Remembrance Day wreaths laid at the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument, 2014
When I moved almost 37 years ago to the Bruce Peninsula – formerly known as the Saugeen, or Indian Peninsula – I naively believed Aboriginal people should be treated as equal citizens of Canada. The year was 1979, 10 years after the now-infamous “white paper,” formally called the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy.
I know I’m not alone. There are legions of us pre-boomers born just before our fathers went off to war. Many didn’t come back. Many did, but in various states of brokenness, never to be whole again. Continue reading
I was awakened a couple of times through the night by a vivid, troubling dream – a nightmare full of anxieties about not being able to do anything because there was too much to do, not knowing even where to start, and then having my most precious equipment stolen right before my dream eyes.
Well, if there’s a daily prompt I can’t let pass it’s this one – newspaper.
I was for 30-plus years, and still at least part-time, what veteran Canadian journalist Allan Fotheringham has often called an “ink-stained wretch.” (Now Foth, don’t deny it, I remember you using that expression quite often when your column appeared regularly in Maclean’s Magazine. I trust you still do wherever your work now appears in print, as it must surely. It gets to be a habit doesn’t it, this work we do? Like breathing.) Continue reading
I am by Canadian standards low-income. I try to live simply here on my secluded, rural property on a modest pension income, supplemented by a relatively small amount of money from self-employment.
I’ve always worked hard, and always will, for as long as I can. In that respect I daresay I’m the same as the vast majority of people in the world, especially these days.
And like most Canadians I’ve always paid my taxes. Now that my 2015 income-tax return is done I have a small amount to pay to help support the cost of government, including the projected $29.4 Billion federal, economic-stimulus budget.
It happened many years ago. I wasn’t a man yet, maybe I’m still not, in the spiritual sense; and I believe that is what matters most, regarding our growth and development as beings alive in the world for what is, after all, a very short time.
So, whatever time I may have left, even if it’s just this present moment, I must use to set that right.
I’ve had plenty of time and even opportunity. I may even have been offered the very important gift of a mentor, or guide, early on who could have helped me understand what happened that night.
If I had had some sense of how important it was that there should be such people among us, to help young people find their way I might have been more likely to take hold of the gift of them for dear life and found my path.
But I didn’t. I let them go unrecognized. I didn’t have a clue. I was a fool. But then I wasn’t born and raised in a culture that understood the importance of such things, I might say, by way of excuse.
And sadly, tragically, that’s still true for yet another generation of young people in our world.
And we wonder why so many are so desperately lost that they are throwing their lives away in vain pursuits of one sort or another, sometimes with terrible consequences for many others; or just throwing their lives away, period. What a terrible waste. Continue reading
April 6, 2016, Cathedral Drive Farm
What happened to spring?
It was here in little Hope Ness a few weeks ago. I was all set to disconnect the snow-blower from Mr. Massey Too, take the winter tires off the van, and the storm windows off the house, and maybe even get some peas and potatoes planted. It’s the second week of April, after all; I’ve done it before by now.
But winter came back. The ground is covered with snow again, the overnight temperature went down to -13 (Celsius) a few nights ago. It’s supposed to go down to -10 tonight, and the forecast for the next few days isn’t that much better.
I declared if officially spring, right here in this blog days before the vernal equinox in these parts because it was so warm for so many days and the snow cover was almost completely melted away. But this, now, is more like the middle of winter than the beginning of spring. Today the sun is shining; that’s about the only consolation. And spring has to come, doesn’t it, surely? (I know, your name’s not surely.)
What happened? Continue reading
I’ve had some good friends in my life. They have stood by me in thick and thin, never judging, never putting me down, and always reassuring me I’m okay, in a way I can’t begin to explain . . . well, on second thought maybe I can. It’s like this: if I can say to my really good friend, Sergei, “I get it, I understand what you’re saying, I feel your pain, and your joy,” then it affirms something about me, as well as him.
Canada – my country, our country, their country – is one of the richest in the world. Yet, the people of Pikangikum, a remote, Aboriginal community where nine people died last week in a tragic house fire, are living in conditions that would be considered deplorable by any world standard, let alone Canadian.
By all accounts it is not living, not in any way most of us should think right and proper in this country. Continue reading
A lovely old garden shed on the “to do” list needs some TLC
I live in Hope.
I do that literally, as in I live in Hope Ness. I also live in hope of learning how to tap into the special spirit of Hope Ness so at this late stage in my life I can finally do justice to it, and life.
About time; it’s been 37 years since that wonderful, hopeful moment when I came out of the woods, around a curve in the then still-gravel county road and was stopped in my tracks by a place that called out “home” to me.
There were more twists and turns, more ups and downs over the years; here sometimes, sometimes not. But hope and stubborn perseverance have seen me through, and I’m here to stay for good now in Hope Ness, at the place I have come to call Cathedral Drive Farm, beside the Hope Bay Nature Reserve, the Hope Bay Forest, and Hope Bay itself, of course.
Finding Hope Ness 