My first mentor John Lawson and me at a Bruce Cockburn concert c. 1984
Thirty years ago today as a 16 year old, my life changed. On October 20 1984 I participated in a massive anti-nuclear weapons march in Toronto. It was an eye opener for me. i met hundreds of people who had come together across the mostly left side of the political spectrum to march for peace. I had never been exposed to social justice and action coalitions before, and became almost overwhelmed by the leaflets and pamphlets that I collected that day on issues like Kurdish independence, sanctions against South Africa, cruise missile testing, Central American civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, native issues such as logging at Temagami and weapons testing in Labrador…the list went on and on. Acronyms from that time seem like distant memories: FMLN, FSLN, IRA, CND, ANC, ACT…
I was involved in peace and social justice issues through my church, St. James-Bond United Church, which had a very active social justice program. Our associate minister, John Lawson (who ran for the Green Party in Kitchener in the last federal election) was really active in challenging us young people nto engage with the world and not accept the standard narrative of upper middle class Toronto; money was everything, social justice and peace were communist-loving sympathies and solidarity was for naive idealists. (Years later, after touring the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, I felt extremely vindicated for having held on to the principles i cultivated in those days).
On that day, John took some of us downtown to march. Later that day he leant me two books that changed my life: a collection of Franz Kafka’s aphorisms and short stories and the first volume of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s “The Political Economy of Human Rights Vol. 1.” I devoured both of these works. i think the Chomsky book was actually not even legal in Canada at the time.
That day was indelibly marked into my memory as the day in which my love and interest in serious literature and progressive politics emerged. My world opened up, my eyes opened up and almost every part of my life’s work that has been important to me got an acceleration on that fall afternoon with 100,000 other people and one mentor on University Avenue in Toronto.
Inspiring action in a time of despair.
Our work and the work of every person who loves this world—this one—is to make one small deflection in complacency, a small obstruction to profits, a blockage to business-as-usual, then another, and another, to change the energy of the flood. As it swirls around these snags and subversions, the current will slow, lose power, eddy in new directions, and create new systems and structures that change its course forever. On these small islands, new ideas will grow, creating thickets of living things and life-ways we haven’t yet imagined.
This is the work of disruption. This is the work of radical imagination. This is the work of witness. This is the steadfast, conscientious refusal to let a hell-bent economy force us to row its boat. This is much better than stewing in the night.
via The Rules of the River | Kathleen Dean Moore | Orion Magazine.
Chris Hadfield, Canada’s greatest guitar slinging astronaut, has this to say:
“… I was up (on the space station) for five months and it really gave time to think and time to look at the world, actually to steal 90 minutes at one point and just float by the window and watch the world, go round the world once with nothing to do but ponder it.
And I think probably the biggest personal change was a loss of the sense of the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
It’s really we sort of teach it to our children, you know. Don’t talk to strangers, this is us. This is our whatever – our family, our house, our neighours, our relatives, your school.
It slowly grows where the line between us and them is. Um but to – I’ve been around the world thousands of times, 2, 593 times – and that line we impose on ourselves of where us ends and them starts, just keeps diminishing and it wasn’t conscious. I noticed maybe a third of the way into my half year stint up there that I just started referring to everybody as ‘us’. Unconsciously there was some sort of transition in my mind that ‘Hey, we’re all in this together.’
And I think you come across any city in Australia and you see the pattern of the downtown and the suburbs and the surrounding farms and the water and the rail and the communications, just the standard human pattern. And then if you just wait until you cross the Pacific – takes about 25 minutes and then you come across the Americas and there’s that exact same pattern again. And then you wait another 20 minutes and you come across northern Africa – and there’s that exact same pattern again.
And we solve the same problems the same way, all over the world. It’s just ‘us’ and everybody just wants some grace and better chances for their children and a chance to laugh, understand it all. And that inclusionary feeling was all pervasive and unavoidable, having seen the world the way I’ve seen it and it was part of my motivations in doing my best to share it when I came back.”
Thanks to Alan Stewart for transcribing this.
I can always rely on John O’Donohue:
Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells
Bowen Island oriented with Snug Cove pointing towards you, as the entrance to the Island.
Yesterday in our five day residential we invited the participants out on the land for a solo retreat. Bowen Island, where I live, is an incredible place. To get here, you have to take a boat across the Queen Charlotte Channel, a deep body of water at the entrance to Howe Sound. Howe Sounda was formed by glaciers and mountain making processes, and now is a fjord surround by walls of 1200 meters or more.
Entry to Bowen is through Snug Cove, a small and protected harbour that s part of of a bigger bay called Mannion Bay. it is a deep round sanctuary that serves as a channel into the island, and a kind of birth canal when you leave. I have never tired of the process of crossing this threshold.
Once you are here, the Island draws you ever inward, with our one main road branching into three at the crossroads and later into dozens of ever smaller roads and lanes ending at beaches, bays, lakes, mountains or sometimes just petering out into the forest. There are no real loop roads here: once you take a path you have to retunr pretty much the way you came.
This landscape sets us up for a beautiful retreat. When I have helped people have solo experiences here I have always framed them first with a noticing of the threshold that is crossed. Richard Rohr captures the power of these kinds of thresholds here:
The edge of things is a liminal space – a very sacred place where guardian angels are especially available and needed. The edge is a holy place, or as the Celts called it, “a thin place” and you have to be taught how to live there. To take your position on the spiritual edge of things is to learn how to move safely in and out, back and forth, across and return. It is a prophetic position, not a rebellious or antisocial one. When you live on the edge of anything with respect and honor, you are in a very auspicious position. You are free from its central seductions, but also free to hear its core message in very new and creative ways. When you are at the center of something, you usually confuse the essentials with the non-essentials, and get tied down by trivia, loyalty tests, and job security. Not much truth can happen there.
via On the Edge of the Inside: The Prophetic Position by Richard Rohr, OFM.
Once we have crossed the threshold, typically a person’s experience will consist of three phases: a moving out onto the land, a resting phases in stillness and a return. It is a mythic journey in many ways. In going out I invite people to dwell on what they are getting ready to leave. In resting I invite people to be still for at least an hour in the forest or by the sea, which is enough time to let the forest close back around a person and let it reveal itself to you. And the return journey is always accompanied by a gift; you are bringing something back. These little out and back pilgrimages are important and very powerful for people. As I learn more about the way this land works us, I feel like I can let it more fully host me and the people I work with and the insights can come.