When I bought a SmartKlean washing ball on Earth Day in Roberts Creek, I’ll admit to some skepticism. Was this strange, bright-green ball, full of ceramic pellets and a double magnet, truly going to clean my laundry?

Friendly local vendor Neale Smith explained the impact of the various pellets, from chlorine removal to “the far infrared effect.” The latter breaks down the water’s hydrogen molecules, which causes more molecular motions. Negative ions then weaken the water’s “surface tension” so that dirt can be removed more easily. Apparently, it’s all about friction.

And those two magnets, stuck together? They are supposed to generate electrical charged particles that cling to dirt and bacteria, which then disappear with the water outflow.

It all sounded impressive, albeit dubious. My husband was even more skeptical than me. But I liked the idea of not polluting water or using chemical-laden detergents. And one small washing ball was supposed to last for 365 wash loads. That would save on a lot of detergent.

I bought the ball. Like the directions said, I threw it into the washing machine full of clothes, ensuring that there was enough room for it to bounce around. When the laundry was done, it looked great. Better still, the wash had not left white streaks on the clothes, like detergents can.

Even my husband was impressed. We’ve since done several more washes and all have turned out really well.

I’m delighted to be using a new product that delivers what it promises: “practical, economical, ecological.” There’s one more bonus: you don’t need a rinse cycle because there are no chemicals to rinse out.

We need more balls, so to speak. Let’s get these out in popular use and put laundry detergents and fabric softeners out of business.

Besides, in a pinch, you can always use one as a percussion instrument.

The SmartKlean washing ball is available at IGA and through It’s About Time Eco Product Distributors. The initial $50 outlay is high, but it’s worth it when you consider how many tubs or boxes of laundry detergent it will save you in a year or more.

A woman riding English saddle on a sleek, tall horse stops on a forest path and waits for our group of about 20 to enter the woods before she proceeds. We’re making her horse nervous. Elphinstone Logging Focus (ELF) has invited us here, into the Day Road forest in Roberts Creek, B.C., to see what could soon be gone due to logging.

This heavily used recreational area, part of Island Timberlands’ (IT) private forest, is the northern section of a 120-hectare (300-parcel) parcel already logged by IT. Part of district lot 2674, it is an important wildlife corridor, containing patches of old forest, a network of high-value trails and a gorgeous waterfall. I am amazed at how serene and pristine the forest entrance and the woods itself look and feel, only a few kilometres north of Highway 101.

Some might argue that since this is private land, Island Timberlands has a right to do what it wants with this piece of forest. But Elphinstone Logging Focus sees it as part of a community legacy, an opportunity for sustainable, rather than clearcut logging. This informal conservation group is calling on Island Timberlands to donate this parcel to the Crown, to be added to an expanded Mount Elphinstone Provincial Park.

“You can see in one section where it was selectively logged in the early nineties,” says ELF president Ross Muirhead. “There’s a lush underground of salal, the hydrology is controlled. It looks like a European eco-forest.”

Muirhead, who has spent years lobbying passionately to stop clearcut logging on Mount Elphinstone, emphasizes that if IT chooses to log in the Day Road forest, he would like to see the parcel, as a compromise,  selectively logged, leaving old-growth timber, and only the trees that are ready for harvesting taken. He emphasizes that the Roberts Creek Official Community Plan calls for selective logging, but no clearcuts.

Island Timberlands’ plans to clearcut the Day Road forest contravene a community agreement made with MacMillan Bloedel, who previously held the timber licence to this parcel, says Muirhead. Following a roadblock in March 1997, MacMillan Bloedel agreed to a selective harvesting plan. Logging was done off the main trail network so that the forest maintained a balance between cut areas and intact forest.

We stop and admire a tall red cedar, which has a series of high scrape marks caused by cougar claws. It’s the animals’ marking tree, the same one used repeatedly.

With the waterfall as their backdrop, a visiting couple poses for a photo on a high point on the steep trail. We discover that they were married in this exact spot roughly a year ago; they have returned, from off-coast, to revisit the beauty. An activist woman in our group tears up when recounting how much this forest means to people; she sees this couple’s anniversary gesture as a poignant symbol of that.

