Something political (part 1)

 What does one do when they are away from their home riding at a time a national election is taking place?  This was the conundrum that faced me while I was on my epic two month journey 3,904km (give or take a few hundred kilometers) away from home.  If I were to point to my normal election habits I would vote, go home and curl up in front of the tv alone to watch the election results and be riveted to the screen for 3 hours or so before I decided to call it a night.  But I was travelling and these were hardly normal circumstances - after all I did not have a tv!  Since I'm slightly passionate about Canada (give or take a few degrees of passion [mostly give]) I knew that not watching the election coverage results first hand was not an option, so other arrangements would have to be made.

First of all, voting - I made arrangements a month in advance of the actual polling date to vote by mail.  I might have snorted very loudly in amusement when I opened the envelope from Elections Canada to discovered that it was like a Russian nesting doll inside, with one, two, three more envelopes and a ballot required for use in order to return my vote.  I had to write my vote on the ballot, put it in an envelope, seal and sign.  Then I had to put that envelope in another envelope and seal and sign.  Then I had to put that envelope in yet another envelope, address it, attach my own postage (Seriously Elections Canada no pre-posted envelopes?  I'm so disappointed in you.) and mail it.  Talk about a process!

Second, finding a place to watch the election coverage - I just happened to be in Toronto for the week that the election was taking place so I figured that there was some place out there showing results for the public.  After all, this was Toronto: the city that blew my mind as I entered it and realized how absolutely huge it and the greater surrounding area was.  We're talking about an area that is half the population of Ontario, equal to the population of BC or three times the population of the Maritime provinces put together!  If there was no place in a city this big to watch the election coverage results then I was going to eat my toque, or hat (for those non-Canadian readers out there).  Still there was the chance that finding a place might be difficult since the election night conflicted with an all-important Toronto Blue-Jays baseball playoffs game, and an equally important debut of the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer during Monday night football (priorities, people, priorities).  After looking online, however, I realized that my fears were in vain.  The problem was not finding a place that was showing the election results; no, the problem would be narrowing down which place out of all the plethora available that I wanted to spend my night.

It was a tough decision, but in the end I settled on a cinema up in the university district that was hosting a free screening of the election coverage. I was secretly hoping they would be selling popcorn too! Having made my decision, I announced my evening intentions to my international roommates in the Toronto hostel I was staying at, giving them the opportunity to join me, only to receive incredulous looks all around.  The Swede declared that this was absolutely fascinating - that Canadians actually get together outside of the home together to watch election results!  This was something she has never heard of before, which I find absolutely fascinating.  I guess Canadians are comparatively very passionate about their politics, something that was apparent only after receiving an outsider's perspective.  Despite the fascination, however, she declined to join me for my exciting evening on the town.  No problem, having been single for so long I am used to going to the cinema on my own!

Decision and arrangements made, it was the evening of October 19th. I bundled up and stepped out into the heart of downtown Toronto.  My mission: to spend my evening at a cinema celebrating with other Canadians our democratic right to vote.  It was to be a unique, fun and historic night.

The story continues!

Something grave

"Graveyard!" I exclaim excitedly to my travelling companion Josh, who had joined me for the first two weeks of my foray to Eastern Canada.  We had driven up the east coast of Nova Scotia and were now in Cape Breton Island on our way to hike the Cabot Trail.  During this first week of being together I had caused no shortage of eye rolls from him in my enthusiasm for pointing out the multitude of neat little graveyards that dotted the sides of the road.  They had little crosses and headstones!  This was exciting to me!  After all, I had grown up in a place where headstones were uncommon.  Plaques parallel to the ground were used for easy lawncare purposes so that graveyards looked merely like rolling grassy hills than a place that monumented where people were buried.  So any graveyard that looked like an actual graveyard thrilled me.

Someone cleared their throat beside me.  "Perhaps you can tell me why you find a graveyard exciting?" A female voice spoke from the passenger seat, her tone not at all approving of my lighthearted appeal for a place of the dead.

I winced, even as I kept my eyes on the road ahead of me. I had forgotten for a moment that we had passengers travelling with us to go hiking who were complete strangers to us.  How does one explain a fetish for graveyards to a person they had just met?  Things in the car had just become very, very awkward.

