It strikes me that I could create all these same conditions at home with my tiny zendo and 100 square foot residency cabin. But at home I will continue in my daily patterns. I will schedule meetings with people, I will see all the house work around me that needs doing. I will sleep in my comfy bed and scroll through mindless Internet on my phone. Going somewhere else allows me to challenge those habits, to find respite from them for a moment or two and unhook from the cycle of everything that steals my attention.

Normally I attend at least one seven-day Zen silent retreat (called a sesshin) every year, which is a much stricter affair and involves several hours of meditation between 5 in the morning and 9 at night. But I have missed out on these the last couple of years, mostly due to my own stress around internal issues within my Buddhist community that I feel responsible for as a member of the governing council. I will return to this practice of sesshin later in 2026, but in the meantime I found myself craving some quiet time of reflection.

When I scheduled this retreat back in December, I had hoped to set aside some time for writing and get ahead of some essays for this newsletter.

Little did I know that I would arrive in such a state of depletion after two months of illness culminating in an awful flu right after my birthday in February, followed by a dental extraction that took place two days before my arrival here. My energy levels have been far too low for writing.

On the other hand, I couldn’t have chosen a better place for resting, reading, and meditation. At home I would still be trying to do all the things. Here I can just be in the moment of what my body/mind needs. A nap? A sit by the little woodstove? A simple meal? This is all that is required of me in these days.

When I was in bed with the flu last month, I could not do anything at all. I could not read or watch tv or answer email. I was so sick that I could only take care of my basic needs and otherwise lie there, though unfortunately I was not able to sleep. And so I spent a lot of time, many hours and days, meditating on the illusion of separateness that the body affords us. How we believe our skin bags separate us from others in such a total way, even as a flu virus exposes how very permeable we are and how we are connected to every other being through our breath.

I sometimes do a meditation practice where I focus on feeling my skin against the air, to see if I can tell where it actually meets and whether it is separate at all. This came up for me while feverish and lying in bed; I rather spontaneously felt that the borders of my physical body had become fuzzy, the separateness not quite dissolved, but rather merged with the matter around me in some way I hadn’t been aware of previously.

I am under no illusions that this was anything other than a dissociation brought on by fever - it was not “the dropping off of body and mind” that we seek in Zen practice - but it was an interesting sensation to me, and one worth reflecting on further as we witness yet another war unfolding on myriad fronts. How separate are we from the school girls killed by American bombs on the very first day of the attack on Iran? How separate are we from the grief of their mothers?

I have unplugged from the news while away from home, a crucial step in finding silence in a world as noisy as ours is right now. But this is only a temporary measure. A chance to dive into the depths of rest and repair, before surfacing into the world and its requirements anew.

The last time I was at this retreat centre was in 2013, partway through my Master’s degree in Liberal Studies. I had come on a solo retreat to write a paper on meditation after spending a semester engaging with the practice (sitting with both Ch’an and Tibetan teachers) in a course about the nature of enlightenment taught by Heesoon Bai.

A couple of weekends later, at the recommendation of a friend, I went to Mountain Rain Zen in Vancouver and sat there for the first time. After that, I kept showing up every Sunday, and in the spring of 2014 I did two meditation retreats in different traditions - Tibetan and Zen. In the end I stuck with Zen and took my formal precepts (lay vows) in the spring of 2017.

I associate this retreat centre, though it is Christian in its formation, with the beginning of my life in Zen Buddhism. So I suppose it makes sense that I would return here now, in this period of deliberation about my spiritual/vocational life.

For a long time after receiving the precepts, I thought about becoming a Zen priest. This is a natural step for many who wish to deepen their relationship with our practice and serve the Zen community as ritual-holders and eventually, transmitted teachers. But two years ago, on a sesshin, I became acutely aware that the robes are not for me. There are reasons for that, which I shall leave alone for now - but suffice to say, the open question that had been floating around me for a few years, closed right up, and I started thinking about other ways to advance my Zen studies and additionally, serve my broader (non-Zen) community.

Which finds me here, in a hermitage cabin with a stack of books about chaplaincy and Buddhist contemplative care. Ten days ago I was accepted into the Vancouver School of Theology (VST) where I will start a second Master’s program in September (part-time until I retire, mostly online). I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of years, working on ideas around it seriously for a few months - but until now have shared my plans with very few people.

Though I can’t access the kind of Buddhist Chaplaincy program I would like to take (we don’t have one of those in Canada), I think I have figured out a way to make one up between formal education and self/Zen-directed learning: A VST Masters in Public and Pastoral Leadership with a specialization in spiritual care, some online courses from the Shogaku Zen Institute, and close work with my teachers and Zen community. I will apply to do clinical hours (known as Clinical Psychospiritual Education - CPE units) through one of the hospital programs that offer this once I am retired from work and have the hours to commit.

All in, I expect it will take me 4 or 5 years to complete once I start - though I hope to be working within my community in appropriate ways as I go so as to develop more of a sense of where there are gaps that interfaith chaplaincy can fill.

I haven’t quite figured out what my eventual practice will look like given the fact I want to work within my small island community, and not for a religious institution, prison, or hospital. But I’ve realized during my time on retreat that I don’t have to know that yet. All that matters is that I take another step on the path and see where I end up this time.

I have slept very well here, except last night. Today is my travel day back to Gabriola, and although I am not leaving until late afternoon I feel the pressure to get going, pack up, clean my cabin. I am feeling the push to re-enter the flow of my life, despite recognizing that I will need to keep taking things slow until I am finished with illness recovery and dental procedures. Until the energy I had only a month ago comes back to me.

Yesterday’s time change has pushed the morning back into darkness, and my laptop is the only light in my otherwise off-grid hermitage hut. I have spent most of my time here offline, but like the rest of me, this communication is eager to get out into the world. If only to remind my readers that I’m still here, stumbling forward, with my eyes and heart wide open.

In the Studio

After a long break, I returned to the weaving loom in February and have committed to spend some time weaving, or doing weaving related learning for this year’s 100-day project. I have documented each of the days thus far over on my blog.

Before I left for retreat, I started a Jane Stafford kit I had in my stash. Thus far, I have woven 6 of 9 placemats from the pattern kit and will finish the last few on my return home. Each of these placemats is different, and I’m using this weave as a bit of a sample for some gift napkins I’ll weave later this spring.

While on retreat, away from my loom - I spent time pattern drafting and developing some colour palettes to try out when I put a new weave on.

Three Things

1. I have just finished the third book of On the Calculation of Volume, a 7-novel series by Danish Author Solvej Balle, about a woman who becomes stuck in time and can’t leave the day of November 18th. Six of the novels have been published thus far in Danish, with only three translated into English so far - I’m now waiting on next installment of the strange and moving tale of Tara Selter’s inability to get out of her time loop and back into the throughline of her life. I highly recommend as a kind of apocalyptic narrative.

2. A read from last month that stayed with me is Liz Bucar’s article What if Trevor Noah is Right About the Left and Religion. As someone from the left who came to religious practice later in life, I have realized the gift that these frameworks can offer to our capacity to move forward, even when the going seems impossible. This piece by Liz Bucar is an excellent examination of how faith may help us find our way to a better world.

3. The 100 Day Project started on February 22, but it’s not too late to join! This is my second serious go at it, the first being three years ago when I did 100 days of watercolour and ink. This year I’m doing 100 days of weaving-related activity. It’s such a great way to deep dive into an area of creative practice and connect with other people making art and craft!

And finally…..

No recipe this month! But maybe I’ll send something out separately when I am back in my kitchen.

I’ve noted a lot of new subscribers lately, which have mostly come through Substack interactions and referrals. Welcome everyone and thanks to those of you who interact and refer!

If you can’t remember how you got here, it might be because you are also interested in Zen, weaving, thinking critically about the world, end times survival, community building, and occasional recipes.

If you get this by email and enjoy it, it really helps if click through to the web home for this newsletter and click the heart button - there’s also a place to make comments and I love the engagement.

Another place you can find me online is my blog at http://red-cedar.ca where I post less formally about my life once a week or so.

Instead, I want to write about art, and about what it means to come together as witnesses — as people willing to hold space for one another in times when the news feels unbearable and the weight of all the history that’s come before gets lodged in the chest, and makes a lump in the throat which only dislodges with tears.

On the weekend, my husband and I went into Vancouver to attend a screening of Inside Llewyn Davis, accompanied by live musical performances. We didn’t end up staying to see the film in the end, it wasn’t what we’d really come to see.

The afternoon opened with a performance by an old friend of mine, Rodney DeCroo. We go back a long way — to the 1990s, to the heyday of activism on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, to shared protests and a time when we could almost imagine that collective action would bend the arc of things to come. For a while after his marriage broke down, Rodney even came to live in my little activist duplex on Kitchener Street, sleeping on our couch among dirty towels and leftover dishes from potluck suppers.

Rodney began with a song about his father, a man drafted into the Vietnam War, a fact that shaped the rest of his life, and in turn the life of the son who came after him. The war left his father with wounds we’ve since learned to name, though they were rarely spoken of at the time. Alcoholism and PTSD marked him until his last days. Before starting the song, Rodney spoke briefly about what had happened the day before: about Venezuela, about the United States once again forcing itself into another country’s affairs, about the familiar pattern of intervention cloaked in moral language while driven by the greed of robber barons. His voice was raw; his hands shook with the outrage of it.

Of course it was emotionally overwhelming, and when he began to sing, he couldn’t get through the song no matter which way he tried it. Three times started. Each attempt ended with him stopping short, overcome. It was too close to the bone, too much history folding in on itself at once. His father’s war, the protests we fought against US oil imperialism thirty years ago, another looming conflict. Repeat. Repeat.

Rodney apologized to the audience, but he didn’t need to. The room was with him. You could palpably feel the sympathy with our performer’s anger and frustration, that he was merely channeling what the rest of us were feeling. He had simply stepped forward far enough to give it voice.

In that moment, I was reminded of another performance, from early in 2025 when I attended a concert by Leslie Dala, who was performing Philip Glass’s Études, Book 1 as part of a show marking the composer’s birthday: 88 Years, 88 Keys. The date was January 31st. Canada was on the brink of launching counter-tariffs against the United States. A defensive move, certainly not as dramatic as war, but significant nonetheless given the newness of the terrain being rolled out by the terrible child down South.

The concert itself was not political. The music was precise and demanding, executed luminously to a packed rehearsal hall in the east side of Vancouver. But at the end of the performance, during the talkback, Dala spoke briefly about the moment we were living in — about uncertainty, about risk, and about the difficulty of taking principled action when the consequences were unclear. He did not make a dramatic pronouncement, or declaim the United States. It was just an acknowledgement of the date and the times we found ourselves in. The questions that made the audience restless as they entered the room that night.

At Dala’s words, it felt as though the audience collectively exhaled. Almost audible - an energetic release that happens when someone names out loud what everyone is holding in, their breath tight in their throats. While the music that evening was extraordinary, it is that moment of collective witnessing that stuck with me: the relief at not being alone with our fear.

Rodney’s performance on Sunday was similar for me. It’s what I will remember a year from now when I think about going to the event. Not all the great songs that were played - but the one that wasn’t played and why.

Over the last week I’ve been reading an early novel by Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night, recently reprinted. It is a fragmented book, built from small stories and observations, set in a hamlet in Poland near the border with what was once Czechoslovakia. Tokarczuk often writes from borderlands — geographic, historical, psychological — and this book is no exception.

The novel traces a place through centuries of change: shifting borders, wars, religious movements, renamed towns. At one point the region belongs to Germany; the place names are altered. After the war, people return, but the names do not revert — they change again, becoming something new. Identity is unstable. Belonging is transitory.

Within this frame are dozens of smaller tales: a man who dies on the border and whose body is pushed from one side to the other so no one has to deal with the paperwork; a man who survives wartime starvation by eating human flesh and later becomes a werewolf; knife-makers with a strange and insular religion. Marginal saints, outcasts, oddities. Lives shaped by forces far beyond individual control.

What has stayed with me is not just Tokarczuk’s imagination, or her capacity to collect and fabricate the mythologies into a much grander story, but what’s at the root of all her work. The human characters, fragile and resilient. Subject to injustice. Capable of beauty. Marked by death and mystery. Continually reshaped by political decisions made elsewhere, often without regard for the people who must live with their consequences.

And yet — her people persist. They tell stories about their neighbours. They gather to watch the comet arrive. They make meaning out of the seasons that come and go.

That, I think, is the throughline between Tokarczuk’s borderland, Rodney’s unfinished song, Leslie Dala’s remarks, and the audiences who show up for these moments. I am stabilized in these acts of collective witnessing.

As I said to my friend Sharon on the weekend, the only reason I ever go to anti-war protests is to be around thousands of other people who feel, as I do, that the violence must stop. To be unified in witnessing and speaking out against the growing darkness on this part of the globe or another.

We live in a time when the scale of events is overwhelming, as I’m sure it did for the Poles displaced and arrested at the start of Hitler’s wars. Countries as pieces on a game board delivering power into the hands of the few.

And while there may be little we can do right now, there is the act of witnessing. Art is one way we do that — to feel, not just to know; to experience collectively, so we are not alone in our grief, anger, fear, and the small shreds of hope that remain.

There’s an Ethan Hawke video floating around in which he says,

Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they’re not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until... their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you any more and all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life and “has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?”

Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can’t even see straight ... and that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s sustenance.

In moments like these — politically volatile, morally disorienting, emotionally charged — creative work is one of the places we can go to remember what it’s like to be a human in community with other humans. Not as an escape, but as a grounding place.

Rodney couldn’t finish his song. Leslie didn’t offer solutions. Tokarczuk doesn’t turn history into a moral fable. And yet, each of these moments of listening, of reading, offered something essential: the permission to witness without pretending that everything is fine.

I’m here for it. For continuing to build the works that bind us together; for making space for artists, musicians, and thinkers to gather on the deck at Birdsong in the summertime, to raise a glass and curse the war. For throwing my lot in with those who must fight, and with those who remain at home, bolstering one another through acts of care, attention, and witness — trying, in inhuman times, to stay human and whole.

January recipe: Roasted potato tzatziki bowls

This is not my recipe. It came from Eating Well and I hope they don’t come after me for sharing it here. This is so nourishing and tasty, perfect post-holiday comfort food. There are a few steps, but it’s really easy and so worth it. Serves 4.

Ingredients

• 1½ pounds baby gold potatoes, halved

• 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided

• 1 teaspoon salt, divided

• ½ teaspoon ground pepper

• 1 large English cucumber, halved crosswise and divided

• 1¼ cups whole-milk plain strained (Greek-style) yogurt

• 2 tablespoons lemon juice

• 2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh dill, plus more for garnish

• 1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh mint

• 2 medium cloves garlic, grated (½ teaspoon)

• 1 (15-ounce) can no-salt-added chickpeas, rinsed

• 1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved (from 1 pint)

• ½ cup thinly sliced red onion

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450°F with a baking sheet positioned on the center rack. Place halved potatoes in a large bowl. Add 2 tablespoons oil, ½ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon pepper; toss to coat. Pour onto the preheated baking sheet and carefully spread into an even layer. (Do not wash the bowl.) Roast until golden brown and tender, about 35 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool on baking sheet.

2. Meanwhile, grate 1 cucumber half on the large holes of a box grater; place on a clean kitchen towel and squeeze over the sink to remove excess liquid. Place in a separate medium bowl and add 1¼ cups yogurt, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1 tablespoon oil, 2 teaspoons dill, 1 teaspoon mint, the grated garlic and ¼ teaspoon salt; stir to combine.

3. Chop the remaining cucumber half; place in the empty reserved bowl. Add rinsed chickpeas, halved tomatoes, ½ cup red onion, 2 tablespoons oil and the remaining ¼ teaspoon salt; toss to coat.

4. Spread the yogurt mixture in 4 shallow bowls. Top with the roasted potatoes and the chickpea mixture. Drizzle the bowls with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil. Garnish with dill, if desired.

In the studio

There is nothing really going on in my studio at the moment, so here is a picture of the lichen growing on my dying gate. Next year we will have to replace these gates, but at the moment they are growing the most beautiful life.

And speaking of lichen, during the holidays I collected a ton of windfall lobaria pulmonaria during a walk with my dad. It’s a beautiful lichen that can be used to dye fabric a brown shade, though you do have to use quite a lot to get much colour out of it. That is currently drying in my studio, though it isn’t very photo worthy.

Three things

1. Looking at US Imperialism Through the Lens of Liberation Theology: My husband and in-laws were liberation theologists who spent much time in the Latin America targeted by the US in the 1980s and 90s, and this week’s episode of US world domination has been reminiscent for them of struggles past. I very much appreciate this liberation theology take and suggested readings on the situation on Venezuela. Skip it if you aren’t in the mood for religious references.

2. Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey. Despite all the new year energy hype, January is traditionally a month of rest (as this essay so eloquently argues), a time in deep winter when our fields are fallow and the larder is close to bare. If you are struggling to “justify” rest in your life, I encourage you to read Hersey’s manifesto which argues that rest is not withdrawal but refusal, and a way of reclaiming our humanity in the grind culture built on exhaustion.

3. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. There will eventually be seven volumes comprising this fiction series, but I have only read the first one so far and it is a curious work. Set on a single day, repeated over and over, the protagonist Tara Selter, attempts to figure out why she has become stuck in time (when no one else has) and how she might become unstuck. Very little actually happens in the novel, as is to be expected since November the 18th isn’t a particularly eventful day for Tara or those around her, but the writing carries a quiet and hypnotic effect, and ultimately is a meditation on what makes the essence of our days and our life. This is perfect wintertime reading. Six volumes have been released in Danish, with only three currently available in English (I’ve got the next two on order).

And finally….

I said it on Facebook and I’ll say it here: Yes, the world is a bit of a shitshow right now. But I am still beyond grateful to be on this spinning ball, making plans and dreams, hanging out with the folks that I love. Thanks for sharing this space with me.

If you get this by email and enjoy it, it really helps if click through to the web home for this newsletter and click the heart button - there’s also a place to make comments and I love the engagement.

