Growing Food Without Land, Money or Time

Baskets of freshly-harvested broccoli, cucumbers, zucchini, wineberries, purple peas, winecap mushrooms, multicoloured chicken eggs, kale, celery, cauliflower, and a diverse selection of flowers.

The idea of homesteading or growing food is enjoying some increased popularity at the moment, supposedly because it’s rewarding, both from a human-connection standpoint as well as ethically/morally, with regards to climate change and ecological preservation. Also, of course, once you’ve become accustomed to the deliciousness of homegrown fresh foods, it can be hard to return to the comparatively dull stuff from grocery stores that has sat waiting for ages, and usually was farmed extractively. That stuff is empty of nutrients and joy! And with the rise of fascism (and fascist destruction of trade, farming, research and prosperity), I think we’ll soon have many more reasons to grow and preserve our own foods.

I grew up in a homesteading family, so it wasn't difficult for me to tumble back into this rewarding life, as an adult with children. But, especially for people who are new to it, I know homesteading (or even just growing a little food) can seem really, really daunting. I keep seeing videos of homesteaders and food farmers “giving up”–either because they faced too many disappointments, or because other adventures called to them. If you’re one of those people who wants to grow food but has been put off by all the discouraging news out there, I’m writing this for you! I want to help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls, and find some serious hope and joy from growing food. The thing is, many of those homestead failures didn’t have to be failures. These people lacked a few of the basic ingredients for homesteading. I’ll talk about those ingredients in a minute. But first… the biggest deterrent to people growing food is lack of land, time or money. So let’s deal with those first.

I have no land!
OK. So you’re like most people. That’s OK! You can still grow food. The most obvious solution is to grow plants on a balcony or window. You can totally buy some expensive little gadgets like grow lights to help you with this, but it’s not even necessary. Just choose plants that don’t need a lot of light or space. The simplest is sprouts. Given two square feet of counter space, you can grow a huge variety of incredibly nutritious sprouts.

Easiest: Bean Sprouts
Buy the cheapest beans you want (whatever type you like but mung beans grow fast, so are great starters!). Soak a cup (or two if you have a big family) in at least twice as much water, overnight. Then strain them, rinse them, and spread them onto a baking tray lined with a woven cotton dish cloth (or whatever piece of fabric). Rinse them once or twice a day.

When you see them start to split, or little tiny points appear, they’re ready to eat! You can let them go a bit longer if you want to have a bit of a crunchy sprout. They’ll be delicious cooked like regular beans (and much more easily digestible), but can also be marinated for bean salad, or eaten fresh.

Almost as Easy: Pea or Sunflower Shoots
Buy whole peas or sunflower seeds (for planting; not packaged for eating!) Soak them overnight in a bowl of water, and then lay them on a planting tray full of soil. They barely need any soil, and can literally be dumped in a heap, or in dense rows. Put the tray on a windowsill, as they do need some light when they green up.

When it’s mild weather, they can also be planted outside, in this way. Simply wait for them to shoot up about 4-6 inches, and then snip them off with scissors. The peas will actually continue to grow and can be harvested a few more times.

When they’re spent, throw the remaining roots and stubs into your compost. The peas especially are amazing nitrogen fixers, and can even just be dug into the soil to feed whatever you grow there, next.

Alfalfa Sprouts (or clover, fenugreek, mustard, etc.)
This takes a tiny bit more time every day than the other two, but they’re SO delicious. I do recommend buying seeds intended for sprouting, here.

Prepare a wide-mouth canning jar (at least a pint or a litre or so), by cutting a piece of sturdy mesh that can be placed over the top and held in place by a canning ring. You can buy sprouting-screens for such jars, but it’s totally unnecessary.

Put 1 to 2 tbsp of seeds in the bottom of the jar, add some water, then the mesh and ring on top, and allow to soak for at least a few hours, or overnight. Then strain the water out through the mesh. Fill with fresh water, swirl around, and strain again. Leave the jar sitting open side down in a shallow bowl or on a (clean) dish rack. The seeds should be sitting against the mesh in the bottom corner of the jar, but not fully covering it. Repeat this rinse-swirl-strain process three times a day until your sprouts are starting to green up (tiny leaves will be developing at the end of the long stems). Then rinse and enjoy them!

Other than Sprouts: Small and Borrowed Spaces
So, obviously, sprouts are not the only thing you can grow on a counter. Buy or make planters out of whatever containers you like, and experiment away! Lots of people grow herbs inside, but veggies are possible too!

And if you have a balcony, even more is possible. I used to grow all kinds of veggies on my 3x8ft balcony in Vancouver, Canada. I had a screen of beans on one side (for shade as well as harvesting), squash growing along the railing (I had to hang little hammocks to hold the fruits as they got heavy), all kinds of herbs and heat-loving veggies, as well as a couple of tomatoes, and a 1x1m mini-lawn for my cats to roll on. We were very happy.

Of course, if you don’t have a balcony or windowsill at all, or just would like to grow much more than that, you may be able to work somebody else’s land. This relates to community-building, which I’ll talk about in a bit, for obvious reasons. But an increasing number of people are willing to allow others to grow food in their otherwise-unused yards, especially if they also get to enjoy the produce. Community gardens are another such non-homeowner option.

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I have no time!
This is such an unfortunate reality for the majority, these days. Especially for those with kids or low-paying multi-jobs. Obviously, there are some things you can do (like sprouts, above) that can still be do-able, given enough forethought (and maybe a reminder to rinse and eat them!) But if you want to grow more than just sprouts, a mind-shift might be necessary.

For us, the pandemic gave us a reason to let go of kids’ activities and start a proper garden (after a few years of development, our kids have now moved out, and we grow most of our own food on less than 1/4 acre). A garden (or balcony planters) can take as little as a handful of hours per week, in the busiest growing season. And obviously, the more you grow, the more land you utilize, and the more variety you grow, the more time you’ll need. But I do have a few time-saving ideas:

No-Till Regenerative Gardening
I won’t go into detail, here, but I’d highly recommend watching a few YouTube/etc. videos about it. This is what we’ve been doing. At it’s core, it’s about feeding the soil and working with the ecology you have, instead of stripping it. This involves allowing some weeds to grow where they want, allowing the soil layers to remain in-tact by not ploughing, tilling, or weeding too aggressively, and watching which plants grow best where, to allow the garden to evolve in the way that works best for the plants you’re trying to grow. A lot of “allowing.” But… the more we “allow” things to grow as they need to, the less work we have to do in fighting them.

