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A kid on a bike

Startled by the sharp bbbrrring of a bicycle bell I stop and turn around to see who is coming up behind. It’s a steamy Okanagan afternoon and I’m happy enough to interrupt my jog.

Ice cream. Do you want ice cream? A small brown, very brown boy skids his foot on the loose gravel and brings his bike to a bumpy halt. The wheels on a white plywood box tethered behind bounce sideways and then rest. The lid, decorated with the peeled painted words Ice Cream, settles. The boy, catching his breath, looks relieved that his caravan hasn’t run him over and at the same time looks hopeful that he’s about to make a sale.

What do you have? I ask. Fudgicles, Revellos, Creamsicles, he says.

A Creamsicle, I say. Orange I hope.

Orange it is, he says. That’s 50 cents.

He closes one hand around my two quarters and pulls a brown paper bag out of his pocket with the other. He steadies his rig with his knee until the bag and the coins are stuffed safely back in his shorts. He smiles and pulls out a Creamsicle. He smiles again.

He says, thank you.

As the heat begins its assault on the ice cream I say, thanks and pull off the wrapper. I lap the drips with my tongue.

Where did you come from? I say. I’m not sure if I mean how did you just appear out of nowhere or what brings a young brown boy to this very white interior town? He doesn’t get my question either. He dips his head as if to listen harder. He squints his eyes as if that will help him understand. Then he fans his hand on his chest and says, I’m Portuguese. I’m from Brazil.

He hops up on his bike seat and pushes hard on the pedals. Slowly the rig edges ahead.

As he rolls away I call out, Thanks a lot for the ice cream

Without turning around he calls back, You’re welcome

I watch the boy and the bike and the white plywood box wobble up the road. Little did I know a few months later he’d be sitting at our dinner table eating chicken pasta casserole.

I say, He’s come to stay. He’s now part of our family.

Our kids look at him eagerly, hesitantly, curiously.

I say, You have another brother. He’s our family. Now there are six of us.

He smiles and scoops more casserole. Before I can explain that his foster family can no longer take care of him, that their dad and I agreed to take him in, that everyone will get their say later but he needs a home now…

He says, I picked this family. His English is better now. He says, I looked around this place and knew this is where I want to live. He fans his hand around the table. With you people. In this home.

I’m thinking, wait a minute. You picked? You’re the kid on the bike with the ice cream and the paper bag full of coins.

We hang a flag of Brazil in the room he will share with his new brother. We find a mason jar for all his 50 cents. This will be his permanent stop. He is home.

It’s been almost 35 years and I still wonder who chose whom and in the end, of course, it doesn’t matter. He’s a son, he’s a brother, he’s an uncle, he’s family. It was magic that brought us together.

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Feeling the happy in the birthday

I had a wonderful feeling of deep appreciation on the 13th when I was inundated with birthday wishes. I received Happy Birthday from old friends and acquaintances, friends of my children, nieces and nephews and Facebook friends I have never met from places I have never been.

Happy Birthday has always felt a bit Hallmark to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved a good meal and gifts but it was easy to pass it off as a trivial celebration. Not yesterday. I truly felt remembered. For a few seconds people thought about me and wanted me to have a good day. A special day. “I hope you have cake.” “I love your blog.” “I haven’t seen you for awhile, let’s get together.” “You are celebrating your birthday but the rest of us are celebrating the anniversary of you arriving in the world and making it a better, happier place for us.” (Thanks Chris.)

Perhaps the difference this birthday is that I let myself feel appreciated. My old self is loosening up on the weighty, the important, the significant… I am beginning to experience the simple, the immediate, the gentle, the human, the sweet, the pleasant, the lovable as being the truly exceptional. It’s a wonderful transition.

I never imagined I would have sixty-eight birthdays. Like most people, old was not something I wanted to imagine. But more specifically in my case I was raised to believe that I would never reach old age. I never thought I would reach an age to marry and have children let alone grandchildren.

My family’s religion taught that Jesus was coming back and he would put an end to this world. By 1980. By 2000. There was no way we’d reach 2025. Bible prophecies assured us that we were living in the time of the end. Most importantly the Jews were back in the land of Israel and we were to keep our eyes out for the time that “Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven…Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.”

