Purposeful Pigs and Dewberries

It's been a while. I've been busy. Other concerns taking up my time until I realize my batteries are low. I'm not myself. I'm feeling low...blue...no...I think it's disconnected. And so I return to the garden and the moment I see the raspberry ripe in my backyard I know what I need to do. I eat it! And I am filled with the knowing that I am swimming in the unconditional love that the earth provides for us. How is it possible to forget this? My batteries begin to flicker with life... Wait. Batteries? Where did batteries come from? It is my spirit awakening...reaching out. And amazingly enough, my garden reaches back! I have been foraging, harvesting and preserving food for the winter. Jars of unconditional love in my cold room, bags of spiritual renewel in my freezer and wrapping itself gently around my hips and belly, the comfort of knowing that despite everything, mother earth is alive and well within and around me. I wake up with a purpose for each day. Today we are going blueberry picking, tomorrow we'll harvest the peas and beans...Wednesday we'll be canning peaches. A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a segment from Deconstructing Dinner examining the food industry. In it they were talking to a woman who had observed pigs at a factory farm. She made the observation that the sows who were fed regularly while enclosed in a very small space (barely enough room to lay down) appeared to be in a state of almost catatonic depression. (I've heard there is prozac for dogs...why wouldn't pigs get depressed? I definitely would if I were forced to live in those conditions.) Anyway, when she was asked about why a pig would be depressed she maintained that it would likely be the same reasons that humans are...disconnection from a purposeful life. So what is a purposeful life for a pig? Foraging for food! This summer my eleven year old daughter discovered berry picking. She was at her grandmother's house (where I grew up) and the ditches on the driveway were filled with wild strawberries and in the forest she found more dewberries than I have ever seen before! Her goal...dewberry jam! She spent hours wandering around in the forest until her eyes became so sharp she could spot the berries from quite a distance. She was very disappointed when we had to leave before she had gathered enough. When I asked her why dewberries were her favorite she said it was like finding treasure. We are surrounded by generous treasures, gifts of love from the earth to us. Thank-you mother earth for finding me in the garden, my daughter in the forest, and reminding us how much we are loved. Now if all of the earth's creatures could experience that spiritual reawakening! The pigs at First Nature Farms are pretty lucky!

Getting to the Heart of Sappy

Years ago I wrote a song called "Scared Sentimental" in defense of my own songs from my own criticism. I would pour heartfelt words into a simple melody and come up with something that wasn't nearly as edgy as the songstresses of the day like Sinnead O'Conner, PJ Harvey or even Melissa Etheridge. In the moment of writing the songs they would have an almost unbearable intensity, but a few days, weeks or even months down the road I would need a new frontier, the words that flowed so completely from heart now feeling and sounding trite, cliche' and to my great distress...sappy.

And so my relationships with my songs can be uneasy. They come to me, we fall in love, I try to capture them so I can share them and then I move on like a fickle lover to the next melody and repeat the pattern...each time a little more in love than the last. Every once in a while, I'll come back to an old one and play it again and remember how I felt when I first found it lingering on the strings of my guitar, and this time the lyric or melody reveals a little more than I noticed the first time we met and I fall in love again... until another melody comes along. When other people like my songs I feel cruel, I say or think "Oh they're really not that great! I wish I could write songs like..." and then the songs feel rejected and I feel a little wounded too.

It was Max van Manen who said something about the difference between trees and people being the roots and the feet. The minute people try to plant themselves somewhere they see where else they still need to go while trees remain rooted where they are existing by reaching high and pushing their roots deep into the earth around them. So maybe the songs are like trees, complete with leaves, roots and sap. I move through life leaving a trail of (sap)lings behind me so I can always find my way back to the moment when I fell in love with...I've been lucky to be in love with so much.

When I think of my songs as saplings, suddenly something else is revealed...the sap! So what then is a "sappy song" when we know that the sap is the lifeblood of the tree? It protects the wounds, it transports nutrients and in the case of maple syrup...produces something so sweet that our plain every day wheat based staple pancakes are fit for royalty. Perhaps there is something very sweet about writing a sappy song.

So don't let a moment skirt around and pass by you
That you don't share a smile with the one who is beside you
Oh mother, father, sister, brother, my friend, my lover...I'm here!
I've been scared sentimental by visions of hallways
Where love waits beyond all the unopened doorways
And I wait, afraid to knock in case they all disappear.

