Wednesday 27 November 2013

Gretel Ehrlich, and the Landscape of Home

Last night I couldn't get to sleep and so picked up a book of essays in an attempt to bring sleep to me. In doing so I read something I was so moved and unsettled by (an essay on climate change and spirituality) that there was no hope of sleep after reading it. So much for sleep besides, what does one person's sleep one night matter anyway? More importantly the questions that remain with me are what does Gretel Ehrlich's essay The Future of Ice mean for me, for my little Island in the Gulf, and for the floating sphere we all call home?

Born and raised on a small Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, I am an Islander through and through. Like many other young people I left in my twenties  to attempt to expand my universe. Although I did my best while away to try to find landscapes in the interior of Ontario that I could fall in love with, I was constantly heartsick for my Prince Edward Island home. I recall  driving one bleak November day in Ontario and coming unexpectedly upon a lake and almost driving into it I was so happy to see a relatively large body of water. I didn’t realize how desperately I was missing the landscape of home; as much as I was missing the people and familiar routines.

But my little Island home, although wonderful and where we have chosen to raise our own growing up family, doesn't feel so comfortable anymore. The ease of childhood's ignorance has long since worn of and I am left with a grating feeling in my throat when I speak certain words, an inability to get a full breath when certain words are uttered by others. The words I speak about are all related to development and environmental protection, and to the ways we use our land and waters here.

We, as a small Island community, have a responsibility towards the land and air and waters of our home and I do not think we are taking this responsibility seriously enough. As environmentalist David Suzuki says people who live on islands know there are limits to things. He is right in that many of us here have a lived sense of those limits and what we need for our survival. Yet why are we  continuing to allow government to be swayed by investors promising to bring jobs in genetically modified fisheries to our waters, why are we still considering hydraulic fracturing off our coastlines, and why are we not an entirely organic Island when far sighted and reasonable people believe it is a possibility that could become a reality if only the government and people of our land were to speak out, and let their voices be heard?

The essay I read last night was written by Gretel Ehrlich and is entitled The Future of Ice. It is a gorgeous piece of lyrical writing about spirit, place and the role our behaviours play in affecting the landscapes we live in. It was a read that made me want to get up out of my bed late on a wet, cold night and go outside to touch the earth at my own doorstep just so I could remember that I am alive; a living member of the world right now. Ehrlich's writing provides a glimpse into the fragile, changing nature of the North, somewhere we oft think of as the last true frontier, strong and wild and free. The witness she bears to the vulnerabilities the north is facing is startling and sadly too easily translatable to our planet as a whole. The words she uses, poetic. This woman truly loves  Earth and writes about her love in a way that makes you feel as though you've somehow entered into the love as well.

As I age, I am realizing that many of greatest truths I have known in my life I knew intimately as a young child still awed by the sensuousness of the world. Truths which for too many years since I have largley forgotten. Ehrlich's words shook those forgotten truths from me much the way a good hug reminds you that you need to hug people more often. Yet her words rang hauntingly as well, like a rattlesnake's ominous warning entering spaces you'd rather pretend do not exist, rattled and shaken just before it's too late.


     "How fragile we are.’We' being the humans and this mountain. My Inuit friends in Greenland use the word sila to describe weather: the power of nature, landscape, and human consciousness as one and the same. Every scar on the landscape is also a perturbation of the mind." 
Gretel Ehrlich

I have felt the desecration of our sacred lands and waters too oft as a perturbation of my own mind, and more times than I care to recall have felt the scorn of others for being too deep a feeler, too much a fool for the voiceless. Yet still I must ask: what are we doing to this wondrous world, to all its living creatures, to ourselves? Is it still possible for us to take pause, look deeply into the eyes of the world, and fall in love again? 


