Maa Press

Time in the Mountains

2011-04-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

Time in the mountains:

“…the character of lived time is changing in radical and unprecedented ways: temporal discomforts are widely expressed and felt and the question of time, previously left to professional philosophers or Slav ruminators has become a public issue as well as a private problem.” Eva Hoffman.

Time is mysterious and somewhat incomprehensible. We live in so many different kinds of time but rarely notice.
I was graphically reminded of this recently when I spent an action packed week in Vancouver away from the farm. There’s always a frisson of nervousness leaving the farm and my animals – but in this case, it had to be done. I needed a new car. Mine had been smashed to smithereens when some addled person drove off the road and hit me.
First there is the road trip, a familiar one, traveling down out of the mountains, five mountains passes later, sailing down that steep long hill into Hope, out of the snow and into the rain and then the grey sad boredom of the endless ‘free’ way stretch of road past Chilliwack and Abbotsford and Langley and Surrey, that seems to take as long as the whole rest of the trip combined.
And then while in Vancouver – time was equally mysterious. It stretched and twisted in strange ways. It seemed somehow possible in a week, to cram in an almost endless series of events. I wrote, taught, watched films, had tea and lunch with various friends, went to the university several times, bought a used car, bought books, cooked, played with my grandson. And then got in my new used car and drove home. Back to the mountains. Back to mountain time.
It always takes me three days to get back to the farm from anywhere, regardless of where my body is. The first day is for rushing around, checking to see if anything all has changed while I was gone and for unpacking, laundry, dishes and walking. The second day is exhaustion day, and by the middle of the third day, everything starts to feel normal and it is hard to remember that I was ever away. And the odd thing is that no one notices. What felt so momentous and jam packed with events was just another week to the folks living here. And since they usually only see me once or twice a week, (everyone in town seems to meet everyone else in town at the grocery store) unless they read Facebook, they don’t even know when I am away.
Definitely, time moves more slowly here in the mountains. And of course, there is a place here, as well, where there is almost no time and if I sit still long enough and stare at the mountains, the sky and the lake, I can almost get there. Or walking, or staring at water, the sense of immediate time falls away. There is another sense of time. After all, the land was here a zillion years before there was a me or a thought of me, and it will be here in whatever shape or form for many zillions more. It changes slowly and constantly all the time. Trees emerge; animals come and go, rocks erode but my existence has little impact.
On the other hand, for me, the small changes I make, a fruit tree here or there, a garden bed, a fence, new animals, have a huge impact even though they are infinitely small and easily overrun by natural processes.
But to me, to me they mean there will be food for another meal, another season, another year.
I spent the first week home planting seeds in the greenhouse. Seeds are amazing; they are like a small explosion of time in a speck. A barely discernible seed means a tomato plant covered with fruit in August. Or the rich scent of basil spun into pesto. An hour spent planting seeds in small pots in the greenhouse produces such amazing benefits two or three months down the road.
The first time I really noticed the utter variability of time was walking with my grandson, Gaelin, when he was two. One day, while his parents were eating lunch, it took us almost an hour to walk a city block. We looked at ants, and dandelions, at the cars across the street, at sun on tree leaves. We explored a bus stop, a fence, a gate, and chased a bee. It was great. I learned a lot.
Time has been variable and problematic this winter and spring; whenever something happens like a car accident, a fight with a friend, an illness, (all of which happened to me recently) I try to remember that someday soon, these incidents will be in the past and that the emotional storm I am living through will soon be gone. It’s not so much about living in the moment as it is about surfing time’s many and variable waves. And staying afloat, -- whatever the weather.

Naming and Claiming by K.Linda Kivi

2011-03-08T07:18:00.000-08:00

My last blog entry was about the Ktnuaxa Qat’muk Declaration affecting the Jumbo Valley and the proposed Jumbo Glacier Resort. At a recent Jumbo Wild! rally in Nelson which was organized by the NDP a leaflet was distributed by Settlers for Sinixt Sovereignty commenting on that very same Declaration. Most of it is excerpted below. As a Jumbo Wild activist I've been acutely conscious of and troubled by the Sinixt/Ktunaxa conflict for a long time. Summarized very briefly, this conflict is about the Ktunaxa claiming lands that include Sinixt traditional territory. As the Sinixt were declared extinct for the purposes of the Indian Act in Canada in 1956 (though aren’t) their territory has been seen as up for grabs by neighbouring nations. This has been deeply upsetting for both the Sinixt and people like myself who support them.

Hence, I would like to add the commentary of the Settlers for Sinixt Sovereignty to the mix. As Luanne wrote in her previous blog entry, there is such power in naming and in who does the naming of what. Naming is claiming, as we well know from the history of settlement in North America. With the Qat’muk Declaration, my glee was about indigenous people claiming and naming the Jumbo Valley. In that glee, I momentarily overlooked the complexity of that naming, even among indigenous people. My fantasy that all of us who oppose the machinery of consumer, capitalist, imperialist culture could always get along, work together and present a united front against the fundamental forces of exploitative power is a long, long way from being realized.

So, in the meanwhile, how do we in the west kootenay, who suppport both Sinixt sovereignty and Jumbo Wild! situate ourselves vis-a-vis this situation? I don't believe there is an easy answer to this question. I keep hoping for some healing between the Ktunaxa and the Sinixt but I know this is not even remotely possible as long as the Ktunaxa continue to ignore and attempt to obliterate the Sinixt claim to their own territory. How then do we effectively refuse to be divided and ruled?

“The Qat'muk Declaration, Ktunaxa Collaborators, and the theft of Sinixt Land and Culture

The Ktunaxa Nation council's Qat'muk Declaration at first glance looks like an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty to protect a large watershed, grizzly bears and an endangered fragile ecosystem from development but is actually a plot created by native and non-native politicians to quicken the theft of traditional sovereign Sinixt territory through false land claims and the BC
Treaty Process in the interests of industry, business and the dominant settler society.

Kathryn Teneese is the recently appointed Chair (Council chief) of the Ktunaxa Nation Council. Since 1996, she has also been the nation's Chief negotiator. Teneese recently lead a delegation of Ktunaxa Nation members to the BC legislature in Victoria to declare opposition to the controversial Jumbo Glacier Resort and declared it as Ktunaxa Nation territory and as a sacred place to the Ktunaxa.

The problem with the Qat'muk declaration is that the Jumbo Glacier is traditional Sinixt Territory.

Stories surrounding the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers tell of an ancient Salish mother tribe (Sinixt). Through the Indian Act the Sinixt (Arrow Lakes Indian Band) were declared extinct in 1956 after the uninhabitable Oatscott Reserve was found empty. Even though hundreds if not thousands of Sinixt were elsewhere in their traditional territory, predominately south of the US/Canada border (or wherever one could take refuge from racist bounty killings, and the overall impact of disease and settler society). Today the Ktunaxa Council and BC government through the BC Treaty Process are trying to strip the Sinixt of their traditional lands.

Three weeks prior to the Ktunaxa council's Qat'muk declaration trek to Victoria, Kathryn Teneese and the Ktunaxa council made a “Strategic Engagement Agreement” with the BC government receiving nearly 1.7 million dollars to further engage in the land use planning, resource extraction and treaty making over Sinixt territories. A photo of this so-called historic agreement shows Teneese with the biggest smile in the room, signing the document with the Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources Bill Bennett, and Pat Bell the BC Minister of Forest and Range.

With millions of dollars in funding from the BC Treaty Process the Ktunaxa Council has been engaged in the land theft, cultural whitewashing, and profiting from the development of Sinixt territory for years. According to Sinixt elders, the Ktunaxa are outsiders to the area with their namesake, the Kootenays. Historical evidence suggests that the Ktunaxa are from east of the rockies with possible relations to Algonquins who traveled with the fur traders west. Other evidence suggests that they most definitely traveled westward from the Plains after possibly being chased out of occupied lands in the Rocky Mountain foothills by the Blackfoot.

The Ktunaxa council goes as far as to claim ancient Sinixt cultural sites, and Sinixt stories and legends as their own to further their business, political and economic interests at the expense of the Sinixt.

After (a) historic battle the Sinixt who were also suffering from the impacts of disease epidemics granted the Ktunaxa use of some fishing and hunting grounds within portions of traditional Sinixt territories.

Canada's and BC's control over Indigenous nations has taken many forms, including police & military violence, churches, Residential Schools, & Indian Agents. Today, chiefs & councilors acting as collaborators have become a vital part of the colonial regime's ability to control indigenous peoples. Colonialism always prefers to deal with collaborator chiefs, who can more effectively control their people than can direct government agencies. This is most often done by setting up puppet governments comprised of indigenous collaborators. The state gives its full support and recognizes only them as the legitimate representatives of the nation. This strategy is known as neocolonialism.

These chiefs serve to pacify & confuse native populations, appearing to fight for 'rights & title' when in reality they are working along side the government & corporations. Many, like Ktunaxa Nation Chair Kathryn Teneese and Treaty Commissioner Sophie Pierre, are themselves politicians, businesspeople, and lawyers, who gain wealth, status and power from the colonial system. This involves acting as a legal agent (i.e., as a band council or political organization) on behalf of Native nations, legalizing the theft & exploitation of ancestral territories (in the case of the Ktunaxa... other nations ancestral territory). By helping government impose its policies & strategies on Natives, these types of collaborators aid in the assimilation of their own people.

The BC Treaty Commissioner and former Ktunaxa Nation Administrator Sophie Pierre was a strong advocate for the 2010 Olympics and encourages VANOC's Olympic vision of dealing with indigenous nations and their unceded land bases through the BC treaty process, according to the introduction by Ms. Pierre in the BCTC 2010 annual report.

Pierre and the Ktunaxa Nation, have a 40-million dollar stake in the St. Eugene Mission Resort, a BC residential school turned upscale 4.5 star, 125 room resort and casino just minutes from the Cranbrook airport. Pierre is also the acting President of the holdings company that operates the resort.

Major economic interests and benefits are behind the Ktunaxa Nation council's fraudulent claims to Sinixt lands. The Ktunaxa council and its councilors are trying to make agreements and treaties with the BC government on lands they have NOT inhabited “since time immemorial” as some politicians would suggest. Traditional Sinixt families use and occupy these lands to this day with archeological evidence supporting their existence and use of these lands for over 12,000 years.

It is unfortunate that the Ktunaxa Nation council has jumped on the band-wagon (no pun intended) to “Keep Jumbo Wild” while trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the local settler society and their own people. Their declaration against the Jumbo development holds no integrity in the context of the larger violation of indigenous sovereignty. Put simply, the Chief and Council are opportunists against Jumbo.”

Naming Our Places:

2011-02-18T08:52:00.000-08:00

Naming:

One of the fundamental rights that people have is the ability to name where they live. Last fall, Canada Post, with no consultation, changed my post office address from what it had been for thirty years, Boswell, to a new address, Kuskanook.
And even though this is a small change, and with no big impact on my life, I found it irritating. So lately, I have been examining why this arbitrary address change disturbs me so much.
I am a Canadian writer, a university professor and an academic researcher. And, I am also a lifelong organic farmer on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake in south-eastern BC. I have written a number of books set around Kootenay Lake. I have also written a memoir about my life growing up here on our beautiful farm on the East Shore. In all of these books, I have referred to the area where I live and where our farm is, as Boswell. When I go on book tours or travel to teach, I tell people I live in Boswell. No one knows where it is, of course, so then I happily explain that Boswell is more a concept than a place, a thirty mile long community where everyone is your next-door neighbour. Interestingly Boswell got its name from Earl Grey making a literary reference to Samuel Johnson, who wrote a book called, the Life of Boswell.

So being a Boswellian, born and bred, is a big part of my identity as a person and also as a writer. Sense of place and sense of ecological identity, is also an important area of my research.
On the other hand, the name, Kuskanook, (or Kuskonook) has never played much of a role in our collective community identity, either historically, geographically, or currently.
Kuskanook, for me, was the place where my beloved friend for my whole life, Alan Wilson, was born, grew up and then died tragically from brain cancer. His house and his parent's house are gone now -- buried under a mud slide. So Kuskanook is now identified by most people in the broader region as a place with a boat ramp and a beach. It’s not seen by anyone as a name for a region, nor is it a name that is used by people, local and otherwise for our area. And in fact, historically, it never has been use, as a generic regional name or a 'civic' (As Canada Post terms it) name, for our area. Why Canada Post has suddenly decided I live in “Kuskanook” and where they got such information is a complete mystery to me.

In the last few years, as more people have moved here, Boswell, as a regional description of a place, has begun to acquire specific place names within itself, Armstrong Bay, Kootenay Bay, Sanca Park (Sanka?), Destiny Bay, Mountain Shores. Traditionally, all of us have been served by the Boswell Post Office, we go to the Boswell Community Hall for wonderful dinners, and a few years ago, we all celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the community of Boswell.

But last November, Canada Post, and the Regional District, together or separately, it's not clear which, designated a post office name change for our community, with no community input or opportunity for reaction, which strikes me as an oddly undemocratic way to make such a change.
Since then, despite many people emailing and phoning both Canada Post and the Regional District asking for a community meeting or an opportunity to at least have their say but so far, nothing has been done.
So what bothers me is two things; the arbitrariness of this change, that it was done with no community input, but also the fact that someone from far away with no knowledge of this place and obviously little understanding of the nature of this community, has decided what it will be called.
The issue is about community identity and our sense of where we live and our right to name our place for ourselves and to each other, and to our friends and business colleagues.
Our farm is a bit of a community hub; people come here to garden, to take writing classes, to swim with our family, to visit, to buy books, to have dinners and lunches and partake of other events. And to all of these people, I say, and will continue to say, "Oh, yes, I'm in Boswell."
I would very much appreciate a community meeting to discuss all this and have asked for one, but the silence from Canada Post around the name change, and the community reaction to it, has continued.

Farmer Politics

2011-01-19T10:03:00.000-08:00

Farmer Politics:
I still haven’t given up my faith in democracy or even in the common sense of most human beings. But I also find it increasingly difficult to feel as if I have a political home or even much in common with most of the political rhetoric being thrown around these days. I don’t fit into any of the slots that politics or the media think people like me should be slotted into. And I have no one party to vote for with which I entirely agree.
On any given day, I can wear any number of occupational hats; farmer, writer, teacher, mother, grandmother, cook, bottle washer. And, I can wear any number of political labels, none of which quite fit, but all of which fit some of the time, radical, feminist, environmentalist, redneck, conservative, anarchist, socialist, right-wing, left-wing, ranter, crank. None of them mean very much and some aspects of some varieties of political ideology apply to me only some of the time. And in fact, I am pretty much allergic to any forms of ideology.
In part, because I am a farmer, and because it is how I was raised, and because these ideas make sense to me, I value independence, honesty, strength, endurance, caring for the land, and caring for others. I want to live my own life on my own terms, be responsible for myself, and be free to take the risks I think I want or need to take. I want to raise my own food and be free to share or sell this food to my friends and neighbours. I believe in taking care of my family, my friends and my community. I believe in sharing, in cooperation and in independence. Those things go together.
When my brothers and sister and I were small, we took all kinds of chances that would be frowned on, forbidden, regulated and banned today. We were wild kids. We had matches, guns, hatchets, knives, fishing rods, and boats. We ran loose in the woods. We lit fires, we went swimming on our own right after eating, we hunted, fished, drove tractors, climbed enormous fruit trees, ran barefoot all summer, and worked our guts out. No one ever showed us how to do things; we learned by doing. Our father’s simple words to us were, “You see, you do.”
I think kids need time alone in the woods. I think they need independence, they need to learn to work, and they need to learn to survive. Survival and endurance are learned skills.
Generousity and caring for others is also learned.
As a farmer, I also think small entrepreneurial businesses are great. They are the backbone of small communities.
But big multi-national corporations are not ‘businesses’; they are something else entirely, something destructive and demonstrably uncaring of ordinary people’s lives and of non-human lives.
My parents were small business people. They survived by selling what they grew; meat, milk, eggs, butter, chickens, fruit and vegetables. Almost all of what my parents did would be illegal today. And yet, they fed themselves and their kids, and they fed their neighbours. They had simple values of hard work and friendship. But my parents weren’t conservative. My father was born in Saskatchewan, the birthplace of social caring in Canada. My parents voted NDP all their lives. When my father worked at the mine in Riondel, he was a union man, as were all the miners. Otherwise, they would have been forced to work for peanuts in unsafe conditions by mine owners that cared nothing for their lives. We were always poor but this poverty was not frightening because we ate so well and we had an arrogant sense of our own individuality. I’ve been poor my whole life and what for me, is frightening, is not poverty but lack of being able to do anything about it. What is even more frightening is being so afraid of poverty that I give up my sense of my true self.
But these days, the media and whatever powers seek to control our lives want to put us all in little slots. If you’re pro business and pro-family, then somehow you are also pro giant corporations and pro right wing religious patriarchy and anti-taxation and pro-religion.
No, thanks. I am pro-family and pro-small business and pro-independence and pro society taking care of people who need help and pro-my community. I am also pro-clean air and clean water and wild animals and above all, I am pro-honesty.
And I don’t care what religious beliefs someone has as long as I don’t have to hear about them. And I care far more about how they behave toward other humans and other non-humans than I do about what they believe. I don’t mind paying taxes for schools and health care and roads. I do mind paying taxes for huge corporations that don’t need subsidies, for stupid wars in foreign countries that achieve nothing, for more and more regulations and inspectors and bureaucrats with nothing much to do but complicate people’s lives.
Human beings and non-human beings are facing enormous challenges of many, many kinds. More than ever, people need to be able to speak their minds or write their minds without fear of reprisal. They need to do this is in a caring, mannerly way. They need to do this with honest information, not information that is slanted to make them believe one thing or another.
I’m not right wing, left wing or in the middle of anything. I am just out here in the woods, living a semi-independent farmer’s life, going for long walks and trying to make sense out of it all.

Is January the meanest month??

2011-01-04T17:27:00.000-08:00

January:

There is some dispute around our farm and in the family as to whether January is the grimmest month to get through or February. January tends to be a grey month, warmth locked far away in the ground, frozen snow crusted on the fields, the clouds lid locked over the lake. Not much to do but stay in and work, and for relief, look at gardening catalogues and go for walks, but even walks are a challenge when the snow is crusted and frozen.
I teach online, and I always have stacks of writing and reading to do, so in many ways I welcome winter and semi-solitude it brings. I think writers are fortunate. We are never without something that needs doing. When I talked to my cousin Kerrie, a rancher in Alberta, this fall, she said winters were difficult for her and her husband. Not much to do but feed the stock and plow the driveway. Her husband watched a lot of football and she had various hobbies but winters can be hard for farmers who want to be out and doing. I can’t imagine spending my winter watching television.
February around here is a bit easier since we tend to get some days when it is warm enough to go out and rake the sawdust, prune fruit trees, light a fire. But February is also a tease, warm one day and frozen the next and it drives people crazy. It’s the curse of anticipation and thinking that any day now it will be spring. It’s warmer, but not warm enough. March is when planting in the greenhouses begins but we can’t really garden, can’t actually get digging, raking and planting until the middle of April.
But that doesn’t stop us dedicated gardeners from getting together to go over seed catalogues together. Last year several of us had a seed catalogue afternoon, where we all brought our collected seed catalogues and made lists (not orders yet) of things we might want to grow. An imaginary garden is much easier than a real one.
Gardening is always one of those activities (the opposite of writing) that begins in order and hope and descends quickly into chaos. On the other hand, it is pretty much simplicity itself. Given warmth, light and nutrition, things will grow.
But they have their quirks. I love the fact that there are several happy volunteer wild cherry trees on the farm growing under cedar trees, where no gardener in his or her right mind would ever plant them. Every year, flowers fail where they should flourish and flowers I’ve neglected thrive or bloom on their own in the ‘wrong’ place. Vegetables that should be productive fail, like the giant broccoli plants I grew one year, healthy plants, no broccoli. The pigs loved them.
Last year, the peas and beans, which are normally productive, were eaten off to the root by deer and never recovered. I love the idea of a farm at peace but there are too many deer and not enough predators. I’m cheering for the cougars this winter.
Right now, when the dogs and I go for walks, I can see what they smell, a mosaic of tracks overlaid, deer and coyotes, mice and squirrels, and at the beach, duck tracks that end in spots of blood and wing brushes in the snow. Eagles harass the coots. Coyotes have scraped away the snow to get at mice in the long grass. I love my warm safe house. At night I close the curtains, open the computer and sail away. But in the afternoons, after a morning of teaching and writing, when it is time to go outside, I miss the garden.
But it will soon return.

Fear and Survival

2010-12-04T10:09:00.000-08:00

Fear and Time:
On A Friday night, I made it to through slush and a dimming light, to the Kootenay Lake ferry. It was late -- dark and snowing hard. I knew I would have a precarious fifty kilometre drive home. As I rode the ferry, I was reminded about something my sister had said on her last visit, how, every time she rode the ferry, she though about the terrfiying depths of black freezing water beneath her. My sister is the most fearless, intrepid, and amazing woman I know. She trains horses. She rides across country jumping over fences, up and down steep banks and in and out of water. She can walk up to the toughest and scariest horse in the world and make it behave. I was surprised to hear her say this but I understood. Kootenay Lake is big and deep; it has a reputation for eating boats of all sizes. I looked at the black snowy mountains and thought about the creatures there, and the combination of fear, adrenaline, and alertness that kept them alive. I thought about how all of us, human and non-human, ride an edge of awareness and fear, especially in the winter.
I had been teaching all day, my eyes were tired and sore, and I had already been held up on the highway because of an accident. As I drove off the ferry and up the steep hill, I realized he road was even worse than I thought it would be. Because of the thick blowing snow, I couldn’t actually see the highway. Instead, all I could was watch the dim fuzzy line of snowbank beside the right hand of the car. As long as I could see that snowbank, I could assume there was a road. I should have been terrified but as I set off up the hill and into the blackness, I felt an odd sort of exhilaration set in. Perhaps, I thought, it was a small particle of what adventure junkies and risk takers feel.
I had a long drive with a lot of time to think. I wondered if this combination of awareness, exhilaration and hyperalertness is what some people experience in battle. I thought, again, about the mountains above me and the many many inhabitants of those mountains; I wondered about their lives, their careful alertness, their constant awareness of risk, and survival. Did they feel like this all the time or was mine just a human moment?
I have always known that will and determination play a big part in survival. I have always known, since I was a small child, playing by myself in the mountains, riding crazy wild horses, climbing cliffs, that, in risky situations, I could make decisions to survive. I kept this awareness as an adult, I remember once, coming home from a long hike and having to traverse a section of steep hill in the dark. The darkness had come more swiftly than I was prepared for and I couldn’t see where I was going. I decided, very calmly and carefully, that I would feel every step, check every hold, that I would not slip and fall there in the dark and that I would make it home safely. And so I did.
I decided something similar on the way home in the snow. I knew the road. I would drive slowly. I would be alert and cautious and take no chances. It was almost exhilarating. I caught myself driving too fast as I got closer to home and had to make myself slow down. And I made it, came in the warm house, made myself tea, took a while to calm down and get to sleep.
Now, in the mornings, often at first light, the pair of coyotes that live next door are out hunting mice in the tall grass in the field below my house. The black flocks of coots huddle on the lake as the eagles hunt them. Winter, for some creatures, is a time of rest and recuperation, and for others, a time when the odds of surviving are sharpened. Every morning, I silently say hello and send respect to these coyotes, savvy, alert, and secure in their coyote world.
At night, I draw the drapes against the dark, the snow, and the cold. I go to bed under a huddle of quilts. I send my thoughts out to the coyotes in their den, the ravens in their tall trees, the eagles, the coots on the black water, the queen wasps sleeping in the cracks of the logs of my house, the frogs buried in mud, the sleeping bears, all of us, surviving, alert, aware, on edge, but not fearful. This isn’t fear but its opposite, this is calm, alert awareness. The world is not a fearful place but neither is it an easy place. Joy and tragedy, exhilaration and terror, we all ride them, together, on a thin and icy edge.