Other places you can find me online includes my blog at http://red-cedar.ca where I post less formally about my life once or twice a week.

Happy New Year everyone!

And yet! I keep noticing flickers of light all the same. I don’t mean the kind of light that blinds us to reality, or insists on hope as moral obligation. Instead, I’m thinking of the light that pools from the desk lamp on a dimming day, the small glow that surrounds your hands as they are writing and making on the table – or the light from the window as we come home on a rainy afternoon and sail into the safe harbour of home.

This fall, some of those flickers came in the form of the Solidarity Socials we held on Gabriola Island. These were simple craft socials held once a month through the rainy season (we have more planned for 2026, as the rains will continue). At these gatherings, we invited the community in to make books, dye fabric with plants, print patches, and braid rope. There were snacks. There were demonstrations. There was a lot of sitting side by side, hands busy, conversations unfolding at their own pace. Nothing demanding like a workshop, and no money required to attend. Just people showing up to create a container in which to make things and make space for each other.

There were, of course, other bright moments in 2025 as well: parties, communal meals, field school meetings, open mics and other musical events. Each coming together feeling like defiance of the headlines. “Fuck you!” we said with our organizing, our laughter, our beautiful hands working steadfastly against the cloth to the sound of fiddle music.

While I don’t think joy cancels out grief or fear, I’m not sure how we survive if we don’t find ways for them to coexist, and to hold that space for each other when the darkness persists. Feed the world with light, as I like to say.

Every year I choose a word to guide me, and in 2025 it was the word COURAGE. I needed it, and I used it to show up in new ways for myself and my community. I will not enumerate how that manifested here except to say the Solidarity Socials were a part of that and I appreciate very much the people who worked with me to make them happen.

The word I’m carrying into 2026 is lucipetal—a word I first used in 2007 for a photography project, during a dark season in my life. Borrowed from the biological sciences, it names an organism that turns toward the light. A light-seeker. In its very shape, the word doesn’t reject darkness; it simply describes an orientation, a small stretch toward what glimmers. And in so doing, I strengthen my capacity to pay attention. In which direction do I find life and connectivity, quavering though they might be? Lucipetal doesn’t ask me to be hopeful so much as it asks me to notice. To recognize the light in others, to seek them out, to build small fires together.

This is my intention and guide for the upcoming year, and I hope you join me in defining your own word or phrase to carry you through. I have been doing this practice for years, and I’ve found it to influence my life in surprising (and sometimes dramatic) ways.

I leave you with these words from Zen teacher Taigen Dan Leighton, from his Winter Solstice Dedication as we forge onwards towards the days of returning light:

“On this Winter Solstice, Darkest day of the year, we now resolve
Not to turn away from the deep darkness of our troubled world and of our lives.
We welcome the light increasing now from this day on.
May we all spread this glowing light in our lives,
May the Bodhisattva Way pervade all human hearts,
And may the world begin healing in this awakening light…..”

May you be well this season!

December practice: Walking

December can get heavy - food, family, darkness, end of the year reflections. It can be a lot. So to counter that, try a simple walking practice this month. As you go out of the house, make your intention to notice lightness and reflection. Let your feet meet the ground and your eyes catch whatever flickers of light draw you: a porch lamp, rain drops on a branch, the fog of your own breath. Each time something draws your attention, name it silently, and then return to your noticing practice. At the end, pause and ask yourself, What did I turn toward today? In these short, attentive walks, the lights become guideposts, helping us find energy even in the darkest of seasons.

And finally….

Here’s to a Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and peaceful New Year. I hope these holy days give you the rest and warmth you need and deserve. See you in 2026!

Now here I am, standing on the threshold of year’s end, thinking about all I did — and didn’t — do in 2025.

My word at the beginning of the year was Courage. Given the election that had just taken place, and the shitshow which seemed destined to follow, I figured I would need it. But I took that word further than my political outrage and managed to put myself out in the world a lot more than usual — giving workshops, playing the fiddle, taking on some tough non-profit work, and pushing my own creative boundaries.

This whole last year has been one continual pep talk to myself to get out there and just *do the thing*, and it has paid off in building my confidence to lead workshops, make art, and even invest in a professional-grade violin to support growth in my playing capacity. But all that being *out there* and organizing all the things, has also taken me away from this writing space, my meditation practice, and some of the quieter rituals of my life. I’m already looking at 2026 and thinking that it’s going to be a year with less sowing and more tending to what was planted in 2025.

My Gabriola Island Field School project is one thing I plan to carry forward into the new year, though not so much as an in-person activity. Instead, I want to take the work of the past twelve months and share it here as part of my newsletter offering. While I’m not sure how the field school gatherings and emails impacted the thinking or creative work of the friends who participated, the process deeply sharpened my own attention to seasonal rhythms and ritual in both my personal and creative life.

In this next iteration, Field School — as expressed through Comfort for the Apocalypse — will focus on transitions through the year and through a lifetime, weaving together what I developed in 2025 with new work that reflects the season of life I am now travelling through.

In nature, as in life, nothing new emerges without a kind of apocalyptic ending. Autumn strips the trees bare, winter browns the fields, and decay breaks down what was to make room for what will be. When I think of apocalypse as an ecological process rather than a dramatic event, it is simply another way of expressing change…. a necessary scraping back of the old to allow new shoots to emerge. What I hope to continue building with this newsletter is a space for reflection, ritual, and creativity in those times of change — that is the comfort part of my newsletter title — tools for supporting personal and social transition.

As I was writing this, Oliver Burkeman’s bi-weekly newsletter The Imperfectionist, dropped into my inbox. In it he says, “When you’re procrastinating on a project, wondering why your outwardly successful career doesn’t feel as vibrant as it could, or feeling stuck on a difficult life-choice, it’s worth asking if you’ve forgotten the importance of building your days, as far as you’re able, around what actually interests you.“ This question of interests could not be more timely, as this is exactly my aim in repositioning of my writing and work for the coming year.

If all goes according to plan (and I do have a bit of a content plan, mapped from my field school work onto this newsletter), you’ll be hearing from me more frequently. The work here will guide my own practice and planning, so in many ways this is as much about keeping myself on track as anything else. We’ll see what proves sustainable as it unfolds.

For now, I move into December with a desire to let go of organizing for a bit after a busy fall, while also knowing the holidays will rouse me to action for at least some of the days ahead. This season always feels like a paradox to me…. just as I’m ready to lie down for the proverbial long winter’s nap, there is one last spark of light to tend before bed!

December recipe: Mexican Hot Chocolate

When I was 19, I worked behind the counter at Java Coffeehouse (formerly La Bohème) in Victoria, BC. If you spent any time in that city in the ’80s and ’90s, you know what a one-of-a-kind place it was—replete with tables made of broken mirror, clouds of smoke, and baristas with big personalities. Among other fancy drinks, we made our hot chocolate with Ibarra, a Mexican chocolate spiced just so. We hand-grated it and melted it into milk frothed nearly to scalding on the espresso machine. Topped with whipped cream and chocolate curls, it was comfort in a cup, especially on wet winter days.

You can purchase Ibarra and other Mexican chocolate tablets online or at your local Latin American grocer, or you can try this take with ingredients you likely already have around.

• 4 cups milk (dairy or dairy-free)

• 3 tablespoons cocoa powder

• 1-2 tablespoons maple syrup

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

• Optional for more warmth: ¼ teaspoon chilli powder

• 4 ounces bittersweet, chocolate grated or finely chopped

Warm it up. In a medium saucepan, combine the milk, cocoa powder, maple syrup, vanilla, cinnamon, and a pinch of chili. Heat gently over medium, stirring until everything is smooth and lump-free.

Melt in the chocolate. Add the finely chopped chocolate and whisk for 3–5 minutes, until your hot chocolate is done.

Serve. Whipped cream and chocolate shavings optional but for the win.

In the studio

For the Field School this year, I handmade four “books” which consisted of a zine, a stab-bound pamphlet, an accordian-fold booklet, and then finally this folio with 16 winter-themed creative prompt cards inside. This field school project has been such an interesting challenge for me creatively - both in terms of content and presentation. For this folio, I created 5 mixed media collages that were copied and then cut down to size by hand to create both the folio and the creative prompt cards. I’m pretty happy with how these turned out, and with the fact that I’m done with all the field school output now so I can re-focus on other studio things for a bit.

I am considering an offering of a set of creative or journal prompt cards for sale in the new year if I can figure out how to scale up a little bit. Will see how that manifests.

Three things

• Of the many things I’ve attended on this island this recently, for Creating in Dangerous Times, by Celestse Nazeli Snowber was one of the most unexpected. In under an hour she danced, read poetry, and engaged in academic discourse with the assembled audience. This small collection of poetic thoughts on creativity in this world is a charming flicker of brightness, just like Celeste herself.

• Just in time for holiday listening comes along Ruby Singh and the Future Ancestors with their genre-bending collab Celestial Libations featuring legendary Memphis-born griot Arthur Flowers, weaving blues, gospel, hip hop, and storytelling into a mythic sonic ritual. This is some amazing good vibes for the darkness of winter and I’ve got it on repeat.

• If you’re looking to reflect on the year behind you and gently orient yourself toward whatever 2026 might bring, the free Year Compass is a wonderful tool. It’s less about rigid goal-setting and more about pausing, reviewing where you’ve been, and opening up space to imagine where you might want to go next.

And finally….

I’m back! Again! And again and again! Goddamn I am not at all consistent am I? But I’ll keep trying if you keep showing up to read when I do.

I’ve also reinvigorated my more-personal blog at http://red-cedar.ca - were I’m posting about the pedestrian things in my life. If you want to hop over there, I do recommend my recent post about my new fiddle because that’s one of the most exciting things going on at the moment.

Please like and share this newsletter if it resonated with you—it encourages me to keep going and we all need encouragement right?

The everyday problems one wakes up to become a respite then, even if they are intractable—for the problems in dreams are layered with something else—the disorienting sense you should have known or understood the strange, shifting world inside sleep, but didn’t.

I returned from a vacation in Montreal last week and within a few days of landing, developed some worrying signs of illness that turned out to be Covid. The worst of it is behind me now, and although it wasn’t nearly as bad as the first time I had it, it’s prompted a similar level of introspection—at least, if my dreams are any indication. I’ve slept a lot over the past week, and the dreams have been constant and vivid.

In 2023 when I got sick, I had been working a demanding job in a challenging work environment for the previous 8 months, an assignment I took on to see if I could improve my pensionable earnings as I headed toward my “best five” years*. The particular project was one I believed strongly in the mission of—containing crucial ecological goals which I was eager to contribute to. I signed myself up for a two-year contract that was supposed to extend to five years, thinking I was finally finally stepping into a work home where I could put my problem-solving and analytical skills to good use.

Instead, what I found was an unformed set of goals and a tremendous amount of infighting among a handful of individuals who disagreed over organizational direction and financial priorities. Efforts to build the program quickly turned into efforts to appease the dissatisfied parties. In the broader context of chaotic environmental events at the time—the heat dome and the flooding event, both in the fall of 2022—it became nearly impossible to reach any consensus on how to move forward.

Suffice it to say, work had become an incredibly toxic and embittered place for me. So much so that when I came down with Covid—a potentially deadly illness with lasting complications—I felt relieved. I was off the hook from attending work that week. I didn’t have to face another meeting where I’d be expected to solve problems that others were shovelling in front of me.

Covid hit me with a deep, all-consuming exhaustion. For a full week, I could barely stay awake for more than an hour at a time. My partner was away, so I set up camp on the couch and spent the days drifting in and out of sleep, binge-watching TV shows in a kind of delirium whenever I was conscious. In this state, it wasn’t even a question of whether I could check my email or attend online meetings. It was the kind of sickness that takes over your life.

Even in that fog of sleep and Severance episodes, it wasn’t lost on me that being sick felt like a better option than going to work. I realized I was in a job that felt worse than possibly dying alone on my couch in a haze of croupy exhaustion—and how profoundly messed up that was. It was a crystal-clear moment, one that rang through me: I was not willing to live my life that way. And so, while I was still very sick, I called my partner (sobbing, I was crying non-stop at that point in my Covid journey) and told him I was going to quit and return to my old job.

This time around, my Covid experience hasn’t been nearly so intense for which I’m thankful. For one thing, I only had one day of being flat out on the couch unable to do anything besides watch Facebook reels. And for another, I’ve been able to attend to some priority work in between napping, and happy to do so—returning to my old job meant returning to a much more respectful work environment which I’m able to function in.

And yet, the dreams keep nagging at me. Though each one is different in its details, the feeling is always the same: I’m disoriented and lost. In one, I leave a formal dinner to use the washroom on a university campus I know well, but when I try to return, I take one wrong turn, and then another, and keep doing so all night until I have left the campus and find myself in a city I should know well. Everything looks vaguely familiar but just “off” enough that I can’t get my bearings. I wander alone, without a phone, wallet, or any way to get home. Or in last night’s dream, I got into a cab but couldn’t reach the friend whose home I was headed to. I didn’t have the address, and the driver sped around interstate throughways trying to help orient me.

These are clearly dreams about self-direction and vulnerability. And while I don’t fully understand why they’re surfacing now—unless it’s simply because I’m feeling vulnerable in illness—I’m curious about what they might be pointing toward. For some time now, I’ve been working on defining my creative voice through different media: sketchbook work, writing, playing music with others. But I’ve struggled to land on what I most want to be best at. Instead, I’ve been trying to imagine a version of myself that allows for creative work without self-recrimination, a person who is at ease in one’s life and manifestations.

Although I have worked in therapy, spiritual practice, and other modalities to overcome childhood wounds and adult traumas, I continue to believe myself to be a difficult person, untalented, and dull.

But just as I am in my biological mid-life transition, I have noticed other shifts taking place in my life over the past few months that are helping re-orient some of those stubborn beliefs.

I have taken more ownership of my creative process, and put myself forward to work with others more readily. I have identified some of what I want to work with in my life - such as music - and focused more on practice an initiating work with others. I am currently doing a load of online workshops to practice with different media, to find a voice for the kind of writing and visual-work I would like to do. I am leading a creative practice study group and developing new workshops for the year to come. I have overall become more selfish in my creative practice, trying to prioritize it when I can (which is why my corner of the garden is a bit of a mess right now).

(Even as I’m pushing forward, I wonder why? Why bother at all? Why this need to communicate so fiercely? Why can’t I be content just to tend my orchard?)

Perhaps this is the disorientation my dreams are pointing to. The terrain is always familiar, and yet I cannot get my bearings. A path of my own making, and still I have no idea where it leads. But do we ever truly get our bearings mid-journey? Even when we’ve chosen the direction ourselves, we often remain uncertain, stumbling forward without a clear sense of destination. Only once we’ve reached some kind of stopping point can we look back and see where we have travelled, and what vantage points helped our way-seeking to find the place we ended up.

Liminal spaces - illness, life transition, dreams, airports - are uncomfortable for many of us, and yet this is where new directions are set upon.

June Recipe: Cardamom Coconut Chia Pudding

Last summer, during a Zen meditation retreat in the mountains, I was served a chia pudding as part of a formal oryoki-style breakfast. I had always been averse to the idea of chia pudding—though I’m not sure why. But at a Zen retreat, you eat what’s in your bowl. As with so many things in life, I discovered I’d been wrong; it was delicious! I’ve finally gotten around to trying to re-create that version from last summer.

Ingredients

• 1 can coconut milk (full or low-fat)

• 1/2 cup greek yogurt (any fat percentage)

• 1 tsp cardamom

• 1 tsp vanilla

• 1.5 tbsp maple syrup

• 1/4 cup chia seeds

Directions

Blend everything together except the chia seeds until it's creamy, then mix in the chia seeds. Let it sit for about 10 minutes, then stir again to break up any clumps. Refrigerate for 2+ hours to set. I top mine with hemp seeds for extra fibre and protein, and fruit (banana or raspberry). Makes an awesome breakfast or dessert. This makes 4 half-cup servings.

In the studio

Studio time has been a bit intermittent lately, as I’ve been playing more music. Still, I’ve managed some book-making and sketchbook play this past week. I’m really captivated by bookbinding these days, though I find it tricky to photograph the results—something I plan to work on. I’m also hoping to get back on the loom soon, but there are only so many hours in the day—though the longer light certainly helps!

Three things

Rest is Sacred: Reclaiming our brilliance through the practice of stillness - Octavia F. Raheem | This is a beautiful and nourishing book of sutras to encourage rest in hectic world. Poetic, nap-sized poems to read as one takes a breath in this chaotic world.

Jenny, Eleanor, and Laura et al.: This is Not a Book About Marx - Valerie Lebvre-Faucher | an essay of 80 pages that explores the intellectual roles of women in Marx’s life (and in early communist/feminist theorizing), and makes the greater point that *all* writing, and *all* intellectualizing is a communal process. A short read, but packed with so much good thinking.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder | This is also a short read, making the rounds right now because it is a manual to what unfolds before us. I’m keeping this one close at hand as a continual reminder to make eye contact and not obey in advance.

And finally….

I had a party recently (before Montreal and before I got sick), and some really good friends were there. In the mix, Comfort for the Apocalypse came up and it was noted that I had not written for awhile. Those friends were encouraging (insistent, even) that I get back to it. I really appreciated that. It’s nice to know that people read your work. So this is a thank-you to all those who got this far.

I haven’t been writing because I’ve felt a bit blocked. I’m not sure I need to write about the apocalypse anymore—it’s pretty clear what we’re up against—but I’m also not ready to rebrand this newsletter. So if you’re still with me, I think things are going to meander around a bit here. I mean, it’s not like the apocalypse is going anywhere—it will continue to shape the background of my writing. But I’ve too often stopped myself from writing here because I thought my ideas weren’t “on theme.” Enough of that, eh?

This is about the only place you can find me online these days - so like and comment if you want to encourage me. I will do the same for you, online and in person! Stay well friends!

