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Ripped sheets

If you ask Google if knitting is good for you it will tell you that knitting can help lower anxiety, increase self-worth, improve concentration, help with visual/spatial awareness, aid anger management, increase feelings of empowerment, and provide an activity that is self-soothing.

Google describes knitting a lot like taking a walk, which, it says, reduces stress and anxiety, enhances overall mental health, improves your mood, increases awareness, helps you feel connected, enhances self-expression, improves your cognitive function, is beneficial for cardiovascular health, manages weight and improves overall physical well-being.

I’m thinking that knitting interspersed with walking Piper should, as my father would have said, “fix whatever ails you.”

In her book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times Michelle Obama writes about how knitting helped her get through some of the nasty, early, dark days of COVID, “In all my decades of staying busy, I had always presumed that my head was fully in charge of everything, including telling my hands what to do. …(K)nitting…reversed the flow. It buckled my churning brain into the back seat and allowed my hands to drive the car for a while. It detoured me away from my anxiety, just enough to provide some relief.” 

A lot has been written over the past decade or so about the therapeutic value of knitting. Our grandmothers and great grandmothers would hardly believe how their essential work making socks and sweaters and mittens and their peaceful pastime creating doilies, table cloths and tea cozies has become such an obsession.

Previous generations of women had their own anxieties—pre vaccinations, childhood diseases were terrifying. Mothers watched children die from conditions we, for the most part, no longer worry about. The family economy, their own health, for many, their lack of autonomy, and, as they aged, losing a tooth and then another and another was cause enough to be anxious.

Although our grandmothers didn’t write books about the therapeutic characteristics of knitting, the afternoons they spent with their friends drinking tea, discussing life’s challenges and knitting would have been just as healing then, as they are now.

But these days. These bizarre, chaotic, disruptive, insane days of turmoil require knitting on a whole other level. Gentle yarn overs. Rhythmic click, click, clicking. Soft sensuous slide of cashmere. Harmonized, coordinated shades of muted pinks and blues and greens. Polite, mannerly circles of well-behaved women, need to step aside, need to be interrupted for a moment by a metaphorical clash of a cymbal. We need to, as it were, take the mic out of the stand and storm the stage…a bit like Mick or Elvis.

This weekend we had that moment. No gentle knitting. No soft matching yarns. No stitch-by-stitch instructions. No expensive wool.

We used old sheets and duvet covers from the bags of cast-offs in our basement or from the second-hand store. We ripped them up to make our yarn. We pulled off the frayed edges. We combined colours we had never imagined ever using, never mind putting them together with other colours we never imagined ever using. Then we knit these bizarre balls of string? Not quite. Yarn? Not really. Cotton? Not purely. Into bathmats.

Bathmats. That’s it. Women travelled to Saturna Island to rip up sheets to make bathmats. Why? Why not? And then there were all the other reasons for spending a sunny spring weekend on Saturna. Joni’s stories of her Coast Salish grandmothers hard work and knitting innovations. Good food. Whale watching. The peaceful bliss of birdsong, the cacophony of frogs and the stars. On our out-of-the-way island there is little to dim the lights in the night sky. There is no better place to immerse yourself in the wonder of the light show than on the patio, wrapped in a blanket, with a cup of hot tea.

When you come to the Lodge you will have a ripped-sheet, knitted bathmat. You’ll find ripped-sheet, knitted doormats and ripped-sheet knitted bed shawls…everywhere. I might be wearing a ripped-sheet cape. Or, you might eat your breakfast on a ripped-sheet placemat (I haven’t made them yet).

This weekend we ate together and ripped sheets. We talked together and ripped sheets. We listened to each other and ripped sheets. And then we knit. Inside we knit. Outside we knit. Loudly we knit. Quietly we knit. We knit with an edge. Ours weren’t gentle stitches. Ripped-sheet yarn knitting is not elegant. It is not noble. It has attitude. Deliberateness. Determination.

Why did we do it? Not just because it is good for us for all the Google reasons. But because we need to. The simple over and under. The around and through. The ripping. The fraying. The thinking it out. The making it work. The work of making it. It helps us keep our balance.

And when women get together and recalibrate their equilibrium they go home and reestablish balance in their homes and workplaces. And when their homes and workplaces are rebalanced our world has a hope of refinding its balance. I know. I know that going from ripped-sheet bathmats to balance in the world is a stretch. But it’s also a start.

Each one is sufficiently bizarre and beautiful on its own. Together they take crazy to a whole other level.

