The “new road” from Nanaimo to Campbell River takes you high above the ocean, across the tops of the lowlands where the Vancouver Island range mountains slope down to the Strait of Georgia. It’s a long fast stretch of double highway, posted at 110 km/h and taking only an hour and a half, which is a full 30 minutes shorter than the more scenic, but interminably slow Ocean Route.
What you gain in speed though, you lose in character, and other than a few stunning lookouts, the scenery is dominated by recovering clearcuts on the mountains all around. You miss towns completely until you descend into Campbell River. The only crossings north of Parksville are mainline logging roads, with the exception of the road up the Comox Valley.
Off the road however, there are a few places to stop and get some good rest. Whenever I do this trip I always stop in at the Java Shack in Campbell River, which has some of the best espresso on Vancouver Island, and fantastic homemade soups and baking. It’s right down by the ferry dock, so is a great place to stop if you’ve missed the Quadra Island ferry.
Today though I’m pausing here on the way north, into high mountaon logging country, up highway 19 to Port MacNeil. North of Campbell River the road cuts inland through incredibly steep terrain and seeks out the Nimpkish Valley, giving equal access to both sides of the mountains that form the spine of this Island. Up here the economy is strictly about access – access to timber mostly, so the main highway splits the difference between both sides of the Island and the clear cuts come right down to the road. In Sayward once I was almost denied service at a gas station because I tried to pay with my VanCity Enviro Card. People are serious about logging here, and the great unspoken terror of fish farming, an industry that is driving a wedge between people and communities. The Broughton Archipelago, a maze of islands and treacherous channels, is the home to two dozen fish farms and a formerly thriving wild fishery. The wild fish fleets are down significantly – it’s hard to even find wild fish on the menu in Campbell River except at the excellent fish and chips stand in the Discovery Marina – and the resulting hit to traditional diets and ways of life in local First Nations is devastating.
I’ve driven this road dozens of times, awed by the scenery and the impact that humans can have on such a vast territory (see Google maps for evidence of the logging activity, none of which is hidden from view north of Campbell River – in the southern part of the Island, a nod to tourism means that clear cuts are carefully contained behind view corridors that give the impression of pristine forests). Not too many tourists wander up here, and I guess people kind of like it that way. A few make the trek for the world class salmon fishing and the whale watching tours out of Telegraph Cove and a few others get up to Port Hardy and board the ferry for the inside passage to Bella Bella, Bella Coola and Prince Rupert. But by and large this land belongs to the people that live here, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, and that’s why I’m here – to run a gathering tomorrow in which these folks will talk to one another about what’s possible together.
Should be interesting.
I am heading out on a mammoth trip today. My itinerary looks like this:Monday – drive to Port MacNeil on northern Vancouver Island
Tuesday – Facilitate community to community forum with North Island First Nations and local governments. When finished, drive back to Campbell River and jump on a plane. Fly to Vancouver, then Toronto then Ottawa.
Wednesday – Facilitate workshop in Ottawa with the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
Friday – Finish workshop and return to Vancouver
Saturday – Facilitate one day Open Space for the Ministry of the Attorney-General Family Court Committee. Return home Saturday night.
This is a little unusual for me, in that I usually don’t do a red eye flight across two thirds of the country. I know I will be tired, and I know I need to stay focused on these three jobs and what I am doing. And believe it or not, I woke up this morning deliciously anticipating the journey ahead.
For me, this kind of travel and work is a mindfulness practice. I use these journeys to be very mindful about where I am and what I am doing. Often, when I am en route, I don’t speak to other people at all, preferring to travel in silence, reading, listening to music or podcasts or writing. If I do speak it is only to be politie, get where I am going or ask for help. As a silent meditation I find travelling in this way to be incredible practice, and it brings me to the work I have to do with as much presence as I can. In general I don’t check my emails when I am on the road, preferring instead to give as much attention as I can to the work I have at hand. Fortunately I have my partner Caitlin Frost is back in our office, answering phone calls, sorting logistics with clients and flagging important emails for me. This is an incredible gift as it allows me to be on the road, safe, undivided and present for my clients.
