Here's another blog post for Sierra Club

Oh, here's another one....

http://www.sierraclub.bc.ca/blog/tales-of-resource-extraction

I wrote a piece for Sierra Club

Posted on their blog site.

http://www.sierraclub.bc.ca/blog/being-with-hope

If you're not careful...

This photo was taken today on Main Street, the neighborhood I've been living in for the past year, and that I'm moving out of tomorrow.

That quote again:
"If you're not careful you'll get lost here and find that where you end up is better than where you had planned to go."

Marion Jewelry, delivers within North America

As you can see I've been busy making jewelry.... Please check out my jewelry blog and perhaps purchase a few things for the women in your life with class and conscience!

http://marionjewelry.blogspot.ca/?view=snapshot



Made with semiprecious stones, reclaimed beads, charms and chains, and some proceeds go to Hurricane Sandy victims!

The right kind of gifting for Christmas 2012.

click here for paypal

How I became an Environmental Activist

Although my grandfather and my father were both activists, activism never interested me much. I would always kind of try to figure out just what the hell they were doing.  My grandfather had unsuccessfully attempted to incorporate art into protest, and my dad had done a bit better job of it. When I was young, Gramps had written a very long winded and boring 40-page poem protesting the closing down of several tracks of the VIA Rail.  As I got older my father dressed up in a dinosaur costume and joined other raptors on bikes to protest the overconsumption of fossil fuels. I rejected the public spectacle of it all. 

It wasn't until I went through a chronic and debilitating depression that this changed. What better person to become an environmentalist, than someone who's experienced with depression! I joke.

Although I had experienced depression before, it had never been as long or as intense as the Great Depression of 2011.  It started with the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant meltdown. Just ten days before, I had packed a champagne silk wedding dress with a hand-painted floral design across its empire waistline into a suitcase and went with a one-way ticket to Frankfurt, Germany.

I met my sweetheart and lived in ten days of bliss until the nuclear disaster. It was as though someone had put a hockey stick into the spokes of my bike while I was freestyling down a steep hill. I toppled, and I toppled bad.

No amount of water poured over the two reactors by firefighters risking their lives through the exposure was going to cool them off. Every day was punctuated with the horror of images from the tsunami and nuclear disasters which resulted. And because I was in Germany with no job and only one friend, I had nothing better to do than stay home all day and watch the news.

What was to become of our oceans? Just the year before it was the BP oil spill. When that happened, I would wake up happy every day until I remembered that oil was still pouring out of the leak. Birds were black with oil, the media was covering it all up.

Unable to cope with my ever increasing black moods, I packed my silk wedding dress into the suitcase along with some German books, and left the man at the Frankfurt airport as I flew back to Vancouver. 

 

Within a month of being back in Vancouver three deaths  and a mental breakdown of a family member put my healing on hold. I would wake up mornings, look at myself in the mirror, puffy eyed from hours of sobbing myself to sleep, and feign a smile as I prepared for work.

It was around this time that I learned that BC's beautiful coastlines were in danger of oil spills, as the Alberta tar sands were potentially going to send diluted bitumen through proposed pipelines through Prince George and through the Vancouver harbour itself. These monstrous supertankers taking hairpin turns through inlets of seals, sea lions, 200 species of birds, and Killer Whales, was not anything I wanted to see. 

 

Depression can cause a sense of shame and disconnect. And what makes it worse is that it's difficult to know what to do with dark feelings.   Does one soften reality around the edges with a readily-dispensed prescription of psychotropics?  This seems like an ideal solution if one's perception of the world is unnecessarily bleak, as a skewed darker version of reality.  But what if the depressed person's view of the world isn't skewed at all? What if the problem is more an inability to engage effectively with the bleakness, to do one's part to change it for the better? 

 

It was only when I had a change of perspective that I started to heal, and when I began to heal I began to act. I realized perhaps my despair was a compassion for the earth. I realized a lot of the feelings I had, perhaps mother earth also felt. A sense of being torn apart, not being listened to, despair. This sounds hippy dippy but it's the most authentic I can be. The deep love for mother earth and sense of disconnectedness from her that most humans are experiencing. 

