in gratitude

One of the things I’m noticing about myself more and more these days is that I often omit the final step in my communications on line - pushing the send button - if I’m lucky I’ll discover it quickly, if not it takes time to surface. This post is an example - it was written July 22 and found again today when I logged in planning to write another. I’ll let this one sit for some days before writing another.

Two great souls have crossed the veil in the last weeks. Andrea Gibson an inspiring, brilliant poet, performer and wise one who left us knowing their life had been a gift that would continue to carry lessons and comfort to many of us, and the great teacher Joanna Macy the ripples of whose widening circles of The Work that Reconnects have spread all over the world urging us into active hope.

I was a late-comer to Andrea Gibson from reading their ‘Things that Don’t Suck’ substack,. I stumbled into them because of cancer and I was intrigued and delighted by the name. I came to appreciate their activism, their courage, their brilliance, their poetry and performances through exploring them online I am forever grateful and blessed to be alive and well today thirty three years after my own cancer diagnosis with a cancer that took my sister before her time, my dear young cousin too soon, a beloved chosen family member just last year - the same age as Andrea - yet allowed my beloved chosen step/daughter to live on.

I wondered those thirty-three years ago what contribution the physical and psychic toxicity of our culture had made to what seemed to be an exponential growth curve in the disease. The question of what could I do with the life I had been given to strengthen the web of joy and love, hope and devotion to our planet, was answered by that teacher.

Just three days ago we witnessed the passing of a great teacher, philosopher, wise woman and inspiration to many. I discovered Joanna Macy’s teachings about ten years after my recovery from cancer when a dear chosen sister invited me to go with her to a Work that Reconnects workshop in an education centre beside the Cheakamus River in the Paradise valley near Squamish. The foundational spiral of the work simple yet again so profound in its wisdom, supported us through the stages of our weekend of learning from ‘gratitude’ to ‘honoriing our pain’ bringing us to ‘seeing with new eyes’ and then bravely ‘going forth’.

The teachings of that weekend profoundly affected me and have remained integrated into my way of being in the world since. I won’t presume to describe Joanna Macy’s work here, you can find so much about it on line and since her passing there are substacks and posts all over the internet. I will simply describe an experience of my own that changed me and gave me the courage to change my life.

It was a wet weekend in late fall, we bundled up and went out into a clearing in the forest to become a Council of All Beings I was drawn to a weed - a lowly green being often regarded as an invasive nuisance, torn from its home and discarded in disgust. That day my understanding of what it meant to be in relationship to all the living world changed irrevocably and began my long journey of devotion and care for the more than humans I share space and time with in life.

I write this short post in gratitude for Andrea and Joanna, each of whom offered their incalculable gifts to the world through which I and many of us have become more whole.

What is remembered lives

With gratitude to the Hul'q'umi'num and SENĆOŦEN speaking people of the Cowichan tribes on whose unceded traditional lands I live.