CHINAMPA
As the lily-pad lined canal narrows to where the hanging floripondia bush (Angel’s Trumpet or Brugmansia arborea) meets an explosion of truffula-tree like pine needles, we feel a nudge on the back of our boat. The gentle rock pulls me out of a trance born from the golden hour dappling on the water and a silence broken only by birdsong. The wide bench of our barco, shaped like a canoe flattened from above, has plenty of space for me to pivot in my seat and face the source of the bumper boat action.
I see a smiling woman, standing firmly in her identical barco, and her two large dogs questioning us curiously (probably about our inept paddling techniques). Her barco is empty, she may have ferried around family or tourists, or be commuting home from a day’s work in the nearby town of Xochimilco. The deftness with which she wields her paddle, much longer than those used in Canadian canoes, reminds me of my place as a visitor in these floating oases.
I’m trying to resist the urge to wax poetic on nature in an overtly cloying way, but the straight-out-of-Avatar landscape I find myself in has me at a literary loss. My partner and I have joined a group of 5 young Mexico City residents who are renting a chinampa, a man-made, floating-island style of farm plot originating in the Aztec civilizations. For $200 USD per year, the group, called Chinampa Atzin, tends to vegetable beds they have prepared, builds geodesic structures from reclaimed materials and drink pulque, a milky alcoholic drink made of fermented maguey sap, after a long day in the hot sun.
Xochimilco and its canals of otherworldly beauty are designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but the chinampas are not untouched by the realities of modern agriculture or the unbelievable proximity to Mexico City, the 6th largest urban population in the world. Chinampa Atzin explained how despite their group and other chinampas farmers growing organically and regeneratively, the canals that directly irrigate deep-feeding crop roots are picking up copious pollutants in the water. Sewage run-off and agrochemicals complicate the best of intentions. Draining of aquifers to support Mexico City’s ever-expanding population have lowered water levels significantly, further compounding the pollution problem. Decorative water lilies (Lirio aquatico) introduced in the 1980’s for aesthetics have exploded in population, covering the canals’ surfaces and shading out oxygen-dependent plants. These algal blooms encourage methane producing bacteria production and have been found to sicken migratory birds who rest in the waterways. I think back to Canadian farmers I’ve spoken with who farm organically and regeneratively, but without an Organic certification because of the prohibitive cost of testing and verification. Prohibitive pollution is a new concept for me.
My visit to volunteer with Chinampa Atzin coincided with World Wetland Day. Swallowing pessimistic sentiments on the greenwashing and conscious-clearing stickiness of themed environmental days, I’m glad the work at Xochimilco aligned with a global acknowledgment of the immense store of biodiversity, carbon, spiritual significance, and livelihood that wetlands are.
When pessimism and frustration over my/the collective’s inaction abound, my only solace can be found in grassroots, hands-in-the-dirt style work. The only antidote to inaction is action, and for a generation of cerebral, anxious, computer-tethered beings, I think this most obvious of statements is also the most important. And selfishly, I write these words not for others -Chinampa Atlzin is proof enough of the enthusiasm of restorationists in CDMX- but for myself.
If it resonates with others, it’s worth sharing. Despite the potential of the pandemic slowly dissolving into collective immunity and tentative reentry into the world, there’s a heaviness that lingers. A heaviness that I feel is palpable both in my own pocket of consciousness and beyond. My balking at themed concepts like World Wetland Day rings of nihilism and burnout. To counter that, I’m choosing to remember and reflect upon our specie’s love for ritualization. For embellishing the passage of time, for lighting a candle of awareness to what we value and what we must hold onto.
*For some spirit-bolstering, recent updates on a promising solution to the water pollution problem of Xochimilco, check out Sarah Freeman’s article, “This fragile wetland is dying. Tour boats could be its unlikely saviour”, published by National Geographic. And who wouldn’t love to cite nanobubbles as a silver bullet to an ecological crisis?