Natives of the Outside by K.L. Kivi

2010-11-26T12:31:00.000-08:00

“The street is a world where people in flight from the traumas that happen inside houses become natives of the outside.”
Rebecca Solnit

This line from Solnit’s book “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” reached out and grabbed me the other day. Solnit has a knack for a trenchant turn of phrase as was evidenced in the brilliant first essay in her book “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” as well as in “Wanderlust.” She seems to be preoccupied by similar topics as I am: the way our modern culture has caused us to diverge from a more basic, physical and conscious state of being, the dichotomy of inside/outside being a key concern.

I think myself as a “native of the outside” but not because of traumas suffered within houses. I suppose each of us has our own route to the places we end up. I’d say I’ve had an inexorable draw to the outdoors that is probably encoded in my peasant DNA. That said, I also have felt like an outsider to mainstream culture most of my life. Did that propel me to connect more profoundly with non-human life or was it the other way around. Solnit’s traumatized natives of the outside are people for whom the world is turned upside down; once the notion of safety of home is undermined, then perhaps it’s not difficult to cast off its companion notion that outside is dangerous. Or maybe, the unveiling of the lie of home sweet home puts other mainstream notions in question, creating an easier avenue of exit from said mainstream.

Solnit’s book is certainly good at unveiling aspects of our culture that often remain unexamined. She delves succinctly into the twists and turns of our culture and their impact on us as individuals and communities. I love the way she speaks of the human body as a “sensing, breathing, living moving body (that) can be a primary experience of nature too: new technologies and spaces can bring about alienation from both body and space.” I too have pondered the impact on our psyches of having bodies whose primary functions are recreational rather than utilitarian. Instead of our feet carrying us to gather food and shelter, we now drive to work and take our bodies to specific places for specific activities, be they hiking, soccer, etc, for them/us to get their/our necessary movement. Bitingly, she writes, “the body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet;…(it) is exercised as one might walk a dog.”

She goes even further, noting that in our modern car culture, walking could be seen as an “indicator species” for our physical, psychological and psychic health. Walking can be seen as “an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination.” She draws on the relationship between writing and creativity, talking about the walking habits of writers from Dickens to modern day adventurers. When we are no longer able to walk because of a scarcity of time, a scarcity of walking spaces, a scarcity of cultural values that honour walking, the gym becomes “a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion” which accommodates something essential after we abandon the original modes of human physical activity. But what kind of wildlife preserve can a gym be in you think of bodily motion being as much about a beckoning to the imagination and an experience of place as physical exercise? In teasing apart too many strands of this rope, one might end up with a pile of tattered, useless sisal instead of a functioning whole.

I could go on, as this subject has strands that connect to so many other topics. In the meanwhile, I highly recommend Solnit’s work, especially if you’re interested in erudite, thought provoking and well researched non-fiction. But, a better conclusion yet might be to spare your eyes and sitting weary body and get out for a walk.

Qat’muk, Qat’muk, Qat’muk Wild! by KL Kivi

2010-11-15T10:42:00.000-08:00

I’m repeating it to myself, this new/old Ktunaxa name for the Jumbo Valley and Jumbo Pass area, wondering just exactly how to pronounce it. Qat’muk, Qat’muk, Qat’muk. In the mere naming of it, something has been returned to us all and as I mutter Qat’muk, Qat’muk, a bubble of glee rises in my chest.

This naming was released today, as the Ktunaxa Nation of Southeast British Columbia was received by the BC Legislature to make a declaration. Their 50-member delegation was in Victoria to assert the importance of the stewardship of the land in its traditional territory. "I think it's the importance of Qat'muk, the Jumbo area, how important it is to our people, and the animals that live there, the grizzly bear, he holds everything for us," delegation member Herman Alpine told CTV Calgary. Interestingly, this comes on the heels of Friday’s announcement that Canada has finally signed on to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And though I cheer on the delegation and applaud the signing of the Declaration, the cynical part of me wonders what these developments add up to.

In the case of the Ktunaxa, they have been left holding some of the few cards that might have any clout in the work to converse the ecological integrity of the Central Purcells. For the past few years, while enviros for Jumbo Wild! have been blocked from any formal process with the government around the proposed Jumbo Glacier Resort, the Ktunaxa have been at the table. And although the Ktunaxa Nation Council have been publicly against the Jumbo Glacier Resort development for some time, their alliance with the environmental movement hasn’t always been strong.

I understand this. Or at least I think do. These same environmentalists haven’t often been in the forefront, or even allied, in First Nations struggles for recognition, self-determination and validation of the ongoing cultural genocide of their people. Suddenly, we need them. Suddenly they are useful to us. What’s to say that this relationship, which has never been reciprocal, will suddenly become reciprocal? Colonizers and settler cultures are notorious for using then abusing indigenous peoples world wide. Though it can be agonizing to not be able to reach across this historical gulf, at the same time, I cheer on any First Nation that claims their power. Part of that power is to define the terms of their engagement.

Even so, they still have to deal with the dominant political culture that wishes First Nations would simply shut up or go away. For example, the article in the Toronto Star entitled “Canada endorses indigenous rights” was small and buried deep in the News section. No photo, just three columns of print halfway down the page, with a few quotes from First Nations leaders. This article placement in the main newspaper of Canada’s largest city certainly reflects political attitudes toward the indigenous people of Canada as well.

Canada was one of four countries to vote against the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples when it passed in the UN General Assembly three years ago. Not that these non-binding “statements of principles” add up to much other than the symbolic, but the lack of even lip service to the symbolic has been a blot on Canada’s once shiny human rights image. Perhaps we should even thank the Harper government for three years of showing their true colours – brown for “we don’t give a shit about Indians.” There is still something to be said for honesty.

I await the unfolding of this story. It feels like, just maybe, First Nations have gained enough strength to rise up out of the wallow colonization has ground them down into. May those of us who honour the importance of land, belonging to land and the role of indigenous people in this connection, have the courage to put our hands paddles and participate in getting this big canoe moving.

What, me worry, by Luanne Armstrong

2010-11-09T13:14:00.000-08:00

“Everything worthy is under fire.” Wendell Berry

Like many people these days, I watch the world with some puzzlement and dismay. This is not the world my generation thought we were making. When we were marching against the Vietnam war, or fighting against nuclear war, or marching for women’s rights, we thought we were working for, and we talked about its coming into being, a bright peaceful future where everyone would be fed, housed, cared for, fulfilled.
And the odd thing is, we won most of these battles – sort of—(and they were battles, however peaceful they looked.) The Vietnam war finally ceased; women moved out of their kitchens and into work and jobs; the environmental movement was created; all kinds of social services were also created; nuclear weapons stopped being tested in the South Pacific and in the American desert; the Berlin Wall was torn down; the Soviet Union disintegrated and the Cold War was over. We thought.
But that peaceful global future we envisioned has yet to appear.
I get up every morning and while I am drinking my coffee, I cruise through various websites; what is the price of oil doing, what are people saying about global warming, what is up with those one hundred dolphins being held for slaughter in Taiji, Japan? And so on. Clicking through. Good news and bad. Facebook, where more and more people seem to have taken to putting up links to news stories they deem important. Click. Click.
And then I get on with my day. I’m not marching anymore. But worrying, oh yes, indeedy.
But what is there to march against? And with whom? The problems coming down the pike in some unknowable and largely unvisionable future are so big, so vague that most people don’t talk about them, and don’t even seem able to talk about them. Global warming – what will that do? When will it happen? Is it happening now? Well, sure the Arctic ice is melting, but hey, last winter was really cold. Wasn’t it? Things seem normal? Don’t they?
Peak oil? The oil industry says one thing, the peak oil doomers another. Everyone agrees that oil will get much more expensive in the future but how much, and when? And everyone agrees that the higher price of oil will have a drastic effect on our economy and the North American suburban-drive-everywhere-all-the-time way-of-life, but when and how much and what to do about it is never discussed in the political arena. The only people I really talk to about all this are a few women my own age, in our sixties now, and watching the future for our grandchildren grow darker.
Our children are busy with careers, jobs, bank accounts, school, raising their children, buying houses, mortgages. Busy doesn’t even begin to describe it. They worry sometimes when they have a moment and then they rush off to the next appointment.
And me? I stay put. I grow food. It’s not much and it has no impact on anyone but myself, and the friends and family members I can supply with food. If there were more to do that I thought would be effective, I would do it. If there was a march I thought was heading in the right direction, I might join it. Or not. Maybe I’ve been on too many marches and spent too many hours in meetings to really believe there is a right direction anymore.
I grow food, I read, I write and I worry.
Click…click…click.

The Animals Come Back by K.L.Kivi

2010-10-28T13:13:00.000-07:00

I caught the glimpse of black out of the corner of my eye. I spun to where the dark form had likely taken refuge – under the old aluminium canoe painted in faux birch bark – and seeing nothing, I stepped closer. A mere hint of a small nose appeared from under the edge of the boat and quickly withdrew.

“What do you see?” my brother Erik asked. He and I were trying to extricate the dock from the swollen lake. Each passing year, as water levels failed to fall to their previous autumn levels, the dock was becoming more difficult to put away for the winter. Climate change was increasing precipitation in this area surrounded by the Great Lakes. This year, the water came so high that the centre support, which I would later find a kilometre away on the other side of the lake, had floated away leaving our old wooden dock submerged and waterlogged.

“It’s black, but I don’t think it’s a squirrel. It didn’t move like a squirrel, and besides, I think that black squirrel you saw at your place was just a fluke. Possibly an urban drop off.” I skirted the canoe and tried to peer under it.

“There it goes! There it goes! Along the shore!” Erik shouted. “What is it?”

I looked up just quickly enough to see the fleeing shiny, dark brown form. “It’s a mustelid - from the weasel family,” I pondered out loud, “but it’s too small and fat to be a marten and too large to be a weasel. Maybe it’s a mink,” I offered, being struck by the lustre of its fur.

“A mink?” His puzzlement held the fact that for almost 50 years, my brother and I have been coming to this Muskoka, Ontario lake, and we’d never seen such an animal before. His puzzlement was just that, and not disbelief. Over the past five years, we’d been surprised by the appearance of too many new species at the lake to be closed to any possibility. The animals that had put in an appearance or reappearance since our childhoods, included otter, wolf, water snake, bear, moose, fisher, turkey, various waterfowl and cougar. As well as the animals known as humans.

In the 60s and 70s, rural areas with marginal farming soils such as Muskoka emptied of year round residents. Yet the newly urbanized generation still had a hankering for nature and thus began the selling off of lakeshore lots for cottages (Ontario equivalent of the BC word, cabin). Mr. Clarke, whose long gone white farm house stood on the shores of McKay Lake and whose sugar shack back in the bush has been converted into someone’s summer abode, subdivided and sold lots at $1500 apiece, a price quite affordable to middle class or working class urbanites like my parents. These same lots now roll over for $200,000 and a Muskoka cottage has once again become the purview of the moneyed. Or, permanent residents.

Whereas no one lived on MacKay Lake year round for all of my childhood, the past decade has seen the return of the year-round resident, usually retirees from either southern cities or northern towns. With them have come more kayaks and canoes, more Muskoka chairs and binoculars and even a sled dog team. On our lake, they are neighbourly people who help each other out and participate in creating a sense of community. They tend to be nature lovers in search of tranquility rather than people with a love for pistons and pistols. Much reduced are the motor boats, dirt bikes and snowmobiles of the 70s and 80s. Instead of driving away the wildlife, they put up bird feeders and get excited when a mammal wanders through their yard. These are obviously people whose survival interests do not lie in safeguarding crops or livestock or providing for themselves through hunting, trapping and gathering. One could argue, as Luanne does in previous blog entries, that their connection to place is less deeply rooted than that of previous residents whose basic needs relied on the land. And I suspect this is true. Nevertheless, I greet the arrival of the wild things with excitement.

I abandon the dock removal operation and go see where the mustelid has gone. I find it crouched at water level under the overhanging roots of a big hemlock. Its shiny black eyes peer out at me every time it bravely thrusts its white chin out of its hidey-hole. We eye each other for a few minutes before I go back to lugging waterlogged pieces of dock to shore. I know that the current state of human/non-human animal balance and our relationship to land, will change again. My hope is that this time around, when we come to need the land again for our basic survival, that we will find a different balance than before, one that understands the value of co-existence.

Solitude: by Luanne Armstrong

2010-10-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

Solitude:
I have now had three weeks of fairly intense solitude and it has left me wondering how people who sail around the world solo, or row across the ocean, solo, or go on long journeys alone manage. Or what abut all those early European explorers, freezing in the arctic, dying in the jungle, crossing deserts and dying of thirst? Why did they do it? What drove them? How did they cope with the solitude, the loneliness and the absence of their friends and family?

And in all the stories of early pioneer days, there are always stories of hermits, recluses, people who chose to live alone with almost no human contact. On the hill just to the north of our farm are the remains of a man named Bill Haley, who lived very much alone with only a herd of goats for company. But there are lots of other stories in our area of people who had left family or friends to live alone. It was the pioneer era, and so many people were naturally separated from everything they had known.

I have often wondered how that was bearable for some people. What was it like, in the days when a letter took three to six months to arrive, for people to be separated for the rest of their lives from everything they had once known as familiar and dear? And I know it still goes on but at least, e-mail is now almost instantaneous.

Research reports that prisoners stuck in solitary confinement go crazy fairly quickly. What happens to people who voluntarily choose solitude – to monks in caves, hermits in their wilderness? Herd animals in zoos separated from their natural habitat and their natural companions also go crazy pretty quickly – we’re not much different than them.

Human beings are animals who live in groups; we live in families, tribes, clans, communities. The more I read novels, the more convinced I am that the basic human plot, at the centre of all of our stories, is the unbinding and rebinding of a sense of family. John Gardner, a famous novelist and writing teacher, said that there are only two plots in all of literature: someone comes to town or someone leaves town. Very much the same thing. Because human beings desperately need to be with other people and often have an equally hard time getting along with them, the endless human saga is full of the push and pull of people leaving their families and then coming home again or leaving one family and forming another kind of family.

In my case, I have briefly left a very full chaotic, and rewarding life, full of people, animals, plants and community, at my farm, for one that has had mostly only books, words, language and writing in it. Despite all the best gadgets of modern communication: internet, email, Facebook, phone, I still felt alone. Electronic people are not the same as real people. My electronic students, however brilliant, are not the same as living, breathing bodies in a classroom.

It was a productive time, in terms of writing, no question, but one can only live with words and idea for so long. After that, I, at least, need people, need voices, need contact. And I also need to be outside, with animals, plants and the living, breathing world. Here in Saskatchewan, I did go for long walks and soaked up the smells and sights and sounds of the prairie, a place I really only know from stories about it.

The future vision that some science fiction writers have had, of people living in self-contained rooms, surrounded by electronic toys, is so impossible that it is almost funny. People simply wouldn’t survive like that, or at least, not for long. I believe that many of the problems of modern life are caused by sheer human loneliness, people who no longer have sane and structured human contact. By this, I don’t mean the right wing vision of rigid and hierarchical nuclear families, where initiative, ideas and creativity are stifled. But of families that nurture, sustain and care for each other. I am quite sure they exist and they are still the best way for people to live. When they work.

For most of its history, humanity has lived in small groups of two to three hundred people and evolved distinct ways for such groups to get along. The survival of our ancestors depended on such communal understanding. We no longer no know much about this because now because we believe we always have the choice to leave. But for those of us who have chosen to stay in one place, take care of the place we love and the people who live there with us, leaving is never a choice at all. And maybe that is a very good thing.

Belonging by Luanne Armstrong

2010-10-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

Belonging:
by Luanne Armstrong
I got a chance to read my great-aunt, Catherine Armstrong’s diaries the other day. She and her three brothers came west in 1907 to take up land grants in southern Alberta, near the Cypress Hills, and to build lives centred around ranching, cattle, hay, seeding in the spring and harvest in the fall. Her journals, while not detailed by any means, are full of references to visits by friends and relatives, riding to the neighbours, or going to dances. And also references to work; she counted the number of pieces whenever she did a laundry, I presume by hand. One hundred and fifty-one pieces of laundry, she writes one day, or one hundred and thirty, always hundreds of pieces of laundry.
And then there was all the other work, one day, ten loaves of bread, the next day, seven pounds of butter churned, plus whitewashing walls, cleaning the kitchen, riding out to look for stock and all the meals for visitors and her brothers.
And also, occasionally, references to depression, to weeping, to homesickness, or to a day spent reading. And as well, a wonderful romance, buried in this pages; casual reference to “Fred” showing up, to walks and talks and finally, she says, “Well, I guess we will get married.” And so they do and become one of the founding families of an Alberta town called Irvine.
She and her brothers worked the ranch but eventually, one brother bought out the others. After that, my grandfather moved to Saskatchewan, and after his wife died and the drought in the thirties made grain farming impossible, hecame west to BC, and bought the farm where I still live. So that is why I am not an Alberta girl, or a rancher, though when I was a girl, I dreamed of it, wanted to be a cowgirl, and dreamed of the romance of the West.

I read these diaries in the interesting context of staying in a writer’s house, the Wallace Stegner House in a small town in Eastend, Saskatchewan. It’s October, and farmers are still harvesting grain, racing against time to get in a big crop. Too much rain, for a change, instead of too little.

Interesting to be here and reading Wallace Stegner and his take on the romanticism of the American west and how distorted and historically inaccurate it is. Now the west is the land of big trucks, big machines, big harvests, big farms and big skies. It’s very hard not to wonder how will this land, and these people, function in the future? How will global warming, the price of oil, the future of food, the price of land, affect them? Most of them have only been here for three or four generations. This new generation, the children of my cousins out here, are in university or working. Very few of them want to be or are farmers.

This land, this economy, these big ranches and fields and grain farms, are all adaptations to the exploitation of gas and oil. None of this will last forever. As Josh Farley, an ecological economist says:

"Before fossil fuels, when humans lived almost exclusively on the energy of contemporary sunlight, one calorie burned by a worker could create 10 calories of food, but now we use 10 calories from oil to create one calorie of food. And remember that the market has no way to account for the disastrous consequences of burning all those fossil fuels. And we’re increasingly dependent on non-renewable resources for the food we need to live.””

The land here is beautiful and productive but it has also changed before and will change again.
Near Stegner House is a museum containing dinosaur bones that were found near here, laid down 65 million years ago when big parts of North American were under water and the rest was a lush jungle.

And yet people are smart, and adaptable, and the land has always called people to be farmers. People who feel they belong to this place will adapt, I hope. It was wonderful to spend time with my family here; they know this land in a way I never could and they showed me their parts of it and their understanding of it. If they ever come to my part of the world, could I show them how I now belong there? And what would they then see and understand about me?

Finding your balance: by Luanne Armstrong

2010-09-27T10:37:00.001-07:00

Equinox and balance:

This year, full moon and Equinox happened at the same time. For the first two weeks before Equinox and the week after, bad new filtered in from various friends. Many people were ill with deep chest colds; three friends had floods in their houses. One who had a flood also had a beloved family member die suddenly. All kinds of tension and sadness suddenly pervades our lives.
Just coincidence, of course. The moon, the seasons, the rhythms of life don’t affect us anymore. So most people believe. And yet, there are many rhythms in this world and the animals and plants play no attention to human lives and go on living to the rhythms of light and seasons and the turning planet.
I read a sad and moving article this week in New Yorker about the people of a small town in Colorado named Uravan, where once they made a living mining uranimum. The main point of the article was that, even though many former residents of the town had died of lung cancer, and that after uranium mining was shut down and the whole town shredded and stored away as toxic waste, people still missed it, wanted to move back, wanted the mine to re-open. Both the writer and the people he interviewed seemed unable to articulate why the people would miss this place except for the fact that it had once been their home. Once a year, they have a reunion. They press their faces up against the barbed wire fence around their former home and feel nostalgic. They remember the voices of children playing and they long for a place that was never really their home and that killed many of them.
I do something similar to this as well. Five miles from our farm is another farm, known in our family as the Mannarino Place, after Jimmy and Victoria Mannarino, who cleared it and farmed it and then sold it to my grandfather as a wedding present for my mom and dad. We lived there until I was two and then my parents moved away to a small mining town and then to our present farm on Kootenay Lake, where I have now lived since I was five.
And yet, I still miss the Mannarino place. I loved to go there when I was a child. I felt peculiarly at home there and I still do. And I dream about this place. Over and over, I go back there, but it has changed. A strange family is there, a man I hate and despise and try to get rid of. Whenever I come to this place in my dream, I recognize it, even though it is much different than the real farm. There are houses around it; there is mine high on the mountain, there is a deep woods, there is a huge frightening house full of ghosts.
I rarely go there now in reality. The place has been sold and sold again. And still I miss it, long for it, scheme as to how I could get it back. Why? I have no idea, other than in my child’s wild true heart, the place was, is mine.
Once I was riding my mare home from the farm where I had left her to get bred. On the way, we passed through the place where I had bought her. We went by the temporary corral where the owner had housed her with another more. The barbed wire was falling down, the fenceposts were leaning, and yet my mare went eagerly towards this corral. I let her, curious to see what she would do. She went inside, nosed around, sniffed the ground, poked her nose, sniffed the empty feed bin. Then she stopped and relaxed, obviously expecting me to slide to off, take off her saddle and bridle, let her be at home and relax. I disappointed her, made her leave that place she had once felt at home, and continue on to my home.
Do the places we have once lived leave shadows and ghosts within us? Are we, as biological creatures, tuned into these places in ways we don’t understand. Why do my dreams of the Mannarino place haunt me, in particular, the old house, long destroyed and in my dreams, full of terrifying voices from the distant upstairs.
And what scars are left within people torn from their homes and displaced by war, genocide, famine, industrialization or any of the other infinite ways in which people have been shoved around the globe from place to place, particularly in the past two centuries of colonization, exploitation, industrialization and globalization?
Before modern industrialized warfare, there was also war, but a different kind of war – over territory and boundaries and resources but this rarely resulted in a mass displacement of whole peoples. What scars and traumas are left in such people? No one asks this question? Does anyone even want to know?
I am still determined someday to go back to Scotland. I want to find the place from which my ancestors left so long, long ago. I want to imagine myself back into the scene that must have taken place, somehow, when a whole family of Armstrongs, the mother, the father, and their seven children, made the decision to leave for Canada, to leave the place that had been their home for as long as anyone could remember, and make an entirely new life. In my lifetime, I have never been displaced. I have camped in many locations but always lived at ‘home’, at the farm. So it will take a writer’s leap of imagination to sit in that place, with my ancestors’ blood thrummng in my veins, and understand why they did that, and what it meant.

Killing the Hare by K.L. Kivi

2010-09-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

It’s been over a month since the morning I stood, shovel raised, over the wide-eyed, trembling snowshoe hare and spoke to it in the softest words I could find, but the moment is still vivid in my mind’s eye. The hare’s soft brown ears and long whiskers twitched but the rest of its body was still, paralysed by the well placed bite of a predator. Around midnight the night before, I’d been jolted from my half-sleep by a scream that could have been human if there had been any babies out in the dark forest. I rummaged for my headlamp and rushed outside. I found the hare sprawled on its side on the bare ground near the shed, wounded at the neck. I hesitated, not knowing what to do.

