Author: adminJB

Ruth Cuthand’s Beaded “Tuberculosis”

In December 2025, I visited the McMichael Canadian Art Collection with my husband, a visual artist. The McMichael holds a special place in our relationship, a place where he, an American, met many of the Indigenous artists who survived colonization and its aftermath to make art exploring the heart of Turtle Island’s beauty, torment, and sources of healing. This art has been important to me for most of my life.

As a white girl born into the racist culture of a US/Canadian border town, I grew up hearing and reading stories of white beneficence toward “backward Natives.” My real education began with a teachers’ college friendship, not with an Indigenous person, but with a friend who during this period identified as a Black woman. Before we had words like settler, and intersectional feminist, and systemic racism, and cultural genocide, we didn’t address the obvious inequities in schooling that led many whites into professions and People of Colour into the less-than positions open to “minorities.”

I never forgot the things I learned from this beloved friend. Much later in life, when I tried to reconnect with her, I understood why we couldn’t. Too little awareness of my white privilege over the years of our young adulthood prevented her from trusting me. How could she be sure I was safe to know in middle age when I’d been so oblivious during adolescence and young adulthood? She couldn’t. I’d lived for years benefiting from the privilege bestowed on racism’s favoured white sons and daughters.

Something perhaps neither of us understood back then was the great potential we had for forging an authentic friendship. She didn’t know about, and I didn’t understand, the importance of an early event in my life that would lead me to the margins of life where the people I admired and empathized with created supportive communities to navigate the white racism that has created systems to ensure othering and less-than status. This personal event, a seven-month quarantine in a tuberculosis preventorium housing children exposed to TB, changed everything in my life, including my sense of belonging . . . to my white family and within my white skin.

Once I began therapy in my thirties, I found the courage to ask questions about this quarantine period, a subject forbidden in our household throughout my child and teen years. By the time I began therapy, I was well informed enough to know that a two-year-old toddler can’t survive in caged isolation without some kind of affectionate relationships. When I questioned the grandmother who raised me, she insisted this experience was of little consequence. When I asked my mother, her reaction – sudden tears – suggested she too had questions about quarantine and our subsequent estrangement.

I persisted, asking and witnessing her tears until these gave way to my mother’s recollections of her own time in quarantine, a far longer period than I endured, in the adult wing of the sanitarium with many war veterans dying of tuberculosis. I learned from these highly charged conversations that TB patients were considered dissolute, that they had somehow brought their illness on themselves through wayward behaviours that led to poverty and promiscuity. As a thirty-year-old mother of two young girls whose husband left her in the early days of her quarantine, my mother was easily convinced that she had somehow brought her misfortunes on herself. It is always easy to bully a victim of bullying. My mother had been bullied by her mother, the grandmother who became her stand-in when she was diagnosed with life-threatening TB and quarantined for two years.

Discovering this story – our attachment rupture story – helped me to understand why I’d led a very anxious life, why I found it impossible to concentrate during my early schooling, and why I felt so isolated even from those who professed to love and value me. But this story, our story, didn’t help me to understand how I survived being caged for seven months. I had a hunch there was another story, one my young self knew and longed to tell as much as I, the resourceful, adult Jane, longed to hear.

Supported by the therapeutic process, I was able to persist with my questions, working through mutual discomfort with my mother, and piecing together the parts of the story she had been holding for me without knowing I would one day need these pieces to understand who I’d become. One of these fragments slipped into my heart years after we’d began our question-and-answer dance. On a day ordinary in every aspect, she told me I was not the only child in the preventorium. There had been six First Nations children in isolation with me. I was the youngest. The oldest, she’d heard from the doctor who had treated us, had been about twelve.

All at once I could feel myself sprung from my cage to go on adventures with this tiny ad hoc family, perhaps after lights out or during staff lunch breaks. Suddenly I could imagine meaningful relationships saturated with affection and comfort, relationships that never had to be named or explained. We were prisoners together. Of course we bonded.

I learned very little about these Indigenous children in spite of making inquiries through medical records departments. “Destroyed long ago,” I was told, “when the TB Sanitarium closed and a proper hospital was built on its grounds.” In spite of my efforts to reconnect, these six children remained my family in imagination only.

*******

This status changes on the day I move through McMichael rooms full of Indigenous artwork in December 2025. A twelve-year-old, in charge and tenderly concerned for the younger ones, becomes as real as my own flesh. The girls and boys descending in age and height, and me, the two-year-old, spoiled and passed from hip to hip, are together again. I can hear our laughter as we share our secret, forbidden adventures. What precipitates our reunion?

As I walk through these dusky, silent rooms, I come upon a framed, cornflower-blue, beaded circle holding a pair of lungs, these beaded in gold and red.

As soon as I see this image, my eyes fill. For a moment, I fear I might howl.

