Heather Conn Blogs

This past weekend, Global TV highlighted Roberts Creek on its weekly Saturday morning news feature Small Town BC. The station shared photos sent in by Creekers, showcasing some of what makes our community such a glorious place to live: the beach at sunset; the mandala and pier; the Gumboot Café; the Hall; the Roberts Creek Daze parade; and creative ingenuity, like the person who filled a local pothole with wood chips, daffodils, and other flowers.

 

Yet, we don’t need to see the Creek celebrated on television to know what a special place this is – all you have to do is live here. A friend who’s writing a feature on Roberts Creek for a newspaper in Germany told me this morning: “Doing this article has reinforced all the more to me what a great place this is.”

 

For me, the attraction of our community lies in its outstanding beauty and social/cultural values: tolerance; honouring the earth with organic gardens and markets and food security; private and public creativity; a laid-back lifestyle; independence and self-sufficiency; political and environmental activism; and the talent and expertise of our residents.

 

We need to protect these values to prevent the Creek from becoming an over-crowded, over-extended place without sufficient infrastructure and agricultural land to maintain a high quality of life for its current and future residents. That’s why I was glad to attend the recent open house regarding the Roberts Creek Official Community Plan (OCP) review. (An OCP, drafted by volunteer residents, uses a long-term view to outline goals and policies for the community, to guide decisions on planning and land-use management.)

 

The Sunshine Coast Regional District invited local residents to provide feedback on various aspects of the OCP vision, including transportation, the town core, density, and agricultural land. Many people shared passionate comments, criticisms, and suggestions at the microphone while others wrote feedback on large sheets at a series of display tables.

 

Such public process is a vital part of community participation, democracy, and collaborative decision-making. If you don’t share your views with those who have the power to effect change, then don’t complain if and when your vision never happens. Act now. Be part of the future you want to create.

 

Send your comments to David Rafael, Senior Planner at the Sunshine Coast Regional District: 604-885-6804, ext. 4 or david.rafael@scrd.ca.

I recently added a folder on death and dying to my filing cabinet. It’s not that I’m morbid, but I’ve faced the subject a lot in recent months through a variety of workshops, presentations, and the death of people I know. And I’ve learned about the Sage-ing® Guild, a group for whom I facilitated several workshops at a conference. They positively affirm the elder years and encourage creating piece of mind by making “legal, medical, fiscal and spiritual preparation as a way of facing one’s mortality.”

 

By not fearing death, I believe that we make a conscious choice to live life to the utmost, not shrinking from the reality of a demise that we will all share.

 

Someone recently sent me a list of the top five regrets of the dying, based on a book written by Bronnie Ware, who worked in palliative care. These are the most frequent comments she heard from people who were in the last three to twelve weeks of their life:

 

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Ware says: “It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way.” I agree completely.

 

• I wish I didn’t work so hard. In Ware’s words: “By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.” Again, I wholeheartedly agree.

 

• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. How many people suppress their feelings to keep peace with others? This can result in bitterness, resentment, and even illness.

 

• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Ware says: “It all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks.”

 

• I wish that I had let myself be happier. “Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice,” says Ware. “When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

 

“Life is a choice. It is your life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.”

 

A woman on Orcas Island, Wa. named Alana chose to die on her own terms. She died in the woods on a bed created by her friends, who sang to her as she was dying. She wrote a prose death poem, which includes the following: “How can we know how to live if we don’t know how to die? . . .[M]aybe we could find a little appreciation for the miracle that eventually the spirit and the body separate. Is that so awful? How is it that we get so attached to all of this gross matter? . . . .

 

“If we are not feeling love and gratitude for who we are and what we have, then we are not living, we’re merely existing. If we do not live with love and joy, I am certain death will not contain them either. So now is your chance, here is the secret: Live every moment as if there was nothing more important than joy, than gratitude, than love. Put these wonders into everything you do . . .your finances, your chores, your work, your friends and family. And I promise you will never fear death or anything else and your love will be returned a thousandfold.” Amen.

 

I never thought that I’d write a post that promotes Lady Gaga, but I love the dance that Sunshine Coast elementary students did this week to her song Born This Way. (Click here to see it on YouTube.) What a tremendous way for kids to learn self-acceptance and to celebrate Anti-bullying Day!

