I am just returning from a memorial service for my friend and colleague John McBride. John and I worked on a number of Aboriginal economic development projects over the years and he died in October from pancreatic cancer.
Today at his memorial his wife Val read some selections from his journals. One insight that really stuck with me was written in his final days as he was making sense of his death. He wrote that the end is about peeling back all the layers of who we have been to discover who we really are at our core. And he named his core as that of a man who lives with joy and revelled in having just enough.
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- How's the weather?
Pouring rain.
Really?
Yeah. # - The mist on the Sound and the stockings hung with care at #artisaneats on #Bowenisland http://yfrog.com/h4lgtrj #
- Cocoa West http://post.ly/1KLJO #
- When the forest breathes at the end of a Pineapple Express: mild, wet and clearing evening. http://yfrog.com/gzkttvj #
- This morning's rosy tinted dawn. http://yfrog.com/h4ufbojj #
- Cold front passed. The air is crisp and the ground saturated with four days of chilled rain. #
- Finn and friends learning longsword at Academie Duello. #
- Syllable. Grey. Warm. Dry. #
- The view from my office this wet afternoon. http://yfrog.com/h3572bj #
- It is a beautiful day. Clear crisp blue and white. Snow on the mountains and sun on the sea. Just, thank you. #
- Mountains, moon, snow and sea. http://yfrog.com/h3tsahj #
- Sunset and moon rise http://post.ly/1Lpt5 #
- Xmas party, kitchen junket and quietly sitting for 30 mins as the Squamish blew thru a forest lit by the nearly full solstice moon #pagan #
- Mad Mabel at Tir na Nog today! A Bowen Island Christmas classic! Hooray for Kingbaby Productions! #
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Other than blogging, probably the first social networking site I used was delicio.us. When it was launched I was in my traditional “second-to-early adopter” position and I relished it. Now with news that Yahoo is going to shut down the social bookmarking site, I’ve decided to let it go. I’ve downloaded all of my bookmarks in one html page and stored it in Evernote, which is the program I use for note taking.
If you are interested in having a look at my archive, click the “Currently Reading” link on the right or, if you view my blog in a feedreader, have a gander here: salishsea’s Bookmarks on Delicious.
If you need to move your bookmarks, here are a few ways to do that.
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A continuation of my exploration of the past six months.
The goddess who consumes all exhausts herself I myself have witnessed the esoteric language of one under the influence of the goddess This state is profound The release intense — Taupouri Tangoro Lele Kawa: Fire rituals of PeleThe smoke and steam of Kilauea rise from a crater held within a vast caldera many miles across. You can approach the rim of this caldera in various places and see the crater containing lava a few hundred yards away. At night, the steam and smoke glows from the fire within. When we hosted out gathering in Hawai’i we did it with the goddess 300 yards away. The power and origin of the impulse of creation lay beside us, washing us in steam, rain and sun.
For me Kilauea was one of the most divinely feminine places I have ever been. The container within the container, that which holds the primal origins of earth itself, a vessel for the creation of everything. It is difficult, or maybe impossible, for me to speak of insights that arose from being there. Instead what I experienced was a jolt, a crack in my consciousness that led to tremendous grief, perhaps a mourning of the missed chances I have had in my life to balance feminine and masculine, perhaps a keen awareness of the cost of not being able to do so. Something intuitive and emotional; the only way to write it would be to employ the esoteric language of the spirit, disjointed images.
Music always travels with me. Snippets of song, melody, poetry and words crowd my head and heart, and flow freely when I am moved, when there is an opening to the outside world. I daresay if you followed my internal soundtrack and charted the songs I sing at certain times and place, you could chart the liturgy of my life. On the volcano that morning, my mind was filled at times with the line from U2’s With or Without You: “And you give yourself away, and you give, and you give, and you give yourself away.” The goddess consumes herself, gives herself away to the flow of life itself. Forms and reforms the container to hold life itself. The sacrifice, the most sacred gift, is to give oneself away. Totally. For me, the moment on the crater when I cracked open felt like a flow was moving through me. When I told my colleague that “defense” had left me, I was saying that the shell that I used to guard myself from the flow of life moving through me was gone. There was no way to defend my tender and open heart, to stop it from breaking, from the heart emerging. To this day, six months later, it feels bruised somehow, as if the forceful cracking through of all I had been holding back had torn and ripped its way to freedom. Belvie at one point took me aside and said “thank you for facilitating us.” She had seen what was coming through me as bigger than myself.
My shadow is narcissism. A self centered reflection, on who I am, who I want to be, how I want you to see me, how I want to be loved and appreciated. This narcissism comes through in my writing, my speech, my embodied actions. It is most alive when I teach. I struggle at times with the sound of my own voice. But on the edge of the volcano I learned that to be full of oneself is not to be full at all. That is an easy kind of fullness, one which fits with the smallest possible container. I can create a container that can hold myself and be small. On the edge of Kilauea, I discovered that this container is so small and weak, that it crumbles the minute it grows to hold other than me. It shatters. It is arrogant to stand beside Kilauea and believe that you can hold big things. The volcano herself trembles and roars and renews herself every day, for the work of TRULY HOLDING is dynamic, difficult, and requires us to die in every moment. Any rigidity in the container causes it to be brittle.
My out of whack masculine impulse strengthens the container, believes the hubris of the story that it is my job to do the holding. When I was filled with the power of what was passing through me, that impulse died. I felt truly in that moment the integration of masculine and feminine: that one co-creates the other. There is no container without fire and no fire without the container.