I remember when I was 11 or 12 years old and those verses from the Gospel of Luke were my memory verses. My Sunday School teacher passed them out in the form of a little sticker. I put it in my “proof book”. We were given one sticker each Sunday. The verses were “proof” that we knew the Bible, that the Bible was God’s word, that we understood what it meant and that everyone else had it wrong. That particular proof was long and the other kids groaned. But I was good at remembering. I took the long proofs as a challenge. I have never forgotten that one.

Those verses described the state of the world for my entire life. They kept me on edge. But there was more. There were the prophecies about the six days, the one thousand years per day, the end of the six thousandth year was 2000 and after that it was the millennium. I don’t expect most of you will understand that one. It seemed pretty straight-forward at the time but it’s not one that stuck with me. I couldn’t believe that the world was only 6000 years old. There wasn’t a “proof”. But it didn’t matter. We were waiting nevertheless (I always loved the way that word flowed with three together).

And yet here I am. Sixty-eight years old. I left the religion thirty years ago. Beliefs about the Bible and the god of my family’s religion have long since dissolved. I am no longer right and everyone else is no longer wrong. Thankfully I no longer believe that I am exceptional, God’s chosen. I no longer believe that I will be saved along with a handful of others like in the story of Noah’s ark while the tiny group of us watch the rest of the world and humankind be destroyed. But the sense that this world is temporary has never left me.

These days there has been a very strange turn of events. I used to be the only “end of the worlder” that I knew (other than the “insiders” in our tiny wee church). I used to look out at “outsiders” in awe and be somewhat jealous at the way they had such confidence in the world. It was as if they believed it would go on forever. They made plans for their lives, their careers, their retirement. They had investments and dreams and ambitions.

But these days everyone has become an “end of the worlder”. Most people have finally realized that the world cannot indefinitely provide for humans’ endless capacity to consume. It will not go on forever. Not as we know it. Something very, very different is in our future.

This doesn’t seem to be a good place to end a blog. I don’t have a tidy wrap up for this. I need to write another blog to take up where this one signs off.

For now it is enough for me to say that the idea that the world as it has been would go on forever is where the problem really lies. It is a world-view problem and it was a delusion from the start. A delusion humans love but a delusion nevertheless. Giving up on a delusion hurts. I know because leaving the fantasies of the church of my early life was excruciating.

But once we come to terms with the fact that our existence as it is could never have been sustainable, once we realize that we were just plain wrong about life then we can begin to figure out how to live with a more temporary sense of being human. Then we can figure out how to treat the earth, its beings and other humans as the gifts they are rather than ours for the taking and the using.

Perhaps it’s this transition that allows me to truly feel the happy in the birthday. Letting go of my own importance and incorporating the good will and generosity of others for one moment, for one day is truly a wonderful thing.

Thank you thank you thank you all.

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Ferron

Ferron. She has us.

“Magical”.

In one word. A review of the Ferron concert from a guest. Ferron’s gritty, husky, throaty whispers, her timing, exquisite stories and humour led us on an emotional tour. We laughed, we cried, we cheered and we sang the night away. “Harmless love, what’s the matter with harmless love”. We had that sort of love on Wednesday night at the Saturna Lodge. Like Ferron said “There are no predatory animals on Saturna.” 

“It was best concert I have ever attended. I mean that. And I’ve been to a lot of concerts.”

From an experienced music-ie. He’s been around. He knows exceptional. He knew he had just felt it.

There are too many lyrics to remember. I can’t pull one up and do it justice. You need to hear them yourself. Scrumptious notions, glimpses, moments. Sometimes like the gentle clicking of knitting needles. Sometimes like fireworks.

“Aaahhh, aaahhhaaa, aaahhh.”

Not said like a word. Not an analysis or a review. After each song a woman sitting in front of me shook her head and voiced the movement she felt with simply “Aaahhh.”

“Generous.”

The word kept coming to my mind. Ferron’s generosity filled the room. She’s not young anymore. We found Advil and got it to her in the morning. Her puffy, arthritic fingers still ached when she arrived for sound check. She doesn’t sleep much. She has printed her lyrics but with the dim light they are hard to read. But there she was in a fullness that only comes with being fully real…with it all. It was the first Ferron concert for me but I am certain she was as good as she’s ever been…perhaps better.