I stumble forward, and, within inches of its beauty and its terror, I see this piece has a name: “Tuberculosis.”

Unaware of any place to sit in this Presence that contains my past, I stand before this masterpiece of paradox and sway to music heard a long time ago. Ruth Cuthand, this work’s creator, has conjured my past into the present with her symbol of the disease that has swept countless of its intended victims to life’s margins. Because she has created this beaded image of pain and isolation, a little of the suffering I shared with my six family members is healed.

I am, because of Ruth Cuthand’s art, re-membered into a family of quarantined children who are now beaded together for all time in my heart. This powerful artist neither needs or wants my thanks. Still, I give it in the way that I give daily thanks for all the sources of beauty and harmony shaping my life. Thanks to Ruth Cuthand’s vision and skill and ferocious re-membering work, I now have one more image of healing and wholeness.

To learn about Ruth Cuthand and her work, visit https://www.ruthcuthand.ca/

To see “Tuberculosis” visit: https://www.ruthcuthand.ca/reserving-series/

To learn more about the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, visit: https://mcmichael.com/

Until next time,

Jane

On Seeing Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of Hamlet‘s genesis has been translated into a film of extraordinary passion. Forest witchery so vibrantly portrayed means theatre goers experience the forest’s innumerable life-and-death stories that have imbued Agnes Hathaway’s life with irrefutable power. Shakespeare’s wife, a ghostly presence referred to as Anne in most histories, becomes in O’Farrell’s fiction a match for the Bard in every way. She gathers her healing herbs, tends to her bees, and intuits her falcon’s needs as one who resonates more with the unfolding stories of an ancient forest than with the humans who give her shelter and do their best to “civilize” her. She is an authentic Wild Woman, rich in the ways of the first medicine women, the first growers of food and magic, the first midwives of life and death, the first of those burned and drowned and hanged and tortured to death because of their knowledge and wisdom. With Will, viewers fall under this forest woman’s spell. This, we know, will be a cataclysmic coupling when . . . never if . . . it happens.

For such a couple, grounded in the realities of primal energy, to lose a child is a grief that is untouchable by any of the ordinary-mortal means of mediating loss. No church platitudes comfort. No food fills the emptiness. Not even love can cast its spell and distract from the gaping hole left by their beloved Hamnet. And when Shakespeare, the father, returns to the city, to “work,” Agnes, the mother, feels he is betraying her, their shared grief, and worst of all, their only son.

Their rage expresses mercurially . . . the slamming of a pewter cup upon a wooden table . . . the cold, cold farewells . . . the howls and guttural moans that issue from their souls . . .. None of these grief companions, none, can provide relief for these mythic beings who feel their love and hate and grief too deeply for mortal solace. Will goes to London. To “work.” Agnes remains with her daughters. With their grief. Her brother listens to her anguished mutterings but cannot lessen her terrible sorrow. She lives with the death of a precious child the way a soldier lives with a missing arm – always expecting to see the limb where it should be, beloved, whole.

And then she learns her mate, William Shakespeare, has written a tragedy, not the comedy she feared he uses to distract himself from her bottomless well of suffering. She insists on seeing what he has been doing while she has been with their remaining children, loving and hating, searching for the antidote to their horrifying loss. Finding none.

The name of tragedy Will has been writing, Hamlet, shocks her into wonder. The names Hamlet and Hamnet are interchangeable. She bows her head, pulsing with the discovery that he has been expressing his grief about their child and not distracting himself with frivolous comedy. In this moment, she can never imagine laughing again.

Initially, standing in the pit so close to the stage she can almost touch the actors, she is outraged when they speak her son’s name, cries for them to take the word Hamlet from their mouths. And then, with an understanding that settles in like a warming fire, she knows the theatre is the place that is her husband’s forest, his source of power, his only source of comfort. It is the place Will waits, as she waits in the forest, for their beloved Hamnet to return.

The Play’s the Thing, always, with Shakespeare. The unbearable suffering of a young prince given an impossible task by an insubstantial ghost calms the mother who has lost her child. She listens to the actors’ speeches. She watches their faces. And, at last, she is comforted by the elixir of confession, inner torment, loss . . . and all that is unknowable within the world of the play. Bodies fall to rage and justice. Blood flows. The world comes right again, is restored after the worst has happened.

At the end, Prince Hamlet dies. The ghost her husband became when Hamnet died is flesh and blood, the man, the mate she can weep and howl and perhaps even laugh with once more. This play is his raging grief. It matches her own. Hamnet, the lovely boy their passion for one another sparked into life, is laid to rest in an Earth that knows how to take to itself wild creatures, whether human or no.