My digital cleaning spree was sparked by a change in my email address—away from Gmail, which I’ve relied on for over a dozen years, and onto a non-U.S.-based server. Before Gmail, I ran my own email server as part of a radical tech collective called Resist.ca, giving me a highly personalized address. But as I drifted away from my relationship to the collective (and no longer wanted an account that ended in resist.ca), I got lazy and simply opted for a convenient service.

I’ve recently begun to evaluate all the products and services in my life, and committed to shifting away from anything US-owned, as much as possible. In this context I started to rethink my email provider also—deciding I would personalize it in the process. Now, I can be reached at both *****@birdsongisland.ca and *****@comfortfortheapocalypse.ca both of which feel like very “me” addresses.

Anyone who has attempted a digital move like this knows it’s a massive undertaking. Many start the process of changing their information but give up because it’s just too overwhelming. Someone on social media recently asked me for tips, so that’s what the rest of this post will be—a how-to guide for digital clean-up in an era of totalitarian governments and the oligarchs who enable them.

A quick note before we begin: Leaving the Google ecosystem—let alone other major services—is extremely difficult. My approach is to do the best I can rather than strive for perfection. Below, I outline what I’ve done so far, along with a couple of additional considerations:

1. I started out by evaluating my main digital services - email, cloud storage, password safe - and determined what needed to be moved and my motivations — fighting US dominance, increased security, and less data mining. I knew from the beginning that I would be moving away from free services. Google makes money by mining your data, which is why they offer you a free gmail account. That said, for less than $15 per month you can get most of the basics met in a different service.
   
   Once I evaluated my reasons for moving, I found a suitable service in Proton. I chose Proton services because it is hosted outside of the US, a non-profit, and offers some of the best security out there. It also has email, calendar, and cloud storage services which is what I mainly used Google for.

2. I decided to use my own personal domains in this transition, rather than moving to a generic sounding account. You can easily register your own domain as well. A personal domain simplifies future moves if you ever need to switch platforms, as you simply move the domain and everything else (from the outside) looks the same. Most paid digital services support custom domains and allow multiple aliases, which allows for the creation of different addresses for various projects or separate professional and personal identities.

3. Once I chose my new email service and set it up, I synced my old and new email accounts. Most services give step-by-step instructions on how to do this. Protonmail hoovers everything from your old inbox up (including labels and folders) so I didn’t lose anything in the transfer. Because my old gmail inbox was hugely cluttered, I then spent several hours cleaning it out (deleting, filing, actioning), before deleting everything from the old account.
   
   I have an auto-forward on from my old to new service now, and will likely keep that for the next few months while I continue to clean-up old accounts.

4. Now that my new inbox is nice and clean, I am able to action everything coming into it right away. I am unsubscribing from a ton of junk from the old account like it’s a fulltime job.

5. The clean inbox also makes it easier to identify emails from friends or services I actually want to be subscribed to. When I get one of those, I go immediately and change your email address on the service, or let my friend/family know that I have a new account to be reached at.

6. This next step is a big one. It’s not necessary for the email move, but part of a larger bid to clean-up my personal digital footprint. Like many, I have relied on Google’s built-in password manager in Chrome for years. Your passwords are likely stored in a similar way—either through your browser or on your phone.
   
   One by one I’ve been reviewing the saved accounts in my password manager and discovering a mix of important logins and junk services I never meant to sign up for. Instead of simply deleting these junk logins (not recommended), I am take the extra step to log in one last time and delete the accounts completely. Some services make this easy, while others require contacting support, so perseverance is key.

   
   For the accounts I want to keep, I’ve been simply logging in and changing my email address to the new one. I'm about 50% through this process at the moment and it's taking several hours—but I know it will pay off in increased digital security down the road.

7. Once I finish cleaning up my digital trail, I will download the password file and move it to the new service. Since I am moving on from the Googleverse, I am using the Proton password safe and the Ecosia web browser and search.

8. Calendars and document storage/cloud services are also easily transferable between providers. I’ve moved these using instructions and intuitive processes. I did a big clean-up of my documents before moving them over.

If you want to take it a step further and remove Google from your Android phone, GrapheneOS is a free, open-source operating system you can install. I’m not planning to switch right now, as it completely blocks Google apps, which I still need—especially since I serve on the board of an organization that relies on Google Workspace for Drive and Gmail. However, I do plan to install it on an old Android phone to test its functionality.

A couple other switches include HERE WeGo instead of Google Maps, and Office Libre instead of Google Docs. Both of these are free.

I have yet to explore alternatives to Substack—there are options, but none seem to offer the same functionality. I did cease all non-Canadian paid subscriptions on the site which means they aren’t getting almost any money from me at the moment. As for Facebook, there’s no real replacement for how I use it to stay connected with family and community (Bluesky is a Twitter clone and I never used Twitter in the first place). Reddit also remains a big part of my daily routine. I’m under no illusion that I can fully separate from U.S.-based digital services, especially given my work and organizational ties. However, it still feels worthwhile to take control where I can—at least on my personal devices. Even small steps toward greater privacy and independence are better than none. (Maybe one day I’ll get off the Internet entirely!)

February recipe: Curried lentil soup

February is really a soup month, and since Canada is the world’s largest producer and exporter of lentils, what better way to fight US imperialism than with a comforting bowl of lentil soup? It’s an Instant Pot recipe but you could convert this to stovetop with just a bit more cook time. (FWIW, the Instant Pot is also a Canadian invention and brand).

Ingredients

• 2 teaspoons olive oil

• 1/2 medium onion diced

• 1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger

• 1 tablespoon curry powder

• 2 cups peeled and chopped carrots

• 4 cups chicken or vegetable broth

• 3/4 cup dried split red lentils (rinsed)

• Salt + pepper

• Bay leaf

• Coconut milk to finish

Instructions

• Set your Instant Pot to Saute mode and add a drizzle of olive oil. Toss in the onions and cook for about 5 minutes until they turn soft and translucent. Stir in the ginger and curry powder, cooking for another 30 seconds until fragrant.

• Add the carrots, broth, lentils, 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of pepper. Stir everything together to combine.

• Secure the lid on the Instant Pot, ensuring the release valve is set to Sealing. Select the Manual setting and adjust the timer to 10 minutes.

• The Instant Pot will take roughly 10 minutes to come to pressure before the cooking countdown begins. Once the timer goes off, carefully quick-release the pressure by switching the valve to Venting, releasing the steam gradually at first.

• Remove the lid. Let the soup cool slightly, then puree until smooth using an immersion blender or by blending in batches.

• Taste and adjust the seasoning with more salt and pepper if needed. Serve hot, garnished as desired.

In the Studio

I recently had success in getting one of my second-hand spinning wheels to work properly by replacing the incorrect bobbins it came with and upgrading the flyer head. Feeling inspired, I picked up spinning again, and this single-ply yarn is the result of my February efforts. I plan to dye it with marigold, indigo, and madder before weaving it into a rug later this spring. Perhaps I’ll get it done in time to enter it in the VI Fibreshed rug challenge.

Three things

• A former political comrade of mine writes an excellent Substack under the title Metaviews where he explores how “power, influence, and leadership are being reshaped by technology, social movements, and shifting cultural values.” His commentary is incisive, especially about our current political crisis. Well worth a read.

• Chris Luedecke, who performs under the moniker Old Man Luedecke, released a new album a few months ago - She Told Me Where To Go - and it’s pretty awesome. He played our area last week, but I couldn’t make his show. No matter though, I’ve seen him twice - once in my own backyard!

• Astra Taylor’s Massey Lectures from 2023 - The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart - are worth a read or a listen to right about now. It’s as though what we are going through was entirely predictable by people who pay attention to such things as inequality and rising authoritarianism.

And finally

Well, shit. I didn’t realize when I picked courage as my word for the year that I would be drawing on it with every breath of 2025. But here we are, and there is no one coming to rescue us; nor a secret door we can exit through to escape this terrible reorienting (doubling down?) of capital and power. Buying Canadian is great and all, but we need more than that to fight what is surely fascism on our doorstep (and in our house).

By fight, I don’t necessarily mean riots in the streets, though no doubt some of that will occur. More than anything, we must continue organizing within our communities. Food security, childcare access, housing, climate action, and economic justice remain the key battlegrounds. These are the spaces where we build connections that bind us into networks of resistance as things unravel further. As does the collective making of art and music.

I feel very fortunate to live in a small community where people take these things seriously, where people get together and play at weekly open mics, and organize to support drag shows, and work to build a strong network of local food security. Everything we do to build inclusion and community makes us stronger when it counts.

If this resonates with you, like and share to encourage me to write more. There is so much happening right now that if we blink we will miss the really crucial thing - which is the connections we make in our real lives every day. In love and in struggle, I hope you are well out there.

But also this week— I put out a call for people to join a new music session on Gabriola and was rewarded with enthusiastic responses. And on Tuesday I went to the open mic and played my fiddle (and socialized) with folks in a warm and vibrant community space. I talked to my therapist, and returned to my meditation cushion for the first time in awhile. Despite everything going on, I come to the end of this week feeling okay and looking forward to friends and community visioning this weekend.

All of this, combined with some thoughts spurred by this week’s Feed the Monster, has got me thinking about how I haven’t declared my word for 2025 yet. This is one of my annual rituals which helps me set my intention for the year, but until this week nothing was arising for me organically. In the last few days, however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that my word for 2025 has to be Courage.

A couple of years ago, at my fiftieth birthday party, there was a magical jam session that went on late into the night. Some of my dearest musical compatriots were there, calling out tunes—some I knew, some I didn’t—and we plunged into them one after another. There were snippets of genius and other points when songs completely fell flat or petered out because someone forgot the next verse. But that’s the beauty of a free-flowing jam session—it’s all about the ephemeral and unpredictable moments that arise when we meet one another artistically. The magic of live performance arts, especially those improvised, lies in creating brilliant flashes of light that appear for an instant and then fade, impossible to recreate.

I wasn’t always able to do this, though. Growing up as a classically trained violinist, I learned music through structured methods and books, never reaching the level where I was allowed to interpret music on my own. It was youth orchestra and private lessons, where adhering to the standards set by others was the goal. While this training gave me a solid background in music theory and a good ear, it left me unable to play without sheet music in front of me. When people asked me to jam in my late teens and early twenties, I struggled to respond. I had a gap in my understanding of how to collaborate with others to make music.

Flash-forward a few years to my mid-twenties, and my musical life was reborn. By then I was playing in a band, writing songs with others, revising old tunes, and figuring things out in front of my bandmates on a thrice-weekly basis (yes, you heard that right—my original band the Flying Folk Army rehearsed three nights a week, plus gigs). This was a new way to make music for me, one akin to jumping into a fast flowing river: I had to take the plunge, and float or tread water until I finally caught the current and began to swim. No doubt it was challenging; it meant making mistakes, accepting vulnerability as part of the process, and learning as I went. But the rewards, both in terms of the camaraderie I experience with my band family, and the long term gift of being able to play music anywhere/anytime were greater than anything I had imagined in my young playing life.

By the time that jam session on my 50th birthday came around I hadn’t been playing much at all. I have struggled to make music since moving to Gabriola Island for a variety of reasons, and had been feeling cut off from musical community. On that night, I found myself inside a circle of musicians instead of trapped in my own head and musical shortcomings for the first time in years. It felt like coming home—or, to carry on the swimming analogy, like returning to my natal river.

Later, in the kitchen I was talking with my friend Ben and it suddenly occurred to me that the moment of musical existence we had just shared relied primarily on a kind of courage. The courage to show up in a circle of strangers and play music, to make mistakes, to be bad at something for a long time in order to get good. And the nature of that courage, when opened up in the act of creation such as a jam session, is actually a form of generosity, making space for others to show up in the same way. Of course, this isn’t just true for music—it applies to everything we put out into the world. We start by opening our vulnerable selves up. Then (often supported by others), we find the strength to step out. And in doing so, we give back to ourselves and to those around us. It’s an act of mutual aid, reciprocity—whatever you want to call it—that ripples outward and makes more art, connection, and possibility.

For nearly two years since that chat in the kitchen, the mantra “courage is generosity” has flashed in my mind occasionally, but never has it been more present with me than this week as I prepare two community offerings here on my island—both of which are pushing me out of my comfort zone. One of those is the Gabriola Field School which you can read more about at the link, the other is a monthly traditional music session for acoustic instruments (which this island is strangely lacking in).

Talk about feeling vulnerable! I make these offerings because they’re things I’d love to participate in, but I have no experience leading either an arts study group or a traditional session. And yet, here I am doing it anyways. Fortunately, I am bolstered by a few things I’ve learned along the way in this life of community organizing and making music. First, progress only comes when we’re willing to step forward. Second, most people won’t stand back and let you drown (and if they do, that’s on them, not you). And third, all projects have a life of their own - which means that once launched, the responsibility for them is shared with the other participants.

I’m no longer the young idealist who believes we are just a single revolution away from the world we want to live in, but on my good days I still believe it’s possible to open up space for one another to dance, cry, create, grieve, grow, love, make music, and everything else. When I access my courage, so too do others access their own, and together we do change the world through each tiny co-creating act (another way of saying feed the world with light).

In closing a brief essay on courage, AC Grayling writes:

Although ordinary life demands courage, sometimes in exceptional amounts, there is yet another kind of courage required for the task of being human: the courage to meet the new and to accept the different in the chances of experience. Rilke gave luminous expression to this idea in his Letters to a Young Poet, by saying that we need ‘courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter’. He meant the courage to accept love when it offers, to face death when it comes, to bear the burdens that life imposes in return for its gifts; and above all the courage to create something to mark our own individual responses to the world, however modest, for even when the courage to do this is unostentatious and private, it can make a crucial difference to the content or the quality of our lives.

Indeed, this is the spirit of the new year for me, and I will work to accept both the burdens and the gifts it offers.

January recipe: Marinated apple and cheese sandwich

This recipe popped into my feed and I made it with minor modifications (I had some really incredible gouda I wanted to use instead of cheddar). The recipe makes enough for 4 sandwiches, the apples will keep in the fridge a few days.

• 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar

• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

• 2 Tbsp. honey

• 4 teaspoons whole-grain mustard

• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

• 2 small shallots, thinly sliced (about 1/3 cup)

• 2 small garlic cloves, grated (about 1/2 teaspoon)

• 1 tart green apple (such as Granny Smith) very thinly sliced crosswise

• 1 tart-sweet apple (such as Gala) very thinly sliced crosswise

• Salted butter, at room temperature

• 8 slices sandwich bread (substantial enough to hold in the apples)

• 4 to 8 ounces aged gouda cheese, sliced

• 1 1/3 cups baby spinach

Directions

1. Whisk together vinegar, oil, honey, mustard, pepper, and salt in a medium saucepan; bring to a simmer over medium, stirring occasionally to dissolve honey. Stir in shallots and garlic. Remove from heat.

2. Place apple slices in a large, shallow, heatproof dish; pour hot vinegar mixture over apples, and toss to coat. Let stand at room temperature 45 minutes, tossing occasionally. Drain apples, and discard vinegar mixture.

3. Spread a generous layer of butter on one side of each bread slice. Divide cheese, apple mixture, and arugula evenly on buttered sides of four bread slices. Top with remaining bread slices, butter sides down. Serve immediately.

In the studio

In December, I created a little art book celebrating the life of my Great-Great Uncle Gustave Weisskopf (also known as Whitehead), who flew the world’s first heavier-than-air machine—beating the Wright Brothers to first flight. The project brought together textiles, mixed media, and bookmaking, and now I’m busy in my studio working with those creative energies.

Three things

1. Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff is an incredible distillation of the issues our world is currently facing, while still remaining hopeful that we can collectively make change - and definitely one of the best books I read in 2024.

2. On our Best Behaviour: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good by Elise Loehnen should be required reading for all women ready to challenge the assumptions embedded in our system and in our upbringings. ““We have been trained for goodness,” she tells us, “Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.”

3. Godshot by Elsie Bieker is haunting novel set in a drought-stricken California town. It chronicles the coming-of-age of Lacey May, a teenager drawn into a dangerous cult led by a charismatic preacher. Though written a few years ago, it is an incisive commentary on our current moment. A gripping read for those less inclined to non-fiction.

   ---

And finally….

It seems wrong to exclaim happy new year in the face of a daunting political and environmental moment, so instead I will say, wherever this finds you—may you be well and find courage to accept both the gifts and the burdens of the year to come.

Please like and share this newsletter if it resonated with you—it encourages me to keep going! Love and struggle, that’s what it’s all about.

We are just past the equinox, which seems as good a time as any to emerge into this newsletter space again. Though I have felt an urgency to write these last few months, I haven’t had the patience to sit down and form something whole. My thoughts are incomplete on nearly every subject, and I do not feel equipped to weigh in on the apocalypse taking place in Gaza, which has sat like a stone in my hands these last months. My thoughts on any other subject are dust, or so it seems.

Last month, we hosted a musician at our home as part of the informal Birdsong songwriting residency. He and I got to talking over dinner one night about the paralysis that comes from absorbing world events via the screen and how the impotence one feels in the face of it trickles down into every aspect of life, our creative lives in particular. We freeze in the act of creation, afraid that any output might seem frivolous or out of place against war’s stark realities of starvation, disfigurement, and death. We might feel that unless we speak directly about the real crisis of climate change and species loss, we should not be speaking at all. To go public with our feelings and fantasies in the form of art invites an imagined criticism that we are not doing enough to change this collective trajectory. And so we go silent. At least I have to some degree.

Since that conversation, I’ve been thinking about that silence and what I must do to break it.

A number of years ago, I went to see The Gloaming, a band from Ireland that performs mostly in Gaelic. That show remains one of the great performances in my lifetime of seeing live music—their interweaving of poetry and soundscape and skilled use of dynamics had the audience breathless at times, leaning forward to hear the faint whispers one second, followed by the piano played like a hammer dulcimer in the next. Their show carried a soft sorrow, unlike anything I’ve encountered before, which spoke to me of all the troubles, the rupture of language and religion, and the disconnection from ancient rhythms that the people of Ireland and the world over have experienced through all space and time. Somehow, their music evoked the rise and fall of everything dear.