Grow Fruit Trees!
Fruit trees do need to be pruned at least once a year (twice can be better for some), and they’d benefit from some thoughtful planting and maintenance of the ground around them, but on the whole they can produce a lot of food for very little effort. The same is true of many perennial plants, including berry shrubs, asparagus, Jerusalem artichoke, and many others.

Be a Lazy Gardener
Some things really do need to be done, in the garden: adding compost in early spring, seeding (maybe even starting seeds indoors if you’re in a changeable climate place like I am), and pulling out weeds and veggies that outcompete others. But a pristine and orderly garden is not even a happy garden! Plants LOVE to be mixed up. Most also love to be left alone to grow! Gardening may not even take as much time as you think it will.

Call in the Insects
Insects are generous garden helpers. They pollinate, of course, but when we ensure a great diversity of insects (and insect species), they balance their own populations, keeping invading hordes of veggie-demolishing insects to a minimum. The greater diversity of insects we have, the fewer issues we’ll have from destructive insects. And they work for free! Well… almost. You have to pay them with flowers. Add a bunch of different types of flowers to attract insects. Clumps of marigolds, asters, violets, sweet peas—even perennials like rhododendrons and other flowering shrubs if that suits your fancy! Whatever is easy to grow, and makes you happy. Clovers are not only excellent insect-attractors, but also, being related to peas and beans, put much-needed nitrogen into the soil. They do take a bit of pulling-back, though, as they can easily grow into a bed and take over. I grow low-growing clovers between raised beds, and mulch the extras into my compost, as well.

Plant a No-Mow Lawn
Mowing lawns is not only a scourge on our air quality, but it's also a massive waste of time! We replaced our lawn with a low-growing no-mow lawn of sedges, small daisies and other flowers, and low-growing pink clovers. I never mow, anymore, and my lawn stays lush and green all summer!

Plant Thoughtfully
Check out useful companion plants for the veggies you choose, so that everything you grow can thrive. Always research, to understand the needs of your plants and the kind of plant community they enjoy. This will also help you diversify and create a garden that sustains itself, with little management needed from you.

Share Your Yard
If you have a yard, and a desire to eat homegrown food, but no time to grow it, consider allowing someone else to garden in your yard! Set some ground-rules, especially with regard to bylaws, invasive plants, and access, but then give as much freedom as possible to the person or people using your land. Trust them to make good decisions, and put your effort into building a relationship with them. You’re building a community. 💚

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I Have No Money!
So… this is an increasing majority of people. And probably the hardest obstacle to overcome. I’ve been passionate about growing at least a little of my own food since I left home at 18, so I have learned a few basic cost-saving tricks along the way.

Save seeds
A LOT of veggies are just plain easy to save seeds from. The biggest issue you’ll have is cross-pollination, so plant just one type of each thing every year (like one type of bean, one type of pea, one type of lettuce, etc. etc.) That will save you accidentally creating useless hybrids. In most climates, the most commonly-grown veggies (and tomatoes and cucumbers and squashes) are easy to save seeds from. YouTube, again, will help you out with the specifics.

Don’t waste money!
There’s a massive industry out there making money off new gardeners who don’t know there are cheaper options. From grow-towers to veggie-starts to chemical fertilizers, there is an infinite list of things you don’t need. What you really do need is this:

  • Good Soil: You can buy it bagged if you’re growing indoors or on a balcony, but if you have land to grow on, get it delivered in bulk, or better yet, amend the soil you already have.
  • Compost: Buy a little, the first year, and start making your own (unless you’re composting inside, a good old compost heap, caged to keep out rodents, is your best bet—feed it constantly!)
  • Mulch to Keep Down Weeds: newspapers for small spaces, or arborists’ chips for larger plots. See https://getchipdrop.com/
  • Seeds: share with your community! Look for seed libraries, and talk to your neighbours. You don’t need to buy from seed growers, but if you do, just a few is enough.
  • Gloves: (Only if you’re dealing with weeds like blackberries.)
  • A Shovel: A small trowel is fine unless you have a large plot; then you’ll also want a spade.
  • Pots: Whether big pots for balcony growing or smaller pots and trays for windowsill growing or seed-starting, these should be free. There are SO many people throwing away their used nursery pots every year. Ask your gardening neighbours, or check your local recycling depot.


Garden in Community
The more people share the costs and the labour, the easier and cheaper gardening becomes. Not to mention more enjoyable, more fruitful, and with bigger harvests, since everyone learns from each other.

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Ingredients for Success
OK, so I mentioned the basic ingredients for happy homesteading. I meant that in the same way the main ingredient in Mama’s cornbread is love. It really is—it was for my Mama, and now I’m the Mama I know what that means!! And it’s the same with gardening. The ingredients are love, commitment, and patience. Just like raising children! And baking. 🙂

I’m truly not just being poetic. Here’s what I mean:

Love
You have to LOVE this. Deeply. If you’re growing food because you think you should, or because someone else told you to, it’s going to be a slog. But if you have good reasons for doing it, it veers into the realm of love, and then you’ll weather all the storms. Some good reasons I and other successful gardeners have are because it brings us enormous joy, because it gives us wonderful food, and because it makes us feel we’re doing something to improve our world. What is your reason to love growing food? Maybe you don’t have one yet. You can start with just purpose, and given commitment and patience, love will grow.

Commitment
It’s not going to be a breeze. Growing food is a constant learning curve. Especially if you’re going the regenerative route, but shopping at stores that constantly try to sell you harmful industrial-farming products. You’ll use them and they’ll damage your soil or set back your progress and you’ll lose faith. And even if you really commit to regenerative farming, you’re going to have failures, because that’s simply how ecology works. It’s a balance that’s eked from an infinite complex diversity and many failures. But we commit to that—the complex diversity—and we weather the storms, and find solutions, and really… we grow into it.

Look at the word commit. It begins with bring together (co). Like community, coworker, etc. Commitment is about coming together not only with other people, but also with the task at hand. And in this case, that’s creating and nurturing a harmonious ecology that will produce food for us to eat. In other words, it’s about making ourselves co-participants in our ecology. That realization, alone, will make gardening easier and more successful. It’s not a project you’re overseeing; it’s a community of plants, insects, minerals, and weather that you’re a part of.

Oh… and quitting? You can’t quit. You’re not co- anything, if you quit. So grow a pair of potatoes and keep at it.

Patience
It will take years to have any kind of garden feeling whole. That’s because it has to go through many cycles (a year is a cycle) just for the soil nutrients to find an equilibrium, and from that basis, the diverse ecology of the plants, insects and animals. And it also just takes a few seasons for you to get to know all your co-ecosystem-inhabitants.

