Voyage to the Spirit Mountains

Author and musician, Paul Quarrington, diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, eloquently describes his plans to live each day as though it is his last, connecting with singing and the Canadian landscape.

“As we journeyed through the Torngat Mountains, I finally realized what this trip was all about, for me. First of all, let me get a little scientific on you. The Torngats-comprised of Precambrian gneisses-are amongst the oldest mountains in the world, almost four billions years old. They rise out of the water with enchanted austerity. Sitting well above the tree line, the Torngats are stark naked and make no apology about it. Torngat is an Inuktitut word meaning Place of Spirits, and it very clearly is. The mountaintops are usually shrouded in cloud, and it’s easy enough to imagine the Spirits assembling there, going through the itinerary for another year.  In short, the Torngat Mountains took what little breath I have away from me. The thought occurred that I was on another planet, and that’s when I realized, no, I’m on this planet, I’m just none too clear on what it actually looks like. I realized that what I wanted to do was spend a little time getting to know the third stone from the sun; it has been my home for 56 years, but I have spent much of it confined in the settlements. I wanted to explore and examine, I wanted to interact – yes, in the broadest, most spiritual sense.”

“So there, basically, you have the two main components of my plan for (what remains of) my future: singing and (spiritual) mountain climbing. For example, I think I’ll go fishing this week, getting to know Mother Ship Earth a bit better. I think I’ll go stand in a river just a few degrees above freezing and toss a yarn-fly into the current, over and over again, in the hopes of convincing some chromium-silver steelhead that the thing is edible. Or, I may simply go walkabout, kicking stones and major rock formations. I will build inuksuit (did you know that was the plural? I learned a lot on my voyages…) and I will try to build them across as much of the landscape as I can. In the meantime, I will be singing, all manner of songs. I will sing in Porkbelly Futures, I will sing with fiddlers and button accordionists, I will sing in Gospel choirs and Glee Clubs.”

Inuit mythology tells of the Torngait, the spirits that a Shaman or spiritual leader looks to for wisdom and power. Torngat comes from this Inuit name and the legends which hold that in this region the spirit world overlaps our own. White people have called this area the Ghost Coast and have commented how the sounds of the winds whistling through the rugged mountains bring forth the feeling that one is in another realm. If the earth is home to ancient spirits they would seek out this land where the rocks are among the oldest on the planet and the landforms hold an otherworldly appearance. Perhaps this truly is a place of spirits.

The Torngat Mountains National Park Reserve is the new name for this ancient place. It is the northern portion of the Inuit homeland of Nunatsiavut, located in northern Labrador. (Nunatsiavut means “Our beautiful land” in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit.) The park reserve encompasses roughly 10,000 km2 and extends from the deep waters of Saglek Fjord in the south, to the very northern tip of Labrador; and from the boundary with Quebec in the west, to the waters of the Labrador Sea in the east.

The human history of the park is rich and ancient. Within the park there are hundreds of archaeological sites including tent rings, stone caribou fences, caches, and ancient graves, all of which tell the story of the peoples and cultures, particularly the Inuit, who have made this special landscape their home.

South of Nachvak Fjord is Ramah Bay, home to a unique translucent stone called Ramah chert. This mineral holds an edge that is sharper than surgical steel. It was so prized by the ancient peoples of Labrador that prior to contact with the Europeans, some used this mineral almost exclusively in their arrows and blades.

Paul Quarrington: Each Day Like It’s My Last at National Post.

More at Wanderbird Expedition Cruises.

Ramah Chert.

For Sydney, and for Linda Gordon who loves the landscape.

Les Chevaliers Cathares

Stone knights for Linda Gordon, who taught me that there are too many haiku about cherry blossoms and too few about stone.

Les chevaliers Cathares
Pleurent doucement,
Au bord de l’autoroute
Quand le soir descend,
Comme une dernière insulte,
Comme un dernier tourment,
Au milieu du tumulte,
En robe de ciment.

