Metissage – adjacent to "I am from"

Every year growing up, my family would spend a week in the summers on Hornby island. There are beautiful sandstone rocks that stretch out from the cabin we would camp at into the ocean. There was a collection of apple trees on the property who grew off the hill that led us down to the water.

My brothers and I spent hours out on that sandstone. We would make little stories and act them out and with our imaginary characters. Sometimes I would spend hours alone on the rocks watching the tide slip in and out, watching the constantly shifting landscape on these games. I really liked to play with plushies; I had a collection of small friends that would fit in my hands that I think were the product of Mcdonald's happy meal toys. Those plushies fit so nicely inside those holes carved out in the sandstone homes. But the tide would come in, and soak my palm-sized friends. Cajete says “the primary educator…would be the natural world itself” (21) and, with these summers as my teachers, I can attest to this. I learned that the tide does not wait for dinnertime. I became frustrated by the ever-shifting nature of my makeshift hotels. Eventually, I learned to accept the flux of my playground.

We had some close family friends that would often come and play with us. I remember not always getting along with them. I am a feisty woman and I was a feisty girl too––I did not like to cooperate. I did not necessarily like to share. But being unsupervised out along the water with my plushies and my little homes of stone, forced me to learn how to cooperate with others –– how to communicate.

The sandstone offered a sense of domestic safety for my tea parties and Happy-Meal-toy hotels. They also challenged my understanding of balance and care for my quickly falling feet. It hurts to scrape your feet and face and elbows and knees on sandstone; the sand rubs into your wound, making the cleaning process in a trailer with mom very inconvenient and uncomfortable. The sandstone taught me how to slow down. They taught me how to measure my leaps, but, most importantly, how to choose them.

~

I found it difficult to allow myself to change, to be made by the making. There is abrasion in difficulty –– and we know that learning happens in the abrasion (Kelly 2023). I realize that I’m not a “bad learner,” but I do have trouble listening and accepting the inherent abrasion of challenge (I suppose I already knew this about myself, this process just reminded me). To listen to the process requires letting go of expectations of where the process will arrive. I think my biggest mistake was that this process did not necessarily “[begin] in wonder,” and therefore, was not “learned in earnest” (Wagamese One Drum 32). I wanted a product, and when I didn’t get what I wanted, I became frustrated, like a child. Just as Cajete says that “learning and teaching are occurring at all times, at all levels, and in a variety of situations,” I suppose my watercolour pencil practice was also a teacher in its own slightly frustrating and disappointing way (Cajete 40). I suppose it reminded me that I should be better at saying “yes” to things that scare me––not only saying “yes,” but saying it with enthusiasm.

~

As a new teacher, I’m discovering that “assessment” is painfully cumbersome in practice and oppressive in its effects. I gave my students a creative assignment asking them to write about a place of great meaning to them. I read some of my own poetry as an example. I offered a template, but encouraged them to work beyond the template. They asked questions like “do I need to fill in the whole thing?” and “how many words does it have to be?” and “does it need to be coloured?” and I wanted to tell them so bad “I just want you to give a shit about this –– about the place, about creating, about expressing yourself, about anything.” I can’t teach Giving A Shit. I try to, but I don’t know how. All I can do is model Giving A Shit, which I think I do. And I find it very tiring.

Ironically, I think the main purpose of assessment is communication and a “trajectory check” of sorts. Assessment is just a stupid, fancy, over-formalized concept for checking-in to see how they’re doing. It’s for this reason that I think adults need some form of assessment in their lives. Just like “water cannot stop itself” under its inexorable dance with gravity, I observe a tendency for people to work hard with their heads down (Kimmerer 315). We tend to lack self-assessment. And we desperately need it.

I took a sick day in October because I felt truly mentally unwell; I had been overwhelmed and paralyzed by my constantly growing to-do list. Someone still decided –– not to send me an email –– but to text me on my personal number to ask questions about my lessons that could be answered by looking at my thorough TTOC notes.