I blame my childhood. This was before my small town had internet and our TV had only one channel, CBC, so I had a lot of free time.  And I used that free time to read, voraciously.  I steadily made my way through my mom's bookshelves of the books she deemed fit for me to read so it was there that I stumbled upon a Canadian author known as L.M. Montgomery, known internationally for writing the Anne of Green Gables series.  She also wrote a trio of lesser-known books called The Emily of New Moon series.  If I had to point to the instigator for my love of graveyards those books would be the culprit.  In her stories L.M. Montgomery made graveyards out to be mystical storied places where one can reflect upon and celebrate the lives of the people who came before.  They were places for exploration, discovery and adventure - not merely places to mourn.

Even years after growing up, L.M. Montgomery's influence remains on my perspective.  Before I left to the East Coast I spent a few nights visiting my dad's grave on a mountain hillside where I sat on the grass and looked at the moon next to the plaque that held his name.  For me that wasn't a tortured place.  It was a peaceful place. The grass was soft, the air was warm, the breeze was cool, the hills were illuminated with the pale light of a full moon and I felt closer to my father just by being there, enjoying the wonderful moment in his presence.

I explained all this to the woman in the car, feeling for a moment like a graveyard evangelist.  I proclaimed that they can be places of story, history, discovery and celebration of the lives that have come before.  Likewise they can be places of peacefulness, rest, and yes tearful remembrance, but remembrance that can be flavoured with thankfulness for the lives that were.  It was actually very impressive that I was able to explain myself without stumbling awkwardly over my words and so I felt superlatively elated when she admitted that she could see my point.  Score one for positive graveyard indoctrination!

Something trippy

Field trips. What do those two words bring to mind for you?  I think of gold mines, railway museums, and now-abandoned towns full of people pretending that they lived 100 years ago and had just started making a new life on an untamed land. 

Field trips are the educators attempts to remove children from the plain boring history of rote and plunk them down in a setting where the past comes alive for them.  At least that is their hope - that the children will be able to engage with the physical environment in such a way that they realize that the events of the past actually mattered.  Warning: there is more to the world than whatever it passing through your twitter feed right now.

The thing was, I grew up in a place that did not have much history to boast of.  Growing up, my field trips consisted of the incredible unexciting opportunity to go on smelter tours! Woo-hoo.  How many ways can you melt rock?  Or mines: how many ways can you hit a rock?  Or settling a village on the edge of the Rocky Mountains: how long will it take you to grow a garden in a field full of rocks?  Don't mistake my words - I love rocks!  But, there has got to be more to life and history and Canada than rocks.

The first day I arrived in Halifax I immediately became aware of a fundamental shift in the nearness and realness of history.  Instead of a railway museum I walk into a Via Rail station where people can still take the train as a passenger across Canada.  I take a tour of a church where a piece of shrapnel is buried in the wall from an explosion that tore the city apart 100 years ago in the middle of the first World War.  I walk into an old garrison on citadel hill where people dressed up as soldiers tell me how in this place they built this fort to be an impregnable defense for the city against invasion 200 years ago.  I might have had a friend who stuck his head into a cannon from the 1850's. He had the same deprived childhood I had so all this history was very new and exciting. 

Very exciting indeed.

Canada is not a country with much history, but the history we do have is irrevocably rooted to place.  And the places where we Canadians live will ultimately determine the history we know and experience.  It is the places we live that shape who we are, and I don't think one can have a conversation about Canadian spirituality without having a conversation about place and its central importance to our national and personal identities.  The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote "Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are."  That seems like something worth pondering.

Something Canadian

Exactly how big is Canada?  I can't even find the number online to tell me how much it would be from Atlantic to Pacific if someone were to draw a straight line across it! Suffice to say that it is big - 9.85 million square kilometers big.

That sort of abstract number is a bit difficult to wrap one's head around.  Recently I had the chance to travel to the east side of Canada and one day I had a conversation with a foreign visitor where I ruminated on the possibility of driving back to my home in British Columbia. 

"Oh yeah, how many hours will that take?" He asked.

