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Oliver at the dairy farm.

The Milkmaid’s Tale

Pif’s in labour.

The pre-dawn text lights up our shoebox of a bedroom. I roll off the side of the bed so as not to wake my husband, grab my work clothes from a hook on the back of the door and get dressed in the living room to the light of the Christmas tree.

Let it be a girl. Please let it be a girl.

Thankfully science is on side. The genetic engineering seems to be working. Almost all live births now are girls. If it’s a boy we’ll send notice and the buyers will come to take him away.

My face looks back at me out the living room window, superimposed over the lights of Vancouver’s distant downtown. I use the reflection to pin back my bangs and notice my car at street level below entombed in a layer of ice.

Crap.

The universe maintains its indifference and I begin rummaging around the living room for a makeshift ice scraper.

People often ask how we can be so cruel as to send the boys away. I explain that Hammingview is a females-only world. “Theoretically we could sustain ourselves for a hundred years without a male in sight.” The next line of scrutiny is predictable and I try not to sound callous. “Sperm is stored in the deep freeze. It has no expiry date.”

So if Pif’s firstborn is a male I’ll do what I do every time a boy is born at Hammingview- I’ll rub my thumb over his cheek while he chugs down a bottle of colostrum, his eyes rolling to the back of his head with pleasure. Then I’ll step to the side when they come for him and remain willfully ignorant of how he meets his end.

People persist. They want to know if the mothers object when their newborns are taken. “Some do”.  We endure them crying out as we work. But most are conditioned to look the other way, their eyes large and silent, revealing nothing.

I circumvent further interrogation by redirecting focus to the Hammingview nursery. “A room chock-a-block full of baby girl cuteness,” I gush. “It’s hard to keep track of whose daughter is whose.”

The first time I walked through the nursery my eyes smarted. Yvonne was touched by my entry-level sentimentality. Hammingview 101. Then she hastened to warn me not to get over-attached. “They don’t all make it,” she said with feigned objectivity.

Within 24 hours I was over-attached.  It’s a mandatory pitfall for novices at Hammingview. A rite-of-passage for the uninitiated, if you will.

The newborn responsible for breaching the low-lying defences of my heart arrived into this world before the sun was up on January 6. I named her for the day on the Christian calendar when the three kings were said to have visited the Christ Child: Epiphany.

Pif for short.

The bond between Pif and me developed on the side like a secret between friends. She’d await my arrival each day and when Yvonne wasn’t looking I’d spoil her with cuddles, warmed-up milk, and extra rations of cereal. But most of all Epiphany loved it when I sang her dredged up and half-remembered folksongs from my childhood though I’d be careful to stop short of the end verses when things take a turn for the worst. Like when my darling Clementine drowns in a vat of brine down in verse six:

Ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine.

But alas, I was no swimmer, so I lost my Clementine.

While my attachment to Pif deepened so did a growing unease that I was setting her above the rule of law at Hammingview. “She’s got attitude alright,” a colleague offered when I asked. At Hammingview “attitude” is code for trouble. So as Pif and her cohort turned the corner on adolescence and prepared to move in with the other Hammingview teenagers I decided to make the break. There was no final good-bye. I simply didn’t show up for work the day of the move. Epiphany had come of age. This would be a new chapter in her life.

“Mom?”

I start. It’s Oliver standing in the hallway, his pyjama bottoms hanging off his lanky 16-year-old waist.

When I tell him about the text his eyebrows lift. He knows what Pif means to me.

Oliver was alarmed when he first heard that I had a job at Hammingview. Hires from the outside are rare for the industry. I had always worked in the non-profit sector with organizations designed to set society’s hard-done-by back on their feet. When burnout set in I craved manual labour that paid by the hour, gave me back my weekends, and asked little of my heart.

Which is how I mustered the courage to walk up the drive of Hammingview Farms unannounced and inquire about employment. Standing against a bleak November sky Yvonne looked at me suspiciously. “You aren’t one of those activists with a camera hidden inside your coat, are you?” The question confused me.  I thought I was applying to work in the most benevolent industry known to humankind.

