Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
starlight
this morning i awoke to a cloudless and pitch-dark sky – with dawn still more than an hour away, the stars robust and unfettered against the inky black. still a miracle to me, these skies are unheard of within city limits where the neverending neurons beam from streetlights, cars and automobiles – bouncing against the finite atmospheric roof and encasing every living thing in an orange dome 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
i had an experience about two weeks ago, driving out of the ferry terminal in langdale at 8 pm one night. my car was one of the last off the ferry, and so there was no one behind me on the highway winding up the hill. for the first hundred metres or so the road is bathed in the orange light emanating from the ferry complex, a pool of artificial colouring on an otherwise unlit passage. as i drove, i was not conscious of this division between artifical lightness and authentic dark, but as my car slipped out of the pooling light, the release in tension from my shoulders was unmistakable. i felt suddenly released, and the force of the relief that washed over me was so great i almost started to cry.
it is no secret that one of the reasons i left the city was because of the destructive air quality which was threatening to weaken my health over time – but besides air pollution which is obviously miasmic – i wonder how other environmental contaminants such as sound and light disrupt our central nervous systems? not only would this appear to be physically damaging to us as natural animals, but preliminary studies in mental health have shown a correlation between intense urban environments and what is termed mental illness. this is some of what i am interested in studying as a master’s in counselling psychology (my primary interest is ecopsychology which flows from these and other observations made working as an activist in a highly urbanized environment for the past 10 years).
in any case, the stars this morning were brilliant and as i got out the door, i spied a shooting star streaking across the early morning sky, engaging me to make a wish best left unsaid. although our society’s “quality of life” is tied to dollars, i’m pretty sure there are better measures of such things – such as stars in the sky unobscured by artificial light, and quiet places where cedar drinks from clear rivers.
an excerpt
On a planet of water the land has to end, and here in the West of North America it ends in prodigal beauty. It ends in mountains plunging to sounds and fjords, in the thunder of calving glaciers, in still forests of the tallest trees on Earth. It ends in rocky stacks haunted by sea lions and gulls, in great waves of sand flowing slowly inland, in heights and dark headlands looming in mist. It ends in covers and strands and bare desert hills, in warm lagoons where gray whales sport and birth their young. And always the land ends in ceaseless barter with wind and waves, in the surge and boom of one of the first musics the planet learned how to make.
…………………………………………..John Daniel from The Limits of Paradise
castles and coal towns
on the weekend, nathan and i met up in princeton and stayed at a place called the “princeton castle” (tag-line: “escape to history in log luxury”). you can see from the photograph above the ruins which do look decidedly medieval-castle-like but interestingly, this is a crumbling cement factory circa early 1900s. what is odd about the place is the lack of history that has survived other than building itself which is falling rock by mortar into the ground. what follows is the only information the resort provides:
In 1910 there began a gigantic industrial dream to build a “Great Cement City” called East Princeton, with an enormous cement plant and a complete powerhouse. The dream was to cost over a million dollars. It also cost a number of workers their lives. Four years and hundreds of thousands of man-hours by skilled craftsmen, stone masons, carpenters and engineers, resulted in a colossal architectural achievement known as The Portland Cement Plant. But, nine short months later, the dream fell into silence: the plant was closed down. Some say they ran out of limestone from the on-site mountains; some say the coal they needed for the operation failed to appear because of conflicts with the needs of the First World War, and some say it was never meant to succeed. Now, some 80 years later, people are again returning to experience the magic of what has become known as PRINCETON CASTLE.
friday dancing
i know i said i would post pictures of my weekend trip, but it turns out i forgot to upload them before i left the coast yesterday and haven’t been home (or on my computer) since.
i keep forgetting to post about this – on friday the flying folk army will be playing at el cocal on commercial drive with the amazingly talented norman nawrocki.
Rebel Mouse Productions presents…
from montreal… NORMAN NAWROCKI
with east van’s own… FLYING FOLK ARMY
Friday, October 22 – 8PM
El Cocal – 1037 Commercial Drive
$5/or by donation – All Ages
Norman will blend words, beats, loops, samples & his violin into soundscapes like you’ve never heard… and The Flying Folk Army will close the show with their voices, strings, reeds, wind, skins, and revolution. Get ready to dance!
life status: normal
i think my life is back to some semblance of normal after the uproar of the past weeks. on friday, treasury board made a final offer to tables 1 and 3 of the union which our bargaining teams rejected, but there has been a decision made by the national council to take it back to our members for a vote regardless. in about a month, we will be conducting a national vote on the offer and until that time no strike activity will take place, which means i get my life back until that time.
although the bargaining teams rejected the offers, i suspect the majority of members will vote for the deal anyway since our reasons for rejection only affect a small handful of people in the union (most of the roll-backs involve enforcement personnel and grain handlers). ignoring the specific reasons why the offers were rejected, i think in all we have won the fairest offer we could given the circumstances with increases of approximately 10% over 4 years and language supporting a social justice fund among other things – and we didn’t have to concede on any major issue (such as maternity leave top-ups, which the board threatened to claw back). when i compare that to the arbitrated settlement forced on ferry workers friday (the same time our deal was offered) – of a 7-year contract with a 3-year wage freeze and then wage increases of 1, 1, 2 and 2.5 % – it looks even better.
so after a week of staying in the city, i took off friday to meet nathan in princeton for a mini-holiday. i will post more about that with photographs later today.
i returned home last night at 7:00 and wasn’t in the door more than 10 minutes when the phone rang, the call display showing “animal hospital”.
Red Cedar 