Our group ends up at the “knitted trees” (I had thought it meant intertwined tree trunks), where community members have decorated trees with colourful yarn-bombing. (For more on yarn-bombing and its origins, see my archived blog post “Woolly public art: better than tea-cosies” I decide that I like this form of human demarcation, admittedly quirky and funky, a lot more than clearcut destruction.

                                                                                           — Donna McMahon photo

About 30 energetic voices at last night’s Green Drinks event in Roberts Creek, BC created an audible – and symbolic — buzz and hum of successful community cross-pollination.

Locals of many generations packed into The Gumboot Café for the first Green Drinks event on the Coast in several years. This eco-gathering, co-hosted by Deer Crossing The Art Farm and One Straw Society, created much passionate discussion and a long list of suggestions for future topics and presentations. These ranged from the more obscure (palm-forest logging and destruction caused by a demand for labels made of palm oil) to a request for short, verbal reviews of “green” books.

Besides the shared animated talk, Art Farm resident and puppeteer Sandy Buck explained in an informal presentation how inspired she felt by creative collaboration in public spaces, community-based activism, and the power of a group to create change. She praised the book series A Community Lover’s Guide to the Galaxy. As only one global example, A Community’s Lover’s Guide to Rotterdam offers initiatives for creating communities and stronger bonds through “empty spaces, shops,  kids, food, greenery, sand, books, stories, art, and symbols in new and old ways.”

As social scientist Duane Elgin says in Voluntary Simplicity: “Who we are, as a society, is the synergistic accumulation of who we are as individuals . . .Small changes that seem insignificant in isolation can be great contributions when they are simultaneously undertaken by many others.”

Attendees ranged from local politicos Donna Shugar, Sunshine Coast Regional District director, Lorne Lewis, and Lee Ann Johnson to Food Action Network reps; Bernard, the owner of a bio-diesel vehicle; author David Roche; Scott Avery of Huckleberry Vardo Designs, who builds and advocates for low-impact small living spaces; and “green” authors Christina Symons and John Gillespie.

During the event, I thought of how pleased the late Robin Wheeler, founder of One Straw Society, would have been to see such group enthusiasm, one of the many legacies of her community work and dedication. Thank you, Art Farm, and One Straw for re-launching Green Drinks on the Sunshine Coast. I’ve attended Green Drinks in Vancouver over several years and have always met intriguing and inspirational people. I hope that this event will become a focal point for progressive change and action on the Coast.

Green Drinks on the Sunshine Coast will be held on the last Thursday of every month, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., at the Gumboot Cafe. You can become a friend on FaceBook.

To find out more about the origin of Green Drinks and related events around the world, see Green Drinks.

Rachel Carson

If Rachel Carson, a biologist and author of Silent Spring, were alive today, she’d likely be one of those people that federal natural resources minister Joe Oliver would condemn as a “radical environmentalist” with “a radical ideological agenda.”

In her compelling book, published in 1962 by Houghton Mifflin, Carson warned of the deadly impact that DDT and other chemicals had on the food chain, from insects and birds to fish, the earth, and humanity itself. Her book produced a firestorm of contempt and anger from scientists, academics, and politicians. She was dismissed as an ignorant female, a fear mongerer, and someone guilty of misguided science. Yet, her vision of how toxins affect the interconnectedness of life – a concept rarely mentioned in public at the time – proved prescient and correct. Her book helped lead to the banning of DDT in North America.

A half-century later, today’s environmentalists face similar vicious bite-back and dismissal for their concern about the Northern Gateway pipeline and the potential impact of oil supertankers on the B.C. coast. How truly insulting to have politicians such as Oliver and prime minister Harper, who are supposed to be looking after the people’s interests,  demonize those who simply care about the planet’s future, fish and wildlife, and the livelihood of those who depend on both. Shame on them both.

Even our local Tory MP, John Weston, dismissed local Sunshine Coast residents who criticized the policies of Harper and the Conservative party at his recent public meeting in Sechelt. He said that these meetings attract “negative elements.” In that statement, he has shown that he holds little interest in truly listening to his voters, the community that he is supposed to represent. He has minimized the voices of concerned seniors, teens, and those of all ages in between. Shame on him.

Harper’s government repeatedly demonstrates what little value it places on the power of democracy and the value of a healthy environment. Oliver has said that only those directly affected by the Enbridge pipeline should be allowed to speak at the current National Energy Board hearings. That eliminates the voices of hundreds of citizens (and voters). He might as well say: The vote of person A is worth more than the vote of person B.

