Slack tide in the Salish Sea.
These are the Olympic Mountains across the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the body of water that links in inland parts of the Salish Sea to the open Pacific Ocean. So much water flows through this passage twice a day with the ebb and flow of the tides, that the Strait takes on the quality of a slow river, flowing in two directions, in and out, two great long breaths a day, taking in cold North Pacific water, and exhaling the fresh water from the mountains and snowpacks of the Coast and Cascade Mountains, and the silty flow of the Fraser River – Sto:lo, as it is known on the coast.
AS a result of this flow there is tremendous life in this region. Many times a day freighters come and go through the Strait, heading to the ports of Vancouver and Seattle, or the mills at Squamish and Duke Point or Port Angeles. They carry the atoms of capitalism: coal and cars and plastic toys and oil and clothing and computer parts and everything we take for granted to live the lives we live here. They also carry the military power of the US nuclear submarine fleet and the Pacific Command of the Canadian navy based in Victoria. From time to time one sees sinister ships like the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers, which frankly just creep me out. These are nuclear weapons of mass destruction, cruising lithely through the serene waters. All around this landscape are the scars of clear cutting, new and old, and not an hour from where I am is the Fairy Creek watershed and the the old growth, Indigenous stands of the Carmanah and Walbran forests. Like everything around here, it is a context of mixed and conflicted feelings, activities and histories.
The ocean here is rich and complex and full of life below. Yesterday we watched a pod of five orcas, including a couple of babies and a huge male, frolicking in the slack water. They were breaching and spy hopping and tail lobbing and fin slapping. The young ones were learning hunting techniques while the adults milled around. There are salmon and anchovies and seals and octopuses and all manner of living creatures in the rich near shore kelp beds and in the deep marine canyons and reefs. Walking along the cliff tops here I’m reminded of the Jogasaki Coast on the Izu penisula in Japan, where local fishers steward the forests and have placed signs along the trails to let you know you are walking through a “fish attracting forest.” This is true on the coast here, as at least 30% of the nitrogen in the forest ecosystem come from marine sources, from fish carcasses that litter the salmon streams after spawning and are carried by bears and birds throughout the woods, where they feed the trees that maintain the streams that bring the salmon home to spawn. This is the most ancient cycle of life here on the coast.
I am in T’Sou-ke Te’mekw, and evidence of the ancient and historic use of the land and ocean is all around for those that have eyes to see. Yesterday, walking above the beaches of East Sooke Regional Park, I could hear people down below us on the beaches harvesting mussels. On the trail was a sign indicating that miners had once used the land here for iron, even though there was little evidence of that. But literally below my feet, very near that sign, on a flat spot above the beach near a creek of fresh water was a midden of shells, clearly indicating that the two on the beach were far from the first people to harvest shellfish here. It had all the hallmarks of a historic village site; different signs, different stories.
BC lifted the in-province travel restrictions on Tuesday and it feels good to stretch out and leave home for a few days. While I have loved the global travel of the before-times, I’m lucky enough to live in an incredible natural and cultural landscape here, amongst the ancient Nations of the Salish Sea archipelago, that I really don’t have far to go to actually be in another country. One could simply stay in one place and visit ever deeper into the natural and social history of these places, and perhaps we should. It is important to know our place in all of its complicated and complex realities, to let the emotions and thoughts flow in and out like the tides, bringing new nutrients and new life upwelling from the deeps with the currents and the change of the times.
I think this quote really captures my own social justice practice and my own spiritual practice. Ilia Delio is perhaps what we would call an evolutionary theologian and what she says here about “becoming something that is not yet known” says volumes to me:
By evolution, I mean simply that change is integral to life. We are becoming something that is not yet known. To live in evolution is to let go of structures that prevent convergence and deepening of consciousness and assume new structures that are consonant with creativity, inspiration, and development.
Evolution requires trust in the process of life itself. There is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable. In a sense we are challenged to lean into life’s changing patterns and attend to the new patterns that are emerging in our midst. To live in openness to the future is to live with a sense of creativity and participation, to use our gifts for the sake of the whole by sharing them with others.
— Ilia Delio, The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey (Orbis Books: 2021), 220–221, 223–225.
It is hard to stay open to possibility when we are confronting a choice between the familiar and the new. I have always imagined that a world that addresses climate change, one that properly restores dignity and equality and essential relationships to land and sea and between peoples is one that will deliver a better world than the one we have now. But power and familiarity breed intransigence and unless we can truly let go of what we know and fall forward into the theoretically innumerable realities that are better than this one, we remain trapped in these patterns of behaviour in these ways of relating, in these ways of making a living.