Not knowing what to do: what a familiar feeling. I feel it almost every day and have for many years. It’s not that I don’t do things. I do. I’m active in the campaign to keep the Purcell Mountains wild and keep the Jumbo Glacier Resort at bay. I chair my local watershed committee. Etc, etc. I walk, shout, talk, write and live in protest. All of this activity and the capitalist madness that Luanne describes in her last blog entry has indeed become “normal” for many of us. However, as Bruce Cockburn so aptly sings, “the trouble with normal is that it only gets worse.”

At the same time, I try to live a mindful, conscious life, attempting to embody the values Robert Jensen (previous blog entry) places outside the realm of capitalist culture - solidarity, compassion, creativity, ethics, joy. These things I know how to do, for the most part, at least when it comes to the small world of people, flora, fauna and land that I call my home. But the more the capitalist/industrial/military mindset permeates my homeplace, the more problematic right action becomes. How to express compassion towards those whose only interest is profit? How to participate in a broader culture that is imbued with the ethics of mass consumption and outrageous waste? How to accept what is and lean toward a vision of what could be?

That night, facing the bright, terrified eye of the injured hare, I had to make a quick decision. I decided to step out of the picture and let nature take its course. An animal had attacked the hare, no doubt in hopes of a supper. If it was still around, it may finish its work, eat its meal. I turned my light off and walked away, climbing into my bed, wide awake and trembling, wondering if the hare was in pain. Had I scared the predator away? I could not take my interruption back. Regret would serve no purpose. These are the things I said to myself.

What are the things I say to myself when I don’t know what to do? Last night, I attended the showing of an excellent documentary by Liz Marshall called “Water on the Table.” The film featured Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in her attempts to establish water as a human right. She leads the campaign for public control over water resources in the face of a push for commercialization and corporate, profit-oriented control. The film was beautiful, poignant, evocative, well-constructed and to the point. Maude Barlow, well, she’s one of a kind. My partner and I walked away energized but, ultimately, despairing. It often feels like the predator has already bitten our neck, severed the flow of democracy, hell in a handbasket and all that stuff. Still, wide in my eyes is the fear, the desire to fight, the desire to claim my rightful space in the world. Tar sands: what more can we do? Water privatization: regardless of my opposition, that beast marches on.

In the morning, I went to the place of the snowshoe hare right away. It was with great sadness that I found the animal still there, prone in the dirt, eyes still open, whiskers still trembling, pieces of its fur torn out and its flesh lightly nibbled. The corners of my mouth turned down in consternation and anguish. I knew what I must do. But I didn’t want to do it. I kneeled down and petted the soft, soft flanks of the still paralysed hare all the while knowing that this would only frighten the animal more and change nothing. I considered getting one of my land mates but this too would only delay the inevitable and drag someone else into the distress I was feeling. I went for the shovel.

Is there a time coming in which I’ll have to make a similar, horribly uncomfortable decision about how to end other, irrevocable pain? What will be the edge, the sharpness that will speed the inevitable? Who will we be? Will we finally know what to do after so many of years of not knowing?

Even with the shovel raised in the air, I hesitated; it is not a simple thing to extinguish a spark of life. I stood over the hare for many minutes, swallowing and swallowing at the lump in my throat, shaking, still looking for a way out. And then I steeled myself. Shovel still in hand, I bowed, honouring the snowshoe hare’s life. The line between compassion and violence blurred. What was I doing? And then I thrust the blade into the ground at the place of its neck. Blood squirted and the body leapt into action, the legs flailing. When all motion quieted, I carried the body into the woods and laid it on the ground. And it stays with me. It all stays with me.

Eating Peaches by Luanne Armstrong

2010-09-05T10:31:00.000-07:00

“Capitalism is the most wildly productive economic system in history, but the one thing it cannot produce is meaning. Even more troubling is the way, through its promotion of narcissism and mindless consumption, that capitalism undermines the larger culture’s ability to create real meaning. Virtually all of what is good in society—solidarity, compassion, creativity, ethics, joy—comes from outside capitalism, giving the illusion that capitalism is a civilized system. It’s a cliché, but important enough that we sing it over and over: Money can’t buy you love. Capitalism cannot create a healthy human community, and it undermines the aspect of human nature rooted in solidarity and love.
The other obvious failure of capitalism is its contribution to the erosion of the health of the ecosystem. Humans have been drawing down the ecological capital of the planet since the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, but that process has intensified dramatically in the capitalist/imperialist/industrial era. Our culture is filled with talk about the success of capitalism even though that system degrades our relationships and threatens our existence. That’s an odd definition of success.”
From an interview with Robert Jensen, (journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin.)

The amazing golden beauty and bounty of September has returned again. Really, the only way to eat peaches is to stand under a tree of ripe peaches that the wind has shaken, and eat windfall peaches, one after another, dripping juice down my hands and face. Which I do.
And then later, lying in bed, listening to the wind, and distant rumbles of thunder, of course the worries come in. September, winter coming, work beginning, cold again, how much I dread the cold; it all comes down to fear. Nothing is coming that I can’t cope with, but that thought doesn’t stop the fear coming in the window with the thunder.
Lately, the tune, “Walk Me Out into the Morning Dew,” has been haunting my head. It’s a beautiful song about an unknown doomsday. I even went to ITunes and played three versions to get it to go away but it’s still there. Why is it haunting me so persistently?
The farm is, as always, beautiful, peaceful, and productive. The world far from the farm is so not peaceful. This year was the hottest summer in the hottest year since weather records have been kept. There were floods in China and Pakistan, fires in Russia, Bolivia, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and unabated war in Afghanistan. I sat on the beach, as I do every summer, and watched the summer people go round and round and round in their boats and seadoos. Long lines of RV’s rolled by on the road. Normal, everything normal. And mad as can be.
Stephen Henighan wrote a great piece in www.thetyee.ca, this week, called The Phony War, comparing this time in history to the time before World War Two began. But this is a very long quiet time and we are protected in North America by the enormous resilience of the ecosystems in which we live. Other places in the world are not so lucky. I have yet to read a comprehensive environmental analysis of the floods in Pakistan, but I am sure someone will do one soon.
But surely and steadily, a kind of ‘war’ is coming to the Kootenays. The proposed Jumbo Ski resort lumbers along, despite the fact that no one wants it, it will cost a small fortune to build, it will probably go broke – eventually, as the price of gas rises and no one will want to drive forty miles into the mountains to ski, it will destroy the grizzly population in the Purcells. What kind of person looks at the pristine mountain valley and decides to build a city there?
And, in addition, the Glacier Howser private power project at the north end of Kootenay Lake is back, a project that will only make money for a few corporate suits and their lackeys, that will destroy two large and beautiful fish bearing creeks that flow into Kootenay Lake, that will bring roads, lights, dynamite, noise, destruction, to a pristine area. And for what?
Yes, anyone who burns gasoline and uses electricity is implicated but corporations and their bought government hacks who make decisions that destroy landscapes and ecosystems in order to only enrich a few, are far more implicated. And yes, many of us will go to the phony ‘public hearings’ and many more of us will protest and some will be arrested but the game is rigged from the beginning and no one in government or industry is listening.
I wish I knew what more to do. I write, I teach, I read, I farm, I grow food and store it away -- I walk through the blazing beauty of September, both joyful and fearful. I stop to pick a windfall Gravenstein apple and go to the beach, sit in the sun, come home in the blue dusk and read some more.
Waiting.

The Things She Carries: Luanne Armstrong

2010-07-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

The things she carries:

On the 33 bus, she looks across the aisle and there is a mirror and a laden down old woman looking back at her. Sunglasses, walking stick, keys, purse, bag, computer, books, notebooks, a good pen, eyedrops, heart pills. She wears comfortable shoes and a sun hat. Once she ran outside early, barefoot, cold dew on her feet. She shrugged on a t-shirt and shorts. Into the garden for a few peas, a couple of strawberries, carrots with the dirt rubbed off. And then to the beach in the grey dawn, fishing rod in hand, a line, a small hook, a glass jar of worms.
On the bus to the university, she is the only one without earphones. She looks through her sunglasses at the bright-sun streets. If only she could read on the bus.
***
As my mother got older, leaving the house got more difficult. Even going for a walk to the beach required remembering. The right shoes. A coat? Was it cold, she would ask me? She was afraid of cold. Even on hot days, she might need a coat at the beach. Or should she change her shoes. Had she turned off the stove? Did she need her glasses? Sunglasses? I was patient; I betrayed my mother in that patience. Once I would have snapped at her. No you don’t need a stupid coat. Now I waited. Behind her fear of cold, her fear of the wrong shoes, was her and my real fear, the forgetting, the losing it, the really getting old fear.
***
Each morning, for two weeks I ride the #33 to the university. One morning, a woman gets on and drops her bus pass. She lurches into the seat next to me as the bus takes off. “Oh no,” she says, leaning over, scrabbling with her fingers under the seat. The bus pass, impossibly, has slid into a thin heating vent, a slit under the seats. I lean over, lending more if not physical support, as she slowly creaks to her knees, pushes her arm under the seat and retrieves it.
“I have this theory that inanimate objects are out to get us.” I say.
“They certainly are. Last week, just as my neighbour was getting into the elevator in our building, she dropped her keys and they fell through the crack between the elevator floor and the building floor and all the way down the elevator shaft. They had to shut down the elevator. Took two days to retrieve them.”
“Seems whenever I pick something up, a milk jug, a tub of yogurt, it is plotting to spill out of my hands.”
“There’s something to that,” she agrees. We nod, smiling and talking until she gets of the bus, her bus pass now safely contained in her purse.
***
“Everyone should write a memoir,” I tell my class. “Otherwise personal history, family history, disappears in two or three generations.” Another students says that things that matter, family heirlooms, also lose their meaning in a couple of generations. She is planning on having her name, her mother’s name and her grandmother’s name engraved on an art-deco bracelet given to her by her grandmother. Provenance, the history that things carry with them. When my father died, we threw out all the things he had collected, all his treasures, now junk, the vacuum cleaner that he had wired together so it sparked and shocked anyone but him who used it. The toaster that no longer popped out toast. The record player. The reel to reel tape recorder. Truckloads of his treasured accumulated layered stuff went to the dump. He had spent years going to garage sales, bring home things that almost worked, things that only he could fix.
My daughter and I are talking about this. “After I die, you can throw everything away,” I say, “except my journals and all those bags of letters.” She laughs but her face is suddenly shocked. Her mother’s journals, once private, once books she sneaked into when she was a child to catch a glimpse of her mother’s tortured inner life, will be just more writing. And what will they mean to anyone when I am no longer here to explain what I meant? The one excuse writers can never make – this is what I meant to say.
The things we carry that fill our lives, that stack on shelves and in drawers, markers, records, each with provenance, each sticky with memories and meaning. Some have more meaning than others; old photos, books, journals. But I will never know, now, why my father loved his junk. He was poor his whole life; he hated spending money, he liked to tinker. But the stuff was far more important to him than that.
I am weighted with all the books I have read and stories I know and people I’ve met and things I’ve done and places I’ve seen. I am weighted with letters and conversations and emails and books I’ve written. I am a freighter, low gunneled in heavy seas. I am a walking encyclopedia, I am a freight train going both ways from the past to the future, a muddle of metaphors, walking slow. I carry the world and its many deaths, its huddle of lives.
***
Animals are without kindness but full of care. As I work, again and again, I pass the new swallow nestlings, silent on the clothesline beside their nest, still being fed by their parents. They watch without fear. I look away. I am not dangerous, I say. I carry pots of plants. I carry seedlings to the garden and weeds away from the garden and mulch to the garden and vegetables to the house sink. I carry the hose and sprinklers from place to place, moving each sprinkler every couple of hourse., I carry a bag of soil to the greenhouse. I carry buckets and baskets and later, I carry raspberries and cherries, caught in plastic, to the freezer.

I had twin daughters. Getting out of the house to go for a walk with them in the stroller always seemed impossibly complicated; like planning a safari, bottles, diapers, toys, crackers, jackets in case it rained, my wallet, my shoes, my own jacket. Going anywhere with children still seems impossibly complicated. But now that I am old, sometimes when my nine year old grandson comes to visit, we get in the car with only money and drive twenty miles to buy a milkshake. When he first arrives at the farm, he takes off his clothes, he jumps on the trampoline naked, he wears the same shirt for two weeks. As he jumps on the trampoline, penis bobbing, he puts his head back, looks at the sky, yells, “I’m free, I’m free.”

On my desk, books and pieces of paper stack up, totter, slip, slide, hide under the printer, accumulate dust, cat hair, dog hair, skin cells, the ones I need most disappear; the ones that hover lose all meaning.
***
Even at the farm, going to the beach for a lazy afternoon, she carries a bag with: drinks, a towel, a notebook, a paperback, pens, pencils, drawing pad, and once at the beach, she sets up an umbrella, a chair, a table; things from the bag are spread on the table, she sits, her eyes closed against the light.

The summer table. She rests.

How to Pit Soft Cherries by K.L.Kivi

2010-07-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

There is a tree by the side of the road. Every year around this time, I climb it. From the rocky bank, I put my foot up onto its curving, fat trunk and hoist myself up. There are two trunks actually, each as grey and thick as an elephant’s leg. But what do I know of elephants? This tree is like my elephant, a large, steady ear-flapping pachyderm that offers up its back to give me a ride again and again.

Up the tree I climb, straddling the large gaps between the steps in its branches, moving between the trunks until they are too far apart to bridge. Up I go even further, pulling myself up onto the soft springy branches thinner than my wrist. There, I find the small, burgundy black globes of sweetness hanging among the eye-shaped leaves: cherries.

Tonight, as I climbed and reached and picked into the bucket hung from my waist by a leather belt, I said to my friends: I come here as much to climb this tree as I do to pick cherries. Don’t get me wrong - I love the cherries. Every year, I pick honey buckets full of them, rendering them into clafoutis, jams and just plain canned cherries. These are not the firm, large cherries one buys in stores and snacks on like bonbons. This variety, whose name I do not know, it is not one that lends itself to storage or transport. Very quickly, these soft pungently sweet cherries will turn to brown mush. The trick is to act quickly.

I set my two buckets on the fridge in the basement where it is cooler than my house on this hot July night. In the morning, I will begin the process. Some I will can whole, cherries packed into quart jars, covered with boiling water, lidded and processed in a hot canning bath. These I will take to gatherings in the winter, where my friends will sit around eating summer sunlight one red droplet at a time, carefully spitting the pits into a communal spittoon-bowl. We will talk of summer. We will feel warm. I will be in my tree again.

(You could say, that whenever I am not in this tree, I am out of my tree. I once read a very smart response to the accusation, “you’re out of your tree!” “It’s not my tree,” the person replied.)

Another portion of the cherries, I will pit and freeze, and others yet, I will pit and turn into cherry jam. Once the raspberries and Saskatoon berries are ready, I will combine the three to make a concoction that is food and delight and nourishment all in one. You need a cherry pitter, friends have said to me. What do I need another gadget for? Tomorrow morning I will fire up the best, most efficient cherry pitter in the world: my lips. Yes, it is true! With these soft cherries, it is possible to suck the pit out of them and leave all of the flesh and most of the juice behind. Of course, some juice will splatter on the wall behind the sink and another quantity will stream down the outsides of my arms and drip off my elbows, but there’s enough juice in these gems for all that and the jar.

And thus, my love affair with the tree will continue as I place my puckered lips on each cherry, lovingly extracting their pits. Kissing. That’s what I do. Let it be known: I’m an unrepentant cherry kisser.

I kiss many cherries, maybe twenty or thirty, before I spit out a mouthful of the hard seeds. And then I kiss some more. The cherries go into a pie shell to await custard or into the pot to await jamification. I kiss until my lips and chin and cheeks and clothes are smeared with indelible red. I kiss until I burp up red bubbles. And then I kiss some more. At some point, I run out of cherries. Sated for this year, I go up to the garden. The raspberries will be ripe in another week!

The price of staying put: by Luanne Armstrong

2010-07-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

I am writing this in Vancouver, working at the university, buying books, going out to eat in restaurants. Of course I enjoy part of this but it is also contrary to how I want to live and what I believe. I do it to stay alive both financially and creatively.

Staying and living in one place runs counter in every way to the North American vision and dream of independence, making lots of money, self-creation, hustling, moving, road movies, re-creation of self and family and onwards. Not that this is a particularly successful vision in some ways. Yes, it lets people get rich and build enormous houses on pieces of land where they have no sense of where they are, it encourages people to wander on and re-create who and what they are over and over until they are so lonely and lost they will hang on to anything that gives them a sense of stability.
What living at the farm for sixty years has taught me, is to love every blade of grass, every insect, every tree, to wander around, to live outside time, to be irritated and suspicious of strange people, to farm, to grow food, to listen to every noise, to live intensely with animals, to listen to swallows and crickets and frogs and ospreys and say hello and goodbye to them at the right times.
And nothing of these is worth any money, nothing is translatable into values recognized by mainstream society. So, I get to go outside and be weird and eccentric and wave at ravens. I get to be poor again and have time to write and dream. I get to live in a world of flowers and plants and gardens and neighbours who are neighbours and come if I need them. I get to think about my grandchildren living here without me. I get to plant trees and wonder what they will look like in a 100 years. I get to dream.
All good and all romantic. And there’s the niche, the rub. It isn’t romantic or idyllic; it isn’t stately mansions. It’s dirt and work and food. It’s ordinary. And it has a price, just not the one people usually imagine.

Friedrich Engels coined the phrase, “the idiocy of rural life,” at a time when poor people who lived rurally were part of a definitive class system. The romance and idyllic ideas of rural life came from poets and the upper class. The two crucial factors in making the difference between idyll and misery were money and education.
These days, when I read many and frequent discussions on the internet about food and agriculture in the days of declining oil supply, I am amazed at how confused and simply ignorant most people are about the nature of small, mixed, sustainable farming. And this is even more surprising given that many people still have at least grandparents who were farmers. And given that both Canada and the United States were pioneered and settled by people who were prepared, who had to be, independent, self-sufficient and skilled in multiple ways. How can we have forgotten this so quickly?
So talking about small farming runs up immediately against the soup of contradictions; it is idyllic, romantic; no, it is backbreaking work, lonely, dirty, smelly, covered with germs, a long fight against the forces of nature; no, it is being one with the land, close to the land, learning from the land.
And of course, as is usual with clichés, all of these contain a small kernel of truth and not much more than that. And in fact, within all these small kernels of truth is the reality that not much has changed in the rural parts of North American and until there is some kind of real apocalyptic crisis, it isn’t likely to.
In both the US and Canada, over the last thirty years, the working-class rural population has mostly fled to the cities. In my community, and in many others, they have been replaced with summer people, or people on vacation or tourists, people for whom the outdoors-rural-wild is a place they can purchase, either by buying land or renting time, to have fun, not a place to live and work. The services, the amenities, the educational facilities, and most of all, the jobs and money, are all still in cities. It is still impossibly difficult to make a living as a small farmer, although a small farmer can live and eat well, and subsist. So for anyone who chooses to stay, who chooses land, who chooses the place they love, who chooses actual rurality, they must and will choose it over a ‘career’, an education, chances to advance up any kind of economic ladder.
Barbara Ehrenreich in her book, Bright Sided, about the negative side of positive thinking, writes about the amount of leisure time that people living in medieval villages actually had. Farmers, except at specific times of the year such as planting and harvest, could work three or four days a week and still have time for festivals and celebrations. Village life was often marked by holidays, fetes, celebrations, religious ritual and community events, far more than it is today. In fact, rural life often tended to fairly celebratory. What made it idiotic and difficult wasn’t the nature of rural life but the nature of the class system, that prevented people from getting an education or better health care, or being literate or traveling.
A healthy functioning rural community that has access to good education, where people are socially and communally minded, is still a good place to live, a good place to raise a family, a good place in which to learn and understand the intricate web of economic, cultural and ecological relationships that connect humans to the places where they live. Industrialization, industrial agriculture, urbanization, suburban ecological deserts, have almost destroyed this life but not quite. Many people miss it and they want it back. They may not even know what it is they miss. But the impulse to form community and to love where one lives is a deep and basic a human instinct and won’t ever quite go away.
If any of the multiple apocalyptic catastrophes being proposed come about, then it is indeed possible that small farming and rural community, a return to true ‘peasantry’, meaning, being from a region or a rural district, may again arise, may indeed be the saving of people. But that is all in the future.
For now, I and many other rural people survive in a fragmented and class-driven rural society where, unless someone comes with money and education, opportunities for education, health care, a decent job, and the ability to make any money as a farmer are still very limited. The price is paid in travel, in time, in being split between here and there, in urban and rural, in watching our children and grandchildren go away and be sucked into the busy-ness and madness of cities, of progress, of ‘careers’, all with a price to pay as well.

Re-membering the human by K.L.Kivi

2010-06-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

"In the confusion of modern overstimulation it is not easy to know what is essential, what is radically simple and to the core. What is my deepest understanding?" Stephanie Kaza

Small puffs of clouds hang over the mountains that descend in a dark blue swoop to the water’s edge. The paddle’s rounded edge cuts the shining surface, the pull leaving swirling eddies. My hands bring the paddle around again to dip and draw. Again and again. My muscles echo the movements of my companion in the stern and this too is, somehow, part of the core, the radically, wonderful, all consuming simplicity of this moment.

I stop paddling and gaze over the edge of the canoe. My paddling partner keeps the motion alive and we gradually veer toward the forested shore until she too lifts her paddle. The sun shines through the green water revealing the sharply sloping bottom. Among the timbers of a sunken steam boat that once plied this lake, fish linger, probably kokanee, a land-locked salmon. Their speckled flanks gleam in the penetrating sunshine. Is water invisible to the fish, as air is to us? It sustains, upholds and defines their very motion, but what do they perceive of their undulations, water and sunlight through which they move?

What is the movement, what are the substances of my placement on Earth? Air, yes, that is easy to say, but what else defines the context of my being? What are the ways in which I most fundamentally inhabit the substances of home? I catch only glimpses of it, like now, canoeing down Slocan Lake in the sunshine, and reach for words to describe it, the unnameable something when all of me is engaged, all of me aligned with the place and instant at hand: body, heart, mind, spirit. How often does it happen? Here in my home among the Columbia Mountains, it is no longer a rare occasion but, nevertheless, one I always notice and savour. The simplest of sensation, like the part of the paddle shaft where the varnish has worn away and is rough against my meaty pad of my thumb, become me. What is.

Although in retrospect, I’m sure it happened many times before, probably when in bed with a lover, the first time I truly was aware of it happening out in nature, was not here in the landscape with which I am most familiar. My full engagement with place occurred the first time I visited my parents’ homeland of Estonia. It happened precisely twice during that emotionally tumultuous “return” to the homeland that the substance of that place met the gesture of me.

My cousin had taken me berry picking. It was late August or early September and we entered the sun-speckled pine bog with wicker baskets swinging from our hands. Elvi had to show me how to spot the red jewels from among the emerald moss but from there on in, it was as if I was repeating a very ancient gesture. Initially, I crouched but eventually found myself sprawling in the thick moss to get down to eye level with the berries. There the earthy odour of moss added to the pungency of pine. The larger cranberries were easy to distinguish from the smaller lingonberries that hung on stems like ruby lilies of the valley. Lost in some idyll, my fingers danced my basket full. When Elvi returned from her own wanderings - which involved more mushroom hunting than berry picking - she had to repeat my name before I noticed her. And leaving the forest, I lagged behind. When I noticed she was far ahead of me, I decided to take a short cut across a small ditch. It wasn’t until I was in full stride into the ditch that Elvi cried out a warning. But it was too late. I sunk into what had looked like solid green, up to my hip. I instinctively had splayed my other leg across the surface to keep me from sinking deeper. Elvi and I linked arms and she pulled for a full minute before my leg came free in one great sucking sound. Elvi was particularly happy that I’d managed to bring my gumboot up as well, rubber boots a precious commodity in Soviet era Estonia.