My naivety served me well. Yvonne offered me a job on the spot and in keeping with expectations my first few days at Hammingview were exhilarating. The primal connection with this improbable community of lactating mothers was immediate and all in the context of the rhythmic pulsing of the pumps and the steaming-warm sloshing of life’s most sustaining miracle: milk. It had been years since I had weaned Oliver yet the travail of breastfeeding came back to me as though it were yesterday: the involuntary let-down, the frustrations with latching, the cracked and bleeding nipples that never get a break, the ever-lurking risk of mastitis, the engorged mammary glands when milking is delayed, hard as rocks and painful as hell.

“That industrial grade spatula might work,” Oliver proposes as a solution to my ice-removal conundrum before disappearing into the bathroom.

When he was four a Mexican playmate convinced him to set a basin of water and a shoe outside the back door on the eve of Epiphany. “While you are sleeping the Three Kings will stop by your house to give their camels a drink,” insisted his young friend. The next morning Oliver awoke to a tipped and emptied water basin and a shoe spilling with candy. He stood silent for a long time looking out through the slats on our back porch pondering all that had transpired in the darkness on our soggy, East Van lawn.

When he emerges from the bathroom he offers to scrape the car off for me.

“I’ve got it, buddy. You go back to bed.”

For months my decision to cut ties with Epiphany seemed sound. I stuck to the discipline of it, attending to the flow of new arrivals into the nursery as a way of filling the space made empty by Pif’s departure.

Then mid-morning on no-day-in-particular my resolve came up short. This was all the excuse I needed to abandon whatever it was I was doing in the nursery and go in search of her.  She wasn’t difficult to find, lying on the grass with a few friends, her black and white coat glinting in the early summer sun. It occurred to me then how clueless she was about what lay ahead and how these would be the most carefree days of her life at Hammingview. It didn’t seem right to interfere. I turned my back and walked away, glancing over my shoulder for one final look, and there she was!  Standing apart from the others, looking at me.

“Piffy?”

My half-whisper anticipated a well-deserved snub.

Instead Epiphany tossed her head and ran at me with such force I had no time to brace myself for the 700-lb display of adolescent affection. I was knocked to the ground on contact. Laughing I got to my knees and, just like in the movies, threw my arms around her neck promising never to abandon her again.

I wasn’t present when she was inseminated and only learned of her pregnancy when I saw her name on the board. It was in a list with others under the word “confirmed”. While this news meant that her unstructured days of running in a pack and watching the fields turn colour were at an end it also, and more importantly, meant she’d be allowed to stay on at Hammingview. At least for now. Some of the girls “don’t take”. Their names appear on the board under the word “open”. If too many open months pass their names are erased and that’s the last we see of them.

Oliver watches me pull on my boots.

“You okay?” he asks. He knows what’s at stake. 

Hammingview stories are dinner fare at our house. He’s well acquainted with the shortlist of potential outcomes, each with its own variation on misfortune.

There’s Tilly whose daughter was stillborn and Jewel whose wasn’t. Yet where Tilly let milk flow like a tributary of the Fraser River in spring, Jewel wouldn’t relinquish an ounce. No amount of pleading could switch on the oxytocin release mechanism in her brain. A week later the count was out and I knew Jewel had been taken.

Agnes stories are a favourite. I refer to her fondly as the Mother Superior for having given a lifetime of service. Her badge of honour is a limp. It won’t be long before the truck comes for Agnes.

Then there is Dori. Oliver knows it would please me if Pif had even an ounce of Dori’s spunk. She is legend at Hammingview for staging a revolt. It seems she had no intention of being impregnated a second time. Alerted by the syringe and latex gloves neatly laid out on the dispensary table she made a spontaneous break for freedom that left an air gate dangling by a hinge. We found her later that morning at the neighbours’ and had her home by lunch. The next day Dori was “done” and now her belly, like a ripening sadness, grows fuller and heavier by the day.

  “Yah. I’m okay.” I give Oliver a muted smile. “Thanks for asking.”