Then there was Norm MacPherson. Her virtuoso guitar accompaniment who has played for decades and with stars such as Burton Cummings and the Poppy Family. His brilliance makes it look and sound as if he has performed with Ferron for years.

And Robert Montgomery. He’s been a sound and light guy for the likes of David Bowie, Rush and Reba McIntyre and there he was at Saturna Lodge setting the stage and turning two musicians into a delightful, quality production.

But it wasn’t just Ferron and the others. It was the Lodge. Tex and I learned quickly when we bought it that it didn’t belong to us. Not in the usual sense of the word. We sort of belonged to it. And it sort of belonged to the island. I have long had that sense of ownership when it comes to land, place, space. It’s bigger than me. I am simply the current caretaker. The most recent custodian. The one who is responsible for it for a tiny slice of time until I pass it on to the next and the next and so on.

Ferron knocked on the door only weeks after we had first wondered what we could bring to the Lodge and what it would bring to us. She came bearing stories of previous owners. Previous efforts. Previous dreams. She came bearing ideas of what could be. She was in love with the Lodge. She has been side by side with us bringing a new contribution to this magical place.

So there we were. Wednesday night. A full house. Sharing love.

Okay. I just remembered the lyrics that have been bouncing around in my head. The ones I’ve been trying to pull up as I write this blog. I’ve got them. I have to share them with you. Not to get preachy or teachy but we all need these words these days as we struggle to wonder what to do with our crazy world. Not that we need complacency but we all need to chill out like we used to say.

Ferron’s concert gave us a moment to relax and just be with what we’ve got.

“It’s old human nature, It’s cold or it’s hot

But if it’s snowin’ in Brooklyn

You say it’s snowin’ in Brooklyn

Well if it’s snowin’ in Brooklyn

I’d say snow’s what we got.”

Getting ready to host. Sunflowers by Kevin Stewart (Vancouver)

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Ella’s hat

It’s all about the hat

“I’m just going to stay here and knit with Grandma.” That’s Ella’s response to suggestions to do almost anything. 

So here we sit. Across from each other. Talking about how much she loves Saturna Island, the Lodge, her brother Silas, her school, learning to speak SENCOTEN, playing soccer and most of all knitting. 

“I’m your knitting partner,” she says. And she is. 

Ella was born with the knitting gene.

At 10 years old her needles click in her hands while she looks around, giggles and talks. Like her great grandma, Laura Olsen, I’m sure she could knit with her eyes closed. 

Ella doesn’t knit what she’s told or knit from a pattern. She designs what she knits. She amends it as she goes. She adds colours and stitches depending on what she sees emerging. She designed and knit the skirt she wore on her first day of school in grade one.

This weekend it was all about the hat. She had to have a hat.

“I’ll knit one for myself if you tell me how,” she said. 

She tried on all the hats on the table and knew exactly which one was perfect for her.

“It’s yours,” I said. “A gift from me.”

But Ella is really the gift. To me. To the world.

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Going small

Knitted hats on the table

I’m reading Michelle Obama’s book The Light We Carry and was interested to see the lead photo was of her sitting on her foot on a wing back chair…knitting. She bought needles and wool and learned to knit as a way to get through isolation during the pandemic. She soon found out that knitting is more than one stitch after the other. It is a gentle, quiet, therapeutic practice that helped her manage her pandemic anxiety. But she found out that it’s also not more than one stitch after the other. It is a simple motion, a beautiful rhythm—yarn around, pull through, push off, repeat, repeat, repeat. Simply motion.

“Everything was big. Everything was consequential. It was hard not to feel overwhelmed.” Michelle was talking about how she felt during the pandemic. “Nothing felt even remotely like enough. There were just too many gaps to fill.”

Now that stage of the pandemic is over many of us are left with the “nothing is enough” feeling about everything.

The rise of fanaticism and narcissism (perhaps two expressions of the same condition) leave us bewildered and beleaguered. The right to maintain the personal freedom to travel, to express oneself in any way we choose, to make up our own facts, to purchase at will and to preserve our western privilege have become our causes while the voices of the historically oppressed, the people who for generations/centuries have had their rights trampled, have been sidelined. At the same time the real threat to all of us bickering humans—climate change—marches along. 

