Spring and my friend Blackie

I have, for the past 50 or so years, had some luck in predicting when spring is going to occur. I define spring as that point when the frost is leaving the ground and one can smell the mud (and other things that have been frozen all winter). I was told the secret by a man who I have always thought of as Blackie. I don't know if that was really his name or if it is just a name that has become fixed in my memory. As well I have always believed him to be a Mohawk from Kahnawake or as we use to call it - Caughnawaga. But it is so long ago that I sometimes wonder if this was just some romantic fantasy of a boy who spent far too much time dreaming he was a courier du bois living in the forest away from everyone.

I met Blackie at Camp Upward Trail on the shores of Lake Memphremagog in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. I was a lonely 10 or 11 year old kid who was not fitting in very well into the culture of organized camping. I couldn't swim and therefore was not allowed in the canoes, I really didn't like doing crafts and I had no friends in my cabin. Blackie who was a counsellor was my only friend. He spent time with me showing how to tan a rabbit skin and then stretching it over a hoop. Then he let me write a prayer on it. On the day that that hoop got hung in the dining hall I can remember feeling as if I had earned membership in a special kind of club.

Blackie told me a couple of his people's creation stories and he told me how to predict spring. That was over 50 years ago and I have never forgotten that secret or Blackie. For a variety of reasons, some springs I just don't get chance to hear/see the cues. Then spring, when it comes, is as much a surprise to me as anyone else. But there is usually a day when I can say - spring is in six weeks time. More often than not I have been reasonably accurate within a couple of days.

But the weather and all of the animals that respond to its ways, no longer follows the usual patterns. Geese no longer fly far to the south to avoid winter. They just head to the warm waters around the nuclear power plant in Pickering. I heard song birds on Saturday. It was obvious that they too had wintered just a bit south of me. Last spring while there was frost was still in the ground I saw flocks of robins. What they ate is anyone's guess. There certainly were no worms.

But in spite of the changes in the weather patterns - I am predicting that spring will arrive in all of its glory and smells six weeks from yesterday. That is on or about April 14 the frost will be out of the ground and we will smell the mud. It may snow after that, it may get cold for a few days but spring will be here. And at least for one more year I will think of Blackie and be grateful for the stories he told me.

P.S. when I thought about writing the above I assumed it was going to be a minor rant about climate change and our apparent inability to work collectively to deal with it. Instead in turned out to be a bit about a lonely kid and and adult who made life a bit easier for him. Thanks Blackie.

On the Road Again (almost) 2013) #2

I have, what may turn out to be, a terminal condition. I am in the early stages of spring fever.

 All right I may be exaggerating a wee bit. Perhaps spring fever cannot (directly) kill a person. But it feels like this year it is going to be close if for no other reason than it might almost kill me to sit on my thumbs for the next few months. The sun is shining, the snow is melting and I can almost hear the whine of tires on the road getting closer and closer to where I am standing. How do I know I have the fever bad this year?  I was in the middle of a class teaching away. All of a sudden I realized that the back part of my brain that is always chattering away whether or not anyone is listening, was calculating how soon I could be in Winnipeg and then Calgary (the answer in case you are curious is Sunday morning in Winnipeg and if the Gods of Hitchhiking were kind, Sunday night in Calgary). I had to stop talking while I listened in to that part of my brain that was planning on escaping. I don't think any of the students noticed and soon I was back on track. Still it was pretty weird.

It is only the beginning of March for heavens' sake!!!!  I have over three months before I head west. Maybe it is because it has been a hard semester, but I have never so early in the year felt the need to be on the open road. I will have to learn how to lower the volume on that back brain. I know I can't shut it off but I also know that I can' t be teaching and thinking about the road at the same time. My students deserve all of my attention.

Witing a blog

I know that there are those who write blogs for a living and have thousands of people who follow it daily. The  March edition of The Walrus (http://thewalrus.ca/gossip-girl/)   focused on one such blogger. She writes up to 4,000 words a day - sometimes even more. This blogger has thousands of readers. My writing pales in comparison. According to Dazeinfo ( Dazeinfo), there are over six million blogs out there on the internet. Six Million!!! I suspect that many of those blogs are long defunct; people started them and just did not maintain them.   I also assume that the vast majority of the rest of them are written by people like me; every week or so we think of something to share and we write 500 or so words. Nothing earth shattering or even remarkable - just the ramblings of an individual. But still it is an amazing bit of technology. I have no way of knowing who reads this blog. But I do know how many people read it or at least have wandered into it. And I also know which country they live in. In the past few years there have been 3,700 views of this blog. In the last week two of those viewers have been from Germany, four have been from the USA and most remarkable,  two of them have been from China! How does one find this blog on the Chinese version of the internet?  By what strange route did they end up on my page reading about me getting my haircut? I am almost embarrassed. I have been told that it is cumbersome and time consuming to post a response. As well Google appears to be somewhat invasive  of one's privacy before allowing a response. And that is a pity. It would be nice to, on occasion, know how people found the blog and what they thought. So please feel free to respond. You can post a response anonymously.
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comments of social movents and social media

In the past two or so years there has been, within the popular press, frequent discussion of social movements and social media. In general the talking heads have suggested that such activities as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement or the Idle No More Movement are in fact social movements that have utilized the connecting power of social media. I don't doubt that all of those  movements have been enhanced by Facebook and Twitter. In fact it could be argued that some of the events would not have happened if there had not been broad access to social media. However, I am just not sure if those activities fit the definition of a social movement. More importantly I think there could be an argument made that social media not only is limited in its capacity to organize the people, but that it could in fact be damaging in the long term.