We need moments of disturbance to move into new realities, and the more we refuse to accept the painful truths of the status quo, the less chance we have of actually making something better.
We are emerging from 2020, a year that was terrible in so many ways and one in which we saw many stories of governments mobilized to retool systems to create universal programs of health and economic care; stories of mitigated climate impacts and the support for local economies; stories of massive logistical challenges solved; stories of racial equity and justice being foregrounded and new conversations and actions around changing the coercive structures of power that perpetuate injustice.
We have evidence that we can quickly make massive changes that take us into that “becoming” but we remain trapped in the fear that doing so will cause loss and harm to people (let’s be honest, people who look like me) that benefit from the status quo. It might do, but the status quo is such that we are at a moment in history when we have enough wealth to mitigate those losses and usher people into a better world. There will be contraction. We can manage. Some of us have no idea how much resilience we actually have, because we’ve never been tested.
We can’t know what we are becoming, but we have enough evidence to know that the path we have been on and the vector on which we are travelling is heading towards a world where our gifts are increasingly discarded and our regard for life diminished. Perhaps at some point the fear of the immediate reality will outweigh the fear of choosing something different. I wish it weren’t so, that we have to be motivated by fear over love. And we need not hope for this future – it is the hope that kills – but rather we simply need to act now and trust in one another differently, listen to the voices that are at the margins of our world, at the ecotones between the thriving systems of life and the social clearcuts in which we are immersed. Those voices are bringing us the new patterns, the challenges, and the invitations. Hear them, amplify them, exchange gifts, follow them and let’s journey away from this hellscape.
It’s funny to start noticing the cycles and patterns that return here over a year. I’ve lived on this island for 20 years now and this is the first time I have spent an entire year (15 months now, and counting) without traveling outside of the bioregion. And as everyone has noiticed, time has taken on a ndifferent ndimension during the pandemic, but perhpas what is really happening is that we are just getting more comfortable with the way time actually is.
This morning I was cruising through my garden, sending slugs to their doom and cropping a few lettuce and spinach leaves for my lunch and I heard a great mass of bees swarming a California lilac plant that we have. The sound was really deeply familiar as they were all at that same plant last year for about two weeks. Hearing the sound again was like being greeted by an old friend. Something familiar. Same as the Blackheaded Grosbeaks that are waking me up every morning with their beautiful piercing calls and the lushness of my salad garden, delivering full bowls of goodness for lunch and dinner every night. I had the thought “I’ve been here before. THis is a feeling of home in time.”
Despite my close intimacy to rhythms of the land here, I think this is the first time I have really felt time as an actual circle, which returns to the same place. It has the effect of drawing out my experience of life. Slowing it down, not disrupting it like it does when I travel away from this place. Over this past year I haven’t had the sense of getting older, as if there is a line or a path you travel. Rather I have a sense of being different, but in the same repeated moments and places.
It is a mild day here on the southwest coast of Canada. Last week we were touched every so lightly by the polar vortex that swung a little right on it’s southward adventure and managed to squeeze cold air with storm force winds out of our fjord. The windchill dropped to around -20 a few times, with 100 km/h outflow winds buffeting Howe Sound. That isn’t especially chilling by Canadian standards, but here on the west coast we live in house made to keep us dry, not necessarily keep us warm in the same way and so pipes freeze, wood stoves are over fired, and hydro bills go through the roof. Luckily we suffered none of the small disasters of cold weather in a temperate climate. But my friends and clients in Texas did.
Word this morning that one of them, Bertina Combes, passed away on February 19. during the height of the cold weather that crippled Texas. She died from complications of COVID-19 and in her passing the University of North Texas has lost a much beloved professor, academic leaders and fierce and kind fighter for racial equity and diversity. Bertina was a core member of our Participatory Leadership cohort. and was championing the use of deeply participatory methods to address diversity issues at UNT. And she was a terrific human being. I’ll really miss her. Tender.
Communities and organization pass thresholds all the time. Some are subtle and you find yourself in a new territory and new space without really knowing how you got there. And other times the markers are obvious and everything has changed. It certainly feels like that when a person is born or dies in your circle. We ritualize these thresholds, often with the intention of holding each other together as we cross through the thin space between two worlds. Whether it is the rituals of death and life, the transitions of power, the dissolutions of structure, or the sharp changes in a culture.