MESS
“One day I suddenly saw that the sun is my heart, my heart outside of this body. If my body's heart ceases to function I cannot survive; but if the sun, my other heart, ceases to function, I will also die immediately. We should be able to be our true self. That means we should be able to be the river, we should be able to be the forest, we should be able to be a citizen of any country in the world. We must do this to understand, and to have hope for the future. That is the nondualistic way of seeing.” -Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace
My grandma passed away a few weeks ago, and I’m surprised by the vigour with which she has scattered pieces of herself across my recent wanderings, how she has sprinkled Buddhist breadcrumbs for me to delight in following. Whether they’ll lead to nirvana I can’t be sure, but the process of discovering Buddhist statues at the summit of two recent hikes, and being emailed a pdf copy of Being Peace out of the blue felt like welcome nudges from her. The language barrier between us was immense, so the wafts of incense and shrines of sweet oranges and Hennessy in her small apartment were more meaningful to me than any clumsy birthday wishes we stumbled through. Her identity as a Buddhist is one of the few pieces of her I can hold onto, the comfortable weight of this facet added to my small store of stories about her translated through my dad. I consumed Being Peace voraciously, and relished in the way it reignited my long lost flirtations with Buddhism as a teenager. Are there any earthophilic folk who haven’t developed a relationship (or brief but fiery fling) with Buddhism or another non-anthropocentric spiritual path? The nondualistic philosophy of embodying forests and rivers in the quote above would surely get any environmentalist hot and bothered…
I’ve been trying to hold this concept of nonduality up as a lens as I move through grief, through work, through the satisfying process of stirring coconut oil into a pot of daal. If nonduality could act as a prism and dissolve rigid identifiers, perhaps it could refract some of the dogmatic feelings that are elicited through disagreements with my sister, political tweets, beliefs I carry about myself and those around me. Would the result be more beautiful, or simply more chaotic? Should I continue to work diligently to create order and tuck ideas into neat, tidy boxes while the universe and my Buddhist ancestors sling back Hennessy offerings and demand entropy?
The work of wading through the swamps of my own slippery philosophies, and wrestling to tidy up my inner landscape was exhausting. But I received a most welcome push towards nonduality while participating in last week’s Argonomy Update 2021 Conference, a meeting of farmers and agronomists across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. While the conference did highlight some of the sticky ways which dualistic thinking and Othering creates distance between farmers and research scientists, there was one presentation that broke down these barriers. Dr. Paul Galpern of the University of Calgary shared his research on “messy” spaces in farm fields, and how wetlands and forests interspersed between crops can actually boost crop yield. The phenomenon is based on a “spill effect”, in which beneficial insects who make their homes in the “messy” shelter of wetlands and treed areas can spill forth and improve, through a “halo effect”, the pollination and yield of neighbouring crops. In this study, the dichotomies of good farmland/bad farmland, messy eyesore/fertility amendment were blurred. When a farmer can dissolve notions of duality in their field and allow opportunity to arise in the periphery, a kind of gift-from-doing-less is born!
The study is a moving reminder that chaos leads to growth.
Ease leads to abundance.
Life begets more life.
So I don my waders and dive back into the swamps, to embrace the messiness of loss and a long winter and a future both vast and deliciously muddy.
BITTER
Something is brewing in Minneapolis, in the United States, and in the hearts, minds, and twitter feeds the world over. The movement is bubbling, and the streets runneth over with grief, grit, violence, and awakenings. For many in my generation, the Black Lives Matter movement, rekindled from past efforts with fevered intensity by George Floyd’s death in the spring of 2020, is the most violent and heart-wrenching social justice movement to happen in our backyards. The streets, the internet, and our conversations are dominated, at least for now, by the sharing of experiences with racism, and injustices at the hand of a broken police and judicial system. We are learning more about the inner soulscapes of one another, and yes, I have been horrified, disappointed, inspired and frustrated in turn (and probably elicited the same reactions in others). Conditioning runs deep, and defensiveness is a stone wall that goes up in an instant, but is damn well exhaustive to scale. Bitterness is a pervasive flavour, and an understandable reaction to centuries of dehumanizing oppression, willful ignorance and genocides both obvious and subtle. It’s also a flavour that is woefully underrepresented in modern diets as much as it is present in our spirits at this time.
Traditional medicines of the world teach us that the flavour of bitterness plays an important role in processing and purging within the body. While bitterness does precede the danger of a poisonous plant, it also encourages the production of bile, and primes the body for digesting food, and supporting the liver in elimination. I am trying to hold this knowledge as a meditative intention through my confrontations with racism of various scopes within my own life and the world. With each incoming account of racial profiling and murderous police officers walking free, my heart floods with bitterness. I want to harness this feeling, and craft a more proactive, dedicated action plan for combating racism.
To compliment this intention, I made a Dandelion Tincture with a recent gift of dried dandelion flowers. Despite the ubiquity of concrete, the determined dandelion, or Taraxcum flower, raises its sunny head in droves throughout urban jungles. My walks these days feel more like frolics now that many public and private spaces have laid down their mowers and fertilizers this spring, allowing dandelions to flourish and coat the neighbourhood in bright butter yellow. Between Covid and the Black Lives Matter movement, dedicating so much genocidal extermination towards this misunderstood weed feels particularly problematic. Dandelions possess healing potential for our physical bodies, and sunshine for our spirits, plus dogs look ridiculously idyllic bounding through a park munching on dandelion flowers. And regardless, who has the time and energy for wrath directed at plants these days? If you’re interested in putting the Round-Up down, and learning firsthand about the bitter-alchemy-backyard witch-magic of a bitters tincture, try the following.