I’ve seen multiple homesteading “influencers” give up after a year or two. That’s like putting your toes into the opening of a shoe and declaring it doesn’t fit. No. You have to put it on, lace it up, and then walk around in it. And even then, you probably have to wear it for a few weeks or months before it really feels great. It’s the same with gardening. So… find a reason to love it, commit to it, and then be patient. And when you struggle, go find regenerative solutions for the ecosystem you’re growing into.

Happy spring!

How to Overcome Fascism by Eating Delicious Local Food in Season

A wicker basket containing nine eggs of different colours (dark reddish-brown, pale brown, green, and pale green) along with a small open jar of local honey.

We had a beautiful moment, yesterday, when two young women who grew up next door to us brought us a jar of honey in trade for our chickens' eggs. They're just visiting their parents' house, as they both moved out years ago, now, and it was lovely to catch up a bit, and chat about what flowers the bees were drinking from.

Here's how it works: Both my and these young women's parents bought land, when it was affordable, here. Our parents grow and tend to a plethora of flowers, fruit trees and vegetables. Their parents keep bees that drink from the flowers in both of our yards (and pollinate the veggies and fruits we grow, as well!) and we keep chickens, who not only fertilize our veggie garden, but provide eggs and meat that we can trade for this gorgeous honey… made partially from the nectar of our own flowers. The neighbours on the other side of us grow corn that for some reason we can't grow just a couple hundred feet to the west, so we delight in fresh corn, in August, in addition to all the crops we grow ourselves, and buy from others in the neighbourhood. All of us have to give away zucchini and other too-plentiful crops to the broader community, as well. And we teach people how to do what we do, because the more people do this, the richer we'll all be.

It seems really too idyllic to be true, but this is the dream my parents had in the seventies, and through three generations we've now managed to carry it on, to some extent. And it's the foundation of what it truly means to buy local.

Now here we are clenching our teeth, watching a bunch of fascists try to take over a rather large chunk of the world, munching through Hitler's playbook one vile action at a time. Whether you're here or there, or whether you're repulsed or scared by their actions, eating local is a good idea. In fact, eating local has always been a good idea, because it's sustainable. And now maybe the trade war or the scarcity caused by fascists kicking a large percentage of farm workers out of their countries will push more people to eat local, too. I hate to think there might be a silver-lining to all of this, but also I'd rather build that silver lining than only wither away amongst the negatives. I think maybe that silver lining is bigger than food, too. I think now we can we use our frantic flee from fascism as a leg-up on the way to save humanity from pernicious greed.

And it doesn't matter what country we live in, either. All of us are going to be affected by the trade-war, and all are going to be affected by food and labour shortages. But we don't have to suffer. Yesterday I saw someone asking where to get fresh local produce in winter. Well… we live up north, so we probably can't, unless it's from a greenhouse. So the question is not so much how to simply buy locally, but how to change our diets and expectations in order to buy locally.

Me? I only eat fresh corn in the summer. That's when it's abundant, here. And frankly, it tastes a lot better than whatever well-travelled corn is available in the stores in other seasons. Maybe I freeze some of my neighbour's corn in the summer, and can add it to a nice Spanish rice or pot of chili, right now. Because it's winter. I'm eating a lot of veggies, legumes, fruits and meats that I dried or froze last summer, along with some fresh greens that I'm growing on my windowsill and under a grow-light (pea-shoots, alfalfa sprouts, and a few lettuces). In fact, even if you don't store food yourself, the best-tasting food in the grocery store during a northern winter was flash-frozen fresh from local farms, last summer. A bag of frozen broccoli is much more delicious than those slightly grey imported broccolis in the fresh produce section.

It definitely takes a little more planning to eat what's locally grown and seasonally available, instead of just going for fresh avocados, tomatoes and apples, year-round. But I like a small challenge, and to be honest, it's not much of a challenge after you've done it for a year or two, and mostly… it's so enjoyable! That fresh corn that I only eat in summer? It's not only more delicious because it's fresh and comes from my smiling neighbours' hands; it's also more delicious because we only eat it during one month of the year! It's like Christmas treats: by the time we get back around to Christmas, we're craving that stuff! Scarcity makes things delicious.

But what about expense; affordability? Have you seen the prices at the local farmers' market?! This kind of seasonal local eating is only for the privileged, right? Well yes, to some degree I can see that line of thinking. I have a huge privilege in being able to farm on the land I rent, but my family is also on the lower end of the middle class, and we've managed to make these choices by prioritizing where we spend our money. Instead of taking vacations, we built a garden; instead of owning a home, we rent. We cut expenses wherever we can, and spend a little more on the things we feel matter most: a healthy home and meaningful time with our children. We spend more than most people on ethical, partly-foraged meat, because raising our own chickens, buying neighbours' lambs, local, sustainably-caught seafood, and local grass-fed beef and dairy is very expensive! So we minimize our consumption of it, and we supplement with legumes and pulses. I buy some dried and grow/dry some myself, and then I just soak them overnight, move them to a tray for sprouting, and cook them in a day or two, whenever I feel like it. We pay pennies per cup of food, this way. Unless we add expensive cheese, which… I confess happens more than it should!

But boxed cereals, cookies, prepared foods; even canned foods–these I consider a waste of money. Our culture spends a lot on processed foods that don't nourish us, and deplete not only our finances but also our land and cultural heritage. Learning to cook from scratch is a huge benefit not only to our health, but also to our pocketbooks. It's true that it takes more time, but for our family this became quality time. By the time my kids moved out they were fully capable of growing food and cooking from scratch. I can't imagine a more important skill, but it's also a point of bonding for us, as we still get together to make and share meals.

How about a useful list. I'm in the Pacific Northwest, and can only talk about my own experience, really. So here it is, a list of common locally-produced foods from my region. I'd be happy to hear yours!

Fruits:

  • Spring: blossoms! (OK it's not a fruit but you can see my reasoning…)
  • Summer: all kinds of berries, grapes, and stone-fruits
  • Late summer: figs, kiwis, more berries, tomatoes
  • Autumn: apples, pears, quinces, tomatoes
  • Early winter: persimmons,
  • Winter: stored apples (still fresh), jams, canned fruits, frozen fruits, and dried fruits

Greens:

  • Spring: Pea shoots, edible-pod peas, spinach, lettuces, overwintered kale and broccoli, wild greens
  • Summer: Lettuce, Chard, kale, cabbages, broccoli, green beans, shelled green peas, celery
  • Autumn: same as summer, plus spinach
  • Winter: some fresh kale, stored cabbages, frozen or dried greens, and fresh sprouts/shoots

Other vegetables:

  • Spring: seaweeds, overwintered cauliflower, baby carrots, asparagus
  • Summer: turnips, celeriac, carrots, beets, cauliflower, new potatoes, peppers, eggplants, artichokes, sunchokes, zucchini and other summer squashes
  • Autumn: same as summer, plus potatoes, winter squashes 
  • Winter: seaweeds, stored potatoes, carrots, sunchokes and squashes, canned or frozen other things, dried seaweeds, peas, beans and lentils

Grains:

  • Autumn: most of our local grains are harvested in late summer or autumn, and of course they store on our shelves all year, after that. We have quite a few available in our area, despite not being the prairie: oats, barley, wheat, rye, corn, buckwheat and sorghum are what I'm aware of.