From disconnectedness, alienation, despair, and into a new awareness, or at least a reminder of an ancient truth: the interconnectedness of life.  Through the despair, I became connected to all others in despair. I realized that I was aware of a bigger earthly reality. That is the life force itself that we are tapping into, that is readily accessible to us.  There are constant reminders that we are living in the spirit, in interconnected ways.  Experiences of synchronicity, vibrant dreams, deja vu.

The compassion and love which is at the heart of many activists' messages is yet again a reminder of how interconnectedness reminds us to act. And at the heart of activism remains a regenerative life force, the interconnectivity, the energy of love.   This puts a huge smile on my face.

We will be facing some pretty tough times in the near future.  In four years all of the ice may have melted in the Arctic.  We will see extinctions and environmental devastations.  We will see pipelines break, oil spills, nuclear disasters, war, famine, etc etc.  Will we look away, or will we do our part to try and make the world a safe, beautiful place for future generations?

 Everyone has a limited time, the days of our lives. Everyone has a beginning and an end. The time is now when we have to look at the end, our mortality.

Those who have faced mortality, death, destruction square on without flinching, are compelled to act well in life. To see how bad it is, demands the decision to act. That decision compels us throughout life. Facing the abyss for a moment, we gain the strength to act clearly and effectively in the time we have in this life.

The Existential Camping Freakout

Two weeks ago I went to the Stein Valley with two friends. It was there that I had an experience, which, although not concretely influential in any way, really impacted me. It was the “Camping Freakout” experience.

We hiked deep into the woods for hours before finding the spot where we would set up camp. The question of whether or not to set up the tent came up, and we decided against it, so that we could sleep under the stars in the big sky. As a city person, I rarely see such proliferation of tiny lights up there, nor a moon so bright that it seems like it had been plugged in and turned on by God who says, “Get up-- it's night fishing time!”

The abundance of starts: constellations clear, milky way framed by the crests of the mountains as we lay, curled up in sleeping bags in the mouth of the yawning valley. Clean river rushing loudly next to us, and stars... tails trailing... shoot intermittently across our heavily hooded yet curiously opening eyes.

The first night, after a satsifying meal of ramen, which tasted so very delicious after shedding so much on our hike in, we sat around candle light (camp fires were forbidden in the dry and fire-hungry valley) while other campers nearby sat around their crackling campfire.

“In all the years I've come here, I've never seen another soul,” Mark said.

“I don't like it,” Silvia said, and we all agreed.

But we slept well.

It was the following night, after the other campers had gone, that we felt restless and fearful. We could all feel a dark, ominous presence after the sun went down.

Images of an animal staring at us from within the bush kept popping into my mind. It wasn't a bear I was imagining, even though we had seen fresh bear tracks during our excursion earlier that day. It was a black wolf with piercing eyes. It kept waking me up, and I lay in my bag, helpless and terrified. My body was cold and unable to move, frozen with fear. This image, like many images seen during lucid dreaming, was so realistic. The wolf occupied not just my mind, but the darkness out there, the unknowable and unseeable space around me.

To lack vision, to be completely disoriented, untrained, uncapable of defending oneself, while at the same time being watched, being known by a powerful force out there, made every hair on my skin stand on end. And I was under the microscope of that penetrating gaze, so that every golden strand on my limbs undulating as though by static, was perceived by this being.

What else is there to do but surrender to this feeling? To recognize one's complete insignificance and helplessness out there in the woods with the wild animals. For the first few hours I had wished to be under the roof of my East Van apartment, but then I realized this was silliness and a new level of acceptance set in.

I just lay there and stared at the stars all night, unmoving, dozing off for a few minutes and then being rattled back to hyper-alertness.

An animal never attacked. Eventually the moon rose over the crest of the hill on my left, illuminating the surrounding bush. And then a few hours after that, the sun followed. A silver coin followed by a gold one.