We, their witnesses, know love, joy, and peace will return to their family, tinged always with the deepest blue of those graves where each of our loved ones lie buried, whether in the ground or in our hearts. This is how life goes on after tragedy. Someone tells a story. Someone hears a story. Someone, after an endless night, sees a lighter sky and the wonder and promise of a sunrise.

Until next time,

Jane

On Creativity

The human journey, on every continent and in every age, presents human beings with the contrasting experiences of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, kindness and cruelty. It is widely believed that when we are children, we are so pliant and so teachable that many religious and educational practices use these contrasting life and death forces to instil their belief systems, claiming:

“Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll show you the man . . ..”

This saying is sometimes attributed to Aristotle, sometimes to Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and sometimes to self-appointed gurus who claim to be its source because they do not bother to research their materials or even know that they should. In these days of technological glamours, “likes” trump everything, especially the search for truth.

Even if we can never be sure of the quote’s source, we can identify its English language pronoun and noun. He, the pronoun, stands for children born with male genitalia, and man, the noun, is the name we use to describe the adult phase of that view of maleness.

Whenever  I think about that sentence’s male-centredness, I also think about what happened to those designated “girls” and “women” while boys were being educated formally, in schools and churches, to become “men.”

Because of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley, because of the Bronte sisters, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte, and because of Jane Austen, here in the west we learn in our elementary and high-school English classes that girls and women were being domesticated, trained to serve, schooled to care for their fathers and brothers and husbands, molded to obediently meet the needs of home and hearth as the “Angel in the House,” certainly, but most especially, they were groomed to meet the needs of the boys and men they lived among.

I don’t believe I could write the above sentence without knowing that while others did their best to control and subjugate girls and women, Nature Herself taught us how to live within such strictures with more pleasure than pain. All we have to do is align ourselves with Her first principle: Creativity. This is not to say that creativity should replace the fight for equality for all peoples. Nor do I mean to suggest that making something can make up for the harm done by inequality. What I am saying is that Creativity makes the fight for equality more bearable because it feeds us at a fundamentally primal level. More than any other support, we need our primal energies to keep on keeping on.

Then as now, Creativity is an unstoppable source of energy that draws in the marginalized to the centre of Life. Creativity bolsters our commitment to causes; it is the impulse to make, MAKE, unshackled by the belief that we have no right to do so.

If we are lucky, whether we’re born with male or female parts, some combination of the two, or their absence entirely, we learn to harness the brutish nonsense that does its best to convince us we are less than. When we learn to harness the energies fueling limitations and use them to support our own purposes, we become makers of every sort. And, once we have had a creative, making experience, there is no going back. Madness and rage may descend for a time, but then a friend says, “Come to pottery class with me.”

Creativity is the finger in the dyke of madness.

Creativity says, “Forget labels and body parts, religious edicts and educational gridlock. Just make something . . . with your mind and heart and body and spirit . . ., a story . . ., a pot . . ., a dress . . ., an invitation to others to create. Make something that restores your belief in yourself and your cause, because Mistress Creativity assures us with every making adventure we undertake, “In My company, all is well, communities form, and peace reclaims the human soul.”

Whatever pronoun you choose, whatever your experiences before your seventh birthday, make something today and share it as you will.

And then, use the joy it brings to view your current challenges anew.

Until next time,

Jane

 

 

Aging and Prince Hamlet’s Fifth Act

The bodies are everywhere, well, figuratively speaking. For those of us privileged to experience old age, like pall bearers, we carry our share of losses. We mourn, and . . . we celebrate. For while death is inevitable, so is life in all its wild and willful glory.

Recently, I’ve had to meditate on loss because of a visual impairment that makes unsafe activities I used to relish. After moving to Ontario from Vermont, I discovered a theatre lab that holds readings once a month. These are at night, making it necessary for me to figure out how to attend without my usual sense of independence. This is a safety issue, mine and all those who might be on the road with me when darkness falls.

Continue reading Aging and Prince Hamlet’s Fifth Act

Jane Goodall and Eating to Save the Planet

How do we commit to carrying on this remarkably hopeful environmental activist’s work to protect all Earthlings and our Earth Home?

One thing we can do without too much trouble? Reshape our food habits and support our local farmers at farmers’ markets and independent grocery stores carrying local and regional organic farm produce. Goodall speaks eloquently about becoming a vegetarian to save the Rainforests threatened by corporations that clear cut to make room for more pasture land for the “beef” industry. (I put beef in quotes to remind myself that cattle are living beings, not inert blobs of flesh beneath celophane wrappers.)

Her call to become plant eaters mixes with many others, including John Robbins, scion of the Baskin and Robbins ice cream corporation. Early in life, he rejected his family’s millions to pioneer plant-based food awareness. An early spokesperson for a planet healthy died, he sparked awareness that infuriated corporations pushing food that uses up reserves of water, endangers the lives of humans who work in the “meat industry,” and inflicts cruelty beyond description on the emotionally intelligent animals it commodifies. If you doubt animal emotions, read Jeffrey Moussiaeff Masson’s The Pig Who Sang to the Moon for evidence of animal emotional expressions similar to humans’.

