never too old to play in the rain

When the world gives you rain, enjoy it!

The grade 6-9 group took a few minutes to sit quietly and observe, hear, smell and feel the rainy woods.

Plus there was some dam-building and creek diversion.

Once one person is stuck, everybody else might as well join her!

Mud.

Everywhere mud!

Glorious mud!!

(Yes!)

Might as well wash off and have a drink of the rain.

But not for long. The grade 4-6 group became as wet as they possibly could.

...much to their unanimous delight.

Ahhh... Gloves. Or would those better be called sponges?

You're never too old to love water. So when the clouds gift us with it, get out in it!!

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The Importance of Printmaking

I am a printmaker. It's one of the things I'm proud to say about myself. Printmaking is not just a craft, but a way of looking at the world. And one of my life's greatest delights is when I can share this craft and lens with others. Today I was fortunate to have the opportunity to share it with a bunch of kids.

How to make a simple dry-point intaglio print:

First scrape down and round off the edges of your plate. Then plan your work with a permanent marker on the plate.

Then use an etching scribe to scratch the design into the plate. We used acrylic plates first.

Then we used zinc for the second round of prints. The scribe cuts a groove into the surface that has a burr on one side (and sometimes on both sides). This groove will hold the ink during printing.

When the plate is run through the press, the wet paper is pressed into all the grooves, and around the plate, giving a noticeable relief to the print. We can take advantage of this by carving the plate to form an interesting 3-D effect when it's printed.

When using only lines for depth of colour, texture, and form, it can take a very long time to get the whole plate finished.

Some scribes are easier to create deeper lines with, but in the end inking is as much or perhaps even more important to the outcome of the print than the lines themselves.

Ahhh... ink. Thick and sticky, it needs to be mixed well on the glass plate using little cardboard paddles. I don't have a photo of the paper, but generally when we start inking a small plate is a good time to start soaking the thick, fibrous intaglio paper. This ensures that the pulp of the paper will be moveable and will push well into all the crannies of the plate.

Then the ink is wiped onto and rubbed into the etching plates.

Using a smooth paper, we then have to wipe all extraneous ink off the plate! Technically, all the lines (grooves) should hold the ink while it wipes relatively cleanly from the smooth upper surface. However, the wiping can be tweaked in many different ways to allow for a lot of rich moody tones and layers of depth.

Finally, the wiped plate is laid on the press bed, hands washed (for the umpteenth time in this process!), the wet paper laid carefully over the plate, and then a sheet of newsprint and three layers of wool felt. And then we slowly and steadily run it through the tightly-wound press.

And this is what it's all for! That moment when we peel back the paper and discover what we've created!! No two prints are entirely alike, and every time we peel back the paper it feels a bit like a gift.

Between 2-hour-long sessions of intaglio practice, we went out for a very wet rainforest picnic, and to see if we could find some nature-made prints. We found our own footprints, first, then the print left by lichen that has fallen off a tree. We found the hole in the ground left by an uprooted tree, and even an owl pellet! We decided it qualified because, like all prints, it's a mark left by something departed - an impression of the past and a clue about past events.

owl pellet

Prints often have a feeling of melancholy, because of the inherent absence or loss involved in their making. We breathed on the studio windows and made prints of our faces in the steam. They were gone by the end of the day. It's good to think about prints; about the impression we leave upon the world and the impact we have. Prints speak also about memory. They remind us that the impression is not always the same as the original. And like memory, every retelling takes on a different character; a different reality. Prints remind us of our importance in the world, of the many different and multifaceted truths, and of the relative changeability of it all.

Taliesin Busking Accordion

This is Taliesin, playing a tune he wrote.

Tali had two assignments for school: Earn $150 towards the school field trip, and support a cause. He decided to try busking, and of course he chose the cause closest to his heart: Trees. He'd never tried busking before, but at the end of this first day he said "I loved it! I don't even care about the money - I just love to see all the people smiling."

When he has busked enough that 40% of his earnings equal $150, he will bring that to his school, and donate the remaining 60% to the Ancient Forest Alliance.

The gift of being seen.