Insanity rules at the highest level of our society. The U.S. nomination of the speaker of house is a case in point. The recent sideshow was a disturbing display of dysfunction. Each player, clearly a bundle of anxiety, driven by their own priorities and imperatives looked more like circus performers than elected leaders. There was just too much wrong with the situation to get it right.

Watching the Canadian parliament or BC legislature isn’t much better. We all know there’s a systemic problem. The structure of our democracies needs to be rethought, rejigged, refreshed…those are thoughts for another day. But for now, for me, that project is too big, too consequential, too overwhelming because I don’t think we can get there. As long as we continue on the path we are taking madly chasing big ideas while our inner selves are in chaos we won’t get it right.

Being someone who is convinced that our real challenge is climate not personal freedom I am thinking we don’t have a lot of time to do “inner” work. But we have no choice. 

Wonder if each one of us took time to get mentally and physically healthy. Wonder if we stopped with the “busy, busy, busy” and be still. Wonder if we took a break from the “important, important, important” and focused on the simple and the light. 

Wonder if we got out of our heads and how significant our ideas are. Wonder if we stopped letting our feelings, our triggers, our grudges inform our every action. Wonder if we got into our bodies, its simple functions.

Not golf, where we take our business to the course. Not exercising, where we beat ourselves up to achieve ulterior goals…better bodies, better looks, better opportunities… Not counting laps at the pool or steps as we go about our daily tasks. 

Sigh. We are so damned goal orientated. We are so damned impressed by the busy, the important and the loud. 

Michelle recommends “going small”. Rather than letting her head stay in charge she reversed the flow by picking up knitting needles and letting her hands lead. As she says “I buckled my churning brain into the back seat and allowed my hands to drive the car.” Once she got the hang of the yarn overs and unders she said, “Something in the tiny and precise motion on repeat, the gentle rhythm of those clicking needles, moved my brain in a new direction.”

I’m thinking each one of us has our own sort of knitting that will help us reset our anxious brains and let go of our troubled feelings. Something that will help us find a new inner rhythm. Not counting steps, just putting one foot in front of the other. Not swimming laps, just taking the breaths and kicking the feet. Not networking on the golf course, just swinging the club and following the ball. Not getting the gardening done, just turning the soil.

I’m with Michelle. I hope 2023 is the year people decide to go small. And if we take it slow, relax, get quiet and enjoy simple movements on repeat for no other reason than to enjoy simple movements on repeat I think we can find a new groove. That’s it. Just a new groove. But if you need a big and significant reason for letting go of the big and significant I’m pretty sure your new groove will benefit the consequential things as well.

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Goodwill

Peace on earth and goodwill towards men. It’s my favourite seasonal greeting.

It’s Christmas so it’s allowed to be biblical. But when I hear it my former life as a Bible student rushes back with a question. Is the Bible really giving a blessing to all humanity?

The whole thing reads “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will towards men.” At least that’s how it goes in the King James version (KJV)…the one my family read two times each day, during breakfast and after supper, everyday of my early life.

Right now I’m not thinking about the glory to God part. God is, obviously, not something you can put your finger on. So my sense is that how we give Him/Her/It glory has to be left up to our individual imagination. But giving glory, or at least giving acknowledgement and respect, to something greater than ourselves is worth thinking about if we have any hope of reversing our society’s current slide into narcissism. More on that some other time…

Peace on earth is also too big for me. I used to hope and even believe that one day I would see peace on earth. But I was a child then and now that I only have another decade or so on the earth (if I’m lucky) I am absolutely certain this planet will not see peace in my lifetime. 

What I’m thinking about these days is the “goodwill towards men” part of the Christmas card. I mean goodwill toward all humankind. Why are we doing such a terrible job of it these days?

Seriously. Can it be so hard?

You know the pass you give to your family, your friends and even your favourite political leader? You know how you make excuses for their bad behaviour? That’s what I’m talking about. Why can’t we extend that…that kind of goodwill…to everyone?

We’ve never needed it more than we do today. We will not “solve” the climate crisis without it. We will not deal with our healthcare, education, child and family, race, gender or housing crisis’ without it. We will not have peace in our families and our neighbourhoods without it. We cannot and will not make any useful collective decisions that address the monster issues of our day unless at the heart of our thinking is goodwill towards everyone.