In a large mason jar, combine dried dandelion flowers with cleaned, chopped and dried dandelion leaves and root chunks. Submerge the plant matter in apple cider vinegar. Shake the jar from time to time, noting that the vinegar may rust the metal of a mason jar lid, so lay a piece of parchment paper in between the liquid and the lid. Store in a dark, cool place. In one month, you’ll have a potent tincture that can be taken before or after meals to aid in the digestion and elimination processes. Remember that powerful medicine doesn’t always go down easy, and that healing will require making space for our full spectrum of emotions, the bitter and sweet in turn.
COMB
I’ve stumbled upon a number of serendipitous bee hives recently. A small one next to a farmer’s field in Bucerias, just a couple inches in diameter, with delicate hexagonal holes and thin crepe walls. Another heftier one that nestled satisfyingly to fill my hand, behind the cabin on Pigeon Lake. Then, whole rows of empty hives in the eavestroughs of the cottage in Muskoka, a kind of post-apocalyptic apartment complex vibe that took my uncle a precarious afternoon spent on a ladder to clear out. There is so much about bees that I don’t know, and a seemingly infinite complexity with which they design their hives, dictate colony roles, dance directions, and create vibrational bee-balls to nuke invading wasps. Why I’m discovering so many empty hives on the ground recently, I can only guess. Had the hive fallen from some unwelcome bird pecking action, then the bees abandoned ship? Had the hive grown too small to support a colony burgeoning with spring birth? Or do bees, like us, sometimes yearn for a change of space?
The connection between my physical homes -the places I cook, eat, sleep, bathe, and hunker down in when it’s raining to watch the world drip by- and the shape of my thoughts has never been more sharp. It’s gotten me thinking about the recipe of a space, the particular ingredients that I crave to make a shelter feel like a home. Challenging in these times, when a dining table has to double as an office desk, and the kitchen stands in place for every restaurant I’ve ever craved (and hooo boy, how cravings have brought colours to my mood during sheltering in place)! The well-worn paths through hallways that I pace with a phone tucked into the crook of my neck bring a new depth of intimacy to the relationship my feet have with my floors. My body has learnt new ways to interact with beds, couches, wooden floors, cool tiles, dust, grass and fuzzy carpet tassels. All meditations have taken place in a sprawled position, lounging has become a posture of choice. From this new, more horizontal perspective, I’ve gotten to dig deeper into the nature of energy, inertia, and the puppet strings I pull out in the company of others, and cast off in the confines of home. I could sit up straight, but the awareness in a slouch is not to be written off, a passive style of observation that can catch even more than a perpetually pert state.
All this is to say that my spaces and I -and yes, I am delightfully aware of my privilege, joy and all the lucky stars that have allowed me to embody multiple spaces in this time- have inevitably grown a lot closer. And I invite future instantiations of myself, who will no doubt stumble blindly into the streets with fevered aches for all my glorious loves and regular old humans, to take moments to breathe these walls in deeply.
LICHEN
The preface to all this, the prologue that we skimmed through too quickly before flipping to a stark page full of unknown plot twists and fears, seems so far away these days. Like blowing onto glass and peering out at the world through a fuzzy haze, memories take the same blurred quality. I write this with the intent of breaking the looking glass effect, uncovering a connection with organisms beyond my 6ft bubble.
Also, because I have really taken a-likin’ to lichen, and perhaps you have too?
Growing up, lichen, like many other of the mysterious offerings a forest brings to a child’s hungry imagination, was an integral prop in our fantasies. Sprinkled with abandon over our mudpies as delicious garnish, picked and thrown by the fistful as fairy dust, stuffed into pockets to be fabricated into shoebox-dioramas in Canada’s colder months. I’m doing my best to resist the cliche temptation to stumble into “back in my day” speak, but whoops, it sounds like it’s happening anyways. Without getting overly sentimental and pessimistic about the current “shelter in place” orders’ affect on children’s (and adults’!) exploratory forest wanderings and wonderings, I want to remember how vital it is to poke around at strange “tree dandruff” whenever I stumble upon it.
That’s why I’m all the more grateful to the Canadian Museum of Nature who recently launched a contest to elect a new National Lichen! What came up in my internet moseying last month was a community of passionate (understatement!) scientists who found it a great shame (truth!) that the great white north was doing without a mascot of the lichen variety. Curious about why this particular mascot was potentially more crucial than a national…frog let’s say, I dedicated an ample amount of my social isolation spell thus far to lichen research.