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My COVID Study

COVID studies are everywhere. Of course. COVID was the biggest thing to happen globally since WW2. And perhaps, in terms of pervasiveness, it was bigger. And it was likely one of the biggest things to happen to us personally—to our families, our jobs, our relationships, our businesses and our health. COVID also forced each one of us to think about things we hadn’t necessarily thought about much—vaccinations, personal freedom, government control, international cooperation, corporate conspiracies, the effects of social media and everything on-line—sex, sales, self-help, entertainment, research, friendships, influencers and snake-oil salespeople.

Now if you are not yet tired of COVID you can read the studies. Were the vaccinations effective? How pervasive were the negative side effects of the vaccinations? Compared to the negative effects of long-COVID? What did we learn about viruses? Virus control? Isolation? What was done right? What was done wrong? Who’s covering up what? It’s a field day for researchers.

I recently realized that I have done a study of my own. Not deliberately. It just happened. We reopened the Lodge to guests in 2022 as people were beginning to emerge out of their various methods of quarantine. Here we were. Inviting them to spend the night. The first time many of them had gone anywhere. They had breakfast with us. And chatted. Everyone had one thing on their minds. COVID.

If I wrote up my study it would be a review of two questions. First, what did you do during COVID? Second, how did COVID affect your life?

The questions were not deliberately thought out, rather, they were a response to the ubiquitous questions our guests asked us, “When did you buy the Lodge?” and “Why?”

Our answers always sounded something like this: “COVID. We would never have bought the Lodge if it weren’t for COVID. Buying the Lodge was not part of a plan. We didn’t think it through. It only made sense, if it made sense at all, during COVID…when nothing made any normal kind of sense. But here we are and our COVID choice has changed our lives. With a huge amount of work and determination it has changed it for the better.”

Our answers to the guests’ questions set the stage for their responses—perhaps a hundred or more.

I understand my study is not scientific. The participants were not random. They were a self-selected group of people who chose to come to Saturna Island. Generally, our guests are people who want calm, who love nature, who are not looking for big city lights and adventure, who enjoy simplicity, who don’t make huge demands on life and who like homemade granola, farm eggs and fruit for breakfast.

Many of our guests had made equally as huge, life-changing decisions as we did. Some closed businesses they had owned for years. COVID provided the push they needed to move on. Some went back to university and took classes on line. Some lost their jobs and had to rethink their careers. The virus took some of their friends and family. Some were heart-broken that they could not be with their mother or father at their end-of-life. Some counselled their children who suffered from social and emotional anxieties brought on by isolation. Most people went online in ways and to an extent they had never before. People did more gardening, cooking, baking, hiking, biking and had more babies than they would have otherwise. A few bought island homes and made a commitment to get out of the rat race.

We didn’t hear anything unexpected, just dozens of personal stories of how people make or remake their lives when faced with unusual challenges. Many people had put on weight and others exercised their excess weight away. People had become fearful and felt more anxious than ever before. They were more mistrustful than previously—not knowing who to believe—believing everything they heard or read was in one way or another not completely trustworthy. People were angry at government, at the medical establishment, at vaccinations or at anti-vaxxers. Some people supported the flag waving truck brigade. Others lost their affinity with the flag altogether, feeling that it had been somehow desecrated. Everyone lost friend and family relationships. The response that was repeated more than any other was “We don’t talk anymore. We can’t. We can’t find common ground.” Some mourned the loss, others were angry at the alienation they felt with people with whom they had once been close. But new alliances were made. New friends found. New interests discovered.

My study has no conclusions. I am a historian. Not enough time has passed for me to make grand pronouncements about how COVID changed society for better or worse. While this round of mass infection appears to not have had a good outcome in terms of how badly the masses responded to their leaders’ efforts to manage public behaviour (or it could be said the other way around—how bad leadership’s efforts were at managing public behaviour). From the participants, however, I can say that they coped, they morphed, they folded joy into pain and they grew.

Next time, and there is no doubt there will be a next time, perhaps individually we will be more prepared. We will be informed, empowered and bolstered by our stories of the crazy, the painful and the resourceful ways we dealt with COVID.

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Decolonizing the garden

Perhaps the most beautiful part of the Lodge is the garden. We have been told that Gerhardt Rehm designed it. He was a well-known landscape architect who also created many exceptional gardens in Victoria. We still don’t know the whole story but there is no doubt the garden has been touched by many loving and ambitious hands.

The Lodge rests on a hill overlooking the garden. Every time I walk down the stairs or a guest stands at one of the bay windows we see the remarkable landscape. But in spite of Gerhardt’s artistry and all the hard work of previous gardeners the place had been neglected for several years and had turned into a messy jumble of overgrown and untended foliage.

Looking closer I realized it wasn’t just messy. The garden had been colonized. A full hillside of English ivy—up the trees and down the banks—scotch broom, Daphne, holly, bamboo and blackberries. Even the beautiful little wild geraniums and fragrant morning glory had wound their way around every rock and fern.

