So Much to be Done

It's a crisp day with the soft dimmed sunlight of mid fall. Breaking the seasons down into early, middle and late is part of the haiku tradition.

Things that disgust me in mid fall:

a snail that has been stepped on

a disposable diaper that oozes gel onto a rain-filled gutter

receiving the news that UBC farm will likely lose two of my favourite gardens

hearing the election results

I am busy. I am making art and giving workshops. I am overwhelmed at how much activism needs to happen to save the things that matter. I am embarrassed to be in a city where women in the arts community are afraid to call themselves feminists. So much work to be done. Another Conservative minority voted in and the losers left beating their chests and blaming everyone else. What ever happened to the spirit of gentility, congeniality, honor, humility and graceful pride? What happened to integrity and soul?


Mid fall is the place in between the transitions from summer to fall and fall to winter. We need to ritualize the transitions between transitions. Fall is in limbo, and yet fall is falling all around us as acorns, leaves and horse chestnuts drop onto sidewalks. My father will have an operation tomorrow. I know it will be hard. It will age him. If only we had the power to slow those changes down--to stop mid-fall, as it were, and linger there. Transitions must happen, and so we ritualize them, fetishize them, or try to ignore them, but we can't stop them mid-fall. We try to suspend time, stretch it out, but it pulls us and transforms us into a being that has experienced yet another season on this earth. The falling leaf may catch in a spider's web, but it is still slowly decaying, breaking down with that snail and that diaper and becoming one with the earth, for better or worse.

Mid fall is philosophical. We are between waking and sleeping. A spider is dreaming it is a leaf dreaming it is a spider and so on and so on. Borders dissolve in the rain. Transitions open us up to new forms of being. What will you be mid fall?

First Frost

Friday morning I woke to the sound of my neighbor scraping frost off her car window. First frost. I knew it was coming when earlier in the week I noted the first morning my breath made fog on the way to a meeting. These details help anchor us in the seasons. "Why do you celebrate Thanksgiving?" asked a woman visiting from Holland. First frost marks the end of the growing season. I said it was started by the first settlers who wanted to celebrate surviving another year. Can you imagine what a slog it must have been to get the crops in before they freeze? Did you make of the note of the first day you put the heat on in the house? Farmers and gardeners remember those sorts of things. They notice climate change.

Of course, there had already been a frost in Saskatchewan. Mom told me that it was not a hard frost and she was surprised that many of her flowers, including her sweet peas were still blooming. My mother grows beautiful fragrant sweet peas in candy box colors, gladiolas aka "glads", her own forest of sunflowers, and petunias. I'm not a big fan of petunias, myself--sticky, garish and common if you ask me. In Saskatchewan, they're always peeking up from mint-colored container beds made of recycled painted car tires. Maybe some day I'll find it in my heart to love them.

Today I am leading a workshop on making seed balls for memorial gardens. As I was sifting the chunks out of the sea soil I was using and thinking this was a tedious job and it would be much better to use mushroom compost, I had an idea. If you are making memorial seed balls--why not use soil from the person's place of birth or somewhere meaningful for them? You could use soil from their favorite garden. You might need to get someone to package it up for you and send it in the post, but what a lovely ritual that would be. Paula Jardine had the idea that the family could put their loved one's ashes into the seed balls as a way of distributing them among family and returning them to the earth. This is the context I am creating the workshop in.

I like going to the graveyard. Traffic whirls by on 41st and up Fraser while in the heart of the cemetery, it is quiet and calm. Time is suspended. When my grade five history teacher told us time was a man-made concept, it blew my mind. It's true, time is cultural, but it is also natural. Death shocks us into remembering that nature has its own time, measured by soil temperature, the earth's rotation around the sun, micro-climates, and some say the fluttering of butterfly wings. This kind of time is not man-made. It is formed by everything that exists and it is mysterious and unknowable. When my grandma died, it must have been about this time of the year because I remember a farmer saying, "She's found a good place for the winter." In a small prairie town, even the most shy, laconic person in the community shakes your hand at the funeral and says something to the bereaved about death and time.

We try to stop time artificially by creating concrete memorials that withstand the rain and the wind and the passage of time. But even those slowly wear down and become mute witnesses to the mystery. Seeds are the best kind of memorial. They remember life and create new life from that memory. Diaspora--the spreading of seeds. Seeds remind us we have made it through another year and we have the resources to make it through another if we're lucky. This thanksgiving I will celebrate the pumpkin seeds, the seeds in the gullets of the turkeys, the spelt and the wheat not yet contaminated by genetic modification, the marigold, arugula and coneflower seeds ripening in my garden. Which seeds will you celebrate?