Social media has proven to be incredibly effective at getting people out on the streets. Thousands of people have become involved in specific acts of protest and civil disobedience because they have read, on various social media, of what is to happen. But social media does not keep people involved once the event is over. Let me give you an example.

A month or so I walked/danced with a hundred or so other people, in the middle of what is claimed to be the busiest intersecting in Peterborough. Our goal was to block traffic just for a quarter of a hour to remind our fellow citizens that the Indigenous people of Canada had legitimate and long standing grievances against the government and that it was time to start to negotiate in good faith. It is well past time.

I did my thing, talked to the one person I knew and when it was over I went home. No one knows I was there or who I was. No one has ever contacted me to come out to the next such civil action. My reading of that Facebook page, in spite of my participating in an activity has done nothing to either get me more engaged in the movement or better educated about the issues. For a social movement to have any longevity it would seem to me that a critical function must be to educate the people who are participating in the activity and to make them want to be more involved. While social media is great at getting people out on the streets, it does nothing to help create within those people any sense of belonging; it does not give those participants a sense engagement or ownership in the outcome. Furthermore it does not provide any information as to what to do next. The consequence of this strategy is that people do it once or perhaps twice and then move on to the next issue.

It has been argued that we live in an age of instant gratification and I wonder if that is part of the problem. Somehow we expect things to get solved quickly without a long term commitment to create change. If one looks at the civil rights movement in the USA, it was a 30 year process just to get it recognized as an issue worthy of a national discussion. And part of that process was the education of both the people who were being oppressed and those who believed that change needed to happen. There is a lovely bit with Pete Seeger talking about Rosa Parks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbpBh6Ts6Mw) and how she was trained to be an activists.

I think  there is a lesson to be learned in that story. Let's use social media to get people out on the streets. We need to use any device or technology available to gather the people. But we need to refine and enhance their commitment, their frustrations and yes even their anger so that they want to remain engaged in the process for the long term. It is not enough that they walk the streets or block some traffic until the TV cameras come, we need to educate and mobilize ourselves. It will be a long fight and we had better get ready for it.

Haircut

I now have short hair - or at least what passes as short hair for me. My hair is in fact the shortest it has been in well over 12-13 years. My only hope is that it will grow - quickly. To say that I am grieving would be an exaggeration, but not by much.

I miss my hair, I miss knowing that it is there, I miss being identified, at least in part, as the teacher with the really long hair. Just a few minutes before I went to the student lounge at Fleming College to get it cut, I heard a student as we passed in the hall say to his mates - "That dudes got some sick hair!" or at something like that. I will miss those comments as I walk thought life.

I have known Wally - my barber for quite awhile. Not that we see each other very often. In fact it has been, by my rough calculations,  about 10 years since we last talked. I use to go to Wally's to get my hair trimmed every moth or so. People seeing me go in would wonder why I, after being in his shop for 10-15 minutes came out with nothing cut off. In fact people use to ask me if Wally had refused to cut my hair.

What most folks didn't know was that Wally had for a few years been helping me let my hair grow long while still looking respectable. It was an almost impossible task but he did the best he could. When I decided to get my hair cut to raise money for the Save The Net Campaign there was no one I could think of to cut my hair except for Wally. I felt as if I owed him that much.

It was great to see him and to know that we could still enjoy sharing a few stories as he "trimmed " my hair.

Getting my haircut in front of a handful of students, in a very public place was weird, uncomfortable and almost unpleasant. I think I like to have a bit more control over things than I did. But I gave my word; I had collected somewhere $400; it was too late to say no.

There is a plus side to all of this............. I can comb my hair! For the past eight years I could only use a brush - a comb could never get through the tangled hair - at least  not without ripping out chunks of hair. I had a shower this morning and it was fast. I am sure I saved at least 5 minutes of hot water. I should be able to retire a few months earlier just on the savings from the reduction in shampoo and conditioner alone.

The reality is that in spite of the fact that it is 1-2 inches shorter than I had envisioned, my hair is freer now than at anytime in the past 5-6 years. Because it got so easily tangled, it was almost always braided or tied behind my head. I seldom got to feel the freedom of it blowing in the wind..... it was just too much work to comb/brush afterwards. So as short as it is - it now does move in the wind and that feels good.

And it will grow - won't it?