How to Listen to the Land: Raincoast Music and the Eye's Awakening

"Right now is the time when we wake up and start paying attention to what we are actually doing. I've always said we can do whatever we want. The question is what do we want to do. And we need a new definition of progress, you know, toward listening to scientists, and toward elegance and beauty. And so we have to get our philosophy right. What way do we want to go forward? And we need a critical mass of people who care deeply in their hearts about nature." Robert Bateman, Canadian artist from the B.C. coast sponsored by Raincoast Conservation Foundation for an Oil-Free Coast

This past weekend, I headed a block over from my apartment to grab my usual afternoon matcha. As I swung my head around to grab a coffee cup lid, my line of sight was crowded with the most peculiar, and at once familiar, beauty. Frame drums, doumbeks, and instruments of all kind, beautifully hand-crafted in the likelihood of natural aesthetics. The clouds of a waking dream parted as I stepped forward to shake the hand of the drum-maker himself. 

From Vancouver Island, Sylvan Temple Drums boasts specially crafted hand-made local woods just south of the Great Bear Rainforest. At first meeting, the key to my city's grandest music festival was gifted, unceremoniously, and with the sincerity of a true friendship. Before purchasing an absolutely gorgeous alder doumbek, I became privy to the music of such as Alabama Shakes, Thievery Corporation, Cat Empire, Caravan Palace, The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, Mamselle, Haram, and on. It was a splendid weekend. The gift of music breathed new life, and as through the wood of our country, the sound reverberated with untouchable magic into my heart and marrow. 

Such as luck would have, the serendipitous vibe of the exchange revealed the marked truth of reciprocity in nature. Human beings are mere messengers, and vessels of light and wisdom, others more naked and bright than the rest. They who are naked and bright are merely known as generous to us more gross souls. And so, in a parable of ancient China, correlative meaning ensues. 

Source: Galen Mongeau

After receiving the great gift, not as from divinity, but from the hands of a fellow man. I was moved to wonder on the spiritual nature of the harvest. In such a world as where the sense of harvest has breached sustainability to egregious excess in exploiting the natural resources of the land, where is the sane harvester of life's great gifts of creation? And from the musical instrument of the trees sings a tale of the potent harmony embedded within the forest, within the land. The land is imbued with the music of life, with the instruments of soul, art and meaning. 

When will we honour right harvesting, as in those who are traditional users of the land since time immemorial, not mere environmentalists, but as local harvesters who depend on the land for their livelihood? Whether it is in the food or the materials, in opening a doorway to family, community and inner fulfillment, our vocation, role and fulfillment is in the land, offering all a place, as a truly honest way of making each our own living. Might we see the hidden inner nature of the Earth as not only our source of physical life, but as our source of grounding and flight, as our source of reciprocal creativity, the inertia of magic and play as the source of harmony itself, as a way to growth, promise, and all our relations?

Learn More about Pipelines:

And the People Protecting Future Generations:
KEEPERS OF THE ATHABASCA

Also, read my Comment on Geist.com on the Energy&Art debates

__________________ 

A pipeline twice the size of a whale. A gargantuan opening, closing the way through into an opaque, unholy void. The brackish filth of water moves as on its own under our quaking boots. And the spill seeps into the metallic soil below. The Earth shrieks, yet her voice is muted under a dense, resin helmet. Deafened by fortunes of squandered wealth, the murderous cold frays the nerves with blinding speed, and then, all there is to do is work.

Interior of an Ironworks by Godfrey Sykes 

"Give 'em yr bucket." Our manager removes our defecation pails, to be filled with drinking water for the next hour. The only change of the guards is vomit and an empty stomach. Coffee, whisky and blood. The grisly, noxious sky burns with the weight of an Earth turning on its side, looking out through grey eyes, a globular iris of naked waste. The entombed sky wretches as the darkening muck churns and writhes like a cold snake. What was once soil and groundwater, turned to the tar and feathers of the shamed petro-state of Canada.

Cottonopolis by Edward Goodall 

The pipe gargles and spews rasping smoke, as if it were a choking throat, attempting a last word before immobile onlookers. The brevity of life and death makes us motion-sick. There is a sea of greed, corruption and ignorance below these decks of metal and bone. The quiet break the loudest. And at once, as the gushing oil explodes with a merciless fire from the side of frozen metal, men are trapped behind the void. Wading in the flush of a liquid worse than sewage, the brain nauseates, overwhelmed with the job of planetary death.

