this life is to take part in that which is bigger than our self
and so I carry this body to these places to exercise gratitude by realizing the shrinking difference between myself and place as this body exchanges oxygen with carbon dioxide and tree breath.

Walking over land helps my body accept that which I find difficult to acknowledge.
My heritage and cultural legacy - the questions I have about colonization and the way those who have come before me had assumed a dominance - that continues today largely unquestioned.
I try to walk often - along roads, up mountains, down to water - to find myself in the places I call home, because it allows me the time to arrive when I get to where I'm going.

Today I asked,
"How do I introduce myself in a good way?"
And we laughed, and laughed, because nobody had ever asked that question before.

I think it has to do with walking. It's a human speed and helps conversation. It's also an earth speed, and allows for mushroom finding and berry eating.
Today I can't decide which I enjoy more. Thimble berries or blue huckleberries. Life is good.

Roche de Boule trail, Hazelton B.C.
click for larger view

giving up hope

I've given up trying to save the salmon and the trees
as I've decided to fight for sustenance and breath
cause in the grief of the moment I've seen the forest mirror my lungs
and the salmon's body become my own expressed through my living

I've given up trying to save anything
by coming alive to the inseparable existence of being

tree twigs and forests

You want me to tell you about a part
of this tree, as if it's not part of the
wind and the forest, the clouds
huckleberries and me.

you want to know about a part
without the stuff of significance.
what is a branch without the sun?
what of the sun without story and
song?

'tree' is only the combination
of everything
breathing into existence

atmosphere, soil and
starlight of the sun

automatically intergalactic

we can't not be connected
cause 'tree's' cellulose is the
celofane around this sandwich

i'll try to tell you about just this one part
and we'll start from the beginning...

There’s scientists who

Study rivers feeding forests.

Nitrogen travelling

in the Bodies of salmon from oceans belly

Carrying a special isotope, so

They can see the fish in the tree rings and leaf samples.

It’s simple,

Wolves eats salmon heads

(canines get sick off a gut parasite in the salmon and die)

So there’s headless fish fertilizing forests

While bear grabs a snack for the land,

Digesting that dorsal muscle and egg sack to

Fatten up, leaving a carcass that

Expands in biomass as

Diptera fly maggots become that N15 signature.
The unfathomable mass of a salmon spawn
growing through death, through life as

Hymenoptera (Parasitic wasp) and

Coleopters (Burying beetle),

Expand salmon's affluence

And the wren’s, singing salmon songs
catch that n15 nitrogen in flight, held in feather

…
This is

the forest herself, feasting

Making love with the ocean.

A potlatch, a great giving,

…

Salmon – ocean blowing kisses

To majestic wild forests –
Salmon - Subsidizing this terrestrial

Community of nitrogen hungry

False lilies
Salmon-berry-bushes,

Cedar.

 - Now living
expressions of ocean’s love song -

…

And forest holds those fragile eggs in stream beds
giving delicious shade and clean water to those fish
for years before heading on their journey that will
always return,

And forest, a key determinant of salmon health
                                     Which is human health.

Our habitat, the result of

     This gift economy,

                 This giving ecology

May our living be Our dance, our praise of being caught

Between the love affair of Abundant ocean and forest.
And river,

Ever feeding ocean fresh water to sooth Her salty breath.

rainy days pushing oil

it's raining today,
perfect morning for coffee and books

but all those trees i've ever planted, and any beautiful place i've taken a picture, mountain peak, stream, glacier, forest, tree, pond... is in the rain.
In a year, or two, so many of those places may be healing from the scar of a pipeline, silently sucking bitumen west through unimaginable wilds, maybe places humans haven't really ever been (?) Tankers sliding up channels that have crippled ferries a fraction their size, 225 times a year, and the oil still sits on the beaches of alaska even if we don't really remember when or how that spill happened.

The forests of these wild oceans are the fish. N17 (nitrogen) from the salmon are particular to the universe, and the forest is built from them. We know this, in the most scientific way.
Salmon forests, the ocean and land are dancing like our lungs with this atmosphere. The difficulty of seeing ourselves as part of these systems is the grief or pain of taking life for ourselves. It's ok (necessary!) to be sad when falling a tree, taking a life, an animal, a vegetable, a fruit, for in that grief is the gratitude and joy of being alive. the thanks. humility.

the forests and oceans of north western bc don't need us. We can run a pipe full of bitumen through them  to tankers in tight waters until it all goes wrong, somehow (inevitable?) and that place of wolves and seals, urchins, cedar and salmon may begin to dysfunction and we will suffer as well.
We need the forest (in the largest sense) not the other way around.
All the forest/ocean/life needs is for us to know our place
through humility.

follow this link to youtube to watch in full screen HD or below in the foodgrows mini-screen...

http://friendsofwildsalmon.ca/

Participate in the Joint Review by Registering by the 6th of OCTOBER.

find out more here

or register here

or go HERE to register to make an Oral Statement (before OCT.6th)

* Note, email the people below AS WELL as filing the online form as per the Government request. This may be a make or break in one's application.

