Everything is Awesome!

...

Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim gray sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap

And chase the frothy bubbles,

While the world is full of troubles

And is anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

 ...

~WB Yeats, excerpted from The Stolen Child                

I think most of us shelter our children from knowledge of terrible things, and I believe it's important to allow them to grow without the psychological stress that is sparked by the day-to-day news. I used to keep the radio off in the car when mine were younger - now that they're 9 and 12 I just turn off gruesome details, as much for myself as for them. But they are keenly aware of the many pending global disasters, as are most of their friends. Every day we hear of more studies: Mass Global Extinction. Social Collapse. Barren Oceans. World War. Radiation. Food Shortages. Climate Change. My kids know that their lives will be directly effected be these terrors, and it makes them sad. I try to talk about these things with them in a positive light: maybe we can be a part of humanity overcoming these changes! But my words are a thin veil over my obvious lack of certainty.

So I'm honest. We talk about pretty much everything that comes up, from rape to murder to suicide, mental illness, the end of the world, sexual exploitation, aliens and corporate greed. Sometimes they call me out on my purchasing and transportation choices, and I'm glad to have someone to discuss them with. If we weren't having these discussions, they'd still see me making choices; they'd still be influenced by media and their social circle, but they wouldn't have as many opportunities to consciously consider and discuss those things with adults. I truly believe that this would leave them much more vulnerable, in the long run, to corporate and political media campaigns, and I don't like that option.

Apocalypse in Pieces. Acrylic, oil and sharpie on reclaimed B.C. Binning panels.

But what about the fear? The sadness? Depression and hopelessness? Yes! I'm terrified! I'm more frightened of what knowledge of our situation does to my children than I am worried for our future. But I also consciously choose to be happy. I imagine that when things get dire enough, humanity will prevail, and we'll be so much wiser for it. I await this day with joy. There is always misery everywhere if you want to see it, but to look at things from a miserable perspective is not particularly useful. I personally would prefer to study what needs to change, and tackle the awesome challenge of making those changes. What does that mean? Everything is awesome!!

We went to see the Lego Movie in the park the other day with a large number of other families from our community. It was a little bit predictable, and I can't deny having many less-than-awesome thoughts about Lego and corporate control of our children's minds, but... Everything was awesome! I spent more time playing with my beloved friend's 1-year-old than I did watching the movie. Bats were eating mosquitoes; children were wandering comfortably between the snuggled families, sharing bags of popcorn. The full moon was pressing up the clouds from behind the trees in the east. Stars were appearing - and yes, of course I wished on one! Right there in the middle of the crowd of people I love and people I don't know at all. Love was everywhere. And sweet William looked at the moths in the projector beam and wistfully exclaimed "Look! Fireflies!" And everything was awesome.

I can't hide life's miseries from my children, but I can't handle being miserable all the time, either, so I am trying my best to pass on an ability to enjoy everything we have.

On the way home in the car, we were talking about the End of the World. And we agreed that if we knew today was our last day, we would make it wonderful. Well - we ARE going to die. It could be in one year, ten years, 50 years or 100 years. Death is certain. And we're going to do everything we can to make whatever time we have wonderful.


...and on a side note, as I'm finishing this post, we're having a truly awesome thunder storm. There's a lot of shouting going on as we and the kids (who are in their beds on opposite sides of the house) estimate the distance of each strike over the sound of pelting rain on the tarp over our house. This is awesome. :-)

What We Don't See

My family lives on a little rock in the ocean. It's a small island in a small sound that faces almost unimaginable threats. From fishing to aquaculture to logging, from oil and gas and other industrial development to waste incineration plans, we face devastation at every level of the air, land, rivers and sea. And if that wasn't enough, we residents are polluting and destroying habitat with our daily lives at an ever-increasing rate. Our attempts to live sustainably fly out the window when we hear about great events in town and hop on our behemoth ferry to attend. Or when we choose jobs that mean commuting by ferry, vehicle, and sometimes plane. For those of us who grew up here it's easy to feel a warm sense of home in the smell of tar-coated dock pillars and diesel fuel. For others it seems a small sacrifice to damage a bit of shore for a dock or a breakwater. But we forget that we are part of an ecosystem.

Sieving the collected gravel to separate out the size we're looking to sample.

Yesterday our family participated in a workshop on surveying forage fish spawning on our island. Forage fish matter because they, in their various life-stages, are a key element in the local ecology. Well... of course we're all key elements. Perhaps forage fish matter right now to us because we have been blinding ourselves to them. So have you ever scraped off the top layer of sand and gravel from a large area for sandcastle or beach-fort building? I have. And probably a million forage fish embryos along with it.

This is what we learned. Forage fish spawn at high tide just below the highest tide line -- in 6 to 10 inches of water, at the top of their reach on the beach, during the brief slack-tide. The embryos attach themselves to small pebbles in the top couple inches of beach substrate.

More sieving.

The young then drift out to the water column, where they become food for many species, throughout their lives. If they don't survive this beach time (and currently it seems that less than 1% do, although previously the rate was closer to 10 or 15%), that food source is gone. Too many years of this and we could be in an unstoppable downward spiral of species loss that includes ourselves. Oh wait! But probably we already are!

