoes.  I felt like I was collecting an offering from each member of the Heal-all family that lived in the forest.  They felt generous to me and I was grateful.

I often feel conflicted about the plants which my ancestors brought to this part of Canada when they become “invasive”.  I find it hard to hate the plants, as they are just being who they are.  But, I can see how they change life for the indigenous plants just as my ancestors did in such a harmful way for the Indigenous people.  I wonder, if we, the descendants of those who brought the plants were to renew our relationship with the descendants of the original plants, if we could bring them under better control and negate their negative effects.  I don’t know for sure, but the idea intrigues me and I feel drawn to renewing these relationships.  And so, taking one leaf from each plant felt like renewing the relationship of reciprocity with this particular community of native plants.  Who knows how this will inform renewing my relationship with the alien subspecies of Heal-All.  That will be another story.

Despite my netted hat, long pants, socks, shoes and light jacket, I still got some mosquito bites through my clothes and on my hands as I stopped to pick.   This made me think of my blood being carried away by these little winged female creatures and becoming new mosquitoes or being eaten by birds or the many toads that hop about in the woods.  Then my blood would become a toad or a bird, and then maybe a snake or a fox or a coyote or compost in the forest floor and then a tree or a Heal-all plant.  The forest was giving to me and I was giving a very tiny amount of blood in an unintentional reciprocity that was evidence of our interconnection. 

A lack of knowledge or acknowledgement of our place in all of life is what some people feel is one of the deep causes of this pandemic.  At the very least, the pandemic has shown us how we are interconnected in ways that we cannot ignore or deny.  Perhaps our ignorance, denial and lack of reciprocity is what needs to be healed.  This is something which we all need to self heal.  And that is when the flowers of the Self Heal (Heal-all) started to get my attention.  I wondered if they had something to say about this idea.  Flowers are used in the creation of Flower Essences to facilitate emotional or spiritual healing.  Perhaps these tiny purple flowers were trying to get my attention.  And so, I asked permission and was flooded with “What took you so long?” in response.

Suddenly, I could see lots of Heal-all plants on the next section of the trail which was bathed in sunshine.  So, I collected the flower heads of some of these, leaving most to provide seeds even though they are a perennial plant that grows by spreading stems which can also root at the nodes.  After a few minutes, I came to the end of these plants and then walked the rest of the trail where they were nowhere to be found.

We walk a loop in the forest and repeat part of the trail on the way out.  When I came to the first section of the trail where I had collected leaves, I thought that maybe I should have collected flowers instead of just leaves.  I second guessed myself.  So, I reached out for the first flower I saw.  My glasses were a bit steamed up from the sweat on my face but as soon as I picked the flower, I felt the sharp sting of a wasp or bee (who love these plants) in between my third and fourth fingers on my right hand.  I dropped the flower and yelled “Ouch.” 

I didn’t want a big, fat, swollen finger and so my mind clicked into gear.  I was in the middle of a natural pharmacopoeia.  What would help?  Obviously, Self Heal has an antiseptic quality for wounds, so I grabbed a leaf, crushed it up and rubbed it on the sore spot.  Then I picked up the flower head that I had dropped so it didn’t go to waste.  What next?  There is lots of Curly Dock in this part of the trail.  It is good to settle down Stinging Nettle stings.  Why not?  I picked a leaf, crushed it up and rubbed it on the sting which was building in intensity.  What else?  Mud is good for a wasp sting and I didn’t know what had stung me.  So, I stooped down and collected some cold, damp, sandy mud from the trail and packed it onto the sting.  I could feel the bite calming down now and I started to walk again.  Quite quickly, I came across a patch of Jewel weed leaves which are an antidote for Poison Ivy.  I cleared off the now warm mud and applied a number of crushed Jewelweed leaves onto the area.  After a couple of minutes, I was back at the car and my hand no longer hurt at all.  There was no obvious swelling either.