Continue reading Jane Goodall and Eating to Save the Planet

On Leaving Vermont and Returning to Canada

Since the US 2024 election and the current federal government’s growing disregard for constitutional rights, responsibilities, and freedoms, whenever I sat at my computer, I faced the twin spectres of ICE detention and eventual deportation. Although I’d been a Permanent Resident of the US since 2003 and have no criminal record, I felt my Canadian citizenship determined my otherness after Trump suggested Canada become the 51st state and many Canadians made clear we were not having it. That I had been living in Vermont’s green mountains legally and at the same address for 23 years made no difference. As with other Canadians, my position became precarious when those of us living and working in the US joined the growing list of this current authoritarian regime’s targets for revenge.

Continue reading On Leaving Vermont and Returning to Canada

Earth Day 2025: Toward Remembering the Rest of Our Family

Reflections on The Overstory / Patty Westerford

The following words form the first trickles of thought and feeling inspired by The Overstory. Richard Powers won a Pulitzer for this novel in 2019. I have no idea why I didn’t hear about it sooner. It, a massive, walking, talking forest of a book that makes reference more than once to Macbeth’s nightmare on-the-move forest, only made it to this Vermont, rural, woodsy cabin this spring. I haven’t finished reading it. I will likely never finish reading The Overstory.

There are writers who love characters and writers who love places and writers who love ideas and writers who love Earth. I suspect Richard Powers loves all of these and so much I can’t conceive of loving because I have not lived his experience of the world. The one experience I share with him, the love of and gratitude and reverence for the greater than human world, is enough to keep me faithful to the story, word after word, line after line, page after page.

Growing from character roots through trunk and canopy and seed making, this wild interconnection of passions and awakenings and disillusionments and deaths is a call to kinship, to owning the sprawling family of species growing every which way on this planet we humans call Earth. Patty Westerford, one of this story’s human roots, mulls a response to an invitation to speak at a sustainability conference called, absurdly, Home Repair. This engagement means exploding her miniscule carbon footprint by flying from the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee – where she is going to seed in her own unique way – to California.

Since experiencing academic belittlement as a scientist who in her first forest studies presents evidence about tree communities not accepted within the narrow confines of current scientific tree research, Patty is a traumatized scholar who takes refuge in the safety of living and dying tree species. I couldn’t help but remember Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the traditional scientific community’s violent attacks on what has come to be counted as bedrock truth regarding the murderous effects of human created persistently toxic substances on air, land, water, and all insect, plant, and mammal species. Living through constant attempts to humiliate her by destroying her credibility has made Dr. Patricia Westerford agoraphobic as well as entirely allied with species far more evolved than her own. As she considers traveling to California to repeat what she has already written in several different configurations for the reading public, she muses . . .

She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A Tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she’d get an ovation.

Many readers are utilitarian. They read for work, for approval, for glibness when conversing. Many readers want to be the smartest people in the room. This year, on Earth Day, I reach out to readers who absorb books to increase their humanity, their wisdom, their interconnections with all that is the way trees absorb from soil and air and water and sunlight and one another whatever they need to continue to protect this planet while increasing its beauty and harmony and meaning.

This post is for readers whose patience and faithfulness invites The Overstory and its unruly, unpredictable inhabitants into heart and mind, and deeper, into gut and imagination, to fertilize as it will. Earth Day is the one day when such preposterous invitations are possible. And . . . for the readers I hope to mingle with, every day is Earth Day.

Every day is life on and within this Beloved Home’s Heart and Soul. Every Day is mourning for our own species’ hubris and tragic engagement with more, with next, with bigger, with power without love or understanding, in short, with everything that has led to the destruction of so much of this planet’s generosity, wisdom, nourishment, and healing.

Richard Powers remembers Ovid, who also writes of People turning into Other Things.

What we turn into is up to us.

I’d like to believe, on this Earth Day 2025, that this tiny Vermont Yellow Birch grove has claimed me as one of its own.

May we all become like trees, knowing how to live and how to die.

May we nourish today and fall when life nudges us over.

May we repose feeding unknown wonders ready to blossom and bear fruit.

May we take hold and let go.

May we make room and connect.

May we learn to appear and reappear as root, trunk, canopy, and seed.

Until next time,

Betula Alleghaniensis

aka Jane

For International Women’s Day 2025: Women, “Hotness,” and Becoming an Earthling

Because I was raised in a border city, being Canadian rather than American was an early, clearly made distinction. This distinction did not suggest Canadian superiority, at least in my family, but pride in British and French traditions and geographic differences. Like a lot of Windsorites, I learned that while most of the US begins south of the Canadian border, in our part of the world the City of Detroit sits on our northern horizon, the American city’s spectacular display of light at night casting diamonds up and down the Detroit River separating our two countries. I don’t know why, but I liked this anomaly and learned to relate to most places through their north-south axis.

