About

Dreaming, imagining, creating, tending…
These are all ways of living the world we want into being.
If we can’t do this in little ways, home ways, community and family ways.
How would we do it in big ways?

Leah Reesor-Keller, Tending Tomorrow

So much in our world seems off course. The fruits of centuries of capitalism and colonialism are coming home to roost with crises of addictions, homelessness, and climate. Election results highlight the deep divides in our society. Labour disputes disrupt our ability to purchase sugar, send our children to school, mail a parcel, borrow a book. Wars rage in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Our neighbours are imposing destructive tariffs and threatening annexation. It is easy to despair.

Truth be told, as privileged Westerners, it is often easy to ignore these interlocking crises. Life goes on. There are errands to run, plants to tend, church functions to support, meals to prepare, concerts to patronize, books to read, friends to visit. An absurd number of airplanes fly overhead every day. Though store shelves are sometimes more bare than we are accustomed to, anything we want can be purchased at the click of a button. Our lives are disrupted, and yet they are not.

And through it all, groaning under the pressures we exert and yet always finding space for life, nature carries on. The basic bonds that tie us to the rest of Creation cannot be broken. We need food, water, clothing, shelter, clean air to breathe. And one way or another, these needs are met by Creation. It is easy to ignore these most primal of bonds – until the infrastructure that has come to be essential starts to break down, as it did with Calgary’s water main failure last summer.

The way our water comes in through a tap and flows out through a drain is a potent symbol for our linear consumption. We bring in food and other goods from the store and send the waste out in our garbage (recycling, green bins) and down our sewers. It is no wonder that the circularity of life’s rhythms evades us.

I began to grasp this conundrum decades ago, first intellectually and then intuitively. I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the highway of consumption and have searched out side roads and runaway lanes that draw me back to our fundamental connections with the land. My original priority was food – local, homegrown, foraged. Food that highlights our dependence on Creation and on one another. Food chains that come as close as possible to eliminating waste and potentially even healing our abused ecosystem.

More recently, my explorations have veered into textiles: knitting, spinning, weaving, dyeing, exploring how I can have – and recognize – the same type of intimate relationship with textiles that I have long pursued with food.

It is an ongoing journey. I am no expert, just someone seeking to live with integrity amidst the voices (mostly internal, but also the implicit hum of mainstream society) telling me that I am wasting my time, that there are quicker, easier, cheaper, more efficient ways of doing things. I know that there are many others who also hear the call to live more fully into our connections with the earth with a depth of love and respect that disrupts conventional patterns of consumption and waste. As the prevalence of free(r) trade wanes, it is becoming more common for Canadians to scrutinize the origins of our purchased goods. Might this be an opportunity to unravel some of our previously accepted destructive practises and spin up more sustainable fibres?

I know that each of our situations, our choices, our paths, are different and that even on these unique paths we need companionship and inspiration. This is what I hope this blog can be. A way for me to articulate and share snapshots (literal and figurative) of my journey that will clarify my own course and, I hope, spark some new ideas and inspiration for others. We are navigating troubled waters. Let’s hope that together we can chart a better course than any of us could alone.