Nuts and seeds:

  • Autumn: mainly hazelnuts (indigenous, here!), but also some walnuts, hemp seeds, pine nuts, beechnuts, and chestnuts.

Animal products: (not by season because some can vary, and most can also be stored frozen)

  • meat: fish, invertebrates, poultry, larger birds, rodents, lamb, pig, and beef. I believe it's more sustainable to only eat locally and ethically-grown meat, and to eat it only rarely, supplementing with eggs, legumes and pulses, as well.
  • eggs: although many non-industrially-farmed chickens produce fewer eggs in the winter, it does depend on the breed and the conditions, so it's absolutely possible to have fresh eggs all year round.
  • dairy: we have lots of local sustainable small dairies here, producing cow, goat, and sheep products!

Sweeteners: (mostly made in autumn; stored all year)

  • maple syrup, barley syrup, honey, corn syrup, and beet sugar.
  • apples, grapes, figs 

Salt, spices, etc.:

  • we do actually have sea salt produced on the west coast!
  • many herbs, peppers, seeds, spices, etc. are grown here and preserved before winter.
  • seaweeds, kelps

What to cook! This is just some of my favourites:

  • Spring: all the flowery salads, dairy, eggs, and bright fresh greens! Also legume/pea salads, wild-green and egg sandwiches.
  • Summer: (Do I have to say this, even?) ABUNDANCE of fresh and grilled foods!!! We even make our own ice cream by putting frozen fruit, honey and local cream into the food processor!
  • Autumn: pies (fruit and savoury), hearty soups, hot potato and grain dishes.
  • Winter: chili, stews, & casseroles made with dried and frozen produce, baked desserts of grains and dried fruits, 

I'm getting hungry writing this list. Yum. Every region of this earth has its own delicious range of available nutritious foods in every season. We can not only survive but absolutely thrive by embracing the goodness of the places we call home. Tomorrow, I'm going to make a fruit-filled bread with my eggs, honey, local butter, home-dried apples, and some locally-grown oats I can grind into flour using my handy little mill. 💛

Taking the Leap (away from fascism)

A red and orange and yellow background with a giant swoosh of white abstract paints and pencil lines and scratching that vaguely resemble a leaping bird wing.
"Escaping the Nest" (detail), by Emily van Lidth de Jeude

You can only get pushed and pushed and pushed to a certain point, and then it becomes easier to take a leap to somewhere else. That happened to us with our first child, as we tried to find his place in the landscape of school options, and nothing–just nothing–felt good to him. We had heard about some mysterious people who just didn't send their kids to school at all: unschoolers. Terrifying. But after some research, I timidly told our son's Kindergarten principal that we'd be joining the unschoolers. And to my shock, he agreed it was a good idea for our boy! I was scared, but we jumped. And suddenly we felt so free.

So the thing about jumping is that you do get this feeling of freedom, but then you have to land, and land running. I guess we've mastered that, now. We embraced the landing of our unschooling choice, and took step after stumbling step over the next ten or so years, until we discovered our kids (because our daughter chose to unschool as well) were fully capable teens running their own show. And now they're happy, independent adults, still running their own show. We made it! But it wasn't just lucky. It was planned.

You don't jump out of a plane with no preparation. Or at least I hope you don't. I jumped into the unschooling world after a bit of research and some deep heart-searching, because I needed to be sure I could give up my career for this. And I did. I bit the bullet and did it, and we're all OK!! The thing is about making big life-changes: you have to run with it. Don't go timidly. You go with intention, and determination to keep taking the next step, even as you're just starting the first one.

Same for getting married, for maintaining what has sometimes been a difficult marriage, for buying a new car, for taking a huge road-trip with the kids, for some of my biggest art projects, for growing our own food, for my kids when they decided to move out and support themselves, and now… for leaving fascist media in the dust, even though it feels like the whole world depends on it.

Yep. This week I spent every spare minute researching and planning for my leap away from Meta, Paypal, Amazon, and Windows. (I never used X to begin with.) Poof! In two weeks I'll be free of all of them. And yes that includes their hard-copy shops like Whole Foods. Done.

Is it scary? YES!! Especially because most of my friends and even my own kids are not following suit. I've only managed to find a few dozen of my community members on BlueSky, and even fewer on Mastodon. But I have faith that number will grow and, on the whole, I feel delighted. (Edited a year later to add: While there are indeed more locals on BlueSky, I have basically abandoned it now, because Mastodon is far better, and far more open-minded.)

I think I'm in the free-fall stage of taking a leap. I'm buoyed by that feeling of weightless joy that I feel at the top of a swing's arc. I made profiles on BlueSky and Mastodon, and spent two days messaging contacts on Meta and asking for their email addresses and phone numbers. My Contacts folders are now a thing of beauty. 

But the best part is that I've had a few really wonderful conversations (by text and email) with some friends I've not spoken to in years. It turns out I was seeing almost nothing of what my friends posted on Meta, and now I'm finally connecting with these people! Even my European cousins are jumping off WhatsApp and we've moved our cousins-chat to Signal. With a little faith, all this turns out to be easy. It's like a refreshment for my heart and mind! Remember when we used to just call each other for a visit? Or simply drop by? I hope that becomes normal, again.

So, I need a parachute, right? That list of friends' contacts is my parachute. I spent a good long time creating it, and I trust that it will hold me. I've been researching where to get goods locally to replace the things I shamefully relied on getting through Amazon. Additionally, I'll have to learn to use a Linux operating system. That's going to be my next big task. Thankfully I live with a man who has some experience with it, so I know I'll manage. And even one of the locals who's also migrating off of Meta has offered to coach me. We have a beautiful community.

I guess the thing about taking a big leap is to just do it. In all of these situations I got pushed so far I couldn't not jump. In this case, I just know that there is no possible way I can live with myself if I support or am even associated with fascist companies. Being confronted by the irrefutable fascism of these people has pushed me off their platforms. Period. Now I just have to hit the ground running, and I think I can manage that. See you on the other side!