And it was there, in the darkened Chan Center, somewhere at the top of the second set, that I had something of an enlightenment experience during which I understood music for the first time in my life. Which sounds odd coming from a lifetime of playing and watching music played live, but something in that performance shook loose in me the realization that music is as essential to human existence as breath. That we cannot live without it because it is the most powerful tool we have to alleviate suffering. Whether it performs as a song of joy, a lullaby, a lament, or a rhythmic chant, music has the power to lift us out of ourselves and into that which drives our existence forward—the mystery to which we all belong.

Like all enlightenment experiences, my writing on this cannot capture the fullness of the understanding, but it’s not my aim here to do so. I expect some of you reading have had similar realizations when encountering music, artwork, writing, dance performances, and so on. It is through our creative work that we speak to one another, open doorways to other possible worlds, commiserate in our wounds, and celebrate our triumphs. What I could hear in the music of The Gloaming was the troubles, yes, but also the sounds we make in response to them. Sounds that move us into a greater connection with one another.

What I said to my musician friend at the dinner table the other night was what I believe. If we are so privileged to be out of the fray of war and disaster, the best possible thing we can do is feed the world with light. And by that, I mean being as good as we can be to one another, making work that is bigger than our small selves, and always exploring the edges of the better world that is possible. Through all of human history, a lot of which involves suffering, humans have mustered it in themselves to make works that have stood to inform those who came after. If previous generations of artists had waited until the wars were over to produce work, we would have very little with which to understand ourselves now.

I don’t credit the creative work I do as “art” because it is not a profession I pursue, but it nevertheless is fundamental to my daily life. A kind of breath that explores possibilities, finds new avenues, plays with language and colour. I have not spoken (or sung) out loud much lately, but I have never stopped writing or working in the various ways in which I express the something bigger than myself I am always trying to reach. Perhaps this doesn’t serve the world in the ways I wish it could, but it does help me sustain a positive orientation towards working with others and making our human connections ever stronger.

Scrawled on a sticky note stuck above my desk is a quote by Shane Koyczan which reads “If your heart is broken, make art with the pieces.” This is an instruction I take seriously; my silence serves no one.

April recipe: Morning glory breakfast cake

I’ve been on a healthy eating kick lately, but I still want to eat cake. This Smitten Kitchen recipe pretty much fits my needs these days. Though I’m not sure I’d eat it for breakfast, it’s definitely an afternoon snack kind of affair over here.

Ingredients

• 1 cup grated apple (from 1 medium apple)

• 1 cup grated carrot (from 1 thick carrot)

• 1/2 cup very well-drained crushed pineapple or chopped fresh pineapple

• 1/3 cup shredded, unsweetened coconut Finely grated zest of 1 lemon

• 2/3 cup raw or granulated sugar

• 2/3 cup neutral oil, such as canola

• 2 large eggs

• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt

• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose or whole-wheat flour

• 2 tablespoons toasted pumpkin seeds (pepitas)

Instructions

1. Heat your oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Coat an 8-inch square baking pan with nonstick cooking spray.

3. In a large bowl, combine the apple, carrot, pineapple, coconut, lemon zest, sugar, and oil. Add eggs, and whisk to combine. Sprinkle spices, salt, baking powder, and baking soda over the batter and stir very well to combine. Add flour, and stir just until it disappears.

4. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Sprinkle pepitas over the cake.

5. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out batter-free. Let cool in the pan, then carefully cut into squares with a serrated knife.

6. The cake is very moist and a little crumbly. We find that it keeps best in the fridge. The cake will keep for 5 to 6 days, chilled.

In the studio

There are so many rabbit holes in the studio these days! I’ve been doing a 100-day project that involves making a small watercolour painting or ink drawing every day (yesterday was Day 50), reading a ton of textile theory which I’ll likely write about here soon, and most recently, learning a bit about bookbinding. It turns out the functional maker in me *loves* bookbinding almost as much as weaving.

I finished this watercolour sketchbook on the weekend to take with me on a period of residential Zen practice later this month. There are fourteen pages (28 if I paint on the back of each), one for each day I am staying at the meditation house. I love being able to custom-make small writing, drawing, or painting books specific to their purpose; this is the obsession of the moment.

Three things

1. Feed the Monster I think I’ve recommended this substack by B.A. Lampman before, but I wanted to bring it to your attention again, especially if you are a creative person who likes prompts and things to think about in your work. Feed the Monster now has a weekly offering called Taking Note, which includes ink drawings and journal prompts. I’ve linked right to the new workn so you can check it out easily, but also click around the rest of Feed the Monster for great artwork, creative insights, and inspiration.

2. Sonal Champsee has some advice for creatives doing their taxes, just in time for filing! (You should subscribe to get her great writing advice on a regular basis.)

3. The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard These are the first two novels in a series and I read both of them in January. I am now trying to be very patient in waiting for the 3rd and 4th books to be translated into English (Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer). I have only a vague idea of where this narrative is going, but so far there are a lot of characters and loosely intersecting storylines that all revolve around the emergence of a new star in the sky. Perhaps it’s all just an allegory for climate change, but I suspect it’s heading to a more supernatural/

   apocalyptic place than that. Fantastic writing, and lots to think about.

And finally

It’s been awhile. And I’m not kidding about not being able to wrap my head around writing. I’ve had terrible brain fog over the last few months, which may or may not be related to a possible thyroid situation I have going on (tests underway). In any case, I have missed putting out this newsletter so much. This connecting with other people through words thing ticks my boxes on some fundamental level, which I suppose is what keeps me returning to writing.

If you want to see more photos of my work and life, I am still posting on Instagram.

Thank you for inviting me into your inbox, as always!

Megan

For the month of September, I was diligent in my practice and started to get the vast map inside my mind into Scrivener (the manuscript application I use). Fortunately, I wasn’t sitting down to nothing; I had 16,000 words plus a significant amount of background writing from 2022. Reading it over fresh after a year away from it helped bolster my confidence. Some of the writing isn’t half bad! The book pitches sound professional! I can do this!

Engaging with the content again was a reminder of the way connections get made and then re-made over months of reading and paying attention to other things. Everything ultimately speaks to everything else; the question is what subjects take precedence over others in a finite number of pages. Though I always find writing a bit of a slog, I did manage to re-structure my book project and added several thousand words more to it in the first month back at the writing desk.

In October, my routine was disrupted by a trip to NYC, and then another trip to the interior of British Columbia. I kept up as many writing sessions as I could, while getting less and less out of them, continuing the pause on all non-writing creative work. But by the middle of the month, these other creative attentions were starting to nag at me. My fiddle, locked away in its case, wanted to be set free. The fabric project on my small loom cried out for one little repair so I could finish weaving the cloth. The bobbin on my spinning wheel just wanted for a couple of dedicated hours to get filled with finished yarn. I started to feel anxious about it all, which distracted me from writing further.

Last week, the feeling of missing out got to be too much, and I found myself re-tuning my fiddle, finishing my cloth, and plying my yarn, all within a couple of days. I finished sewing a jacket and paired a pattern with some fabric to start sewing a new tunic. I made some brush and ink sketches, dyed some fabric, and agreed to sing two songs on an album my husband is making. Basically, all that tamped down creative energy, exploded into a half a dozen (or more) new projects, and so for the last ten days I’ve done no writing at all.

I have always believed my “problem” as a writer, musician, and maker of functional textiles is that I’m too diversified to excel at anything. Because I don’t focus my time into a single pursuit, it takes me a long time to complete projects, and I don’t put the dedicated hours in to practice one craft to its highest standard. This results in not taking myself seriously, or being afraid to identify as a writer/musician/maker of things, for fear I will be seen as fraudulent because I don’t dedicate my unyielding attention to any one discipline.

For example, I hate it when other players ask me what kind of fiddle music I play. In the world of serious fiddle players, most people specialize in one or another kind of music (Irish, old-time, Cajun, blues, gypsy). But because I really only play music as a happenstance of my life (I was raised from toddlerhood with it), my tendency is to play with whoever comes along and whatever music interests me at the moment. I have no focus. I am not a great “fill-in-the-genre” fiddler. I am not obsessed with technics or performance. Therefore (in my mind) I am not a real musician at all.

At least I have played in bands and recorded albums. My ability to identify myself as a writer is even more fraught, because I am not “published,” therefore externally validated. Likewise, I do not sell my textiles, so I have not tested my handwork skills in the market of public valuation. You get the idea.

It’s an ongoing identity problem. On the one hand I believe I am not a real artist/writer/musician. On the other, as my recent writing experiment revealed, I cannot silence any of these creative parts of myself in order to focus on just one.

I have tried to manage these tensions over the years by engaging in time management strategies, dedicating specific weeks or days to particular creative pursuits, participating in creative accountability groups, and so on. Through all of this, I have learned some excellent approaches and found positive habits that really work for me:

• dedicated and routine studio hours

• breaking work into manageable chunks so that even when I only have 30 minutes I can make progress

• using music and other ritual to build mood containers when writing, and

• making detailed notes on projects in case there is a gap of weeks or months between sessions with them.

Some other making/breaking of habits I’ve been working with lately to create more space for my work include:

• saying no to myself and others, putting an end to overscheduling myself

• allowing my own work to be a priority

• removing social media apps from my phone to both remove distractions and make myself less vulnerable in the world, and

• engaging in regular therapy with a focus on self-determination.

These practices have wedged free a lot more external and internal space for me, opening up time where I didn’t have it before and giving me license to take different approaches to starting, sustaining, and finishing creative projects. What I keep learning in all of this is that my real “problem” is not that I am too diversified in my pursuits, but that I have a great predilection for setting up artificial constraints and boundaries which don’t further me in any way.

When I simply trust the flow of my life to carry me between ideas, projects, and finished outputs, it does all work out in the sense of overall progress and completion. When I get in my own way with restrictive rules or get overly caught up in how I want others to perceive me, I become inconsistent in output, frozen in indecision or fear. At the heart of all of this is the central lesson of non-attachment, which is another practice that I seem to be slow to learn (but that is a post for another day).

Because I think some of this discomfort comes from a sense that I do not progress in my work fast enough, or complete projects on a better timeline, I’m very curious to know out of all of this, what metrics others use to determine their success in creative practice. Is it number of hours spent? Finished work? Just the satisfaction of doing the thing? Let me know, because I’m in the pocket of breaking/making new habits at the moment and new insights into creative work are most welcome to me.

In the meantime I am halting the internal rule-making, to allow the work impulses to come as they do. “Following the heat” as my creative coach Jill Margo terms it. The trick is not turning this into a variation of “waiting for the muse to strike,” but instead making room for the whole spectrum of expression so I can better focus when I do sit down to the manuscript. It will be so much easier to write, if I don’t feel like I’m silencing other parts of my creative self in order to do it.

You can find it here.

And here’s an old recipe that got taken down with some content awhile back!

Sourdough Banana Bread

This is hands down the best banana bread recipe I’ve made, and the secret is in the order of ingredients. Yes, it definitely feels weird to add the oil last, but it changes the way the batter comes together and bakes to create a loaf that rises incredibly. It also has a crust with a bit of tooth which I like in a quick bread.

Ingredients

• Butter, for coating the pan

• 1.5-2 cups mashed overripe bananas

• 1 1/4 cups lightly packed brown sugar

• 1½ tsp pure vanilla extract

• 2 large eggs

• 1/2 cup bubbly, active 100% hydration sourdough starter

• 2 cups all-purpose flour

• 1½ tsp baking soda

• 1/4 tsp fine sea salt

• ½ cup neutral flavored oil (canola, corn etc)

• 1/4 cup milk

• 1/2 cup of chocolate chips or nuts if you like that kind of thing in a banana bread.

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 375 F.

2. Lightly coat a 9×5-inch loaf pan with butter.

3. Add the bananas, sugar, and vanilla to a bowl. Cream with a hand mixer for a minute until well emulsified.

4. Add the eggs, one at a time and mix well. Add the sourdough starter.

5. Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt together into the bowl with the banana mixture and then stir with a wooden spoon to incorporate.

6. Add the milk and oil and mix with the spoon until just combined. Don’t overdo it at this point because it makes the bread tough.

7. Add chocolate chips and/or nuts at this point.

8. Pour the batter into the prepared pan - bake for 65-75 minutes until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. At 55 minutes, put a piece of foil on top of the bread to stop it from browning too much.

9. Cool in the pan for 20 minutes before inverting onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Towards the end of the book, he lands on Terry Eagleton’s phrase (delivered during a lecture series that became a book of the same title) “Hope without optimism”. Optimism, Eagleton argues, is the naive belief that things will get better. Hope is the projection of self into a discernible future; even if that future is illusory, it provides a drive and an architecture for change. Optimism belongs to the elites, he says, hope is the political catalyst for the rest of us.

I have since downloaded Eagleton’s book to read his position in its entirely, because this discussion of hope is one I’ve I dipped into many times over my years of activism and community involvement. In particular, this week’s reading reminded me of the writings of eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen on this subject. In his book, Endgame (2006), Jensen argues against “hope” as a response to world problems, saying that, “Hope is what keeps us chained to the system….” He turns to the Pandora’s Box myth, recalling for the reader that hope was the only thing that did not fly out of the box when Pandora’s curiosity accidentally released the evils into the world. The traditional take on the story is that hope was the one thing given to humans to cope with the world’s terrible ills; our sole balm against all the unleashed sorrows. Jensen’s take is that hope is actually one of the evils, in that it serves those in power by keeping us as inert as the belief in Heaven does. He says “Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.” He says, “when hope dies, action begins.”

I have returned to this book excerpt (conveniently reproduced as the online essay Beyond Hope by Orion Magazine) many times over the years to puzzle through my own thoughts on the matter of hope in these times. I once strongly subscribed to many of Jensen’s views and he informed a lot of my personal philosophy at one time. But in the course of my activism, which included working alongside Jensen for a brief period, I came to the conclusion that he was either out-of-touch when it came to what could really be expected of people, or quite happy to see the creation of martyrs to further radical eco-action in defense of the planet. I strongly suspected the latter which is where I parted ways with him and others who exhorted activists to “do whatever it takes” while denouncing them for not holding tightly enough to the party line upon arrest for illegal activities.

I digress a bit, but it brings me back to what was problematic in Jensen’s notion that — that he has somehow transcended hope, and fear (and that’s what it took to really act in a manner that would save salmon and forests and ecosystems). Is it possible to completely unhook ourselves from basic human responses? Given the tenor of some of the arguments I saw him engage in, not to mention his dismissal of concerns people working with him had, it seems that this kind of posturing might put one outside of compassionate discourse entirely. Radical hopelessness (or the “courage of hopelessness” posited by Slavoj Žižek) is something I understand, but is it possible to have no hope and no fear and still be fully in touch with the breadth of one’s present emotional landscape?

Returning to Jensen’s writing now, I am struck by the opposition he sets up between hope and action. There is nothing in the definition of hope (“desire for a certain thing to happen”) that precludes taking steps towards that desired-for place. Jensen is correct that hope is not necessarily action-oriented, and it takes action to make change. But isn’t hope one of the orientations from which we derive vision? Optimism, no, as Eagleton underscores in his work, the belief that things will necessarily get better without doing anything at all is a position derived from complacency and a ton of privilege. It gets us nowhere. Not so hope, which is scrappier and requires that we do something about it.

Ray Bradbury was famously quoted as saying “Action is hope. There is no hope without action,” which in Horvat’s estimation, is all we have as we move on from the belief that our system will somehow save us from its worst excesses. “It is out of these defeats,” he says, “we must learn and build something different; a stronger movement. And so, the struggle goes on: from protests to general strikes, from refugee solidarity movements to cooperative markets. It is this hope without optimism that can carry us into the future, because it salvages what has passed not as something that has to be repeated, but as a potential that might lead in new directions and that can still — if we keep constantly in mind the lesson that there is no final defeat — change the present.”

The story of Pandora’s box is curious, for why should hope not fly out into the world and circulate among the sufferers? Why keep it inert, contained within the box, un-activated in some way? And why hope and not love, beauty, or meaning? These are also buoys against suffering. Hope is a very limited perspective to be sure, and in the story of Pandora it does speak to a void of action. Even so, I wouldn’t categorize it as an evil, and I do hope for a world unhooked from its current trajectory of species decline and climate crisis. What we enact towards changing our trajectory takes place within our own context and capacity, but surely we are fueled by visions drawn from the emotional complexity of our full selves.

Three (related) things

1. Poetry from the Future by Srećko Horvat (2019) is an engaging philosophical treatise on where we stand and the essential question of how advanced our apocalypse is. He is not optimistic, but does share a vision for a way in which we can work together in a world in which there are no longer any islands to which we may retreat.

2. At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hines (2023) is a recent work examining our place in these times. He explores the role of science in climate change and pandemics, how public policy aimed at tackling emergencies may be divorcing us from our natural ecosystems, and what clinging to modernity means for our future. One might not agree with all of Hines’ conclusions, but this is a well-thought out contribution to the apocalypse literature of our day.

3. Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton (2014) is an argument about personal and political orientation in a faltering system. This is classic Eagleton: full of connections and references, backed by a deep understanding of history and politics, and making a provocative argument in support of a different future than the one on offer.

And finally

I’m away at my (shared) cabin in the woods this week, something I would like to do more often as it helps me minimize life distractions and get down to writing. Now that everyone has left after the long weekend, the silence up here is astounding.

I’ve also recently deleted the Facebook app from my phone, which is giving me a different kind of respite. The older I get, the louder the world is, and my nervous system needs a break.

To put together a “go” bag is to ask yourself what sorts of disasters are most possible or plausible and in which of those you would be forced to leave your home rather than shelter in place. It is to analyze scenarios in which you might have to flee on foot or end up separated from your partner or pet. As you weigh out those threats, you might feel compelled to take on other household tasks, such as replacing old smoke detectors or cutting dry debris away from the side of the house. It’s an exercise in imaginative dread, is what I’m saying, which is probably why I put it off for so many years. (My last attempt at this chore resulted in a single knapsack partly filled with some granola bars, a whistle, and a pair of shoes, which languished in the back of our closet until I dredged it out recently.)