I almost laughed at him. I stopped myself in time. That would not have been very nice of me. But the very fact that he was trying to estimate the journey in hours instead of days proved to me just how naïve he was about the size of Canada.

"Um, it would take three days," I try to break it to him softly  "if I drove almost around the clock." The look of shock on his face was priceless.  I admit I was experiencing that slightly sadistic inner sense of glee that most Canadians get when we get to blow people's expectations out of the water with how awesome Canada is.

 

The discussion of distance came up several times on my journey with the various tourists from other countries.  One girl from Belgium was simply amazed that it took me 4 hours from my hometown to get to the biggest Canadian city nearby (Kelowna BC , which even isn't that big).  It takes less than four hours for her to travel from one end of her country to the other. 

So many of the tourists complained about how expensive it is to travel across Canada.  Yeah it is, I tried to explain it to them, that's what you get when your country is so big and things are so spread out.  It is part of being Canadian.  The sad thing, however, about that fact is that the stereotype that Canadians don't travel to visit their own country is true.  I met more Germans at the places I stayed, than I met Canadians.  In my conversations I found more Australians that had travelled from Pacific to Atlantic Canada than I met Canadians who had accomplished the same feat. 

And yet, despite this divide from east to west of this very, very big country, everywhere I went in Canada felt like home.  Even in the fifth biggest city in North America, Toronto, I found Canadians who were pleasant and polite, bucking the expectation of  self-absorbed and rude big-city-folk that I secretly had (I suppose that wasn't very nice of me).  And even though the landscape was incredibly diverse, everywhere in Canada still had a picturesque beauty to it that I think sings to the souls of Canadians, shaping who we are.

Over the next while I'm going to spend a bit more time blogging about my journey and experiences, and the thoughts I had along the way.  I always figured that if I did a Master's Thesis or PhD it would be on the essence of Canadian Spirituality, which I am fully aware is a currently undefined and esoteric notion.  But having travelled across this country I am convinced now more than ever that it is a thing.  Somehow, Canadians are Canadians and there is something spiritual there that is binding us together, despite the enormous distance it may take to cross this land from sea to sea.

Something involving rainbows

 

 I have a strange obsession with rainbows.  This I blame on my childhood, where the house we lived in was situated in prime rainbow-viewing territory. It was not unusual on a rainy day to be able to look out the window and see a full double bow illuminated end to end. Think about what that can do to the imagination of an impressionistic child.  My father thought the real-estate value of the house should have been increased just for the rainbow view.  I find myself wondering if other people would agree with him...

 

 As I grew into an adult the fascination for rainbows stayed with me. I remember once while living in Calgary (in my 20's) dashing outside my house and running as fast as I could to a nearby park in the rain, just so I could stand underneath one of the most beautiful and vivid array of colours I had ever seen. I had never been so close to the base of a rainbow before. If there had been a pot of gold I definitely would have found it! 

 

 This preoccupation with rainbows has become my chocolate of picture-taking.  It is so sweet and delicious, I just can't resist! A couple of months ago I was minding my own business, playing around on my computer in my apartment while a torrential downpour raged outside, when suddenly something caught my eye: sunlight, glorious setting sun-light, the kind of sunlight that makes the whole earth glow with the brilliance of its dazzling presence.  My eyes widened in horrible realization. The thought that went immediately through my head was "There is an incredible rainbow happening outside somewhere, and I'M MISSING IT!!!". I dashed throughout my house like a whirlwind, grabbing a jacket, shoes and my camera - quickly throwing on a pair of pants - and then vaulted out of my house in a full sprint.  This is a curious re-enactment to my experience in Calgary years earlier, now that I think about it.  I ran to the park nearby my apartment with the prayer on my breath that I was not too late.  I had to see the rainbow!!!
 

As I rounded the bend:

 I am curious, is there anyone reading this who would say that they share a similar fascination for rainbows? Or am I'm just a little over zealous for the colourful and completely wondrous interaction of water and light in the sky?  :-D

 

Something at the museum

Advertising is an amazing thing. There is the potential for something to exist your entire life right in front of you, but it's not until they put a bright flashy sign on it that you actually see it.  Take, for example, the Trail Museum. I grew up near Trail.  Lived there all my life. I could tell you all sorts of crazy facts about the area, like it is populated by Italians and their descendents, that its primary industry is smelting metals like lead, copper and zinc, and that the city was not subject to the Great Depression due to its vigorous growth in the 1930's. One thing that I have shockingly never known, however, was the fact that Trail had a museum. And it is open to the public. And it is free.

