A story of gratitude

Today, I kissed and hugged my little Zevie dog for the last time.  I owe him my life. 

It was a sunny Summer day in 2010 when I came across the grainy photograph of a little salt and pepper puppy on a virtual pet site.  The image held the sweetest little character with hints of quiet grit and gentle wisdom.  I was smitten!  Zevie collided into my life like a joyful meteor at a time when my heart was wobbly from the unravelling of my marriage.  His love and play broke me to pieces and gathered them back into place.  Together, like twin constellations, we have roamed far and wide over the last thirteen years.  While I walked and fed him, Zevie took care of the more profound work of tending to my heart and connecting me back to my inner landscape. He taught me to set boundaries between work and play, grounded me with daily rituals of walking and napping, and restored my faith in untethered love.  Unbound from judgment, Zevie accepted and forgave every single vulnerability he dug up in me.  On those maudlin days, he would fix his gaze on me, with his head tilted to one side, and declare that what we really needed was a tray of sushi.  Without being burdened by cumbersome words, Zevie imprinted my life with gentle enlightened wisdom in the quietest ways.  We shared a love for the scents and solitude of forest trails.  His shadow blended into mine on those walks as though the universe recognized that we were baked from the same ingredients of clay, fire, water, wind, space, and stardust. We belonged.  

As our circle grieves the loss of our beloved companion, I feel the embodied presence of sadness in all my spaces and honour this profound human-animal connection. Zevie touched the lives of many friends and in the messages of love we received this week, we are glimpsing the tender ways in which he tilted our lives towards joy.  The love of our more-than-human friends is a profound experience.  Losing pets can be more devastating than the loss of a family member.  In considering human wellness and recovery, we need to build collective consciousness about pet care and loss, and healthy ways to adapt to transitions. How many of us are able to talk about our grief without guilt or shame? Do we know where to find help for our needs when we move through pet euthanasia?  Are there supports at our workspaces that compassionately recognize the trauma of such losses?  How can we ensure that workplace conversations and wellness infrastructure integrate pet loss?  Are our institutions advocating for pet therapy as a gateway to collective healing?  Let us advocate for these humane shifts. 

There are useful resources to guide our wellbeing in this regard.  Ontario Pet Loss Support Groups and Ontario SPCA and Humane Society offer virtual pet loss support groups.  My brilliant friend Angie Arora, whose vast experience in pet loss and veterinary social work, has provided an insightful roadmap in her research called Pet Loss and Best Practice Guidelines.  I’m reading a book called The Last Walk by Jessica Pierce on the ethics of end-of-life care. Jon Katz has helped me frame end-of-life questions surrounding the last year of our treasured dog’s life in his book titled Going Home.  The Animal Academy Podcast offers insightful and moving conversations about the human-animal connection.  Closer to home, the Canadian Courage Project looks like an interesting space that supports youth negotiating homelessness and their animal companions. 

I want to learn from your stories of love and letting go, so how are you all doing in this time for reflection and newness?  

Wiser ways of knowing

Once in a while, we receive a gift at the right time and when we are ready to be replenished by the offering.  This was certainly true when I recently had the privilege of staying at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to shape my inner world through communion and community.  Many of you know that I have been on a journey of wellness for the last many years - not just as a scholarly pursuit, but as a daily practitioner.  Seeking out Indigenous practices from places where I have lived and live, and digging for deeper roots of modern contemplative healing practices.  How often do we engage in practices that help us to find a ‘pause’ in our lives?  When do we step beyond our rational churning selves to dip into the world of metaphors, storytelling, emotions, and the relational world that can quench our spirits?  I don’t know about you, but I am weary of linear perspectives that we are fed daily.  The predictable thinking that is relentless in demanding high performance, expedient impact, and quantifying metrics to measure change…while at the same time denying opportunities for gathering, reflection, clearing, and opening up to new ways of curating shifts in our systems.  Do we sincerely believe that we can list and checkmark our way to liberation?    

The time in Treaty 7 territory, in a nest on the side of Sacred Buffalo Mountain, offered an opportunity to hollow out and fill up the imagination. Within the wisdom of Elder Dila’s stories, songs and drumming, we discovered that same open sense of spacelessness and timelessness while valuing presence in everything we do. Sensing, intuiting, and tending to the dreams we carried into our space.  Learning to pause and listen, rather than react or attach to any particular outcome.  In circles and in solitude, we explored deep listening with each other and paying attention to the land so that we can start building right relations.  Like the cow elk that gathered every morning on the campus grounds, we used ways of knowing that were less tangible, like our intuition and noticing the subtle messages from our bodies.  Carrying these lessons forward into daily lives can be hard because it requires that all of us curate a daily practice that runs counter to the values of mainstream systems thinking.  That we take up the intentional practice of inviting thoughtful pauses as an act of resistance and resilient action.  