Toronto, for instance, is bounded on the south by Lake Ontario. If you know that, then you can explore the city knowing where you are in relation to one of the Great Lakes. Not everyone cares about this, but for some of us, knowing where we are in the world is important. It sets up relationships, as for example, when people talk about British Columbia and the Canadian Rainforest, the Gaspe and the Eastern Townships, and Canada’s newest Northern Territory, Nunavut. Knowing where I am in the world in relation to other places has inspired my identification as an Earthling over all other possible identities. And this identification brings me to women as they are portrayed and revealed in US film and TV.

Movies ignited these reflections. Like many children of the fifties, my escape from duck-and-cover, air-raid terrors came with a twenty-five-cent piece and permission to “go to the movies.” It took me decades to understand what I really hungered for in those darkened theatres – meaningful, coherent stories. Like many children, I lived in chaotic incoherence that required a release valve. Movies were my first release valve, television my second. I make this introduction to explain that when I watch something, I am always decoding and attributing meaning. This is a way of saying I’m on the hunt for coherence. Like that distinctive north-south axis of my birthplace, stories feed my sense of knowing where others are in life and this in turn helps me to know where I am.

Over the two-weeks leading up to International Women’s Day 2025, I watched The Substance, The Last Showgirl, Pretend It’s a City, The Later Daters, and Julia’s Stepping Stones. These three films and two television series cohered into a mirror ball of insights that illuminated many dark corners in my mind. I have listed them in the order I discovered them because it was this order that inspired a coherent sense of patriarchal colonization that I will do my best to articulate with the intention of honouring women everywhere.

Women are the reason I am writing this post. Women living in unsafe and terrifying conditions are often the subject of the stories we watch. It saddens me to say this. My antidote to violence is simple. If we all lived as Earthlings, we would live far more happily and creatively and far less destructively. But that is my solution. For others, the solution is a better iPhone.

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley have expertly planted The Substance’s indelibly horrific images in my psyche. The film exposes through exaggerated caricatures, a driving force of patriarchal colonization – western media. The presumption that predatory men have the right to control women and girls groomed to please them is evidenced in drama, documentary, and news programming. In patriarchal systems, girls and women are trained – like show dogs – to see themselves through men’s eyes. Focusing on compliance in childhood, this pleasing behaviour is created through advertising that emphasizes appearance and sexuality and availability and desirability, and, in rarer cases, a legacy position at an ivy league school. Through current patriarchal colonization efforts, we learn that it is okay to be smart as long as you are “hot.” All this emphasis on pleasing through appearance doesn’t leave much time to explore the actual self, the world, and larger issues. And that is why patriarchal systems prioritize criticizing the surface appearance of the girls and women they are determined to control.

Some girls and women, like Fran Lebowitz and Julia Reichert, exist within patriarchal systems on their own terms, defining themselves through their self-determined exploration of life’s possibilities. If I were to simplify this idea, I’d say their curiosity leads them to explore what they like and what they love and what they want to be and do. In the case of both women, their curiosity blossomed when they discovered they did not fit in to the standard formula of girl and womanhood established by patriarchal colonizers. If we aren’t considered conventionally pretty and, worse, if we are non-compliant, we are pretty much left to our own devices, if, that is, we are not intentionally marginalized, jailed, or murdered for our non-compliance. If we come from wealth, another story spins out because money is the symbol of power in patriarchal colonialization. A third story spins out should we be physically captured and sold into bondage.

Pamela Anderson brings to life the poignant end of the road for pretty, compliant girls and women colonized by patriarchal toxicity. In a world where news anchors are fired for letting their hair change with age, imagine what happens to the girls and women who mature in the toxic patriarchal death traps set out to lure men and male-identified women into casinos and other “entertainment” hubs that thrive on the exploitation of people only valued as money making assets. Toward the end of the film, Anderson’s character, Shelly, erupts with the tortured confession of the damned: Being seen, by men, being adored, by men, made her feel good, made her feel pretty, gave her life meaning. It is a very heady draw when you are a good-looking woman living under patriarchal control to be selected as adored sex goddess. Norma Jeane didn’t try to escape her killers because her killers created Marilyn Monroe and told her she had value because she was the sexiest woman in the world. They didn’t tell her it was only her momentary surface beauty they exploited for money and power. Her talent was an inconvenience they denied, ridiculing her suffering and tossing her on to the sex-goddess trash heap when she became less compliant and more herself.

