A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the nuthatches have disappeared from my home island this year and how I was missing their little calls.
Today,fromt he other side of the world a friend shared with me a watercolour he made inspired by that post. And so, through relationship and connection across time and space, one nuthatch has re-appeared on Bowen Island, , early on a holiday morning.
It is apparently International Tea Day, and my friend Ciaran Camman sent along this beautiful twitter thread describing tea culture across the Muslim world. It put me in mind of some memorable cups of tea I have had in my time:
- I fell in love with Turkish tea culture sipping tea from tulip glasses in Istanbul, during summer downpours in Taksim, by the side of the Bosphoros, or in the quiet back alleys of the old town as the calls to prayer echoed through the streets. Or on a gullet in the quiet waters off Demera, or in the mountains of Selçuk.
- A impromptu stop in for a gorgeous cup of tea and a perfect scone with my beloved beside the Ouse in St. Ives in the UK on a summer day, pictured above.
- Developing a deep love of the cornflower flavoured black tea that we used to buy from The Tea Merchant on the Byward market in Ottawa.
- Endless cups of Dilmah tea with my lovely mother-in-law. She introduced me to Dilmah, and I’ve never gone back. A lovely Ceylon tea, from a great company.
- Drinking dark thick, bitter tea from a huge pot boiled for hours on a woodstove in a hunting cabin on the tundra of Nunavik as a group of Inuit polar bear hunters sat in circle and discussed their futures over caribou stew and bowhead muktuk.
- Making an impromptu tea ceremony with So Yoshida and friends in a small tea house in a little park near the Tokyo harbour.
- Watching used Irish Breakfast tea bags pile up in a little plate in the kitchen of a cottage I shared with Chris Chapman and Anthony McCann by the shores of Galway Bay in Ballyvaughn, Co. Clare as a kind of metric of the conversations and stories we were telling.
- Sharing a pot of tea with Simon and Julia Lucas back in 1989 when a group of us Native Studies students travelled to Hesquiaht in Clayoquot Sound with Sennan Charleson to spend a week immersed in the community. It was my first trip ever to BC, the first time I ever got to meet Simon and Julia and it was a memorable afternoon, listening to stories of the community, the culture, the language and the plans for the future.
- Drinking rooibos outside our meeting space while watching giraffes carefully pick their way around small dialogue groups during an Art of Hosting at the Heia Safari in South Africa.
Grateful for these experiences and connections.
That statement will either mean something to you, or it will mean nothing to you. It might mean nothing to you if washy space-y pretentious prog rock wasn’t your bag in the 1980s. But it was mine.
I have always had an eclectic taste in music and back in the early 1980s when I was 15 my friend Aiden, who was a couple of years older than me got me into all the British prog rock bands like Yes and Genesis and Pink Floyd and Emerson Lake and Palmer who had all done their best work in the previous decade. As a devotee of Queen, I was a bit suspicious of synthesizers, but I have also always had a penchant for drones and atmospheric washes and mystical poetry and stuff like that. Bands like Rush were doing all that, even if Queen, until 1981 anyway, was explicitly rejecting it.
Anyway, my love of Jon Anderson’s voice and Vangelis’ notoriety for the Chariots of Fire and Bladerunner soundtracks led me to an album that for a couple of years was a staple in my Walkman. “Private Collection” was bliss to listen to through the headphones. The following year, they released “The Best of Jon and Vangelis” and that was the extent of their discography that I owned on cassette.
Here is “Horizon” from from “Private Collection” in all of its 23 minute long glory.
Headphones on. Bliss out.
It was in this day In 1992 that I started my first real job in an office, beginning work as a policy analyst at the National Association of Friendship Centres in Ottawa.
I can remember that day vividly. It was a lovely warm morning in Ottawa and I even remember wearing a light purple collared shirt (it was the early 1990s) and carrying my lunch in a newly purchased MEC fabric briefcase that served me for many years.