Seed Ball Recipe

We must embrace seeds as never before

We must be there with seeds, for seeds; must witness their incredible seed-to-seed as we do our own seed-to-seed

Let us repeat their vital statistics the way we do for movie stars and sports heroes

Let us save seeds, trade seeds, let us cherish seeds as sacred messengers from our parents’ parents

Let us be at home with seeds on this earth we share as home,

Yes to their inherent expansiveness no less than to our own

--excerpt of Seed Declaration by Dan Jason, Salt Spring Seed Sanctuary


The Recipe
The basic recipe for seed balls is 5:3:1; 5 parts clay to 3 parts compost (or rich soil) to 1 part seeds and enough water to make it stick together. For example: five cups clay, 3 cups soil, and one cups of seeds makes enough seed balls for a group. If you make them for yourself at home use 1 1/4 cups clay, 3/4 cup soil and 1/4 cup seeds.

The clay is the trickiest thing to find. It must be powdered dry terracotta clay. You can buy it at a potter's supply such as The Mad Potter in Richmond. You should wear a filtration mask when you're handling it so the dust doesn't get into your lungs. For the soil, I use sea soil that has been sifted to remove rocks and chunks of woody vegetation. As for seeds, you can use anything that self-seeds and is not invasive. Use seeds that are meaningful to you. I like to use seeds that I have collected with permission from sites where I do volunteer work. My mother sends me seeds from Saskatchewan in the mail and my friends give me seeds from their gardens. Joining a garden club is also a great way to learn to save and share seeds. If you are going to buy seeds, try to use local ethically sourced seeds from small organic farms, such as The Salt Spring Seed Sanctuary. Van Dusen Gardens holds a Seedy Saturday Festival in March where you can buy and exchange seeds and attend workshops.

Mixing it Up
First of all, remember to wear clothing that is easily washed! I like to mix the clay and soil and spritz it with a bit of water to keep the dust down. Next, you add the seeds. (You can use a mix of seeds or make separate batches of seed balls with single varieties.) Now it's time to get your hands dirty! Mix everything with your hands and spritz with water until you can form balls with the mixture. You want to make balls the size of marbles (about the circumference of a penny).

Next, put the marble-sized balls in paper egg cartons to dry out for at least three days. They can be sown after the first frost, or in April. Place the seed balls on top of the ground and then nature will take its course and let the seeds germinate when there is enough warmth and moisture (around April in Vancouver), or you may water them in the spring after the danger of spring frost has past.

--recipe adapted from Path to Freedom

The Collector

To call me a pack rat would be an understatement. I collect books, photos, art supplies, magazines, teas, chocolate, honey, vintage clothes, fabric, costumes, seed bead necklaces, and seeds. Yes, an evolutionary anthropologist might say I have a displaced urge to hoard supplies for my tribe's survival. It's true, I live under a feast or famine kind of anxiety. Sometimes I have work and money and sometimes I work for free and go into debt. I am always hoarding things for a rainy day. Well, there are a lot of rainy days here in Vancouver, and today's one of them. I am a greedy hoarder, I'll admit. Especially since I have had a child. It just makes me that more id-oriented. I know some people think I'm crazy. I come by it honestly and think part of my obsession comes from my grandmother and father going through the depression. It shaped the way they collected things. It made them frugal, although my father is an incredibly generous person. He has given away many many things to people in his community and to my sister and I. My mother is the same.

Some people watch the weather obsessively--doesn't this come out of the same survival instinct that would have been an essential skill in the past? Once we are uprooted from our natural environment and brought into cities we can lose the sense of being in touch with the seasons. I think this makes us a bit mad (speaking for myself, of course.) I know that ever since I moved to Vancouver I have been obsessively creating an seasonal/emotional map of the city. I've written poetry that takes place over a walk in the neighborhood in the "I did this, I did that" style. I create comfort zones by visiting the same restaurants and coffee shops over and over again. My regular visits to UBC farm act as a touchstone to assess where we are in the season's cycle.

After all, our increasingly urbanized culture is in denial of seasonality. We buy strawberries in January and take holidays to tropical destinations in the dead of winter. I don't know how healthy this is, in fact I'll go out on a limb and say it's making us alienated and neurotic (again, referring to myself above all.) Every time I go to an event that revels in seasonality it is a healing experience for me, especially when it's not raining!!! I've been reading about traditional phenological knowledge and it is blowing my mind. This is very important information that kids should be learning in school to increase their connection to location and climate. I'm determined to share this knowledge. I'm hungry for it. I will collect it, but I won't hoard it. I promise.

The Feast Sustains Us

As I was cycling back from a meeting at the graveyard (regarding All Soul's Day), it occurred to me that I have a responsibility. As a spiritual cultural worker I am responsible for my own spiritual and physical health. That thought cheered me up. It made me think that we need to pull together as a group and create programs to keep us spiritually and physically healthy. When we are called on to do our job we need to be in the right physical condition and in the right state of mind to do our job calmly and gracefully. This required a certain level of physical stamina.