*I'm aware that many people feel we have to stay on these media to transform them. But that's just not me. I like working from the ground up, and now I'm off to help with building something better. For more details on why I'm leaving fascist media, etc. please check out my previous post: My Grandmother's Cocoa and How We Overcome Fascism

My Grandmother's Cocoa and How We Overcome Fascism

A hand lifts the lid of an antique Droste's Cocoa tin. There is red dutch-processed cocoa powder, inside.

On my shelf is this old can of cocoa. It says "Droste" and gives a weight "For Eng. and the Colonies". For me, this can of cocoa carries more than 1lb of memories and warnings.

When I was in my early teens I went to the kitchen of our double-wide trailer, stood at the upper extension of my tip-toes, and slid this red and blue metal can off our harvest-yellow fridge. It had been there as long as I could remember, and I'm not sure why this day, of all others, I finally made hot chocolate for myself, but I did. And since I'd looked in that can many times, I knew where to find my ingredients. 

Maybe fifteen minutes later I sat on the couch, fully proud and enjoying my first self-made hot-chocolate. I found something crunchy in my mouth and, already a fan of chocolate-covered coffee beans, I crunched away at the small bean and said, "aw, Mum! You got your coffee beans in the cocoa." 

"I can't imagine how," she said, disinterested. And I began to crunch another. But I thought better of it, and took it out of my mouth to see. It was a beetle! A small, black, coffee-bean-shaped beetle, desiccated and swirled with all its brethren into my hot chocolate.

"Gross!!" I yelled, and hurried to the kitchen to begin rinsing my mouth and spitting vigorously into the sink. 

Mum followed me. "Where did you get the cocoa?" She asked, with a wry smile.

"From the cocoa can! On the fridge!"

She began laughing. "Oh that's Grootmoeder's. From before the war!"

'Before the war.' Or, in Grootmoeder's words, 'in former days'—this was a topic we all heard about quite often, as storytelling was part of the way my grandmother dealt with her trauma from that time, along with keeping mementos. Our cocoa can was apparently one of those mementos. It was a reminder to her and to future generations of the terrifying shaking of planes overhead, of a deep gnawing in her empty stomach and a deeper fear that the baby in her arms would die of starvation. It was a reminder of the days she slipped under cover of night over rubble and into farmers' fields to steal tulip bulbs to stay alive, but never ever ever used the cocoa. Why? Because she needed a sign of hope that one day cocoa would not be just a relic of 'former days'. 

"Former days' were when Grootmoeder made chocolate treats for my grandfather, read the news and medical journals as compensation for giving up her dream of becoming a doctor in order to get married. When personal sorrows such as hers competed for space in her mind with the news telling of Hitler's determination to invade Poland, and other such worrisome things. I mean, it wasn't as though Hitler was actually new news. His rise to power began the year Grootmoeder was born, so to a young woman on the verge of starting a family, it wasn't exactly alarming. And besides, who wants to be alarmed? Who wants to set aside the demands of daily life to fight for something that may not be such a big deal, especially to a young, privileged, non-jewish Dutch woman? And what could she, a nineteen-year-old, possibly do to help the situation, anyway? She wanted to, of course, but her dream of becoming a doctor was in the process of being shoved under the carpet, and even if war should happen, she wouldn't be tending to injured soldiers.

Five years later she was nursing a baby from her own starving body, while trying to cook tulip bulbs on a dark, makeshift flame, while the buildings around her crumbled. And hidden away with other treasures was a can of cocoa that said "For Eng. and Colonies Net. 1lb." The fact that that cocoa came from a vast landscape of colonial murder and exploitation on the other side of the world, just to be processed and sold not only to my privileged grandmother but also back to the people still colonizing the out-of-sight-out-of-mind Americas was, truly, out-of-mind, to my grandmother, in former days. She had other things to worry about.

As Canadians, on the day after the new regime in America started Nazi-soluting their crowds, freeing violent fascist leaders from prison, and declaring their intentions of annexing various regions of the world, including Canada, we may feel similarly. Maybe it's more important to get our kids to school, today; to keep the peace in a community that's feeling the climatic and geo-political stresses and starting to fray at the edges. Maybe we're too stunned by the US government's sudden and bold conversion to what looks very much like a dictatorship (sweeping unilateral powers handed to the President, reworking of the official government website to remove the constitution and replace it with military imagery, declarations of intent to take over other territories, and commentary about there never being another election). Maybe we Canadians have our own pending elections and fascist contenders to worry about, and, like in the US, where about a third of potential voters didn't vote at all, the silent many could very well determine the outcome. And besides, our neighbours are all angry with us for not speaking up about their causes often enough.

Maybe it seems all hopeless and we just curl up with a hot cocoa for some Netflix hygge time. Maybe you don't want to hear me compare this Canadian moment to that time my grandmother was turning twelve and the Dutch National Socialist Movement was founded, in her country. Because did that really matter, compared to what was happening in Germany? And it was all just "news". What could she have done, anyway?

And here this can sits, on my shelf in Canada, with fresher cocoa in it, and I am self-medicating my very real personal traumas and fears about the future of my world with cocoa that, while supposedly ethically farmed and produced, hearkens back to pre-WWII and reminds me that we're all making choices in all our various moments that may be the difference between eating cocoa and eating tulip bulbs.

We have mundane obligations—yes. We do need to keep ourselves fed and our minds and communities peaceful. And we have opportunities in every action we take to courageously love through our fear. My teenaged grandmother watched the rise of fascism in her country and I'm watching it now, in mine. And all of us have, I feel, the responsibility to work to end short-sighted, morally blind, and greed-motivated thinking in our own communities. Because all fascist leaders began as children in communities, somewhere. All of us have influence on people who may one day oppress us or our loved ones. So that's where we need to do our work.

For me, the work looks like this:

  • Educating myself (with factually and ethically sound sources) on everything I can possibly learn, but especially the functioning of our current society, so that I might better understand the implications and consequences of my daily actions. 
  • Deleting my accounts (and thus no longer supporting or being exploited by) Amazon, Twitter, Paypal, Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, and anything else I soon may find to be associated with the group of mega-billionaires now running the fascist uprising.
  • Seeking to understand and have compassion for others, while still speaking out (gently) when others are causing harm—especially if they don't see it, themselves.
  • Building community: volunteering and supporting others who volunteer in my community. Being engaged in public processes and informed about past, current and future events.
  • Spreading factual information (hopefully non-combatively) in every way I can.
  • Voting at all levels of government. And encouraging others to vote, as well.

I posted recently on a home-canning group I'm a member of, and mentioned something about "hard times ahead". Instantly a bunch of other canners jumped on my comment with laughy-faces and remarks about the coming golden age of America, promised by their newly-elected leader. They were obviously canning the Kool-Aid. 