As we float quietly, letting the slight breeze carry us down this mountain cleavage that is lake, I think: the land had laid claim to me. And I was – am – so happy to be claimed, each time it happens. Land does not belong to us, but we belong to land and in recognizing that, we reciprocate and that is where the magic happens. The need to be nowhere else but here, where ever here might be.

The second time it happened was while harvesting potatoes. It was a warm September afternoon and I had eaten well at my friend’s parents dinner table. I was loaned boots and work clothes by Eero’s mother. Feasters were greeted by neighbours outside and we walked to the potato field nearby chatting, some a little too merry from drink. One of merry, a round-bellied, red-nosed man followed with an ancient chugging Soviet tractor with Lenin’s head as the gearshift nob. He turned the rows while the rest of us followed, spreading out to gather the uprooted tubers. Again, something about the motion of stooping and gathering potatoes from the soil, planting footfalls in the dark loam and repeating the gesture was as natural as a baby’s mouth groping for a milky breast. People called to one another across the furrows and laughed, stopping from time to time to straighten and stretch their backs or carry their full baskets over to the trailer where we dumped them into the growing pile.

In my book, The Inner Green, I attempt to describe these experiences, writing that it was as if “I uncovered the passageway home”. But what home are we talking about here? Not a home I have known in my lifetime. These two incidents lead me to wonder about sources, because it’s unlikely that my parents stories of berry picking or potato harvesting, had there been many of them, could inspire such a sense of resonance with a physical act. Or could there be some other explanation for these moments of rightness that I experience from time to time? An evolutionary anthropologist might see some genetic root. Some indigenous cultures may interpret such moments as ancestral memory, others might see them as manifestations of past lives; in any case, the why remains a mystery.

How much of what it is to be human is invisible and unknown to us, I wonder as we take up the rhythm of paddling again. Does the fish know when it has left the water? Is its flopping and flailing in the bare air known to it or does it only remember fluidity when it is righted by water? A fish not righted dies. What happens to us humans? What is the cost of living outside our rightful context, of not being at home in the world? What is the price the individual pays, what is the price the collective pays? What is the destiny of a human culture that is not rooted in place?

As humans, I think we seek that moment of connection, yearn for it without knowing precisely what we are pining for. We seize upon it in whatever form we find it. Maybe the profound draw of sex in Western culture is due to the fact that a union of two bodies may be one of the easiest remaining connections to that sense of physical rightness. That sense of being fully present and completely engaged. Maybe we are always looking for the ultimate partner, being manipulated by its promise, because it is one doorway to our essential selves that we still know how to walk through. Another might be the most banal gestures involved in caring for our children – reaching down for uplifted arms, bringing a baby’s mouth to the breast, clearing snot from a small upturned nose. These are doorways to humanness that we still need.

What gestures of humanness are in the process of being forgotten? The long walk to move camp. Stalking an elusive deer. Carrying wood. Resting one’s head against the flank of the farm animal. Climbing the tree. Digging for roots. Plucking a fowl. Casting a log upon the fire. When my body encounters one of these gestures, it re-members. My limbs and torso think and speak and rejoice. Our bodies do not keep up with time, time creates our bodies. We have evolved for specific tasks, because of specific tasks, in response to specific places. Desert people are often tall, rainforest dwellers often small. Seafaring people do not get seasick, even after many generations of no longer going to sea. And our hands: they need their work and though we provide some, it is often not a re-membering kind of work. I doubt the carpal tunnels of our wrists will begin to want keyboarding after a few generations. So much of what we do now, is de-membering, a forgetting that we are born of generations who knew a specific air, a specific water and a precise place on Earth.

Though I have found my way into these densely forested mountains and made my home here, it is clear to me that the rise and plunge of the land are irrelevant; my fundamental home is among trees and interacting with soil. As an adventurer, I marvel over and even love the tundra, the mountain peak, the prairie, the ocean, but the feeling of rightness that I have chosen to call home is the screen of trunks, limbs, lichens, mosses and fauna upon which the story of growing and gathering food unfolds. It is the odour of coniferous sap, the tang of wild berries, a shaft of wood in my grasped palms, a chorus of wind and birds or the persistent quiet of snow. How would I live without these things? Who would I be?

Could our cultural fascination with vampires and zombies and horror be a reflection of a de-membered culture, trying to understand where bodies lost from their primal context go? What replaces the sense of connection that de-placed people do not experience? I write de-placed, not dis-placed, because displacement implies that there is a place to return to. So many of us are generations lost to a multitude of places that “return” is not an option. Re-membering requires a new process, a modern day quest for that sense of rightness that I have seen many friends and acquaintances embark on. Without being able to articulate precisely what they are looking for, they nevertheless try on places with the persistence of a mountaineer looking for a new pair of boots. As if their lives depended on it. Perhaps this is because their lives, our lives, do depend on it.

I dip my paddle in after a lull and pull. This is who I am. Here. Now. This is my deepest understanding, one of radical simplicity.

June Diary: by Luanne Armstrong

2010-06-14T09:39:00.002-07:00

June Journal:

At the beginning of June, even though I had promised people I was coming, I resisted going to Kaslo and Nelson to teach, even going so far as to email the organizers to see if they would cancel. But no go.

And then I left the farm, got to Nelson, had a good time, and realized that leaving the farm, periodically, is a good thing. Five days of talking and visiting and home again. And of course, things are fine.

The garden is in; the ground is weeded, three weeks of rain soaked everything and the fir and cedar have responded with lush electric green tips on their branches. The hot weather plants, tomatoes and eggplants, are sulking and yellow but their turn will come now the sun is back. Right now, they are pushing their root tips into the soggy fertile ground and getting ready to produce mountains of fruit. I planted only the large, purple-black eggplants this year. The smaller eggplants are more productive but I love the colour of the big fat ones. Every year I pick them and stare at them; how can a purple be so black, a black be so iridescent? I have never seen a colour like it anywhere else.

Plus Nelson is a mini-city. So I bought five books, several magazines, looked at hemp shirts and some other lovely and very expensive clothes I would never buy. But I did buy puzzles and toys for Tiger Lily and Tallulah. And I took home a bag of expensive organic food I can’t get in Creston; ate brilliant lunches and even did some writing. What’s not to like? But it’s hard to leave the farm, especially at this time of year. There’s always something that needs doing, something to plant, something to weed, something to water, even something to pick. Even though it is the middle of June, the garden is bursting with spinach, radishes, lettuce, onions, Chinese cabbage, Swiss chard, and even broccoli. Every morning, I wander with my coffee. There is always a new flower opening. When I am there, the farm becomes the world.

And too often, late at night, unable to sleep, I read. I read about the oil plumes in the Gulf of Mexico, albatross chicks starving to death after their parents feed them plastic, mistaking it for fish. I read about peak oil and possible food shortages in the future, about global warming, ice sheets melting in Greenland. This fall, I will fill the shelves again with canning, jars full of dried fruit, and a freezer full of vegetables, fruit and meat. Life continues here as it has for ten thousand years.

And yet I am planning on running away from it all again. Not for long and not soon, but the need to finish the two books I have been slowly working on. So I will try to spend some time in the city in the fall. The essays on land are almost done but the ethics book needs some concentration and time. The farm is a difficult place for a writer. A farm needs to be a community; it needs people, it needs parties and dinners and planning and work. And I need solitude and time to walk and think and write. So I will run away again to the smelly city where life is too easy and the grocery story full of expensive fruit that I would never pay for at home and the library is just down the hill and all the tools I need and want as a writer are there; my friends, books, my writer’s life and all the time my heart will be crying, go home, go home, go home.

The weekend after I got home was full of people: sons, friends, and a lovely long leisurely Sunday morning with all sorts of people dropping by, eating raspberry pancakes and apple cake, then coffee or lemonade and sitting in the (finally) hot sun. Then I drove to Creston and did an exhibition ride at the Therapeutic Riding Centre. People cheered and applauded and my riding instructor asked if I would think about going to the National Therapeutic Riding Centre Dressage test sometime in the future. I immediately said yes, even though I have no idea what this means. But it is a goal to ride towards and a new vision of myself, at 61, as a ‘disabled athlete.’ Hilarious. But fun.

The farm has now acquired an old wood cookstove that will eventually become part of the summer kitchen-shower-bathroom building we will one day build at the beach and a relatively new tractor that will be used for many, many things.

Today the clouds are rolling in a bit but the tomatoes are in flower as are the intensely blue Chinese delphiniums, the purple delphiniums, the white miniature roses, and the pink poppies are ready to ‘pop’. I feel like getting a chair and sitting beside them, quietly cheering.

neighbours

2010-05-31T11:12:00.001-07:00

“By community, I mean the commonwealth and common interests commonly understood, of people living together in a place and wishing to continue to do so. To put it another way, community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature.” Wendell Berry

Neighbours:

On many days, the farm is a busy place. People come to garden, to pick vegetables, to help with the harvest, with wood, or apple juice making or butchering. Some of the time I am outside and often, I stay in the house and produce coffee and cake and soup and juice. I don’t mind a traditional role as long as it’s an occasional choice.
The conversation is always about people we know and gardens and dogs and weather. Rarely do larger events intrude. I love the sense of neighbourhood, of community, and I understand the limits that this kind of community includes. This isn't about political or cultural sharing; this is about the work.
But living at the farm also includes an uneasy geographical proximity to people with whom I have nothing in common so that geographical proximity breeds an odd contradiction. A truly ironic example of this happend on the first long weekend in May. I was inside listening to a special on CBC radio on the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland and the implications of this for the world’s oceasn. When I went outside, all I could hear was machine noise; weed whackers, lawnmowers, boats, seadoos, chain saws, and long lines of motorcyles and RV’s on the highway. The summer people (who are not neighbours) had arrived.

Once rural community was built on a gift economy. When we were kids, and people came to visit our parents, no one ever left without something, a box of apples, a bottle of wine, or some cookies. Neighbours shared work, food, news, and help. This is still true but now not all people who live nearby are actually neighbours.
Good neighbours are the people who show up when your house is on fire, or the forest is on fire, if your pigs get out, or your dog is sick or you need a ride to town. They come to dinner or just for coffee; something they only come occasionally, but you’re are always glad to see them. Good neighbours invite you over for coffee when you need it; their kids play with your kids; they plow your driveway after a big snow, give you their many different colours of iris corms, or their abundance of whatever they have, vegetables or apples or salad greens.
And of course, geographical neighbours can also be the people whose kids roar up and down the nearest road in their ATVs, who have dogs that bark all night or get off the leash and come over and kill chickens; neighbours who have parties, let off fireworks at night when you are in a sound sleep, spray Roundup in the creek that goes through your pasture where you are raising organic beef, use up all the water in the creek in mid summer when it is most dry, light fires despite a ban, they build fences that are five or ten or fifteen feet in on your land. Such neighbours can be an infernal nuisance.
Neighbours is a contradictory word; community is a warm and fuzzy word but often contains the same contradictions. A community is always close-knit in a crisis because crisis creates community. So does hunger and fear, birth and death, joy and grief. Marriage unites a community but so does gossip, and hatred and love. Rural community was always built on sharing, survival, and necessity and underneath the ephemeral chatter of the present day industrialized suburban nonsense, those bonds still, and always will, exist.

In a future that is looking increasingly difficult for humanity, the gifts of family, neighourhood, community and clanship will begin to resume the kind of importance they have traditionally always had.

Dealing with the Mob by K.L.Kivi

2010-05-24T11:36:00.000-07:00

The ravens were flying in from all directions, drawn by raucous squawking in the forest. From out on the Slocan Pool, idly bobbing in our canoe in the sunlight and pre-freshet current of the Kootenay River, the commotion seemed incongruent. What could possibly be the cause of such a conflagration? Each black bird that flew over bee-lined it to the spot on the hillslope in front of us with such a sense of determination, that it was clear that this was no simple Sunday corvid picnic. And each bird’s arrival upped the ante, indignation emphatic and volume pumped until the happening on the hill fully captivated us as well.

As we paddled into the bay below the hillslope, we kept our eyes on a clump of Douglas Firs a few hundred metres above. Every few minutes, the ravens would erupt in a frenzy of feathers, black sparks against the blue sky. I was already guessing at the motivation of the ravens when a deep hooting confirmed my suspicions: they were mobbing an owl. Hoooooo. Hoo-Hoo, Hooo. Hooo. From the throaty depth of the call and its pattern, I knew this was no mere Barred owl.

Mo and I looked at each other, obviously thinking the same thing: let’s go see. We landed and pulled the canoe up onto the fresh greenery that was sprouting there. I was about to examine the plants along the shore when the ravens erupted again, this time flying quickly to a neighbouring clump of evergreens.

The poor owl, I thought, but didn’t say it. Ravens mob owls for a reason.

We hesitated not because of what we might find but because the slope in front of us was so steep and gnarly with fallen limbs and trees. Plus, we were exhausted from a week of the hard physical labour spring inevitably demands. Still, we couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing the owl and ravens close up. We bushwhacked up slope until we stumbled on a well-trod deer trail. The trail zigzagged up, bringing us right to the clump of tall, girthy trees where the ravens had now been keeping up their raucous vigil for at least 20 minutes. The black birds were obvious to see, all motion and noise but we had to peer diligently into the trees, shifting our position a few times, before we finally spotted the large, buffy shape of the owl. A big one!

“It’s a Great horned owl!” Mo whispered. I trained my binoculars on it. I’d never seen a Great horned owl with such a bright rusty colour around its eyes and such distinctive black ear tufts and parentheses around its face. I was in the process of trying to convince myself that we founded something rare, like a Long-eared owl. It wasn’t.

The owl was sitting, seemingly fairly calmly, a foot from the fat trunk of the fir. Apart from the distinctive full swivel of its head as it kept an eye on us as well as the ravens in the branches around it, the big bird was still. This type of mobbing a is regular, perhaps even weekly occurrence in the life of a predatory bird. What did the Great horned owl make of it? Every few minutes, an individual raven would break free of the mob and actually fly at the owl who would fluff its feathers and shake, as if to discourage some pesky insect. Occasionally, it would give its series of low hoots. A quick look in my bird book revealed that they were fairly well matched in size and weight if not in weapons of claw and bill. The ravens, however, had the advantage of numbers.

My initial pity for the owl was subsiding as I thought about what the ravens were doing. I was assuming that their behaviour was an act of protecting their nestlings or even retaliation for a recent attack but was there something going on here that I couldn’t guess at? Is there such thing as raven principles? A code of behaviour that harkens to solidarity in the face of historic enemies? For example, if the ravens were social and environmental activists protesting a G8 summit, would I even pause to wonder how Stephen Harper or other world wrecking leaders were feeling?

We edged closer. Clearly, the owl was as concerned about our presence as it was about its familiar foes, the ravens. It swooped off its limb in a graceful arc into an adjacent clump of firs. The ravens followed. We went back down slope. By the time we were back out on the Slocan Pool, the mob was calming. Had they made their point? The owl continued to be owl, predatory bird of the forest and the ravens continued to be its potential prey. No one was injured in the making of this film.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the intra-species human analogy I made earlier. As much care is needed in animal-morphizing as in anthropomorphizing. Using animal behaviour to justify human interactions can occasionally lead those of interested in what is "natural" seriously off course sometimes. The conflict between ravens and owls is one based in survival. The conflicts between the military industrial consumer complex and the citizens of the world are a different story altogether.

Owning and Being: by Luanne Armstrong

2010-05-13T08:59:00.000-07:00

Owning and Being Owned:

I am feeling a bit domesticated these days. My house is not really my house; it’s the farm-house and therefore, all kinds of people wander in and out on a daily basis. My family, my friends, visitors, and various dogs; many days, the teapot fills and empties and is filled again. So therefore, I feel it somewhat behooves me to keep the place at least minimally tidy and in working order; consequently I have new drapes, courtesy of my friend, Yvette, a new floor, courtesy of my brother and sister-in-law, and a new lawn mower, courtesy of my son. All a bit amazing to watch!
I have never been a house person. As a child, for me to be given a choice between being outdoors and in was no choice at all. I was almost always outside. The house was a place to eat and sleep and read. My mother looked after the house. Talk of decorating and renovating was an immediate excuse to flee.
But – I have this house. The house seems to always want things, drapes and flooring and cleaning and furniture. Occasionally, on my way home from buying groceries and chicken feed, I wander into the local hardware store and wander, lost and marveling, up and down the aisles. What a lot of stuff one can buy for a house. I stand, marveling, in front of the appliances, coffee maker, blenders and food processors. I can’t believe I am doing this. I hate stuff. I am an anti-consumer. But there I am, staring at stuff. The house is making me do it.
Louis, who is nine, is coming to the farm again for the summer. Lately, he has been talking about a TV show he watches, in which a group of kids are attempting to survive in the wilderness. We have decided we will play survivor on the beach this summer. At night, as he goes to sleep, we have conversations about what we can take with us. Are sleeping bags okay? Yes, he decides. Can I take my Swiss Army knife? A pot, teabags, salt and butter?
I know where this leads. I’ve packed up many a picnic for the beach. The amount of stuff needed to produce just one meal is formidable.
When I was a kid, I loved the idea of surviving outside. I had many and various hideouts on the mountain above the farm. Often, especially in the spring or fall, I would take some matches, a can of beans out of the pantry and my trusty hatchet, and head up there just for the sheer delight of making lunch on my own. There were two books in particular that I loved and read over and over; Two Little Savages, by Ernest Thompson Seton, and My Side of the Mountain, by Julie Craighead George, which were about kids who lived in the woods and did it well. I never quite lived outside, but I always liked to think that I could, if I had to.
But at sixty, a teacher and writer, I find myself stuck in the house far more than I would like. And I am completely amazed to find that I am actually learning to care for this house; learning how much time and energy and stuff it takes to keep a modern house functioning. And this isn’t a big middle class house. This is a small log house on a farm, with a woodstove.
And outside -- lawn, garden, mowing, pruning trimming. Yikes.

I have often said and it is true, that I belong to this place where I live, far more than it belongs to me. It has mothered and fathered me and made me what I am and for that, I am always utterly grateful. But belonging to a place, versus owning a place; belonging to a place versus being owned by a place; or being owned by possessions, being possessed by my sense of ownership, versus simply having enough things to function comfortably, are very, very different ideas and states of being.
I don’t want to own this place, but more than that, I don’t want my sense of connection to be transformed into one where the place owns me. It is a gift from fate that I have the chance to be here in this beauty; to share the gift of the non-human lives around me, to balance my choice to be here with the care that I give the house and the garden in order to maintain them in beauty as well. It’s an enormous and important distinction, a whole universe of value, between belonging, and owning.

more about lost by Luanne Armstrong

2010-05-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

Lost:

Apparently, one of the natural reactions to the death of a loved one is to feel as if you should go looking for them. I think about this, driving to town for groceries. I think, “I should go see my mom,” and then I think, oh no, I lost her. Where did she go?
What an odd expression for death. We lose our loved ones, they don’t just die, they are lost to us, we can’t find them, they’re not so much dead as wandering in some unknown and unfathomable wilderness and the wilderness itself is lost.
I think about this, wandering the farm. So much is lost, so much is present, so much is being created for the future. It’s always in process.
I walk by the dog graveyard. After I lost my old dog, I had a clear and comforting vision of him running with the other ‘lost dogs’, running and barking at the coyotes, as he used to do, and happy to be out of his crippled body and into one that let him be free. It was comforting because his ghost didn’t hang around, whimpering and scratching at the door, as he did when he began to grow deaf and then blind and then panicky if his head wasn’t right by my foot. Dead, he didn’t seem to need me at all.
When I walk by the chicken shed my father built, I think of my dad and his endless work, and now my father is ‘lost’ too, although his voice stays in my head and his influence still shapes the whole family.
The old paths in the pasture are still faintly there, lost here as well, my childhood, there is the rock where I used to lead Lady, my stubborn barely trained first horse, so I could leap on her back and we could pretend to lead galloping cavalry charges up the hill. Lost now to the new pond and trees is the big rock that was once an elephant I could ride on, or a castle or even a spaceship. Wandering the pasture is always an exercise in nostalgia.
The difficulty with staying in one place for so long is this overlaying of the past and the present; when our dad died and my brother and I began rebuilding the farm, we agreed that it was hard for us to see what could be changed, because of these layers of memory, this sense of what our grandfather and our father had laid down as templates. Although it’s easier for my brother; his giant machines can wipe out years of memories in a few moments but both he and I see things as they were as well as how they are and that can be more than a little confusing sometimes for outsiders.
Walking here, I am always a little bit lost in time. Some days I walk with my mother at my shoulder. Every day, she and I walked to the lake together and home again for tea. Now, I walk with my grandchildren, who will make their own memories in whatever form they want. It is odd for me to think that they will not know my parents, who are still so present for me, and how easily lost are the stories and memories and history even of this place, where I work at maintaining our history, and where every family dinner is an occasion for the same stories to be recounted over and over, each time with a new layer added.
But that’s why I am a writer and that is the gift of this great circular grief and joy of lost and found, lost loved ones, found memories, found stories, levels and layers and the ground of history.

Scattered Sprigs of Wheat by K.L.Kivi

2010-04-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

”Listening to the heart - following the heart is not the same as following the emotions, wishes or ideals.” So writes Reverend Master Koten in response to my question about the role of discernment in the Buddhist philosophy of letting go of judgement.

Like Luanne Armstrong, in her blog entry “Beat,” I’ve been listening to my heart as well. But it isn’t the physical heart that I’m trying to tune into, it’s that metaphorical heart, the one Reverend Master Koten alludes to, the one that supposed to let me know how to make the appropriate decisions in life. After seven months in Ontario, caring for my ailing elderly parents, I returned home to these Columbia mountains that shelter my kind, and collapsed. I felt like a sheaf of wheat that had had its string cut; the pieces of me have been strewn about ever since, pell mell, in the sun and in the rain. I putter around the land, stopping to catch my breath, wondering at my exhaustion and then remembering: we’re at elevation here and everywhere the paths are steep. Seven months: was that all it took for my body to forget what it takes to live in these mountains? And though my body is out of practice, it’s really my mind that’s given way, relaxed the tight string of the daily demands on a caregiver.

And mostly, it’s okay. This piece of Earth has always received me well. But sometimes
I pause and think: I should start picking up those sprigs of wheat soon, make up the sheaf again. It was in one of those moments that I wrote the Reverend Master. Ten days of wandering from land partner’s house to land partner’s house mewing to be fed started feeling uncomfortable. The least I could do is make meals for myself again. I picked up that sprig of wheat but continued to look at the rest of them with bewilderment. What do I want to pick up? What of my old life feels appropriate? I feel paralysed to make decisions. How does one tell the difference between the desire of the heart and those of “emotions, wishes or ideals” anyway?