But we just can’t seem to do it. I can’t seem to do it. Trumpites draped in stars and stripes…I cringe before I even meet them. Defenders of whiteness…I immediately want to argue. Religious fundamentalist zealots…trigger my shutdown response. I try but there are times when I just can’t find my good will.

I went back to my KJV source and read it again “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men.” Yes. That’s what I want. For everyone.

Then the weather-beaten, cynical old me looked a little deeper. I read the passage in several dozen other translations. Other than the KJV, only a handful say “goodwill towards men.” Most other versions add a qualifier something like “goodwill towards men with whom He is well pleased.” Or “goodwill among men of goodwill.” Or “goodwill among men whom He favours.”

Ah. Therein lies the flaw. The other versions add qualifiers. They describe exactly what we see everyday…goodwill to those in our bubble, to those we like, to those who we deem to be good.

Just like what I read on a Facebook meme the other day “I will be good to people who are good to me…it’s as simple as that.”

It’s no wonder we are stuck with our selves and our same-groups in this adolescent, self-absorbed, narcissism. It’s no wonder we are plagued by the dichotomy of  “us and them” with us pitted against rest of the world. It’s what we’ve been taught.

The trouble with much of the Bible is that it’s directed to a same-group. Right from the start the book is about a chosen people…and an unchosen. That sort of thinking might have worked in the past but now it’s time push our western cultural teachings to another level. There are things we need to relearn. (I can’t speak for other cultures but I from what I can see they aren’t doing a super job of embracing difference either so this is likely more than a western problem.)

Goodwill to everyone? Sigh. We aren’t even close. We haven’t grown up enough yet. And we won’t get there unless we get out of our tiny selves and our tiny same groups.

So I’m going to start with my tiny self. It’s my personal challenge. Sharing goodwill is my 2023 New Year’s resolution. And I don’t mean goodwill for all the people who I find interesting. I’m talking about the people who rub me the wrong way…the ones who have done me wrong…the ones who have no goodwill for me. It’s on the edges of easy that the real work needs to take place.

I’m not giving up on goodwill for all humanity. Even though it feels like an almost impossible global challenge in our colonized world where the planet’s peoples share the same neighbourhoods and hallways and smell what everyone’s cooking for dinner. And in our technological world where a quest for truth is no longer the ultimate journey but as easy as a quick scan of your own algorithm on the Internet.

Our predicament is bigger than the 1%. It’s bigger than corporations. It’s bigger than which media we listen to. It’s bigger than who we vote for. It’s bigger than the secret power mongers aiming to control the world or whether Trudeau or Fauci is telling the whole story.

It’s about listening to our planet writhe in pain. It’s about feeling the loss of our fellow creatures. It’s about putting ourselves into perspective and getting humble. It’s about going beyond how right we think we are, what we’ve been taught and what comes easy.

In 2023 let’s take it up a notch. I’m going to try. And if you’ve figured out how to do it can you let me know?

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Blame

A kids’ story from Ron Martin–his message–you can’t stop bad things from happening but you can choose how you respond

“What is the world coming to?” We hear it all the time. I have said it myself.

There likely hasn’t been a generation that hasn’t mourned the “good old days” and that hasn’t thought the “kids these day” are just not what they used to be. But we really are in a period of unusually dramatic change. I don’t think we can deny that the revolution is here and the fundamental changes taking place in our society and on the planet could make the industrial revolution and WWs 1 and 2 look like blips on the historical timeline.

Certainty has been obliterated. Not just in the economy, but in so many things this generation has never questioned before—health care, education, transportation, weather, food production—everything we have previously just assumed would be there for us. 

People are looking for someone or something to blame. The idea that there is a giant conspiracy to twist our brains and turn us into nasty mindless robots permeates social media. Even privileged people with exceptionally good lives are quick to get angry and blame governments, corporations, managers, owners, basically anyone in charge of anything, for their inconveniences. People feel like victims but they have trouble identifying the oppressor. The easy target is the 1%, whoever they are, or the corporations, whoever they are, or Trudeau, as if he has personally upended Canadian society. 

