A Province Hungry for Change: Food Security on PEI--- 2014, The International Year of Family Farming

Hungry for Change

Undoubtedly there are a great many thoughtful people living in our little province who are hungry for change. They are labouring towards an elevation of understanding of how the choices we make daily  affect our lives and the lives of those around us.

 Living in a small place it is easy for us to be dismissive of those who speak out regarding long held ways of doing things but it might be wise to consider that there is not something always inherently wrong with change. Something very good just may come of it.

 Just recently I was involved in some projects my eight year old daughter undertook for social studies, and science. We discussed some basic concepts regarding the needs of living things. Clean air, clean water, both drinkable and life supporting as well as healthy, living soil in which to grow our food were some of the things we discussed. Basic needs for living things, but are these basic life support systems being respected for the wondrous and diverse life giving qualities they contain? I love this little province we call home, and wish only wellness for it but am confused at times by the ways we allow destructive practices to impact the well being of the land, waters and air. 

We know that continuous application of  agri-chemicals contaminate our air, soil and waterways. We know that there are still many unknowns when it comes to the use of cosmetic pesticides and human health, yet we as an Island community have not yet come around full-scale to the notion that we need to change how we think about and care for these basic life support systems for the health and well being of all. 

I am  very encouraged by the rising tide of young farmers with an interest in practicing more sustainable, organic methods of farming. A friend of my sisters just recently purchased a 98 foot greenhouse to add to her organic farm and, as she said in a note she wrote me last fall, it was thanks in no small part to the people who supported her weekly veggie delivery over the past several years. This is exciting news to me! Each time we make a choice towards better informing ourselves and our families about the real sources of our food, each time we pause mindfully and consider how we prepare and consume the foods in our pantries and our refrigerators, we give those basic support systems (air, soil, and water) the respect they deserve and improve our connection to the land and the sea we live and work and play on.

How we choose to grow our food, how we care for ourselves and our homes, how we purchase goods and services all impact the air we breathe, as well as the health of the land and the waters of this finite piece of land we've put our roots down into. We all need to take responsibility for the choices we make.

Feeding seven billion people on a warming planet is a concern leading scientists are considering. The troubling fact that more than one in four children living in PEI are food insecure means that how to healthfully, and economically feed ourselves and our families is a growing concern of many Islanders. Understanding that there is a connection between both concerns and that there are  common solutions beyond large scale conventional agriculture is something everyone should be thinking and talking about. Reconsidering how we purchase, and consume food requires of us a willingness to think about our connection to the natural environment and to every other living thing on this Island and the planet as a whole. 

"The United Nations, for its part, has designated 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming to raise the profile of these unsung agricultural workers and spotlight the roles they could play in the face of challenges like climate change, malnutrition, and poverty."   

Andrea Stone National Geographic May 2014 

Many Prince Edward Islanders are celebrating 2014 for the historic role it played in the formation of our country. Perhaps we would do well to consider 2014 as an opportunity to celebrate small scale agriculture in our home province. By getting to know and supporting local, small scale farmers whose aim is to nurture the land they farm, we are taking an important step towards improving food security and healthfulness for all.

Many of us do know that the time for change is at hand. All that we require is a community of understanding and personal commitment as well as the political will to make viable change a reality.

Sincerely,
Jill MacCormack

Loving This Planet

I LOVE this planet we call home! I love it like I love my own breath, even more than my own breath! When its wonder, its magnificence and beauty take my breath away, I am still in LOVE... even more so...
To nurture this LOVE, I am continuing to consider deeply how choices I make in my daily life impact the greater whole. I am contemplating the wondrous way I fit into the cycles of the natural world, the way energies of thought influence matter, my body--- this little earth--- I daily inhabit.
In gently caring for myself, my family, our community, I am contributing immeasurable wealth to the world. Each kind word, each thoughtful action, each act of LOVE says to the greater whole, "thanks for letting me be part of something so wonderful"...Happy Earth Day!!
Love Jill

Spring, Where Art Thou? The Dreariest day of the Year, March 11th, 1933

There upon the barren Maple's limb,
a song sparrow chose to rest his wing,
and sweetly raised on high its morning hymn

a most welcome, venerable sign of spring.  

                    

No sweeter sound this morn could I have heard,
the trilling song was most melodious.
Whoever would have guessed- this tiny bird
could cure me of my long held weariness.
Jill MacCormack

This past winter (2013-2014) my beloved PEI was blanketed with fully twice the amount of snow as last winter and the most snow recorded in 42 years...which means the most snow of my lifetime thus far.

Feeling too deeply winter's etchings upon me...lack of sunlight, housebound repeatedly by storm after storm...too much isolation, too much inside my own head...like lovers who've spent too much time together, winter and I need some space this year, some time apart so as to better appreciate each other again next year.

But, like a great many others, a trip south was not in the cards for us this year, not that it ever has been a consideration for a number of reasons. Thus leaving me, like so many, desperate for those signs of spring that lift the spirits, searching outside of myself towards spring:

Crows carrying nesting materials, pairs of goldfinches at the feeder; the male becoming increasingly more lemon coloured with each days passing, a sighting of newly returned grackles, the great blue heron huddled in an open corner of the pond, the fat little robin who returned too soon weaning himself off of my stormy days cranberry handouts, a pair of bluejays attempting to get seed, a song sparrow sitting pretty on the low edge of the snow bank still mid window high outside my dining room, a pair of Hairy woodpeckers tracing a stump of birch out back with their hungry beaks, the snow slowly receding from the driveway and roadside edges resulting in gurgling, muddy rivulets and the smell of wet decay, Lucas' ecstatic discovery of daffodils broaching the earth beneath the living room window, persistent fellows...all! It may be weeks before we see the crocuses or buds on the Maple reddening and my patience with much has grown thin but spring, however late, will come.