And so I listen, not quite sure what I’m listening for. My heart feels naked and lost, bobbing out in the sea with no land or ships in sight. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Lostness is a place of fertile possibility if one can avoid panic. Knowing why I’m lost is helpful. There’s nothing quite as disorienting, as heartbreaking, as watching a parent lose their mind and turn into a kind of child before one’s very eyes. Dementia calls for very concrete action in terms of care, but subconsciously, another process is taking place, re-ordering the known world of my psyche.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her “Field Guide to Getting Lost” that “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery…And one does not get lost but loses oneself… a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.” So, basically, I’ve come home to the piece of the Earth I know the most intimately in order to get lost. Here, I realize, it feels safe to be lost. Each tree seems like an old, kindly friend. There were very nice trees – oaks, maples, hemlocks, ash, pines - in Ontario; why does this particular forest possess such nurturing benevolence for me?

And so, I give myself over to lostness. Simply. And try to pacify my mind that wants to command this situation – well, to be perfectly honest, every situation. I practice listening, waiting for the metaphorical thumps that make up the beat.

Beat...by Luanne Armstrong

2010-04-10T18:05:00.000-07:00

Beat:
Luanne Armstrong

It shouldn’t keep me awake but it does. Thump, thump, thump, ka-thump. Regular, still regular. I check it. I have spent the last year and a half with a heartbeat that went ka-thump, rrr, ka-ka-ka, thump,thump, ka-thump and other variations. If I walked up a hill, even a tiny one, I stopped, waited for my racing heart to catch up to itself.
It’s called atrial fibrillation; it’s surprisingly common, especially among older people. Some people even have it without knowing. Atrial fibrillation is also easy to fix but because I live in the country, because waiting lists for minor stuff are now lengthy in Canadian medicine, and because, the last time it happened, it looked from the outside anyway, as if I could at least still function, it took far too long to get into an emergency ward where under the supervision of a cardiologist, they could attach defibrillation paddles and shock my heart back into regularity.
And then finally they did and I could go back to having my life again.
But now I wait with some trepidation for the damn thing to unshock itself, and go back into stuttering and blipping and stumbling along.
And I listen to it. I would rather not. I lie in bed at night and I can feel my body vibrating in different places. I can hear the blood squishing through various veins and arteries. I don’t know why it bangs so hard at night or even at various times during the day. I talk to my heart; I want it to be contented and even and regular. I soothe it. Things are fine, I say. Life is good. Dear heart, I am happy. (sometimes true, sometimes a lie. I lie to my heart.) I tell my heart anyway, hoping to pacify it. Calm, I think, easy there, like soothing a horse.
The first time it happened to me, I was working at a difficult job and in the middle of a difficult separation. My life was a mess. My kids were almost grown up and leaving home, leaving me. When my heart started blipping and stuttering, I ignored it. I felt it was right I should have a broken heart. In fact, I did have a broken heart. Someone finally dragged me off to Emergency, where they stuck me in a bed, stuck electrodes all over me and forbid me to move. I slept for a while and once the electrodes were off, spent most of my time in the cafeteria, drinking coffee and noodling miserably in my journal until after four or five days, they fixed it and sent me home.
I wrote that experience off until the next time, ten years later. This time I was lying in bed, in the middle of the night, wide awake, worrying about my family, my parents, our farm, which was for sale, my children, and my complicated future. This time my heart gave a sudden lurch and began to stutter and blip like a motor that wouldn’t quite start. Resignedly, I went off to the city, wandered into the local Emergency Ward. There was far less fuss this time, they slapped the electrodes on, knocked me, and sent me home. I walked home and slept for a couple of hours, got up and went back to work for the rest of the day.
This last time, it happened as I was getting out of bed. I was feeling fine. Everything was fine except my heart wouldn’t work. It was November. I had now been at the farm, now my farm, for three years. Every morning, I got up, dizzy, waited for the dizziness to pass, went and lit the fire, fed the cows, came in, sat down, still dizzy, reluctant to move. But then it was spring and then it was summer. There were things to do, things that had to be done, no matter how down-hearted I might be.
All summer, while I stumbled up hills and tried to keep up with the garden, too tired at night sometimes to even be alive, my heart and I discussed metaphors. Weak hearted, I scolded it, half-hearted, broken hearted. It’s my heart, I thought. Why doesn’t it hear me? Why won’t it fix itself?
I wanted to have a full heart, a strong heart, a brave heart, not this foolish stuttering heart that quailed at every effort. I wanted to have my heart in my work, not avoiding it. Somehow I couldn’t keep my mind on work when my heart wasn’t inside it somewhere, chugging sturdily along. I wanted to have the heart of a lion, not the heart of a lettuce.
And then finally, the hospital in Vancouver called, and off I went, yet again, to the smiling busy nurses and the brisk cardiologist and then zap, and home I went with a high head and a heart of what? My heart leapt up—my heart was cast down, a heart made of elastic and electricity. Heart like a wheel on fire. Heart of my heart.
It’s odd to be aware of my heart, as I am, like always sitting in a silent room with a ticking clock, not only time ticking away but the endless motion of things inside me that I would rather take for granted, breath and blood and muscles and decay. In bed at night, I turn over and no matter how I arrange myself, my errant treacherous heart beats in my fingertips, my neck, my legs, swooshes in my ears, whispers, I am here, I am still here.

And so we are.

March Diary: Spring Noise by Luanne Armstrong

2010-03-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

March Diary:

March is full of spring markers; one of my most cherished is the first swallows arriving, always so excited, dive-bombing each other, playing in aerial acrobatics. These swallows have already moved on north, the next wave will stay, build nests all over the porch, raise many babies and in the early mornings, as I drink my coffee on the deck, they will sit on the log over my head and gabble swallow talk.The frogs started early as well; now they are a brilliant chorus, not music exactly, but sound that punctuates and swells and billows through the cold spring nights.
We are early with everything this year; it was a dry warm winter and will undoubtedly be a dry and fiery summer. Already the gardens at the farm are dug and ready to be planted. Several people are gardening here this summer, which takes the burden off me and makes the work so much easier. It’s one of the paradoxes of small farming; the more people who are involved, the more work gets done, the more food can be grown, the more people can be fed. There’s a limit of course, but even a few acres of intensely cultivated land can produce an astounding amount of food.
March is always a mixed up month; storms and squalls barrel across the lake, huff and puff, blow away, the sun comes out, it’s hot, oh no, it’s cold again, it’s impossible to put on the right amount of clothes, I don’t need a fire and then I do. It’s too early to plant the garden and then, maybe it isn’t. Maybe the onions can go out—or the broccoli. Or maybe wait.
There is lots of noise in the neighbourhood this month; not just frogs, unfortunately. Last week, I went for dinner to my friends nearby who have now lived here for thirty-four years. They came in 1974, built a house in the woods up on the side of the moutain, and lived there in utter peace until a few weeks ago when the land next door to their house was bought by a man who proceeded to cut down every tree, dig up the ground so it will erode in the rain, park a whole series of ancient travel trailers on it, then he bought a generator and hooked it up to a bank of enormous arc lights that buzz and spark all night. What this man thinks he is doing; what the story is that he is telling himself about his relationship to this place is incomprehensible to the rest of us. He has announced loudly in the community that he is making an RV park with 450 sites. Well, we’ll see.
Neighbours in the country have so much more impact on each other than neighbours in the city. Each noise has a meaning, has a story, and the stories clash, compete with, and contradict each other.
So March has been noisy in many ways. April is here, Easter is next week. I have two hens setting so perhaps baby chicks will appear if the eagles, weasels, skunks, or coyotes don’t get them first.
It always amuses me somewhat that baby chickens and rabbits are symbols of Easter. Apart from their traditional meaning, in previous agriculturally-dependent times, March and April would have been the hungriest times of the year. No food in the garden yet, no fruit on the trees and most of the last year’s storage exhausted, what would there have been to eat? Unlike the abundance of Christmas, Easter is about staving-off-starvation foods, eggs, and rabbits, and perhaps, if you were really lucky, a lamb. Just as the earth is resilient under its burden of noisy human needs, so our once-upon-a-time culture as people of the earth remains resilient in our traditions and our foods.
***
Speaking of culture, my very favourite book this month was called “Intelligence in Nature”, by Jeremy Narby. What became really obvious to me after reading this book is that most of what people believe about the nonhuman world are ideological beliefs, based on very little knowledge or actual experience. Various fragmented parts of the science world are now re-defining what is meant by such words as intelligence, or culture, also a deeply contradictory and biased words. Do animals have culture? Do the swallows above my head in the morning, ‘talking’, what else can I call it, have culture? Do humpback whales, singing, changing their songs, changing the patterns, communicating all around the ocean have culture? Why or why not? The answer is, we don’t know. The answer is, the human meanings of such words are by definition, exclusionary and therefore only applicable to humans. We have no language for what animals do or what we see them do. We have no way to interpret or describe what they do or feel. When I say the swallows sound happy or excited, I am describing my human interpretation of what they sound like.
My friend Kuya tells me that the Buddha said the greatest human illusion is that our bodies end at our skins. I have never felt that way because my body is part of the farm, an extension of it, and every sound that happens has a meaning, not a human meaning, but a meaning that is part of the whole gestalt of existence here. Even the human neighbours tearing up their small part of the world and cutting down all the trees are part of this existence. A frustrating and occasionally, to me at least, maddening part, for sure. From my view on the deck, I get to watch not only the swallows, the eagle on the pine tree every morning, the slow emergence of buds and seeds, but the strange and often incomprehensible panoply of human ‘culture’, whatever that means, whatever it is.

Security by K.L. Kivi

2010-03-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

What is the difference between having security and feeling secure? Or is any security nothing more than a feeling? And who do we become, how do we behave, in the face of this presence or lack of security or a feeling of security?

I was recently talking with my brother and sister-in-law about anthropologist Barry Hewlett’s work on hunter-gatherer childhoods (Hewlett et al, 200, Internal Working Models, Current Anthropology, 41:287-297), about Hewlett’s findings that forager peoples tend to have very secure sense of themselves within their environment. Unlike traditional agriculturalists, people from industrialized cultures and everyone in between, hunter-gatherers are much more likely to view their environment as a giving place, trusting that it will provide them with the essentials of living.

Hewlett calls this sense of self an “internal working model” and posits that these models are formed in early infancy based on the responsiveness of caregivers. Since forager peoples tend to hold their infants more than any other human cultural groups, he argues that their sense of security is rooted in the child rearing practices of their community. Among people like the Ake of the African rainforest, infants are held, both while awake and while sleeping, upward of 90% of the time. They are passed from hands to hands, the community taking collective responsibility for the holding of babies. Among the nearby agriculturalists he studied as well as North American families, babies were held far, far less, especially when asleep. And they were held by fewer people. Correspondingly, people from those communities had a less benign notion of the natural world. Overall, they were more fearful of the environment and other people.

My brother was challenged by the notion that security was a feeling and not an objective fact. That foragers, who do not store food but eat only what they find on a day to day basis, should feel secure. And, correspondingly, that those of us who live in abundance and the security of stored food, stored wealth and luxuries, should feel so insecure. “No, no, this is backwards,” he argued. “The foragers don’t have any security. They are not secure.”

“Why then,” I asked, “do they feel so secure and we, who have so much, do not?” And still he struggled to understand everyone’s wrong thinking.

“It doesn’t matter what they feel,” he argued, “what matters is if they are secure.”

But is does matter. If you look around us here in North America, you can see that the feeling matters as much or more than sums in the bankbook or the food in the fridge or the size of the house. In fact, this vast accumulation of stuff beyond what can be used by the possessors might be precisely the outcome of a sense of insecurity. It’s always amazed me how some of the richest people of Earth can feel so fearful of lack, whole industries forming around retirement, insurance, investment and other hoarding behaviours. As Hewlett notes, “internal working models and consequent styles of social relations can generate a diversity of cultural institutions, kinship structures, social roles and sharing patterns.”

Where am I going with this? What does this have to do with sense of place and the environment? Those are my questions precisely. How do these insecure working models of our culture play out? Is greed an outgrowth of the quest for security? If so, our desperate insecurity has a huge impact on the environment. We often wonder how we can halt, change, redirect all the ecologically damaging activities of our fellow humans. If Hewlett is right, that it’s all rooted in the simple act of being held as infants, then we should start, right now, by holding our children all the time and finding others to hold them when we cannot.

But it can’t be so simple. Holding a child. Perhaps the complexity comes into the equation when we start thinking about finding others to hold our children when we cannot. The rich are the only ones who can pay for such a service and often do, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. Could it be more about the quality with which we hold our children and that quality is something that must be cultivated instead of bought. And in the cultivation of a community of child rearing, what else do we cultivate amongst ourselves? Trust, obviously. A community of trust. And does that trust extend out, once established, beyond the cluster of people? Or is the place an integral part of that community of child rearing?

Perhaps this is the point that Hewlett misses in his research: that for foragers, the specific land where they live, is part of their known and loved world. To use a word of Luanne Armstrong’s, they have “agency” within it, ie. the ability to interact with it in a very profound way that it based on skills and knowledge that are generations deep. So the trust is not just from your own lifetime of being held and cared for but from generations of being held and being in relationship to the land. Their trust is not random, but specific, based on the community of land and people they know, and know well. And once you trust someone or some place, how do you treat it?

Hewlett’s premise turns environmental destruction and healing into a psychological issue, with a psychological answer, along the lines of “love is the answer,” and “it takes a village to raise a (healthy) child.” But does that get us anywhere even if we believe it’s true? You can’t make anyone love something. Can you even teach people to love things that they fear? Or make love more important than fear? And even if you could, how would you go about unravelling the insecurity that binds our culture to its collective fears about the natural world?

I’ve long believed that knowledge and agency are key to this question, that we must re-establish our dependent relationship to the land in order to find our way back into the community of land and people which, in turn, will foster the sense of security we so desperately yearn for. And if the process of passing our sense of community onto future generations is better grounded by holding children more, why not begin now? Given our current ecological crises, it’s an experiment worth trying.

Writing about Interbeing: Human/nonhuman Part One

2010-03-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

Writing After Nature:
Luanne Armstrong

It would begin with the dogs howling.
“Here he comes, “ my mom would say. “It’s Wally Johnson, the dogs are howling because he smells like death.”
And sure enough, when Wally’s old green Austin pickup rattled into our yard, we would run out to meet him because the back would always have several dead animals in it. We kids would gather around, fascinated as he explained what they were and where he had caught them. Wally was a trapper and his life and his livelihood was animals, their lives and their deaths. In order to track, trap and kill animals, he had gathered a broad and expert knowledge of place, wilderness, animal habitats, animal behaviour and his own survival throughout the winter, snowshoeing from small trapper’s cabin to cabin, living on animals he trapped or shot. Wally was a man of his time and understanding; he loved birds, fish and deer. Everything else, especially predator animals, he believed should be exterminated. Even at the age of seven or eight, I knew he was wrong and I argued with him about it. And Wally, to his credit, listened carefully and gravely to my arguments and then argued back. In Grade Four, I wrote an essay titled “The Balance of Nature,” to encapsulate my arguments. So in an odd way, reaction to Wally was the beginning of my environmental understanding.
Because I grew up on a farm on the edge of wilderness, because my father was a subsistence farmer always fighting with weeds, weather, coyotes, bears, ravens hawks and owls, because my mother loved all animals, I grew up with a contradictory and conflicted view of human-nature relationships. My brothers and my sister and I spent out time when we were not in school, either working on the farm or exploring the wood and lakeshore around the farm. And because as a child I lived far more intensely in my relationships with animals than I did with people, I was never quite sure where my loyalties should, or did lie.

I am still not sure although I am sure that I am not a fan of Western Civilization or the false idea of ‘progress.’ I do think change and resilience are both factors that continue to profoundly affect human nonhuman relationships as well as writing about such relationships.
In my own Kootenay Columbia region of the world, new residents and visitors often perceive this place as a somewhat peaceful near-wilderness. But in fact much of the fish population in Kootenay Lake is artificially maintained, the main rivers all have multiple dams on them, the forests have all been logged and least once and sometimes twice, many of the animal populations are at risk, and environmentalists fight to keep giant ski resorts off the glaciers, methane drilling out of the last few undisturbed areas, private power projects off the smaller creeks. In my own wandering around, in my relationships with the dwellers that live there with me, including wasps, mosquitoes, bears, birds, frogs, dogs, pigs, horses, cows, and one demanding cat, I watch as parts of it change and parts of it stay the same.
These days, I am a part time farmer, a full time writer, and a sort of academic. I write stories and poems and I go for walks and write a lot about the thoughts and ideas that emerge while I am walking around. I also read pretty constantly books about place, or nature or animals. And if I start from walking around, from looking at what is going on with the people around me, as well as animals, both domestic and wild, birds, insects, plants, trees and the interrelationships among them, then the questions that arise connect me both to the local and the global; how we live, ethically, here and elsewhere, I am always both leaving and coming home, always both in a place of discovery and a place of familiarity. I live in a place where there is constant interaction with the non-human world and the contradictions between how both myself and other people interact with this world continue to puzzle, fascinate and confound me. And these contradictions are constantly being made sharper and more poignant both by the growing environmental crisis in the world, the resulting growth of environmental awareness, particularly in the sciences and some other sectors of humanity, and the changing nature of our relationship with the non human world. In fact, as warnings of environmental problems continue from many quarters, the stakes get higher and higher. The environmental problems, if you are paying attention, will scare you into the heebie jeebies, global warming, water scarcity, oil shortages, polluted oceans with giant floating islands of plastic…and even if many of these effects will be mitigated by environmental efforts, there is still enough there to give any conscious person, especially those of us with grandchildren, at least pause for thought.
And some consideration of the irony of it all. After all, what will be the vaunted philosophy of humanity, the loftiness of the human story and the illusion of our superiority if life on earth as we know is undone by something so powerful and mundane as the weather?
Or, as Kate Rigby, an Australian writer who has done of lot of thoughtful writing on this subject puts it:

“…the incredibly complex and diverse matrix of life into which scientists now believe modern humans evolved some forty thousand years ago currently appears to be changing in ways that cannot but seem privative. Pollution, habit loss, global warming: none of this might spell the end of life on Earth; but the tidal wave of extinction that such anthropogenic factors is now engendering surely threatens the particular oikos, the planetary community of living beings into which humanity was born, and to which we owe our evolutionary emergence. Are we then in the midst of our own endgame?” (Issue 39 - 40, September 2006 Australia Humanities Review)

Such warnings continue almost nonstop these days and in the meantime, very little changes, or seems to change, in the modern way of life. So what then is the role, or should be the role, or could be the role of writers in general, and nonfiction writers in particular, who want or choose to write about the nonhuman world?

As Rigby continues:

We are going to need the very best science and the greatest technical ingenuity that we can muster both in moving towards a post-fossil-fuel economy and in preparing ourselves for the potentially catastrophic climate change impacts that are now already inevitable. However, climate change is not just a technical problem requiring a technical ‘fix’. Both in its causes and effects it is also a socio-economic, political, cultural, and ethical problem."

And that is where the writers must, and I hope will, start to weigh in, in bigger andstronger numbers than they have done so far.

walking the lines in February

2010-03-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

February: 2010

This has been a strange month full of complex odd contrasts. Today, Sunday, the end of February, although the major earthquake in Chile has been the second item on the news, the first item all day has been – a hockey game. Yes, THE Olympic hockey game between the US and Canada. All month, the radio has been blaring the Olympics, day after day – I tried turning the radio off but I have been sitting and typing with CBC in the background for so many years, it is hard to work into the silence. So it goes back on but at a low buzzy level where I can barely hear it. It isn’t the Olympics that really bothers me, not the athletes, not the events even, or people having fun; somehow it’s an odd sneaky tone of triumphalism that creeps into the media; that says, see, naysayers and doommongers and liberal bleeding hearts do-gooders, the world really does belong to Coke and corporatism, so all you negative people can just shut up. And the thing that made me rejoice about the Olympics is that in some odd way, the people and the athletes took it back from the corporate spin, if only very briefly.

And today, my dear friend Mair Smith is in a hospital in Edmonton dying of thyroid cancer. She and I worked in the Alberta Status of Women together and did other feminist work ; we had long conversations about all kinds of ideas but our relationship changed somewhat after she went to Findhorn and became ‘spiritual.’ And today I sat on the porch with dear friends and had a conversation about how thin are the lines between spirituality, religion and superstition. Mair walked those lines with elegance and, yes, occasionally drove me crazy with her enthusiasm.

Yesterday, I read on some news site online about a woman who is running for governor of Texas who declared that all the government anyone needed was the right to private property, and the right to own a gun. Yes, I can occasionally see the temptation of such simplistic bizarre thinking in which you never again had to think about or consider anyone else.
And all month, I have been dealing with our beloved farm as a piece of real estate, a dichotomy that drives me really, really crazy.

But at least today was sunny. The heavy grey sky lid day after day, that sits over the lake and screens off the mountains, that seals in damp and despair, burned off by noon and I went outside, pulled my baby maple trees out the sawdust and watered them, planted some sprouting apricot pits and went for a walk.
We made a number of decisions about the farm this month, most notably, to invite a couple of our close friends to put RV’s on sites near the beach – a break with our traditional family culture of proud solitariness– but we did it because of money, because a farm endlessly needs money, needs infrastructure, needs fences, barns, pens, tractors, seeds, mowers, and so on. Needs to pay its taxes.
We also contacted a lawyer and real-estate agent and met with both of them in order to finish our subdivision, and put conditions on the sale of the lake shore lot that we must sell in order to buy out our sublings.
We met with the bank loan officer and I drafted a ‘business plan’.

This will all be an ongoing process for a while. And I hate it, loathe it, loathe the concept of land as real-estate. Want to hide from it all. My druthers would always be to leave the farm untouched and intact; to even let it go back to wilderness as much as possible. Instead, inch by inch, we are surrendering to civilization. To roads. To people. To buildings.
Everything we are doing makes sense and it’s all for the best of reasons. The people with RV’s are people who would be visiting and sharing the beach anyway. Our friends. The lot sale has to go ahead in order to save the rest of the farm. The lawyer is a good guy as is the real estate woman.
And it all makes me crazy. This land is not real-estate. It’s my home, a place I only want to protect and care for, a place that protects and cares for me. Not as real-estate, Not as private property. Not as a place that gives me rights or that I would shoot other people to defend.

Nor am I a person who should have to deal with money, real-estate, wills, taxes, contracts, or any kind of paper work,…I am a writer. Right now, I steal time to write; I steal time to work on my presentation on the new nature writing for the Banff nonfiction conference, the presentation I didn’t give last year but that is good because I have actually done a whole lot of work and research on it. I have a new YA book jumping at me, but not begun, a sequel to the last one. I am going to the coast in March to do research on the ethics of nonfiction book. I am almost done a series of essays on land issues. It all creeps along far too slowly, in among meetings and teaching and anxiety.
At night I huddle over the computer, watching BBC Mysteries, falling into them as if falling into a pool of deep water, wanting only distraction and escape.
This is a world which makes it endlessly hard to walk in balance, where contradiction lurks in every corner, where values shift and change, where the future lurks like a menacing shadow, and even a two week Olympic binge, however distracting it was, only staves off that shadow for a brief period.
How thin are the lines we balance upon. How deep and wide the contradictions.

Thinking our own thoughts by K.Linda Kivi

2010-02-17T19:44:00.000-08:00

The Olympics, the Olympics – everywhere I turn, it’s all about the Olympics these days. And every time I hear the word, see the marketing gadgets and junk, am confronted by the media madness over this sporting event, I do my best to turn away. Not to react, but simply to refocus my attention elsewhere.

I have no gripe with competitive sporting events per se. The Olympics were designed, after all, as an alternative to war, so that humanity could work out their aggression and desire to dominate in a peaceful forum. The concept is good but, unfortunately, not highly effective considering the current state of armed conflict in the world. As for what the Olympics have become, that’s a discussion I’ll leave to other commentators.

