10 Things I Learned from Being Silent

20 hours of no talking (plus 36 of no eating) can teach you alot, especially since there's lots of time to listen. I did it to participate in the Day of Global Solidarity - recognizing the billions of people who have no voice and/or who go hungry every day - and to raise money for VIDEA - Victoria International Development Education Association. But of course in the end the most powerful experience was what I learned about myself.

1. I talk alot. All interesting and brilliant and funny, of course, but alot. Sometimes a wee filter or a 2-second delay like they have on some live TV shows might be a good thing.

2. I process verbally. It's why my parents feared to go to parent-teacher interviews. It's partly why I talk alot. It's why I love teaching and facilitating. It's why I write. Taking something in, churning it around in my brain, then spitting it back out again helps me digest and integrate (hmm, spit-out to digest, not the best-formed analogy ever...)

3. I express my feelings verbally. At the end of the lovely visit/interview with my friend Elke, I wanted so much to tell her how much I enjoyed being with her, respect her, respect that she let me stay silent, appreciate all she gives to the world, etc etc, and all I could do was smile and hug and hope it all shone through my eyes. And who knows, maybe it did even more than the words would have.

4. My wife likes to hear me talk. 12 years of marriage and we still have so much talk about. Thirty minutes into the verbal fast and she moaned, "I feel abandoned." This morning I burst out in a stream of things to share with her from yesterday - sharing it makes it that much more real.

5. I don't need to say it all. Others will eventually say it for me, or something that's better or more interesting. At the end if it hasn't been said, now's my chance to speak, or maybe by then it won't feel that important anymore.

6. People talk more when I don't. During this silent day I interviewed the fantastic Elke Cole for a magazine article. Instead of the usual back-and-forth Q&A, I just sat back and let her share. After an impressively short time to get over the awkwardness, she talked. Then instead of filling the silence with another leading question, I'd just wait and she'd go deeper, or in a direction I wouldn't have guessed, and that's where the richest stuff was revealed. Near the end, she said, "It's amazing when someone's just listening, how much I want to talk."

7. Silence is a great chick magnet. OK, maybe not so deep, but it's true. Women, and i suppose men too, were fascinated and impressed by me and my little sign. Stopped to read it, commented, smiled, sometimes mouthed words back thinking they had to be silent too. I wish I'd known this trick when I was young - so much easier than a cute puppy.

8. My voice has many modalities. I cut out blog, facebook, and email as well as voice, and tried to minimize writing notes and pantomime. Even my sign was a powerful communicator, literally stopping a few cars in the street. The goal wasn't to communicate without talking, it was to experience not being heard, not being able to share my needs and feelings and ideas, not being able to be actively part of the shaping and running of the world that runs me.

9. My voice is strong. With little effort I mobilized over $500 and a lot of publicity for VIDEA. Even while silent I supported a presentation at city council opposing "smart" meters, and a seed was planted that I could become an elected council member or some office. Instead of feeling solidarity with the billions of people who feel little or no power against the government, corporations, spouses, etc controlling their lives, I instead felt the full power of my voice.

10. I want to do this again. I want to more regularly explore different ways of communicating and being with the world. I want to remain conscious of my powers and limitations, and how they relate to others around me and around the world. I want to take time for some deep listening, inside and out, and take time to respond I want to continue to support groups like VIDEA and maintain my connection to that active international development world I once immersed myself in (and hope to again, soon, but that's another blog.)

Thank you to those who supported this experience with pledges, smiles, tolerance, good humour, interest. And thank you to all of you who mostly indulge and encourage my blatant lack of silence - may your ears always be as big as my voice.

Smart Meters are just plain Dumb

Last year our family spent over $1000 to rid our house of all wireless signals and devices - cordless phones, wi-fi internet, cordless keyboards, etc, based mostly on a gut feeling that this vast uncontrolled experiment with massive doses of electro-magnetic radiation was somehow Wrong. I later outlined some of the research-based reasons to be wary of wireless. Now BC Hydro - the exclusive electricity distributor in BC - is forcing every house to have a "Smart Meter" that will emit 100 times the radiation level of a cell phone. Radiation through my children's growing bodies and brains, through the bees trying to pollinate my plants, through this airspace that I thought I had some control over.

If you're in the Cowichan Valley, please come to Duncan City Hall tonight (Mon, July 4) at 6:45 to support a presentation to council about this. And wherever you are, please check out the EMF Safety Network to get educated about the dangers of wireless in our world and what we can do about it.

The World Health Organization has listed wi-fi ("non-ionizing radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation") as possibly carcinogenic. That puts it right up there in their books with Chloroform.