______________

In celebration of the filters of raw earth into breathable air. The track "America! America!" is inspired by the forestal creation of a hand-crafted alder doumbek from Vancouver Island, at the cusp of the Great Bear Rainforest, a place that also signifies a cusp of human civilization. So, the sound of the wooden drum, of the local land, is played in conjunction with a Maple Shakuhachi (also indicative of the local country's national tree).


The doumbek and flute seek a passage, of wind and earth, into the waters of being and becoming, towards a sense of grounding (drum) and direction (flute). The vocalization/narrative sounding muses on the exhausting reactionary sense of progress that ensues in the modern world, where people continue to consume and waste, yet there is a lack of listening, and a lack of sheer creation.

The calamity of today is not one of natural resources, it is our state of mind, and as the musical instruments of the natural world teach us, there is much to learn from the shapes and sounds within. As Chuang Tzu said, "What happened was my own collected thought encountered the hidden potential in the wood. From this live encounter came the work that you ascribe to the spirit."


This nine-poem chapbook speaks to the deformed nature of land under the warped perception of consumerist greed and a wholesale corruption of value in life, and unsurprisingly human life. The interludes speak to a frenetic base of experience in the fragmented world of manufactured waste and devastated landscapes that have become the norm, closing our minds and eyes from the truths and repercussions of our noxious way of life.

Through poetry, I affirm and re-encounter all my relations through a sense of the inner community. Creative language inspires an inward journeying to find the root and nature of mind. The place where our whole selves may firmly take root in the most fertile of soil, in the home of universal belonging, and so give back and become one with the self-regulating, self-sustained renewability of life in harmony with all of creation.

Interludes via FREEDOM

Walking the Tar Sands: Storytelling from the 4th Annual Healing Ceremony

"If the development of the Tar Sands has one good thing about it, it might be that it wakes us up.

Business as usual is over. We've run out of time. It is the tipping point. It's telling us that everything about fossil fuel economies have changed, in terms of cost, in terms of scale, in terms of environmental footprint. Everything has changed. Now, if as a society we can respond to that and say, you know what, we need to get off this within 30 years, then that would be great. If we don't respond to it, then as a society we will likely collapse, because you can not sustain a civilization on a resource as dirty as bitumen." Andrew Nikiforuk, multi-award winning Canadian journalist, and author of Tar Sands, in the documentary Tipping Point: The End of Oil

Highway 63 to the Athabasca Tar Sands, past cords of balsam poplar, I am reminded of the old adage from the Second World War. "Bodies stacked like cords of wood." The puncturing wind howls and slams with a dry heave over the windshield as sixteen wheels burn past, loaded with split trunks. To my right, a comrade of voice and indigenous rights advocate, Gregor MacLennan tells me the green corridor of lush grassy, treelines are a mere trick for the eye. Behind them lies the gargantuan tragedy that could only be wrought by the world's largest industrial project. Gregor had visited the Tar Sands with the Achuar people of Peru, who had recently fended of Calgary-based oil company Talisman from drilling on their territory in the Western Amazon rainforest. Not long ago, as a student in Iquitos, the largest city in the Western Amazon, multiple truckloads of logged jungle timber floating along the Amazon basin became a common sight for me. First impressions on bearing witness to the immense destruction and its repercussions for local communities along the Athabasca river, the Achuar, Gregor said, were overcome with sadness, and lack of hope from the locals. 

Yet, on July 6, as a contingency of solidarity groups, activists, environmentalists, scientists, and First Nations leadership, including Winona LaDuke, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, walked the 4th Annual Tar Sands Healing Walk, there was certainly no shortage of hope. Beyond hope, however, there was the sheer presence of strength on that full day of walking to bear witness, pray and heal in solidarity. The Healing Walk encircled Tar Sands development, pausing for a moment of silence at each of the Four Directions to heal Mother Earth. Together with elders, traditional drummers from the Dene Nation led all who followed in support. At the final direction along the path, having reached the homestretch, I asked one of the lead drummers for an extra drum, as I had forgotten mine, and wished to accompany the rhythm. "We don't have any others, it's personal. We each cut our own," he said. As they proudly held their snare-tightened skin-headed drums.