Dr. Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux spoke to us about the value of leaning into some of the traditional wisdom to restore connectedness and healing, not just for ourselves but for those who have hurt us.  She explained cultural loss through the Indigenous Seven Fires Prophecy that foretells  starvation of spirit and a fear of creativity and wildness bequeathed by colonization.   When facing the question of how to move forward as a settler, it is has become clear that my inner work is not just personal work but it is collective work.  It requires breaking open barriers to healing and reclaiming shared meanings from all our cultures.  While our journeys with contemplative traditions like meditation, yoga, ceremony, reading, and writing are critical, we are being called upon to move beyond the ‘maya’ or illusion of our own separateness.  In the book, Lighting the Eighth Fire, Smokii Sumac writes that building peace in our societies requires that settlers “must choose to change their ways, to decolonize their relationships with the land and Indigenous Nations” and use the wise practice of relationship building and collaboration to build “mutual recognition, justice, and respect.” Dr. Marie Wilson speaks of reconciliation as a movement rather than a moment in time and challenges us to change “how we do” things across generations.  She writes that reconciliation is about “imagining and convening ethical spaces” that renew dialogue as we learn about and from each other.  

Living in these dark times where right-wing ideology can destroy women’s liberties over their bodies without apology, there is an urgent need to practice against the grain, to gather, to listen, to pause and see each other…and to rise in collective action.  

Please visit the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and Action Canada for Sexual Health to see how you can get involved.  Learn about reproductive justice through the work of SisterSong and forced sterilization through the International Justice Resource Centre.

Let us open to wiser ways of knowing.

“These trees tell stories

My ears can only

Dream of hearing”

Tunchai Redvers

Fireweed Poems

A love note to bell hooks

On Wednesday, December 15th, right in the middle of a zoom meeting, a text message popped up on my phone from my daughter.  I excused myself to read the short gripping text that simply said: “Oh my god bell hooks.”  That began a series of reflections about the passing of this incredible ancestor that I feel compelled to articulate as a response to my own sadness.   As comrades and co-conspirators who read my blogs, I know that many of you will have an extraordinary story to share about the way in which bell hooks has shaped your journey.

I first encountered her writing – Ain’t I a Woman? -  as a new immigrant from Kenya in a Women’s Studies class at Atkinson College, York University.  Coming of age in post-colonial Kenya, the courageous critique of what she called “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” had a deeply personal resonance.  Her immense body of work dares to build platforms at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class.  bell hooks exquisitely penned experiences that were so familiar and known to us.  She cultivated our imagination and planted seeds of radical love for us to tend.  I was even able to read her audacious poems to my daughter because she skillfully made her writing so accessible that older incarcerated people and young children in middle school were all able to embrace her wisdom.  Her work challenged the precious elitism of academe and even today, her passion for embedding love in the creation of community sits at the core of critical thinking and theory that I teach in post-secondary classrooms.  For myself and my daughter, she was able to bridge the generational gap so that we could read her together.  Our tattered old copy of “Teaching To Transgress” has accompanied us from Toronto to Nairobi to Delhi and back, guiding us to work well with the work. 

In the Spring of 2004, my then ten-year-old daughter and I attended a talk on Love: Connecting Self and Community by bell hooks in the basement of the Bloor Street United Church.  Her prophetic questions were always about how we can fearlessly connect with each other and make meaning in our ordinary lives. How do we value love in our culture?  What are some concrete everyday ways to dismantle hegemonic dominance?   What are we each doing for the creation of what she called ‘the beloved community’? What are we willing to risk?  Her words, so relevant, still holding meaning for us in this time and after decades of political resistance in communities.  

I am re-reading her book ‘communion’ and it has even more meaning now in my fifties than it did in my thirties and forties.  She writes fluently about the way in which women negotiate and normalize patriarchal authority in their lives.  My personal and professional life is littered with instances when owning my power has brought me to incredible adversity and punishment for not following a conventional trajectory. During these sad times, the messages of self-love and staying true to personal truth in bell hooks’ writing kept me going. 

bell hooks shaped me to grow into a wildly courageous person and I am filled with gratitude for her teachings.  As we heal from this destabilizing loss, there is even more reason for us to collectively continue building from the blueprint of her legacy so that the ground feels less shaky beneath our feet.  For she reminds us that “when we engage love as action, we can’t act without connecting.”

Here is a free copy of Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism that you may like to read (again): https://hamtramckfreeschool.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/hooks-bell-aint-i-a-woman-black-woman-and-feminism.pdf