This time around, I really went at it. I got the list of government-recommended supplies, made some additions to it, and then systematically collected and ordered everything for two well-provisioned bags. Though I’m still missing a few items (gas masks, ibuprofen tablets), the bags are sufficiently complete to be put away for the time being.

What is in our go bags: first aid supplies, water, granola bars, cell phone chargers, work gloves, duct tape, sharpies, writing paper and pens, a week’s worth of meal rations each, nalgene bottles full of water, whistles, emergency blankets, radios, flashlights, batteries, copies of ID, photographs of each other, copies of insurance documents, a change of clothes and an extra pair of shoes each, and some cash. At the advice of our neighborhood security coordinator, I also packed a knitting project to keep my hands busy should we be stuck for hours in an evacuation center. Strapped to the outside of our very sturdy packs is a military-grade wool blanket.

It took so long to put all of that together, and yet when I look at this as a list, it seems naively insufficient. Of everything I packed, the item that upset me the most was the ziplock with sharpie pens, blank paper, tape, and photos of loved ones—collected together for the purpose of making a poster should you be looking for someone who has gone missing or has evacuated from a different location. When packaging those things, I was reminded of the thousands of missing person posters plastered all over New York after 9/11, when body parts were slow to be separated from the rubble and no one knew whether their loved ones had died or were perhaps in a hospital somewhere.

According to our neighbourhood security coordinator, having to use these go bags is much less likely than being required to shelter in place. This is something I am well-prepared for with my well-stocked canning pantry, not to mention all the analog crafts like weaving and spinning that take up the better part of my time outside of paid work. Reading MFK Fisher’s book How to Cook a Wolf recently, I realized that for many years I have lived in the manner of a wartime housewife, putting food by when it is inexpensive, buying extra of certain dry goods when they are on sale, and making sure we have enough clothing and other household items to last should there be shortages. I go through periods of paranoid stocking-up whenever there is a particularly bad fire season or global threat to grain distribution, and because of those times, I now have enough for not only ourselves in a protracted emergency, but for those who might come to our door.

How to Cook a Wolf was published in 1942, at the height of the Second World War. It is a work of both food philosophy and recipes, an attempt to inspire courage in the wartime housewife who faced rationing and shortages. In Fisher’s words, the book is her “streamlined answer to the pressing problem of how to exist the best possible way for the least amount of money,” which speaks deeply to my own goal of living my best possible life despite impossible times. Her prescription for wolfish times runs the gamut from using every last bone and scrap to make broths and juices to the penny-by-penny cost of a life-sustaining sludge to get one through the most impoverished periods (this is in the chapter titled How to be Cheerful When Starving). She tells us that “now of all times in history, we should be using our minds as well as our hearts in order to survive... to live gracefully if we live at all.”

In the chapter How Not to Be an Earthworm, Fisher turns her attention to the blackout requirements, which coincided with dinnertime during a greater part of the year. Here she explores the need to create an "emergency cupboard with shelf-stable foods that don’t require much in the way of cooking in case of fuel shortages. She lambastes government recommendations for tinned soups and soda crackers as both non-nutritious and poor in spirit, suggesting instead that one put by canned goods they would eat anyway (as well as some small luxury foods should they be available). According to Fisher, one does not require a hot meal three times per day, and so it’s a good idea to get used to constructing meals that do not require cooking for times when that isn’t possible. It is a question, she tells us, “of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.”

Fisher was an American, and so her disagreeable surprises are not nearly what they were for the citizens of Europe, and yet….. Reading her words eighty years later, I am struck by how much the climate crisis of today can be likened to the crisis of war. The fires, the floods, the spectre fleeing one’s home with only what can fit into a backpack. Over the last several months and years, we have seen an increase in the number of “events” that have thrown land and lives into an ever-more precarious place. Communities besieged with the terror of “air raids” with no shelters to flee to, a long emergency coming in from all directions.

Because Fisher had lived through WW1 as a small child, she does write with certainty that this second great calamity will come to an end, something that I’m not sure I can do writing inside of the current crisis. It does occur to me though that to survive this, we must start to think of ourselves as in the middle of a protracted war and operate accordingly, taking our cues from those who came before us to prepare for what could come (while hoping that it never does). The go bags are a nod to this, insufficient as they might be, as well as a chance to reflect on all that is important as we pack up the bits of our lives.

And finally….

You will notice that this newsletter is missing the recipe and recommendations it normally has - but fear not! I plan to distribute more writing throughout the month instead of saving it up for a single newsletter at the end. I am both working on a book, and toying with the idea of moving my more blog-ish content from Red Cedar over here, and so I’m experimenting with the format of how I produce (and you receive) my offerings.

I will not be writing at red-cedar.ca for the next little while to see how I feel about publishing more “personal” content here, but you can still find photo updates on my instagram @megan.elizabeth.adam - and you’ll be seeing a little bit more of me in your inbox!

Stay well out there, and stay tuned for more.

How could so many things have failed at once? Simple, really. Every single thing on this list has been in our sights to fix for months, if not years. The downstairs bathroom renovation was a priority project when we moved in seven years ago. We were told last September that roof replacement was imminent (but hoped to get “just one more year” out of it). The hot water tank hasn’t been insurable for some time and was on my list to replace this October. The dishwasher is just one in a long line of free second-hand appliances we got on the community bulletin board to save money. Ditto the washing machine.

I had a plan for working on things one at a time (downstairs bathroom first, then laundry room, then roof), but the appliances and squirrels had other designs on the timeline. Forces of nature and collapsing machinery are not predictable, nor controllable when it comes to their fail points. By putting off the inevitable on all fronts, we now find ourselves dealing with everything at once.

Experts tell me that we procrastinate, even on our most important tasks, because we don’t want to be inconvenienced or deal with unpleasantness. According to some research, procrastination is linked to disordered emotional regulation, a deeper inability to manage our moods around something with negative affect. We bargain against our future selves for an immediate payoff in the form of rest, or at least not having to deal with the thing we don’t want to deal with right now. According to researchers, the momentary relief we feel from putting something off is part of what creates habitual procrastination. Essentially, we are rewarded by a tiny dopamine hit when we feel relief, and this sets basic behaviourism in action. We chase these tiny chemical rewards even if the overall behaviour hurts us in the long run.

In the case of my house, a lot of that bargaining with my present and future selves arises from the actual cost of doing things. Who wants to borrow $30,000 to spend on a new roof? That has got to be the least fun use of cash ever. Much better to throw another dinner party or even book a trip to see friends in New York, instead of spending $800 on a dishwasher. These are the classic conundrums of adulting. To convince ourselves that our choices are the right ones, we engage in a lot of magical thinking. In our putting off of things, we rationalize a future in which we have more time, money, skills and self-motivation, even if we change nothing in the present to make that so.

The whole credit system we are enmeshed in is emblematic of this. I can acquire what I want or need now, on some premise that money will appear in the future. Perhaps I will pay this debt on my next paycheque, I tell myself, or the next one. But I can’t afford to do that because I need all the money from each pay to live on, and if something happens like an illness or job loss then I will become forever behind, secretly hoping for some magic money to come (like an inheritance from a long-lost relative). Similarly with the house repairs, I think “if only I could set aside the time to do this” without actually taking out my calendar and setting aside the time. In some fantastical version of my life, extra hours are generated during which I am not exhausted or behind on other projects, and I suddenly become inspired to do house renos and repairs.

On a meta level we see this play out to devastating consequences. I hope the scientists are wrong, and fantasize that technology will save us when it comes to climate change. I project a future in which the right political party wins and takes care of our social problems without investing my time for those in need in my closest community. I wish for a return to a time of greater connection with others, but refuse to put down my technology and engage more fulsomely in conversation. We want the better world, but we don’t want the short term pain of giving up anything to get there. We think that in the future we will act differently, or perhaps we tell ourselves there is nothing wrong to begin with, acting as bewildered as the people of Fort Mac when our houses burn to the ground in a literal tornado of fire. (According to a friend of mine, even after the 2016 disaster, most of the people he spoke with there in counselling sessions were still in denial about climate change).

This isn’t entirely our fault. To some degree, we are captured by a biology that is very present-oriented. As psychologist Dr. Hal Hershfield explains, “We really weren’t designed to think ahead into the further future because we needed to focus on providing for ourselves in the here and now.” His research shows that to some degree our future selves are more like strangers than parts of us - and that our brain actually responds as though by putting off our present problems, they become someone else’s problem (the future self being perceived as an other by the current self). When stressed out, we’re even less likely to make good future-oriented choices, particularly if we feel a threat to our self-esteem or overall well-being.

I don’t want to overlook here the fact that for many people, financial or time constraints really do require putting off non-priority items until they require more urgent attention. If you work two jobs, or can’t afford daycare, or live on a disability cheque, then things are going to get put off as you get further behind because there is no rescue from this system.

These are not the issues I face, however, as I work through a list of tasks over ten days that could have been handled with less crisis over the last few years. Instead of writing during this period, I have fixed my dishwasher and also ordered a new one, swapped out our smoke detectors (and installed one in an outbuilding where people sometimes stay), bought a new water heater, and fixed the upstairs toilet. Together, my husband and I have ripped out a bathroom and are halfway to reinstalling it, and we have learned to work better together on each issue as it arises, adding to our store of knowledge about each other in addition to the way our home is plumbed and wired.

If procrastination is about managing negative emotions, then it stands to reason we can create a positive emotional feedback loop to encourage better habits. I find that by considering only the next task (as opposed to the endless list of tasks) it’s easier to tackle that one thing. Once I’m moving in the direction of the bigger project, other tasks don’t seem as daunting. It’s also true that by celebrating our small project advances, my husband and I are energized to continue onto the next item on the list. Making a “date” with each other and setting aside specific times to tackle discreet project components also seems to help move us along.

I don’t know that there is a corollary between fixing our household procrastination/magical thinking problem and the bigger ones we face collectively, even if I do believe the roots are the same, and upheld by the same structural forces. I’m certainly not up to offering simplistic answers just to close off an essay. But I do sometimes wonder if the doom-saying of our current cultural moment is demotivational. If I can’t see a positive payoff, even for future me, how will I ever manage my negative emotions to act in the present? If I believe that it’s all a garbage-fire, or worse - a lost cause - why should I do anything different right now?

Despite having managed my emotions around a number of chores recently, I have still not dealt with the squirrels in the soffits. That’s mainly because most of the advice out there suggests killing them and I am having a difficult time with the negative valence of that. Sure, they are in the soffits (and probably the attic) but how much damage can they really be doing? And again, my magical-thinking brain gives me all sorts of reasons not to act in the present to save my house in the future. Perhaps you can help me here - got any advice on the squirrels? Or perhaps you have thoughts on the tasks, big and small, you just can’t face. How do we break this cycle personally and collectively?

August recipe: Chocolate zucchini cake (with icing)

According to the people I served this to at an early August party, this is the best chocolate zucchini cake ever. I got only the smallest piece before it was eaten up, but fortunately there are still giant summer zukes everywhere and I plan to make this again before the end of the season.

Cake

• 2 cups sugar

• 1 cup buttermilk

• 2 eggs

• 1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

• 2 cups flour

• 3/4 cup unsweetened Dutch cocoa powder

• 2 teaspoons baking soda

• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder

• 3/4 teaspoon salt

• 3 cups shredded zucchini about 2 small or 1 large

Icing

• 1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream

• 2/3 cup powdered sugar

• 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Instructions

Cake

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease a 9 x 13 pan.

• Whisk together sugar, buttermilk, eggs, and vanilla in a large bowl.

• To the same bowl add flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt, and baking powder and stir until combined. Stir in zucchini.

• Spread into prepared pan and bake for 50 minutes (or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with moist crumbs).

Icing

• Combine cream, sugar, cocoa, and vanilla in a stand mixer. (Or use a hand mixer for this)

• Beat on low until incorporated, then beat on high until stiff peaks form.

• Spread over cooled cake and serve.

In the workshop

I have not had much time in the textile studio over the summer, but in addition to the flax project I wrote about last month I’m working with my “fibre pod” on a local wool project. Pictured above is the preparation of dyed wool for spinning. This involves a lot of teasing the felted locks with a comb and then using a drum carder to create roving. Once this part is complete, I’ll spin the roving into a worsted-weight, 2-ply yarn which will be knit into sweater to be gifted back to the farmer who raised the sheep this wool originated from.

Three things

• Audio: For the Birds (also known as the Birdsong Project) | Started during the pandemic, more than 220 musicians have contributed tracks to this multi-volume work celebrating birds. Poetry, music, soundscapes. All donations and purchases of this project are received gratefully by the Audubon Society.

• The Bear God, Revisited | In this essay published by Orion Magazine in 2020, Emily Sekine meditates on Japanese stories and disaster planning, and what the national approach post-Fukushima might teach us about building a culture of resilience in the face of disaster.

• After this summer of fire, you might be thinking about putting together a Go Bag (or reviewing the one you’ve got) I’ve been using this BC government checklist to put together new ones for our household. Besides the pen and notepad, I also include a sharpie and blank paper, plus some duct tape and a small sewing kit, reading material and a knitting project for the interminable waits at evacuation centres.

And finally….

I am putting together these last words during the August blue moon which I cannot see for the clouds tonight. Grateful for the rain of the last couple of days, our temperatures are definitely shifting towards the Equinox which is only three weeks away.

I’ve made a couple of changes on my Substack page, so if you go there to like this post you might notice the new layout and some recommended reading on the right-hand side of the page. Some of those are subscription reads, some are free, but they are the Substacks I read most avidly these days.

If you want to hear more from me in general, find my blog at Red Cedar or follow me on Instagram @megan.elizabeth.adam - otherwise, I’ll see you here next time.

When it has been hot and dry here for too many days in a row, our island community enters the stillness of “shutdown”. This is a designation made by the fire department that requires the downing of any tool that could create a spark when the risk of fire is extreme. Activities that are limited or prohibited include lawn mowing, land clearing, chain-sawing, outdoor welding, explosive use, and so on.1 In other words, it gets very quiet here once the heat comes on in full force.

While shutdown is a drag for workers who rely on these activities to make a living, it also brings a restorative peace one rarely encounters in the machine-world. Only when the machines go quiet do we realize how much their volume dictates our own, an ever-amplified world drowning out the scrape of branches against one another, and the sh-rring of hummingbird wings. Right now it is so quiet I can distinguish subtle sounds from one another, waves lapping at the rock 100 feet away, soft air moving the fir branches just enough to make them audible. I can also hear my neighbour collapsing his ladder, a car approaching from the direction of the village… a scooter goes by; a squirrel chitters an admonishment.

This year, shutdown was declared while I was away at a silent meditation retreat in the mountains. When I returned home, it took me a couple of days to register that my neighbourhood was quieter than when I left and why that would be. As much as I appreciate the hush that extended the silence of my retreat, extreme fire risk puts me on edge. In the last few years, supercharged fire and smoke patterns have changed the way I spend my summers. I no longer wish to be away for long stretches of time in case we need to wet down our roof or otherwise participate in community fire planning. I organize my trips to the Interior in spring or fall when it’s less likely to be on fire. I recently cancelled a trip to the west side of Vancouver Island because highway instability (due to a recent forest fire) has made me question the ease of getting home in an emergency.

Smoke has been minimal on the coast so far this year, and the evening ocean swims have been divine. On the surface, it’s an idyllic summer, one in which it’s easy to forget that BC has now surpassed 2018 for the worst fire season on record with over 14,000 square kilometres burned. In the mountains where I was just on retreat, the hot afternoon thermal winds reminded me daily of how quickly a spark would take off were it to land in the brittle-dry forest all around.

************************************

Between writing the above and sending this out today, shutdown has ended (perhaps briefly - we only had one day of rain and have returned to drought conditions since), and the chainsaws are back in full force. We really leap to the machines as soon as we can! But what I wanted to close with remains the same: Shutdown offers us more than a fire safety measure if we listen into the silence which asks us to examine how we can survive with fewer machines, in a quieter world, with a focus on restoration rather than growth. It asks us to listen the hummingbird, the fir trees, and the neighbour next door whose windows are open to the sea against the hottest days on this earth.

This is the flax plot I grew with some friends starting in April, just before mid-July harvest.

In the workshop

Not really in the workshop but at a farm up the road, my local fibre pod rippled (threshed) our flax yesterday. This process involves removing the seed heads from the stalk. We can now move onto the next stage in processing our flax into linen. Although we don’t have dedicated flax processing equipment, we made do by clamping some large wool combs to sawhorses and made short work of the seed and chaff by pulling the stalks through the offset tines of the combs.

Three things

1. The new book Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast by John Vaillant is really worth a read if you want to learn about climate change, the oil industry, and the new reality of fire as told through the story of the Fort McMurray fire in 2016 (still the costliest disaster in Canadian history). Superbly written, gripping from start to finish, and essential reading if you want to understand why fires today aren’t acting the way they used to, and what the consequences of that might be.

2. Wild Mind Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction by David Hinton: this beautifully-written short work weaves poetry, philosophy, and history together in an examination of the need to reconnect our to our deeper, wild earth relations, if we are to stop their ongoing destruction. A book of dharma wisdom about how to live more ethically in these times.

3. The article What to do With Climate Emotions by Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker couldn’t have come at a more opportune time as I listened to co-workers back east recount climate horror stories impacting them this summer (tornados and floods). How do we cope emotionally with the fact we are really in this thing right now? There is no straight answer for sure, but Tolentino offers a thoughtful essay as one response.

And finally…..

Despite my hope to return to this newsletter in February, life turned out to be a series of shocking events this spring, and I am now back in therapy. Happy to say, things are more stable again and I’m doing some internal work that has long needed tending to. I’m also learning to draw, spin wool, and grow/process flax into linen which are all healing endeavours in one way or another.

I can still be found at my blog Red Cedar and Instagram in between sporadic newsletter episodes here. Be well people! These are weird times.

It was a year of quitting things—a job assignment, my union leadership role—and taking on projects I did not exactly choose. A year when under the duress of job pressures and illnesses I had to explore my values and priorities as a part of my survival. I got right up against the edge of a breakdown, but managed to pull myself back before jumping headlong into the swift moving river below. I am thankful for the guardrails of my life which allowed me to make the necessary choices to step back when I did.