Yesterday my son and I went to a feast hosted by The Downtown Eastside Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden at UBC Farm. It was a lovely event on a beautiful sunny fall day. I felt very privileged to participate and act as a witness to the feast ceremonies, and I brought a jar of honey and some sage as an offering of gratitude. I didn't take pictures of the ceremonies, but I did photograph the salmon cooking on the fire and more bees in flowers. (Surprise, surprise.) I am still fascinated at how late the bees are out foraging this year and right now they are active in the French Marigolds, calendula, cosmos, dandelions and sunflowers at the farm. Because everything was late this year it's a lucky thing the bees actually still have flowers to draw nutrients from. One of the things that lead to the high rate of winter deaths in honeybees in BC last year was lack of late forage. I am collecting as many late fall flower seeds as I can and yesterday was the perfect day for collecting seeds at UBC Farm.

But I digress. There were many tribes represented at the feast--Gitsan, Cree, Musqueum and many others. I realize with embarrassment that I need to bone up on my knowledge of local tribes and I need to find a map of the Vancouver territories. There were songs to bless the salmon around the fire, letting any bad energy dissipate and collecting the warmth from the sun, the fire, the fish and filling out hearts with that good energy. The elders were honoured, and given a special place to site around the fire. The children and youth were honoured and acknowledged. All throughout the ceremony the speaker thanked us for our patience as these ceremonies and speeches needed to be done because of ancient protocol. Thanking the people present occurred many times throughout the day, acknowledging the role of each person involved was also an important part of the protocol.




It was a feast rich with the gifts of wholesome food--bannock and jam to start with, bison stew, deer stew, halibut soup, salmon, potatoes, beets, and salads made with ingredients from the DTESAK Garden. At the end of the meal coffee was poured into the fire as an offering to the spirits and the ancestors.

Ullie was asked to help with a children's ceremony to protect the garden. Flags in the four colours from the medicine wheel were tied to stakes from the salmon roast were pounded into the corners of the garden. Green for the plants of the earth (North), Blue for water (West), White for the clouds (South), and red for fire (East). This ceremony was filmed for a program on cable TV that teaches children how to speak Cree.


It was a day that exhausted in a good way and it also gave us memories that will sustain us for a long time. The resilience of the Musqueam nation, in particular was referred to and inspired me. What was once a thriving nation of 30, 000 was at it's low point only 90 people, but in spite of this they still managed to preserve their culture. This in itself is a miracle of stamina and strength.


In one simple ritual of gratitude we were asked to really live in a moment with each other in a circle in the garden, feeling the earth under our feet, enjoying the feeling of a full belly after the feast. We were asked to close our eyes and listen to the sounds of the garden and breathe in the fresh air. Then we acknowledged the gratitude for every one of the people around the circle and asked ourselves how it would be if this was the last meal we had ever eaten. A drummer closed this set of ceremonies with another blessing. These rituals were especially important now that the land is threatened for development. I noted a great sadness and seriousness in the eyes of the farm workers who have grown to love this farm so much.

What I realized on my bike ride back from the cemetery is that we need to keep each other in good form to organize and perform these community events. We need to feed each other, metaphorically and physically. This mid-life stage as an artist is especially important as we bear the brunt of the load of this responsibility at this age. If we let our health go--if we don't care for ourselves and each other, the culture will suffer. We're responsible for our bodies, our souls, ourselves--the whole she-bang. We--the eco-feminists at large need to create a healthy environment for spiritual cultural workers. Where do we begin? As witnesses to people like the Musqueam who can teach us some hard-won lessons in cultural survival.

The Late Late Show

The Van Dusen's party's almost over, but those late late blossoms, the bosomy divas and sensual concubines who've had too much wine, show off their sumptuous jewels just before the frost comes to shut it all down. (The light turns Nicole Dextras's leaf letters into stained glass.)

Japanese Maples show off their highlights.

The heritage sweet peas are still pumping out their glorious perfume.

The Stink Iris puts on a burlesque act.

Sedum proves irresistible to the 2 o'clock bees.



Dahilias and amaranth--spiky and bloody.



Hand-tinted echinacea and more of the delicate stonecrop.

I can almost deceive myself into thinking winter will not come this year, that we will enter a loop that preserves this enchanted, bejeweled time. One more day of this, and then they say the rain will begin again. A boy throws a penny into the pond and I make a wish.

Amy Young, Artist

I just wanted to give a shout out to an artist someone e-mailed me about. (Thanks David). Amy Young is doing some great stuff and I like her website. It's easy to navigate and the interface suits the content. Check out Dis.M.Body-- An answering machine made of lint.

"Your messages can be recorded into the sculpture by speaking while pressing the red button and played back by pressing the yellow button, but our voice messages are like our lint, sloughing off, on answering machines around the world. Lint, buttons and sound sampler."

This Farm Fountain that Amy Young made in Collaboration with Ken Rinaldo is the ultimate container garden, complete with ornamental fish. They have instructions on their website on how to make your own. Another cool piece, called The Digestive Table contains a vermi-composter.