I have not yet been able to brush off the feeling of being confronted by my desperate and completely alienating mortality. Although I have my city skin back on, I am completely naked, and don't wish to forget this very visceral sense of “naked we came, naked we will leave.” And to use the time in between with the most wisdom and gratitude possible. Lord willing.

Occupy

"Stand in the Place Where you Live," was a song by a band called REM, whom some of you may remember, if you are of a certain generation.  When I was young, I didn't really understand the meaning, it seemed like a dorky song where people do a simplified version of the Macarena with just jumping and facing the different directions when the song commands it of you.



But now, 20 some odd years later, I get it.  It's about occupying space.  Knowing where you live and where you come from.  Who you are, what you have to give.  Representing yourself and your tribe out in the open.

This has been the theme this year.  Let's give a snapshot of some simple, repeated moments from my everyday life, which, seemingly insignificant, add up with their simple repetition to become the drumbeat of it all.

Someone recently told me, pay attention to what happens in the mornings, because the seemingly insignificant events which occur during your waking hours will shape your day, and each day will shape your life. 

Waking up each day to a gorgeous view of mountains, these mountains which call me back home when I'm away, these mountains which comfort me when I'm here.

These mountains are best seen from East Vancouver, in my opinion, and so, even more than bringing me home to Vancouver, they bring me to East Van.  So here I am back in East Van, and have had a wonderful year of looking at these mountains from my window.

Then I drink coffee and get on my bike. Riding to work means that I notice the sky overhead.  My attention is drawn to birds.  I feel free as a bird gliding down the hills and into the city.  I am alone, and happy.

Until I hit the construction.  All summer there has been construction in Vancouver on my bicycle route.  The corporation which has purchased one of the biggest museums in Vancouver has decided it's totally okay to jut its noisy dirty construction presence into a very large portion of public space so that cyclists and pedestrians and those cars trying to access the parking lot all have potential collisions every day.  It can irk a person on a bad day.  But who is to blame?  I see people yelling out at cyclists for going too quickly, cyclists yelling out at pedestrians for taking up their lane, but who is occupying the space?  It's the construction site which has determined that all  manners of transport occupy a tiny little hair of a causeway.  We are the 99%!  on a little hair.

And ironically during that little stretch, there are huge billboards lining the path, advertising a way of life along with the purchase of goods.  Today, it was a clothing company and the headline was, "Beauty eats at her desk."  Okay, office attire, I get it, but I am having trouble understanding the appeal of that certain lifestyle.  I wonder how much these billboards subconsciously influence us humans.  Is this our education?

Then after the mess of billboards I go through the "Pain and Wastings" area, the downtown eastside, with people stumbling down the streets after a night of partying.  Partying to the extreme, so that they have lesions on their faces, missing teeth, an obliteration of perhaps previous goals of first impressions and ettiquette.  My heart always breaks, each morning, during this stretch of causeway to work.

Then, I hit my district, my work district is filled with tourists.  People who take up the space with their bags and cameras, stopped in their tracks to document something visually new to show friends back home.  They have no story, no history, they don't belong here, they are collectors of insignificant snapshots, and they remind me of who I was as a traveller.  And I am unhappy with my district and unhappy with my work. I desperately want to shake off who I was and become something new... to be grounded, to listen to this place, to learn...  I want to decolonize, to re-organize priorities, to re-orient myself.  I want to put my roots down further, and this means... no longer working in this stupid ESL industry. For you see, I work with newcomers all day.  But I cradle my intimate knowledge of my city next to my chest and realize that I am moving away from one way of seeing the world and into a whole new reality.

You see, I used to value diversity, broadness of experience, sharing of differences, more is better.  But that is changing.  Not that I'm becoming the negative opposite of that, but just that I'm into delving into what this place is, and I don't want to go anywhere else, just down deep into the knowledge of this place.  (Hopefully I will be able to explain this more clearly in another post.)  And there's a lot to learn.  O Siem.