The act of turning away from media imposed mass events, is something I have been practicing for many years. It is the manifestation of my desire to nurture human cultural diversity. On a personal level, I call this choice “intentional complexity”. I invented this term, in part, because the path of “voluntary simplicity” that I was on didn’t quite describe why I was attempting to free myself for the constraints of wage slavery and consumerism. Heading off in the direction of simplicity, I realized was more a method than a desired result. Simplicity is good, but what is it for? What am I after?

What I want is a life in which I can be fully present, of mind, heart and body.
I want to be ready for the adventures that unfold of their own volition as well as the ones I choose. I want to make choices as unfettered as possible by what is expected of me in a culture that doesn’t inspire my enthusiasm. I want, like Luanne, in her Feb. 9 blog entry, to be in service to the Earth. I want the richness of being able to listen, to hear and to respond.

Natural historian David Quammen writes:
“More and more in recent years, we are all thinking about the same things at the same time. Electromagnetic radiation is chiefly responsible; microwaves, macrowaves, dashing and dancing electrons unite us instantly and constantly with the waves of each other’s brain... Too much “conscious unity of souls” is unhealthy, probably even pernicious. It yields polarized thought… with everyone smugly in agreement that such-and-such matters are worth contemplation, and that the rest by implication are not. Such unity is a form of overall mental impoverishment.”

Quammen’s own personal “battle against homogenization of mind”, has lead him to get rid of his television set and to explore nature. He encourages people to take a day or hour every month to think about things that “nobody else deems worthy of contemplation”. Thinking and writing about sense of place and peasant culture fits the bill nicely. Who, except me and a handful of kindred spirits, cares? And what point does thinking and writing about these things have?

But the point is precisely that I care. And I care deeply. At this moment, there isn’t anything else I care about quite so deeply. This must be a luxury in our modern society; to be able to say that I spent the day thinking about the subject that is most vital to me. However, I have no illusion that my mind is entirely my own; mental ruts await the tired wheel of my brain at every turn. Nevertheless, I am on the project of trying to think my own thoughts on both mundane and more elevated matters. This, in turn, leads to the creation of my own works of art and craft, experimentation with food instead of always following recipes, even attempts to transform social interactions.

But then I think: isn’t intentional complexity just another trap to get us to focus on individuality instead of collectivity and interconnection? After all, in peasant and forager cultures, many people must have been thinking about similar things at similar times; the weather, the soil, the animals in the forest, how best to weave the fabric, how to heal the cow’s udder, whether the fisher, the farmer, the hunter, the berry picker, the child, will soon be home. However, they thought these thoughts in their own local dialects, using their own unique internal languages, based in the small, but meaningful variations of plants, animals, landforms and culture that each village represented. Their thoughts were part of an ongoing dialogue, millenia old, with the elements that formed them and the objects they formed. And they did not think only of practicalities and survival, but of innovation and philosophy, justice and spirit. They engaged with the unknown, seeking not definitive answers, but engagement. They spoke with the owl in the tree because it was there in front of them. They gathered in sacred places because it felt good and necessary to celebrate their connection to land, that specific land, with friends and neighbours. Perhaps a few hundred or a few thousand overlapped in their thoughts at any given time, not hundreds of millions, as often happens now.

How did we get from there to here? Using my own Estonian heritage as an example, the cultural awakening in the mid-19th century caused what had been a culture of engagement with neighbours and land, to evolve into a culture with a different purpose. People began to learn the same songs and eventually read the same books. Freedom from serfdom was the point. Homogenization of language began to accelerate with the widespread introduction of schools. The loss of regional Estonian dialects has happened within my generation. My aunt, who was fluent in Mulgi murrak, is now long dead, and though my cousins can understand the dialect, they do not speak it. Her grandchildren recognize a smattering of words and phrases. My father’s murrak is rusty at best. I know only a half dozen words. Worse, I had trouble understanding my aunt, even when she spoke in high Estonian, because her local intonation was so pronounced.

How pronounced is my local intonation? Can it be known from my language, my body, my thoughts, where I come from, which land I belong to? Are my thoughts a link between me and the land, between me and those I share the land with, between us and other diverse peoples in places farther away? Or are they merely manifestations of media mogul manipulations in places that are un-places? Is there room in my life for the wonder of wandering through the recesses of this oft over-glorified human brain of mine, for the pleasure of engaging with the Earth place where I belong, for the magic of giggling with friends from the bottom of my truest self? All of this serves interconnection of the truest kind, the kind that involves self-defined individuals and diverse communities coming together to share the best of themselves. Wasn't this the original point of the Olympics as well?

Gardening by Luanne Armstrong

2010-02-09T09:11:00.000-08:00

In Service to Place

Gardening season in this part of the world begins in February, in the grey time, the cloud lid heavy over the grey flat lake and dim blue mountains, light and heat driven far away. But the snowdrops are pushing push out of the frost; the buds swell, dap, unseen, begins to run in the maples and birch.
I whisper to the sad leggy geraniums; soon I promise them, light and heat will come.
And this week, my friend Kuya came and we did our seed orders together, acknowledging our goofy willingness to fall for words like heritage, Russan, French, in the vegetable descriptions. But we ordered them anyway.
The seed orders will arrive in a couple of weeks, and then I can crank up the greenhouse, put in lights and heat, start putting seeds in pots.
And then, in early April, the ground will be dug and rototilled, though not by me.
And then finally, will come the first soft day in April when the sun smacks my shoulders with actual heat. The mud has dried. The garden soil crumbles under food.
I will gather a rake, a shovel, string, seed packets, dump them all in the wheelbarrow, and plant a first row of spinach or peas in the dug, raked garden soil. Usually, on such a day, the sun comes and goes as abruptly as someone turning out the lights. Snow squalls barrel across Kootenay Lake; what was sun is suddenly rain or sleet or hail and in fifteen minutes, the squall has chased merrily its tail merrily over the Purcells and faded away.
I will bend and dig until I’m tired, which doesn’t take very long and then retire to the deck to watch the clouds and the sun on the shining lake. And then I go back; I will work like this all day, in small rushes, and stretches of time, until the cold spring evening sets in and I retreat to the house.
And all the while I’m pounding stakes and tying string to make a straight line and digging a trench with the hoe and laying in the seeds, I wonder all over again, what I’m doing and why. I know all the obvious reasons. I believe in growing my own food, in independence, in growing local, in not being dependent on gas and oil for my food. Every spring, I wonder why I am here, doing this, all by myself?

When I step outside on a spring night, the earth reeks of waking; the call of birth, of living, of being dragged out of dark muck and curled sleep by light and heat. There’s cruelty in it. Part of me is exhausted by this call; the demand of all that sweat and stooping and bending.
But I serve my garden. And it serves me. It’s not clear just where this service, these kind of obligations begin or end, Nor am I at all clear who is serving who, or what and how we got into this somewhat mad relationship in the first place.
Still, it feels like a call to service; a call to tending, a call to caring and midwifing seeds into plants and plants into food and food into nurturing people’s lives. It’s the smell of soil warming, of mould and rot and worms and buds breaking. It moves me without any conscious volition to stoop over the soil and see clustered, rows of sprouts, two tiny primary leaves, breaking the crusted soil, heading upwards.

The Nose on Aurora's Face by K.Linda Kivi

2010-01-31T12:33:00.000-08:00

What is it that divides humans into those who attempt to live with ecological integrity and those who don’t? A strong sense of place? A compassionate giving nature? The way we are raised (see Jan. 18 blog entry)? A culture of conservation?

This is, of course, the million dollar question. If we had an answer for this one, we could be far more effective in changing the course of environmental destruction currently underway. My time in Aurora, Ontario, has been fascinating in that I’ve been living among people who’s environmental ethic seems to begin and end with filling up many blue boxes worth of recycling a week. These boxes get put out weekly alongside piles of usable appliances, furniture, sporting gear, electronics, toilets, etc., as well as bags and bags of garbage. I really have no idea of where to begin a conversation within my neighbourhood where there seems to be no qualms about waste and consumption, be it in the form of “trash”, gas-guzzling vehicles or monster houses.

So, I’ve been following the local story of the Nokaiidaa Trail and one woman, Heidi Stoecklin’s, campaign to keep the trail from going through the local McKenzie Wetlands with curiosity. As someone from rural BC who is accustomed to large areas of wilderness, I’ve asked myself, what’s the big deal? Why is Heidi so passionate about this one little patch of swamp? And where does she get the energy and patience to attempt a conversation of this kind with clearly clueless politicians and public? Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that they are not clueless so much as holding values that have little to nothing to do with ecological or social integrity. Part of me thinks: why bother talking to these people anyway?

With that attitude, it was easy for me to dismiss the McKenzie Wetlands campaign as a waste of time. It’s just a tiny remnant of an ecosystem anyway that has been battered and fragmented beyond viability. Like some of Aurora’s residents and politicians, I asked myself what difference would a little boardwalk through a tiny wetland make, the whole area is surrounded by the suburbia of World Wreckers anyway?

The letter to the editor of the local Auroran newspaper that I finally wrote and sent, more as a tribute and encouragement to Heidi than anything else, outlines the ecological services provided by wetlands and pointed out, the obvious, that humans are part of that greater ecology. But surely these people know that? Then why don’t they live as if they understood the implications of their behaviour?

Equally puzzling, though more laudable, is what motivates Heidi to keep on attending the meetings, write letters to the editor each week that basically say: look, you have a nose on your face? And: look, how much money are you spending trying to convince your face it doesn’t have a nose? Meanwhile, the politicians seem to be unwilling to look her in the face, nose or no nose.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Heidi is a gift to Aurora. Every community needs its Heidi, someone who’s willing to take the time and put in the energy it takes, with such grace and respect, regardless of the outcome. Heidi is starting where she is. She’s starting where the people of Aurora are at. She’s starting with a microcosm of the larger ills and insisting that people listen. We can only hope that some of them will hear. One thing is certain: if she doesn’t speak up, nobody will hear. And at this point, until we figure out what the magic formula is, simple, heartfelt, insistent communication is still all we have to go on. Maybe the act of speaking to one another is what creates a common language.

Where does that leave me? Not sure. My investment in this community is small. My commitment here is to caring for my ailing parents. All my actions, prior to this letter to the editor have been small and covert. The one conversation I had with an Auroran – a very nice, smart man in my meditation group - about the state of waste in the neighbourhood was met with: oh, I haven’t noticed. And: you can’t sell used furniture any more, so we have to put it out in the garbage. Sigh. But what happens to me and my integrity when I choose not to engage, but simmer in my disgust and despair instead?

Any ideas?

January Journal by Luanne Armstrong

2010-01-24T16:56:00.000-08:00

January diary:

For too much of January, I felt like bad old sad old country song; lost my dawg, lost my car, lost my dear old Mom…plus it’s deep dark miserable January and it’s raining and so on and so on…and so on.
But mostly, in amongst the various griefs, I was (and am), also relieved; so hard to watch the dog get old, and older and struggle with keeping his dog dignity, running, barking, peeing and shitting outside. How do dogs understand old age anyway?
And all fall, going in to see my mom as much as I could manage, trying to be with her and watching her decline and decline. In some odd way, her death has given her back to me, my lovely, laughing, always busy Mom, who was never quite the shrunken white haired woman in the wheel chair watching the door for me to come in.
And the car is now fixed and spring will come and a whole week of family and visits and people and phone calls and organizing is over—over—over. Now can I have my nice dull writing life back, I hope. Before Christmas interfered, I was having a dull and boring life for the first time in my EVER and I liked it! Didn’t expect to and I was always only a hair away from boredom but it was all so manageable instead of chaotic. And I was getting work done, and keeping up with teaching and even having odd moments to go for a walk. Lovely! Amazing. Who knew order and lack of crazy busyness could be so liberating.
So tonight here I am again, alone, (except with a shiny new floor) rain on the roof and the deck, silence and darkness outside, only one dog snoozing on the rug, and the revisions to the new book sitting beside the computer.
It is ridiculously and unseasonably warm and I am paying no attention to the whispers from the greenhouse, the trees and plants. My brother was out pruning trees briefly today but we both know in our bones it is too early to pay any attention to the garden, even when the false and lying sun pokes out from behind the clouds with actual warmth in it. It isn’t warmth but light that triggers growth. For me, it is the smell of earth, when I am outside on a cold spring evening and I can smell the ground, a smell of cold and mold and earth and anticipation. But right now, the light is still telling me, sleep, sleep, and Sunday night, after the kids left, after the funeral was over, after the house was clean and quiet, after I emailed all my students, after a week of decisions and dinners and the jangling and jostling and banging of various people, emotions, sensibilities and ideas, I let it go, I curled under a heap of blankets back in my own bed, and slept and slept.
But then of course, the next day, and the next and the next, there are the banalities of the ordinary, bills, money (and the lack thereof), letters, emails, revisions, chores. I need a new thought, or a new project, or a new something, but as always, gotta finish off the old before the new will wander in the door.

But spring will wander in soon -- time to get those seed orders done!

Mothers, Others and the Giving Place by K.Linda Kivi

2010-01-18T12:19:00.000-08:00

I have long been fascinated about fear, fears about the natural world in particular, since those fears very much colour our sense of place and our interactions with the natural world. Which of our terrors – be they of heights, snakes, spiders, mice, bears, falling trees, etc. – are rooted in ancient instincts and which are outgrowths of our current cultures? Obviously, our places of discomfort have been used by modern media and political interests to manipulate us but I’d assumed that the answer to my question about the root of our fears was largely unanswerable. Wrong.

My friend Karen Warkentin, professor of Biology at Boston University, gifted me with a wonderful book recently. Evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding is a compelling and informative exploration of the theory that cooperative breeding among humans has given rise to both our current morphology as well as our cultures as distinct from the other great apes. The book is chock-a-block full with fascinating comparisons between our child rearing practices and those of other primate and mammalian species as well as how the influence of multiple caregivers affects human psycho-social development. I was particularly captivated by the information on the role of grandmothers and post-menopausal women in the survival rates and development of children in a community.

Following on my observations about the fearful children of “the World Wreckers” in my previous blog entry, I was delighted to encounter a mention of how our relationships with other humans might affect our relationships to the natural world. Synthesizing the work of a group of psychologists led by Barry Hewlett, the team found that, “the way children interact with their caretakers influences their sense of belonging and shapes how they feel about the environment they live in.”

The children of traditional foragers (as well as the adults), tended to “view of their physical environment as a “giving” place occupied by others who are also liable to be well-disposed and generous.” In contrast, the children of other subsistence folk such as farmers or those of upper middle-class Americans, were more likely to be fearful of strangers and of their environment. Yet even among farmers and post-industrialites, “children who were accustomed to multiple caregivers grew up less likely to fear strangers.”

If indeed the isolation experienced by infants in the nuclear family unit has given rise to people less positively connected to their environment, how in turn does that lack of connection play out in their lives? Are they likely to behave in more destructive manners towards the environment? Are they prone to be greedier, less concerned about their impact they might have on others with whom they share the finite resources of the planet? If there is even an inkling of these behaviours being rooted in our upbringings, wouldn’t that suggest the most radical act for the future of the planet would be to ensure that children are indeed raised by a village instead of just one mother and maybe a father?

Hrdy notes somewhere else in the book that the US government earmarked $1.6 billion for educational campaigns to reinforce the nuclear family; she comments that if that sum was put into better childcare options for working families, a culture that was more caring and compassionate might begin to re-emerge. The point here is that it is no coincidence that the greed of the wealthy is running rampant, destroying life support systems for all the inhabitants of Earth. Everyone’s tax moneys are being funneled into propaganda to maintain a system in which humans might evolve away from our origins as an empathetic, interactive species. She posits that “compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish” And without that curiosity and empathy for others, just what will our relationship to the natural world become?

So, are you game? Ready to trade in the nuclear family and return to our origins of communal care? By letting whole villages raise our children again, we might create the pre-conditions for the survival of our species and the planet we call home. Stay tuned as I look further into Hewlett’s research. In the meanwhile, read Hrdy’s book and learn something new about what makes us human.

Time among the World Wreckers by K.L. Kivi

2010-01-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

When I walk among them, the children of the World Wreckers in Orchard Heights do not reply to good morning greetings in the street. Against the backdrop of 4000 square foot houses, three car garage, one acre Orchard Heights properties, the ten-year-old girl and the twelve-year-old boy just behind her seem oddly afraid. The blank windows of the luxury prison homes stare silently at us all, as if in mute indifference to the children’s furtive gazes. The tinted-glass SUVs and 8-cylinder sedans squat like sinister ornaments among the ubiquitous, landscaper-groomed front yards. Except for the scurrying children in the street, the place looks sterile and uninhabited.

This was, once, a place of work and food, not a chilled hideaway for the ultra rich, but a hillside orchard, a farm habitat interspersed among woodlots, a place know for its productive soils and vibrant agricultural culture. Here once stood row upon row of trees, providing myriad varieties of apples to Torontonians just south of here. The apples now consumed in Toronto and here come from as far away as Aotearoa (New Zealand). Gone is a culture connected to soil and weather and neighbours, a life known for its ups and downs, good times and difficult ones. This place is anathema to the rural community I come from in the Kootenays.

Here, the culture of the land has been replaced by the culture of wealth, a blank-faced neighbourhood and the spawn of the good life. But why do they not say good morning, or even nod, from their place of supposed security? Is it that economic security has not amounted to a sense of security in the world for them? Or is it perhaps that when economic security is actually excessive wealth, their fear is well justified. On some level, the people who consume far more than their fair share of the Earth’s bounty must know that they are purchasing and consuming and polluting at the expense of others. They must know that their lives that are grounded in the accumulation of stuff, none of it from here, are unsustainable. How could they not?

Noted climate activist and writer George Monbiot wrote in a recent article in The Guardian that the very wealthy are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gases currently generated on the planet. He challenges the notion that population growth is the key issue in the climate change debate. “It’s time we had the guts to name the problem,” he writes, “It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich.” Where those of us who have the cash to drive hybrid cars and dutifully fill our blue boxes fit into this picture is debatable but the places where 63% of the world’s population growth happens produce negligible greenhouse gases. These are the majority of the planet’s denizens who never even dream of owning a vehicle much less live in a culture where anything packaged is ever purchased.

It is the mega-rich among us who create the problems the rest of us must live with: those who head up tar sand extraction industries, who jet about in private planes or at least with private rooms, who move money in perpetual quest of the financial bottom line, who heat, air condition and provision dozens of far flung monster houses, who cruise around in yachts that consume 3,400 litres per hour and send their children to exclusive private schools.

The ten-year-old girl, blond braids bobbing against her shoulders might not know why she is afraid; even her parents might not be aware how afraid they are. Fear is part of the culture of wealth. It seeps into every decision they make. Acquiring wealth is one thing, but hanging on to it is another. They must be constantly on the look out for anyone who might envy their riches a little too much. Who knows what guise they might take! Part of the problem with cultivating a consumer culture is that people end up wanting what the rich have. That is, of course, part of the point: to create want alongside creating the illusion that wealth is possible for anyone who has the smarts to go after it. This is what is called the free market economy of the so-called democratic world. A lot of money goes into convincing the masses that this system actually functions freely and that the only reason you and I are not rich is because we’re stupid or lazy. And if we reject that whole story, we must be stupid and lazy or criminal and deluded.

The poor are afraid, but of different things. They have little need to barricade their doors, hide in gated and alarm-ridden neighbourhoods and cower in heavily guarded countries. The poor have no need to lock up their potential enemies or send armed forces against them. Mostly, the poor are too absorbed with surviving their lives to bother with the rich. And in our increasingly economically segregated communities, few of us brush up against the truly wealthy. The bastions of the world’s filthy rich are well removed from our feeble protests. Long forgotten are the slogan’s of sixties leftists like “Eat the Rich!” Monbiot asks, “So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems?” Perhaps those few of us who live among the World Wreckers, in their neighbourhoods and in the countries that provide them haven, have still too much to lose. We cuddle up to the few of the public perks that haven’t yet been eroded by privatization and parallel private services – the occasional good public school, some well-funded hospital or other public facility.

Yet, their excesses threaten to swamp us wholesale. As I turn a corner and head toward the two-car-garage, 3000-square-foot neighbourhood that cosies up against the flank of wealth, I see no signs of more consciousness. The first week I witnessed garbage day in Orchard Heights I thought it was a special, large item pick-up day. I made a mental list of what was being thrown away in this one square kilometre of suburb: three couches, three computers, two end tables, three stools, many toilets, enough plastic lawn furniture to seat a celebrity wedding, computers, a photocopier, fridges, sports gear, enough carpet to do Buckingham Palace, etc. Then, two weeks later, it happened all over again. More plastic lawn furniture – it seems people here think it’s a disposable item, like menstrual pads – more toilets, office chairs, desks, goalie nets, more carpet, always computer monitors, lamps (which look very nice in my basement with the gold-rimmed lamp shades I picked out later), tobogannes, a Bosch hammer drill, slide projector…

But no, I can’t keep listing. Some garbage days, I can barely go out, I’m so appalled by the unadulterated waste. These people don’t even donate their off-casts to charity. The children stroll past this excess every two weeks, just like I do. It is no wonder they are afraid. There is the man in the red van who is perusing for a bicycle for his son; there is the man with the pushcart who picks through their blue box for returnables; there is the middle-aged woman (me) who carts pedestal sinks and mint condition, state of the art office chairs home. These scavengers must remind the children that their families have too much, other families have less and that they waste unnecessarily. These children must know that they are watched.

What will it take to stop the World Wreckers? What will be required to topple the culture of World Wrecking? And if substantive change to the world of the wealthy ever did occur, what would become of the miles upon miles of mansions that accommodate one small family each, sometimes one small bloated person? Would the sprawling fields of the mega-estates that surround Orchard Heights with their thoroughbreds be returned to the agriculturally productive state they once knew? Will ten-year-old girls smile and reply to their neighbours when they wish her a good morning?

Land and Being: by Luanne Armstrong

2009-12-29T12:15:00.000-08:00

Land and Being:

Writing about love is hard. A love story tends to always veer into romance, or sentiment, or lyrical grandiloquence. And yet a love story is impossible to avoid. It wants to be told. It trumpets its own eloquence. How can I avoid it?
And yet, I have no idea if that is what I am writing. It's like walking in my own Zen Koan; I go around and around inside this story. What do I love here about this place, and why? How many ways do I see this place? And how many eyes here, also see me? What do they see? How do we see each other? Is this even a relationship? Is it all a one way emotion, and me, the odd human stalker, wandering around wanting to be loved?
I ask myself at odd and various moments, what am I doing here? While I bend over the garden, plantng. In the spring, breathing on tulips. Or listening to a lone frog, both of us awake on a March night; or in August, listening to the Northern harrier crying over the burned-to-golden summer field as I sit peeling peaches in the hot slanting sun. Watching my foolish farmer self, at harvest, harried by nature, wild turkeys in the grapes, deer eating the apple trees, voles eating the garden, small lost bear in the pears. Around and around we go, a palimpsest of footprints telling an infinite number of stories, over my lifetime, over so many lifetimes.
If I put my ear to the ground, if I lie down, can I hear the past banging its way under the grass roots, the tree roots? Can I hear the banging of all those other feet coming by? Can I hold eternity by the hand, like a child with almost no sense of myself, listening, at last, inside this place and so end in dreaming? If I wasn’t walking here, I would be walking somewhere, my head in the sky and my feet shuffling in grass, in leaves, in multitudes. And wondering how to grasp it. The intricate complexity of a field, a patch of moss, a flower opening. What do I really know?
Walking here, listening, every day I grow smaller and larger. Raven comes by on my solitary mornings in the winter, as I throw hay to the cows, which stand ankle deep in yellow mud and manure. At night, the dogs and the coyote yell challenges, or greeting or some other complexity. What do I know? This fall, I missed the swallows leaving and felt an acute sense of loss; I was interrupted by inattention, my being busy. No excuses. And the ospreys left as well, without saying goodbye. No, it was me that didn’t say goodbye, stomping around picking apples and preparing for my own winter. Another year going around; all year we chase each other, the seasons and I, round and round, I am lost inside and lost outside and occasionally, glad to be so lost.
The elements bind me together; fire inside my belly, fire in the sleepy animals, fire in the woodstove, lake always glinting in its cleft home between mountains, my feet banging, banging on the earth while I listen, In love with here, with land and being. And late at night, I curl under many covers, listening to snow hissing at the windows, wind banging the tree branches together, in an odd syncopation, in my bed house, my bed-balloon, my bed cocoon, tethered to the night sky, swinging and whirling in the wind,
Travelling all night; never lost.