 

More than a hundred children from Roberts Creek Elementary, Churchill and David Lloyd George schools gathered at the mandala at Roberts Creek pier in a choreographed dance, wearing T-shirts that read “ACCEPTANCE Born This Way.”

 

With the youngest kids in front, the group giggled and gyrated, arms skyward and hips jiggling, to lyrics like

 

Don’t hide yourself in regret

Just love yourself and you’re set . . .

 

In the religion of the insecure

I must be myself, respect my youth . . .

 

Whether you’re broke or evergreen

You’re black, white, beige, chola descent

You’re Lebanese, You’re orient

Whether life’s disabilities

Left you outcast, bullied or teased

Rejoice and love yourself today

’Cause baby you were born this way

Lesbian, transgendered life

I’m on the right track baby

I was born to survive

 

Whether you think Lady Gaga is an appropriate role model or not, you can’t argue the overwhelming impact that today’s popular culture has on young minds. This song and its message will reach far more children than any self-help book or class on self-esteem. Yet every effort, big or small, that gives kids the sense that they’re lovable and worthy just the way they are is invaluable.

 

Where has childhood gone in today’s world? Bullied kids, gay or straight, are committing suicide. Mothers are pushing their tots to compete as mini-sexpots in so-called beauty and talent pageants. Advertising is sexualizing young girls as more and more get anorexia at a younger age and struggle with a poor sense of body image. Increasingly, children must face their self-esteem issues on their own, as their parents bow to the influences of sex-sells media, the image-is-everything credo, and neoconservative, traditional values that make being gay or “different” an abomination.

 

At the extreme, we face the exploitation of children across the globe, including in North America, as sex and domestic slaves, child brides, and prostitutes. Whether they’re waving weapons, ordered to kill or maim their loved ones to prove their loyalty to sadistic ethnic and rebel causes, or facing death and torture as helpless pawns in the political wars of adult greed and power, children need the support of healthy and courageous adults who will help them thrive and survive, not suffer and die. They need to feel valued and loved, as we all do. (Groups such as Free the Children and Me to We are serving a vital role of support in this area across the globe. I’m not going to get into the recent Invisible Children debate.)

 

Children around the world are dying without access to basic medical care. Here in B.C., with the highest child poverty rate in Canada, we have kids going hungry and getting sick in families who can’t afford specialized medical or dental care. We have babies born with AIDS and fetal alcohol syndrome. How much do we really value children in the West?

 

Originally, I was going to write this week about International Women’s Day and the attempt by neocon yahoos like Rush Limbaugh and U.S. Republican candidates like Rick Santorum to keep women in domestic slave status. Their efforts to thwart women’s self-determination regarding birth control, reproductive rights, family and career roles are truly appalling. How far have we truly come in a half-century, since feminism gained a popular voice in the late 1960s?

 

Then I realized that the power and rights of women and children are deeply interconnected. As long as patriarchal values and controls determine laws and social customs at all levels, from the family to the world, the rights of women and children will remain devalued. Heck, it’s been 83 years since women were legally declared people in Canada. How long will it take before they have true equality with men, and most adults recognize children as our future, worthy in their own right? The young and the female have stayed invisible and silent for too long.

 

I’m glad that in Roberts Creek this week, at least, educators and parents gave children a public voice.

 

 

“When a critical number of people change how they think and behave, a new era will begin.”

– Jean Shinoda Bolen, The Millionth Circle

Two SoulCollage cards in the Council Suit: the Sacred spiral

I would like to reaffirm and reclaim the true, symbolic power of the circle. The phrase “going in circles” implies that someone is lost, has no clarity, has not found a focus on a linear path. Yet, as we know, life is not a linear process at all: like a circle, it is a continuum of beginnings and endings and new beginnings.

 

The circle, one of our oldest symbols on the planet, represents wholeness and integration. Within a circle, there is no hierarchy; we are all equal. A woman I know in Vancouver, who facilitates workshops with executives, says that some CEOs she’s worked with have a hard time sitting in a circle. To them, it’s a scary concept; they no longer stand out or appear to have authority over others when they’re in a circle. Her comment shocked me; after all, kids in kindergarten sit in a circle almost every day. Do we need to relearn how to find our power within a circle?