As a result, I met the new year without much of a plan and no big resolutions. I did not rush back to the gym in an attempt to recapture the strength I’ve lost since illness in November derailed my weight lifting. I did not promise myself so many hours of writing per week, or to finish the book draft I abandoned last year. I did not renew a daily schedule which prescribed all the hours in my days. I didn’t even declare a number of books in the annual Goodreads book challenge.

I don’t think I’m alone in this approach to 2023. The last couple of years have exposed just how unknowable the near-future of our lives becomes in sustained social crisis. Between cancelled gatherings due to illness and lockdown, labour shortages which have left many without medical care and other essential services, and inflated food prices, we can barely plan the next meal let alone the next twelve months.

We know the worst may still be arriving as we look towards Ukraine or the twin-edged sword of the mental health/opioid crisis unfolding in our communities. Climate change disasters close to home kill humans and animals, shred our infrastructure, and leave us standing on the threshold of a world we no longer recognize. On a personal level, a single accident can render our former life opaque in an instant.

At the outset of the pandemic, I found myself abiding abrupt changes to plans and schedules, and adapted my life accordingly with some ease. Admittedly, I was so over-scheduled until that point that letting go of many engagements was a relief. But I also felt my Zen study and practice were a crucial component to my equanimity. In particular, I thought a lot about “beginner’s mind”, a concept popularized in North America by Soto Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki.

The beginner’s mind calls on us to not-know, to be liberated from the known. When we come to the world as an expert, we have expectations to outcomes that are very specific. When we come as a novice, we are open to many plans and possibilities. Likewise, embracing a state of not-knowing (not predicting what is going to happen next) we are liberated from our attachment to future outcomes, and called on to live in the present circumstance in front of us.

Easier said than done in most areas of our lives, but because the early days of the pandemic were unprecedented in my corner of the world, I found it possible to stay with the beginner’s mind in those first months as I carried out my altered daily routines.

As the pandemic wore on, however, that ability to roll with things and remain open decreased, as I began developing expectations around what would happen (or not happen) next. Like everyone else, I became an “expert” on viruses and medical systems, and that (faux) expertise shackled me to a particular set of desires and frustrations about the roll-out of vaccines and lifting of lockdowns. I wasn’t alone in this. It seems as a culture we have entered 2023 quicker to anger and distrust, so sure are we of the answers, so gratified by outrage. The self-appointed pundits of our culture demonstrate on the nightly news that the more we “know”, the angrier we are allowed to be.

Now, I don’t know about you, but coming out of a pretty rough year it’s clear to me that living with frayed emotions, frustrations, and anger does not serve me or my community. It does not serve the planet. And so 2023 is my year of taking a step back from all the knowing, planning, projecting, and deciding. Instead, this is my year of “making do,” which calls on me to figure out what I can do with what I have, to persevere without blaming others when times are unexpectedly challenging, and to look at every situation or problem as having many potential outcomes. This is an orientation I hope will not only kick me out of my 2022 stress and anxiety hangover, but also guide me to greater acceptance in a churning world.

I don’t know if 2023 is going to be an answer year for me, but I am dedicated to the questions. I take as a guide these words of the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Maybe these words resonate for you as well. What are the questions we must learn to love? How do we know when we have lived into the answers? Perhaps it just means new questions arise. And so we are always beginners as we stumble along.

Things are still not back to normal in the world of performance, but we do have opera again! One fun February thing was taking in the Vancouver Opera Society presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

February recipe: Spiced cashews

I discovered this as part of a soup recipe recently and now it goes on everything: lentil soup, salad, stir-frys - everything. It is the ultimate salty/sweet/hot/crunchy thing that amps up whatever you put it on.

• 1 tablespoon coconut oil

• 3/4 cup cashews

• 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds

• 2 tablespoons sesame seeds

• 1 teaspoon ground coriander

• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds

• 1 teaspoon fennel seeds

• 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (optional)

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper 

• 1 tsp. raw sugar

In a skillet over medium-low heat, add oil, cashews, and pumpkin seeds. Toast, stirring constantly (seeds and nuts burn quickly if left unattended), until cashews are lightly golden, 6 to 8 minutes. Add in all remaining ingredients and stir for another 2 minutes. Stores well for weeks in a sealed jar.

In the workshop

Many years ago I made myself a envelope-style pouch out of heavy cotton canvas to carry around my small cross stitch projects in. At the time I did not know how to use a sewing machine and was also terrible at hand sewing, and yet I still managed to use that project bag for twenty years. The cloth was coffee-stained and frayed at the edges when I finally picked it apart last month.

Now I am turning it into a new project bag, having scoured and dyed the fabric with dried dhalias from my garden and Eastern brazilwood. The embroidery thread I’m using for embellishment is also naturally dyed with madder/marigold and myrobalan/indigo.

My embroidery is as unpolished as it gets, but I am enjoying this small project and all its “making do” energy right now.

Three things

1. There are a lot of Substack newsletters out there, and I only pay for a few (maybe, four?) One of those is Human Stuff by Lisa Olivera, specifically because I appreciate her monthly reflection guide. A lot of her content is free and worth a read - she is a thoughtful and incisive writer - but I’m in it for the guided questions at the start of each month. A little prompting to help me write and think when I don’t know where to start on the page.

2. Everyone knows Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work Braiding Sweetgrass (and if you don’t, go read it right now). Earlier this month, David Marchese published his interview with her in the New York Times magazine titled You don’t have to be complicit in our culture of destruction, which offers us more of Robin’s insightful words. Highly recommend.

3. One of the best things I listened to this month was Krista Tippet interviewing Nic Offerman on the podcast On Being. Offerman talks about the power of making things by hand, Wendell Berry, and ways that we reconcile modern life when we know we weren’t meant to live this way. Not surprising that a conversation between these two people would be entertaining and engaging.

And finally….

Yes, this is supposedly a monthly newsletter but has been intermittent since everything fell apart last year. I’m fine with it if you are.

But I do miss this newsletter as a focal point of my months so we’ll see what happens next. Will it become monthly again? Will it stick to any regular schedule? We’re living the questions here so only time will tell.

If you want to hear more from me in general, find my blog at Red Cedar or follow me on Instagram @megan.elizabeth.adam - otherwise, I’ll see you here again soon!

I was recently asked to speak at a memorial service for someone killed by a vehicle while riding their bike on some errands. I did not know this person, but her family found me on the internet and asked if I would come and give spiritual remarks from a Buddhist or meditation tradition and I agreed. I am an “official” Zen Buddhist after all, having taken lay vows six years ago, so it’s not completely outside my wheelhouse to speak about the Dharma or attend to matters of death.

With the decline in organized religion, there is such a gap in ritual in the big events of life and death. When it comes to marriage, the civil system at least provides an inexpensive officiant, but there is no analogue for a funeral unless one pays a private funeral home for this service. And it’s a shame because memorial services in which no one gives overarching remarks or a eulogy have a tendency to feel a bit hollow, uncontained. In my years of Zen practice I’ve come to appreciate how much ritual provides the necessary container for supported experience, spiritual or otherwise.

Because the death was sudden, and the person was much-loved, the memorial service was tearful with many heartfelt words spoken by family and friends. What follows is an edited version of the words I shared at the memorial, for just as it is difficult to hold the loss of life without dwelling on grief, it can be as sorrowful to look out on our current social and environmental landscape and not think about our suffering planet.

To be alive is to encounter suffering. This is the first of the four noble truths - the essence of the Buddha’s teachings. We live in a world designed to turn us away from that suffering through the consumption of things. Digital media, gadgets, overseas vacations, video games, and so on. And yet the suffering persists both around us and inside of us. Even if we are temporarily relieved from it, it hangs around on the periphery, a bit of nag reminding us that all is not well. 

This nagging feeling is like an itch. Sometimes when we meditate with others, everyone sitting very still in the meditation hall, we might get a terrible itch somewhere that is hard to reach. There is no way to scratch it without making a big movement which would disturb everyone around us, not mention alerting our teacher to the fact we are not in concentrated meditation. So we try to put the itch out of our mind, by focusing on our breathing, willing it to go away, ignoring it. But as anyone who sits on the cushion long enough knows, ignoring the itch rarely works. In fact, it often becomes more persistent the harder we try to banish it and then we are no longer meditating but feeling tortured instead. If you have been there, you know an itch can become an all-consuming enterprise for the mind.

What I find more useful is to spend a few moments focusing on the itch instead. That is, giving the itch all of my attention when it arises. Allowing it to blossom into even painful feelings, burning into my skin for the moments I give it. By some mechanism, this works. Focusing on the itch releases it much more quickly than attempting to ignore it. By focusing I don’t mean clinging, it’s really about accepting the existence of the itch as part of my current state of being.

The first noble truth is really about that. About bringing awareness to our suffering, and accepting the full experience rather than trying to shove it into a corner and forget about it. We cannot problem solve from a state of ignorance, nor can we reach out to our community of support from a place of aversion. Without accepting the difficult feelings and moments, we are trapped and alone. Modern trauma research shows that to ignore our difficult experiences is simply to delay our reaction to them, creating further emotional separation from others and even from ourselves. When we instead open in our suffering to others, we not only lessen our own pain but make a bridge of connection so that others may do the same. 

This is the basis for the second noble truth, which is that our suffering arises from the belief we are separate from one another and from the world itself.  In one of my favourite teachings on the nature of death, Shunryu Suzuki talks about a visit  to Yosemite National Park in the sixties where he encountered some very big waterfalls. He describes watching the water come down from a distance, and how it appears as a “curtain thrown from the top of the mountain”. 

He says

It does not seem to come down swiftly, as you might expect; it seems to come down very slowly because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams….. And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time… for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling… [but also] Only when separated into many drops can it begin to have or to express some feeling…. Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called “mind-only,” … or “big mind.” After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life. When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! 

Suzuki was someone who had great understanding, and in this teaching he shares that our lives can be seen as part of a greater whole, a flowing river that separates and then returns once more to the great body of water, eventually becoming the oceans around us and the water we drink. In his example, he takes us from the second to the third noble truth, which is that a peaceful mind is a possibility in our lifetime, something achievable by us drops of water even as we hurtle through the space and time of our lives. 

That’s easier said than done though. Especially when we are right in the middle of the strong feelings, like grief, fury, and outrage. It feels like these sufferings are out of our control, and we live in a culture that reinforces that through institutional messages, media manipulation, and the stories we tell each other. It takes a lot to find a different framework of understanding, a lifetime of dedicated practice.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Humpback whales. They have been very present inside the Georgia Straight and on the west coast of Vancouver Island this fall. I have heard many beautiful stories about them and have also seen them myself a few times. 

A few weeks ago, I was traveling from my small island to the big island, when a group of whales circled our ferry and everyone crowded onto the deck to watch the five or six Humpbacks (one of them a calf) swimming on both sides of the ferry, breaching and blowing. While I wouldn’t say they were circling the boat, they did seem to be escorting it. The captain shut the engines down entirely to avoid striking a whale that might cross over the front of the bow. It was difficult to tell exactly what the whales were doing, were they hunting? playing? But they had an awareness of us humans watching them, escorting their early morning fellow travelers on the boat. 

Some people took out their phones, others just stood and watched while the kids ran up to the sundeck to get another view without adult bodies in the way, and for about fifteen minutes we floated, engineless, while the whales swam back and forth. Eventually, by some cue, they all headed off together, leaving us behind to resume our trip.

It was one of those moments, where time slows and people get out of themselves and connect, united in a moment of awe. Like viewing an eclipse from a park in the middle of a large city and talking to strangers in the dark, the separation between us thinned. People came out and chatted with each other; no one complained they were going to be late. The sight of the whales brought a pure joy out of people that they shared, divisions and isolation temporarily forgotten

We are so lucky to have this gift of whales returning to our waters. And not only humpback whales, but minkes, transient orcas, right whales, sea lions, seals, and sea otters. They bless us with their presence after nearly being extirpated not so long ago. Growing up on Vancouver Island in the seventies, we took the ferry to mainland often but rarely saw a whale, now we encounter them on a regular basis.

The reason for that is simple. From the late fifties to the late sixties, Canada stopped a number of behaviours targeting marine mammals. We stopped killing sea lions and seals as nuisance animals, we ended our participation in the international whaling fleets. We closed our whaling stations and banned the sale of whale products from the commercial fishery and hunt. We are lucky this was done before the very end of these animals, and it has taken more than fifty years for them to return in the numbers we know them now, which are near-historic for some of these species. 

When we consider the turn-around, it’s quite remarkable. That not so long ago, in the lifetimes of many of us, we collectively changed the way we saw these marine mammals. We went from seeing the humpback whale as a menace and a commercial product, to something quite different indeed. A source of joy. A blessing. We have welcomed them back to their rightful home in our shared waters and they seem to want to communicate with us again. 

The humpback whales around Vancouver Island are proof we can encounter the world differently than we currently do, of our capacity for transformation. That through a series of right actions we not only changed the laws, but our whole understanding of these creatures and our relationship to them. They are a reminder that the world as we see it, is just that: the world as we see it. We are fortunate that the world is not limited to our understanding. 

Even when our view of reality is clouded, as it is for us most of the time, the practices of right living transform us, and our relationship to everything else. This is the fourth noble truth, and one we can learn about through skillful practices in our lifetime. While we may never fully realize the end of suffering, we can still practice wise understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, concentration, and mindfulness. Each of these practices help us get through life with more skill and ease, creating a buffer against the worst of our suffering.  

The moment we are born and leave the great river we are challenged by the presence of feeling, feelings that occlude the reality of our life. We are restless without understanding we have already arrived at our true home, we are anxious or bereft without grasping that everything we need is within and around us. While it sounds simple, we know it is not. Only through practices that open us to each other and our greater world, do we find our way through.

October recipe: Walnut Pesto

Now that basil season has ended, walnut pesto should be in our your quick recipes list for fall and winter pasta dinners. Simple, satisfying, and incredibly delicious!

• 1 cup walnuts

• ⅓ cup lightly packed flat-leaf parsley

• 2 cloves garlic, diced

• 3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese (plus more for serving)

• ½ cup olive oil

• ½ teaspoon salt

• ¼ teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper

In a food processor or blender, pulse the walnuts, parsley, garlic, Parmesan, oil, salt, and pepper to a coarse puree. Serve over fresh pasta with more parmesan.

In the workshop

Painting is not within my skillsets, and yet I’ve been having such fun experimenting with paints made from natural dyes, tannins, and minerals (like iron) these last few weeks. I’m taking an online workshop through Maiwa School of Textiles which has given me a whole set of new techniques and skills to work with. I have two more weeks of coursework before the end and lots of ideas to work with over the winter.

Three things

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Ilness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture | Gabor Maté’s latest offering to the world explores attachment and authenticity, auto-immunity and stress, and the ways in which our society sets us up for illness—personal and global. As always he is compelling, and well-researched, his work giving us a path to healing if we are willing to take it.

Burn Wild | Seventeen years after the Earth Liberation Front arrests in the United States, some of those indicted speak for the first time on record in this podcast which explores the question, “how far is too far when the planet is on fire?” An 8-part series by the BBC.

The Death Artist | A long read by Maggie Donahue about how one artist works with death, and the importance of bringing death and its objects into our everyday lives to get more comfortable with it individually and as a culture.

And finally….

This month’s writing is a bit more like a dharma talk than normal and I expect some of you are wondering what’s up with that. Sometimes I get asked to delivery Buddhist-y words at things because I am a Zen practitioner and took vows in the Soto Zen tradition several years ago. I have no “official” standing or even true understanding except that which I’ve experienced through my own practice, and yet I think it’s helpful to offer words when asked given the lack of death ritual in our culture these days. More essays on the (not) end of the world coming soon!

If you want to hear more from me in general, find my blog at Red Cedar or follow me on Instagram @megan.elizabeth.adam - otherwise, I’ll see you here again next month.

Those of you who have been around for awhile know this is the space where I write my monthly essay about some aspect of our changing world, or how we might tend to one another in a time that seems impossible. Sometimes I write about objects and our weird attachments to them, or about meditation practice, or my conversations with trees.

But after two years of being very careful and almost never leaving my small island community, I threw caution to the wind on the Easter long weekend and went to a restaurant in a nearby city. At least that’s what I think lead to a nasty case of Covid-19 which left me in bed for most of last week, unable to do much more than knit a sock while watching television. I did not get the “just sniffles” version, nor did I get the “terrible fever for days” type. Instead I was somewhere in the middle, floating in a lethargic sea with aches and congestion, marathon-watching television and catching up on my Reddit-reading. It was not particularly conducive to productive writing time.

During the downtime, however, I did manage to finish re-reading Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books, first published in 1993 and 1998. In the anarchist circles I used to travel, these two novels–Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents–were passed around as handbooks to the future. It’s been more than twenty years since I last put my hands on a copy of either of them, but because I’ve been writing about dystopian literature (among other subjects) lately, I decided it was time for a revisit of these classics.

Butler, who died prematurely in 2006, was a sci-fi and speculative fiction writer who explored social issues through her work. In the Earthseed novels she projects a world in which the US has broken down into walled states warring with each other for resources. Life is expendable, slavery has re-emerged, and the economy on offer is one of company towns offering protection in exchange for indentured labour. It is here we meet our protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, daughter of a Baptist minister who serves their gated community in Robledo, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Though she is motherless, Olamina carries a trait inherited through her mother’s addiction to a prescription drug–the condition of "hyperempathy", which is treated as a shameful disability in a society rife with suffering. Carriers of this condition (known later in the books as Sharers) share pain with any living human they see. When her community is burned to the ground by looters, seventeen-year-old Olamina barely escapes with her life, later coming to learn that almost everyone she grew up around has died in the attack.