Let us not be fooled by a smiling face on a can of cocoa or a militarized website. I'm the granddaughter of a Dutch woman who nursed her baby from a starving body, and I'm married to the grandson of a Nazi soldier whose family was impoverished, shunned, and living in extreme fear, after the war. Both of our families carry immense trauma from that time. The last time fascism took hold like it is right now, everybody on every side of all the borders suffered, except the richest few. That's always the way. 

This coming 'golden age' is not for America, it's for the richest few. It's a return to feudalism, and we are the exploited masses. (Watch Yanis Varoufakis explain this, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3FdIyNMaFY) If you're reading this, you're unlikely to be one of the richest few, so we're all serfs in this boat, together. It's not the 'other people' (however you want to define your personal xenophobic preferences) who are causing the problem. It's the people massaging our fears. And together with the diversity of all the other serfs, we're the majority. We can build the future we want to see. 

We are not powerless. We overcome the fascism by refusing to fight, vilify or other our fellow citizens. We overcome the oppression put upon us by creating local abundance and resilience in our own communities. We overcome the fear used to control us by opening our arms to embrace each other. That is how we win.

…
…….
…
Editing this post to add relevant links, for those wanting to understand more about the current regime:

What is wrong with Stargate: https://www.devx.com/experts/matt-wolfe-explains-project-stargate-and-their-500-billion-dollar-plan/

Why leave Meta (beyond their end of fact-checking, diversity employment, and their permissive stance on hate-speech against lgbtq and immigrants (yes–it's worse!)): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3FdIyNMaFY

How AI can be used to support fascism and looking into how to resist that (podcast): https://researchpod.org/university-of-bristol/transforming-society/developing-anti-fascist-ai

Forbes' explanation of the new DEI rules: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/01/23/trumps-diversity-orders-rattle-ceos-what-companies-should-know-about-new-dei-rules/

Health and Science devastation: https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-hits-nih-devastating-freezes-meetings-travel-communications-and-hiring

Something more hopeful: Elisabet Sahtouris (evolutionary biologist) on the evolutionary inevitability of cooperation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMAPIlUJwmQ

The Shed

Sunbeams and bits of fog flood this photo, from behind a tall Douglas fir tree and a young Sequoia. In the foreground, an old shed with a cedar-shake roof sits steaming. It's also listing to the right, and under a lean-to on the left of it, an orange tractor is parked.

Pappa built this shed in 1983, when I was seven. With his confident hands he cut the trees on this land, bucked them up, and built a whole life for us, this building being one of the first big things. He used logs for a foundation, and built a frame of scrap wood and home-milled beams and planks. He used a simple froe to cut hundreds of cedar shakes for the roof, and when he was finished he installed the headboard from my brother’s bunk-bed as a ship’s wheel at the end of the hayloft, and he added a little electric propeller to the front door, so we could pretend we were flying a plane.

My brother and I and all our friends slept many nights in the hayloft, convinced there weren’t any spiders, by night, even though by day the palm-sized wolf spiders crouched between many of the shakes over our heads. We could sleep with our heads by the steering wheel and watch the stars run by.

The shed is being pushed by a tractor from the left, and leaning hard to the right where a man and a golden retriever are walking.

This is the shed where we slaughtered rabbits, raised chickens, hosted haunted houses and tea parties, and eventually made some carpentry projects. It’s the shed my own children think of as the steam train, for the way its roof steams in the winter chill. And after forty-one years, its life is over. The logs that support its sturdy plank-floor have rotted away, and the shed is listing dangerously.

The shed is now falling halfway to the ground, and the man is reaching down to pull the golden retriever to safety.

So this weekend, after slowly emptying it of two generations’ worth of tools and other “useful things”, Pappa pushed it over with his tractor.

The roof of the shed has hit the ground, and the man and dog are looking back at it from the side.

It’s hard to see it go, in a year that already gutted our family, but in a way, this evening’s hot dog roast over the flaming pieces of the shed was a kind of letting go. Maybe fire leaves devastation in its wake. Maybe it takes and takes ravenously. But it also cleans.

A large fire burns in the foreground, and behind it, semi-obscured by flames, a man with a white beard and baseball hat sits, looking into the flames. he looks sad, and is holding his hands together in front of his knees.

I feel a bit like I was washed by the flames, tonight. I wonder if that’s how my mother’s flesh and bone felt, as it was burning up in the crematorium. Now she’s become the heat that rose up into that spectacular sunset on the night she burned, and her bones, the tiniest white fragments—molecules mixing with the humus and mineral earth. I hope she feels clean, now. Things look different around her without the shed.

The Little Threadbare Bag of Advices From the After Times

foreground. Photo by Emily van Lidth de Jeude.

When people talk about severely traumatic events, they often refer to "The Before Times". I heard this during Covid, when we could look back at carefree parties and hugs with our grandparents. I felt this when my father died, and his half of my family crumbled, and I remembered all the beautiful times we'd spent together, not knowing they were our last. 

The Before Times are always somehow fanciful. All the negativity disappears and we pine for those Before Times like unrequited dreams. We long for and resent our lost innocence. Before I had Long Covid, I could just walk around on the streets and up the mountains and down into the valleys. In the After Times of Long Covid, I sat in my car and watched people walk by on the sidewalk, wondering how they did it. Walking seems miraculous, now. Those times when I could just call my Dad up to tell him about my day seem like magical memories. Those times when our children played together in the blissful company of grandparents who are now gone seem miraculous, now–now that we're in the After Times, where we are jaded and distrustful and fearful. We're in the After Times, where we are wiser. Supposedly. Wisdom, too, is not what we thought it was, when we were innocent.

I'm still waiting to feel wiser about my mother's death. I know I'm in the After Times, now, but I've just stepped over the threshold and I'm totally lost. People keep offering me pieces of wisdom, and every time I think, "Ah-ha! That's something that can help me on my journey!" And I stick the wisdom into my little threadbare bag of emotional tricks to pull out when it will inevitably be required on my Big Adventure Into the After Times. Like: "It's OK to cry; that means you're connecting with your mother," and "Mourning is a sickness. Like Long Covid. You've learned to integrate and adapt to that sickness; you can do it again." And every time these words feel like they came directly from the Deep Dark Mystical Universe of the After Times, where people are wiser and all the ones who've lost their mothers were apparently waiting around to catch my fall, and pull me into their embrace. Thank you.

A hand is pulling a dainty white handkerchief out of a faded pink-brown purse with a metal clasp. A huge flash of sunlight reflects off the metal clasp.
Mum's little purse with her handkerchief.