In the natural world, transitions between states and seasons are very gradual, but the more you pay attention, the more you notice sharp transitions. Here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island, we have just passed across a threshold. Today the dawn chorus of birds was loud and strong, led by Pacific Wrens, Spotted Towhees and Black-capped Chickadees, resident birds we see and hear everyday, but who have started their breeding songs. The light is returning faster and earlier and the migrants will begin returning as well. This is pretty typical for mid February, and we are increasingly unlikely to have anymore snow at sea level. Yesterday I spread compost on my garden beds and seeds of peas, kale, spinach, lettuce and – optimistically – beets, I sprouted indoors two weeks ago are growing steadily now and will be ready for planting out soon. I’ll tempt the frost a little in an effort to get at least two crops out of my beds this season, but in my bones it feels right to move. We have crossed a threshold and action is different.
When you live on an island like ours, Nex?wle?lex?xwm/Bowen Island there are rhythms that are like breathing. They come and go over time on cycles as short as an hour or as long as geological epochs.
Most mornings I begin my day on my covered porch, drinking a coffee, reading a meditation, spending some time in silence and contemplation. At this time of year the mornings are dark and, more often than not, wet. This morning we are in day four of what is called an atmospheric river, a massive steady plume of rain that extends from the Hawaiian Islands north-east to our coast. Such a pattern is like a long exhale of moisture, a plume of breath from the tropics that brings warm air and rain and sometimes fronts with gale force winds, which we call the Pineapple Express.
From my morning perch I can see the ferry coming and going, every hour or so, our connection to “the continent.” The early ferries – 6:20 and 7:30 – are commuter runs, with workers heading to the city on the earlier boat and high school students off to school on the later one. As the ferry approaches, the intensity of traffic on my road increases, and the closer we get to sailing time, the higher the speed of cars racing to make sure they don’t miss the boat, or to deliver a sleepy bus-missing teenager to the dock. There is a period of stillness and then the flow reverses and the labourers from the city who have made an early start travel in their work vans and pick-up trucks through the arteries and capillaries of our island road system. As the ferry leaves, things become still and quiet again.
It is very much like the tide that comes and goes twice a day, sometimes bringing as much as 3.5 meters of water to our shoreline, lifting the logs off the beach and floating them on the currents and eddies of Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, the inlet in which we live. This time of year we are coming into our highest tides, and the beaches will be cleared of the boom logs and torrent debris that has cascaded off the mountains into the sea during the past few months of rain and erosion.
And there are the longer period rhythms here as well. The world breathes birds on to our island all in season. Right now there are the winter residents having their run of the place, and with a mild and possibly snowless winter at this altitude near sea level, the towhees, juncos, song sparrows, chickadees, nuthatches, and wrens are spoiled for choice. large flocks of siskins and kinglets swirl in the grey air and occasionally at night you can hear the calls of snow geese flying high above the coast line in search of their estuary winter feeding grounds south of here at the mouth of the Sto:lo/Fraser River.
Winter is short here, and the new year brings with it a month of rain and grey, with gradually brightening skies and then the first hints of spring weather in early February, in line with the Irish seasons more so than the Gregorian ones. But of course there is already a calendar here, the Squamish calendar,that relates to the seasons of food and harvest. The land never really rests in warm winters like this, with the forest extracting as much as it can from the dim light but the mycelial networks in the forest floor working overtime to breakdown nutrients and keep everything fed and flowing in the moist and nutrient rich humus. The forest itself breaths a rhythm of feed from the sky and the earth, continuously growing the giant trees for which our coast is known.
Everything is geared around natural rhythms here, and they care little for the smoothing out of human life brought about by a pandemic. Our community rhythms have become a faint signal in the past 10 months, the peaks and troughs of gatherings, festivals and commemorative events flattened into mere bumps and barely acknowledged remembrances. In this sense it feels very much like our village has been holding its breath, but I also have a small worry that with another year of lock down we will become severed from the rhythms of community life. It only means that we will have to create new ones, or resurrect the former ones in new forms. But it does remind one of how easy it is to break the fabric of community life and set people adrift with one another, a dynamic that was sued against the indigenous population here over generations, through the pandemics of smallpox and colonization, which ravaged community life and stole even the waiting breath.
And in my own life, a turn has been taken as my youngest child has moved out, into an apartment in the city where his 20 year old life is also on hold. He has a job and will start a new set of university classes online this winter, but being 20 and living in a city for the first time is supposed to be a time of socializing, living life fully and enjoying oneself, and that’s just not possible at the moment. Back on the island, Caitlin and I have become empty nesters, and have just spent a couple of weeks in quiet and still recalibration of our lives in a shared space that, after 23 years of parenting, is once again just the two of us. Another exhalation, a deeper one, and an intake of breath for what the next third of life will hold.
Happy New Year to you all. May you continue to breathe and find life in the rhythms of breath that surround you.