For six months, I have run into myself. I am at sea in this respect. I am a poor student of the feminine, of the integration between the masculine and the feminine. I have been taught a lesson and I have spent six months trying to understand it, trying to see the way it shows up in daily life, in my work, in my family, with my friends and colleagues. I have met or re-met women like Luana, Ria, Ginny, Mary, Christina, Teresa and my dearly beloved Caitlin who are causing me to re-think and re-feel this edge.
But I am a baby. I sit silently in the forest watching small patterns, seeing the way douglas-fir trunks mimic my life’s journey, watching ravens sing to their futures and their pasts, studying the flow of water around the moss beds and over rocks, listening to the sea washing the island I live upon. I know nothing of this new world. It is a monumental shift to the way I am seeing things, and it has tipped me off my keel. I feel like I am in some form of limbo, like in Hexagram 12 (Pi – Obstruction) of the I Ching, where heaven and earth are moving apart from each other. The masculine and feminine are separated in my mind and my heart seeks their reintegration, hexagram 11 (Tai – Peace). What lies in the way of these two finding one another is my self.
The transformation that happened at Beyond Sustainability was one of seeing anew, and is one that requires much time to properly understand, integrate and embody. My hope for this lifetime is that it will happen. My modality right now is resting in it, letting the feminine teach me in the rare moments when I can be open to her.
I build fires, sit in the woods and hum.
Long, long have I tarried with love In the uplands of Kohola-lele, The wildwood above Ka-papala. To enter, permit me to enter, I pray; Refuse me not recognition; I am he, A traveler offering mead of praise, Just a voice, Only a human voice. Oh, what I suffer out here, Rain, storm, cold, and wet. O sweetheart of mine, Let me come in to you.
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Reading and interesting speech from the UK-Canada Colloquium by Okalik Eegeesiak who is the head of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. The QIA recently obtained a court injunction against the federal government in Lancaster Sound, preventing scientists from conducting siesmic research on the composition of the seabed. Eegeesiak talks about what this means for Inuit:
Unfortunately, Inuit in Nunavut have taken more frequently to the courts. This move is in protest at not being included or consulted properly. For example, we have a major case before the courts right now to address the federal government’s reluctance to live up to its obligations under the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. More recently, my organization, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, was successful in getting a temporary injunction on the federal government’s plans to carry out seismic testing in Lancaster Sound. This injunction is based on our assertion that the air-gun array proposed for parts of the testing will cause irreparable damage to marine wildlife and impair our ability to hunt in the area. The concept that pushes us into these lawsuits is the idea of the right to say no, which can be described as the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent. Meaningful consultation, participation in decision making and the right to say no to development when it does not suit our needs is what we strive for when we participate in the many forums we attend with the federal and territorial governments.
This concept of Free, Prior and Informed Consent goes far beyond information sessions or community meetings. Meaningful consultation should reflect an inclusive and respectful process like the consultation you would have with your spouse when you are buying a new home, rather than the “consultation” you have with your teenager about cleaning up their room.
I want to make it clear that we understand that meaningful consultation is not the same as controlling or having a veto over the actions of governments. However, it is our belief that our voice should be heard at a minimum and most of all respected and not ignored, across a wide range of issues that affect us, including education, housing, lands and wildlife management, sovereignty, and economic development. And our voices are worth hearing – we have a valuable contribution to make for our land and ultimately to our country and the world.
Today, as eyes turn north yet again, with dreams of oil, gas, minerals and ice-free ocean travel, we remind everyone to consider the advantages of Free, Prior and Informed Consent and respect the way in which, we as Inuit, choose to engage with our governments, organizations, and industry
In Canada, the law provides powerful protection for First Nations, Inuit and Metis groups who have Aboriginal rights to their territories. In practice, this protection means that governments and industry must consult with Aboriginal groups prior to undertaking any activities that would infringe on Aboriginal rights. Eegeesiak points to what such consultation means for Aboriginal communities. The kinds of conversations that need to take place at this legal, cultural and political interface are complex and weighted with issues of power.
For me one of the most difficult questions to address in these kinds of consultations is the massive power imbalance between the federal government and communities. Ine the example above, Eegeesiak struggles with this power in his characterization of what consultation means: it means the ability to say “no” but also not to veto government action.
For me the power issues might be better characterized by looking at both parties in a formal consultation process and asking who has the power to say yes or no and mean it? And, perhaps more importantly, who has the power to benefit from yes or no?
In other words, it’s one thing to simply say no in a consultative process, as the QIA did (or later in a court case, when they were treated unfairly at the consultation table) but quite another to have the power to benefit from a no. With limited capacity, inuit communities have a limited ability to deal with their own stand against exploitation. For example, most of the economic, social and political infrastructure in the Arctic is directly funded by the federal government. If the Inuit block oil and gas exploration in parts of Nunavut, the federal government has the option of waiting until conditions change, in which case, the Inuit may be in a position where the traditional whale and seal hunt might be sacrificed for the economic benefits of oil and gas exploration and development.
Many indigenous groups around the world face this dilemma. In most cases, resisting resource extraction is simply a temporary reprieve on the demise of culture, land and the lives of the people. In Canada at least, we have Constitutional protection for Aboriginal rights but that so far has not levelled the playing field with respect to power and capacity.
The question for governments then becomes, what is the moral obligation here with respect to decisions and activities that could threaten the future of an entire people, even if such actions bring local and national economic prosperity? the question for indigenous groups is terrifying at every turn: will this decision terminate our people? will this happen on my watch, and will I be the one who let it happen?
We need a new way of consulting and collaborating on resource development and indigenous communities. That these questions are never raised at the tables or in the process says something about the unwillingness of society to engage in the shadowy sides of power and exploitation. If it is not the job of the folks actually in the process, then whose job is it?