 The blueberry bushes in the front yard are at their peak. Every day or so I pick the colander full of the plump, sweet berries. Blueberries embody summer. They taste of sunshine, earth and summer rain, held in juicy sweetness.
The other day while picking, I found a small, perfect feather cupped among the leaves. It looked to be from one of the tiny birds that lives in the neighbours hedge. I am not a birder, but perhaps a wren? I left it there, expecting it would blow away. I had forgotten about the feather when I went picking a few days later. For the second time its presence among the berries surprised and delighted me. This time I saw it as an offering. I accepted the gift and added it to my altar. This morning, out in the back garden, I was startled by a rustling in the peas. This was not wind, it was as if something was in the peas, a critter of some sort, but one that did not run away at my curious approach. It took me a moment to see that there was a wren in the vines. I could see that it was somehow tangled in the netting. As I came back out from the house with a pair of scissors, I stopped to smooth out my energy and ensure it was calm and gentle. Through it I let the wren know that I was coming to help. It stilled, but then beat its wings in an effort to fly away as I came right up to where it was snagged. Slowly I snipped that netting around its foot and wings. It flew up, only to become entangled on the other side. As I released it again, it flew into the netting at the end. I kept thinking of the birds who hit windows because they can’t see the glass. These are consequences of our human ways of doing things. This fine black netting was almost invisible. I clipped that netting and watched as it happened again. This time I took the scissors and cut a big hole in the spot where the wren had last been, opening it up wide. When I once more snipped the netting where it was now ensnared, sister (brother?) wren flew for the hole and was gone. I hold the feather from the blueberries with a new reverence. For a moment I thought it was a gift for helping the wren, that somehow the universe knew about this in advance. But I realize it was given to remind me that we live in symbiosis with all life. My call to healing is not only for my human sisters and brothers, but all of creation. All my relations.
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 I don't know what ate this leaf. I suspect it's not considered ideal to have something nibbling holes in you. And yet the holes have rendered it extraordinarily beautiful.
I wonder if it's the same for us. I wonder if our ragged edges are beautiful. You wouldn't want so many as to cause irreparable damage, not the whole tree. Just enough to see that it's ok, that we're fine despite our wounds. That in fact, wounds and all we are extraordinarily beautiful. Join my Virtual Healing Circles Monday mornings at 9 a.m. and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. pacific. Learn more at the Good Vibrations: the Energy of Resilience facebook page, check out the Healing link on this site or drop me a note by e-mail. #semiahmoobay #peacearchbeach #beach #beachwalk #beachlife #pacificocean #sunsets #sunsetphotography #spectacularsunset #nightsky #beautifulsunsets #awesomesunset #urbannature #inspiration #beauty  In the past four months I feel that I have become friends with this beach. I walk it often, camera in hand. It is my sacred honour to capture not only the evident beauty of this place, but also often overlooked beauty. I try to find a way to tell a beautiful story even of that which would seem otherwise – death, loss. The beach is different every day – tides, the coming and going of ocean life such as crabs and seaweed, the plants on the shore cycling through the micro seasons, sun rise, sun set, bright sun, rain, clouds, blue sky. I have sunset pictures from many days, shot within a 20 foot span, and each is different. Often I walk with camera in one hand and a bag in the other picking up the debris left behind by other visitors. While this stretch of beach is only modestly visited by people, our presence is obvious in the garbage left behind. I’ve picked bags of cans, alcohol bottles, a deck of playing cards scattered across the seaweed, plastic, broken items and a miriad of other human made stuff. Toys in good condition found in the sand such as children’s shovels and the odd ball I leave on a log for future visitors. This evening I went to sit with the geese. The place where the little stream flows into the ocean is their gathering spot for the night. I’ve been here with them many times and they seem to accept my presence. I know it is a risk tonight, though. The police have been coming to clear people off the beach the last month or so.  As I sit, I take a few pictures of the geese with the colourful sky of the sunset behind them. Oddly, I can sense the trees behind me beckoning me to step into the hollow under their branches, surrounded by tall grasses and Queen Annes’s Lace. I make my way back and find yet a new way to see the sunset and take a few pictures. The hollow draws me back deeper. There’s a single stock of Queen Anne’s Lace back here behind the overhang of branches. The dappled light of yellow and orange sky that peak through the leaves makes for a stunning silhouette. As I capture this, I notice the geese shift as one and start to move away. I wonder what has disturbed them and make myself very still. Voices. I quietly shut off my camera, reach for my phone, silence and darken it. Two uniformed male RCMP appear on the foot of the trail, I can see them from below the overhanging foliage. I watch as they look around and move onto the beach. They stop not 20 feet away, directly in front of where I squat. I can hear them talking. I draw in my energy and make myself invisible. A beautiful peace holds me, as if the beach community, the plants and the place, have wrapped me in a bubble of calm. Geese flying overhead to land further down the shore, away from the intruders, sound particularly clear and loud as they call. I feel as if I am breathing in rhythm with the tree, with the energy that surrounds me, my breathe blending with the pulse of the land.  