-from Scared Sentimental by Susan Picard

More Letting Go

Letting go is this wonderful concept…not so easily achieved. Not too long ago my daughter came home with a science project to design and build a musical instrument. The object of the exercise was to create an instrument that varied in pitch and volume. They had drawn up the plans at school and were to complete the building phase at home. This was not the first musical instrument my daughter has ever created and so she approached the project with a considerable amount of confidence. Her plans for a set of shakers were very well drawn, and when she sat down to work, she didn’t actually want any help from her mother.

When it became clear to me that she didn’t understand the difference between pitch and volume I felt compelled to become involved. Things went downhill from there. Both my husband and I tried to introduce ways in how to change the pitch between her two shakers, but could not find a way to get her to understand that it was okay to change her project when it wasn’t meeting the outcome. We tried to show her the difference. She climbed into bed crying. When I asked her what was wrong I was told that I wasn’t listening. She had made a plan and she just wanted to follow it. We let her finish the project on her own and she got 100%. I shook the shakers for quite some time, listening for a change in pitch between the two. Did the short shake, did the long shake, discovered a definitely change in tone and volume, but not pitch. One shaker had a little more rice in it, did that change the pitch ever so slightly? Perhaps…maybe…yes.

The challenge to “own” our learning isn’t a simple one, especially in a world of conflicting “right ways” of doing things. I try to move fluently back and forth between what is “essential learning” and the ambiguity of discovering meaning. There is a boy who wants to share his ideas and they flow all over the page willy nilly, so I try to find ways to guide the flow. “Why do I need to put in periods?” he asks me as we edit his work together. “Because I need a chance to breathe,” I tell him. “If there are no periods, I don’t have a chance to breath, take a rest, absorb the meaning.” “But this is a river!” he tells me, “I don’t want you to breathe.” We negotiate his river together and I try to instruct him when we need to breathe, he tries to tell me where we need to go. We end up laughing.

Letting Go

I'll never forget Norm Goble, a former president of the Canadian Teaching Federation, who I met at an ATA Summer Conference. He was our keynote and spoke to us about the work he had done with Project Overseas setting up opportunities for Canadian Teachers to mentor teachers at projects around the world. His presentation really touched me and so when I saw him standing alone with a glass of wine at the meet and greet later on, I took the opportunity to meet with him. We had a wonderful conversation about all of his experiences and at one point I asked him how it was he managed to do so many amazing things and he responded "Susan, I am an ambitionless man. I simply took the opportunities that were presented to me."

I think sometimes it is hard to separate ambition and opportunity. As my own life evolves in unexpected ways, I try to keep my eyes open for opportunities and to let go of the destination that once seemed so apparent. I try to avoid despairing over the barriers that appear to be so unjust and instead focus on the joys I have encountered taking the unexpected routes. I am lucky...I have been gifted with a passion for many things and therefore have many vehicles to take on this journey. In the end, I am most buoyed by the words of Stephen Lewis when he visited Grande Prairie almost two years ago. Something to the effect of: it doesn't matter what you do or where you start...just start somewhere because it's all connected. The world is the classroom and at any given moment we are both student and teacher.

Pruning Raspberries

Masanobu Fukoaka writes in One Straw Revolution that farmers should take time each night to write poetry. I was thinking about that yesterday as I was cleaning the old canes out of the raspberry patch. There is so much to be learned from interacting with the garden that is worthy of being remembered and resonates far beyond the little patch of ground in my backyard. What does pruning the raspberries tell us about life I wonder as I roughly pull up the tiny plants that have dared to grow outside my designated patch? At what point are we no longer useful I muse as my shears cut through the dead wood of last year's fruitful stock? My heart breaks just a little bit when I mistake a new cane for an old one and must toss that green stock onto the rubbish heap. Then I slow down and try to be more careful, deliberate about each stock I cut. What makes the old so different from the new? The colour of the cane can be darker or lighter, the thin bark cracking and peeling away...but not always. I check for green buds waiting to burst...but some stocks are well behind the others and are not so obvious. Then I see that the new canes have no branches...nothing reaching away to the stem to create a treelike skeleton.

In that moment I see my own life a little differently. In the years before my children came I shot up straight, with a singular purpose, as tall as I could be. But now my children have caused me to reach away from my narrow stock out into the world. "Go out in the world, be fruitful and multiply." I have been a fruitful plant, as I watch my little raspberries playing in the dirt, pretending they too are gardeners. They draw me out into the world in many unexpected ways, and I extend my life and time into many places hoping that my energy and love will somehow come back through the world to embrace them. I look at the dried up old canes with their brittle limbs extending out and I thank them for the fruit they gave me, the jam that was so beautiful on my toast all winter, the berries that livened up my yogurt. I thank them for the beautiful green foliage that made my garden seem so wild and free last summer and for the summer promise that still lies within my patch. And in that moment of joyous gratitude I feel that somehow I have honoured myself.