December Journal by Luanne Armstrong

2009-12-16T08:04:00.000-08:00

December Journal:

And I suppose, also, the end of this year’s journal, typed to a background of an utterly confused and confusing blare of noise from Copenhagen. Only two writers have made any sense of it so far for me, Michael M’Gonigle, writing in the Tyee, and George Monbiot writing in the Guardian. Other than that, the mainstream media is as silly about Copenhagen as it was about H1N1.
It was a good year for me, if not for the planet. My house is full of food from the abundant garden, the chimney is clean, the wood is dry, the house is warm, small things that make a world of difference. And despite the environmental degradation in the world, we see more animals and birds around here, not less. Wolves were here one afternoon, above us on the mountain, howling on their way through from somewhere to somewhere else. A cougar tracked through the pasture. Then the other day my brother came in with a hunk of grey hair. Something had broken the bottom two strands of barbed wire in the north fence and left a chunk of hair behind. We looked at it mystified; not deer, not moose, not anything we knew. The next morning, he came back, gleeful. “A grizzly,” he announced. Not everyone would be thrilled at the sign of such large predators around but we are glad at this sign of a functioning and intact ecosystem.

Partly it is because there are fewer hunters and fewer people here in the winter; driving along the lake road means driving by many huge and shuttered houses. Even the few people that still live year round tend to go away for large chunks of the winter. Even so, many of the house still sport large yard lights and outdoor lights. From my house, at night, in a landscape that was once pristinely dark, I can now see three sets of yard lights. I have no idea what purpose these lights achieve; they burn all night and every night, (one is on an empty house) when I look out, they irritate me like an itch I can’t scratch.
But mostly the farm is quiet; the pigs are gone. The empty pigpen is oddly sad. The garden is asleep under the snow. The greenhouse is shut down. A few birds eat dried Saskatoon berries and rose hips. Flickers occasionally come to drill my house-logs for dinner. An eagle goes by on its way to harass the coots but the ravens don’t chase it as they usually do.
Walking is an experience of black and white and grey stark beauty, grey water sloshing restlessly under the wind, black rocks, black trees, snow layered on every surface. It’s a great time to look for tracks, for the record of the busy restless life that still continues all around me.

And it’s the social time of the year for me as well, and conversely, also the quiet time; time to write, to think, to walk. When I arrived in Vancouver ten years ago, I arrived on the verge of Y2K, and a great chorus of confusion of what might happen. Nothing did, partly because a great many technical people spent a lot of time and money making sure it wouldn’t. But now that the world stands, again, facing a great historical turning point, there is, yet again, great confusion. Despite the many apocalyptic voices around, no one really believes that disaster will come – not yet. Just as people partied in Paris while German troops were marching towards them, and the radio went on announcing that all was well, so we drive and shop and live our lives. I do it as well. I loathe the pressure this time of year to shop but I like the part that is about friends, family, connection, community, making music and art together, catching up after a too busy summer and fall.
Christmas, solstice, the turning of the year, the time when there is still abundance left from harvest, when the freezer, the cupboards, the canning jars, the dried fruits, the boxes of huts and onions and garlic are still here. The hungry time of the year is still to come. No wonder Christmas is a festival of life and Easter is a festival of death. Traditionally, Easter would have come at a time when the cupboard was empty and the garden not grown.

But all is well at Kootenay Lake. I write and listen to the radio and read and study.

And I listen and wait. And while I do that, I plan the next garden.

***

The Idiocy of... by K.Linda Kivi

2009-12-09T16:02:00.000-08:00

“We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out.”
Raymond Williams

It is late April. As I make my way up the path to check on our hydro-electric system’s intake, I take in the leaves of the deciduous trees which are opening in a spring chorus of myriad shades of green. Light jumps everywhere: in the froth of the gushing creek, on the black backs of the happy ravens, through the forest’s new beginnings. All I want to be, is outside. Interesting how we “be outside” like being happy or sad, a state of existence rather than how we speak of finding ourselves in places, like “in the house” or “at the beach.”

All of my body wants all of this being: the warming sun, the cool breeze on skin, the fragrance of life, the chatter of squirrels and wrens, my spring song, the textures of last year’s dead greenery against black soil, the itchiness of hands wanting work. The last item, the work, is particularly compelling. Perhaps if I was an urbanite, I’d be itching to go for a cycle or put the canoe in the water, but outside is where a rural person works; and in spite of the repetition and cyclical nature of the work, it is what I most want. Our garden is already turned over, peas and greens planted, beds reinforced, compost distributed, new gate built and hung weeks before the official gardening season begins. My land partner Joe and I have been felling and bucking up dying birch since late March, unable to still our hands any longer. But we are not working regardless of fatigue and weather. We are working because of weather, necessity and glee. The harder times will come later - in the heat of the summer, in the scramble to be ready for winter - but for now we are contented and eager.

Some thinkers claim that modern life can free the human from the “idiocy of rural life”. The idiocy of … I run this phrase through my mind as I continue my way up the path, noting fallen trees that need to be cleared, and try to imagine what they could possibly mean. The OED defines idiocy as “utter foolishness”. How could it be considered foolish to have to go outside? To have to work hard, regardless of how one feels, regardless of the ferocity of the storm, the muck or the numbing cold might be drudgery perhaps, but foolishness?

Last week, I visited with Brenda of Elderbee Greens as she and her daughter pricked tiny seedlings from trays and transferred them into the larger pots they sell each year to legions of dedicated gardeners. There was no idiocy or foolishness or even drudgery there, in the balmy warmth of the greenhouse, the worktable covered with first leaves reaching toward the sunlight, innocent and irresistible as happy puppies. I joined the work, dipping my fingers into potting soil and we talked, conversing about my first novel, which she had recently read, the upcoming elections and the outrageousness of politicians who refuse to understand the perspectives and ways of rural people.

This time last year, I was cycling through the Estonian countryside, the houses streaming past like a scarf of stone, wood and thatch strewn among the tentative green. People were outdoors, raking and digging and puttering for as long as the light would let them. I stopped now and again to chat with someone across a fence, hedge or mossy stone wall, our conversation turning more often than not to European Union politics, the emptying of the countryside, about the impact of capitalism on agriculture and rural life. Only three kinds of people remain in much of the Estonian countryside year round: the elderly, the troubled (alcoholics and crazies), and the very stubborn and brave. Sometimes, the last are grouped in with the second. What grieves rural people is not the idiocy or drudgery of their lives close to the Earth, but rather decisions made by people in far away cities that do not consider their wants or needs.

And here in North America, where in a mere 50 years the balance of the population has shifted dramatically from rural to urban, how are we seen? Do the majority of Canadians, urban people, understand that being rural means working and that our work brings deep, necessary pleasure; the symphony of muscles stretched and filled, of joints and tendons moving, resisting, giving way, of the heart, lungs and other organs working toward a crescendo? Working the land imbues us with a rightful sense of place, of participating in the living world, of kinship with every other being who must find home ground, harvest food, create shelter, weather the elements, create and raise young, survive. Good work is hard. It asks something of us, whether it is feats of strength, acts of endurance, the union of mind and fingers, focus in spite of repetition and boredom, problem solving skills, calm in the face of calamity or finding harmony and rhythm with co-workers. Hard work demands both courage and humility. A life lived close to the land makes us humble.

As I arrive at the top of the last rise, I look down into the treed gully at the damn that feeds our water intake for both domestic and power use. The water is gushing at full force, up to eighty times its regular volume during the rest of the year, the unnaturally straight line of the waterfall beautiful none the less as it sluices over the entire eight foot width of the metal between two concrete abutments. This hydro-electric system reminds us on a regular basis that although we may have the ingenuity to design and build such a technological wonder, nature is still not under our command. Over the years, our power has gone down over sudden high flows and debris flows that have filled in the small black pool behind the damn to the brim. Months of excavating sand, mud, rocks and logs in chilling spring water is nothing if it is not an exercise in humility. And I like it. I like being reminded that I am but a small part of a much larger entity, a force that encompasses me like a parent, like a teacher, sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce.

I scramble down the steep, snow-pocked slope hanging onto the ropes we have tied to the trees for that very purpose. At this time of year, we check the intake daily in order to adjust the clean out gate/overflow so that the right amount of water – not too much, not too little – flows over the intake screen. Someone must be here in April and May to do this job. Either that or do without electricity for a while. In this way, the choice to live a life tied closely to land does sometimes preclude other choices. The chickens need to be fed, the harvest brought in, the goat milked, a day of work abandoned because, oh well, it’s raining and the intake visited and adjusted accordingly. In North America, we love to love choice. We have been taught that it is a value above all others. Choice implies we are free of necessity, that we have risen above the plain cut of survival. Choice makes us feel powerful. It makes us arrogant.

I pull up the clean out gate another notch and head back up the slope, leaning out as I seize the rope and clamber up like a rock climber. I am full of energy, a veritable spring of vigour, as I run back down the path for the sheer pleasure and challenge of hopping over roots and rocks. There is absolutely nowhere else I would rather be. As I slow down to climb a short snowy section, I wonder which modern thinkers will expound on the idiocy of urban, industrial life?

Agrarian thinkers like Wendell Berry spend much of their energy extolling the virtues of the rural lifestyles that are being abandoned, of the life that is being lost. They write about what they know about – the goodness, the beauty of a life lived close to the land. They respond to the Urbanist attack not by counter attack, but with passionate defense. Humble, they want only to preserve what they cherish, not to force it on everyone else. Yet it bears some consideration: if the problem with rural life is that we have no choice but to go outside, shouldn’t it be equally problematic that most urbanites have no choice but to stay inside? Who in urban settings rejoice at being indoors when the leaves unfurl and shoots push up through greening earth, when the sun is rocketing diamonds out of the new snow, when the heart yearns for the texture of tree or wind or rock? When urban people go outdoors, it is when their work is done. And work, to many of them, is a due they must pay so that they can go outside, when it’s over and rest and recreate. Thus, urban and rural people live their lives in reverse.

But the idiocy of urban life isn’t necessarily in the reversal of the inside/outside situation. It’s more in the disconnection of work from the meeting of basic needs. There is a rightness, a deep satisfaction, about pulling up a carrot that I can’t imagine a bureaucrat feeling as they fill out another form or put in a showing at a meeting. So many of the basic animal tasks of survival have been co-opted. The Belgian/African a cappella group Zap Mama wrote and recorded a song about one of the women’s grandfather who came to visit her from Africa. During the song, we share in his discovery that the modern world has stolen all the tasks of his body. Some machine has cut the bread, leaving his hands bereft. He encounters an escalator, which has stolen the work of his legs. “Escalator, machine encore!” he cries out. The pinnacle of this robbery occurs when he discovers that television wants to do the work of his dreams and imagination. His entire body of work has been robbed, rendering limbs, brain, even him, meaningless.

Increasingly, urban people give bodily meaning to being outside through modern activities called exercise and sport. Like work, exercise can bring deep, necessary pleasure; the symphony of muscles stretched and filled, of joints and tendons moving, resisting, giving way, of the heart, lungs and other organs working toward a crescendo. Outdoor exercise can imbue a person with a rightful sense of place, of participating in the living world, of kinship with other beings. Good exercise is hard. It asks something of us, whether it is feats of strength, acts of endurance, the union of mind and fingers, focus in spite of repetition and boredom, calm in the face of calamity or finding harmony and rhythm with one’s companions. Some outdoor sports demand both courage and humility. But, if you don’t feel like going, or the weather is kacky, you don’t have to go. Also, unless you are a professional athlete or a recreational professional (eg. ski guide), when the work of exercise or sport is over, you still have to do the work of feeding yourself, of providing shelter, power and transportation, of fulfilling your need to be productive and contributing to society.

For urban people, outside is a dreamland, especially at this time of year, the yearned for territory of weekend warriors. City people who dream of moving to the country often return to cities when they realize how much work is required. Either that, or they create urban lives in the countryside and hire rural people to do their work. Cycling around the Estonian countryside many of the rural Estonians I encountered working – fixing fences, planting flowers, repairing roofs and outbuildings, airing out houses, raking yards, pruning trees, expelling rodents, cutting firewood – were doing so for absentee landowners. On the island of Saaremaa, many of the people we met were working on the waterfront summer residences of Swedes, Finns and North Americans. The owners often came for only a few weeks in the summer to experience the idyll of country life. If a springtime visit was in the works, the local hirelings would be hurrying to “get the place ready for the owners”. Getting the place ready meant removing the work, especially the outdoor work. These places are, in the words of art critic Lucy R. Lippard, “ landscapes in transition between labor, abandonment and recreation.”

I live on land, in a life, that sits on the active fault line between labour and recreation; these two forces actively battle over my soul and that of this mountainous terrain. In Estonia, these forces are only beginning their struggle as consumer notions of leisure filter into the economy and psyche of the nation. Here in the Columbia Mountains as in Estonia, the forces of labour want to harvest the trees, mine the rocks, exploit the soil, to make things out of resources, to draw material wealth from the bounty of the land. The forces of recreation want to admire the standing forest, swim in the unmarred sea and lakes, to draw solace from the Earth’s grandeur and gifts. Those two desires coexist among traditional rural peoples and both desires are paid their dues. It is only in our modern, industrial society that the two have been separated, that we have been asked to choose one or the other.

Through industrialization, outdoor work and outdoor recreation have been posited as incompatible opposites, and have thus become polarized. Indeed, industrial forestry with its roar of machinery does not know or respect the sacred or ecological necessity. And modern recreation sees wilderness as the place where no people dwell in interchange with the land. In seeing land as a blank slate, it can be as destructive as industry. We understand community best from within; the ecological community is no different. Traditional (as opposed to industrial) rural life, where people live with and inside the land, is the middle ground between these two forces. It is no coincidence that this lifestyle is not just devalued by modern society (try telling city folk you’re a farmer, hunter, trapper or wildcrafter and see how they treat you), but it is often rendered invisible.

In the cusp between rural and urban, half my work is done sitting, often in front of a computer while the other half occurs outside, my body eager to excavate its own true rhythm. Sometimes I relax indoors, sometimes I recreate outdoors, pressing my body into service climbing mountain trails or paddling rivers and lakes. I see my work in front of the computer as a necessary evil, both to provide for myself monetarily but also to participate with my thoughts in a society that no longer provides as many forums for people to meet and discuss ideas in person. I see my outdoor recreation as a social compromise, a way to participate with those who are seeking to know and love the land but are no longer rural. My favourite trips are ones that involve some kind of productive work, be it berry picking, firewood gathering or just salvaging scrap along the way. My favourite work is that which I do outdoors.

From my recent spring hikes, I have come home with bags full of False solomon’s seal, fiddleheads, nettles, watercress, wild salad greens. The forest has been feeding me for weeks now. My body yearns for that: for the emerald food of spring that answers my hunger for its cleansing and renewing properties. On my walks, I have shared my glee about the bounty of the Earth with friends by showing them how to harvest wild ginger without killing the plant, or talking about the plants I will gather for my tea blends when the time is right. Each time I wander, I engage in the work of observing the forest, of noting its steadiness and its changes, of including myself in its beauty. After the winter lull, my energy rises, flaring like an enormous cottonwood full of pungent buds. Outside is not just where I work and survive, it is where I thrive. What’s so idiotic about that?

Part 2: Animals R Us, by Luanne Armstrong

2009-11-30T10:55:00.000-08:00

These days, attitudes towards animals conflict and clash with every person; my brother walks up the mountain to be with animals, he watches and notices everything but he still rages, much as our father did, about bears in the fruit trees and deer eating the garden. He loves ‘his’ animals but he is still more aligned with our father’s values then with mine. But it doesn’t matter; we share enough similarities and the same ideas about care and respect.
Last week, I went to visit a new neighbour, a wealthy German industrialist who has spent a lot of time and money and energy landscaping his place, making a garden that looks quite natural and beautiful. He has also built a series of ponds on a hill, and each pond is surrounded by an electric fence to keep the otters from eating ‘his’ goldfish. I pointed out, rather mildly, that otters are endangered here and goldfish breed so fast they tend to become a nuisance. He shook his head impatiently at me. “The otters live in the swamp,” he said as if that somehow justified everything. I liked his garden but I didn’t like him.

It never fails to astonish me how much emotion people invest in their relationships and ideas about animals, both positive and negative. They either love them passionately; or, just as often, are terrified of, or hate them just as passionately. Stories about animals seem to be either long or short; in either case, they are usually not stories about animals at all, but about people’s ideas and involvement, however profound or superficial, with animals. Which is very odd, because animals don’t seem to have similar kind of passionate feelings towards us although of course we matter to them in all kinds of ways. But of course, we don’t know, because we haven’t yet learned to communicate with animals in such a way that their communication matters to us, as well as ours towards them, and most of us still tend to assume we know how they think and what they feel, often without a lot of evidence.
But there is a slow change going on…there are a lot of people working with animals in positive ways, interesting books, about a parrots, bonobo monkeys, about chimps, about bears and wolves; like most other information not amenable to mainstream thinking, none of this gets widely covered or talked about.
Most of these books are still focused on how much animals are or are not like us; whether they have language, whether they have culture, how they feel about us. But I was very happy to read about a man named Lynn Rogers, a biologist who has spent time with bears in the northern US woods. Rogers is no sentimentalist. Even after devoting 40 years of his life to the back bear of Minnesota he is under no delusion that his interest is reciprocated. The bears don’t really like him, he says.
"June, she has no feelings for me,” he is quoted as saying. “If she had feelings I think she would want to seek out company like a dog does its master," he said. "But she doesn't think of me in those terms. I'm just the guy that brings her a treat once in a while and that she can ignore and not pay any attention to and that is what makes her so valuable to science."

I also like this quote from a book called Landscapes of Fear, “We tend to suppress the knowledge that fear is a universal emotion in the animal kingdom from our consciousness, perhaps because we need to preserve ‘nature’ as an area of innocence to which we can withdraw when discontented with people.” Yi-Fu Tuan.
Craig Childs, a biologist who makes a living looking for water in the desert, says: “The life of an animal lies outside of conjecture. It is far beyond the scientific papers and the campfire stories. It is as true as breath. It is as important as the words of children.”
Or, as Barbara Noske writes, in Beyond Boundaries, “perhaps what I am looking for is an anthropology of animals, a place where the human-animal interface thins and disappears, where “Otherness” isn’t any longer an excuse for “objectification and degradation, either in practice or in theory.” (p.170

The reality of animals will never really be accessible to me or to people in general. But knowledge of animals is a different thing. But people who work with animals or encounter animals on a regular basis, (and these people are getting fewer all the time) farmers, hunters, animal trainers, etc., usually have a very specialized and often quite deep knowledge of particular kinds of animals and particular kinds of knowledge about animals; my sister, for example, is a horse trainer and knows an immense amount about horses but isn’t interested in dogs. My friend George, who is a hunter and a fisherman, knows his local landscape and the habits of the animals within that landscape amazingly well, but is suspicious and resentful of what he sees as the intrusive meddling of ecologists and wildlife biologists meddling with his choices and telling him what to believe.
Scientists, while they are often are extremely knowledgeable about particular kinds of animals, seem to often know little about animals in general. But they are also constrained by the requirements of science and what often appears as a rather almost comic fear of not anthropomorphizing animals, which often then excludes anecdotal evidence or local knowledge or indigenous knowledge – in addition, science seems very slow to take up on the idea that knowledge of animals gained in a library or through scientific methods is itself biased and oddly skewed to a particular point of view. Science needs to do more research that is both respectful of animals and their actual lives.
But at least people who work or live or hunt or depend on animals are in relationship with animals; and while this relationship takes an almost infinite variety of forms, depending on how such people characterize animals, it does exist and can be leared from. But then of course, this is also the great difficulty, that people are free to characterize animals according to whatever cultural and social framework they happen to be working with; from a woman getting her poodle dyed to match her apartment; to the Inuit hunter dependent on his dog’s sense of smell to get him home.

I still spend a lot of time these days with animals though much less than I did when I was a child,. When I was a child, I was sure my father knew everything about animals. He knew a lot, and everything he knew was constrained by his view as a pioneering small farmer, desperate to survive and make a living.
But now, I listen more. I listen and watch. The swallows sit on the porch in the early morning, gabbling and yelling, sounding exactly like a crowd of people at a party or in a restaurant. When the hawk comes by, or the golden eagle, the ravens come out to meet him or her. There is obviously lots of communication going on, wing tip to feather lift and I am blind and deaf to it.
I know something about domestic animals, less about wild animals, almost nothing about insects and lizards and spiders and wasps and flies. I share the farm in June and July with an almost infinite number of mosquitoes and I truly can’t come to any understanding about them because no matter how equitable I am determined to be about our shared life, they in fact, drive me quite mad. Screaming mad. Raging mad. They do it to anyone and everyone. Nothing about it is personal.
And while I am picking raspberries and the mosquitoes are ranging in and out of my ears and eyes, I try to remember we are here together, living our lives in some kind of strange and unknown partnership/relationship, each with our roles and our umwelt; mine is of heat and berries and itching and satisfaction and theirs is one being mosquitoes, blood, smell, pursuit, reproducing. In our own ways, we are doing exactly the same things.
But for most people, especially those that rarely encounter animals, the idea of animals remains an area of innocence, an area of sentimentality, an area of the unknown where humans can endlessly project needs, desires, their own humanness. And in this territory, we lurch from sentimentality to cruelty and back, a lurching horribly and eerily similar to historical positions previously help by whites about blacks, the church about Indians, Southerners about slaves.
It is no longer politically acceptable for men to say what women are feeling, or for white people to assume they know and understand the reality of people of colour. But it is still perfectly acceptable to assume we know what animals are thinking and feeling. But we don’t. And can’t.

This spring, a neighbour phoned my house. Her voice panted in panic. The night before, a cougar had broken into someone’s chicken shed, she said, the person had surprised it and the cougar had run away. Someone else might have seen the same cougar, she thought, of course they weren’t sure, but she was phoning everyone with children or grandchildren to warn people keep them inside.
What I didn’t tell her was that my brother had come down from his walk on the mountain, a few days earlier and told me he had just found a cougar den with a female cougar and two kittens. We were both glad about it; there are too many deer and not enough predators in our neighbourhood. I didn’t tell my neighbour this..
Neither of these stories is a judgment; one person is terrified of cougars and one is not. The difference is that my brother walks up the mountain every day and has all of his life; he walks up to deer, ravens sit on his shoulder. He’s not a Thoreau kind of guy; he’s redneck logger who loves the place where he lives and knows enough about it to walk through it with no fear and a sense of comradeship.
But my neighbour’s fear is a lot like being terrified of terrorists; if they never attack, the unfearful people can crow triumphantly, (after a long while) that nothing was ever wrong but it only takes one attack for the fearful people to consider their fear justified. It only takes one bear/cougar/wolf/coyote attack for all kinds of stories and fear to circulate. People are terrified of cougars, bears, wolves, because of the possibility, however remote, that they can hurt people.
Whether any of the stories of people being in danger or hurt are true or not, what caused the animals to act the way they did, never seems to be an issue.