The police are so close to me, can they really not know I’m here? I wonder. I am dressed in a red and black plaid shirt over a red dress. My skin is pale. Not exactly camoflage. But they make no indication that they see me. When they look around it’s as if their gaze just slides past this place. I can hear snippets of the stories they are sharing but try not to listen. From those bits, I know I don’t want to hear this. I reset my intention for invisibility. I feel cloaked by the energy around me. After about 20 minutes, still squatting, my legs and feet begin to cramp. Slowly I stand enough to ease my backside onto the log behind me, watching to see if the movement attracts the attention of the two on the beach. The rustling in the bushes behind me from a night creature moving through the brush seems loud to me. They seem to notice neither. I settle on the log. Another 20 minutes goes by. Most often when they come, the police walk the beach. I wonder why these two just stand in this spot and for so long. Perhaps they figure that by now no one will be here on the beach so they’re simply enjoying a pause. Finally they turn, wondering out loud where the trail marker is. It’s 10 feet to my left. I still myself further as they pass right by me, pause at the marker for one last look and head up the path. I wait another five minutes before I move, taking a few more photos from this vantage before making my way through the growth and back to the open beach. The geese calmly return to their favorite spot as I return to mine. We greet each other silently and then return to our own thoughts, mine of gratitude for this place. Now it is getting dark. I head up the unmarked trail behind me, pausing at the top to check if anyone is there, then make my way home, enjoying the summer night.  Join my Virtual Healing Circles Monday mornings at 9 a.m. and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. pacific. Learn more at the Good Vibrations: the Energy of Resilience facebook page, check out the Healing link on this site or drop me a note by e-mail. #beach #geese #canadagoose #queenanneslace #spiritual #invisible #gratitude #beachlife #beachwalk #sunset
  When I was in elementary school, probably grade1, I remember an assignment where we were asked to draw a city scene, draw a picture in any case. Mine was a cityscape and I had drawn a picture I was so proud of. And was devastated when the teacher returned my art work with exes through it. See I had drawn an image from a few years previous when my family had traveled to Japan and so the street signs, the building signs, I had drawn were vertical and with Japanese kana and the teacher did not recognize that as being a valid proper sign and so she had marked them as wrong. I have talked to other people who had experiences as children where teachers had marked pictures wrong because their grass was purple or their sky was orange and of course everyone knows that grass is supposed to be green and skies blue. One thing I have learned from living, from being out in the world, is that that is not exclusively true. We have narrowed our vision. Here where I'm living now, I have really been able to observe the micro seasons as they pass. I have seen the lawn go from green to yellow and then white from dandelions and then back to yellow with buttercups. And then after the buttercups purple from clovers and low lying plants with tiny tiny purple flowers. Sitting at the beach I've seen the sky transform from blue to orange to yellow. I’ve seen it purple, sometimes all of those at once. A trip to the local farm market reveals that carrots and beets come in colours ranging from red to orange to yellow to purple. Even kale comes in different shades of green and purple. And I remember one time making mashed potatoes from purple potatoes and my family thought that I had dyed them. We have narrowed our focus, creating mono cultures of ourselves and of our foods and of our environment. And I am reminded of the sayings that there are people of the book and people of the land but that Creator's first writings were the ones of the land in all of its rich diversity. When the settlers first came to North America they did not recognize, and therefore didn't see, Indigenous methods of land management, which are a co-creative process between the plants, animals, the lands, and the people who live on the lands. Braiding Sweet Grass by Robin Wall Kimmerer provides a beautiful description of this co-creative process.  I think about this when I think about the Wet’suwet’en and others who defend land against so-called economic development. Economics is about household management. The way colonizers have, and continue to approach the economy in this country is to preference one group of people's household management over another. For a company to come onto land and say this is needed "for the economy" is disingenuous. The land already is an economy, one that functions in a holistic way that includes, but doesn't centralize, humans. Exploitation of land is not economic prosperity, it is a disregard for the economy that already exists. It is willful blindness to the households that currently live on and with that place. It is to say my household is more important than yours. It is a failure to see the true diversity of the world and to recognize as valid something other than our mono-economics. I am saddened for the children whose creativity was curtailed by narrow-visioned teachers. Those children who continued to draw orange skies and purple grass enrich our lives and see both the beauty and the possibility of this world. And those people who defend co-creative economics that maintains the land for all creatures and species in a way that all can thrive can teach us a better way to live. May it be so. ~ Join my Virtual Healing Circles Monday mornings at 9 a.m. and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. pacific. Learn more at the Good Vibrations: the Energy of Resilience facebook page, check out the Healing link on this site or drop me a note by e-mail.   