been walking

I've been remiss. I mentioned that I would be taking a break from blogging a few months ago, and didn’t really take it, and now I have left off posting for almost a month with no warning.

Well, I'm still here, but running to keep up with other projects and developments in life. There was illness and travel, now community and work projects.

I have developed a running storyline in my life—a kind of meta narrative—that is the essence of my blog. It's a way I have grown to look at the world over the past couple of years, writing here—trying to be observant for stories and images that are meaningful in the world. I’m especially interested in the imprint of our human passage through life and through the physical matter of the planet.

Some days these stories and images accumulate so quickly that it is all I can do to keep up with the flow. Life has been like that lately. Little has changed, overtly, but somehow the world seems to be hurtling toward whatever it is that lies ahead.

The big event, and one of the projects that has kept me busy these past weeks, was our first community walk—an event that my family here on the land and some other friends helped to orchestrate.

Here is how we described the event in our little poster: “Connecting Cowichan is a series of walks in the Cowichan Valley. Everyone is invited to come along, meet people, see what is happening in the region, and talk about what is possible. How can we work together to build a strong, healthy, and sustainable local economy?”

My fear about the event was creating a forum for more divisiveness in the broader community. The way we got around that bugaboo was by offering no particular agenda, no experts, and no grand speeches for the walk. The format was much more horizontal—come and walk, see what is happening, and talk with your neighbours and community about it.

It came off very well in the end, much of it last minute and on the fly. I think perhaps part of the charm of the event was the relative smoothness of the logistics (our timing for the afternoon turned out bang on) without a heavy organizational structure and set of interests at play.

On a cool, overcast Sunday afternoon, threatening rain, over a hundred people turned out along with at least thirty babies, toddlers and kids to go for a community walk in the valley. As we had hoped, there seemed to be a lot of mingling along the way and a lot of discussion about land use, and economic development, and sustainability.

Fifty or sixty people stayed at the hall afterwards for Gen’s fresh muffins, tea, and coffee. We had a community mapping project where we hoped to elicit more stories and ideas, but most of conversation and exchange of information stayed informal as people milled about or tried to find their kids who naturally fell into several age-grouped tribes outside.

The great thing about the walk is that a lot of people came out who I had never met and who are not the ones who would come out to a rally, say, or a march. These were the folks that were just happy to have a facilitated community walk with their family and very interested to share information and ideas along the way. Suddenly it appeared to me that the critical mass needed for a fundamental reorganization of economics and land tenure in our region is possible. We just need to mobilize…or simply to walk.

We are committed now to at least one more walk, and have suggested there will be several over the course of the spring and summer. My concern is that we stumble on our own success and have difficulty organizing the logistics (while keeping a low organizational weight) for what could become a very large event. I suppose it is a problem we want to have…

The walk has been one project that has been occupying me and there are several others that I hope to write more about soon. Then there is the family, and the garden. Zena has been working the past two days digging our experimental grain patch where we are trying oats, red fife wheat, buckwheat, and quinoa. We have plans for greatly expanded production of food this year. The saffron bulbs I planted last year seem to have survived the winter although several of them already nibbled by deer. We are planning on lots of new fencing this spring.

In the midst of garden planning and planting, I just cut down our Brussels sprouts that I put in late last summer. I think we did not have enough growing season left at that point and so we will only get one small meal. They are potent little buds though.

The nettles are poking up again and we looking forward to lots of steamed greens very soon.

I will try not to fade out on lichenology again, but my postings here may be sporadic for the summer. I’ll be keeping a lookout though...and I think we best all stay tuned…

Photo: a bunch of walkers from this past weekend, cutting through a field in Glenora.