Jean Houston at the 2012 Women of Wisdom conference in Seattle

At a recent Women of Wisdom conference in Seattle, author and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen shared her concept of the millionth circle. Drawn from the concept of “the hundredth monkey,” it refers to a circle of people whose awareness, activism, and group collaboration shift global consciousness. Bolen and Jean Houston, another conference presenter and a leader in today’s human potential movement, see women as playing a deciding role in this evolution. In their view, grassroots circles of self-aware women are spreading the power of the sacred feminine around the world.

 

Yahoo! We need that kind of resounding inspiration right now, especially while U.S. Republican candidate Rick Santorum and others of his ilk are trying to drag women back to Neanderthal days of control and submission.

Tsawaysia Spukwus (Alice Guss) at the drum-making workshop at the Sunshine Coast Museum

Yesterday, while at a drum-making workshop in Gibsons, BC with Squamish nation educator Tsawaysia Spukwus (Alice Guss), I had to give my full attention to a 14-inch wooden circle in front of me. Ten of us (eight women and two men) were lacing deer hide around a circular wooden frame, trying to weave it over and under another double-looped circle of twine that we had knotted and placed inside the frame.

Each time I pulled on the long, thick cord that I was using as thread, the loose inner circle of twine within the frame got pulled out of shape and I had to keep repositioning it. At first, this was very frustrating, until enough woven loops were in place around it that the inner circle kept its form.

What a metaphor for life, I thought. We can each choose to find our own circle, inner and outer, and give it shape in a way that provides form and meaning for us. Then, we can use this circle (drum) to share our voice and vision with others. This circle reaches within and out to others across communities and nations and the planet in one ongoing, holographic sphere of interconnectedness.

Two of my SoulCollage Council Suit Cards: The Mandala (top) includes an aerial view of the Roberts Creek mandala and a photo of the Sam Mandala salmon fish design that I created several years ago. The bottom image is The Sacred Circle.

For most of my life, I have felt drawn to circles. In recent years, labyrinths and mandalas and spiral forms have held a strong attraction for me. I love the mandala at the pier in my home community of Roberts Creek, which gets created anew and repainted as a community project every year.

My SoulCollage card The Labyrinth shows the labyrinth where my husband and I were married, and our wedding cake. 

I was married in an 11-circuit labyrinth and continue to seek out labyrinths wherever I travel. I use circles and spirals as repeat motifs on the SoulCollage cards that I create, and group people in a circle during my SoulCollage workshops. I look forward to many more years of meeting with others in circles of all kinds, using my drum as an outward symbol of my own creative voice.

Recently, I was invited to be a guest contributor to the blog Spiritually Speaking, which I didn’t even know existed. It’s produced through the Times Colonist in Victoria, BC. I decided to write about my children’s book and the challenges of expressing spiritual concepts in simple, concrete terms that will be meaningful to kids.

If you’d like to read my post, please click here. I invite you to leave a comment on this blog and/or the Spiritually Speaking one.

In the adult realm, I wrote an essay several years ago called Dharma by the Dozen: The Art of Spiritual Writing. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, here are a few suggestions for tackling this genre, in particular:

• Embrace metaphors and similes that relate to the natural world.
• Apply a light touch.
• Use simple language.
• Draw from personal experience.
• Create images of beauty and resonance.
• Write to inspire.

 

I usually support politically correct language but the recent decision by a Utah school district to forego the use of “cougar” as a mascot is too much. The district, based in Salt Lake City, thought that using a cougar mascot for a new high school would suggest unwanted connotations with the word’s other meaning: a forty-something woman who sleeps with younger men. Is there some adult projection going on here?

At least three schools in Utah, including Brigham Young University, already use a cougar as a mascot. If conservative Mormons find this acceptable, why can’t it work for a high school? Instead, the district has chosen the bland, more abstract term “Chargers.”

A concrete word like “cougar” carries far more evocative weight and cachet than “charger.” By not using “cougar,” the district is denying teens the opportunity to use the power and symbolism of a sleek and powerful hunter. What’s next? Will stories for young children no longer have a fairy godmother, because “fairy” is a derogatory term for a gay male?