I reflected on the experience once the pain was gone.  I had not asked permission to pick the flowers from that section of the plants.  I had asked for leaves only.  The sting was a good reminder to be a respectful harvester.  I have to admit that I did not ask permission to take the leaves that helped me once I was stung.  The plants seemed to offer themselves like kind aunties once I was injured.  And yes, I was grateful for the healing and for the lesson.

Once at home, I washed the leaves which were a bit sandy from the splashing rain that shot sand onto them last weekend.  Then I laid them out to dry.  I have more than I can use for myself, so I will share them with others.  I carefully took the tiny flowers from the flower heads and put them into spring water that I had poured into a ceramic bowl that my daughter made for me.  Then I put it out into the sun which can help transfer the flowers’ essence into the water. 

In this time of global pandemic and global healing, these flowers have offered themselves.  I discovered that this plant is also called Heart-of-the-Earth which is quite beautiful.  Over and over again, Earth offers us healing despite what we are doing to her.  Our healing is critical so that we can right our relationship with her and she like a good mother is offering her help.  It is my job to accept that help and allow my natural ability to self heal take over. 

The Whisperings of the Wild Ginger

The dark green fuzzy hearts cover the forest floor and Anna amidst them on a fallen log.  The hardwood trees of the forest are still without leaves.  The spring has been so slow that it seems as if the trees are holding their breath, waiting, for warmth.  Today, there is no wind and the sun appears from behind the grey clouds, a bursting warm smile that bathes them all.

She sits quietly, observing the huge patch of Wild Ginger before her, listening, listening.  The picture of the roots of these plants flashes in her mind over and over.  Earlier in the spring, the tiny patch of Wild Ginger that she tends by the shore of the lake, had been flooded.  The rising water had washed away the topsoil and left the large, snakelike root exposed.  At first, she hadn’t known what she was looking at.  Every few inches, a leaf bud erupted straight up towards the sky.  She had to remember, to search her mind for what grew in that part of the garden.  The root structure was fascinating as it twisted and turned.  The long rhizome had many leaf buds.  She had imagined that each leaf had its own root, but not so.  The whole patch was connected.  After studying it, she covered it up with soil to protect it. 

After the next flood, she did the same.  But on the third flood in a few weeks, she decided to relocate the whole root mass to higher ground.  She had transplanted Wild Ginger to a number of spots in other years, but it was happiest by the edge of the lake.  That is until this spring.  She didn’t want to find out how many times it would tolerate flooding before it gave up.  So, she planted it up in the yard of the house beside another patch she had planted the previous year, under the Maples and Oaks.  She knew that Wild Ginger grew in hardwood forests and thought it might be happy in the corner of the yard beside the big trees.

Walking in this forest in late spring, Anna had come across a folded leaf right in the middle of the trail.  She picked it up, unfolded it and discovered that it was the heart-shaped leaf of Wild Ginger.  It felt like opening a letter, a love letter from the forest saying, “I am waiting for you.  Come and find me.”

She had explored much of the forest already and had seen Wild Leeks, Trout Lilies, Hepatica, Blue Cohosh and Trilliums but no Wild Ginger.  There was one path that had been getting her attention for the past few days but it had been cold and she ignored the intuitive pull.  Now, she thought that that must be the way to the ginger.  It had been calling for a few days before leaving her a leaf letter. 

And so, the next morning, she took the beckoning trail.  When she came to another smaller trail that led down the embankment to the river, she followed it.  Climbing over fallen logs and sliding on the wet mud, she made her way to the bottom of the river valley safely.  Lifting her eyes up from the ground, she saw dark green plants stretching out as far as she could see.  Carefully making her way over the twigs, around the raspberry cane’s sharp thorns, and under low hanging branches, she got close enough to see what was growing there.  She burst out laughing as her eyes took in the emerald green, fuzzy, hearts of thousands of Wild Ginger leaves.  She had had no idea that they were here all this time, waiting for her.

Anna found a level fallen log to sit on and tried to quiet herself so that she could listen.  What did the Wild Ginger have to say to her?  The roots of the ginger by the water’s edge flashed in her mind.  She tried to clear the image and just listen.  Once again, the roots flashed.  On the third flash, she got the message.  It was the roots that were communicating, not the leaves. 