The NAFC was small at that time, just an Executive Director, Jerome Berthelette, a financial guy, Brian Stinson, our office manager Mel Maracle, Molly LaFontaine who was the receptionist and EA to Jerome and Marc Maracle who was in charge of different projects. I think my first day was Jerome’s last and Terry Doxtator started the same day I did as Executive Director.
As a student I worked as a researcher for David Newhouse at Trent University and the NAFC was the subject of a set of case studies we wrote on Indigenous-Government program negotiations. Through the work and the material I used in my honours thesis on organizational development I got to know the staff and when I moved to Ottawa with Caitlin in 1991 Marc gave me a chance to come and work for the organization.
Lots was going on in Ottawa at that time. There were events marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s journey with many amazing shows and exhibits and productions on Indigenous resistance. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal People was at work and we contributed research and testimony to that. The Charlottetown Accord negotiations were dominating the policy discussions in the city and the talk of what it means to implement Constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights in Canada was everywhere. The fallout from the Oka crisis was on everybody’s mind and the fading years of the Mulroney government and subsequent transition to the Chrétien government threw up many policy challenges and a few key opportunities to our movement.
I worked there for two and a half years. It formed so much of what I went on to do for the rest of my life. I was grateful for the learning I got in the job in facilitating collaborative policy making processes. It was exciting to be in Ottawa during historic constitutional discussions – watching the first draft of the Charlottetown Accord come over our fax machine! – and I got to contribute to things like the Royal Commission, the establishment of the Aboriginal Head Start Program and the renewal and restructuring of the Friendship Centre core funding program.
Thirty years is a long time. And the blink of an eye. And I’m grateful these many years later for all the guidance and support I received as a young guy starting out. I’m proud to still call myself a Friendship Centre supporter and that movement will always have my heart and thanks for helping me get going in the world.
This morning the wind and rain continue here in the islands of the south coast of British Columbia. It has been a wet fall and winter – perhaps the wettest since the time of the Flood stories – and this is the coldest May we’ve had for a long time, which brings its own hazards. It’s all down to an extended La Nina event that pipes cool water into the north Pacific and keeps the air masses cold and turbulent, resulting in reliable patterns of convection, instability and therefore precipitation and windy weather weather.
I live in a very rainy part of the world, and so to really love living here, one has to love the rain. This morning as I took my coffee to sit by the sea, I was struck by just how immersed I was in water. The sea of course, which bathes the shoreline and brings all kind of nutrients into our inlet. The creek beside me, channelling the rain from the mountain into the bay, delivering different nutrients back to the shore line. The rain that was falling into my coffee cup, spattering against my hood. And my breath, precipitating in small clouds that echoed their larger cousins across the channel, covering the mountains on the mainland. An entire symphony of sound all played on the same instrument.
For me, actually, water is my favourite image of God. If you are a spiritual or religious person, your engagement with the Divine is of course fraught with reductionist peril. As Lao Tzu wrote in the very first line of a book about the Tao, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” It’s a disclaimer. He says, “look, everything I am about to write here isn’t the things I am actually writing about, so take that under advisement.” One must be very cautious talking about images of God, the Creator, the Divine. Every name severly limits your experience of that which you are trying to talk about. Whatever name or image you have is like trying to watch Barcelona FC play through a tiny keyhole, in the outside door of the Camp Nou.
And yet, the image that works best for me is “water.” It brings life, and it can sweep it away. It can induce terror and soothe the soul. One can go for a hair raising boat trip from which you barely escape alive and then heal yourself with a soothing cup of tea and a bath. Water also has a characteristic of non-duality which gives it an important characteristic as it relates to my spiritual practice. As our atmosphere is made of water vapour, and so are we, it is true to say that “I am in the water and the water is in me.”
To end, here is a poem by William Stafford that I used in our fifth Complexity from the Inside Out course this morning, borrowed from a blog post by my buddy Tenneson. It points towards this non-dual whole I am talking about.
Being a Person
William Stafford
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.