Growing Grass

I was once told by an environmental engineer that farmers know very little when it comes to the environment unlike himself, who had spent more than six years in university studying and many more taking samples and writing reports so he could understand the complex relationships that exist within and between water, air and soil. I asked him what made his short study more valuable than the fifty years my parents spent on the land learning how to keep the grass growing so it could feed the livestock and in turn support their family and still sustain future generations. As huge tracts of land throughout the world disappear into deserts that environmental scientists struggle to reclaim, knowing how to keep the grass growing is powerful alchemy.

I stood in northern Alberta and watched the sky turn red at sunset after Mount Saint Helen’s erupted in Washington State. What more do I need to know about the air but that I share it with the entire planet? I owe it to every other creature to keep it safe to breathe. I have felt the melt of the shrinking Athabasca Glacier dribble into my hand before cutting a ribbon through the prairies, finding a way into my home. What more do I need to know about the water but that we cannot survive without it? As climate changes and glaciers shrink we need to treasure every drop. I grew strong and healthy on food grown on my family’s farm, the northern Alberta landscape providing enough to feed a large family through the winter. What more do I need to know about the soil but that it feeds me? My health is dependent on the nutrients that are present in soil that grows the food that nourishes my body.

I have also observed how corporations, banks, and insurance companies throughout North America have betrayed the trust of investors and taxpayers. What more do I need to know about large companies but that their interests do not serve me? When a company claims that its energy is clean because it does not emit CO2 but neglects to mention that the radioactive waste is toxic and will not dissipate for millions of years, how can I trust their integrity? I have observed cancer and autoimmune disorders become epidemic in a time when toxic substances ranging from chemical fertilizers, to household cleaners to beauty products have been sold to a trusting public only later to be found dangerous? What more do I need to know than it is my job to protect my family? When a company wishes to bring their untested technology to my backdoor, to my home instead of their own, what are their actions telling me about their product? I have seen how hundreds of ducks died the cruelest death when someone near Ft. McMurray forgot to make sure the cannons that were to frighten them away were firing. I know of the meltdown at Chernoble, the invasion of Iraq. What more do I need to know than to err is to be human? No nuclear power plant is fail safe, why risk it when there is no need?

Who will speak for the land if not the ones who live on it and have fed their families and neighbors through good and bad times with the careful stewardship of soil and water? Who deserves a strong voice in deciding what is best for the community if not the ones who have watched and often trusted tides of experts who came and went, each with a new theory, a better product and many unfulfilled promises? It’s a foolish person who would choose toxic waste for quick money over the alchemy of growing grass.

Ode to Betsy

Today I gave away my truck...a 1991 Ford Ranger club cab. I didn't imagine when I bought it brand new after I signed my first teaching contract that I would drive it for 17 years. It had more than 327 thousand km's on it and was still going strong. The only problem was that it was getting hard on gas for some reason and we were given a newer vehicle (1992) in much better shape with much lower mileage and it seemed crazy to keep them both.

My truck took me all the way to Inuvik via Vancouver, the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Cassiar Highway and Dawson City in 1992. In 1993 it helped me survive the L.A. Freeway after I drove it all the way to California. In 1995, it took me all the way out to St. John's Newfoundland. It never needed any major repairs, could start at temperatures up to -30C and had room enough in the back for a bed. I once calculated that I spent a total of 7 months sleeping in the back of it.

Part of me is very sad to see it go. I kinda wish I could drive it until it's last breath, when we would slide together to the edge of the highway and I would know it was over. I want to honor the longevity of a vehicle that hasn't self destructed after the warranty ran out, something constructed without built in obsolescence. I traveled with it as it aged from cool to clunker, never needing a new vehicle to replace the one that worked perfectly well despite the gathering blemishes.

It probably wasn't the most environmentally friendly thing to do, driving an old truck, but after 17 years I figure I spent less than $100/month for the privilege of getting from A to B. These days, that's a pretty good deal. I am grateful that Bob, the new owner, can fix it up and use it for a few more miles. (Why is it that the mileage that I got 17 years ago is better than the fantastic mileage that they're offering with new vehicles today?)