THE EXPEDITION Chapter 4 : Canned Worms

In which it's all about the journey 

Date: April 26, 2019

From Tilley partway to Suffield ~20km

The world is different when you move through it slowly. So many things missed while zooming along become so very important. By slowing down, there is time to see; there is time to feel. There is time to notice everything around us and notice patterns. Moving with the world, instead of bypassing it, we fit into the patterns better. We become part of everything around us in a closer way.

From the beginning (and even on my dreaded but necessary trips out in Calgary), I played gottoit all day. I’d focus on a point – the next hilltop, or bend, or a stand of trees, or anything I could keep an eye on and recognize when I got to it, at which point, Mr Myrtle and I would celebrate another gottoit! We’d have a break, or a walk, or a snack, or all three, and I’d pick out the next gottoit point.

After a while, I noticed the days had less gottoits. Partly that was because of visibility – you can see farther with less hills. It was also partly because my ability to keep going was lasting farther between gottoit points. Not that I was getting any healthier; it was simply because of settling into the walk, and holding onto my encouragements and determination more strongly (I’ve always had trouble believing in myself). I didn’t need as many external gottoits, and the internal ones work better anyways.

Walking, life gets complicated in superficial ways like GPS issues and finding places, and I did frazzle my head off a lot. In other ways, though, it gets very uncomplicated. Water, food, shelter… walk, rest, breathe… be mindful… stop and be comfortable and be part of the problem or walk forward, towards change… step by step….hear the ground change beneath your feet, feel light and smell time, catch stories in the winds….

That kind of walking is beautiful.

It’s a meditation in itself. It also gives space for thinking in a very different way.

Turning the first few days of the walk over in my head, I understood I’d missed the real point of the whole thing. It wasn’t just about making people aware of the problems, and of how to fight those. It was also about helping people see that the solutions are already part of us. 

I have a ‘refrigerator door’ folder on my laptop where I collect quotes and sayings and whatnot, which runs as a constantly shuffling screensaver. Yesterday (as I write), the refrigerator door reminded me (via Socrates) that “the secret to change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new”. There’s so much truth in this. It’s idealistic in some ways – there is so much to be taken down, and stood up for. And when issues boil down to such immediately tangible basics as land, water, air, and life, fight seems inevitable. How do you turn and walk in a new direction when it is the Earth herself we are standing for? Where is there to walk away to? Standing one’s ground becomes as literal as it is metaphoric.

Hence the Tiny House Warriors protecting Secwepemc Territory and all the First Nations and indigenous landback camps in so-called Canada, and those established for other related reasons, as well as treesitters and movements like Occupy. It’s not only a time-honoured nonviolent activist tactic, it’s quite simply owning what you stand for by standing on it.

How does that translate into reclaiming an entire physical planet? How do you stand on the future? How do you wrap your hands around life?

One step at a time.

The book where I later started writing the messages people were already now starting to want to pass on has a Gandhi quote I’ve always loved on the cover – be the change. Here and now, that feels even more true than even. That’s all we have time for. Don’t think about the change, or consider the change, or debate the change, or talk about change, or plan changes, or wish there wasn’t any change, or organize an event to celebrate the anticipated change… “be the change”.

I’d just seen a community do that. They decided to be together and be different. A small town, rural Alberta farming community full of good sensible people who worked hard and didn’t talk about things like global ecosystem collapse and mass extinctions and existential threats decided to learn as much as they could and do whatever they could, together, and to keep spreading that. They decided to be change.

That happened over and over, people and groups and places realizing that yes, others want to talk to. Others want to change too. Things really are happening, the concerns in the backs (or fronts) of our minds are real, and people do want to talk about it. In the time since starting the walk, so many more people are talking and doing, but then and there, it was rare. Even so, all it took was an outsider to start the conversations. As I bought a can of beans in Tilley (in case the restaurant was closed or didn’t have anything I could eat, also just because I wanted to get something there, what with having had such a great visit) someone wryly asked “You really need to open another can of worms?” Then he smiled, adding that it was meant in a good way and the metaphoric can had needed to be opened.

It was all about community… community creating itself, and with purpose. 

When people can feed their ideas well, with observation, thought, discussion, and support, they can create much. When they can feed themselves and each other that way, positive change can grow like the wildflowers we so desperately need more of. People who believe in themselves can do anything. Communities who believe in themselves can change the world.

Not long before walking, I’d been reading and rereading an article about how the future depends upon a civilizational shift to living in communities. I can’t remember it well enough to talk about or credit it properly, but hopefully it’ll turn up and I can edit this bit here to include it. Anyways, it makes a great deal of sense and I believe that too. Our cities and systems are so huge we can’t support each other properly. We’re not part of the global ecosystem; we’ve installed sophisticated cyborg hardware and software operating simultaneously in an organic system, and everyone knows what happens when tech stuff gets wet. It doesn’t work.

Living in small scale communities now involves a whole ‘nother book worth of talking about how, but meanwhile, we can develop community with each other.

A dear wise woman in Peru called me a crystal; she said I’m a catalyst. It’s one of the most beautiful anythings anybody ever said to me. That’s what I was doing – I was a little catalyst, let loose in the world, rolling across the country. The tweak that let out an idea that could become a community, leaving a trail of tweaks to spread, like the old Clairol commercial where “you tell two friends, and they’ll tell two,friends, and…” the tv screen filled ad infintum with all the exponentially multiplying friends. One of many pieces that connect to make a whole.

The letter and petition were really besides the point. The walk itself was an act of prayer, but the story around it wasn’t the words or demands or signatures. Even talking with people myself was peripheral. The real point was helping people connect with each other, with purpose and with the Earth.

#walkBeTheChange