From the A61 motorway at the Pech Loubat rest stop in France, you can see three giant stone Cathar knights brooding over their long lost homeland. Pulling into their often deserted, large last home, you may relax and explore this wild area, and stop off for a quiet pique-nique. You can even climb right up in the hollowed out bodies and look out through the helmets of the lonely giants, east over the vast valleys as they sweep down towards the Mediterranean.

The site seems almost as unloved as the Cathars were by the Church of Rome. But it allows the wildlife to flourish and provides an experience of quiet and the open skies from the rise above the everlasting tarmac ribbon.

“Christianity, without chapels, without statues, Christianity which always refused to encompass anything sacred within visible matter….the heart of man is the true church of God.”
~ Anne Brenon

The word Cathar comes from the Greek word Katheroi meaning pure ones. Cathars believed in a theological dualism with two divine principles, a good one who made all good, unmaterial, things (like the human soul) and a bad one who made the bad, material, things (like the human body). They also believed that the mainstream Catholicism had strayed away from, and had corrupted, the very early Christianist teachings.

The Cathars believed that their soul became trapped in the world, reincarnating over and over until they were once again free from identification with this dimension and could return home to pure Spirit. They saw how our attention becomes easily trapped in this dualistic universe. Snared by the temptations of the outer life, the mind creates an inner thought-based world to match, and by these very thoughts, reinforces the outer world of matter and the senses. Seeing how thoughts and matter became intertwined, creating a net nearly impossible to break, the Cathar Perfects labored to save themselves.

Catharism was a “heresy” that was introduced to the Languedoc in about 1150 and was widespread in this region of France for several centuries. Catharism was so popular that even priests were leaving the Catholic orthodoxy to follow it. The popularity of the Cathars reached it height at the beginning of the 14th century.

In 1209, Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars, when the Catholic Church came down extremely heavily on the heretics, aided by the King of France, keen to grab more land for his idle, spare knights. The eradication of Catharism included the complete slaughter of the town of Toulouse. In all, about half a million people of all ages and rank were killed.

The crusade against Catharism eventually led to the dramatic last stand at the Cathar castle on Montsegur. Here, after an as yet to be explained surrender and terms, the remaining Perfects were burned, ending an era and starting a legend. Stories still abound of the last night of this final siege, and the supposed escape of four Cathars with a treasure, reputed to be anything from gold, to the Holy Grail itself.

The Cathars left us with not just another story of strength in the face of persecution, but also an inspiring call to our intuition that things might not be as they seem. They struggled to escape the bonds of earthly existence and find Heaven and God within.

Lyrics:  Francis Cabrel

The Slow Lives of Stones

I suppose that nothing living had moved among those great stones for centuries.

They lay toppled against each other like fallen dolmens.

The huge stones were beasts, I used to think, of a kind that man ordinarily lived too fast to understand.

They seemed inanimate because the tempo of the life in them was slow.

They lived ages in one place and moved only when man was not looking.

Sometimes at night I would hear a low rumble as one drew itself into a new position and subsided again.

Sometimes I found their tracks ground deeply into the hillsides.

Loren Eiseley, How Natural is “Natural”?
Image, Andy Goldsworthy, Stone River
Andy Goldsworthy at Red Star Café

Life After Humans

Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.

Look around you at today’s world. Your house, your city, the surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out, and see what’s left. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow companions in creation?

How long would it take to recover lost ground and restore Eden to the way it must have gleamed the day before Adam, appeared?

On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house.

In just decades, with no new chlorine and bromine leaking skyward, the ozone layer would replenish and ultraviolet levels subside.

Within a few centuries, as most of our excess industrial CO2 dissipated, the atmosphere and shallows would cool. Heavy metals and toxins would dilute and gradually flush from the system. After PCBs and plastic fibres recycled a few thousand or million times, anything truly intractable would end up buried, to one day be metamorphosed or subsumed into the planet’s mantle.