COVID exacerbated the situation. No one loved that experience and we all became geniuses spouting better ways to deal with it. Many people thought (think) the bumbling governments and fumbling health systems were perfect proof that there were masterminds behind the disaster…forces deliberately messing us up. What COVID did, without a doubt, is create a deep fissure in society that is still affecting us all. 

I don’t have a brilliant explanation for our current dilemma. I wish I did. I wish someone did because relationships are not mending and we are more disgruntled than at any time I can remember. Anti vaxxers believe the mainstream population has been duped into getting vaccinated out of fear and lies being promoted by media that is controlled by large corporate interests. The vaccinated believe anti vaxxers are driven by fear of human manipulation and conspiracies around every corner being promoted by large interests controlling social media. COVID will keep us fighting for a long time. Now whenever you have a medical condition you can blame it on the vaccination or on long COVID…which ever side you are on…as long as we can blame…and as long as we can keep proving ourselves right and everyone else wrong.

Humans are not doing very well. We have lost our grip. Almost everyone is feeling a loss of control as we glue ourselves to our devices and read/watch things that reinforce what we already believe.

My sense is that humans are largely the authors of their own destinies and that the general public is as complicit with unhelpful behaviours and decisions as the people they vote to govern them are responsible. I think that masses of humans create destinies that few individual humans really want. I also like Occam’s razor theory…simple explanations for our problems are likely to be more correct than unnecessary and improbable reasons.

So why is our ferry service so damn sketchy these days? The other morning while we were waiting for what appeared to be a 2-hour delayed ferry I heard a loudly disgruntled customer say, “They want us to believe that it’s a staffing issue. They always want to blame the staff.”

“It is the staff,” I said. “Not the staff that gets to work but the staff that no one can find these days to deliver our services.”

He didn’t like my response. He wanted to blame BC ferries and the government. He even wanted to blame Trudeau. Eventually he understood the simple distinction I was trying to make.

“You watch,” another island resident warned me. “Big corps and big developers are behind the ferry delays. They are deliberately messing up the service so it’ll breed discontent and anger and then we’ll support their plan to build bridges between the islands. You wait. The government will go for it. They are just puppets.”

With my head spinning I thought about conversations I had in the 1970s. We talked about the baby boom and the huge, bulging, privileged, middle class society we had built in the western world after WW2. Universities, museums, health care, resorts, investments, malls, material goods, real estate, travel…something for everyone, or perhaps everything for everyone. The more we built the more we wanted and thought we needed. We did it because we could. There was plenty of everything especially our #1 resource—people. We were streaming out of universities in droves. With knowledge and skills only to be exceeded by our expectations followed by the blithe assumption that our excesses were our entitlements.

“What’s going to happen when our generation is 70 and 80? How will the next generations maintain the social edifice that we are building? Will they even want to? Will there be enough people to look after our old bodies? Never mind keep up all the other services we’ve come to expect.” 

The answer is no. The answer has always been no. We know that now and we knew it then. But we were 20-something and 80 felt like a long time off. We wanted to enjoy ourselves while we could.

The explanation for the crumbling of the western middle class, the inability of society to maintain what it created, the digging in of corporate fingernails to hold onto control, supply chain issues, rising costs, the destruction of the ecosystem and on and on does not need a grand conspiracy.

What we built was simply unsustainable. We had no business building it in the first place. Our expectations were unreasonable and unfulfillable. We had no business expecting them. Our appetite for personal comfort, self-gratification, material stimulation just could not be satiated.

Sometimes our beautiful planet reminds me of a beleaguered husband or wife who has a demanding spouse that simply can never be satisfied. You see these people around. They drag their poor sorry butts after their loved one getting this and doing that. They look tired and more haggard all the time while they are barked orders they are unable to fulfil. 

When we watch we want to say, “Stop! Just stop and be happy with what you’ve got!! Your poor old spouse is not going to be able to run around making you happy forever.”

Writing this has helped me find an answer…for me…for now. “Stop! Just stop and be happy with what I’ve got!! Society is not going to be able to run around and make me happy forever.”

I need to remember the problems we are facing are not about me. They are not about you. They are much bigger than us both r. I wish I could point my finger at who is to blame. It would be easier that way. But the finger would point back at me. Individually we are all part of the problem and collectively my generation has been a huge part of the problem. We built a world that cannot survive and that will take down the ecosystem with it. Individually we may not be able to solve society’s current problems but we can control how we respond to them. 