We have multiple food issues in our house, and consequently I cook most of what we eat from scratch. I've never loved cooking. I would love it if I only had to do it for special occasions, but the daily grind of baking and brewing really was old a very long time ago. It doesn't help when my meals aren't appreciated, and I confess to being a leftover queen, and to receiving the kind of hapless hums that one is bound to receive in response to third-night-leftover meals. Over the years my daily meals have become less and less inspired, except when I can get up the inspiration for something truly grand. And to be honest, that inspiration is rarely my children.

Of course this gives me a lot of mama-guilt. I feel like my children's meals should be my greatest inspiration, and I should love cooking for them more than anything. I tell myself frequently that I'm failing them. And I feel like they don't see how much I love them, because I know I'm not expressing it as much as I should be in the food I present to them.

I have to create a lot of recipes to create allergen-free versions of the foods my kids like, so I print a lot of recipes off my computer word-processor. Consequently I have a big sloppy stack of stained, crumpled, disorderly 8-1/2 x 11" sheets which I have to pick through every time I need a recipe. I have some multiples printed, only because I reprinted after being unable to find what I was looking for.

On my fortieth birthday this past November, I received one of the greatest gifts of my life.

My children made me a recipe book. They got a big red binder (my favourite colour!) and a bunch of plastic page-protectors. They searched through about ten years of files on my hard drive and found a selection of food-related photos, which they printed and used to decorate both the binder and the beautiful divider pages they created. And of course they stuck it all together with specially-chosen sparkly duct tape.

Then they carefully sorted all of my many pages into the book, and presented it to me with cards that said they love me, and a coupon for more divider pages or page protectors, whenever I need them. The first picture I saw on the cover of the binder was my 2 and 5-year-old children having a little picnic under a tree. I remember that day so well.

I remember how I helped them put the food together and then left them to go out and picnic on their own, and how proud they felt as they did it themselves. They included photos of their older selves making cookies, of a wedding cake I made, of some special family meals we had...

...and I cried. I sobbed and sobbed as I looked through the book and felt all the stress of not-good-enough just fall away. I felt suddenly like my children saw me. They see how I struggle to be enthusiastic about cooking. They see how much it matters to me to make good food. They see the effort I put into their lives, and mostly they see how much I love them. They see me.

I've already redeemed my coupon once for a section of my Indian recipes. I use my book all the time, and I tell everybody about it. They've seen me cry about the beautiful book on more than one occasion. It is a good and wonderful thing not only to be acknowledged by my children, but for them to see how great is the gift of that acknowledgement.

Skating All Day and Skating All Night!

We don't get much ice time here in the rainforest, so every year or two, when the pond or lake does freeze enough to skate on, we get as much joy out of it as we can. I'm not a good skater at all. I can go forwards, backwards, and around in circles (but not with much control...). However, when I put on skates and fly out under the open sky - especially with the whole lake to myself - I feel a kind of euphoric freedom that I don't believe I've ever known in another situation. It's my happy place. So this year (as usual), we kept the kids home from school and skated from night to day and back to night again. Ahhhhhh...

Bubbles in the surface of the ice - lit by our flashlights in the night.

Flashlighting through the ice to see the dormant lilies and lake-bottom, below.

By the next morning there was a centimeter of fresh fluffy snow on the ice!

Those who skate together stay together! ...or something. It does take a fair amount of coordination and in-the-moment correction to manage skating together when neither of us actually skates very well, but it's wonderful to share the moment!

My favourite sport shoes. :-)

My favourite man.

  

My favourite boy.

My favourite girl.

My favourite place to go flying in the wind!

We had to share the same two pairs of skates between the four of us, so unskated people made things like footprint art.

...and more footprint art. We wonder if people in airplanes saw it.

And we borrowed somebody's hockey equipment - thank you, whoever you are!!!

Part of the joy of skating is the silly awkwardness of getting geared up and un-geared up. :-)

Back for another night-skate... with headlamps.

Orion watching.

Headlamp and snow-shovel art by Adrian and Tali.

Tali's spiral headlamp and flashlight art.

...and more of the gorgeous ice bubbles.

Happy winter! May skating bring you joy, as well!

Earth Day Every Day 5: Dark

Earth Day Every Day is a bi-monthly series of essays I write for the Bowen Bulletin, re-published here for fun!