So you can imagine my surprise when I am driving down the highway into the heart of Downtown Trail and WHAM!  There it is on the side of the road in bright red and white letters "Museum Open FREE Admission." It was a revelation. Trail has a museum!!! Advertising has expanded my world.

Knowledge of a thing is worth nothing, however, if one is not able to make use of it, so last week I took advantage of a free afternoon to test out my free museum admission.  It was amazing. I learned things. I found crazy old mechanical calculators with so many buttons that I couldn't figure out how they worked and had to call over the museum attendant to give me a demonstration.  I found an old phonograph which plays cylindrical shaped records before they invented the disk shape ones.  I found out that there is actually a creek flowing through downtown Trail and the highway was built on top of it.  CRAZY!!!

And you know what the best thing about the museum experience was for me?
This sign:

 

Honestly, don't mind if I do!

Something botanical (part 2)

 

If you have read part 1 of this saga then you know that my elite skills with house plants means that they usually end up dead.  Method of death: they would all eventually contract these little pesky flies that eventually overwhelmed and killed the plant.  Death by insect, what a way to go.

After a couple of failed attempts at being a responsible plant baron I gave up and bought no more house plants. I didn't want to be responsible for their cruel and untimely deaths. But then, one March for my housewarming party, two friends gave me plants as gifts. One was a leafy thing that was supposed to have yellow leaves year round, and the other was an enigmatic stalk-like plant growing out a giant bean called a lucky bean plant. I was terrified.  It was one thing to kill my own botanical experiments, it was another thing entirely for a person to entrust me with the life of another living thing, expecting that I had the capabilities to make it thrive. If I didn't keep the plants alive would that signal the end our friendship?

Terrified of the looming and very real threat of catastrophe, I did my research this time on how to raise house plants. I found out that my previous failures were not because I didn't love my plants enough - rather it was because I loved them too much. I had overwatered them, causing little mites in the soil to multiply out of control ultimately killing the plants. I learned that plants need moments of drought as much as they need water. They need air in the soil as much as they need moisture.  I needed to let the dirt dry out between waterings.  I resolved to apply my new knowledge with wisdom to ensure the survival of the house plant species.

Since that discovery, I have not killed a  plant. I have been worried several times.  They keep losing leaves for mysterious reasons.  Several of them have turned about as ugly as a potato plant, but the most important thing is they continue to live!!!  Only, I still identify myself as a failure as a raiser of house plants. Every time I get a new plant, it immediately loses its flowers, and they never come back. Even the plant that was supposed to have the yellow leaves year round turned green.  I can keep plants alive now, but I cannot make them happy. And that has made me sad.

So the reason I have told this incredibly way too long epic tale of plant raising is so that you can sympathize with me, and thus appropriately join me in celebrating exuberantly at this picture!

 

This is a geranium plant I got at a Mother's day event at my church (even though I am not a mother, I guess being female is enough to qualify me for a geranium plant).  True to form, immediately after receiving this plant, it lost all its flowers. Then its leaves started dying. Determined not to be a plant murderer again I learned that geraniums are actually desert plants and prefer receiving even less water than other plants, and that if I want it to flower it again I should locked it in a cool, dry and dark place for a couple of months and just ignore it. How is that for parenting advice? 

So that is what I did. I shut it up in a closet and ignored it for almost three months.  Then, with trepidation I brought it out and gave it some water. Leaves came! But poor thing, after being starved and ignored, it then suffered physical abuse.  Twice wind blew through the window, pitching the plant into the sink, scattering its dirt throughout my kitchen.  It lay there in my dish water looking pathetic and destroyed.  Resolutely I put the plant back on the window sill, begging it to forgive me for my negligence in ensuring its safety.

The plant forgave me. God bless geraniums: a plant that doesn't mind being horribly abused and still decides to flower!