Yes, I'm winter weary and it shows in my face, my enthusiasms, but I should not complain. I think to my mother's retelling of "the dreariest day of the year", a tale from her own mother's childhood, a tale of the bleakness of late winter on the northeastern side of our fair Isle, in the 1930's. Her mother's story was one of poverty and illness, lack of resources, and winter weariness and truly being isolated and housebound. It makes me wonder how I would have navigated such times. It certainly etched itself on my grandmothers generation with a deepness and acuity that would make my complaints of being tired of winter pale in comparison. Although, undoubtedly, the sensitivity to environment is evidenced as having passed through the bloodlines to me.
Jill



THE DREARIEST DAY OF THE YEAR

                                                               

I was just a young girl when my mother told me this story  from her childhood. It was March 11, 1933. A three-day blizzard was raging from the south and her mother was sick in bed upstairs.  All eight kids and their father were in the kitchen, the only heated room in the house. Snow covered the windows darkening the room. The strong winds whistling through the drafty old house meant moving the kitchen lounge closer to the woodstove to try and stay warm. As there was no tea in the house, her father resorted to toasting some wheat on the stovetop  to try and make a drinkable substitute. He kept the wheat in a storage bin above the kitchen. Tea was a basic necessity to a Northsider like himself.  Because it was impossible to get to the river for drinking water, their dad melted snow then boiled a big pot of potatoes in their skins.  This was clear evidence of how much their mother was needed in the kitchen, as all the kids hated unpeeled potatoes.  To pass the time, the kids played store with an orange crate and food from the pantry. The bleakness of that day was to become an indelible memory  for my mother and her siblings, a day they vowed to remember for as long as they lived. They wrote the date on as many places as they could, including the walls of the outhouse and the school. Down through the years on March 11, my mother would relate this story and upon phoning her sisters or a brother living out west, would ask if they remember what day this was. The answer was always the same-“the dreariest day of the year, March 11, 1933”.

Written by Arlene McGuigan as told to her by her mother Maud MacDonald (nee O'Hanley)

Nature as Restorative of the Human Spirit...the Woods on a Snowy Evening

 

For as long as I can recall I have loved to be outdoors and have found it to be tremendously restorative to my spirit and self as a whole. As the years have passed and the cares of life increased for me I have repeatedly let myself get too far from what I so desperately require for renewal. Reconnecting with the natural world has only ever proven to mean reconnection with what is deepest within me. 

The way the snow of late hangs heavy upon the evergreens in our backyard has reminded me once again to return to nature as part of a return to myself. Last evening, after a most delightful tromp through our little back woods with our two youngest children, I once again proved to myself that  despite my age and what the world might say, I am not yet too old to lie down in a bank of snow, to crawl under a thick canopy of fluffy, white snow- laden evergreen branches under a night sky and feel the cool caress of the earth wrapped around me in stillness and silence.

Looking back through some old notes I found a passage from a friend which speaks so eloquently to my own deep experience of nature as restorative.

Here is the short passage a friend of mine sent me in early 2009 from a memoir written in 1883 by Richard Jefferies called The Story of My Heart:

"There was a time when a weary restlessness came upon me, perhaps fro too-long-continued labour. It was like a drought, as if I had been absent for many years from the sources of life and hope. The inner nature was faint, and all was dry and tasteless. Then, some instinctive, uncontrollable feeling drove me to the sea.

Alone I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters....The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me. The wind came sweet and strong from the waves. I touched the surge with my hands, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind....my soul was strong as the sea and prayed with the sea's might, "Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, to the earth and the air; give me my inexpressible desire which dwells in me like a tide -- give it to me with all the force of the sea.

So deep was the inhalation of life that day, that it seemed to remain in me for years."  Richard Jefferies

And my early 2009 response to it: (I actually believe it was PEI's first celebration of Islander Day hence the reference when I wrote this response.)

"What an exquisitely beautiful piece of writing! So incredibly evocative of the mystics sense of God and self in the natural world! How many times I've felt that need so strong and desperate! Most often this occurs after a time of sustained alienation from self and beauty. I've been dragged by that "uncontrollable feeling" out into sub-zero temperatures just to lay on the ground and feel the icy winds and snow blow over my prostrate body and at other times to the woods to breathe deep the bracken, fern scented air. Over and over again I let myself get to that place of "weary restlessness" by something damned within my human nature... and not ever has nature failed to restore my slackened soul.

Summertime wildflowers, the slant of late afternoon sun on marshland in November, songbirds at the feeder in winter; all breaths of new life... good for the soul! Like Jefferies, I know well the desire to be in direct physical contact with the natural elements...the need to immerse oneself in the entirety of the experience. I find myself restored not unlike when I rest myself on my beloved's chest. Oh, what a glorious description his was! I love when someone writes so clearly that there is no time! That writing could have been spoken by anyone, at anytime on any beautiful shore! What a gift! On this day of celebrating being an Islander I am eternally grateful for this Island and it's never ending responsiveness to my pleadings for its beauty. "

May you too know well the restorative power the natural elements have on the spirit!

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost 1874–1963 Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.