Gardening has given me time to think about colonization…the choking and strangling…the taking over. It’s not that colonizers are in and of themselves nasty creatures. In fact, they are beautiful. But they are not satisfied with inhabiting their own territory. They have invaded the whole garden, creeping underground and dominating the soil so nothing else can grow.

At first I got a bit panicked. I had dreams of Sleeping Beauty. If I didn’t wake up the thickets would become so dense I would be choked.

Some plants I’m containing…English ivy, because it is doing a good job of covering a bank…blackberries, because they make excellent jam and pies. The Daphne, holly and scotch broom are gone (for now) as are some of the wild geraniums and fragrant morning glory (they are sweet and hopefully somewhat innocuous).

It’s the bamboo that really got the colonization message through to me. Apparently Gerhardt loved bamboo and many Victoria residences are now decolonizing their gardens along with me. This is not clumping bamboo, the decent, polite kind that remains contained in its own space. This is running bamboo that doesn’t stop. It’s greedy.

I cut down a stand in a gulley along the property line about 4 feet X 20 feet…some had grown 15 feet tall. Gone. But the trunks are impenetrable and the tubers are 2 inches round and those are the ones I can see. What I can’t see is that they have traveled at least thirty feet from the gulley to a small garden under a large fir tree. Bamboo, like long unruly hairs on a dog’s back, was sprouting up through the variegated bishop’s goutweed (itself an invasive species). In the two years since we have been here the bamboo has gotten thicker and thicker.

After clearing out the goutweed I spent two days with a pick and shovel pulling giant clumps of bamboo roots. Again, it’s what you don’t see. The roots were 10 Xs what appeared on the surface. Not to get too metaphorical but bamboo is systemic…the problem isn’t what you can easily see. Snipping the spindly hairs will get you nowhere. The problem is the way it infiltrates the substrata and leaves the soil barren and dry making it hard for natural species to survive.

I have almost exhausted the colonizer metaphor but not quite.

I became a warrior woman. Digging, lifting, cutting, pulling until I had no muscle strength left. I Googled how to eradicate bamboo and after every helpful method there was the same message…repeated digging, lifting, cutting, pulling required. Figure out a way to live with it. The colonizer is a permanent resident.

Now I’m wondering how we could have avoided our western brand of colonization. I wish there had been a way to control the first sailors who eyed this great territory and wanted to possess it. I think China and Russia had a good idea when they set up traders’ quarters in their cities and confined outsiders to those areas. They wanted the goods but they didn’t want the takeover.

Maybe it’s not too late to think of other ways to inhabit space, other ways to imagine ownership, other ways to use resources because the absolute truth is that we do not own the land. It’s not ours. It never will be ours. We are caretakers of it until we are covered by it and forgotten. Don’t get me started on the “return to the earth” metaphor.

Photo thanks to Bart Wentink, a guest at the Lodge from Houston Texas

Photo thanks to Ralph, our fellow Saturnaite

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Crones, Hags & Witches

I used to think I was relevant. I had gritty things to say about pertinent current topics. I knew what I knew and I knew it was important, make-the-world-a-better-place kind of stuff. A friend once told me I was an interesting person and I believed her.

In many ways I feel that parts of me are waning. Not entirely. I hope I’m still interesting. But the gritty, pertinent, current part. Don’t take this to mean I’m looking for affirmations. I simply mean that who I am in the world and the role I play has changed. Dramatically.

I retired.

I wasn’t forced to. I choose to.

The reason I choose to retire was exactly what I’m talking about here. I had offered my field everything I could. I had squeezed myself dry. What Sylvia could do for on-reserve housing (my field of work, study, expertise, experience…in general my life’s passion) had been done. There are still side jobs and I’m happy to do them. But my life no longer circles around and around my work. And better still. Other people are doing the job. As well, or better than I did it. Not better because they have more commitment, or smarts, or passion or fire in their bellies but better because they are more current. Better because they can take the thing where it needs to go. We share one foot. The one situated in the present. My other foot is in the past. Their other foot is in the future. And that is how it should be.

I am becoming less interested in the content matter that I have stuffed in my head and more interested in the wisdom I can pull out of my experiences. I know it sounds heavy and more than a little self-congratulatory calling myself wise. It’s a characteristic that should only be ascribed to someone by someone else. But it is only wisdom that interests me these days.

The sum, aggregate, distillation of a life of inspiration and insight—wisdom. The words, touch, music, art and everyday acts of doing—sharing. There is no wisdom without sharing.

Ferron, of course Ferron, brilliantly put how many of us older women feel these days.