Opening in the year 2024, Parable of the Sower documents the two years leading up to this moment, and the subsequent flight from Southern California, through the journals of Olamina. Not only is she a Sharer, but she has other visionary gifts and receives the poetic wisdom of a new religion, Earthseed, which she chronicles in her journal along with the tale of her trek on the highway heading North. Earthseed is a metaphoric name premised on the life of plant seeds, which may be transplanted all over the earth (and possibly beyond) to grow through adaptation in their environment. “God is change,” Olamina writes in her religious tract of the present and future, leaving behind the past as she travels through ruined landscapes and gathers disciples to build her first Earthseed community.

In the second novel, Parable of the Talents, we are witness to the rise of the Earthseed community Acorn, tucked far off the road in Mendocino County. The US is still in turmoil, climate change wreaks havoc on the landscape, and fascism gains a foothold under the leadership of the Christian America party. This book contains all the torture, child-theft and sex-slavery one might imagine in such a world, but it is not without hope as Butler’s characters save others, resist, fight back, and eventually break free of one another to disperse the Earthseed message. Butler’s characters are not pacifists, but because many of them are Sharers (pain bestowed on another impacts the Sharer with equal force), violence is only ever used as a last resort.

Butler’s books are a departure from the dystopias of the mid-twentieth century, and a harbinger of works like The Hunger Games which came more than two decades later. Sure, the future is bleak, but survival and compassion co-exist, and in fact are co-dependent. They must be fought for together. Authoritarianism might rise, but it is not inevitable it will stand, no matter the technology that reinforces rule and ownership. The key to achieving anything beyond the most meagre definition of life is to accept that all is change. Rather than becoming weighed down out of fear and a misguided sense of what it means to be “secure”, characters must again and again choose their freedom by discarding spiritual, intellectual and physical shackles that would otherwise hold them back.

When I read these books in the late nineties, twenty-something me was deep in the throes of organizing protests in the belief we could arrest the onslaught of global capital on our homes, forests, and agricultural autonomy. From my early twenties and for many years onwards, I worked alongside fellow travellers to make a different world than the one on offer–we marched and sat in trees, organized street parties, and held earnest conferences in community centres. The nineteen-nineties, you might remember, was known in scientific-environmental circles as “the turn-around decade” in which the decisions made would be the “most important in the history of civilization,” given recognition of the growing environmental crisis and its impact on every corner of the earth.*

During these times I travelled often through Oregon and Northern California, teaching computer security at activist gatherings and hanging out on the edges of intentional communities that looked and sounded a lot like the fictional Earthseed community Acorn. Even though these books start two years in the future from now, reading them is like stepping into a past in which it still felt like there was time to change things before they got out of hand. Butler didn’t offer us these novels from a place of hope, but as a warning, one that many people on the margins felt at the time of their publication. Police violence, environmental racism, and a kind of urban fatalism were thick in the air in the United States, and she wanted to bring us to their (ugly) logical conclusion. But she also believed that it was on the margins a new world would be won through all the tactics available to those who found the hope to keep fighting for their dignity and right to exist.

Butler’s vision, particularly in her depiction of a crumbling Southern California and collapse of civil society all over, feels remarkably accurate. And yet there is something dated about the work. The solutions her characters head towards seem too much like those of another generation, particularly Olamina’s push for interstellar colonization, and the promise of science as saviour. Perhaps also, they reflect a hope which seems naive now that we are thirty years since the first of these books was published, twenty-plus years out of the turn-around decade that did not deliver what the future needed. On the other hand, Butler accurately depicts the world of political, religious, and social polarization we currently grapple with. We can sense that the divide between the world she wrote about and the one we are living is a thin one.

Reading abut the rise of Olamina’s Acorn community now gives me a pang of nostalgia for the cabins in the hills of Humboldt County that I visited often on my travels South. I read part of Parable of the Sower in a big claw-foot bathtub set against the window of a living room in one of those homes. I remember looking out across the valley as I soaked and read, watching the occasional DEA helicopter fly over looking for illegal marijuana grow operations, while listening to my friends making a big group dinner in the kitchen. Reading Butler makes me long for all of it, including a world in which the enemy was clearly delineated and survival seemed more plausible. Her storytelling points us to the margins where we might find the new world growing. The seeds that catch in the cracks will break through to reinvention, bringing new possibilities for life to continue after all. More than anything Butler reminds me that to survive, we need stories of imagination and hope, and a clear sense of direction to carry us home.

* http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/334/515

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April recipe: Habitant Soup

I was becoming symptomatic with Covid when I returned home from Easter weekend with a ham bone from our Good Friday dinner, but before I got too sick I managed to make and can a double-batch of this soup. This is a Bernardin canning classic; it can be eaten directly from the stove, or pressure-canned for shelf storage (a good source of go-to protein). I put 9 jars in my pantry, and had soup for the week leftover in the fridge.

Ingredients

• 16 oz (454 g) dried split peas

• 8 cups (2000 ml) water

• 1-1/2 cups (375 ml) chopped carrots

• 1 cup (250 ml) chopped onion

• 1 cup (250 ml) diced cooked ham

• 1 bay leaf

• Salt & pepper

Directions

• Combine dried peas and water in large stainless steel saucepan. Bring to a boil; reduce heat, cover and boil gently until peas are soft, about 1 hour. If desired, puree mixture in food processor and return to saucepan.

• Add carrots, onion, ham and bay leaf; boil gently 30 minutes. If soup is very thick, thin with boiling water.

• Ladle hot prepared soup into a hot jar to within 1 inch (2.5 cm) of top rim (head space).

• Using nonmetallic utensil, remove air bubbles. Wipe jar rim removing any stickiness. Centre hot sealing discs on clean jar rim. Screw band down until resistance is met, then increase to fingertip tight. Return filled jar to rack in canner. Repeat for remaining soup. If stacking jars, place a second rack between layers of jars.

• When pressure canner is full, adjust water to level as directed by canner manufacturer. Lock canner lid in place and follow manufacturer’s heating instructions. Vent canner–allow steam to escape steadily–for 10 minutes; close vent.

• When canner reaches the pressure appropriate for your altitude* and type of pressure canner, begin counting processing time. Process – heat filled jars – in pressure canner: 500 ml jars – 75 minutes; 1 L jars – 90 minutes at 10 lb pressure.

• When processing time is complete turn off heat. Allow canner to stand undisturbed until pressure drops to zero. Wait 2 minutes, and then remove cover, tilting it away from your face. Remove jars without tilting. Cool upright, undisturbed 24 hours. Remove screw bands and check seals before storage.

In the workshop

As my writing picks up, my weaving drops off, but I have some tea towels on the loom that I’m weaving off one pick at a time. I am very close to a milestone subscriber number, and once I hit that (likely in May) I’ll be doing a draw for one of these towels and a book from my collection of end-times reads. If you already subscribe to this newsletter, you are automatically entered in the draw. Otherwise, click the button below to ensure you are entered.

Subscribe now

Three things

1. After the Apocalypse: There are a number of books out there with the same title, but I’m recommending the pandemic-era missive by philosopher Srećko Horvat, published a year ago. A highly readable text, Horvat invites us to explore apocalypse as revelation (rather than ending) through a series of chapters that read as stand-alone essays. He argues for wholescale system change, making the case that our alternatives are no longer socialism or barbarism – they are a radical reinvention of the world, or mass extinction. Favourite new philosophy read this year for me.

2. Severance: I’ve been raving about this show. I watched the whole first season in one day while sick (it’s available on Apple TV). It’s a show about the possible future of work, but also about what much of work is like now - an endless maze of hallways, obscure tasks with no meaningful purpose, and the expectation that we sever ourselves into two different people on the daily. Lots to digest for the worker-philosopher, but also highly entertaining, with fantastic aesthetics and a top-tier cast.

3. I am in no way advocating for the new Doomsday Alarm Clock written about in this Vice article, but if you want to wake up to sound bites specifically designed to trigger existential dread every morning, that service is now available in app form.

And finally

If you haven’t had Covid-19 yet, I’m going to suggest that you work harder to steer clear of it. While I know it manifests as nothing in some people, I know a ton of folks who have had it badly and long-Covid is real (fingers crossed that is not my fate). Two things which made my life immeasurably easier while sick were the fact I always keep a well-stocked pantry (and didn’t have to go out for anything), and that I have strong community ties and many people who I could ask for help. When we think about survival, what we do for each other gives more security than anything we could do alone.

As I mentioned up above, I’ll be doing a tea towel draw as soon as I hit my next subscriber milestone (I’m about 10 subs away from that), so share this newsletter and click the love button to make that happen faster!

If you want to hear more from me, find my blog at Red Cedar or follow me on Instagram @birdsongworkshop or @megapocalyptica - otherwise, I’ll see you here again next month.

When the Rivers Rise (Part Two)

Twenty years ago I asked a hydrologist at work about the possibility of BC, a province of rainforests, going dry with climate change. Though I can’t remember exactly the question or answer anymore, the gist I carried away is that we can expect the overall amount of water to stay the same, but the patterns of where and when it arrives to alter significantly. Groundwater may dwindle, for example, but we might still have access to the same volume of water in torrential rains too great for absorption into waterways and containment systems. The timing of water is crucial too, he explained. Too much in 24 hours after an eight-month drought and you lose all your topsoil, compound that with melting snowpack and the flood plains overflow. 

More recently a different co-worker explained to me the importance of understanding flooding as a crucial part of the riverine ecosystem. Like forest fires, he said, we have tried to contain flooding in ways the system can no longer tolerate, and simply building higher dikes in response to each event isn’t going to protect human and animal populations any longer. Although it seems impossible in the face of human industrial, agricultural, and residential activities, the best thing we could do is let the rivers return to their natural course and allow biomass to regrow in floodplains instead of covering them with concrete.

*

The Town of Princeton is built on the floodplain of two rivers, making it poorly situated to survive in the first place, but something I hadn’t realized until I came across a lithograph from the late 1800s, is that at some point in the early twentieth century the Tulameen River was repositioned from its natural course. Though I can’t find any written history on this, the lithograph clearly depicts the Tulameen River cutting through the center of town as opposed to the far edge where it runs today, spanned by the Tulameen Bridge which was built in the 1930s. Perhaps in response to massive flooding in 1894 (documented in settler journals of the time), it seems that rather than move the burgeoning town, horses and hand labour were used to rechannel the river to a more convenient location. 

Likewise, the Sumas Prairie, the site on which hundreds of thousands of animals died in November’s floods, was once a massive shallow lake known by the name Semá:th Xόtsa by the Semá:th people. Drained in the 1920s to create farmland, its demise is proudly proclaimed in a roadside marker from the 1960s which speaks to the land “reclamation” project so crucial to the development of the province. Often when travelling to the interior, I have taken a break at the rest stop where this marker sits outside the RV parking lot on the edge of the farmland basin, and marvelled at the arrogance of “reclaiming land” from a waterway teeming with life. 

The relocation of the Tulameen River, the draining of Semá:th Xόtsa (Sumas Lake) are emblematic of a worldview which sees nature as problematic, a challenge to be managed through heroic efforts and hard labour. Flat land is easier to farm and build on, and so we pave river deltas, removing the flexibility of the land to absorb volumes of water. We eradicate trees and shrubs to create crop and grazing land, and damage the earth’s sponge in the process. A large lake grows and recedes with unpredictability, making it hard to build houses and roads around, and so we drain it into irrigation channels that eventually dump all that freshwater into the sea. As settler people, our way of “knowing” the world has been to change it to suit our short term interests without really understanding what kind of future we make in the process. 

Online commenters discuss the flooding cycle in Princeton and the Lower Mainland as part of a natural cycle that we always recover from. From Alaska through BC and to Washington, there have been several notable floods over the decades. 1894, 1948, 1972, and 2007 are all historic flood years, and to hear some people tell it, 2021 is just another one of those. But the difference between the earlier floods and the most recent version is in the timing and the cause. Flooding in the Pacific Northwest has historically taken place in the springtime when the freshet (snow melt runoff)  happens at a greater volume than rivers, streams and marshes can absorb. What made the floods in November unusual is not only were they triggered by torrential rain, but they happened in the fall and melted snowpack at entirely the wrong time of year. Like the Pacific Northwest heat event in June/July, the floods of November fell way outside of “normal” patterns.

Not only are these extreme climate events giving us an entirely new weather vocabulary to work with–“heat dome” and “atmospheric river” becoming part of our lexicon overnight–they are exposing the history of our human efforts in a new way. They are changing how we see the ecosystem in which we live. Suddenly the sound of hard rain on the roof creates unease, the prospect of a heat wave doesn’t signify the pleasure of after dark ocean swims in the summer but hundreds of people dead. Our way of knowing the world, is spun around, creating a realization that results in denial and anger (our first two stages of grief on the way to acceptance). Recent “trucker convoy” protests and the Q-Anon root they come from may be one symptom of this. On the surface they present as reaction to government regulations that hitherto seemed unthinkable, but can also be seen as part of a larger pattern of response to a world we no longer have “control” over in ways we have been encouraged to believe.

As I finish up this essay, a hard rain in defiance of Spring Equinox spatters against my skylights and windows. It runs in rivulets down my driveway and forms in pools around the garage doors. I think to myself, for the thousandth time since last fall, that we really need to clear the ditches of debris when things dry up again, re-dig them if necessary so we do not fear an overflow spilling through the yard and into the crawl space at the next harsh forecast. We have entered the period of freshet when the rain will again bring snow from the mountains into the waterways, and I wonder how much farther rivers (only partially receded after fall flooding) will push outside their banks. 

I grew up on the edge of a vast rainforest that generated the weather as much as it thrived from it, and in that way I thought I knew where I was from. But as we move through the changing seasons, I realize that much of my worry revolves around the unpredictability of what comes next. The patterns no longer form clearly, and we are left with questions unanswered.

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March recipe: Nettle Beer

For the first time ever I am sharing a recipe I haven’t developed myself or even tried - but it’s nettle season and perhaps one of you will be inspired to try this and let me know how it goes. I got this version of the Nettle Beer recipe from Homestead Honey

Ingredients

• 8 ounces of fresh nettle tops or 4 ounces dried nettles

• 1/2 gallon water

• 1/2 cup turbinado or raw sugar

• Juice of 1 lemon

• 1/4 teaspoon ale yeast

Instructions

1. Harvest the top few inches of fresh nettles – you will need 8 ounces for this recipe. Be sure to wear gloves to avoid getting stung! If you do not have fresh nettles, you can make this recipe with dried nettles.

2. Place the nettles and water in a pot and bring to a boil on the stove. Reduce the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes.

3. Line a strainer with a fine mesh cloth (cheesecloth will work great) and strain the nettle liquid into a large bowl or crock. Be sure to squeeze the cheesecloth to extract all of the liquid from the nettles. Add the sugar and stir to dissolve.

4. Cool the liquid to room temperature and then add the lemon juice, then sprinkle the yeast on top of the liquid. Cover the bowl or crock with a towel and let it sit at room temperature, out of direct sunlight, for three days.

5. After three days, strain your nettle beer through a fine mesh sieve and funnel it into bottles, leaving at least one inch of headspace. We like to reuse Grolsch beer bottles for this purpose (you can sometimes find them at thrift stores, or on Craigslist).

6. After one week, transfer to the refrigerator and drink within one year. Enjoy the lemony-tangy refreshing flavor of your homemade nettle beer!

In the workshop

I was going to post about having the big loom warped this month, but as I started to weave on it, I noticed some crossed threads and mis-threaded heddles. Yesterday I cut the warp in order to make some repairs - but I’m sharing it anyway to underscore the incredible amount of fussy labour involved in hand weaving. If the finished product wasn’t *so* satisfying, no one would bother with the work. By this weekend I should have all 565 threads in the right place and will be on my way to weaving a new piece of fabric.

Three things

1. From a Spiral Notebook: The first of my shared things this week is this newsletter by poet and creative work friend Kelsey Andrews. Once a month she opens her notebook and shares her sometimes dark (and often funny) thoughts with the world. She has a unique gift of seeing through a perspective that is slightly askew, and you will too if you subscribe to receive her eloquent words in your inbox.

2. Feed the Monster: BA Lampman is an artist and writer. I know her through Jill Margo’s Creative Good sessions, but also she is married to a musician who has played at my house on multiple occasions. Her monthly newsletter is fantastic - an exposition on her creative process as a visual artist (collage! sketchbooks!), her Life’s Work project capturing the story of her mother’s Lewey Body dementia, and life in general. A good read with inspiring visual content. Highly recommend.

3. Thrums: On Gabriola Island we really have to make our own fun, and last weekend on the vernal equinox some friends from up the road put on this streaming music and video show. Featuring a weaving loom (sound and video of the weaving process) and a whole lot of noise, it’s a really cool collaboration and available on Bandcamp for free or by donation. These folks push the boundaries and make new work in new ways - elastic and inspiring!

And finally

We are nearing the end of the first quarter of 2022, which means I am doing a review of projects and plans for the next quarter. Some of you know that means I’m working with the Creative Good planner in anticipation of the next round of Follow Through (creative accountability) sessions. So first of all, a shout-out to Jill Margo who runs these sessions and some encouragement to those of you who want to create but don’t. Programs like Jill’s are out there and one of the ways you can discover your way back into creative practice. I’m not sure if she has spots available for the session starting in early April, but I would encourage you to go to Creative Good and find out if that sounds interesting to you.

Secondly, all this creative planning and working over the last year (or five) has got me to the point where I have started to write a book. Which doesn’t mean anything really except that this newsletter might change a bit as a result. I’m thinking that rather than stand-alone essays, I might share excerpts of the book project instead. Or I might decide to write about that project and get your feedback. Or I might use the newsletter to engage in a bit of open letter-writing. In any case, as I figure out that project, this one will likely change. I’m still going to come at you monthly and let you know what I’m thinking about any which way.

You can leave a comment or like this post below. Liking my post helps get it wider distribution in the Substack network, so if any of this resonates with you, please click the things. Sharing with others is another way to support my work.

If you want to hear more from me, find my blog at Red Cedar or follow me on Instagram @birdsongworkshop - otherwise, I’ll see you here again next month.

Growing up on the edge of the vast rainforest that makes up the spine of Vancouver Island, I was never afraid of rain. 