It turns out that Star-Tipped Reindeer lichen (the contest’s winner), like all lichens, is a perfect model for studying symbiosis. The concept of symbiosis, a Greek-origin word meaning the process of living together, was actually created to explain the relationship of fungi and algae that was thought to produce lichen. The recent reveal in this juicy tale of monogamy is that there has been a third player in the relationship the entire time, cue the dramatic audience gasp! Another fungus, basidiomycete yeast, has been contributing to the interactive harmony of lichens all along. And this scientific development feels like just the reminder that the world could use in times of physical distance.
As a self-professed luddite, I had initially tucked my head under a rock (a trick I learned from lichen), and figured I could wait out the time it would take for the COVID19 upheaval to blow over. Alas, what a naive ostrich I was! We might be in this twilight zone of Zoom calls and popcorn-for-dinner for quite some time, and I for one am NOT going to get through it alone. I’m very lucky to be sharing my isolation with another body that I love immensely, and yet, like the algae we previously thought to be in isolation with only one fungus, the lichen teaches us that we need more! We need humans! Family, friends, coworkers, fellow Magic The Gathering enthusiasts, lovely folks to share meals and laughs and obscure 90’s commercial references with. We need furry beings! We need trees and flowers and shores who’s waves sing to us constantly. So if like me, you find yourself in need of a wake-up call to get your head out of a computer and reach out to a fellow fungus friend, then let lichen be your inspiration.
If you’re hungry for more lichen content, or just some juicy reads/listens/watches, I highly recommend:
-Future Ecologies Podcast, Episode 2.1: “Enlichenment and the Triage of Life”
-Donna Haraway’s staggering book, “Staying with the Trouble"
-Canada’s proposed National Lichen video
-National Geographic’s short film, “What’s in a Lichen?”
-Okay Kaya’s infinitely lovely song, “Symbiosis”
FEIJOA
“I’ve been coming every Friday for the past couple weeks, but I gotta ask, do y’all got any fruit?”
This was the first exchange I’d had with any of the Food Pantry’s community members since I began interning at the farm 2 months ago. I hadn’t realized how much I needed this moment of connection with the folks who share the land and its fruits (or in this case, vegetables) with me, until it was delivered in this soft-spoken question. I was practically bubbling over with zeal, the kind that only hours working under a hot sun can brew, and ready to engage with something more vocal than a head of cabbage.
“Nope, apples and strawberries are pretty much past season. We might have some citrus coming in the next few weeks, so look out for that. Have you tried the kale?”
“Yeah, I took some. Just looking for something,” they paused, probably trying to find a word that wouldn’t insult the clear reverence I had for the leafy greens in my delivery box, “sweeter.”
Ah, there was the rub. I sank a little deeper into my muddy hiking boots to consider that, as much goodness and green and gosh darn gorgeousness kale possesses, sweetness it doth lack. And is there anything stronger than a wholehearted craving for something sweet and round and born from so many turnings of the earth in summer’s peak? To deny hunger for a fresh apple would be akin to burning the book on thousands of years of human mythology. And equally as difficult would be to ignore the yearning for strawberry jam licked from sticky fingers, or ripe peaches sliced over a puddle of vanilla ice cream, or everything that was good and pure in the middle of childhood. My Dad, who doles out Confucius teachings on wellness over dim sum fried donuts, has long guided me along the middle path, walking roads both bitter and sweet, salty and sour, and respecting the necessity in each. My Mom, a clinical dietician for 37 years, whispers “it’s all about balance” like it’s an incantation to fend off the evils of excess and extremes. Looking up at such a hopeful face, I needed to brace myself for the difficulty of extolling kale’s virtues, to sing the song of bitterness, arguably the most challenging note to hit.
Until I remembered what the farm was growing in heady supply. A fruit I had never seen before my internship, resembling a tiny dragon egg with smooth, dimpled skin turned tender as it ripens. A fruit of such unassuming inner colour, the faintest hint of yellow, that disguised a sweet explosion of old fashioned bubblegum in taste. The feijoa. I started beaming, an ode to the feijoa is a tune I’ve learned well, some of which was passed down to me from older interns, but most which came from enthusiastic exploration. One bite is all it takes to succumb to a kind of worship for the fruit and its tree, which continues to provide well into San Francisco’s winter season. I described the location, look, texture and taste to my curious audience before returning to the day’s other duties. I don’t know if they ever did try the feijoa, as I never saw them at the pantry again. But for myself, the encounter was a call to my nose, a reminder to sniff around, flip over rocks, question the bees, hunt through the earth, ask for help, whatever is needed to reclaim the sweetness that we all deserve.