Over the last few years I have been drawn to writers whose use of language blends the temporal, with the spiritual often speaking in terms of the physical, bodily world. A good friend of mine, poet John MacKenzie , does this brilliantly. His imagery pulled from the natural world reminds us that we are passionate, breathing creatures of bone and flesh whose bodies are not separate from the landscapes and mindscapes we inhabit. 
A wonderful example of the intimate precision of his writing is exhibited here in a recent sestina he wrote:
The Winter Wings of Gulls

Perhaps, the greatest thing we could do in terms of slowing the progression of climate change is to slow ourselves, our frantic pace, our shallow breathing, and once again be mindful of our connection to the Earth. We then could be reminded of the wonders of the natural world, of the ways that place infuses spirit. Perhaps if we all recalled  the forgotten truths of our childhood, the long, slow creak of years when we drank time like warm milk and squeezed the breath into and out of our days. Those truths we knew in our bones back then, those truths that I knew so well and let retreat to the shadows for too many years of my own life. Thankfully I have been reminded that we are inextricably a part of a great and wonderful unfolding; a mystery of nature and of spirit that encompasses the whole. 

In a particular wintertime childhood memory of mine, I am lying in a snowbank outside of my house, alone on a blustery, snowy day. I was outside by myself as I was oft given to, but I knew in my heart that I wasn’t really alone, that in the great loneliness there was room for all.  I knew all of this and more at age five, lying well bundled in snow deep enough to mold around my little form, the wind blowing, lifting eddies and currents of crystalline snowflakes all around me. My breath, soft little exhales, made clouds above my face which disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared, The sharp catch of cold in my little chest as I breathed the air back in reminded me to breath slowly, gently. I can still recall that feeling of being tucked in by the snow. The cold assurance that this was winter I was lying in, but the secure feeling that there was room for me in it. 

Ehrlich in her essay on The Future of Ice says:
“The sky borrows its radiance from ice, its adamantine clarity, and we spend lifetimes tracking down those elements within ourselves.”

Her essay speaks volumes about our need to make tracking down those elements that re-connect us with the living earth, with the spark of life inherent in all, a more urgent necessity in our lives. Her words an almost silent plea for us to care for each other and this planet with the same loving attention and awe with which we care for those we call our lovers. After all, the separateness we presume to be reality is only an illusion and the cost of being fooled by this is far, far too great. There is, after all, room for the whole of it.
Jill MacCormack



Sunday 24 November 2013

Trust and Allow

 What if you stopped trying so hard? Instead of pushing forward in your life like you are on a battle ground, why not take this precious moment and simply be true to your heart.Trust and allow.  Maybe make it an experiment. Think on something that you truly want to see become manifest in your life. Think about it in whatever way feels natural to you, be that in prayer, in meditation, in some form of quiet contemplation. Think of how you would like to be in your own life in accordance with naturalness. Think of how to create a natural or authentic way of living your life, yet allow yourself to be free from attempting to create the desired outcome through planning or controlling or manipulating any variables in your day. Simply go with the flow and let the universe be the director. See what happens. Did things strangely fall into place? Did you see or hear from someone you had been hoping to talk to or see? Did you experience an ease of entry into situations or circumstances that were almost eerily “just right”.
Whenever we quietly say yes to our true selves and stop trying so hard we align our souls with their destiny. In working towards a future of greater awareness for all, we naturally become that greater awareness by acknowledging its wondrous presence in our lives.
Sound hokey? Then it probably won’t amount to anything more than a laugh for you. Sound a little bit interesting? That tiny crack of interest is most likely all the openness you’ll need to begin seeing the power of increased consciousness and awareness of the universe becoming manifest through you.



Stop for a minute, be quiet, be fearless and let love do the rest... 
 let the river flow freely  
image from www.internationalrivers.org

Saturday 23 November 2013

Love everything...

Love everything...hate nothing...you are different from no one, different  from nothing in any truly important way...The most hated part of another is the most hated part of yourself...The most feared part of another is the most feared part of yourself... The most loved part of another is the most beloved part of yourself...There are no differences...there are no boundaries...just energy moving to and fro...Our minds create the differences, divide the world into good or bad...Our thoughts create the sense of dualism we live out of... Yet...anything truly is possible...when we let go into the freedom of love...