So I decided to go for a run in a park where I knew there was no cell reception. I had been wanting to exercise more consistently so this was a great “productive” task that I could complete while simultaneously contributing to my land practice. I decided to exploit the trees and nature for their calming abilities, their beauty. I ran for one kilometer and then decided to just sit by the creek and watch the water move relentlessly DOWN DOWN DOWN. I did not want to run. I wanted to sit. I had the day off, and Kimmerer says “when you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not going somewhere, but on being where you are” (296). I didn’t have all the time in the world––but I had some.

I had significant trouble sitting still. I made myself sit by the river and watch it rush and roll as it went along the only way it knows how to go. Wagamese’s words echoed in my freezing skull: “I am my silence… I take a little time each day to sit in silence so that I can move outward in balance into the great clamour of living” (Wagamese Embers 15). I don’t want to go without thought, bending to every echo of the clamour. I want to be still and be able to intentionally go. With thought.

~

My mom had a horse while I was growing up. We used to spend every Saturday morning at the barn and would go to horse shows together on a few weekends a year. My mom describes these as some of her best years. I would agree, so far.

I was a small girl, and P.J. was a big, grey fellow. Something was special between us. Even when I was maybe 8 years old, and my head barely made it to his shoulder when I stood beside him, I did not have trouble riding P.J. He was receptive to my little hands and tiny body in the saddle, even when my feet barely made it past the pad. I remember being in the arena and being asked to take a “hand-gallop” by the announcer. My mom told me we went too fast. My trainer told me we went too fast. My dad definitely told me we went too fast. But I remember standing up in those stirrups, leaning forward, and whispering “let’s go” and––you bet––we sure would go. And I would grin real big.

I tend to go fast; I enjoy the thrill of running ––racing–– feeling the wind in my face and hair and all over my body. I enjoy exercising the physical power necessary to run.

I am reflecting on my trajectory––reflecting on where I am running to. Wagamese’s words remind me that “I am not created or re-created by the noise and clatter of my life, by the rush and scurry, the relentless chase or the presumption that more gets more,” and push me to consider: why the rush (Wagamese Embers 26)? And where the rush?

~

To the joy of capitalists, I realized as I embarked on adult life that the term “productive” had become a part of my identity. I am acutely aware of the “demands” of life––that “life comes with the weight of expectation and responsibility,” resulting in an “industrious” way of thinking and perceiving our time which has led us to “[cause] great harm on the planet” (Wagamese One Drum 67). Awareness is the first step. What do I need to produce? Why?

~

Answers have become so tempting. I feel that the practice of completing all the questions and getting the right answers dissuades us from being able to run towards the unknown with curiosity, rather than cultivating a desire to “question deeply enough that [we are] made more not by the answers so much as [a] desire to continue asking questions” (Wagamese Embers 23).

With all the stimuli at my fingertips, I notice my attention-span shortening and my apathy at sitting in slow and quiet wonder. I want to practice asking questions.

~

October 11, 2023:

I am grappling with a tug-of-war on my energy. I’m putting up walls and constantly defending them –– boundaries to preserve what I’ve decided to prioritize. I have an urge to jump into this bog that lies in front of me on the path along the river. I want to feel its softness. I crave softness. I crave the acceptance of the places where I fall short.

I am overloaded with the asking. I cannot make any more decisions. I don’t want to be observed. I am allowed to have off days. I’m allowed to have days off. I am allowed to be affected by the hard things in my life. I am allowed to be a human. Please don’t require a performance from me. I have a performance fee.

I find myself becoming angry that I only get the dregs of a sunset at the end of a day fighting for a moment to myself. People pull apart my presence, time, my everything, claiming that they deserve it –– claiming that I owe them something.

I have to be selective with my energy; I cannot run around donating it haphazardly. I am not a bottomless well. I feel myself running dry, unable to nourish the things that matter most. I don’t even have the energy to visit my Oma who’s back in the hospital. I don’t even have the energy to check in with my grandfather who is recovering from a stroke. I don’t even have the energy to cultivate patience for my alcoholic uncle. I hardly have the energy to support my dear father who I watch stretch himself to be the glue in a relentlessly cracking family. Hell, I watch myself from outside myself slip away into a routine I have crafted for my body, to help her and help my spirit find some resemblance of groundedness. And you’re upset because I didn’t respond to your email in a timely fashion?