On my way to the door I stop on impulse at the alcove where our nativity scene is displayed through the Christmas season. The god-baby looks placidly out at the world from his fabled bed of straw.

“You shouldn’t have come,“ I say sullenly. “This world doesn’t do well with ambiguity.”

Oliver heeds my dip into despair before stepping over by my side. Then, with the deliberation of a chess master, he picks up the lone cow resting outside of the stable behind two sheep, removes the three kings from their place at the centre of the action, and sets the broad-faced matron-of-milking-mothers down in the coveted spot beside the manger within reach of the infant’s outstretched hand.

He holds the cow’s back for a moment as though to check for unforeseen danger. Then, releasing his fingers from the game board, he looks me in the eyes and punctuates the move with a grin.

So this is what I want to know. Why does my response to this 16-year old son of mine fall half-a-life time short of what’s in my heart? Why, when what I want is to give him one of those bear hugs that used to leave him laughing and gasping for mercy as a child; why, when what I want is to find just the right words to thank him for accepting me for the off-script mom that I am; why, when what I want is to let him know how fiercely I love him, do I manage nothing more than to hold up the spatula between us.

It’s not the response of my heart but when he gives the spatula the high five I’m looking for I know it’s response enough. I open the door and head outside into the frosty darkness.

* Story longlisted for CBC’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize

Statement Made to Judge Affleck of the Supreme Court of British Columbia Three Months After My Arrest at the Gates of Kinder Morgan for Protesting the Tripling of the Trans Mountain Pipeline

Your Honour, I want to tell you about the day in March that I stood at the gates outside of Kinder Morgan attempting, as the evidence has accurately established, to block access to the construction of a pipeline that I oppose. 

The police records and the Crown’s argument tell one side of the story. I’m grateful for your willingness to hear the other.

To be honest I had rather heroic ideas about my actions. I have a 15 year-old son, Oliver, and a 17 year-old daughter, Abigail, and they had become discouraged about their future. It seemed that every day on the news there was another development (You know the headlines): the collapse of the bee population worldwide, the demise of the Great Barrier Reef, the breaking up of the polar ice caps, extreme weather destroying homes and neighbourhoods, the anticipated extinction of orangutangs within the next 10 years. And so on.

There are many things a parent can endure, as I’m sure you can appreciate your Honour, but watching your kids lose hope is not one of them.

So, simply put, rather than sit passively by I decided I would do something to empower them  to reclaim their future. I had read recently that the civil disobedience toolkit has been lost to a whole generation in the west where hard-won liberties are now so taken for granted we naively presume right will prevail.  So I set out the morning of March 24 to demonstrate non-violent protest in action (though, truth be told, I hardly knew what I was doing myself.)   

Yet isn’t it the way with life: just when you think you are way out in the lead you discover that there are others with a knowledge and experience base who have been there long (sometimes centuries!)  before you ever appeared on the scene.

We were a big group that day (50 or 60 I believe). It was biting cold and then it started to snow: huge flakes, the size of saucers (you’ve probably seen the footage). The snow caked on our heads and soaked through our clothes to the bone. No one had come dressed for snow.

And that’s when a man by the name of Stacey, a self-identified Anishinaabe ally of the Tsleil Waututh, began walking back and forth in front of us in his toque and grey sweats and work boots, like an unlikely commander of a legion. And he started to play his drum for us and sing us the resistance songs of his people.  And when our teeth began to chatter he told us jokes and laughed with us. And when we could no longer feel our fingers and toes he walked among us passing out warm soup and bread.

And the day dragged on and as our spirits began to flag, an indigenous woman, whom I believe you have met, stood up on a ledge just to the right front of where I was. She needed a cane to balance her frail frame which was wracked by a lifetime of hardship that I’m sure I can’t begin to comprehend.  Yet with her free hand she held up an eagle feather high into the air above us.  I can’t tell you what she meant by this gesture but I can tell you how I experienced it: as an act of protection, as though to care for us and give us the strength we would need for the stand we were taking.

