Finding your balance: by Luanne Armstrong

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

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

“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

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

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

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

"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.