In Tune with the Elements

This mermaid is intuitively and rapturously in tune with the elements in Snowdonia. 

Up over the hill

Up over the hill the rambling wild old apple tree is not quite over the hill. Her tenacious fruit are hanging on for dear life bolstered by the balmy early November temperatures - a veritable Indian summer, a gift from the speckled blue skies. They are clustered on the top half of the tree, safe from marauding deer and the clutch of humans like us, ravenously stripping the lower half of her ample flesh, transforming it by means of our hand-cranked apple press into rich juice of a complex sweet tang that modern-day apple strains cannot match. The pink-blushed fruit that remain will ultimately succumb to gravity and the waning juice of life, tumbling down with the breeze and rotting into a mush where they fall. They will have had a good long life left to their own devices in nature; that’s the most any being can hope for.

Where were you when you fell in love with Nature?

Where was I when I fell in love with Nature?
I was playing in the woods down the leafy lane with my friends for hours on end.

Marine scientist and ocean advocate Wallace J. Nichols explores the neuroscience of our brains on nature, and posits that our love of the natural world holds the key to preserving it.
"Nature brings us deeper into ourselves, connects us more to it and our planet and each other... Nature is medicine."

Twelve Years of Camping & Canoeing

 

Year 1. Algonquin 

For the last dozen years at this time of year as the seasons turn, I’ve been camping and canoeing in southern Ontario parks with my pal David. We have been transported on two trips to Algonquin, two to Temagami, two to Massasauga, two to Kawartha Highlands, one to Haliburton Highlands, and three to the jewel in the crown, Killarney. 

Year 2. Algonquin

Year 3. Temagami 

We have witnessed the spectacular in sun-bleached skies and star-laden heavens, gales and downpours, frosty mornings and breezy afternoons. We have been awed by magnificent scenery in lakes and rivers, canyons and cascades, waterfalls and woodlands, marshes and mountains. We have encountered ravens who bid us welcome and loons who lull us to sleep.

 

Year 4. Kawartha Highlands 

 

Year 5. Temagami

Year 6. Massasagua

We have constructed and been toasted by roaring campfires long into the hours of darkness. We have eaten heartily and drunk merrily.  

 

 Year 7. Massasagua

 

 Year 8. Killarney

 

 Year 9. Killarney

We have mooted a lot of ideas, spouted a lot of drivel, and laughed our socks off. We have ruminated about the world we have temporarily left behind and pondered where it is headed. 

 Year 10. Kawartha Highlands

 Year 11. Killarney

It is a wonder to me to feel so enriched by Nature’s effusive embrace and reassured by the knowledge that this majestic land and lake scape will sustain itself for eons after we are dead and buried.

 Year 12. Haliburton Highlands

Happy Thanksgiving

On this glorious Thanksgiving morning,

Giving thanks for the family and friends we share, the land we inhabit, 

the community we share, the food we grow and eat, the gifts of love and life, 

and much more besides.

Buckwheat Abuzzing

From afar on this mellow morning, the field of flowering buckwheat is a single mass. Getting up close, concentrating the mind, attuning the ears, and focusing the eyes, the plants are lush, their flowers intricate and colourful, imbued with yellow and pink. And they are thrumming with insect activity. Butterflies, bees, wasps, flies, gnats - all wild and busy - are gathering a food that is transitory, delectable, and nourishing. There are no honey bees to speak of, just their less glamorous wild cousins who have been around the planet for eons, hummingly going about their business of collecting what nature offers. They do not stray too much into the mega-fields of corn and soy, which are drenched in danger for their digestive system. They survive on wild food; annual plantings of organic buckwheat are but a tasty supplement to their regular diet, as are clover, peas and vetch.

When I pause for a few minutes to listen, watch and smell, it is akin to soaking up the desert at dawn on a dewy morning, when miniscule flowers materialize for a short time before the heat of the day takes hold and shrinks them away. These are worlds which normally remain hidden, with nature going about its business of flowering, feeding, providing, and reproducing, as it ever was.