And when the police arrived, they positioned themselves in a line in front of us to begin their arrests. It was at this point that an indigenous man wearing a felt bowler hat stepped out from the crowd of supporters. I learned later that he is an artist and activist who goes by the name Ostwelve. And he planted himself eye-to-eye in front of each of the officers in turn and urged them to re-consider their options:  “History doesn’t have to unfold like this.” I overheard him implore. “None of us, not me, not you, has to follow the script life has handed us.”

As the hours passed I was worried about my daughter who had come to support me and as far as I knew was standing by herself lost in the crowd in the snow and the cold.  And I asked for news on her and word came back to me that she had been invited by the Tseleil Waututh youth leader, Cedar George to join a group of indigenous youth for a special youth-focused ceremony in the shelter and warmth of the Watch House.

And I thought “Who ARE these people?”   From what I know of the historic record all we’ve ever done is swindled, robed, bribed, and used whatever means available to us to take their land out from under them.

In the days following my arrest it became my quest to find an answer to this question. I went to the Tsleil Waututh camp by the Watch House on the soccer field to find out.

If you haven’t already done so I hope you get the chance to visit the Watch House, Your Honour.  I think you’ll be surprised as I was surprised to discover that this protest-based surveillance camp, before it is anything else, is a place for spiritual grounding.

The first thing you’ll be  invited to do on entering the camp is to offer prayer at the Sacred Fire. It’s an act that starts you down the road of reaffirming your connection to the Creator and to all living things (animate and inanimate alike). And the more time you spend at the camp the more you will remember what it means to put human relationships before personal acquisition and the health of the earth before material comforts.

I won’t take any more of your time, Judge Affleck.  My account has come full circle.  I crossed the injunction line not to bring discredit to the court but to bring hope to Abigail and Oliver. 

I believe we found the hope we were looking for though not as we expected.  It comes from the knowledge that at the forefront of the struggle there are indigenous leaders, not only here in our city, but across our country and around the world who understand  that caring for the earth is a sacred duty and comes at a great cost.

Regardless of the penalty you have assigned me today, my actions will have cost me little more than a sliver of my white privilege. In contrast the cost to the leaders I met on the mountain that day is incalculable. They have laid everything on the line for the sake of the struggle.  They are the true heroes.  It has  been an honour to stand with them.

Post script:  I pleaded guilty on June 26, 2018 and was sentenced to 25 hours community service.  The standoff on the mountain continues.  Click here to volunteer at the Watch House. 

Sign above the dish pit at the camp on Burnaby Mountain.

Becoming Catholic: An Allegorical Tale of a Baptist Conversion

There was once a child who lived in a bungalow. The rooms in her house were all on one level which made the house, above all else, accessible. Her bungalow was not the only bungalow in the neighbourhood. Indeed, the whole subdivision was made up of bungalows, all of which varied in style or layout to some extent but familiar and accessible in every other way. The bungalow was a happy and safe place for the child to grow up – busy and crowded and full of people she knew and loved.

One day while the child was outside at play in her neighbourhood she wandered off. Like the children in other allegorical stories who wandered off from the appointed areas of play, her wandering wasn’t a pre-meditated affair. It was not an act of defiance or restless exploration. It was simply that one curiosity on her path led to the next and before she knew it she was quite some distance from her point of origin.

When it came to her attention that she was in an unfamiliar part of the neighbourhood she did not feel panicked or anxious. To the contrary she felt intrigued and adventurous repeatedly negotiating with herself that she would go just one more block before turning back.

And so it was that – without a map or any directions, but on account only of her own curiosity and instincts -she came upon a house unlike any she had ever encountered before. And she was astonished by it for it was a house with multiple stories extending upwards and outwards in every direction. And what astounded her more was that this house, if one could call it that, was in the very neighbourhood in which she had grown up and yet no one had ever spoken of it to her before.

That night back in the familiarity of her own bungalow she asked about the house she had come upon. At first the adults in the house responded with surprise that she had ventured into such close proximity to the house and seemed more concerned with how she got there and why she had gone.