Meanwhile, are there any cougars (the non-human kind) left in Utah?

 

 

In the last few weeks, I’ve learned a new word: minga. (My husband joked that it must be some version of Mingus, as in Charles, and started doing some free-form jazz on an air trombone.) A Quechan term, it roughly translates to “a community coming together to work for the benefit of all.” I came across it in the book Me to We, by Craig and Marc Kielburger. The authors describe a dilemma they had in Ecuador in a remote, mountain village, where they had come to build a school for local children. Due to delayed transport and delivery of supplies, their rate of construction was lagging far behind their schedule. Reluctantly, they realized that they would have to leave the needy community with the school only half-built.

That’s when they went to the village chief, the oldest woman in the community, for help. Through a translator, she told them: “No problem, I’ll just call a minga.” She took a few steps outside her simple hut and hollered, in Quecha: “Tomorrow . . .there will be a . . . minga.” The next morning, hundreds of people were in the village square. Women had arrived with infants on their backs, men had left their fields at prime harvest time, and young children were standing with eager eyes. They had come to build the school, walking countless kilometres to get there. Many of the kids who showed up lived too far away to even attend the school, but they came anyway. None of these people expected anything in return. They had  brought food and shared it with the authors and their volunteers. The authors state: “In a matter of hours, they did what would have taken us days, if not weeks, to accomplish.” Immediately after the new school was completed, all of these people participated in a lively celebration to honour the new building, then quietly disappeared.

A minga: “Upon hearing the word, people stop everything for individual gain, no matter how important, to come together for the collective good.” The authors tried to think of an equivalent English term, and other than “barn raising”,  the closest they got was “a riot, but for good.” What does this lack of such terminology say about our culture and language?

One reason that I love my community (Roberts Creek on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast), is its minga-like sensibility. People readily pitch in to benefit others in the area, whether it’s volunteering to paint the local Legion, to host a fundraiser for Japan’s tsunami victims or hold a silent auction to give financial support to a neighbour with cancer.

Yet, the dominant culture in the West still clings to a fierce “Me first” philosophy, valuing getting ahead and competing with one’s neighbour far more than mutual support and cooperation. The reality show The Survivor exemplifies this perfectly; ironically, while in this Ecuadorean village, the authors met one of the participants of the first Survivor show. He was so put off by the hype and papparazzi and image-based associations of the show, that he chose to get as far away from that as possible and flew to live in this remote part of the Andes.

I recommend the book Me to We to everyone. I think that it should be required reading in schools. (The authors co-founded the global activist organizations Free the Children and Me to We.) Their book encourages people to take an issue that they care deeply about, then imagine calling a minga to get people to help. They suggest the following:

“Make a list of how you could call one [a minga] in your community. Ask yourself:

• Who would help me? Friends? Parents? Coworkers?
• What tasks would I need help with?
• How would I call my minga? By sending out a group email? By making a presentation to my faith group? By posting a hand-printed notice in my office?

It’s amazing how many people in our lives are ready to help out . . . all they need is someone to ask them.”

  

                                                                                                                                                                                                 — visual by Avril Orloff  

This week, the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) asked 75 green-minded people their view of what’s critical to launching a successful community sustainability program. In a four-hour interactive session, held at the Cedars Inn motel in Gibsons, British Columbia, Canada, here’s how some people responded:

 

Have a sense of urgency. Be bold. Acknowledge risk.
Have strong leadership. Take action and do it with enthusiasm.
Make it personal and engaging.
Understand people’s motivations and value. Recognize their differences.
Demonstrate concrete examples of sustainability and their benefits.
Involve youth and multi-generations.
Reassure people.

 

The SCRD, the local governing body for about 30,000 people who live along the coast northwest of Vancouver, hosted the fun event, which included a free vegetarian dinner and live music by local band Sweet Cascadia. Facilitator Julie Clark, the education and outreach coordinator for the SCRD waste management program, invited participants to respond to three questions:

 

1.  Thinking like the whole coast (region), what do you believe should be the goals of a sustainability education and outreach program?