Another article, rather big-brotherish but quite possibly true and scary, talks about the plan to have all household appliances with mandatory wireless transmitters.

Regardless of the extent of the harm, which we may not know for another generation, the fact is that electro-magnetic radiation is being imposed on us in higher and higher levels without truly knowing the health effects. And that's just wrong. It's been banned in many schools, particularly in Britain, and at the very least we should have some control over it in our own homes.

There's nothing "Smart" about a device that exposes us to something that hasn't been proven to be safe. And there's nothing Smart about a people who let this happen without speaking out. See you tonight, 6:45, at Duncan City Hall (and again tomorrow, Tuesday, at 3:00 at CVRD).

Mouth Wide Shut

Wanna hear me shut up? Put your money where my mouth is.

This Tuesday I'm participating in a Day of Global Solidarity. For 24 hours I'll not eat a thing, to symbolically stand beside the millions of people who go hungry each day. And also hopefully to raise money to support the great work of VIDEA, our nearby international development agency.

AND, if enough of y'all sponsor me to total $500, I'll also go silent for that full day, to symbolically stand beside the millions of women, children, people disproportionately affected by climate change, global victims of our excessive Western consumerism and predatory trade practices, etc etc - the millions of people who do not have a voice.

I said "symbolically" twice because doing something (a) voluntarily, and (b) for a limited time, is nothing like having it forced on you with no end in sight. There have been times in my travelling days where I was genuinely hungry, unable to get enough food, and that was an entirely different feeling than choosing to fast. But even then, I always knew that I had money in the bank and a Canada to return to, so even though my body felt some of the fatigue and powerlessness that a hungry child goes to school or the fields with every day, my soul still felt hope, felt alive.

The same with my voice. While I do succumb to deep despair at what I've labelled the Fascist Harper Regime, as a white middle-class educated Canadian male I have one of the most powerful, effective voices in the world. There is no way I can ever truly walk beside the 15-year-old third wife my cook in rural Tanzania, but I can take this day to at least acknowledge my voice in relation to hers, and stay silent long enough to re-think how I use that power.

Please join me on Tuesday, or any day, in this creative way of recognizing our place in and impact on the world, and this symbolic and monetary support of our global sisters and brothers. And please do take a minute to pledge your support - I can personally vouch for the good work of VIDEA, and the only thing that will keep me from shouting it from the rooftops will be enough pledges to make me shut up.

Cow's destiny

When I wrote the other day that our cows may derive "some inherent sahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftisfaction of providing organic healthy nourishment for our family to fulfill their destiny," I had in mind a beautiful book called "The Faithful Gardener" by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, telling the story of a fir tree so happy that he can keep the old couple warm.

"Oh, I never knew I could burn with such brightness, that I could fill a room with such warmth. I love these old ones with all my heart." The fir tree and all the knots in its wood - and in its heart - burst with joy in the flame.

Night after night, the fir tree surrendered himself to this rendering. He was so completely glad to be useful and to be alive in this way, that he burned and burned until there was no more left of him, except for the ashes that lay in the bottom of the grate.

And as he was being brushed out of the grate by the old people, he thought he had never imagined more glory than his life had been till now, and that he could never again wish for more than had been his life up to this very moment.

I am very aware that in both cases (cows and trees) that we are looking at the worth of their life from the perspective of their worth to us humans, but still, wouldn't it be such great comfort to have a clear understanding of some single purpose of our lives? My deep meaning is to raise good kids and contribute to our human and full world, but that's still pretty self-serving and/or awfully vague and general.

How about, I am flower. I am here to create beauty for a short time, to gather the sun's warmth and earth's richness to nourish bumblebees and butterflies, then to send forth my seeds for the next generation of beauty and nourishment. Then return into the soil. Hmmm, maybe we're not so different from flowers (and cows, and fir trees) after all.

Taking the Bull By The ....

Animal rights activists beware: Farmer Ricky not only kills animals, he emasculates them too. There's been alot of death and diminution around the WildSide Farm these days.

Death has been at the pesky hands and teeth of an overfed raccoon who apparently prefers our organic chickens to the no-name SuperStore fish-flavoured cat-food in the trap. I keep plugging more holes in the fence and coop and he keeps finding ways to diminish my stock, down to 30 as of yesterday from 56 a month ago. Every morning that I find a new pile of feathers I feel I've failed my flock. Know I've failed them.

So traps are out, and even though they are live traps there'll soon be a dead coon on my dinner table if I finally catch him. There's no cruelty in killing one animal that has killed 26 of my egg-laying chickens. It's survival.