Both Substance and Showgirl depict women coming to the end of the road of that hideous determination “hotness.” In Substance, the self-hatred at the heart of meeting patriarchy’s grotesque standards is dramatized as an all-out war between a younger and older self. We cringe during this battle to the death. We may even laugh. But this film’s truth is a gut punch we can never get over: the demeaning status of women in patriarchy threatens to kill us and far too often succeeds.

Julia’s Stepping Stones, the last film I viewed, is Julia Reichert’s brief and thoughtful look at how she became a documentary film maker. Through this window onto her creative life, Reichert reveals how she escaped patriarchal colonization by thinking about belonging, and class differences, and how to create meaning in a chaotic world.  Throughout the film, she asks questions about what is happening around her. She discovers what she likes and how she feels and what floods her life with meaning. Early on, she loses any desire for the “hotness” that patriarchal colonizers so highly value. She takes photos. She drops out. She regroups. She returns to college. She discovers film. Yes, she says to herself, this is what I’m interested in; I want to know about others and I want to share what I learn through film.

Before viewing Julia’s Stepping Stones, I watched a reality tv series I wouldn’t have watched had it not been produced by Michelle Obama. Over her years as First Lady, I found much to admire, including her advocacy for girls and women, nutritious foods in schools, and general decorum when faced with adolescent, ignorant behaviour. I watched the series waiting for something that would take me to a new place regarding coupledom. What I found instead, was the “hotness” factor run rampant. At one point, a participant confesses to having a PhD because it is important to her to claim her accomplishments. Does she reveal what her grad work is in? No. Does she share her passion in hopes of finding another with whom to grow? No. She packages herself in the typical “tits and ass” mode, as her daughter describes her mother’s look, and goes out in search of an equally good-looking man. She finds him, of course, because “hotness” is an all-inclusive gender disease.

How do we break out of the patriarchal colonization that has led to this reductive preoccupation with “hotness” in the eyes of others, with superficiality, with vanity, with plastic surgery, with false nails and false hair and false eyelashes and false butts? First, we recognize it. We name it as the prison it is, a prison we ourselves create through our willingness to measure up to the absurdist Barbie-Doll “hotness” standard. We talk about it with other women. We see films that explore what leads a girl to surrender her life to the whims of boys and men. With other women, we take a stand against those forces that reduce us to a well packaged commodity to be consumed and discarded when the “hotness” becomes the grotesquerie played out in The Substance. We need each other if we are ever to take back our lives in sufficient numbers to influence decision making locally and globally.

All the explosions of women’s activism against authoritarianism – patriarchal system’s enforcer playbook – prove that we are so much more complex than these stories emphasizing superficiality and domination and humiliation. We need to tell our own stories and the stories of other women as Julia Reichert does. We need to stand together, wherever we may find our north-south axis, to affirm that we belong to ourselves and our beautiful planet, not as corporate pawns or colonized prisoners, but as Earthlings actively fighting for ourselves, one another, and our Home.

Until next time

Jane

 

For International Women’s Day 2025: Women, Water, Numinosity, and the Transformation of the World

As climate, social, and political crises escalate, one source of guidance becomes essential to our continued optimism and activism: a Numinous Story. Numinosity describes the direct experience of a spiritual dimension that is sparked by an apparently ordinary place, person, idea, song, or any work of art. A Numinous Story weaves its readers and listeners into a coherent whole that heals, temporarily, the brokenness pressing in on us when we are aware of more than our own small concerns. The more Numinous Stories we read and hear, the more optimistic, engaged, and committed to creating positive change we become.

Numinosity is not a universal experience. Some visitors to the Holy Wells of the world feel nothing remarkable and come away disappointed. Others find this holiness on a hike through a forest or in a photograph of a Redwood tree. Some feel this Grace in every bath and sip of water. Numinosity infuses ordinary life with the mystical dimension that makes all of life sacred and every place on this Earth a Homecoming.

A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu, is, for many of us alive in these terrifying times, a numinous story. It meanders through our consciousness with the enlightening science of fresh-water lakes and rivers and streams, sometimes heavy with sediment and toxicity, sometimes fast flowing and cleansing, sometimes terrifying with truths smacking us down with the force of a tidal bore. Its characters are story tellers and story receivers, and despite their diverse natures, all the stories they tell reveal the many threats to our source of life on Earth – our water.

Nina Munteanu’s novel structure is perfect for the weaving of human scientific and mystical relationships with water.  It’s initial and final sections create a frame for the inner story of bitterness, despair, self-serving behaviours, and corporate rapaciousness described by a professional scientist, a limnologist named Lynna. In the outer story we meet Kyo and Nam, Kyo’s mentor, as well as Ho, a librarian and keeper of a remnant of rare books. These characters exist on the other side of a mysterious cataclysm, the causes of which are the novel’s key themes.