Sometimes it came in a downpour, filling our gutters and dripping into the basement, other times as a mist casting a murky filter over trees, farmlands, and the little Anglican Church we passed by riding the orange school bus. The fun and colour of Halloween costumes were ruined year after year as our mother covered them with black garbage bags to keep us dry, our heads and arms poking out of holes cut by our father expert with an X-acto knife. At Christmas time we dragged our freshly cut tree out of the forest on a trail of mud, and left it outside for a day or so to become cleaned by the rain. No white Christmas for us. Even in the summertime when we went to Shuswap country in the Interior, we could count on at least a handful of summer storms sweeping with some ferocity across the vast lake, visible and audible for hours before the rain hit our shore. 

When I left high school I moved to Vancouver, the fourth rainiest city in Canada, where I never carried an umbrella even on the wettest of days. My life was guided as much by literature as by anything at that time, and I aspired to encounter the rain much as the characters described by Tom Robbins in Another Roadside Attraction:

They strolled calmly and smoothly, their bodies perfectly relaxed. They did not hunch away from the rain but rather glided through it. They directed their faces to it and did not flinch as it drummed their cheeks. They almost revelled in it…. accepted the rain. They were not at odds with it, they did not deny or combat it; they accepted it and went with it in harmony and ease.” 

As Robbins’ narrator observes when he un-hunches himself and approaches the rain in the way of his hosts, “I got no wetter than I would have otherwise, and if I did not actually enjoy the wetting, at least I was free of my tension.” This seemed to me the only sensible attitude if one happened to live in a damp environment. You could either do as my co-worker did for years and complain every single day about the weather, or you could just get on with your life.

After a few years of living in East Vancouver, I discovered the antidote to the concrete-grey winters lay just over the bridge in the masses of hiking trails on the North Shore. On the urging of friends who hiked year round, I invested in rain gear and developed a love for “water” hikes in the wintertime, those journeys into the mountains across the Burrard Inlet where torrential rain, waterfalls, and rushing rivers might combine to create rainbows or enveloping fogs which transformed the landscape into something primeval. No matter what was happening in the city of metal and glass, the forest always breathed life in great sighs, the mosses and fir needles glittered with water flecked with many shades of green.  On the wettest days I might be the only one on the trail, and I carried the joy of a secret discovery–a place one could be alone in a city of more than a million people.

I have always felt lucky that I do not suffer from wintertime Seasonal Affective Disorder as many people I know do. The wet weather brings a feeling of coziness when I’m inside, and when I’m out and about I mainly experience it as a cool drink of water. Good windshield wipers and a rain jacket will get one through most conditions, and as a life-long west-coaster I have shrugged off the complaints of transplants who cannot adjust to the “damp cold” of living by the ocean. I have been complacent about the rain, undisturbed by the continual water feature, mostly just glad it’s not snow we have to deal with.

At least that was true until recently when I found myself white-knuckling it while driving through a rainstorm in a mountain pass on the way to visit my parents. It wasn’t the water splashing up from the oncoming traffic, or the occasional pool causing my car to hydroplane that worried me; I have driven through much worse in my life. Instead I feared that the road might suddenly wash away under my tires, as parts of it had only months before in one of the biggest natural disasters in BC history.

Even now, I am still trying to wrap my mind around the flooding of November 2021, when four months worth of rain came down in a 48-hour period. Weather forecasters had warned about incoming atmospheric rivers (colloquially known as the Pineapple Express), and so it wasn’t surprising when the deluge started on the Saturday night, but by Monday morning, it was apparent that this rainfall was something like I had never seen before in terms of intensity and the damage it caused.

In near-biblical proportions the rivers rose up and mountainsides came down. By the end of the storm every major highway in the province was shut, more than 600,000 farm animals had died, thousands of homes evacuated, railway passages scoured clean of track and rail, and four people were dead from a landslide in the mountains between Pemberton and Lillooet. In the town of Princeton, outside of which I share a small cabin with friends, the Similkameen boiled over the dikes and down the main streets, through doorways and windows, burying town roads and yards in thick mud and debris. Not far up the road, the whole town of Merritt evacuated in a great flurry as the river breached the town sewage plant, carrying waste water out into the street and into homes and shops.

On the coast we experienced no major catastrophe, except for the lane of highway on Vancouver Island sloughed right off the edge of a cliff when the mountains above the “scenic drive” became a waterfall pushing millions of litres of water down onto the road in a sudden frenzy. In the weeks afterwards, we experienced the dysphoria of being cut off from the rest of Canada, with every highway closed and under repair. After months of voluntary isolation due to the pandemic, this forced separation seemed cruel in its redundancy, a point that didn’t need to be reinforced.

[Part 2 of this essay will appear in this newsletter next month]

February recipe: Chocolate Snack

This treat is a bit decadent and expensive to make, but it’s the end of February which is the month of chocolate as well as being my birthday month. This recipe comes from the cookbook Gather (Chocolate Nourish Bars) and is essentially a kind of chocolate bar with extra nutrition. I’ve halved it here and tried to make the ingredients a bit more accessible. Vegan and gluten free.

Ingredients

• 2 cups quick oats

• 1 cup sliced almonds

• 3/4 cup roughly chopped pecans

• 1 cup coconut oil

• 1/4 cup maple syrup

• 1 bag (1 1/2-3/4 cups) bittersweet chocolate chips with a high chocolate percentage (I used 60% Ghirardelli chips)

• 1/4 cup almond butter

• 1/4 cup cocoa powder

• 1 tsp vanilla

• 1 tsp kosher salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350. Toast oats, almonds and pecans on a parchment-lined baking sheet for 8-12 minutes, until golden brown.

2. Balance a heatproof bowl over a large saucepan of simmering water. Add coconut oil, maple syrup, chocolate chips, almond butter, cocoa, vanilla, and salt into the bowl and mix all ingredients together until melted.

3. Line an 8x8 baking dish with foil and then parchment paper, lightly grease the parchment paper.

4. Combine melted chocolate, oats and nuts in a bowl and stir to combine. Pour into the prepared baking dish and then tap hard on the counter to even it out and get rid of air bubbles. Refrigerate covered overnight until set. Cut into squares to serve.

In the workshop

The textile workshop has been quiet this month as I’ve been giving myself more space for writing, but I have finished a few small jobs. A major accomplishment was getting two quilts finished and out to be quilted (I pay a professional for queen-sized items, they are too hard to do well on a small machine). I picked up the one shown above on my birthday, and dropped off the second at the same time (it will be ready next week). Now I just have to get bindings on, and they will be ready for use.

Three things

1. While writing the newsletter this week I looked up the 2021 flood damage synopsis on Wikipedia - a sobering read. Flood relief and restoration efforts continue across the province, and many people in Merritt and on the Highway 8 corridor have not been able to return to their land and communities. This is also true for residents of Lytton, BC a town which burned to the ground in the heat dome last summer.

2. One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in the last couple of years is the 2021 release God | Human | Animal | Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Wired columnist Meghan O’Gieblyn. In exploring fundamental transformations in human life wrought by digital technology, we are introduced to philosophies of mind, self-hood, and moral responsibility–ultimately coming to understand how blurred the lines are between techno-faith and religion. Sharp and accessible writing, O’Gieblyn is an intellectual force and a writer I look forward to more from.

3. “Listen. Attune your ear to the general discord, and you will hear the cracking of the ice caps, the rising of the waters, the sinister whisper of the near future. Is it not a terrible time to be having children, and therefore, in the end, to be alive?” So asks Mark O’Connell in the introductory chapter to Notes from an Apocalypse–and then sets about to find the answer. In his travels he encounters disaster capitalists, preppers, Silicon Valley billionaire culture, leftish ecological storytellers, and the sobering reality of ecological disaster all of which he recounts in a wry and engaging tone. This book offers a perspective on the pitfalls of survival culture and comes to some terms with which we might live in these curious (perilous) times.

And finally

Like most of the world, I find the events overseas this week upsetting though not particularly surprising. Barely on the heels of the pandemic there seems to be a pent-up demand for conflict out there, a need to “get back” whatever one feels they have lost. It is as though we are living in a perpetual state of “what next” these days, and I hope for the citizens of Ukraine (not to mention the thousands of people arrested in Russia for protesting the war yesterday) that the answer is not soaked in tragedy.

February is such a short month and things have felt compressed all around between work and other responsibilities in my life. My hope for the months to come is that we can emerge a bit more with the spring weather, unspool ourselves from the cocoon of winter Netflix, and find our way back to social life once more.

You can leave a comment or like this post below. Liking my post helps get it wider distribution in the Substack network, so if any of this resonates with you, please click the things. Sharing with others is another way to support my work.

If you want to hear more from me, find my blog at Red Cedar or follow me on Instagram @birdsongworkshop - otherwise, I’ll see you here again next month.

Somewhere in my mid-teens, perhaps fourteen or so, I took my mother's university copy of War and Peace off the shelf in the back room of our house. I had got it in my head that to read such a book was proof one was intelligent or worldly, and back then I was eager to demonstrate I was grown up and didn't need any more guidance. By this point in my life I had read large parts of the Bible out of interest (we weren't religious), the Dictionary, and many entries from my father's childhood encyclopedia set from the 1940s. I figured War and Peace was just another quasi-boring challenge that would somehow make me a better person. 

It's a good thing I didn't tell anyone at the time of my plan to read the “greatest novel ever written” since I gave up five pages in,  bogged down by long Russian names and titles, unaware of even the most basic historic knowledge which would provide some reference points for the opening scene at the salon of Anna Pavlovna. 

I carted that copy of War and Peace around with intentions to read it for a long time, but along the way I stopped associating reading with "becoming a better person," and there were much more interesting things to read in any case. I forgot about it as a goal entirely, though I did later develop a love of 19th century classic literature a la Austen, Hardy, James, Elliot, and Dostoevskey.

I've always been a reader, but my discipline for books waned with the rise of the Internet. I know I’m not alone in the fact my attention span changed from the late 1990s onwards. As a young adult, I could spend hours in bed reading novels, would pour over newspapers and magazines on coffee shop afternoons, and did the New York Times crossword puzzle on Sundays (with help)–but by my late twenties, that ability to concentrate had started to wane. New responsibilities in career and relationships were partially responsible, but I can’t discount that this period of faltering attention coincides with the rise in laptops and cell phones, devices which I have steadily owned since the early 2000s. 

The bad habits started small, but picked up over the years. Instead of turning to books, I sat in front of a screen for indeterminate periods of time, endlessly scrolling for news and entertainment. When I did pick up a book, audible notifications from my devices ceaselessly beckoned me to return, distracting me from reading at pace and ruining any chance of becoming absorbed in the story. With the phone charging beside the bed at night, it was the first thing I turned to in the morning and it ate up the initial thirty minutes of my day. I could feel my attention for things changing, not only in reading, but in conversation, in classrooms, and at work. It became increasingly difficult to exercise my mind for any length of time. I told myself that distractibility was part of the aging process, perhaps triggered by stress or anxiety, but over time I recognized my response to devices as a kind of addiction, something I was turning to hundreds of times per day.  

I’m not sure what the specific catalyst was, though the seeds for change were definitely in the graduate school program I entered just shy of forty. Suddenly I was required to read extensively, retain, and synthesize information. An academic course in which I documented the history of research into neuroplasticity, followed by another delving into the concept of spiritual enlightenment, started me on a path of meditation study. Long periods of sitting focused on the breath helped me see the tendencies of my mind with more clarity, and trained me away from reaching for distraction when I was bored or uncomfortable. At the same time, new research exploring the impact of social media on attention became available and I learned I wasn’t alone.

Armed with more awareness, I made a few changes to my phone habits which I maintain to this day - turning off audible notifications, not using it as an alarm clock (and charging it away from the bedroom), and keeping it face down more than an arm's length away from me when I’m reading. These actions in addition to daily meditation helped return a certain amount of mind space to me.

What really shifted my attention back to reading with intensity, however, was the start of the pandemic when the door to life outside the home slammed shut. My calendar for Spring 2020 was fully booked with work and union travel until the shutdown announcements came. Those first few weeks were spent anxiously cancelling flights and hotel rooms, doomscrolling, and watching daily provincial and federal briefings. But once the initial stress was out of the way, the clock began to tick on daily life while I waited for things to start up again. And that was when I rediscovered my ability to lie in bed for long stretches, immersed in story.

With all those hours freed up, the novel came back to me as a way to travel, to witness the lives of others, and to see through eyes not mine. In the last two years I have read about 150 books and been transported around the world, back and forwards in time, and into specific experiences I could have no other way than through fiction. Although my mind is not as quick as it was in younger years, this capacity for absorption in literature has felt like a return to the mind I possessed before the Internet fully colonized it.

Which brings me back to War and Peace, which I now understand I couldn’t have read in my teens with any enjoyment, and without rewiring my brain I might never have returned to. When travel to visit family was cancelled last month due to illness, I had some hours of unexpected free time and the quiet felt a lot like the early days of the pandemic. Perfect for immersing myself completely into early 19th century Russia. I made much headway into the plot during those days off work, drawn in by salon scandals, political debate, and the romantic lives of the minor nobility. So taken was I by the characters I did not even skim the battlefield scenes, as I wanted to follow their lives wherever they went (though I did speed read Tolstoy’s polemics on historical understanding and the need for land reform sprinkled throughout).

After the holiday ended I looked forward to the times I could settle in for an hour or more and enter the walls of the grand houses and military camp tents, to watch from the sidelines regal ballroom dancing and cannons shot off from behind fortifications. The breadth (and length) of Tolstoy’s work is rare in its perspective from many vantage points, and his ability to draw you into all of them. There are certainly critiques one can make about the casual misogyny and Tolstoy’s own perspective as a noble, it is a novel of the 1860s after all, but in the main it is deeply engrossing and I feel expanded in my historical perspective on having read it.

The problem of attention, and our collective lack of it is changing the way we write and read in our culture. I have picked up several novels in the last year described as “groundbreaking” or “inventive” only to discover a lack of basic character development, or shallowness of plot. What is sometimes heralded in current literature is an appeal to brevity, and a simplification of narrative to fit within a prescribed number of pages. Which isn’t to say there aren’t authors producing great works one can live inside for a period of weeks or months. I just wonder how much audience will be left for these novels as social media and technology companies continue to create products intentionally designed for distraction instead of deep learning and personal growth. My return to attention feels like a narrow escape. Though I am not free from digital distraction in daily life, I recognize the need to manage it so as not to lose hold of myself as we wobble into the future. During the pandemic, my ability to immerse in story felt necessary, and I don’t want to lose my capacity for it.

January recipe: Moroccan Chickpea Stew

Since the turn of the new year we’ve started meal planning again, which means dusting off cookbooks and looking up new recipes to try. I had forgotten how planning the next week’s dinners before Saturday shopping simplifies the rest of the week. No running out for last minute ingredients or lack of inspiration to battle after a long work day. This recipe made it onto my list in the first week of the month; healthy, warming, and comforting winter food.

Ingredients

• 2 cups dried chickpeas - soak and cook these before starting the soup, or substitute with 2 cans of chickpeas

• 4 cups of chicken or veggie stock

• 3 tbsp cooking oil

• 1 large white or yellow onion, diced

• 2 medium carrots, diced

• 2 stalks celery, diced

• 6 garlic cloves, sliced

• 1 tablespoon ground cumin

• 1-2 tablespoons harissa paste

• 2 tablespoons lemon juice

• 1 bunch of spinach, rinsed and chopped

Directions

1. Heat oil in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot, celery and salt - saute until tender (8 minutes). Stir in garlic and cumin and cook for 1 minute. Stir in harissa and cook for 1 additional minute.

2. Add cooked chickpeas and stock. Season with salt, bring to a boil and then reduce heat to a simmer for 15-20 minutes.

3. Once flavours have come together, add chopped spinach and stir in until wilted. Salt and pepper to taste.

In the workshop

Besides working on a quilt, some weaving, and learning to knit socks - I’ve been finding time to play with small textile assemblages this month. Using antique and new materials, I am learning how to convey meaning through composition, and finding a great pleasure in putting my mind and hands to textiles in a different way.

Three things

1. I meant to write more of a reflection on War and Peace but ended up with an essay about my attention span instead. These two reviews - one from The New Republic in 1916, and one 100+ years later in The New Criterion are reflective of much of what I thought while reading the novel, and might provide some encouragement if you have ever wanted to attempt this literary hurdle.

2. Speaking of attention span, Johann Hari has just released Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (my copy is on the way) but The Guardian published an excerpt early this month which promises a readable and well-researched look into the subject.

3. Station Eleven, the miniseries: Readers of this newsletter would likely enjoy Station Eleven, a post-apocalypse novel by Emily St. John Mandel, published in 2014. I think it’s one of the most realistic of the genre, and particularly enjoyed the fact it was set in places I know. There is now an HBO adaptation, and while it departs significantly from the novel (and loses some of its realism), I still recommend it as seriously good television. This show will not take your mind off the pandemic, but it will give you lots to think about as you ponder the phrase “Survival is insufficient” and follow characters in the aftermath of a cataclysmic flu. The power of story in shaping our lives is a central theme of both novel and miniseries.

And finally….

These days feel like a never-ending parade of bad news, the latest being the rattling of sabers by the US and Russia. The irony of writing about War and Peace at this juncture is not lost on me. Tolstoy felt that war was both wasteful and inevitable, part of the inexorable march of human experience though foolhardy nonetheless. It seems that finding strength and ways to be of service to one another is the only way through when nothing else is really within our control.

This edition marks three years of Comfort for the Apocalypse, a record of sustained writing for me. There have been months off, and a period early in the pandemic when I stopped sending the newsletter entirely, but I’m still marking today as an anniversary of building connection between my little world and yours. Thanks for being here in this space with me, it certainly makes my life a little less isolated.

You can leave a comment or like this post below. Liking my post helps get it wider distribution in the Substack network, so if any of this resonates with you, please click the things. Sharing with others is another way to support my work.

If you want to hear more from me, find my blog at Red Cedar or follow me on Instagram @birdsongworkshop - otherwise, I’ll see you here again next month.