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At the community choir concert this past stormy weekend, every choir member carried a flash light. If the power had gone out (which, unfortunately, it didn't), they would have continued by flash light, as they did briefly at one of their rehearsals, last month. So in one of our quirky Bowen moments, the choir left the stage with headlamps and flash lights in hand, and three headlamps still dangling from the rungs of a stool, on stage. And during intermission we hung around in the foyer of the Chapel, and some of us out in the windy dark night.

This is the time of darkness, when life and community brings us out to walk around carolling or shopping or visiting with friends, and an increasing amount of that time is spent in the dark. There's something about the lack of light that makes us appreciate the gift of it, and everything else we often take for granted. As the sun drops off our horizon, we begin to see in different ways.

Dusk is confusing to me; my mind still believes I can see, but my eyes struggle to resolve the vast array of patterned greys. It's like being lost in the half-tones of a rich intaglio print, and eventually I lose visual focus, reverting to other senses, as recourse. Have you ever noticed the sound of bats' wings as they turn in flight, or the buzz of a nighthawk's dive? It's a sound that strikes me at the top of my spine, as the world falls into dark.

I like to walk through the woods without a flash light. During my many walks throughout the year I have come to know these woods, so that darkness brings new experiences, but not often new footing. Still I have to feel my way along, and go much more slowly than I would during the day. The moon is a welcome lamp, but on moonless nights, like the one last week between the storms, even the stars give light. It takes a certain amount of darkness to be able to notice the stars' light falling between the boughs of hemlock and cedar. I enjoy the softness of soggy needles underfoot, and the cool refreshing damp of the air on my cheeks. This is the joy of living in a rural place where we choose wilderness over concrete; sensual exploration over street lights and expediency. Especially at this time of year.

This is the time of darkness – not just because of the number of daylight hours, but because of the power outages, throwing our families into impromptu candlelight dinners and wood-stove-cooked meals, necessitating neighbourly helping-out, caretaking and community. We chose this island; we chose this lifestyle, and many of us delight in the inconvenience. This is the time we celebrate the darkness by lighting our cove and our homes, and by singing to our trees. Yes, my family sings to our trees.

On Midwinter morning we go out to get a Christmas tree. It's always a tree that is slated or fated to come down anyway, and we bring it inside to decorate. As we hang up the cherished ornaments, some of them generations old, we sing, and share memories of years past. As the longest night of the year falls around us, we hit the main breaker for the house, light lanterns from the fire in the wood stove, and parade out into the dark, weaving a stream of firelight through the yard. We sing the Tree Wassail to all the fruit trees and to many other cherished trees, as well. As we walk around singing, tripping, laughing, holding hands and trekking through swampy areas, we feel the world around us. In rainy years, the rain slips in around our necks and soaks our heads as we go. When it's frosty the grass crunches under our feet and sometimes the sky opens up to reflect our fire with starlight.

When we've sung to the trees, we return inside, where we take the fire from our lanterns and light the candles on the Christmas tree, symbolically bringing the light we originally took from the wood stove back in to light our home. And then of course we sit around singing together all evening. That's how we spend our Midwinter, singing to the trees.

May winter's cold to you be kind

May you blossom in the spring sunshine

May gentle rain in its season fall

May you be loved by one and all

~ From the Tree Wassail, by Starhawk

Photo by Adrian van Lidth de Jeude

I Believe in Santa Because I Believe in Science

If you had never been diving, you might assume that islands float. Then you might learn that islands are, in fact, just mountains poking up from the sea floor. And you would be told that islands don't float. So what if you then found yourself on a floating island? Would you even recognize it as an island?

What if you learned to recognize life by our current earthly definitions, and then you went exploring on some distant planet and came home empty-handed, only because you were unable to recognize life in a different form?

What if you lost your beloved baby - the one who was real to you, even though your parents kept telling you it was plastic - and you cried every night and found no joy in your days for months, and nobody understood your pain because your definition of 'real' was not in their dictionary? Then what if you pinned all your hopes for finding your beloved lost baby on Santa Claus, and you wrote him a letter, but they told you Santa Claus couldn't find your baby, and sometimes real life just hurts, and then your Auntie and Nana colluded to replace your baby as a Christmas present from Nana, and she wasn't the same baby, and you gave her a new name, and the hole in your heart wasn't filled but you felt joy again, and you discovered that Santa Claus is real, and that Nana and Auntie are a part of him, and you lost a little faith in the world, but you gained a little, too? And what if you spent the rest of your life searching for answers and discovering all sorts of new ways of looking at things, because somebody let you make your own definitions instead of boxing you into their own?

