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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.
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A new relationship

The last glorious bouquet of hydrangeas from the garden

Six months ago Tex and I had the privilege to become the owners of the Saturna Lodge. It is a grand old house that’s foundations were built in the 1920s but has had several total facelifts and reincarnations since. It is on Saturna Island perched on the hill at the toe of Boot Cove looking down the inlet to Navy Channel.

While we had shares in the Lodge earlier it wasn’t until February this year that our relationship truly got off the ground—the Lodge and us. Madison, my 19-year-old granddaughter, best describes our initial feelings. On her first visit she walked in and circled around. She nodded her head while checking it out.

“Wow, Grandma,” she said. “This is a thing. And it’s a lot.”

Once we got over the muchness of our purchase we began looking for words to describe our connection—steward, custodian, caretaker. The Lodge required us to rethink the idea of ownership. In many ways we felt that we had formed a partnership with the building and property—that the Lodge, itself, was the third party to a new liaison.

Like in any new relationship we needed to listen and learn who the Lodge was and how she functioned (she is definitely and graciously a she). We got to know how quietly she weathers gale force winds, how the sun sidles down the cove and finds her late in the morning, how she presides over the garden as if she is grounded in beauty. And overwhelmingly we came to know how much care she needed from us…the immediate repairs to the old deck, outdoor stairs, porches and siding…the protective painting …the energy saving remediations…

We found out that the Saturna community felt a sense of ownership of the Lodge. It was as if everyone we met had either worked there, stayed there, been married there, had dinner there, had great ideas for what could happen there, had wanted to buy it…but didn’t. We did. Now what?

We had ideas. The space seemed perfectly suited for small events—board meetings, training sessions, workshops, family gatherings… We thought that we might host a dozen or so such occasions a year. It was a manageable business plan and still is.

But many islanders told us that the Lodge needed to reopen for short-term guests. The island didn’t have enough accommodations.

The Lodge herself seemed to agree. She wasn’t built to be a private dwelling. She was designed for short term lodgers…a bed and breakfast. Lovely rooms, comfortable shared indoor and covered outdoor space and gardens to live in.

Tex, is the quintessential innkeeper, the congenial host, the world travelled, genteel hotelier who loves to meet and greet people so it was easy for him to agree.

At first I didn’t want to think about operating a B&B; cleaning, changing beds, cleaning, making breakfast, cleaning… And besides that the Lodge wasn’t prepared. There was too much to do to get her guest-ready. She needed work.

But we agreed, perhaps all of us together, that we should open the door and slowly let people in. In April Tex said yes when a woman called. She was working on the island and needed a room for two nights.

She was from Surrey. She had two teenagers at the madness stage. She hadn’t been feeling well lately. She wasn’t sure about her husband anymore but his folks lived downstairs and that was the only way they could afford their house. The whole thing made her tired.

After she dragged her bags into her room she took her cans of cider out to the hot tub that is nestled in the trees overlooking the garden. A few hours later I got worried. Are we supposed to make sure our guests are okay? The mother in me said, go find her. It was dark and cold. She was blissfully listening to music oblivious to the hours that had passed.

“Thank you so much for letting me stay here,” she said. “I feel calm, serene, peaceful. I haven’t felt that way in a long time. This place has a special tranquility about it. I really needed it.”

A psychiatrist who stayed a few weeks ago said the same thing, “If there is one thing people need these days it’s serenity. And that’s what you have here. This place is a gift.”

The sun is half way down the hill on the other side of the Cove. It’s time to put breakfast on the bar. We are painting the exterior and as Maddy said, “It’s a lot.”

There are beautiful twin boys and their parents staying in the family room downstairs. They will be up soon looking for something to eat. People say this is our fourth quarter, Tex and I. Perhaps. I hope it’s not our final inning. But I think it might be our last big play and if it is, it’s sure a hell of a gig. One thing is for sure…the Lodge is getting ready for whatever is coming her way.

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Welcome to our Saturna House

Sometime in the morning of April 8, 2021 after a few weeks of negotiations we received a call from Caroline, our lawyer, to tell us that Tex and I, along with our partners Elizabeth May and John Kidder were the owners of the Saturna Lodge located on Saturna Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea.

It was only a few weeks before, that the four of us had decided to look into purchasing a place together. None of us were sure what that would look like but once we visited the Lodge we knew that we had found our home. The news that our hastily made plans were now a reality felt like pure possibility. Suddenly there were five of us in the mix, two couples and a grand old lady perched on a gracefully tiered hillside overlooking the calm, sparkling Boot Cove.

First the house would become our home— Elizabeth and John wanted to live there full time; Tex and I, part time. Almost immediately we faced our first challenge. They moved in lock, stock and barrel out of their apartment in Sidney, but the previous owners had left everything from dish towels (some still dirty) and bedroom furniture to a loaded pantry with stuff like a dozen or so bottles of HP sauce, half eaten boxes of Stoned Wheat Thins and jars of peanut butter in the fridge. Our first tasks were to clean, expunge and make space.

Colin Kwok, an architect and friend from Vancouver, came with Joyce, his wife, to get to know our fifth partner and advise us on adaptations we can make so the five of us can live together peacefully.

Never before have I felt more reverence towards a house and a place. Never before have I had such an immediately wonderful relationship with a house and felt such a deep responsibility to enhance and protect her, knowing she will do the same for me.

It’s been only 3 months so we are still settling in to all these relationships. It’s been a long time since any of us have had roommates but we are excited about in our new experience of collaboration, sharing and adventure.

One thing all five of us agree on is that we want many of you to come and visit and share the peace and the beauty. It’ll take time but stay tuned.

The bench welcomes you at the front door