Long before that – in far less time than it took us to run out of cod and passenger pigeons – every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would again carry nutrients to the sea, where most life would still be, as it was long before we vertebrates first crawled onto these shores. Our world would start over.

Excerpted from The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, Virgin Books

Full story at Independent UK

Aftermath from National Geographic.

Timeline from National Geographic production, Aftermath.

K-9’s, Bullet and Glory, star in Aftermath.

Watch video excerpts from Life After People at History.com

All Our Wonder Unavenged

Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His latest work, All Our Wonder Unavenged (Brick Books) recently won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry.

He is a poet of the holiness of subtleties, a master of mindfulness and being. His writing is a form of osmosis, spirit seeping through the details of each poem, creating a marvel of metaphysics and language distilled to purest energy. Living in the moment here is synonymous with being the moment, a transformation that is stunning to inhabit.

The nature imagery is interlaced with references to Buddhism, Greek mythology, ancient civilizations and even witches. The poems don’t transcend the material world so much as find the spirit in what we can see, touch, and hear. Domanski asserts that the deity is in all things.

my mother believed God moved the sparrows around day after day
as a teenager I believed the sparrows moved God around
all the inexhaustible crutches He leaned upon
all the underweights of silence to find His way

now the only god I believe in are the sparrows themselves

Don Domanski was recently interviewed by CBC. Here are some excerpts.

CBC: Your work brings the inanimate to life. What draws you to blur the line between the animate and inanimate world?

It probably comes from childhood originally, children blur that line all the time, giving life to inanimate objects, to toys and dolls, because they can’t imagine it otherwise. What I’m doing is making my way to presence, and blurring that line helps to draw out the inherent presence in things. My definition of life is isness, its elementary stance and grace, therefore everything is alive, simply put being equals life. Now I know this isn’t the usual definition, but still it is an ancient one, not just among children, but among people from all cultures.

I’m an animist when it comes to how I interact with the physical world. Animism is the oldest religious/spiritual practice, the base experience out of which all the other ways of the sacred have grown. So I guess you could say I’m a traditionalist of a sort, a basic believer in first experiences, whether it’s cultural or ones from childhood. There’s a very deep truth there that strikes well below the thinking level, a connection richer than language, which can give words a more inclusive depth and reach.

CBC: What draws you to geology and palaeontology as subjects for your writing?

I’ve always been interested in the natural sciences, so it seems almost instinctive that geology and palaeontology should find their way into my work. I collected fossils for fourteen years, to try and get some sense of time, some understanding of the permutations of time on life. Of course in the end it’s time out of mind, it’s impossible to grasp what two hundred million years actually means. But there were moments in this hunt for time that shone forth with a particular light I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. For instance, finding the impressions of raindrops that were three hundred and fifty million years old. The rain falling on a completely different planet then we live on today. That gives a new perspective, a new appreciation of being.

I see no difference between poetry and spiritual practice

CBC Interview with Don Domanski

Brick Books

Prairie Fire Review of Books

Thames Mudlarks Dig Up Medieval Toys

Members of the London-based Society of Thames Mudlarks look very different today from the Victorian street children the group takes its name from. Where ragged waifs once searched for bits of bone and coal to sell, men in overalls, gloves, and rubber boots now comb the River Thames foreshore with metal detectors.

And though these amateur treasure hunters seldom find silver or gold, historians say what they do dig from the mud is transforming our understanding of childhood during the Middle Ages.

Many Mudlark finds have been displayed as part of a touring exhibition of Britain entitled Buried Treasure. Organized by the British Museum, London, the exhibition highlights the growing contribution of non-professionals, particularly metal detectorists, in unearthing historically-important finds.

Among the showcased items are exquisite Iron Age gold necklaces, Anglo-Saxon jewels, and a hoard of Roman treasure. The Mudlark finds may be less eye-catching, but they are well represented thanks to the insights they provide into medieval society.