These are the caribou that my daughter saw on Grouse Mountain. They were supposedly Santa's reindeer, and I told her that Grouse Mountain just wanted to attract more visitors by pretending they were Santa's reindeer. She went into the little hut there to visit the man dressed as Santa, and told me afterwards that she knew he was the real Santa because he was so nice to her, and he loved his wife, Jessica. And because Jessica was friendly, too. I told her maybe they were just nice people. It was shortly after this that she wrote a letter to Santa asking him to help her find her missing baby. To Santa and Jessica, and the two bored caribou on Grouse Mountain, thank you for giving my daughter hope.

Some people think science is about definitions and categories; rules and laws and putting things into boxes. I think it's about breaking open all the boxes.

Science is about opening our minds.

So what about "magical thinking"? I've been told many times that magical thinking harms our children, either because it sets them up for a huge disappointment, or because it leads them to believe things that are just not true. In allowing them to believe in things we have no empirical evidence of, we are lying to our children; leading them into a life of blind compliance. Further, magical thinking allows us to be taken advantage of due to the inherent innocence and vulnerability of belief in unproven ideas. Nobody wants that for their children.

But I believe that a lack of magical thinking does the same. It hobbles us to the chain of somebody else's empirical evidence or, even worse, as scientists it closes our minds and limits us to the ideas of our predecessors, unable to make advancements or explore new possibilities.

We've probably all heard Arthur C. Clarke's statement that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and many renowned scientists who were once considered lunatics have experience with that. Of course many theories are eventually proven false, just as many supposed facts are also eventually proven false, and then many falsehoods are eventually discovered to be true. How can we navigate this confusing landscape of understanding with our minds firmly latched onto empirical evidence? We need a broad imagination and acceptance of our own lack of knowledge to learn anything at all.

The Critical Thinking Association states that 'magical thinking is the opposite of logical thinking'. I feel, in fact, that they are inextricably linked. Reason allows us to consider all alternatives for a given question and to choose those potential solutions that merit more exploration. Logical and critical thinking give us the tools to explore those ideas. Without any faith in the plausibility of those ideas, what reason do we have to explore them?

I've been exploring the idea of Santa Claus with my children since my son was three. That's when he told me that Santa Claus was coming. Not wanting to shatter his little heart too quickly, I asked him why he thought so. Apparently he "just knew". I told him that Santa Claus had never visited me (or him, for that matter), so I doubted that he would begin, then. I said I wasn't even sure Santa was real, and if he existed at all, he surely wasn't sitting in every mall in the country, and my son agreed. But some of those men might be very very kind and wanting to make children happy, so doesn't that mean they're doing Santa's work? Maybe. But what if there's no real Santa? I told him that the North Pole is nothing but water and ice, and he replied that there must be something at the bottom of the sea, or that people could live in the ice. And I thought, Who am I to tell him that's impossible? So I didn't. And Santa came. Because it's not my place to determine for my son what's real and not real, or to define the idea of Santa Claus based on my own upbringing or the popular standards. That year there were things in the stockings from me, and some from Santa.

I don't want to lie to my children, so I tell them the truth, which is that I don't know.

In the abstract from his research paper, Magical Thinking and Children's Cognitive Development, Eugene Subbotsky states that "...despite the fact that multinational industries (such as toy production and entertainment) exploit and support magical beliefs in children and many TV programs for children show magical characters, surprisingly little is known about the effects of magical thinking and magical beliefs on children's cognitive and social development. Is involvement in magical thinking confined to the department of entertainment, or has it also to do with more practical aspects of children's lives, such as learning and social communication? It is hypothesized that magical thinking does indeed positively affect children's cognitive development, by enhancing creative divergent thinking in children."

So what kind of world do we want to live in? A world where everything is untrue until proven true, or a world full of possibility, exploration and growth? I never believed in Santa Claus because I thought he was impossible. Now, as I explore the many aspects of him with my growing children, I am open to the possibility of him. I also partake of his magic, by participating. I and my children absolutely adore our sneaky little stocking-filling expeditions in the night, and we are all a part of Santa Claus. That joy is one of the gifts of keeping possibility open. Another is the knowledge that my children's minds are open, too.