Kenneth MacDonald
VP, Law and Regulatory Affairs
Northern Gateway Pipelines Inc.
30^th Floor, 425 – 1^st Street SW
Calgary, Alberta  T2P 3L8
Fax: 403-718-3525
kenneth.macdonald@enbridge.com

Abby Dorval
Manager, Regulatory Affairs
Northern Gateway Pipelines Inc.
30^th Floor, 425 – 1^st Street SW
Calgary, Alberta,  T2P 3L8
Fax: 403-231-7380
abby.dorval@enbridge.com

Richard Neufeld, Q.C.
Barrister & Solicitor
Fraser Milner Casgrain
15^th Floor, 850 – 2^nd Street SW
Calgary, Alberta  T2P 0R8
Fax: 403-268-3100
richard.neufeld@fmc-law.com

Pope Mountain, Fort Saint James

looking North

Click on panorama's for larger view.

looking South

 " Faith is an elusive and questionable commodity in these days of a dying culture. Where do you find it? If you've lost a faith, can you invent one? .... But some of us find it hard, even obscene, to believe in an abiding providence in a world of such absurdity that, in the face of unimaginable suffering, most of our wealth and wits are devoted to preparing a final holocaust. And we don't need nuclear bombs for that holocaust, it is going on right now in the demolition of the great rain forests and the toxic contamination of our seas, soil, and air."
- Joanna Macy, P.104, World as Love World as Self

He stares at the door for a while, hoping. It's his door. He cleans the years of sweat and spit and piss and crushed bugs out of its grain, twists the bolts from its flesh, tears out the locks. He returns the wood to the mill, un-saws it, heaves it back a great distance along plunging mud tracks, asks the elephants to drag it back up the steep hillsides. And then, among the profusion of thick grasses and liana and the calls of wild monkeys and birds, he sets the wood upright and it becomes a tree again, one of the trees in the last great golden teak forests on earth, the jungles of northern Burma.


p.22
The Lizard Cage
by Karen Connelly

the question of asking

imagine a friend taking something, say your toothbrush, thanking you, and leaving.
imagine tapping a maple tree, saying thank you, and boiling that sap to make syrup.
imagine taking the life of something without asking, then a thank you on the way out.

I've been thinking about proper ways of interacting with life recently, and have been working from the assumption that we, humans, need Life. Life, does not necessarily need us.

So the forms of life on this planet that directly live with the sun are arguably the strongest, leaving little animals like humans as somewhat secondary, or more distant from, the life source that is Sun.

From this way of understanding belonging, I've been quite rude in my living this far. It's only be the last couple years that I've started to be thankful. "thank you mullein, for your juicy leaves" "thank you tomato for your ripe fruit"...

My 'thanks' to date have been under the assumption that I've been given something. But a safe way to be gifted, is to ask. I've come to realize the importance of ceremony in this regard. Maple, strong, vibrant, tall. You are soon going to wake, and we have nearly eaten all of the syrup we made from your running sap last spring, may we (names here) take from your life force so that we may have that beautiful sugar of your sap for the coming seasons?

Or something like that.

Then there's the listening. how do we listen to non english? non verbal? non human!?

All I know from this point in my life is that I am able, I knew before I knew how to walk.

The way to learn is by listening to myself
And in this way becoming able to hear again
The voices of my larger self
Life

washington clear cuts

those receding hairlines
mountains trimmed, shaven
pock marked faces
erosion come land slide

as i cycled that bicycle to witness
those blank faces
mirrored many of those in
those cars

"why is that fool on teh bicycle smiling"
i could almost here them say
"he's not even there yet" (the park, the destination)
and I would laugh an explanation
that cycle touring is about being where you are
sometimes even less than where you're going,
kinda like my thoughts on life
enjoyment

smiling towards the surrounding, replanted, devestation
i laughed at the falling of the limited seed stock
filling valleys with a half dozen gene sequences
foolish to see a forest as trees, and even more foolish
to not see those trees as the result of millions of years
revolutions of this star, this sun
an infinite, like salmon,
being out competed, sponsored by human involvement
tree planting and hatchery
let's not fool ourselves, we're coping, not helping
for our work is not to procreate the fish, the trees,
but to live our responsibility

____________________

Charles Dickens writes in Coketown Hardtimes (1854) 1969 p.65

"Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise...
Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of Capitalism
Poor [americans] see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"