I keep saying “I’m doing fine, I just need to get my feet on the ground” with little regard for the fact that I am always on the ground, but that ground is also always moving. My knees buckle in the turbulence. My fingers feel like a child’s fingers: they hold on so damn tight to any strands they can to resemble some kind of control over their circumstance. I grasp for what I can and I hold on tight. I’m doing my best –– and I know that that’s okay. But my inability to carry what I care about makes me sick.

~

“My teachers say that all good things require sacrifice” (Wagamese Embers 20).
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about sacrifice and the negative connotations that come along with the word. I can’t decide if I need to change my understanding of the word, or if I should change the word I’m using to describe what I see as a conscious choice of energy usage. Sacrifice, in my perception, implies suffering. I suppose something always suffers, for the sake of something else. If I decide to spend my Sunday morning going for a run, then my academic productivity suffers, but my bodily connection thrives. If I decide to go to bed early instead of finishing my marking, then the pile stays as big as it was the day before, but my body is grateful for the rest it so desperately starves.

I miss doing things for my body. I miss feeling like I had the time to do things for my body. I am fully aware that we make and choose and select how we spend our time. Unfortunately, I see that my current routines are neglecting my body. I am not getting enough sleep. I am not moving her as much as she would like. I see it in the little tendencies, in the small moments she has to express her cravings. The extra long improvisation in the kitchen while I’m cooking dinner. The desire to take my class outside and do the same activity that we’ve been doing for “review” because the thought of sitting inside for another fucking minute makes me want to bang my head against the wall. I can’t actually handle sitting still. I went for my first run in my new neighborhood the other day and I had to stop on the sidewalk because I was crying because I missed moving so much and I wondered why I’m not spending more time dancing while I can. I see my grandparents fading away ––brittling–– their abilities to rely on their physical forms slowly slipping out of their hands. And here I am, too tired to dance. Something is so wrong with that, especially when I’m so hungry to move.

Wagamese writes that he “came here to inhabit a body that would allow [his] soul to experience. So [he is] not [his] body” (Wagamese Embers 94). This is not my experience. I’m speaking like I’m not my body. I’m speaking of her as if she is not me. But I know we are so connected, unable to be torn apart. I am my body. I know some people may feel differently –– that the mind and the body are separate –– but this is not true for me. When I am sick or injured, it affects my mood. When I am nervous and anxious and spending energy organizing my brain and internal conflicts, my body feels it. I feel my spiritual tribulations so deeply in my skin; they could never be detached. What a disconnected life that would be to live.

~

I put a sticky note on my mirror this semester. Contrary in sentimentality to its neighbour that read “I am better than a frozen pizza,” this post-it read: “what is my responsibility and what is just an echo in the clamour of living?” This became a guiding question for my semester, and it will continue to be a guiding question in my practice. There is always more–– more tasks, more things to be added, more fine-tuning to be done. And there is the imminent fear of wasting time that is ingrained in my productivity-obsessed mind. Wagamese says that “fear is the companion of reason” (One Drum 36)––I suppose “reason” is the concept of wasting time. I want to not believe in wasting time. I want to believe that time spent anywhere is for a reason, or at least that there can be meaning in it. There is reason in a detour. And there is learning there. Learning is not production. I’m making my way to that.

~

When my brothers and I were children, my mom would read us stories in bed and hand out apple bites sliced in real time as she read those words through her lungs and into our ears. There was gentle care under those covers. This was our ritual. I would later tear the covers from my younger brother’s chest on mornings that I was responsible for getting him ready and taking him to school. I would rush him through our morning routine and onto the C62 bus line down the hill. I was 11; he was 6. This was our ritual. Wagamese writes that “there is medicine in ritual… it was given to all of us and we have all found our medicine ways” (Wagamese One Drum 20). He carries on: “we have also all forgotten them” (Wagamese One Drum 20). I forgot the careful ritual of duvet covers in the busyness of catching the bus. That has been my mistake. The care required in transition has been forgotten and needs to be relearned.

