Valerie G. Barnes Connell Jordan
Northern Advocate
With all the unrest in the world, it’s lovely to look out the window at sunshine and melting snow.
Springtime was described recently on a Facebook post I read and New Year.
I have never thought of it that way.
When I was born, it was the first day of Spring. It was a stormy day the day before when my father walked in front of the car carrying my mother and me to Ottawa’s “Baby Hospital.”
It was an experience for my family in the suddenness of changing. My birth was traumatic, the doctor went into the operating room to do a caesarean section, which was not foreseen. There was little expectation of the survival of either my mother or I.
We both survived and a new life began in my family.
Although I don’t seen Spring as the beginning of the new year, that rests with fall and around what we commonly refer to as Halloween.
That’s the time of year that the earth settles for the winter, in our part of the world, and everything is dormant.
It’s a time of resting for the plants and animals and the earth is given the chance to rejuvenate.
When I moved to a farming community, at the beginning, many farmers summer fallowed their land to give the earth a rest and give it a chance to recuperate from the summers work.
The seasons flow and after the resting time, life starts to show itself, what some people view as coming alive after the winter months and the hiding from view.
Snow acts as an insulator, nurturer and a blanket for the earth and animals for their resting time.
Then, just as I am seeing today as I look out of my window, spring is showing itself.
This spring is looking quite dry for my liking, I don’t want to have another summer of smoke. I hope there is more cooperation with Indigenous leaders and people across the north in how wildfires are handled than there has been in recent years.
It’s that old colonial thing. People come from afar and try to turn a place into what they left behind, or think they know best, when people have lived on this land for millennia and up to the time Europeans came here, they were healthy, and the land was as well.
That is not so today.
Having spent much time in hospitals lately, I see how unhealthy the population seems to be. The rush on healthcare is great.
It makes me think that we need to change what we do. Perhaps thinking about putting the health of the environment first instead of practicing destruction and caring for each other in a good way.
We all share this Earth home. Why not celebrate what we have, this beautiful home, and work to make it the best home for everyone including all life forms, not just the 1% of several billion people?
