I'm not sure the habit will continue once we get to some new normal but my siblings have been Zooming every few weeks, especially when there is a birthday among the seven of us. I am blessed and grateful for my three brothers and three sisters. Our Birthday Zooms have been family memory sharing for the one who is celebrating a birthday, a time to remember that sibling in a special way. It has turned into us reflecting on the lives of our parents as well, as we more and more take on the mantel of the grandparent generation. There is a softening and a sharpening as we age, crossing milestones together into new and interesting terrain.
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Fort Langley, Trans Canada Trail, Heritage Park and Site of closed St. Mary's Indian Residential School Register to walk at www.eventbrite.com Join us May 29th, 30th and 31st for the 5th annual Walk in the Spirit of Reconciliation! This event is open to everyone. This year's walk will be self guided, maps will be provided and you can walk at a time that works best for you! We will also be providing a Walk in the Spirit of Reconciliation t-shirt for all who participate in the walk. Please register for this event so we can contact you about the map and t-shirt. Please follow social distancing guidelines while participating, please allow 2 metres between other people or groups of walkers. We will be posting Indigenous information, stories and videos on the Facebook Event page throughout the week prior to the walk for you to read or watch before or during the Walk. Post photos at the beginning and end of your selected route or a section of the Walk, so we know what routes have been completed. We look forward to seeing some fun photos shared of your walk this year! If you don't live in the Fraser Valley area, you can still participate! Register for the event and select Solidarity Walk. Then go for a walk on May 29, 30 or 31 around your neighborhood, in a park or on a trail. Post pictures of your walk so we can see who is walking in what communities. We hope you will join for any/all of the days as we walk as individuals or in our family groups in lament and solidarity with our First Nations brothers and sisters whose families have been affected by the residential schools for many generations. As anyone of our human family have been affected, we are all affected. ______________________________________________ The Walk in the Spirit of Reconciliation is in partnership with, the Christian Reformed Church, Diocese of New Westminster, Langley Mennonite Fellowship Church, Mennonite Church British Columbia, Mennonite Central Committee BC, United Churches of Langley and Willoughby Christian Reformed Church. https://www.facebook.com/events/646691492730011/ I’ve written before about my 93 year old Mother-in-Law and her resilience and strong character. Just before the Coronavirus shut down most Senior’s Care Homes, Jenny’s siblings had a quickly convened Zoom meeting and decided to take their mom out of the residence she had been in after the fall that broke her arm and made her mobility really challenging. One of her doctors said that the bone would likely not set and rehabilitation was going to be minimal. Jenny’s sister Liz and husband Tim, decided to take her into their home and wait out the virus and Jenny and I would have her two days a week with Jenny taking on her bathing before returning her for the night to Liz’s place. I think it was a great and humane idea but none of us was prepared for the transformation that took place after the ‘rescue’. Annie was mostly confined to her wheelchair and she had little strength or hand and arm mobility. Well, 8 weeks later, she is healthier and happier than she has been since her fall in July. She is still gaining arm and hand strength. She is slowly beginning to use her walker again and her stability is returning. She is happy, engaged with her family and pretty sharp on most conversations going on in the room. She has a very healthy appetite and doesn’t relish the idea of going back into institutional care. Family conversations have begun about what’s next but it is a minor miracle to see such flourishing. One of my hopes post-Covid is a serious look at senior care in our country. We can do better and part of that care requires good food, good social interaction, imaginative problem solving and genuine respect for our parent’s generation. We were participating in the Good Shepherd NYC worship service this morning and the scripture passage for this Mother’s Day was perfect. From Luke 13:34 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you. I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you wouldn’t let me.” It brought to mind my mother who could at times be a fierce mother hen gathering her chicks. I can’t recall how old I was. Maybe 10 or 12. Some of my siblings and friends had broken into a neighbour’s garage attic in order to explore. Clearly, we had no permission to be there. This neighbor called the police who ended up at our home one evening after dinner. We must have given my mom part of the story. There was a knock on the door. My mom told us to hide under the bed in our bedroom while she answered the police officer at the door, no doubt assuring him that she would speak to us sternly about this situation. We felt safe as chicks under the bed while my mother hen mom received the wrath that should have come to us. My mom fell into all the traditional roles of an immigrant mom in the 50’s and 60’s as we were growing up. My dad fell into all his traditional roles of a male, but as I think of it now, my mom did not fully come into being the capable and confident person she might have been had there been a greater sense of mutuality in their marriage. My mom deferred to my dad and she could have taken on more meaningful leadership in their marriage than she did. Reflecting back, I feel sad about that. I wish I could say that we have come a long way in 50 years, but in truth we have a long way to go, particularly we white males who fail to see our places of privilege. We need some serious humbling and learning, in order for things to be as they were intended in their original goodness. She was always so sweet and so kind. She would be 95 if she were still alive. I miss her. How wonderful it would have been for her great grand children to have known her. My mom. There is a simple robust beauty in the workings of a clothesline and its parts. It’s one of those underappreciated things in life. Whoever thinks about a clothesline until that inevitable moment when you are pinning the last piece of laundry onto the line and it snaps? It