And those pieces of wisdom hang out of my little threadbare bag of tricks; their invisible heavy tendrils dragging on the ground as I wander along. This is my bag, now. It was my mother's very fancy purse when I was small. She kept her handkerchief in it, and a thin Lancôme lipstick, and a smaller, matching purse for money. It carries the Memories That Kept Little Me Safe, when it was hers, and not mine, and I didn't understand this little bag. Now it's mine, in the After Times, and I'm filling it with the Advices of the Wise Ones.

One of the things I couldn't have known in the Before Times is the value of tears. I remember my mother's tears hitting this bag, inconceivably, as she reached in to get her lipstick, because they sometimes fell when nothing seemed to be the matter at all. And I remember them hitting this little bag; how it darkened with the damp, and how my mother swore at her own tears. Now I see the tears in the eyes of these Wise Ones; the weight and vulnerability and frankness of being The Ones Who Held Everything Together in the Before Times, but then the tether broke. 

Now we're floating. Lost. Nothing is together and we are free like we never wanted to be. We have tears falling when nothing seemed to be the matter at all, but their dampness leaves stains that are inconceivable to those who haven't yet arrived in the After Times. Now I'm one of these Wise Ones and these tears are my welcome mat. And my wisdom-offerers are crying, because even after all the years of living in the After Times, the sorrow is not less. It's just integrated. And it's good to know someone understands. Accepts my tears. Our mothers are gone.

The sorrow doesn't get less. It just gets integrated. That was one of the mystical advices offered to me in the Before Times, but I didn't understand it. I just added it my little threadbare bag of advices, where it sat unused on my mother's shelf, in the times when I didn't know what that bag was for; nor how to use it or what it meant, or even how it was possible at all. People gave me this advice and I couldn't see it, because I was in the Before Times. We can't fathom what we have never seen. So my bag sat on a shelf in my mother's house, quietly, being hers.

But now I'm here in the After Times. My beautiful Mama was wiped off the earth so that everything that was so real and tangible before feels now like a cruel slap in the face; a memory of wonder and longing: her arms around me; her little red purse and strange assortment of French lipsticks; her mystical explanation that soon it will be my turn to understand; her tears telling me goodbye; her voice and her song and her love. Now I'm the wise one because I live in the After Times, with my sisters and my aunties and even my dead mother. Now I'm the wise one because I have the experience none of us ever wanted to have. 

Now I meet the people whose mothers are aging; dying maybe slowly or imminently or in some far-off unknown and terrifying future, and suddenly they look to me like I'm a keeper of this horrible wisdom. But I look away from their searching gaze and into my Little Threadbare Bag of Advices From the Wise Ones of the After Times, and I wonder if I'm supposed to dispense these now, or wait. The answer is wait. These people who have not yet lost their mothers are still living in that blissful and mystical Before Time, and none of the Advices will help them because they don't yet know the horror. 

This Bag of After Times Advices is like a set of unlabelled keys to a house of horrors. You can't know which keys fit which doors because you can't yet see the doors. We can't fathom what we've never seen. 

Don't think you need to be prepared. You can't look over the threshold. You will have to reach the After Times, eventually. But not now. 

Right now, you still live in the Before Times. Do that, instead. Live those Before Times like they are your last. Because they are; all of them are. Live them with your children and your parents and your friends and the lost ones and the found ones. Because one day you will look back and say "Why did I waste those Before Times not knowing how magical and mystically beautiful they were?!" And you'll put that too into your own Little Bag of After Times Advices, and you will look at those who haven't crossed over yet, and understand that nobody can give advice to the uninitiated, because we can't fathom what we've never seen. 

Anyway, it doesn't matter how much you treasure your Before Times, it will never be enough. The more you love, the more you lose, but the losing is a kind of sublime sorrow that means you loved. So love. Just love.

I went out to see the auroras last night, and I cried. And it was beautiful, and I cried. I had to force myself to leave the house, because my grief feels like a prison, sometimes, but I went anyway. It was the first time ever I saw the aurora dance, and I was heartbroken not to be sharing it with my mother, so I told myself she was everywhere. In the auroras. That's one of the Advices From My Little Bag. Then I met another person on this horrible beautiful threshold of the After Times, and I did not open my Little Bag of Advices. We just cried. And in the dancing lights, I saw her tears.

Remembering Lyn van Lidth de Jeude

A woman with long straight white hair in a dark brown knee-length sweater and black pants, stands looking down and smiling at a golden retriever, who is also smiling, sitting on her feet, where she stands in her garden. There are forget-me-not flowers all around her feet, and in her hands she is holding a bouquet of raspberry-pink and violet rhododendron flowers, and parsley leaves.
Lyn in her garden with her dog, Kalea.

Our mother and life partner, a lover of song and beauty. A singer, a gardener, wife, mother, grandmother, friend, teacher, and creator and spreader of love, died peacefully on September 18th 2024, five months after receiving her brain tumour diagnosis.

Lyn van Lidth de Jeude helped raise countless children in her 40 year career as an early childhood educator, infant development consultant, and music therapist. Through her dedication and constant love for every child in her care, Lyn worked tirelessly to ensure that they all started off with a strong foundation.

While you may not have guessed it, Lyn was born in Daytona Beach Florida, and a piece of her identity was her deep ranching roots in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Her father Horatio Ham, an engineer, moved the family of 5 kids many times until the final move north to West Vancouver. Once here, Lyn attended West Van High and Capilano College ending with a degree in music therapy.

Music was always a fundamental part of her life. From her many many years with the Vancouver folk song society to her participation in Bowen Island choirs (the Madrigals, Song Roots, and the Community Choir). She also instilled the love of music in her children and shared her songs whenever she could.

Lyn and her husband Everhard moved to Bowen Island in 1978. As she engaged in life with her young family, Lyn quickly grew to love her community and developed deep friendships, choosing to see her friends as family and treating them as such.

In 1993, the family moved to the interior, where Lyn worked as a music therapist and infant development consultant in Kamloops. Lyn and Everhard returned to Bowen Island in 2006, where Lyn again joined the Bowen Children's Centre, with a desire to give back to her own community.

Throughout her life it was most important to love, help, and respect people who needed it. From volunteering at the Nook or the Recycling Depot, the Garden Club or the Conservancy, or delivering food for the Legion, or the countless other community endeavours, Lyn loved to help.

She is survived by her family and many, many friends.

Shortly before she died, Lyn dictated the following message, which she asked us to pass on to her loved ones after her death:

For the people I love,
My time is finished, now. I would like you to know how much you mean to me. I have appreciated the connections and love we’ve shared. I hope you will continue to find beauty in the world.
Lyn

A beautiful woman with long straight white-blond hair sits on a porch, playing a small acoustic guitar. She's looking down at her fingers forming the chord. She's wearing a pale lilac dress and a pair of glasses. It's a sunny day.
Lyn playing guitar on her own porch.