The depriving of "manhood" has been at the hands of me and my friend Amy, courtesy of a tiny little elastic band much tighter than the pleasure-enhancing ones at the Adult shops. We fooled poor little 2-month-old SnowStar (and then Midnight, who didn't go so easily after seeing what happened to his brother) to tie them to a fencepost, then slipped the elastic over his impressive baggage and snapped it shut. Those future calf-making machines will slowly shut down from lack of fuel and work no more.

Again, no cruelty intended. This keeps our young bull - now a steer, technically - from getting too rangy and dangerous, and keeps all those yucky-tasting boy hormones out of the meat that'll eventually reach our table. If we're gonna raise cattle for beef, this is just a necessary part of the equation.

In my final defence, WildSide Farm is actually an orphanage, a cattle rescue shelter. If we hadn't picked up these calves to raise, they would have been slaughtered at birth - since they are a dairy breed, they're not as valued for their meat as pure meat-breeds, and therefore are of no commercial value to the "real" cattlemen. True I'm only giving them 18 months of life, and ball-less life at that, but they do have the run of our beautiful hayfield, the company of each other, and some daily loving from our family and visitors. A pretty decent life as Canadian cows go, and hopefully some inherent satisfaction of providing organic healthy nourishment for our family to fulfill their destiny at the end of it all.

Farmers' Date

Happiness is: 2 nights with no kids, and all four of my power landscaping tools working (yes, 4: ride-em mower, push mower, handlebar weedwhacker, push weedwhacker). And oh ya, my beautiful wife here too. Where to start?

We started the night before by doing what we love best - making a list. Not just any list, but divided up by categories: farm, house reno's, inside clean-up/reorganizing, Friends, and just out of a sense of duty, a little column called "Fun." Fun has a dinner out, theatre tickets, and yoga. Period.

Fact is, it's that other stuff that we consider fun. The chance to finally get the septic field cleared, 13 more species of plants and trees in the ground, and multi-coloured spoons hung on the kitchen cabinet doors is our idea of foreplay.

We were so excited about the list that we started out by skipping yoga to come home (from Galen's delightful first piano recital) to the garden. Planted broccoli, corn, tomatoes, chard, fennel, a mulberry tree and an autumn-olive tree, finished setting up irrigation tubes in the greenhouse, and raked up grass clippings for the cows before a brief twilight respite in the hot tub. Then inside to sort laundry, re-organize the guest room, and an early bed-time too happily tired to even enjoy the fruits of our funky foreplay.

Our first ever date after moving here was to a Backyard Poultry Disease Prevention workshop at the Best Western Hotel, so I suppose this is all nothing new. In Vancouver we used to go out to restaurants alot just because we weren't sure what else to do on a date. No shortage of ways to enjoy each other these days...

Increasing the overlap of work and play, obligation and passion - that's what infuses happiness and fulfillment into this marriage, this life, this rambunctious walk on the WildSide.

Bipolar Fathers Day

There's nothing more intimidating than a blank cheque question like "What do you want to do for Father's Day?" Like whatever I choose defines my priorities and identity, and I'd better like whatever I choose.

My two gut responses were equally strong and opposite. One was to want time alone - take the kids away, let me do some yardwork and nap. Let me take a break from the rewarding but exhausting and never-ending work of being a Father, being a responsible caregiver. The day before I spent the whole day caring for others - kids, chickens, clients, renters, plants, school committee... a day of not being responsible for anyone else would be delicious, but also rather ironic.

The other impulse was that I want to celebrate Fathers Day by doing what I love the most - being a father. Let's build a fort, play without agenda, fall asleep all together at the end of a giggle-fest day. Shed all other worldly worries and dastardly distractions and just be in the full-on Papa mode that feeds my soul and lets me shine.

In the end I did a lot of both. While Sarah took the boys to Quaker meeting I stayed home and did a fun task I'd been wanting for ages - re-stacked all the firewood in the woodshed. A task that's been too low on the priority list to get done, but that made me feel great. Fiddled on some of the rental cabin reno tasks and some other tasks with no pressure, just enjoying Doing. And also enjoyed plenty of playtime with the family, and let them Treat me to fantastic meals.

The highlight was the feverish 3 hour creativity session where the boys would not let me into the house. They sewed bean-bag juggling balls for me, and were just bursting with happiness to surprise their papa with something home-made. Guess that's the answer to this question of what I want for Fathers Day - it's not my day, it belongs to my children, gives them a chance to recognize and enjoy and reciprocate the love they receive from me.

I'm happy to say that Fathers Day is, for me, totally unnecessary. I always love the role, get enough breaks and variety, and the love and attention and appreciation feels reciprocated. But a day to officially focus on this abundant source of beauty in my life, and an excuse to demand homemade scones and whipped cream for breakfast, I'll take that as often as my beautiful family and Hallmark will dish it out.