As William Blake mused in Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

This buckwheat was planted not only as food for live creatures above ground, but also for the subterranean microbiota. In the coming days I will hitch up the plow to the tractor and turn under the juicy stems and flowering tops, just before they go to seed. This green manure will ameliorate the soil and suppress at least some weeds, but the process also cheats the bees from further foraging as they desperately collect their last feed of it.

Industrial agriculture has truck-transported honey bees all over the continent to mass-pollinate our cherished fruits like almonds, apples, cherries, oranges, lemons for our mass consumption. In domesticating them so, they have been opened up to ingestion of a number of lethal toxins, and now their numbers are plummeting, their health terminally compromised. Is it hubris that prevents some from believing that human health is not likewise affected? To offset the biocide that is occurring in industrial and agricultural systems in our time, we need to make sustained effort to protect the complex and rich diversity of life in the wild by setting aside sanctuary wherever we can - in our backyards, in our gardens, on our farms, across the landscape, in our rivers, lakes, and oceans. Survivors of the onslaught  so far, an untold multitude of wild birds, insects, fish and amphibians still depend on us for their very survival. Once forests are cleared, land is paved over and soils, air and waterways poisoned and depopulated, we just have to go back and start over by rewilding swathes of land and sea, trusting that some animal and plant life remains to re-populate them after the shameful decimation we have perpetrated. Nature has proven to be resilient in the past and will be so again, long after we’re gone. 

Health flourish

Retire

chemical concoctions

fossil fuels

genetic mutations

heavy metals

nuclear radiation

and we shall see

health flourish.

Cuba's Healthy Nature

We are setting off on our Cuban adventure – four weeks travelling around the island. Bus will be our means of transport between Varadero, Trinidad, Havana, Viñales, and Guanabo, and we will be staying mostly in casas particulares, which are bed and breakfast-style homestays. Travel will not be easy; we expect it to be like the old days as budget travellers in Indonesia.

The image of rustic simplicity and beauty above has drawn us to Viñales where we will be setting down for ten days or so to soak up the Cuban countryside and diverse wild life, birdlife. A  scenic village, Viñales perches midst the Sierra de los Organos above an extensive valley punctuated by otherworldly Jurassic-age outcrops called mogotes.  This is traditionally tobacco country, but I am really looking forward to checking out  Finca Agroecologica El Paraiso, a spacious organic farm with restaurant on a hill with incredible views of the 'silencio' valley. Cuba’s farming methods are these days famously organic, with farms having being forced to quit chemicals with the loss of supply with the fall of the Soviet Union. What a blessing!

In Havana we will feel the energy of the city scene – people, music, dance, art, architecture, which have either been preserved in time or evolved in their own Cubana style. In Trinidad we will soak up a slower pace midst old colonial-style buildings and cobbled streets, the nearby beach.

The Nature Conservancy reports:

“Cuba has a secret: This country's thousands of miles of coral reefs appear to be healthier than others in Caribbean waters.

Preliminary assessments indicate that the reefs do not exhibit the widespread disease and mortality occurring in places like the Florida Keys, Jamaica and Mexico, in part due to the decades of isolation from mass tourism as well as limited agricultural practices.

A study of the health of Cuba’s reefs can provide valuable insights into coral reef conservation for the Caribbean, and possibly, the world.

In 2012, the Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund completed a three-week expedition of Cuba’s Jardines de la Reina national park. Despite some localized coral bleaching, the research team was awed by what they found – many intact reefs, mangroves and seagrass beds teeming with fish and marine life. This work has laid the foundation for Cuban scientists and officials, who will decide if the 840-square-mile park should be expanded.”

With political change afoot with the heralded easing of tensions between Cuba and the United States and the proposed end to the trade embargo, this is a precious opportunity to see Cuba the way it has become one stage removed from the Western world with all its “bells and whistles.” Time will tell how the island copes with what will almost be a whirlwind of change, hopefully managed so that the people, economy, arts, culture, nature, farming can adapt without huge upheaval.