In that moment, I was struck by a revelation. Jokingly, the drummers made affable conversation, to lighten the moment through friendship and good spirits, and I was struck by each of their genuinely unique relationships to their respective drums. It was as if the making and playing of one's drum represented the circular holism of life, and the central role that creativity plays in that sustenance, that deep nourishment of living in the human experience. As they played on, not with the sophisticated manner of virtuosic world-class music, but with the honest grit and sincere genuflection of direct connection to the spirit of creativity: the heart. And the heartbeat rhythms moved me through the pain and humbling endurance of the Healing Walk. Each step a strike of the skin, a beat of the drum, the rhythm of forward movement, of positivity, of light and love. 

The number 4 had especial significance to my experience at the 4th Annual Healing Walk. Not only is the number 4 a deeply meaningful symbol to Aboriginal culture, but also to my own ancestral culture. The night before the Healing Walk, the two converged in a momentous expression of joy and harmony. On Turtle Island, 4 represents the directions, seasons, and in the Medicine Wheel of Four Colours (Red, White, Black, Yellow) and Four Lives (Mental, Spiritual, Emotional, Physical). 

In my musical life, deeply bound by Mediterranean musical culture, I have given to the Sufi spiritual practice of seeing the numerical symbol 4 as sacred. More closely allied to my blood, in Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism, the wisdom tradition of the Four Worlds, symbolizes the spiritual realms. And so, I dedicate 4 hours of every day to meditation through music, which is a special revelation of Sufism and other world spiritualities. 

At Indian Beach campground, around the sacred fire, I drummed on a 14' frame drum with Dene Nation drummers local to Fort McMurray, who inspired all present to grace the Earth with a ceremonial round dance. Our frame drums, created of the spiritual womb of Turtle Island and the Mediterranean, danced in unprecedented harmony under the inspiring rush of Dene song. Their welcoming me was a moment of incredible significance as I sunk my mind deep into the heartbeat of Mother Earth, to emerge, offering the light step of a dance, the voice of a song, and the resonance of a drum.  

So, as with SoJourn(al), the drum represents a spiritual and personal expression, where we all move and feel necessary to ourselves and the world, whether on a stage, in a publication, or through a drum, we live our lives with enduring harmony and perennial meaning. The traditional drumming is in no way redolent of economic ambition, but of an honouring for the ancestral and allied community that warms us and embodies our truth. The drum is the inner life, the spiritual life, the way to sacred holism, to health and healing. To beat the drum is to impress upon one's spirit the unshakable continuity of the richness that the inner life provides, as to forego the unwelcome trespasses of soulless possessiveness, greedy overconsumption and mindless ignorance. So, in beating the drum we are humbled as we are fulfilled. I could not imagine a more fitting leadership to the 4th Annual Tar Sands Healing Walk, than the unwavering spirit of the Dene drummers.   

See Previous Posts on the Alberta Tar Sands:

• The Value of People: Voices of Struggle and Creation in Western Canada
• Responding to the Critical Condition of Earth

water is sacred

the whole world is with us

the fourth direction

gathering firewood for community

remember Indian Beach

awake at first light

living in unity

on the land

remnants of Fort McMurray

onward to the end of the tunnel

touch the cleansing water

women lead from the beginning

caribou-hide singers with Dene National Chief Bill Erasmus 

the sacred circle of the round dance

Mohawk and Algonquin Confederacy youth dance in pride

to the pipe ceremony to begin the healing

suspicion lurks amid catastrophe

allies in solidarity wear Healing Walk t-shirts

Dene Nation youth represents with Eriel Deranger and Chief Allan Adam

Chief Bill Erasmus smudges for all near Tantoo Cardinal

Cleo Reese speaks to media prior to Healing Walk 

Dene National Chief Bill Erasmus opens Walk

start the Healing

active media set off by way of Fort McMurray

and the smoking gun

exhale emotion

where the treeline ends

warnings echo the birds away from deathly toxic waters

wavering dispersal of fear and anxiety

straight and narrow solidarity as a movement of one

forward

Bill McKibben interviewed at Buffalo viewpoint

youth of the Mohawk and Algonquin Confederacy show pride 

seize the day and slow industrial traffic! 