 So don't let the "bad thoughts" win by defining how you view self and other...there is no real self when we get to the heart of things...there is no real other either....The connection you feel, warm and fuzzy, when you allow yourself to let your guard down and smile, when you hug someone and your toes get warm...when you stop long enough to become present to the wonder of the world around you, when you feel  energy circulating, pulsing through the circuitry of the universe... this is your experiential awareness of the energy of life and it is a truly wondrous thing! Makes you forget that time or self or even place ever existed... it makes you wonder why you ever needed them to exist...Why do you?The best things in life happen when we forget the cares of the world, when we trust that what we need will become available to us...when we free ourselves from the bonds of self, the constricts of time and place, and allow ourselves to re-charge in the energy of simply trusting, allowing, in simply being...
John Tarrant, Director of the Pacific Zen Institute , poses the following question as an entry point into allowing ourselves to love the world as it is:
"What might the world look like if I loved it as it is, just as it is?" John Tarrant

 Stop for a minute...be quiet...be fearless... consider Tarrant's question for us and let love do the rest... Love me...you...everything...

Image courtesy of Digitalart/Freedigitalphotos.net


Thursday 7 November 2013

This Too Shall Pass

This too shall pass- a phrase our mother used throughout our growing up years to comfort us in our confusion, our sorrows. A simple phrase, yet it held a mighty power over us. No matter how dreadful things were, how unbearable a given situation seemed, time would take care of it, and us. And for those simple and complicated years it did. Still does.


Now fully grown, we keep this wisdom close to our hearts, but the sword is double sided. We are no longer children, living the freedoms (and prisons) only childhood can shelter us within. We sense the movement of time with greater urgency. Life's busyness has claimed us more and more as its own. Our parents are aging, us too. Friendships shift, people we love pass away. This too shall pass becomes more and more an awareness of the slipping away, the fading, the sliding, the ceaseless song of time; sad and beautiful love song that it is.
Jill MacCormack
Writing for Art in the Open 2013; the Creativity Project

Wednesday 6 November 2013

Thoughts on Regret

Taken from a traditional Vietnamese Beginning Anew ceremony:
At the foot of the mountain
there is a stream.
Take the water from the stream and wash yourself,
and you will be cured. 
From an essay by Thich Nhat Hanh called Touching the Earth

…thoughts on regret
Today I want to gather the spider webs of my life and let them cling to me as only spider webs can. My regrets, my forgotten desires, lost friendships, moments of my children’s lives when I was not attentive to their wonder, memories of people whom I loved who’ve passed away;
all these and more I want to walk unwittingly into, and feel them cover me so that I have to touch my own fingers to my skin and wipe them down over me and roll them into a fine thread. I will then spin that thread of loss of possibility into a fine silk that shimmers with the hope that’s present in this very moment. And with this graceful hope I will see my old spider webs in a new light. They will carry on them the dew of life giving waters, the glimmer of light that we each carry within us. They will be welcomed and made good use of and my aching will have grown wings and become love.

Jill MacCormack
Writing for the Creativity Project, Art in the Open 2012

Tuesday 5 November 2013

Impermanece in the Natural World...We Too Are Part of its Constant Evolutions

Impermanence:

The natural world with its constant evolutions, moon phases, change of seasons, birth, reproduction, aging, death, erosion, quietly shows us that change is constant, the only dependable known. We too are a part of these cycles and phases of the natural world. Denying this basic element of our existence is to deny the beautiful opportunity to be present to our own lives as they unfold. 


Life is short even if you are granted a long life. Why race through it blind to the beauty life's subtler moments present us with? Life has an innate sense of humour, and an endlessly fascinating quality about it. There is more to discover and explore than we could ever experience in one hundred lifetimes. Why ever be bored? Why not chart a new course?


Guided by the moon and the stars and the sun and the sky, the flowering trees, the moths and the bees, the seaweeds, the bats, the fungi, the wild grasses; the creatures who've no need for making sense of things or keeping track, we can lose ourselves watching the ceaseless motions around us. 
 


Why not give yourself the time and space to get lost outside of the limited sense of self we so often live out of? In this outer realm we become aware of our deep sense of connection with and dependence on all things. It's humbling, and completely wonderful!
Jill MacCormack
writing for the Creativity Project, Art in the Open 2013


“The world is too much with us…” William Wordsworth