Seeing travel as a meditation retreat for me shows up in many ways. For example I have a few practices I cultivate on a daily basis and being mindful means focusing on doing them in unfamiliar places with limited access to tools. I try to exercise everyday, and have developed several “hotel room” workouts, that can be done between queen sized beds in small roadside motels. These are 20-30 workouts focusing on strength, flexibility and cardio fitness. Of course, access to a weight room or a gym makes this easier, but it isn’t necessary. Sometimes, if I’m driving and I get tired I pull over and go through a circuit of push ups, sit ups and squats or I run through some of my taekwondo patterns to get the blood flowing and energize my body.
Eating is another area that becomes a mindfulness practice. Because it’s so hard to find good and healthy food on the road, I think carefully about everything that enters my body. Instead of defaulting to restaurants, I’ll often stop in to grocery stores and stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables, pre-mixed salads or healthy instant soups that can be made with only boiling water. Travelling does not have to mean bread, oil and potatoes.
Travelling offers several benefits to the emotional side of mindfulness practice as well. It is a rare trip when everything goes according to plan and delays, changes and inconveniences force me to be mindful of my emotional states and to practice equanimity with people, machines and other pieces of reality that are out of my control. Some of my favourite trips have been those which have gone horribly wrong, with missed connections, bad weather and few options. If I come through those with a minimum of anxiety, the journey and the return home seems sweeter for it.
Travel can be stressful because it breaks our routines and rhythms. We need to become completely dependant on our own resources, carrying everything we need with us. It forces us to make careful choices about what we take and what we do on the road. We have to live differently than we do at home and that forces us to pay more attention to what we are doing. THAT alone is a gift, for if we can use the opportunity to focus ourselves and work with our mind, we can not only travel better, but understand ourselves better as well.
Slow down, be careful and attentive and see what you learn about yourself.
Nice find from Kevin Harris who blogged the Republican’s digs at Barack Obama’s community organizing experience:
George Pataki: ‘He was a community organizer. What in God’s name is a community organizer? I don’t even know if that’s a job.’
Then former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered his own snickering hit job. ‘He worked as a community organizer. What? Maybe this is the first problem on the resumé,’ mocked Giuliani.
A few minutes later, in her acceptance speech for the GOP vice presidential nomination, Sarah Palin declared, ‘I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.’
One of the responses from the Obama camp was:
‘Let’s clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.’
Exactly…that is exactly what community organizing is. Republicans do it too.
It’s beyond me why so many Republican politicians find it so hard to be actually funny. Every time I hear “jokes” like this, I just want to draw a little square in the air in front of me whilst rolling my eyes. It’s as if years of country club roasts had conditioned them to slightly off-colour jokes being met with nervous titters.
Recently Karen Sella posted a request to the OSLIST among other places for books that are about being human Today she posted the list.
Here is your new life reading program!
Playing and Reality, D. W. Winnicott
Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, D,W. Winnicott
Sexual Personae: A History of the feminine from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia
The World of Pooh, A.A. Milne
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Graham
The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abrams
The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, A.H. Almaas, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, Jon Kabat Zin, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, Evan Thompson, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, and The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams…to name just a few.