Kyo, a small, four-armed blue being whose story begins and ends the novel, introduces us to the characters who form the larger diary section framed by the opening Library section and final Seed Ship section. Kyo makes glancing references to Una, mother of Lynna, and Lynna, mother of Hilde. Only Lynna is fully realized through her own perceptions and thoughts, these expressed in diary entries beginning in the spring of 2045 and ending in the late fall of 2066. Her diary, taking up 250 pages of this 303-page novel, provides the chronological spine connecting our past and present to a possible future that is not the one most humans want to think about, let alone welcome.

From Lynna’s diary, we learn that her mother, Una, was a child of nature alive to the beauty of the natural world. Born in 1969, Una is like the sixties and seventies Flower Children who danced, sang, dropped out, and committed to peace and social-justice causes. A non-traditionalist, Una lived her love of the world, repairing what she could in her role as Jill of all Trades when she needed to earn money. Between times, she introduced her daughter Lynna to the harmonies humans felt blessed to live among during those radical, community building times. Lynna, her diary reveals, is very different from her mother.

A Diary in the Age of Water is best sipped and savoured rather than gulped. Gulping will lead to choking for most non-scientist readers, and this book deserves to be experienced as it is written, in slow, undulating, revelatory waves. Each diary entry offers a rich store of scientific information that provides metaphors for life in our technologically skewed age. One vivid example is from the December 21, 2064 entry on the parasitoid, “an organism that spends a significant portion of its life history attached to or within a single host organism, in a relationship where the host is ultimately killed.” In the entry immediately before this one, Munteanu has Lynna express her feelings about The Giving Tree, a children’s book that suggests Earth is ours to use to death. Juxtaposed as the two entries are, we understand that Earth is the host, and we humans the parasites.

Like all complex stories, A Diary in the Age of Water requires patience, something our video-oriented age does not foster. The richest stories ask that we learn to hold many apparently divergent story threads at once. One of my fears as I read the diary was that the darkness of greed and short-sighted thinking and feeling would win out over that wondrous mystical relationship with the world that Una carried. While Una does her best to pass the experience of the sacred on to Lynna, Una’s spiritual influence is eclipsed by Lynna’s oppressive dependence on scientific knowledge to the exclusion of all else.

Through these characters, Nina Munteanu offers a warning for our times. Science is vitally important to our understanding of natural systems but science best serves us when it is balanced with an experience of the responsiveness of the natural world, a responsiveness that evokes our reverence and respect. Every culture honours the spiritual nature of the greater-than-human world, encoding its reverence in mythology, folktales, and wisdom traditions. – all keepers of numinous stories that transform our relationships with one another and the world. When we live honouring the sacred nature of all life, we become partners and co-creators. When we do not, we are highly dangerous parasites.

Martin Buber coined the phrase “I and Thou” to convey this sacred relationship. First Nations Peoples speak of “All my Relations” when speaking of the greater-than-human world. It is not Una’s daughter, Lynna, who carries this numinosity forward. It is Hilde, Una’s granddaughter, whose name means, significantly, Warrior Woman. How Kyo fits in to this lineage is one of the novel’s most unique speculations, one best discovered by reading the entire novel.

The arc of the novel is reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s journey to mystical revelation in “Anthem.”  After reminding us of human flaws, Cohen sings, “Every heart, every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.” Through his poetry, he affirms what Lynna discovers: knowledge without love cannot provide what we need to feel at home in our world.

This is the lesson Lynna, and we, must learn. She is called to hold the science of water firmly in her mind as her heart slowly opens to water’s responsiveness, water’s intelligence, water’s generosity, water’s love. It is a huge transformation for her, because science has been her safe place, her refuge. But knowing how something works is only the first part of the journey for those of us alive on this watery planet; we must all experience the why – the joy of unbreakable interconnections that make our lives meaningful.

This novel is rich with information about water’s evolutionary journeys; it also describes the horrors of human greed that directly impact our relationships with water. It is not an easy book, but it is an important one, especially for people ready to engage, to advocate, to stand against the corporate insanity currently destroying Earth’s delicate balances. It is a novel to learn from, and it is a novel to take forward into life as inspirational guide. Each of us is called upon to examine, not only our relationship with water, but with all Earth gifts.

If I could wave my magic wand, I would secure a place for this novel on high school and college reading lists, not only in Canada, but in the US, and all over the world. Young people of every culture have to meet the darkest possibilities to make wise life choices, and there is no better place to introduce these numinous possibilities than in safe learning spaces. Young people need places to grow beyond the previous generations’ ideas and concepts. They require safe places to learn to express themselves about personal fears and how these are triggered by the political volatility of these times. Perhaps most of all, young people require the freedom to read books that challenge them, that point not only to what is wrong with how we are conducting ourselves as planetary stewards of a unique planet, but that also dream of the transformations that occur when we relate to the greater-than-human world as Thou.