may have been ten years or more of sitting in the sun, rain, wind and frost, slowly deteriorating the plastic outer coating of the cable underneath and one day it just breaks at the weakest point. When I go to the Coop and ask for clothesline cable, the hardware clerk has to scratch her head for a moment to think where the clothesline parts are located. At the end of aisle seven just waiting for me to arrive after all these years. And there are all the working parts, unchanged for more than 50 years. The simple, but beautiful, undervalued parts of this machine. What are the other things our lives that are like that simple clothesline? The Coronavirus Pandemic has had an enormous negative impact on almost every aspect of our lives. But artists of all kinds have taken such a hit with many uncertainties. Even at the best of times it’s a struggle to ‘make a living, but when galleries are closed, concerts cancelled, theatres shuttered up, filming stopped, readings put on hold and the subsequent revenues in short supply it's even more so. It is also likely that the arts is one of the latter sectors to recover. So today I am giving a shout out to all artists in general and one artist in particular. Just so happens that Annie Robinson is our daughter-in-law, an abstract landscape painter, fabric artist and photographer, married to our son Joshua and mom to precious little Magnolia our oldest granddaughter. Annie has had some major disruptions in the presentation of her work recently. She had the opening of a show of new work at the 32 Lakes Coffee Roasters Shop on the main street of Powell River just as the Pandemic was ramping up. Things are on hold there. She has five works in a virtual show called Earth: An Abstract at the Port Angeles Art Gallery in Washington State. Joshua and Annie are doing an Artist in Residence in Lund this summer and we are hopeful that this will go ahead. I love the painting shown above, Uncertainties & Peace, in the collection A Shifting Landscape 2020. Annie says of this Covid time, “I’m still painting West Coast daydreams, but some of these pieces are more frenetic and less stable. Some are apocalyptic and some are post apocalyptic, serene after the dust has settled.” The first thought that came to my mind was one from my childhood. I was fascinated by the way that prairie rivers create Oxbows, the meandering water cuts into the landscape in long looping waves relentlessly reshaping the land. Annie has taught us a new appreciation for the abstract, for the opening it creates in our own imaginations as we interact with color, shape, form and design, how our interior life is interacting with our exterior life, and especially how we in fact have an interior landscape that is impacted by the actual worlds we live and move in. Meander your way through Annie’s art. And think about all artists today. Think about supporting one with an encouraging note. Download some music. Buy a piece of art with all that money you’re not spending on gas. Annie's website https://annierobinson.art/ I have been walking under the fruit trees in the yard over the past two weeks and they are in full bloom. We are always somewhat on the lookout for a good gathering of bees at this time of year but for some reason there is no need to look. What is usually a buzzzzzzz, this year is a BUZZZZZZ!!!!!!! Not sure what the factors are for the difference but this is really great for pollination. All around, gardening has been kind of special this year. Both of us have more time for it and there seems to be an extra energy for it somehow. We have always been blessed with plenty of space to have a large garden and for good gardening mentors along the way. I am still learning new things every year about growing vegetables and improving how I grow things. This has been a very interesting year for gardening, beginning with a huge rush on people buying seeds. Though some of the seed companies were able to respond to the demand, there was a time that there were almost no seeds to be had at the Coop. I just have had a heightened interest in gardening this year, spending more time in the greenhouse getting things started and doing a better job of soil preparation and even expanding the spaces we grow in. But I am committing myself to Garden in Solidarity this year as well and to gardening for generosity. I received an email update from Edward in Uganda and in the Covid crisis there, a garden is more than a hobby, it’s a serious food source. I can get frustrated by cut worms, or cabbage moths, weeds, club root and fungus but I am still going to be able to eat tonight no matter what happens in my garden. For many in the world, the garden is like a farm that feeds the family and pays the school fees. It has never had to be that for me. I want to be more mindful this year that for many, the family garden is food on the table. Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of The Netherlands by the Canadian troops who were stationed in that part of Europe in the Spring of 1945, pushing the occupying forces out and ending five years under the Nazi Regime. There is no doubt, that were it not for that fact, my life might have been very different. Both Jenny and my families were influenced to immigrate to the country of their liberators. I like to think some time how different things would be had my parents not undertaken that big life change. My dad was from a family of 10 and only my dad’s oldest sister and he made the big move. My mom was the only one of five siblings who did. They left with big hopes and dreams and very little money in their pockets and left thinking they were unlikely to see their parents again. That was true for my Dad. Both of his parents died before he could do a return visit. My mom never saw her dad again though she did get to visit her stepmom, the mom who raised her. I do think this connection is pretty special. I know that the Prime Ministers had a conversation yesterday committing themselves again to this historic friendship. We held two minutes of silence at 11am. If you would like to observe this today, listen to Andre Rieu’s Il Silenzio ,a piece commissioned on the 20th anniversary in 1965. There is a lot of emotion, nostalgia and history tied up in this for me. So much so that when we visited the Netherlands for the first time, it felt like a homecoming of sorts, with a knowing that went to the heart. We love visiting and could imagine spending some extended time there. I only have two elderly Tantes left from that first generation but many wonderful cousins and being together is pretty special. |
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