Dating from as early as the 13th century, items include tiny cannons and guns, metal figurines, and miniaturized household objects such as stools, jugs, cauldrons, and even frying pans complete with little fish.

Made mainly from pewter (a tin-lead alloy), these medieval toys are exceptionally rare and have helped transform perceptions of childhood during the Middle Ages, says Hazel Forsyth, curator of post-medieval collections at the Museum of London.

“In the 1960s French historian Philippe Aries claimed that there wasn’t really such a thing as childhood in the Middle Ages and that parents didn’t form emotional attachments with their offspring, regarding them as economic providers or producers for the household. And for very many years, people believed this,” Forsyth said, noting that it has only been recently, with discovery of ancient childhood items by contemporary treasure hunters, “that we’ve challenged this received wisdom.”

The fact that the Thames passes through the heart of London makes the waterway’s foreshore (the riverbank exposed between high and low tide) one of Britain’s most important archaeological sources.
A prime source for objects found along the Thames today, outside boating accidents of centuries past, is ancient domestic rubbish. Such trash, which included old or broken toys, was used to backfill timber revetments, or embankments, built along the river up to about 1500.

Founded in 1980, the Society of Thames Mudlarks has some 70 members. Forsyth says they are publicity shy. Under the licensing agreement allowing them to go metal detecting along the Thames, however, they must report historical finds to the Museum of London.

The museum now holds around 1,000 Mudlark finds, though not all are made from pewter. Many of the miniature guns and cannons were once working replicas and consist of copper alloy to withstand firing pressures.

“The largest of them are equivalent to a pocket pistol. So [they're] perfectly capable of killing somebody,” Forsyth said. “It’s obvious they are not perfect replicas. But we know they worked, because some of the barrels have exploded. If these were being used by children, then they probably met with an unfortunate accident. Certainly children had access to black powder and could use all sorts of projectiles.”

The miniatures weren’t the only playthings that worked. For instance, tiny copper cauldrons have been found with sooty bases, suggesting children used them to cook food. Other replicas, including a three-legged stool, a birdcage, and tools such as saws, are important because no previous record of these objects is known for the period. “It enriches what we know about the medieval household in terms of the contents of a house.”

Despite the exhibition’s title, Buried Treasure isn’t just about objects made of silver or gold. True treasures are those that illuminate the past.

Excerpted from National Geographic

Exhibit review at Times Online

Childhood in Medieval England

There is no city that does not dream

Canadian literature has largely centred on rural and wild spaces. Cities are often viewed as a blight on the landscape, encroaching on its imagined pristineness.

Toronto writer, Anne Michaels has documented the intersection of Canada’s largest city, and time, memory and imagination in her poem, “There is no city that does not dream.” This poem is the centerpiece of her third book of poetry, Skin Divers.

I first came across this poem one day on the subway, possibly as we were crossing Shaw Street. It was hidden among the subway car’s advertising, and it was part of the “Poetry on the Way” series which made my commute bearable. I had no notepad with me at the time, and I was afraid that I might not come across it again, so I memorized it and wrote it down as soon as I arrived home.

In the poem, the city unfolds, not in its brick and mortar sprawl this time, but as real and imagined remembrances over millions of years.

In a city so familiar that we hardly notice it, we read rumours of lost lakes such as glacial Lake Iroquois whose shores define the Niagara Escarpment; ravines which conceal lost rivers, long paved over, such as Taddle Creek, which still runs under Philosopher’s Walk; and dinosaur bones unearthed with the building of the subway – all part of our city’s geologic garden.

Our present day experience of the spring air and the ferry ride in the rain intertwines with this unread page of love charting where we came from, drifting away from us on the wind.

The line, “The lost lake/crumbling in the hands of brickmakers/the floor of the ravine where light lies broken/with the memory of rivers” transports me into a past where I no longer hear the quotidian hum of the city, but walk through the wild and secret marshes from another time.