I’m out in the garden talking to Keith on the phone. Hands in the dirt, gently teasing the weeds out to get as much root as possible. This small garden has provided all sorts of abundance. Metaphors, stories, surprise at the exquisite beauty of zucchini flowers reaching out from under broad leaves to find the morning sun. Oh, and fresh peas, a taste of raspberries and anticipation for vine ripened tomatoes promised by the plethora of flowers on the vines. There is a familiarity to this, like the memory of a forgotten time. A body memory that runs deep in my being. * In an odd way the pandemic had sent me into exile in reverse. In leaving my home, I have landed back in the garden. Here, where I’ve come to live with my father-in-law, I have re-learned the beauty of dirty hands and the meditation of weeding. I grew up with backyard gardens and pretty traditional -- in the modern western concept of middle class colonial tradition -- family structure. We lived in a single family neighbourhood where most dads went to work and most moms worked at home keeping house and raising kids. Outside jobs the women held tended to be secondary to the men's jobs. Pretty much everyone had a backyard food garden. My family were not great gardeners. We spent too much time away in the summer, camping and travelling in our truck and camper. None-the-less I grew up with fresh snow peas, beans and swiss chard. In my memory those were the things that seemed to thrive. I remember that beans were so prolific we would freeze them for the winter. We snapped the stem end and pulled off any stringyness, my mom scalded them quickly in boiling water and then dumped them into a cold bath. Once patted dry in clean tea towels, we’d bundle them into serving sizes in plastic baggies for freezing. Provisions for winter. As an adult I moved away from the suburbs. My husband and I raised our son in a highrise apartment in the city. I haven't tended a garden for 40 years. Recently, reading one of many emerging articles about the body's microbiome, the author noted that one of the modern losses to our gut health is our clean, indoor environments. We no longer get exposed to beautiful soil microbes. And now with the pandemic we are also encouraged to wash our hands more than ever, use hand-wash if water and soap are not available and to wipe down our houses frequently with chemical washes. While I understand the impetus for this in this moment, I also wonder if the extra sterility ultimately will make us less naturally able to fight a virus like corona. Dirt helps boost our immune system. I wash my hands when returning from the grocery store then put them in the soil of the garden. The garden here is small and planted in raised beds. But it is enough to get the experience of dirty hands as I gently tease weeds out while chatting with my friend Keith on the phone. One of the beds was planted by the neighbours who thought it might be a project for their daughters during isolation. Truth be told I rarely see the daughters there and the tending leans toward watering. There are plenty of weeds to keep me busy while Keith and I muse about the world, our hopes and our place in those hopes, as we collectively, around the world, shift into post pandemic.   And here in the garden is where I was able to articulate my growing recognition about my role in the moment as someone called to a path of spiritual healing. It is to embrace this time of stepping into the role of caregiver, nurturer, an intimate symbol of the Feminine Divine and a role I pushed against for many years. Now, like Mother Earth, I am called to offer myself and my gifts to the world. One of the paradoxes of the path of energy healing or shamanic work, much like any spiritual work, is there comes a moment when the next step in connecting more expansively is to focus inward. I, like everyone, have wounds received from my life, family, culture and choices. This inward journey leads to deeper personal healing. And it is in this moment that I have landed here, in exile in the garden with responsibility to care for my father-in-law who, at 89 and a widow for 9 years is also experiencing the ravages of cognitive decline. There have been times when I was out in the community working for justice and finding solutions to homelessness. I helped start, and ran for many years, a large community ministry in my urban neighbourhood. Now my world has become smaller, my focus caring for this person. Suddenly I am keeping house and home in a way that I never did for my own husband and child. I was the one who worked outside the home. It was my spouse who did day-to-day child-raising and all of the laundry. Raised in the 70s, I learned that women's roles were not valued and I scorned them. Yet the work of healing is the work of nurture and here I am, given this time now to nourish my role as nurturer. I have never had a good relationship with my father-in-law. It wasn't bad, just superficial, not really a relationship in any meaningful way. He had been a distant father, wrapped in alcoholism. He's been dry for most of the time I've known him, but not healed. I recognize that this time of building something with him, offering him the care of good food and companionship, brings healing to the whole family. My call of the moment to healing the world is to begin with myself and to care for Bill. As I build a different role and relationship with him, I bring deeper healing to the whole family line forward and backward. My world, narrowed to this small suburban house, this moment, is what I need to focus myself, to bring healing to the family and our relationships and ultimately create new ripples of love that emanate out, sending that healing into the world. The garden is bringing me there. Blessed be, ~ Join my Virtual Healing Circles Monday mornings at 9 a.m. and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. pacific. Learn more at the Good Vibrations: the Energy of Resilience facebook page, check out the Healing link on this site or drop me a note by e-mail. |
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