She had recently been in touch with a second cousin in England who had shared his research on the family tree.  The website he used took her back six generations to ancestors she had never known about. She had grown up in a small nuclear family with one brother and parents who had emigrated from England.  A few visits with relatives in her life and lots of letters was all she had in the way of a family.  Her parents hadn’t been interested in talking about their ancestors, or perhaps it was too painful.  At any rate, she had grown up without knowledge of roots.  She was given wings and she had taken advantage of those but she never felt she was truly Canadian and certainly not English and in her later years she had taken to thinking of the Earth as her home.

It was, she imagined, like being adopted and finding your birth family.  All these names and dates of family members, long gone.  She wondered if she looked like them, if she had certain family traits, if she would have reminded someone of someone else.  “Doesn’t she look like, so-and-so?”  they may have said.  It was a lot to take in, suddenly being a part of something that went back, well, to the beginning. 

She looked at all the Ginger leaves spread out before her.  What if each leaf was a person in her family?  What if she was one of the leaves?  What if she was connected to them all by one convoluted root system? She had spent a great deal of time imagining herself as part of the web of all life.  Her imagined pictures started out as a two-dimensional web, like the kind that a spider would spin.  Recently, it had become three dimensional with strands of light, or thin silk connecting everything.  She imagined how it would feel, being in such a web.  Kind of snug and cozy, she imagined.  Kind of safe and calm.  No where to go and no one else to be, just herself.  And then she just had to renew her relationship with the life that she came in contact with.  She could do that.

The ginger had given her a new image.  She could take her place in the family, in the patch of Wild Ginger and rest there.  Her mother had felt the loss of her family for so long that she had made sure that she held all the threads for the family.  She didn’t have the peace of mind to be able to extend those threads to her daughter.  She had died with those threads clutched tightly in both fists.  Her father had walked away from it all.  It wasn’t until his dementia set in, in his nineties that he spoke of his mother and father, in the voice of a little boy. But to him, they were his mother and father, not her grandparents.  The few strings she managed to create had been done on her own, which seemed to displease her mother.  And the one string that was left now, with her cousin, was the one that brought in the whole family.  Now in her seventieth decade, the family was revealed just like the Wild Ginger roots.

The lake water was already high when the west wind became wild and pushed the water by her garden higher and higher, over and over again.  The lake had washed away the soil, revealing the roots.  The quarantine due to a pandemic and the cold spring weather had kept people in their houses, on their computers, reaching out to friends and family.  She had been cleaning up papers and came across various pieces of the family tree.  She remembered that her cousin had sent information in the past and she decided to email him and ask him about it.  He had happily connected her to the website he used to work on his ancestry.  He showed her the roots of the family.

She had followed the names of her grandparents and her greats back to the end of the 18^th century.  The same names popped up over and over; John, Thomas, Ann, Mary, Jane, Elizabeth, George, William.  She had taken notes on page after page, trying to sort them out, recording their dates, where they came from and where they died.

Had these ancestors wished for a better life for their children and grandchildren to come?  Had they wished for a better life for her?  Would they have been able to imagine someone in their family living across the ocean so far away?  Would they have advice about life to share with her?

She brought her eyes and her mind back to the soft green forest floor and felt the calm peacefulness of the scene.  There was room for each leaf and they chose different angles to have full light exposure even though they like to grow in the shade.  She felt her body relax and become still and she breathed it all in.  Perhaps this is how her mother felt when she was still in England.  She had once said that if there was no one at her own home, she would go from relative to relative’s homes until she found someone who was in.  Perhaps, this feeling that she was getting, looking at the ginger “ancestors” was normal for her mother.  Perhaps, the loss of it was so great that there was nothing left for her to pass on to her daughter.