2.  Think about a time when you experienced fabulous community engagement in action. What were the important elements?

3.  Think about a friend or neighbour who is not involved in the sustainability movement. What suggestions do you have to engage this person in sustainable behaviour?

 

As participants, we discussed responses with three different sets of people, rotating to a new table for each question. We summarized our answers as individual groups, then shared them with the whole group. A wonderfully creative artist, Avril Orloff, wrote our responses on a series of wallboards, using eye-catching imagery and lettering with a variety of coloured felt markers.

 

This process invited maximum participation and allowed us to meet three times as many new people than we would have if we had stayed at our respective tables. Although I was skeptical at first about how effective this method would be in producing practical and meaningful answers, I enjoyed the interaction and brainstorming and found it valuable. I discovered later that we were following World Cafe Guidelines, which I had never known about. The World Cafe Community website defines its approach as “a natural & effective way to host meaningful conversations that awaken collective wisdom & engage collaborative action.”

 

I enjoyed hearing the suggestions from each group; some sought immediate, localized changes, others took a broader outlook, emphasizing life philosophy and motivation more than specific actions. In my first group, I thought that defining sustainability would be a good place to start, since it has become such a buzz word and means different things to many people. Some people prefer the term “stewardship.”

 

A woman in my group recommended the definition offered by Jennifer Sumner, author of the book Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization, published by University of Toronto Press in 2005. Sumner thinks that since sustainability is such a vague concept, the forces of corporate globalization can co-opt it. She recommends a new understanding of the term, seeing sustainability as “a set of structures and processes that help build the civil commons.” Sumner defines the latter as “any co-operative human construction that protects/or enables the universal access to life goods” as distinct from market relations. She suggests a new term of “sustainable globalization.”

 

Julie Clark cited the 1987 Brundtland Report , also known as Our Common Future, published by an international group of politicians, civil servants and experts on the environment and development. This report defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The report highlighted three key aspects of sustainable development: environmental protection, economic growth, and social equity

 

The SCRD is putting its sustainability focus on three main areas: water conservation; solid waste (e.g. using it as a resource), and energy and emissions. As if to emphasize how our choices now will affect the next generation, participant Georgina Brandon gave the children who attended an eco-minded art project. She had them draw and paint signs that they paraded through the meeting area: giant vertical footprint outlines that cautioned us to limit our contribution to carbon emissions; a long, horizontal shelf of plastic water bottles, reminding us of landfill clutter and nonrecyclables, and outlines of chickens that encouraged food security and control over one’s own food supply.

                                                                                                                    — visual by Avril Orloff

 

Although this event didn’t result in any earthshaking revolution or instant change, it did provide inspiration, validation, and options for initiating change at a local level. Regardless of what definitions we use for sustainability, only actions will make the difference. I think that concrete goals, such as setting dates for achieving specific reductions of  greenhouse gas emissions, make a good rallying point. Make any efforts solution-oriented rather than harping on problems. The overriding question that Julie Clark posed was the perennial challenge: How do you engage the silent majority?

                                                                                                                  — photo by The Blackbird

I was delighted to come across the above photo at an exhibition at W2 Community Media Arts Centre at 112 West Hastings in Vancouver, BC. A photographer and poet in the city, known as The Blackbird, created this image as an example of subvertising. (Wikipedia defines this practice as “making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements to make a statement.”)

In his accompanying artist’s statement, The Blackbird said that he was wondering: “How do I combine the cute and mascot dolls with the harsh socioeconomic and political realities of playing host to the [Olympic] Games while 1) not diminishing the mascots’ accessibility as products of popular culture intended for mass consumption and 2) not making light of serious problems such as Vancouver’s homelessness crisis, the drafting of bylaws that restrict guaranteed Constitutional freedoms in the interests of a corporate elite, and the complete militarization of a peaceful democratic metropolis?”

I had just created a sillier, more whimsical version of subvertising with a similar Olympic theme (see my post below called “Introducing Quarotchety . . .”). It was a wonderful moment of synchronicity to discover this image taken on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It depicts beautifully the startling difference between the cutesie, moneyed version of life, as per Olympics advertising, and the reality of a dumpster diver in Canada’s showcase coastal city. What better way to convey that than use a primary Olympic icon? Well done.