Many of my most treasured memories of learning and connection with others occurred simultaneously in connection with the land. Hiking and camping trips and days by the lake have offered sites of bonding between loved ones. These sites have been part of that bond; dearest friends and family have shared a moment reveling in the beauty of the view from the Stawamus Chief peak, or floating in the arms of Alouette lake. Those places are a part of the relationship that grows there––they are part of the connection. Cajete describes the sea of relationships we live in––the relationship between the individual, community, and natural world (73). I thank the land for holding the development of relationships between people and their role as an active member of those relationships in the most pivotal moments that bring us together.

Oma didn’t go hiking. She wasn’t able to be very physically active in the last portion of her life. For me, the days following her passing were days spent laying inside trying to make sense of this surreal loss, trying to conceptualize the reality of absence. No tears came. No realization. It took my feet on a large stone floor on the side of a mountain for me to miss her. A moment surrounded by the relatives––only the relatives––to be open to the rooting ache of loss. And that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to power-through that period of loss. I want to feel it.

In describing the People of Corn, Kimmerer asks, “for what is corn, after all, but light transformed by relationship?” (343). In being a citizen, a teacher, a member on this Earth, we must be transformed by the interconnected relationships––the sea––and allow the mysterious interconnectedness to act on us (Cajete 73). I’m learning to lean into relationships in whatever organic way they present themselves.

~

In the overwhelm of tasks and to-dos, I’ve been thinking a lot about my responsibility––my ability to respond. I’ve been considering my ability to respond to the echos of clamour in my life, and practicing how to work with care to identify and prioritize where I am able to send my energy. It can’t be to everything. I’m trying to learn not to “tire [myself] out with unnecessary stuff (Wagamese Embers 19). I am practicing taking a moment of stillness––quiet––to intentionally channel that energy into what I can respond to. The important question isn’t “how can I do it all?” but rather “what requires my attention?”
Removing oneself does not allow the opening and acceptance of experience necessary to cultivate relationships and the learnings of life that come from those relationships.

We enjoy categorizing things; we “spend a lot of time trying to compress things into a context [we can] accept” (Wagamese Embers 43), thinking that progress in various facets of life are separate somehow. One of my biggest mistakes is thinking that various channels of production are not connected. I notice that I let myself become overwhelmed by the tasks in various channels. I often neglect to understand that my well-being is the intersection of the categories that make up my passions and responsibilities, and that all of these impact one another.

The art of creating is also at the intersection of the facets of my life. Cajete writes that “education is an art of process, participation, and making connection” (23). I think that it’s important to remember that education is not limited within the walls of a classroom; the creation of looking, seeing what is available, and being open to new understandings and connections.

~

As an adolescent and, frankly, as a young adult as well, I have been preoccupied with what Cajete describes as “objectivism,” this idea that there is one right way of learning and being (19). Answer keys and media and the concept of “doing the right thing” instill a belief that there is a singular right way of doing things and a singular right way of being a thing. “Being” is not something we can put our finger on. We simply are.

I wonder what it means to be “transformed by relationship to earth” (Kimmerer 343). Is transformation in the being in a place and allowing the fog to cover me and pull me to moment of reflection that finally allows me to melt into the grief? Is “knowing” allowing myself to be inspired by a duck?

~

“I know the ocean because I have immersed myself in it and felt the pull of its current. If I want to know life, I need to experience its wonder and breathe it in with every breath” (Wagamese Embers 88).
Relationship comes from experience. Knowing comes from engulfment. Engulfment comes with open arms, surrendering to the current of experience.

I would like to be OK with following the yearning that leads me between the strands of the clamour and toward my mountain. Wagamese says that the “yearning is another gift… a calling. It is our intuition,” and I suppose that’s what my 40-minute detour must be (Wagamese One Drum 17). Somehow.



References

Cajete, Gregory. Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. First Edition.
Kivaki Press, 1994.
Kelly Vicki. “EDUC 868: Curriculum Theory and Art Education” Simon Fraser University,
2023.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2015.
Wagamese, Richard. Embers: One Ojiway’s Meditations. Douglas and McIntyre, 2016.
Wagamese, Richard. One Drum: Stories and Ceremonies for a Planet. Douglas and McIntyre,
2019.