So my family has signed up for this forage fish survey. We'll be taking samples as we learned at the workshop and sending them in for analysis, and hopefully the very intelligent and courageous woman who is heading this important project can continue her advocacy on behalf of forage fish spawning areas.

Winnowing the sieved sand to bring embryos to the top for removal.

But is it enough? Forage fish are an important piece of the puzzle, and yes: every dock that isn't built, every shoreline that isn't obstructed and every forest that continues to lean out and drop its nutrients and shade to protect these embryos is valuable. But humanity is suffering from myopia. We look at our little piece of the puzzle, and we continue to destroy those pieces directly behind our gaze. The water is the life-blood of our planet, and just because we don't often look beneath it, or peer with a microscope between the grains of sand we walk along, doesn't mean those places are less important than, for example, elephants or orangutans. The microscopic world and the macroscopic world are equally essential to our survival and vulnerable to our destructive practices.

Scooping the top layer (hopefully with embryos), into the sample jar for study.

It's time for us to become aware that with every step we take we cause permanent change to our ecosystem. Every single move we make and thought we have makes a difference. What we don't see matters perhaps even more than what we do see, because our ignorance leaves it - and us - vulnerable. When we know that, we might begin to turn around our species' folly and find our way back to survival.

Partnership

Making walls and curtains.

I've been doing this trendy 7 Days of Gratitude challenge on Facebook. It's hardly a challenge to come up with 3 things every day. It's more of a challenge to limit myself! I am so keenly aware of how fortunate I am in my life and in the place and time I live. But today I am only listing one thing: Markus.

I am grateful for my partner, Markus.

I say 'partner' because although he is also my husband, the father of our children, my friend and my support, I have recently come to understand a bit more of what partnership is. It was always there, of course, since the moment I met him and felt a lifelong sense of searching come to an end. But I haven't always trusted it as I am learning to do, now. Our partnership feels to me like an invisible but very strong network of cables linking our pasts, presents and futures; our joys, sorrows and frustrations; our closeness and distance. It's the foundation -- the connection that doesn't go away regardless of the details. It's the kind of thing we talked about when we got married, but are only slowly learning to understand. It's the certainty that we will be together always and that even when this life (and each other) seem totally intolerable, he is still my safety net and I am his. We are each other's home.

So today, on Markus' 45th birthday, as we continue growing blindly together, I am grateful for his existence in the world and my life, and for our partnership.

THANK YOU!

That is what we shout to the world, after dancing together at the Rickshaw Masquerade. This was the 9th annual. It's an event that certainly comes with some preparation and sometimes I wonder if I'll be up for it... but it's so amazing and leaves us all with such a broad feeling of wellbeing, community and joy that we just can't help but keep on doing it.

This is our annual Lughnasadh party. It's by invitation only, but usually the group is between 50 and 90 people. We dress up in our masquerade finery, expressing our personalities or our creativity or our silliness, and we come together to share our homegrown and local food, to appreciate each other's company, and to dance and sing in another year of abundance in nourishment for our bodies and spirits.

I didn't take many photos this year, but my Dad and dear friend Linda did -- thank you both!

We are so grateful for our lives' gifts of love and joy!

spiral dance

let the sun keep burning

and the earth keep turning

holding hands

we will dance into the moonlight

let the green earth feed us

and cool water relieve us

singing free, joyfully

into the moonlight

THANK YOU!!!

lavender festival cakes

dress-up badminton  :-)

Bartender extraordinaire! "Come have a driiiiiink!!!" ... "You have to have a cup. And you have to write your own name on it. Would you like water or beer or my special water kefir?"

Adrian served up celery-mint slushies this year.

Some things are just inexplicable.

Good night beautiful world!

Summer Photos

The puppy is getting rather large... but she still likes piggy backs!

The view from the kids' evolving tree house.

Mmmm... lilies.

50mm of rain in 12 hours, and we chose this day to go for a forest adventure. :-))

Thank goodness for intrepid friends!

We discovered we seem to have had a fashion-matching day...

Hello beautiful boy!

Amber

Tali's room. It's been getting progressively more full of plants recently, although still with a large proliferation of his scientific projects. So I asked him: do you think maybe you'll get into astro-botany? No. He said. I'll still be an astrophysicist, but I'll just have a lot of plants. :-)

Down to the beach...

Oat harvesting time!

Armfuls of oats.

A giant heap of oats.

And oats curing in our box-filled house!

Aiden is now 5! This was actually a few days before his birthday, at Grandpa's 65th birthday, but Aiden is an excellent photo-bomber.

Trampoline time with cousin Jack at Grandpa's birthday party.

Happy birthday Grandpa! Here he is with his 5 grandchildren.

Isn't life beautiful?

Tali thinks so. And we all appreciate the ferry men who recognize his peaceful place and let him stay... :-)

The sky was too saturated for my camera to handle!

This is kind of how I feel about evening beach trips. Squinty-eyed and cozy.

 

Auntie Lidia is a pretty awesome artist.

And she has the answer to everything.