Dreaming about Bears by K.Linda Kivi

2009-11-24T11:53:00.000-08:00

A topic I’ve always been interested in and that ties in nicely with Luanne’s previous blog entry about the umwelt, or perceptive world, of animals, is our human fear of wilderness and of animals. Our human umwelt. So much of the way we interact with nature is coloured or even dictated by these fears. They are so pervasive in modern urban culture, I believe, that most people don’t even discuss, much less question these fears, they are just taken for given. When someone steps out of that unwelt of human fear, they are seen as excessively brave, strange or just plain crazy.

A conversation that I keep wanting to have is: what are we afraid of? Why are we afraid? What is the result of this fear? And if we don’t like the results, is there anything we can do to alleviate or transform our personal and collective fears?

A conversation of this nature can begin in many places but since it’s just me here at the keyboard, I’ll begin with my own experience.

All through my teens and twenties, I suffered from chronic and re-occurring nightmares. In these dreams, I was relentlessly pursued and attacked by various animals, wild and domestic. One night, I’d be wrestling to the death with some giant fish on a bathroom floor. The next, I’d be climbing on furniture desperate to escape the menacing claws of a trio of ocelots (how do I even know what ocelots look like?). But the most frequent scenario was one of being pursued by bears. Sometimes there was just one, other times, lumbering groups of them, but always, as soon as they saw me, they’d come for me with the intent of tearing me to pieces and eating me up. I’d inevitably jolt out of sleep, heart pounding, hands sweating, limbs and lungs primed for flight. I would resist falling back to sleep for fear that the bears were waiting for me on the other side of that thin curtain of consciousness.

This night-time torment translated, not surprisingly, into a fear of bears. Okay, it was a terror of bears. To put this into context, I’m generally not a fearful person. In fact, when confronted with something worthy of fear, I’m more likely to go in search of it rather than retreat. Hence, my solo travels across Africa as a 20-year-old, my fascination with motorcycles and my adventures into the worlds of troubled people like convicts. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that I moved to the Columbia Mountains, a region known for its bear population.

I could spend a few pages elucidating the psychological roots and symbolism of my bear nightmares, but more interesting is what has become of my bear phobia in the past 20 years that I’ve lived among them.

My first waking encounter with a bear came just weeks after I moved to the Kootenays. I hadn’t yet found a place to live and was sleeping in the back of my truck where ever it was convenient to park. It was one such night when I was parked in a wild area that I was jolted awake by the rocking of my truck. I sat bolt upright, only to find myself nose to nose and paws with a small grizzly, a mere plexiglass window between us. Adrenalin hit the system at full gallop. Once I caught my breath, I grabbed a pot and lid from the food box (which should have been elsewhere, not with me) and banged them together with the full ferocity of fear. The bear fell back on all fours in a very leisurely way and snuffled back up the road to where its massive grizzly mama was waiting for it. Yikes.

The nightmares intensified.

Fast forward two years. I was in New Mexico on a winter adventure when I spotted an ad requesting chronic nightmare sufferers for a nightmare reduction study. At the few sessions I attended, the group of us were taught a relatively simple nightmare management technique which is based on the theory that nightmares are a bad habit in response to stress, much like biting one’s nails. The technique was supposed to deal a blow to my bear dreams within three months.

About two months later, having been diligent in the practice of the technique, I had a classic bear pursuit dream. The snarly, fang-toothed fur beast is after me and I am panicked, unable to move fast enough to evade it. My legs are gluey and slow, it is coming closer, closer… I wake up, as much frustrated as scared, and immediately practice the technique that involves creating an alternate version of the dream. I choose to imagine the bear eating me. I then will myself back to sleep. In my sleep, the dream continues where it left off. The bear devours me. And then the most extraordinary thing occurs: I become the bear.

Being the bear is both a visceral and mental experience. I am struck by the sensation of my solidity, of being hunkered down, all my innards protected beneath me. I also feel sluggish, as though it takes so much more energy to move this body and mind around. As I gaze about me, I realize I’m in my own back yard, but my vision is different – I can see more to the sides. My nostrils fill with a odour: the rotting, sweetness of compost. Compost, I think, the thought a scent image not a word. I lumber towards the pile. I wake up.

Who can say what happened in my psyche that night. I have no logical explanation for that distinct sensation of being that was entirely different, entirely alien to me. Who knows how closely it resembled the bubble of perception, the umwelt, of a real bear. But it had an effect (as have the other two dreams I've had about being a hawk and being a deer). What I understood from that experience is that bears aren’t really interested in me, that’s just my paranoid fantasy. They have a world unto themselves that I may enter from time to time in a peripheral way, but a bear is all about itself. What entered me that night was curiosity and respect.

I stopped having bear nightmares and my irrational fear of bears began to subside. I have had many, many close encounters with bears since. I now meet ursine wanderers with the knowledge that I am not all that important to them, just an odd figure that may cross their paths. Even when one attacked my outdoor fridge at 2 a.m. (yes, I know, I’ve brought it indoors), I wasn’t afraid to go out and yell at the big black bruin. It wanted food and I let it know that this food wasn’t available. I also have met numerous people who have been attacked by grizzlies in unfortunate circumstances. Consequently, I do my best to not create unfortunate circumstances when I’m in bear country. I make sure my umwelt includes bears in the most positive way possible, as fellow inhabitants of my homeplace who need more space than we humans often afford them. I view them as equals, whatever that means.

This evolution of my psyche has profoundly altered my relationship with the natural world. I am not adversary, I am not separate, I am not irrationally afraid. There is no longer a sharp line between me and the wilds. I am now “us” and I move through the world in that “usness.” It is what propels my environmental activism. It is what informs my each and every day as I rise and step out my door into home. This is not to say that I live in beautiful harmony in eternal connected bliss. No, it’s more real than that and my relationship to all the animals I encounter continues to evolve, as does my human community's relationship to wilderness, as do I. As do I.

Animals R Us. Part One by Luanne Armstrong

2009-11-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, I lived far more intensely with animals than with people. I spent a lot of time by myself in the woods and at the lakeshore. There were always a lot of animals at the farm, and, my brothers and sister and I made pets of all of them, every calf and pig and dog and barn kitten. We also brought home fish, turtles and sad baby birds that always died. The only things that weren’t pets were the chickens. There were simply too many of them. But one of my favourite jobs was to care for the hundreds of baby chicks that we ordered every year. They came cheeping and thirsty, in shallow boxes cardboard boxes. One by one, I picked them up, showed them the water and grain in their new home, the floor spread with clean sawdust, They huddled together under a metal hood, where a glowing red sun lamp mimicked the warmth of their lost mothers. I fussed over them, if they huddled together too much, they’d smother; if they were chilled, they’d get sick. But usually, they thrived and then one day, always exciting, I opened the door to the big world, a pen full of green grass and sun and watched as one by one, cautious and fearful, they ventured outside.
Eventually, the hens went off to the big chicken house and the roosters went into the freezer and I lost interest in them. There were so many other animals. Late one rainy spring night, my father came home. He called us downstairs, brought his hat out from under his jacket, full of wild baby mallard ducks. Their mother had been killed on the road. The ducks followed us to the beach all summer and then flew away that fall but for years, they, or their descendents, nested in our pasture. The fish, turtles and frogs went into the small pond we had made beside the house. They always escaped. We didn’t mourn them. There was more.

I also began a life-long habit of reading about animals. Stories about horses were my first choice but any animal book would do. In most of these books, the animals were braver, kinder, smarter and in general, more likeable than the human characters. And the people clearly, most of the time, didn’t understand animals. They beat them (Black Beauty) took them away from the people they loved and were faithful to, (Lassie Come Home) loved and lost them, (The Yearling.) I hid upstairs in my room on rainy days, curled up under the covers and wept over Lassie, starved and sick, sitting outside the school, waiting for her boy. I learned pretty much every lesson about being human from reading about animals.
Now, much later, I’m reading about animals again, but now I am looking for a particular kind of book, a book by someone who knows something about the animals they are writing about. Perhaps he or she is a scientist; perhaps not. I don’t care. What I want is for the writer to know and care about animals as what they are, no children or proto humans, but splendidly and only, themselves, in so far, as humans, that we are able to know that. Perhaps I am still looking for that ethical edge, that sense of care and morality towards animals that traditional morality still insists should only be extended to humans.
***
Ethical considerations didn’t really enter into my childhood relationships with animals, although I did have an ongoing constant argument with Wally Johnson, our neighour. He was a trapper; my mother always said that the dogs could smell him coming. He smelled like death, she said, and indeed, the dogs did howl when his truck turned the far corner, came down the highway to our driveway and turned in. Wally was a wonderfully kind gentle man who believed that the only animals that really deserved to live were deer, trout, and songbirds. Everything else he saw as his job to kill, as many as possible, as often as possible. We were fascinated by the carcasses of dead animals in the back of his tiny green Austin pickup. He was always bringing things to show us; he knew more about animals than anyone else we knew, and when he sat at the kitchen table, with a glass of dandelion wine, we sat and listened to stories of cougar, lynx, coyotes, beaver, marten and min. In these stories, all the animals died. I was both drawn in and repelled. I didn’t mind helping my dad kill the farm animals, but wild animals seemed to me to belong to a different realm, one with which I sympathized, even felt akin to.
Wally took my arguments about animals and nature seriously. Somewhere I had heard or read about the phrase, “the balance of nature.” I wasn’t sure what it meant but even at seven or eight it seemed to me obvious that killing all the predators in the woods wasn’t a good thing and I told him this. In fact, we argued about it for years, neither of us ever convincing the other. But Wally also knew the woods and mountains in a way that very few people do anymore. When he was in his eighties, he hiked over the Purcell Mountains with a package of salt and fishing line. He took a young nephew along.
Wally told me this while standing on his head on the board swing tied to the giant walnut tree in the north garden. He had just had couple of glasses of my mother’s dandelion wine. He always did love both my mother and her wine.
Wally was always interested in my or my brother’s stories of what we had seen in our travels around the farm or in the woods. If we said we had seen a bird or a fish, he always immediately demanded to know where we had seen it, what it had looked like, what it was doing. He liked children because he was something of a sad child himself. He had been born in North Dakota in 1900; he often told us stories about how harsh his childhood had been, how little they had to eat and how he had left home at 12 and never gone back. His wife Nettie was the shyest woman around; she wore long skirts and head scarfs and made lard laden greasy doughnuts which we always politely ate on our visits even though they made us feel sick. One day we arrived at their house and somehow, their truck had gotten stuck in the mud. Wally was sitting in the front seat, gunning the motor and screaming, “Push, Nettie, push,” while Nettie struggled along grimly behind the truck, covered in black mud from the spinning tires.

***

The animals I loved best and thus knew best were horses. I first learned to ride on our neighbour’s half-wild horses that they captured, tied in a corral until they were ‘broken’ and then turned them over to us kids to ride. Eventually, after much stubborn begging and pleading, I got a horse of my own. We couldn’t really afford a horse. Such an animal had no use on our farm. Everything we had we used to survive; a horse was purely a luxury. So my father bought her and then resented her for every mouthful of grass she ate. Eventually, he complained so bitterly that I let her go. But I never forgot what I learned from her. When I got her, I knew almost nothing about horses or riding and there was no one to teach me. The horse had never had any training either, so we learned together through a constant series of trial and error encounters, where she learned to figure out what I wanted and I somehow learned to communicate it to her.
My sister is now an accomplished rider and trainer. She says that a trained horse with a trained rider enter into a kind of consciousness where the rider really communicates by thinking, do this or go there and the horse feels the slightest shift in the rider’s body and responds. I never got even close to being that good a rider, but it is pure pleasure for me to watch my sister working with a horse, to watch the horse respond, to see the connection between horse and trainer.
One night, listening to the radio, as I often do when I am lying in bed waiting for sleep, I was listening to a program on whales and the commentator began talking about a term I had never heard before. Later, I looked it up. The word ‘umwelt’ is a German word that means environment, but it also has a specific meaning in the world of consciousness studies. It was coined back in 1930 by a German biologist named Jacob Von Uexkull. Von Uexkull was fed up with the era's dominant behaviorist view of animals, which considered only how animals acted – their behavior. He was more interested in what animals experienced, in the texture and quality of their felt sensory worlds. In an attempt to address this question, he published a monograph called A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men.
To get a glimpse into how animals experience their environment, Von Uexkull writes, "We must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows."
As we step into each of these bubbles, Von Uexkull goes on, "a new world comes into being." Each "new world" Von Uexkull called an Umwelt, a richly-detailed self-world which corresponds to the unique senses and environments of each animal. By imagining these Umwelt bubbles, he believed he could also imagine his way into the reality of the animal in question.
But to truly be able to do this, a human would have to stop assuming he or she knew the actual realty of the animal, stop thinking of it in human terms, stop comparing the animal behaviour and rating it by how close it is to human, stop in fact, making assumptions and just be in the animal’s space. My sister does this by thinking and acting, as much as is possible for a predator human, in a way that will make sense to a horse. And she watches the horse for its reaction to her. It’s a relationship in which they are both fully engaged.
At the farm now, I am far more conscious of the weird ethical contradictions that are involved in our relationship with animals, with which we are still surrounded. My city son-in-law always marvels at how, as he puts it, “In the Kootenays, the animals are just as important as the people.” And indeed, at the farm, we tell endless dog, and chicken and coyote and cow and pig stories. There is people gossip and animal gossip. Both are equally fascinating and equally necessary. The people gossip keeps us informed about our friends and who is doing what; the animal gossip plays a slightly different role. A lot of it is necessary information about how the animals are doing and what needs too be done or not done. In addition, the behaviour of animals is endlessly fascinating and intricate and we are always trying to understand and come to terms with it.
This year, we bought 20 baby pigs to raise. They came to the farm in the back of my brother’s pickup and were unloaded into their new clean pen. These pigs had never been outside, had been born in concrete pens and raised on concrete. They were terrified to go out so eventually my brother pushed them out the door of their shed, one at a time. And then one of them began sniffing the dirt. And then shoveling through it with his nose. And then tasting dirt and grass roots. Pigs really do caper and kick their legs in the air and this one did. He was manifestly in love with dirt. He kept snuffling through it and then looking at us. If a pig could smile, he did.
These pigs were still in a pen but they had a creek, shade, a mud wallow, grass. Every morning, all twenty baby pigs snorkeled their way through the mud pool. They liked to stand in the mud every morning after I let them out and have an amazingly long pee. The pigs quickly became a tourist attraction, people stopped on the road, brought their children to look, took pictures, wrinkled their noses at the smell and the proliferation of flies and black hornets and asked questions like “Do they bite?”

At the farm, we still love and care for animals. And then we eat them. And we are always just slightly uneasy about it but it feels all right. Recently, we killed five young roosters, gorgeous happy strutting roosters, with colourful feathers. But a flock of chickens only thrives well with one rooster; in nature, they would be driven off and probably eaten by predators. Here, we are the predators, big alpha predators with teeth. We don’t hunt and every year, I think I am going fishing but I don’t. I haven’t solved the bait problem. I am not, any longer, willing to squish worms or grasshoppers onto hooks. If I can find a passive, non cruel bait that works, I might, again, go fishing.
And I am also comfortable with the bargain we make with our animals; that they are loved and fed and cared for and then, they go from a living being to food as quickly and humanely as possible.

Bonded by Swine

2009-11-11T09:57:00.000-08:00

My brother and I were talking about the swine flu the other day. To my astonishment, I discovered he’d just gotten vaccinated. He was surprised by my surprise and suggested that my mistrust of government and health authorities was an ongoing manifestation of my parents’ deep-seated lack of confidence in people and societal norms. It is true that we were brought up to keep our heads down and trust no one other than family. These were obviously necessities of survival in the young adult lives of my refugee parents. But does this modus operandi have deeper roots than recent wars? What purposes are served by blending in and relying only on familiar folk?

Trusting the known undoubtedly has deep roots in Estonian as well as other peasant cultures. Rural folks have learned to rely on their own eyes, their own intuition and the collective experience of their families and communities for survival. Why? Because living within the natural world involves knowing the specifics, not generalities, of where you are. Each place has its own soil, its own weather patterns, its own predators, its own weeds, its own ambience, its own human culture. Very little of this information can be found in books – it is kept alive through story telling as a living, collective resource that changes and grows day to day through the participation of the inhabitants.

This self reliance was spun as stupidity, xenophobia and incompetence by popular culture in the 1960s and 70s. That was the era in which the capitalist project included industrialization of farming; getting those pesky, independent-minded farmers to move into cities was no easy task. Remember shows like Green Acres, Petticoat Junction and the Beverly Hillbillies? The characters were rarely, if ever, shown as having the profound and highly functional knowledge of place that characterizes rural people.

But what about drawing attention to oneself? Why has that not been well looked upon? Could it be because in more traditional settings surviving and thriving is a communal affair instead of a personal quest? One head sticking out may jeopardize the idea of collectivity as well as draw very real, unwanted attention to the group. It’s important to differentiate between drawing attention to oneself and being one’s unique self. The former involves expecting and striving for rewards while the latter simply asks for acceptance. Drawing attention to oneself takes a person out of the collective.

Interestingly, modern urban, capitalist culture asks people to do precisely the opposite on both counts. In order to get ahead among the masses, we’re supposed to jump up and down loudly proclaiming our unique worth. And since we don’t have contact with primary producers, we’re supposed to trust labels, guarantees, warranties, economic forecasts and the claims of myriad snake oil merchants. Chia seeds anyone? In the mad rush of a consumer culture, there’s no time to know who and what is around you. There’s no time to develop your unique self in your unique setting beyond taking on entertainment and style likes and dislikes. Most urbanites become passive consumers rather than creators of culture.

Of course, this culture of “look at me” embedded in sameness has made inroads into rural cultures as well. However, Luanne’s tale of the Armstrong pig raising venture shows how our mistrust of authority and the machinery of consumer culture can bring rural people back to some of those values. People who slaughter pigs together, inevitably, in spite of differences, bond on a primal level. Killing is an intimate act. Every time one of the slaughter crew eats a pork chop, ham or sausage this winter, they will have a bodily, as well as mental, memory of that day at the Armstrong farm. Their psyches will conjure up the people who were there with them, the flavour of the autumn air and the tang of the land that took up the blood of their efforts. Nobody was a star, everybody had a role, everybody was required.

Though I missed the Armstrong Farm pig slaughter, I did my own bonding through swine last week. When I got my flu vaccination the natural way – one short, achy bout in bed was what the dreaded H1N1 amounted to – my land partners and I had plenty of time to visit, take each other soup and remedies, and mull over the early snowfall. I feel fortunate to live in a place where so many in my community have refused to bow to the media hysteria about the flu pandemic and the government’s promotion of the pharmaceutical industry’s profit margin. Instead, we entrusted ourselves to each other’s care and wisdom. And it was good.

October: Community and Harvest

2009-11-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

October was a busy month, it whizzed by in patterns of dark and light, rain and sun, cold and warmth. Today, the beauty of this place is like a shout, like a hurrah, it is so bright and astonishing. Dark royal-blue lake, gold leaves, smoky blue air,
The whole month’s events blurred and melded into one another. Partly because I have my head down now, seriously pulling the plow, teaching and trying to write.
And oddly, whenever I do get seriously into writing, the farm, the house, my life seems to disintegrate around me. I wake up to dog puke on the rug and piles of paper fluttering to the floor and dust and dying plants even though I have only been ‘gone’ a couple of hours and not really gone at all…just my mind and spirit and perhaps some form of energy that animates the farm and keeps it functioning turned away. I’ve noticed this before; how much the farm is like a live creature, a creature of spirit and energy and how, when my father finally got old and discouraged, some feeling that used to animate the farm and connect it together faded and almost disappeared. The more people and energy there are about the place, the more alive it becomes. So then I think I can either be a writer, or I can be a farmer but stubbornly and idiotically, I persist in both. And stubbornly and idiotically, it does work, most of the time. Just far more slowly than I would like.
I have been thinking this month a lot about that strange word, community, mostly because Maa Press is going to put out a book on community and I would like to write something about it. It seems odd to me that the idea or discussion of community mostly arises in times of crisis, when, indeed, people are often magnificent in their caring for one another. But it is more the day-to-day arising and dissipating of community that interests me, although it isn’t dramatic but mundane, - conversations over coffee, meetings, concern, information about someone in need or what can be done.
Or, as happens, at the farm. Some days, especially in the fall, the farm is a very busy place. Inadvertently, the government has done us an odd favour by making it illegal for us to kill our animals and sell the meat to our neighbours. This means that legally, people have to come and ‘help’ kill the animal that we have sold to them while it was alive. Most people these days have never participated in killing anything. There is always an initial yuck factor. And then they come and the pig which was alive and smiling and eating apples is soon a carcass hung up and scraped clean and emptied of guts and ready to be taken to the butchers and hung and smoked and made into bacon and ham and pork chops.
I usually stay in the house and produce coffee and cake and soup and juice. People come tramping in, wash the blood and mud off themselves, sit down, eat and drink, full of the energy produced by physically hard work done well. My hands are too crippled to scrape the pigs. I like the traditional role as long as it’s an occasional choice. But one day this month, it got a bit overwhelming; 7 or 8 people doing pigs, 4 people pressing apples for juice, a couple of young men splitting and stacking wood. I had made a banana cake but clearly that wasn’t going to be enough. And one iron-clad rule of rural life is that people who come to help, are fed.
So my lovely friend of 35 years now, Yvette, looked in the dying garden and found leeks and potatoes and made soup; I had buns and sausages in the freezer. And I found time, (while doing the prep work and marking for my UBC classes) to make cookies. We sat on the porch in the late October dusk and ate and drank and were done for the day. The conversation was about gardens and dogs and weather and the pigs and community news.

Meanwhile as I harvest and teach and write and read, the world creeps on, getting stranger and stranger. People cheer the Olympics torch while the government chops money from funding for kids and seniors and arts and libraries and heath care. In the US, the banks announce bigger and bigger bonuses for their employees while unemployment creeps up and up – more and more people go hungry world wide, scientists get increasingly urgent in their messages about global warming, the price of oil creeps up and up, and in Vancouver, the streets are choked with cars, the restaurants and malls choked with people, the Olympics are coming and if a few civil rights have to be given up and a few homeless people booted out of doorways, not many people protest.
Someone asked me the other day if I wasn’t pleased by the number of people standing on bridges on November 26 yelling about 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air as a good number to aim at. No, I wasn’t. It’s going to take a lot more than a few people on bridges to slow down global warming. It’s going to take a lot more than a few valiant protestors standing on street corners to disrupt the corporate Olympics ‘show.’ Everyone supports the athletes and their ideas but that is far different than supporting the corporate mishmash boondoggle that the Olympics has become.

And me, I wander about the farm on mornings like this and wonder why the beauty of this world and the abundance and wonder and amazing diversity of animals and plants and clouds and weather and gold and blue October mountains isn’t enough for this world.

We're blogging!

2009-11-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

posted by K.Linda Kivi
Welcome to the spanking new Maa Press blog. Luanne Armstrong and I will be posting weekly over the winter, sharing our thoughts on what it is to belong to place, to inhabit place and, more specifically, about the place we both call home, the Columbia Mountains of Western North America.