We can stop arguing, demanding and blaming.

We can look inward and reassess our assumptions and realign our needs, wants and expectations. 

We can look outward and focus on what we can do, not what we think or what we read, or what someone said was going to happen, but what can we do for someone else? 

Do something. Anything. We need each other, folks. We even need people we disagree with. The biggest question is not who is right and who is wrong or who is to blame. 

Martin Luther King, Jr’s quote helps us reset our energy and our priorities. “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is “What are you doing for others?”

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Shared symbols

Designs from our DNA

I am fascinated by geometric designs. In grade school I decorated my books with elaborate borders of zigzags, Xs and Os, diamonds and even swastika type figures, having no idea what they had come to mean. As a teenager I stencilled geometric borders around my bedroom window and door. I used to think it was because I couldn’t draw anything else very well. But looking back I realize it was because I didn’t want images of horses or butterflies as decorations. I loved geometric designs. There was something reassuring about the repetitive movement between line and space.

I am not alone. Humans have been using geometric designs since the beginning of time. Genevieve Von Petzinger, a Canadian anthropologist, found 32 common markings in cave drawings dating back 30-40,000 (and more) years and spanning the planet. Perhaps the markings are early signs of language, perhaps otherworldly symbols. So far Von Petzinger doesn’t know the meaning behind the cross-hatching, triangles, ladders etc. But these cave markings contain all the elements of geometric design and are some of the first communicative expressions of human beings.  

When I first encountered Coast Salish knitting I was a seventeen year old newly wed. I moved to Tsartlip First Nation in WSANEC territory with my husband, Carl. His family had been making, what were then called Indian sweaters, since before the 1920s. The earliest example of typical, modern Coast Salish knitting is a sweater dated 1919, which is in the BC Museum of Anthropology. Carl’s grandmother, Martha, may have been one of the early designers of the unique, geometric designed, multi-banded, hand spun, bulky garments. Laura, my late mother-in-law, said that her mother unravelled sweaters she acquired second hand and carefully examined the stitches in order to learn the knitting techniques then she reknit the yarn into her own creation

Although it appears that for the first 20 or 30 years after Coast Salish women learned to knit they did not put their trademark patterning on their knitting, incorporating geometrics into their sweater designs would have been second nature to Laura’s family. They had been blanket and basket weavers before they learned to knit and had a long relationship with the use of geometric patterning.

Laura had a passion for designs and motifs. Whenever something caught her eye on things such as carpets, doilies, tea canisters and other people’s sweaters she translated them onto graph paper and then incorporated them into her knitting.

When I moved to Tsartlip I immediately fell in love with the Coast Salish geometric designed sweaters. I sat side-by-side Laura, like she had done with her mother, and it wasn’t long before I was knitting and spinning in a style that was an almost replica of hers. She shared her pattern book with me and encouraged me to make my own designs and share them with her. Pretty soon I was designing other knitted things but somewhere, somehow geometric designs always found their way into my creations.

When I asked Laura what certain motifs meant she would scoff and say, “Whatever anyone wants them to mean. A clam to one person is a wave to another. Zig zags can be mountains. Chevrons can be arrows and snowflakes can be flowers if you want them to be.” Although Laura didn’t know Genevieve she believed geometric designs belonged to the universe “You know you can find them all over the world,” she said. “I use designs because I just like the way they look and feel on the sweater.” And it’s no wonder. One of Laura’s favourite designs is a dead ringer for modern scientific images of our DNA.

That’s what I love about geometric designs. They are everywhere when we look out in the world around us and also they illustrate the structure of our inner human existence. Geometric designs belong to everyone and they can mean whatever you want them to mean. Perhaps the message of this most basic human language is that we are all one and we don’t have to agree on our interpretations of our symbols we can just enjoy the subtle certainty and peace that comes with the designs repetitions.

The double helix on my sweater, one of the last sweaters knit by Laura Olsen

sylviaolsen

I met Fiona

Photo credit:  Jack Morse/CTV Atlantic

How did the wind reach down and pick up huge concrete flowerpots and flip them upside down demolishing what was left of the late season dahlias and geraniums? It looked as if a band of hooligans, burly, big hooligans had been on a senseless rampage.