Finally, for those of you who enquired, some (and there are so very many) favorite books about being human that I recommend are:
Living Beyond the End of the World, Margaret Swedish
The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
Ornament of the World, Maria Rosa Menocal
Cultural Creatives, Paul Ray
The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida
Breaking Ranks, Ronit Chacham
Better, Atul Gawand
The Hidden Connections, Fritjof Capra
Sketching User Experience, Bill Buxton
The Miners of Windber: the Struggles for New Miners for Unionization, Mildred Beik
Burning All Illusions, David Edwards, 1995 (Also published under the Title “Dare to be Human”)
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach
Illusions, Richard Bach
One, Richard Bach
Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World, Kathleen Dean Moore
The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby
Coming to Life, Polly Berrien Berends
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
All Sickness is Homesickness, Dianne Connelly
Imagining Argentina, Thornton
Prophetic Imagination, Brueggeman
Crucial Conversations
The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (series), Dan Millman
Books, tapes, online et al: anything by Esther and Jerry Hicks
The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo
Creed for the Third Millennium, Colleen McCullough
Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
”Everything I have read by Parker Palmer and Frederick Buechner, nonfiction and fiction alike”
How We Became Human, Joy Harjo
Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restoring Hope to the Future, Margaret Wheatley
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
Bring Me the Rhinoceros, John Tarrant
The Secret, Rhonda Byrne
A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle
Loving What Is, Byron Katie
The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho
Women Who Run with Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
Turning to One Another, Meg Wheatley
Grace and Grit, Ken Wilber and Treya Killam Wilber
poetry of Neruda and Rumi
Coming Back to Life, Joanna Macy
On Being Human, Ashley Montague
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
I Am That, Nisargadatta Maharaj
Metta: The Practice of Loving Kindness, Nagabodhi
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
Life is a Verb, Patti Digh
Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore
The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler
The Occult Significance of Forgiveness, Sergei Prokofiev.
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, Michael Chabon
Man on the Threshold, Bernard Lievegoed (and anything else this guy ever wrote)
Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne
Le Petit Prince, Saint-Exupery (The Little Prince in English)
Bible
Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck & Chris Cowan
Courage to Be, Paul Tillich
Winning Through Enlightenment : Mastery of Life, Volume I, Ron Smothermon
New and Selected Poems, Mary Oliver
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
I and Thou, Martin Buber
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Alice Miller (also, The Drama of the Gifted Child)
If This Is a Man, Primo Levi (in United State published as Survival in Auschwitz)
The History of Childhood, Lloyd deMause
The Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause
In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan
Island, Aldous Huxley
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Tree of Knowledge, Huberto Maturana
Eternal Echoes, John O’ Donohue
Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, Suzanne Langer
Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson
The Fourfold Way, Angeles Arrien
Harmful Advice [Vrednye Sovety], Grigorii Oster (Oster is described as a children’s writer read by primarily by adults. His contrarian rhymes and poetry caused a huge uproar when he came out in print during Perestroika. Sadly, last time I checked he was not available in English”he also has a line of “Harmful Textbooks”)
So it seems that we are having a federal election here in Canada.
I’m a little interested in democracy and as I\ve had two phone calls today, I thought I might as well keep some notes here about my experience with the local candidates.
Today John Weston’s comapaign called me. Weston is running for the Conservatives here in West Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Sea to Sky Country. So I’ll admit upfront that I’m prejudiced here – I haven’t ever voted Conservative, and that isn’t likely to change in this election. I did however find the experience of communicating with Mr. Weston’s campaign a little funny.
I got called around 4pm to ask if I\d support Weston in this election. I usually at least ask some questions – and in the last election I had a long conversation with the Conservative candidate on my pet federal issue – Aboriginal rights and titie. This time I felt like just cutting the crap and I told the caller I wouldn’t be supporting Weston at all.
I figured that was the end of it, but it wasn’t. An hour later I got a call back from a call centre asking if I supported Weston. Intrigued. I took the bait and asked the caller why I should support John Weston. She didn’t really know. SHe pointed me to his website, which I have also done and said I should look there for more information. Then I asked her why she liked Weston. She said that she couldn’t really answer that question, that she just worked at a call centre and that was that.
So the guy who wants my vote can’t even find people who support him to call me? He has to hire a call centre with people who don’t seem to care one way or another to do his ground work for him? This is a little strange and a little sad. One of the things I enjoy about election campaigns is the rabid support that campaign staff and volunteers exude for their cadidate. It makes for fun sport and often really great conversation. In this case, the whol thing defleated before my eyes. Will John Weston’s campaign call centre continue to call me over and over with dispassionate invitations to visit his website, or am I going to get to talk to someone about the Conservatives change in policy following the residential schools apology?
To be continued I guess.