A Diary in the Age of Water. Nina Munteanu. Innana Publications, 2020.

 

 

 

Nightbitch, the Wildness Archetype, and Rewriting the Doom Stories

In 1989, Clarissa Pinkola Estes gave us Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. In 2021, Rachel Yoder gave us Nightbitch, a novel about one woman’s personal transformation into wholeness through her instinctual nature. I’m compelled to write this blog post because of a brief description of Marielle Heller’s film version of Rachel Yoder’s novel. The reviewer said only that the film Nightbitch is about how motherhood turns a woman into a dog.

As true as it is on the surface, to leave potential viewers and readers with this reductionist assessment is failing to understand both the novel’s and the film’s value. It is too easy to look away from Amy Adams as she morphs into this strange creature because the enchantment glamour creating our attraction to artificial beauty robs us of our experience of wildness. This glamour – more active in our culture since the spread of TV and all the screens to follow – also creates the illusion that we have no need for wildness, that it is gross and unnecessary.

Yet our loss of wildness is no small thing. It is the reason behind our undeniable climate crises. Lost wildness has also made our election of authoritarian strong men propped up by human fear possible all over our shared Earth Home. These murderous bullies have no relationship with the greater-than-human world beyond the intention to dominate it, to extract whatever they value, and to leave the rest, thinking they can rocket to Mars or the Moon and begin their exploitive, extractive ruthlessness once again. Some are creating schemes to replace wildness with a technological killing machine composed of so many seemingly unrelated parts it makes the Hydra of ancient times nothing but a silly creature easily outsmarted by Hercules and his nephew. Hercules is another strong-man-saviour myth popularized first by Greeks, who called him Heracles, and Romans, and then by North American culture’s cartoons and films.

When I first began this post, I explored my understanding of the human wildness archetypes as they manifest in human life. I began with scholarly examples because the defensive part of me needed to prove the absolute necessity of wildness in our lives. I’ve worked through that urge. This blog post is for people who already know how our relationships within the greater-than-human web are indispensable to our humanness, to our true nature. We cannot simply watch the world burn, and flood, and freeze, and bake when we have had our own experiences of wildness. Climate crises are personal to us; we know we – humans – have brought these climate crises on through our collective actions and our collusion with the corporations who have been saying since their inception “Hey, we’re here to make your lives better, more convenient, more . . . glamorous.”

When I was young and living in Windsor, teaching and doing what I could to make sense of an increasingly fractured world, a friend gave me a cartoon from the Detroit Free Press. I can’t remember the name of the cartoon, but in my memory, the sequence of pictures goes like this. First the character is sitting outside feeling beyond solace. Then she lies down and looks up at the sky. Then she rolls over and rests her cheek against the grass. Then she “tickles” the ground. When a flower springs up, her face radiates joy. The last panel says “You’re never lonely when Mother Nature loves you.” Now, looking back, I think I knew even then that was only a half truth. The corollary is also true: “You’re never lonely when you love Mother/Father Nature.”

Because of early circumstances that placed me in the greater-than-human world as a distressed toddler, I learned very early that Nature – a being I sensed even then to be all genders, species, and elements – loved and soothed me as the humans in my life could not. As a young adult feeling more and more enraged at the industrialized world’s destruction of the harmonies I’d been loving and being loved by for decades, I was surprised to learn many others didn’t share this experience. In fact, they thought my preoccupations with, value of, and respect for the world of dirt and water, growth and decay, weird.

It is weird, but only because the tech companies have all the media outlets through which to spread their authoritarian, strong-man, saviour myths. The only antidote I know for this endlessly cresting wave of false information is to build a raft of stories that remind us of the value of the wildness in the world, that power beyond human domination, stories like Nightbitch that remind us of the wildness in us, even when we smother it with cultural expectations and fear.

Read or see Nightbitch and draw your own conclusions about how motherhood became a catalyst for the artist-hero’s return to authenticity, to full flowering and fruit bearing, to wholeness. Yes, it’s story about a woman turning into a dog. And it’s a story about how our mammalian instinctive nature returns us to the night air that is the remedy for technology, to the fields of loam and possibility that are growing wildness all the time, to the forests of terror and joy beyond any device a human dreamed up and wants in our hands.

And if you need more stories about wildness and the value of the greater-than-human world, read Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, and all the current writers of fiction who are creating a path through the horrors of technological industrializing strong-man domination to roots literal and figurative pulsing with life. Walk in a forest or wood and feel the truth. Nature does not belong to us. We belong to and within the great web of life that is defeating technology and its worshipers through the raging storms unbridled technological manufacturing creates. Let us align with this massive power, let us take action. Let us feel the anguish of loss. Let our losses galvanize us to action to protect the world’s wildness and our own.

Until next time,

Jane