Oliver continues to strive to speed up the hearings and strip the federal Fisheries Act of regulatory teeth while Harper nuzzles closer to more oil and trade deals with China and Japan. They both make heroes of those who care about oil profits, and villains of those who want to ensure a healthy, sustainable planet. (Like the F.B.I., who harassed anti-war groups in the 1960s and 1970s, Harper is investigating environmental groups for their “foreign” support. Yet he seeks and extols the “foreign support” of Chinese investors and oil companies in Alberta’s tar sands.)

Life, the earth, and its people are far more multi-layered than the prime minister’s simplistic, dualistic model of good versus evil. Overall, Harper is a threat to democratic principles and needs to be removed from office through a vote of non-confidence.

Two days ago, at Earth Day celebrations in Roberts Creek, Donna Shugar, director of the Sunshine Coast Regional District, mentioned how challenging it is to feel hopeful in today’s environmental climate. I agree. Yet as long as people continue to speak out, protest collectively, choose to consume less and grow more organic food, exercise their vote, and support groups that work to protect our planet, we still have room for hope.

We need to take back the right to choose what is in B.C.’s public interest. Take action by writing a letter to Premier Clark (premier@gov.bc.ca), with a cc to your MLA, asking for her to take Northern Gateway off the list of projects under the Equivalency Agreement.  Once the National Energy Board submits its findings, we will have bound ourselves to it. We already know what the federal government has decided.

(Kudos to the students at Windermere High School in east Vancouver who hosted an interactive program on Earth Day.  They set up a 3-D walking course, made to scale in the same representation as some of B.C.’s coastline, and had participants, who “wore” boxes as if they were oil tankers, try to navigate the route. What a great way to bring home a message!)

For more on this subject, I heartily recommend reading Open Letter to Premier Christy Clark by Robyn Allan, posted on April 19, 2012. Allan is a former CEO and president of the Insurance Corporation of B.C.

A few days ago, my husband heard some loud gnawing behind our stove. He said that it sounded like something was trying to chew its way into the house from outside. We suspected a rat.

My hubby pulled the stove away from the wall and shone his flashlight down to the floor. There was no hole and no rat. Only a tiny mouse with shiny black eyes and big ears stared up at him, then resumed chewing on a large hunk of discarded cheese. My husband thought it looked adorable.

The cheese is now gone. The mouse isn’t.

I went to Canadian Tire and bought a product called Mouse Inn, which ensures “a gentle catch.” On the box, it shows a smiling mouse lounging in an easy chair, with feet up on a stool and a lamp in the corner. I liked this image; it’s better than seeing a mouse convulsing under the bar of a mousetrap before it dies.

I promote the notion of a peaceful death – or preferably, no death at all. The Mouse Inn, a small, rectangular plastic compartment with a one-way trap door, comes with some valerian pills, an herbal sedative that is supposed to put the mouse to sleep. One pill, one dozing mouse, which you can then relocate.

We tried it. It didn’t work.

The mouse got into our bottom shelf of seedlings indoors, devouring sweet pea seeds in a dozen peat disks. My husband considered this a travesty. This meant war on mice. . . well, maybe just a minor skirmish.

He has now baited the Mouse Inn with not only a valerian pill, but a giant piece of Black Diamond yellow cheddar. I will keep you posted . . . The two stray cats we’ve been feeding outdoors have not yet caught the little critter. Hopefully, we won’t have to resort to the extreme methods demonstrated by Christopher Walken and Nathan Lane in the 1997 movie Mousehunt.

In other mouse news, while in a dollar store recently on Commercial Drive in Vancouver, BC, I saw a mouse scurry across the floor in front of me, then make a sharp turn down one of the aisles. It was going so fast that it lost traction on the linoleum floor and skidded, just like in a cartoon. I laughed to myself, grateful that the two young boys near me hadn’t seen it.

An afterthought: I lived in the country for more than 10 years before having a mouse indoors. I find that ironic since almost every place I lived in Vancouver over a 30-year-period had mice. I have lots of mice stories. Maybe I’ll make this a series.

Got a mouse story? Why not share it here?

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.

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.

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.

– 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.

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.