However the girl persisted with her quest for an explanation. Finally she was told what her heart had already guessed at. “That house”, she was told, “was the home of your ancestors”. The little girl listened. “Indeed once, long ago, there were no bungalows in this neighbourhood, only the Great House in which everyone lived.’ Her adults explained that they themselves had never been inside but her grandparents manygenerations back lived there. “It was the only home they knew”.

 

“Why did they leave?” inquired the little girl.

There was some hesitation and a weighing of words. “Well….all was not well. There was rumour that the Great House was in danger of collapsing. Some said it was that the beams in the building were rotting, others that the foundations had shifted. Either way, all began to live with a fear that the roof would come down on their heads.”

“So”, one adult continued, “there had been a great exodus from the Great House. Some families tried to rebuild their houses to resemble this original home. Others wanted to avoid the inherent structural dangers of the Great House and opted for the accessibility and simplicity of a bungalow. Bungalows were easy to build and almost overnight dozens sprouted up all across the neighbourhood, and over the years they had spread and grown into the great sprawling neighbourhood of bungalows seen on the landscape today.

The child was satisfied with these explanations. She trusted the wisdom of her adults. She wouldn’t want to live in a house in danger of collapse from rot.

Yet as the days went on she could not forget about the Great House. She found books in the library that spoke of it, describing the elaborate interior of rooms and the vantage points of its upper stories. She learned about concepts like upper floors and attics, of balconies and spiralling staircases. Some days she would walk to where she could see the Great House. Its gables and turrets towered high over the sprawling neighbourhood of huddled bungalows.

At the same time she had no desire to leave the bungalow. She cherished the way people crowded into it. It was small but practical and she knew each of the rooms intimately. She did not want to show disregard for those who had raised her here or to dishonour the judgement of her forbearers when they chose to leave the Great House so many generations ago.

However, the day came some years later, when to be true to her heart, she walked straight up to the door of the Great House. She reached to knock but there was no need. The wide doors swung open. So it was that she found herself standing alone on the threshold, slowly taking in her multidimensional surroundings. No one seemed to notice her or at least no one paid her any particular attention.

From the inside it seemed not a house at all but a space of endless dimensions, one blurring into the next.

There were expansive rooms interconnected in every direction each charged with the energy of music and art crossing the full spectrum of human cultural expression. Gardens with animals, and beaches with tides, and cliffs with cascading waterfalls seemed not out of place. And everywhere an intermingling of people from every walk of life: kings and peasants and fools and artisans and farmers and writers and poets and architects and palaeontologists and astronomers and theologians and saints and revolutionaries, and even a whisky priest. Instinctively the girl knew these to be from every generation – both past and present and, could it be, from generations yet to come.

The Great House was full of activity but not in the boisterous crowded way that she was accustomed to in the bungalow where everybody knew everybody’s name. The coming and going here all seemed to be from a centre which in turn gave a sense of Real Presence to the whole. It was at this centre that all names were spoken and from here that all names were known. The child stepped tentatively forward. She wondered if the Real Presence would have a memory of her name. After all, it had been five hundred years.

I am that child. I cherish my upbringing and roots in the Protestant tradition. And I suspect there are others like me who long for the Great House yet feel a deep affinity for the bungalow.

In Catholic terminology someone coming into the Catholic Church from a Protestant background isn’t “converted” to the Catholic faith. Rather they are “reconciled”.  I like that. It implies that the journey is not so much about loss as it is about recovery. Not so much a separation as a reunion. And like all works of reconciliation it implies a process.

In coming posts I will share my own process in the year long period of orientation and discernment that led me into the Catholic faith. If you are interested, stay tuned.

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Outpost Spirituality

Ever felt of two minds when it comes to your religious adherence?  Perhaps you recognize the limitations of your faith tradition on one hand yet can’t imagine your life without it on the other?  Or maybe you are on that roller coaster of certainty one day and complete doubt the next (and the feelings of guilt for “lack of faith” or indecision that goes with it)?  If this describes you then you are not alone and outpost spirituality might be a fit.

I’ve adopted “faith in the outposts” as a type of metaphor for my own spiritual location at this point in life. Here, let me explain what I mean….