“My best guess for me is that I was on the train and then got off…to pee, get an ice cream, buy a book. And the train left. And I can’t catch up.”

We don’t need to run after the train. We can catch the next one. Or we can stroll down the road until our new place in life catches up with us.

All of us crones–the old girls who “have found our voices (or who are looking for our voices) and who know that silence is consent” (from Jean Shinoda Bolen) can do it together at the second, soon to be fantastic, Ferron writing workshop taking place October 26-29 at the Saturna Lodge. Check it out.

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Hats, more hats, woollen bowls and a beautiful boy

“Cool stuff.”

Koa, a six year old guest at the Lodge from Duncan, got it. He thought if one hat was cool, 7 hats were cooler. And then as many bowls as he could balance…how cool was that?

Soon my hats and bowls will be available in Joni’s shop, Salish Fusion, which will open in a few months in Brentwood Bay. Joni will be highlighting and selling handwork and other forms of art from local people.

I’ve avoided selling my work, mostly because I don’t know how to put a price on what I make.

Some artists price their products based on how many hours it took for them to make the thing. This raises complicated issues. First the better an artist is and the more experience an artist has likely means it will take that person much less time to make something than someone less skilled and less experienced. Thus the hourly wage approach would often mean the better the product the less it would cost. There are so many other factors to think about…the quality of the materials, the precision of the final product, its uniqueness and its wow appeal.

Of course the most important factor in pricing something is people’s willingness to pay. You don’t want to sell too cheap. You want to push the buyer to pay more than they might otherwise have. You want the price of handwork to honour the skill, creativity and love of its creators. You also want the price of handwork to respect people’s ability to pay and these days, for many, that ability is diminishing. Which, of course, raises the question “Is handwork only for the rich?”

These are questions for Joni, when she opens Salish Fusion. For now I love Koa’s enthusiasm and appreciation. That is more than enough for me to keep creating.

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Become inspired: a Ferron workshop

Ani Di Franco and the Indigo Girls call her their inspiration. The Rolling Stone likens her songwriting to Leonard Cohen. The New York Times calls her “one of the most powerful lyric voices to emerge out of the genre known as ‘women’s music’. 

Ferron has released 15 albums and published four books of poetry. She has a Juno nomination. She has performed for decades throughout Canada and the United States.  Ferron was a beloved leader of the lesbian music movement before k.d. lang or Tracy Chapman.

Ferron is a trailblazer. She did that thing many of us want to do. She changed the world. She made a space for women who had no voice. She shared a message many people didn’t want to hear. But we had too. Because her voice was powerful, it was beautiful, it was real.

She made us listen. It turns out it’s not just the lesbian movement that heard Ferron. We all did. 

Ferron is a Canadian treasure and she is here on Saturna Island and ready to share her brilliance with a small group in a writing workshop at the Lodge. The perfect place to become inspired.

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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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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.

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The art of making space

And then there’s the paint dress.

Winston Churchill said, “First we make our houses and then our houses make us.” He wasn’t talking about our private homes but it’s true. We have a reciprocal relationship with where we live. We start by painting the rooms to match our furniture, or the other way around. We set up our photos and hang our art. We nestle in our favourite corner of the sofa and arrange the bookshelf (or TV remote) so it’s an arm’s distance away. Nothing feels better than breathing in the scent of our favourite meal and listening to the sounds of our personal lives…music, children’s voices, video games, conversation…

Whether our house is a mansion, an apartment or a tiny room…we begin making our space at the same time our space begins making us. Our home is where we feel safe (or not). It is where we learn, love and rejuvenate ourselves. It is where we laugh and cry, where we experience our greatest joy and where we suffer our most heart wrenching struggles. It is where we become who we are.

Our home is an expression of ourselves. It is, in a way, our primary art form. It is creative, not just in its decoration but in its function…in how it relates to us and us to it. We are both becoming.

Preparing the Lodge for guests made me think about the relationship between the visitors and the space and what role we play, as innkeepers, in that interaction.

I was laughing with a woman from Vancouver who was staying for a few days. “I have become a maid,” I said. “It’s a long way from the heady work I used to do…changing the world.”

“But it’s important,” she said. “Creating a sanctuary where people can spend a few days in peace, where they can feel valued and respected, where they can learn something and share something. Or where they can disappear in the garden or in their room, whatever they need at the time.”

And, as my son, Adam, said the last time he was here. “The Lodge is good medicine.”

Preparing that medicine has become our art form. We are making the space while at the same time the space is making us and it is helping to make the people who come to find peace of mind, serenity of spirit and simple enjoyment.

This is as high as I’ll go. Thankfully an Island painter is coming to do the top floor.