Anna closed her eyes and imagined being surrounded by her ancestors, there in the forest.  She took a deep breath and allowed her body to feel surrounded, cared for, belonging.  Yes, that was it, belonging and having the right to be here, on Earth.  It was okay that she was here.  She carried some of the genes, she carried their wishes and their stories.  They had passed all of these things to her and it was her turn to make something of it.  Her turn to make something of it for the world, for them, for those that had come and were coming after her and for herself.  She touched one ginger leaf and stroked it’s fuzzy surface gently as if it were her own heart. 

Smiling, she walked up the path, in the company of her family and the forest dwellers, light strands flowing from her fingers and feet to them all, supported in the web that had seemed absent although it had been there all the time.

What Would It Take to Celebrate Canada?

Canada Day.  Every year, I ponder what this day means.  The more history that I learn, the less proud I am of being Canadian.  Our home on Native land is sometimes sung during the national anthem and this feels true to me.  I am ambivalent at best about celebrating a colonial history built on the murder and displacement of the First Peoples.  And this is not just in the past.  It is still going on even today, Canada Day.

And yet, I was born here although my ancestors were not.  This is where I find myself.  I love the land and the waters in this territory.  I am a guest here on the ancestral land of the Wendat people and the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg.  I am proud to live in a land that was protected and cared for by these people for thousands of years.  I am saddened and sickened by what the newcomers have done to these people, the land, the water and the other than human life in this territory over the past four hundred years.

Four hundred years seems to be a small blip in time compared with thousands of years and yet so much has been damaged and lost that it feels overwhelming.  But the Indigenous peoples of this land are holding firm.  They understand their responsibility to care for the land and the water.  They are the ones in court fighting the giant extraction companies that just want to take resources, create damage and then move on.  Indigenous peoples know that this is their home and that they have a sacred responsibility to care for it.

Why don’t we, the newcomers feel this way?  We protect our own “private property” while throwing garbage out the window of our cars.  Why don’t we act as though this land, these waters are our home, as though we are planning to stay here, as though we care about what we leave for our children and grandchildren?  Why do we call her Mother Earth and then treat her as a stranger?

And so, this year on Canada Day we went out on the water in our canoe.  I made my offering to the water and I sang to the water.  These things I have learned from my Indigenous friends, to show respect and love.  My partner and I marveled at the beautiful and fragrant flowers on the Dogwoods and the spotted Garpikes swimming beside us.  Our hearts thrilled when we saw the Ospreys on the nest for one more year.  In this way, we renewed our relationship with them.  We smiled to hear the Bullfrog and the Leopard frog sing from within the cattails.  Yes, this is our home and we love it.

Then we came across an old green tarp trapped in the branches of a shrub that stuck out of the water.  I began pulling on it and feeding it into a big bucket we keep in the canoe for just this purpose.  I had to unsnag the plastic from the dead branches.  It was not easy.  My partner came forward in the canoe to help.  It is an 18 foot freighter canoe with a flat bottom and it is quite stable.  He had to stand up and pull hard as the tarp was covered in algae and was very heavy.  I shifted over to the starboard side of the canoe to counterbalance him.  The tarp was huge and weighed down but with one final tug it broke free and we stuffed it all inside the bucket.  Later we stretched it out on the dock to dry.  It smelled pretty bad as we drove it up to the house so we could get it into a garbage bag and send it to a landfill site.  Not such a great idea but this is the reality of how our community is living here at the moment.

We frequently pull garbage out of the water when we are out in the canoe.  Some of it can be reused such as planks of wood and boat bumpers.  Styrofoam bait boxes and insulation have to be thrown in the garbage.  Water bottles and cans can be recycled.  This is something we can do to show our respect and to show some reciprocity for the life that water gives to us.  But it isn’t a solution.

We newcomers from the past few centuries have a lot to learn from the people who cared for this land before we arrived.  We would do well to listen carefully to their voices, advise and example instead of trying to silence, incarcerate and force assimilation on them.  Admitting that our worldview is seriously flawed, decolonizing our thinking and learning from Indigenous people will help us find our way here on this land and these waters in partnership, collaboration and respect.  That would be cause for celebration.