as one we are the strength of many

exiles march through babylon 

never let your flag below our sight

going the wrong way

see Earth as one of one mind

stronger than anything on our path

hold up the flag of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation

Winona LaDuke meets Brigette DePape

left behind for dead

self-portrait at Tar Sands

praying to the first of the Four Directions

clear-cut deforested desertification in the boreal forests

the Algonquin Confederacy is from the ground

protect your mind in the unholy land of destructive ignorance

human death sanctifies the wounded earth

 sign reads, "reclamation area" at the world's largest industrial project

carrier of the Medicine Wheel walks on Turtle Island

youth drummers inspire all to step to the sacred heartbeat of our Mother

Dene elder represents his Nation

dwarfed under acid skies

raise a new flag in the name of Aboriginal justice

Aboriginal youth bear witness

we shall overcome 

under darkening skies we march ahead

walk the land and see for your self

the largest industrial project on Earth spins out of control

life emerges still from the deepest atrocity

forward this image so all may see and bear witness

violence begets violence and madness fuels madness

look and look again and meditate on your newfound awareness

pipe dreams of the Old World 

we see so clearly yet they are blinded by greenhouse emissions

walk across the devastated earth with hallowed footsteps

the atrocious path of denial shows its ugly face

the black soil of unreason and hypocrisy

workers' barracks of the neo-fascist petro-state

we the people seek freedom and independence anew

shame on the greedy and lifeless work of ignorance 

shame on Canada from the neo-colonial Anglo-dominated west

the road to hell and the largest dam in the world

outside the Syncrude Tailings Dam

an unsavoury welcome from the largest single source producer in Canada 

return to creation, to the beginning, to the drum 

inadvertent signs remind us always to continue our work

back in Calgary the sacred is locked behind urbanity

and the fortune of a local neighbourhood walk

______________

inspired by the experience of living through a flood, while during a week of taking refuge in the residences of close friends, I committed my mind to an expression to creatively express the emotional flood known only by its victims. while the floods of southern alberta were nowhere near as devastating with such human costs as those concurrently in India, still there is a communal trauma, a proven post-traumatic stress that visits all victims of flooding. this is the result of immature development on a 100-year floodplain, where commercial zeal trumps human life, and we become aware of being entirely objectified as city-dwellers within an intensively privatized, economic existence. our lives are bought and sold, and Mother Earth reminds us that whether we like it or not, we always return to her.

The wise ones say that we can never know where we are going if we do not know where we are from. We are from our Mother Earth, and it is back to her where we will go. As ever her children, throughout our lives, we consume from her sources of life, the milk of water, and if we are unaware and ignore the offering of sacred space that recognizes her movement and presence, then we are inevitably reminded that we are ever at her mercy. where I live, the city of Calgary, one of the most significant commercial centres of the global big oil industry was particularly impacted by flooding this summer solstice. if we can hear them, Ma Earth sends us very direct, timely and pertinent messages, namely in this case a message to the tune of, "slow down!" as there was flooding soon before in Fort McMurray, home of the dreaded Tar Sands, and as i write this, flooding in the Petro-State capital of Canada, Toronto. Ma Earth is quite articulate this summer.

This five poem chapbook, Understanding our MEANING, is the second complementary work from the district.Colombia collection. Beginning with a foray into the philosophic Taoist way of compassion that enunciates our living with the giving strength and deep humbling of fluid harmony in improvised music, the poems then take a broad step into the humanities of reason and the struggle for justice in the age of outrageous cultural consumption and environmental ignorance.

We Understand our MEANING when we know our place in the struggle for human freedom against the institutions that would likely allow human life to be bought and sold as the despicable days of slavery, masked by the post-colonial economic privatizations and revealed by the resurgence of decolonization among the First Peoples of Turtle Island. Finally, Morning Dew, the last poem, is revisited through an experimental narrative sounding in the album, Evocations:district.Colombia, where an experience as a temporary climate change refugee embodies the contemporary significance of the common struggle to be human on planet Earth today.

Understanding Our MEANING