As a kid I loved to read stories about people who lived in the outposts. Some were soldiers or scientists, others exiles or missionaries or explorers.  In order to survive these outpost dwellers had to negotiate the remote landscapes they found themselves in. They had to learn what was over the next horizon and where to take cover during a storm. They had to learn the norms of local culture and how to navigate in foreign languages. They had to learn what crops survive in unfamiliar soil and how water distributes itself across the land.  In short, they had to step well out of their comfort zones and take risks that were both exhilarating and terrifying.

Yet equally fascinating to my childhood imagination were the homes that these outliers built for themselves in the seeming “middle of nowhere”.  Whether their abode was a canvas tent or a log cabin or a bamboo hut these interior worlds provided much more than shelter.  They were “homes away from home” – havens containing elements of a cultural heartland faraway: a bedside table with a well-worn book of familiar prayers, a china mug from the family collection, a knotted rug made by a pioneering ancestor kept beneath a foot stool, a fiddle above the door and all the associated dance floor tunes, a book of dog-eared poetry at the hearth, a cherished painting by a favourite artist above the kitchen sink.

To my young heart, the familiar furnishings of these interior spaces made the world safe again. They provided an all-important grounding point for engaging the unknown beyond. A place to leave from and come back to.

Without these “landing pads” the world beyond would overwhelm or dissolve into some form of chaos.

Living deep inside the known and the unknown is where I find myself with regard to my own (Christian) tradition. This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on my tradition or hold it in disregard.  Quite the opposite.  It does mean that I’ve journeyed with it out onto horizons of the human spirit that lie beyond the comfort zone of my own religious boundary lines.

As the world shrinks and the collective human imagination grows I feel compelled to take risks engaging emerging contours that are equal parts terrifying and exhilarating :

  • A growing practise of mediation and mindfulness cutting across religious and even secular lines with implications for collective consciousness and human intuition.
  • A trend toward slowing life down and living with smaller footprints as a counter movement to the frenzied materialism and resource-guzzling lifestyles many of us take for granted.
  • A profound softening on the part of the scientific community toward the importance of imagination and story and art in developing new paradigms.
  • An increasing interest in and recovery of indigenous wisdom and earth-based spirituality.
  • Implications for justice and compassion with the proliferation of social media, especially in a world where greed (mine included) can so easily seem like the trump card
  • The network of personal friendships and business connections in real time due to technological advances no longer bounded by geographical limitations
  • A growing awareness around the globe of the vulnerability of the one home that all humans regardless of race or creed share in common: planet earth.

These emerging spiritual horizons don’t seem to be religion specific.  They appeal to the human spirit as a whole.

I cherish my Christian tradition (I’m Protestant by birth, Catholic by choice).  It’s my starting point. It’s what I know. It’s how I pray.

I’ve seen a lot of spiritual seekers suddenly abandon the faith moorings that have nurtured them for a lifetime.  I understand their departure. Many are frustrated with the limitations and exclusions they were raised on. Yet with no home-away-from-home many give up and loose their way altogether. For many it’s only a matter of time before they get lost on a frontier that in the end overwhelms them.

So I’m going to take my lead from the outpost-dwellers of my childhood books. I’m not going to head out into the frontier without a cabin to come home to.  Inside this simple abode are going to be elements of all the things in the tradition that I value and love:  hymns about the love of Jesus, ancient prayers of the church,  the stories of the Bible and of the heroics of the saints, weekly eucharist, the practice of confession, and the adopted family with whom I share this tradition.

For now this interior world is a critical place for me to leave from and to come home to. I would lose my way without it.

Yet at the same time I’m not going to hunker down here. I’m going to venture out and explore the unfamiliar landscape I find myself in. I’m not going to assume that my starting point is the only starting point or the best starting point. I will allow for other practises that nurture the human spirit no matter how different it may be from my own.

And who knows?  In the end the points of connection and overlap may be far more significant than I had previously imagined.

Are you an outpost-dweller?  If so I’d love to hear from you.  What are your discoveries? Cautions? Fears and hopes?

 

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