I was trapped in Charlottetown during the hurricane. I arrived on Wednesday night to teach and present at the PEI Fibre Fest. The first grand celebration of fibre hand-work for the tiny island. I woke up Thursday morning to an email that said the organizers were thinking about cancelling the event. Hurricane Fiona was climbing up the east coast and was expected to hit the Atlantic provinces on Friday night. Later, with regrets, they confirmed the cancellation and warned us to get flights immediately in order to return home.

Of course there were no flights. So I bought food—crackers, cheese, popcorn, cherry tomatoes, kombucha, water (not a recommended grocery list when preparing for a storm)—and hunkered down in my tiny hotel room waiting for the hurricane.

Fiona arrived right on schedule with driving rain first. In the black of night I listened to the gale and looked out the window across a flat roof (that quickly turned into a deep pool) to a parking garage that was flanked by 4 and 5 story buildings. Through the eerie purple-gray light of the sky I watched the tops of two trees being mercilessly buffeted and wondered when their branches would let loose and how I would clean up my room if they hit the window.

The power went off early. The emergency lights in the hall only lasted a couple of hours. The hotel was black on the inside and relentlessly pounded on the outside. I had plenty of time to think. I only knew two people in the province and they lived at the other end of the island so they could be no help. There was no power, no food, no access to money, no taxis, no way off the island, no cell (mine later reconnected).

I hate to admit it but Friday night was all about me. What was I going to do?

By Saturday afternoon the winds were still high but I thought it was safe enough to go out and see the city. Siding, metal roofing and anything that could be dislodged from the sides of buildings littered the sidewalks. But it was the trees. Smashed. Upended. Exposing their intimate roots and the rich, red PEI earth that could not keep its grip.

I came across a small park skirted by roads and surrounded by old, tired, but still elegant Maritime homes. All the big trees were down. The smaller ones were mangled. A woman stood next to me sobbing. It felt like the respect you have when standing next to a stranger at the graveside of someone you both know.

The media reported with great relief; Fiona had taken no lives. But she did. She took the lives of thousands of our greatest allies. It is a time for mourning and reflection and perhaps a time to rethink our non-human relationships.

sylviaolsen

Telling stories

“Don’t tell stories.” How many times did my mother say those words to me? What she meant was “Tell the truth.” My mother had no time for fantasy or tolerance for lies. Life was black and white for Phyllis Snobelen. She was too busy and practical to wade through the complications of nuance.

There were hard truths in our family that were determined by our religious beliefs that provided her solid ground from which she could pronounce what was right and what was wrong.

Right here I’m stuck. Where do I go with this? Many of you are probably saying, “But if you were Christian isn’t your entire religion based on stories?”

Exactly. And the Bible provides some of the most popular stories in the western world. Stories from which my mother extracted her black and white, but that’s for another discussion at another time time. And then there’s Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Not to diminish the importance of the stories I was raised with but we’ve come a long way since the late 50s and 60s when I was a child. Stories are not the opposite of truth. Stories are not “just” stories. They are the way humans have communicated with each other since we had language.

I’m thankful my mother lived long enough to hear me tell stories and to read some of the stories I had written. While she liked them she could never truly understand the point of it. From her perspective if a story wasn’t God’s story then it was of hugely diminished importance.

But when dementia began blurring the hard lines she had drawn in her life I spent hours with my mother telling her stories. Simple stories about buying a pair of boots or visiting an old friend kept her entertained. She told me stories that were a collage of her childhood and my childhood mixed with, perhaps, utter fantasy. She kept me entertained.

As her dementia progressed she struggled to remember even her closest friends. When a very dear family acquaintance died she had no recollection of him at all. It wasn’t until I recreated into a story something she had experienced dozens of times that she connected.

“Remember at the church on Sunday nights, Mom,” I said. “George (name change) the door man, with his long, dour face, paced across the back of the hall. He watched the second hand of the clock tick until it reached the 12 at 7:30…precisely 7:30. Then he shut the doors and sat down ready for the meeting to begin. Remember wondering why he never smiled?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “But he had a lovely wife who had a beautiful big smile for everyone.”

Stories didn’t just entertain my mother, they helped her connect to me, to her life and to the world. Stories aren’t just stories, they communicate the essence of what it means to be human.