More links, videos and photos for those who might want to spend some time remembering the beauty that was Lyn:

Obituary from the Vancouver Folksong Society: Remembering Lyn van Lidth de Jeude

A man with short stand-up brown hair in a plaid shirt sits holding a baby on his lap, and she's holding a dolly on her own lap. He is smiling at the camera; she is laughing and pointing at the camera. Wearing a little white baby dress.
Lyn on her father's lap.
A black and white photo of a band on stage. Woman on left plays bass violin, woman in the middle is Lyn and stands not singing at a microphone, waiting as the man on the right, with a large acoustic guitar, appears to be taking a solo. Lyn is wearing a loud printed dress, 60's style.
Lyn performing with her band in the late 60's.
A young woman in a blue jacket is riding a horse in the wind on a beach with large ocean waves crashing in the background.
Lyn in the early 1970's
A woman in a white printed blouse and dark orange pants sits on a low seat in a living room, singing and playing guitar. She has long brown hair falling down her shoulders and back, and is pregnant.
Lyn, pregnant with Emily in 1975.
A woman holds a young child on her lap, reading a book. THey are both visibly laughing because they are reading Little Bear's Visit, the child's favourite book.
Lyn reading Emily's favourite story, where the gnome loses his shoes and they come to find him! Watch Lyn reading a funny catalogue with her grandson, here: https://youtu.be/WBWCPy9LpXM
A woman sits on a dock with seaside bluffs in the background. She is laughing at the camera, and holding a little laughing boy ontop of their big fluffy dog.
Lyn, baby Adrian, and Chis Chila.
A wild-looking yard with a line full of laundry on the left and a makeshift shed on the right. In the shed, a man and woman stand slaughtering two rabbits, which are hanging from strings at the edge of the shed. The man is handing the kidneys to the couple's black fluffy dog, who is sitting politely, waiting.
Lyn and Everhard on their first homestead, slaughtering rabbits. Everhard is feeding the kidneys to Chis Chila.
A woman with short grey and white hair stands on a handmade footbridge in the Swiss alps, smiling at the camera because the love of her life is behind it.
Lyn in Switzerland, smiling at the love of her life, Everhard, behind the camera. 1999
A man and a woman in winter clothing and hats, standing in cross-country skis on a snow-covered frozen lake.
Lyn and Everhard skiing in the interior.
A woman stands bending over her two grandchildren, hugging them. Her long white hair tumbles down over them both. The boy has long brown hair and looks safe and happy under her hair, where she's kissing his head. The girl, with long blond hair, is peeking out from her grandmother's white hair, and smiling.
Lyn's love for her grandchildren was perfect. This photo was taken at her retirement party. Watch Lyn singing traditional Canadian folksongs with her granddaughter's class, here: https://youtu.be/LQ7VeLUyZz8
A woman in a large garden stands on a tall folding ladder, measuring a huge sunflower, that was over 13 feet tall. It hangs over her and the flower is bigger than her head.
Lyn measuring her award-winning sunflower that was over 13 feet tall!
A woman standing singing at a microphone, with a beautiful open smile!
Lyn singing a traditional ballad at the Princeton Traditional Music Festival. Watch Lyn singing at the PTMF, here: https://youtu.be/VrBNiLGm_0Q
A man with short dark blond hair and a very short beard, wearing a black cartoon t-shirt and a blue ribbon, stands with his arm around his mother. She is shorter than he is, and has long straight white hair, glasses, and is wearing a pink sleeveless shirt. They are both smiling happily.
Adrian and Lyn on Adrian's 40th birthday.
A man with a short grey and white beard and glasses sits smiling in a pale yellow collared shirt, looking to the left. A woman with long white hair pulled back looks at him with her hand held partially in front of her face. She is smiling and really her whole face beams with love and affection for this man, who is her husband.
Everhard and Lyn at friends' wedding celebration.
A woman sits at the front of a canoe, paddling. She has long white hair pulled back into a bun, and is paddling on her left side. The man who took the photo, from the back of the canoe, was her husband and the love of her life.
Lyn paddling in BC's interior. Photo by Everhard.
A scene with an orange Kobota tractor hauling a black utility trailer with foot-high sides. A young long-haired man in a grey hoodie is driving the tractor, but turned to the camera, smiling. In the trailer an adult man with short dark blond hair, jeans, and a grey sweater, is smiling, with his hands holding a smiling golden retriever. A woman in a blue rain jacket with long straight white hair stands at the side of the trailer, and is lifting the dog's floppy ears up so it looks like she's flying. This is a happy family portrait on a work day.
Adrian, Lyn and Taliesin with the happiest dog in the world, Kalea.
Two woman are partially obscured by a large red currant bush, where they are harvesting berries. They are leaning, heads close together. The woman on the left has dark brown hair pulled into a bun, and the woman on the right has white hair pulled into a bun.
Emily and Lyn harvesting red currants together.

Songs of the Apocalypse

In a triptych called "Three Craws", four ravens are seen in a mess of expressive white paint. One, on the right, caws towards the middle. In the middle, one sits hunched while the other screams in his face, the white lines of his voice filling both the middle and left panel. On the left panel a fourth raven hangs, dead.
"Three Craws", oil and graphite on 3 stretched canvases. Emily van Lidth de Jeude

Songs of the Apocalypse is a series I’ve been working on since around the time my birth father died. He had lived a long time with Parkinson’s, but the circumstances of his death in hospital, while recovering from spinal surgery, are a complete mystery, and in that post-shock landscape of fear, confusion, and a resurgence of shallow-buried family traumas, his side of my family fell apart. So this series of paintings began as a way for me to deal with my emotions of that time. But of course those personal issues are deeply intertwined with the societal issues we all live with: helplessness in the face of climate change, capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal damage, global societal upheaval, and the fallout from those things. For example, many of my own childhood experiences are a direct result of my grandparents’ war traumas. Two of my grandparents come from families fleeing war and famine in Ukraine and Ireland. Others recently lived here through the great depression, and all of these unknowingly stored those experiences in the many generations to come. So those bigger-picture problems filtered down through the generations to effect even my own children’s health and genetic makeup, a hundred years later. Divorce, childhood trauma, and family strife are just microcosms of the bigger picture. So in dealing with individual portraits I’m also looking at our society as a whole. In looking at the wounds and the healing, I’m hoping to create psychological pathways for us all to heal from the greatest struggles we face.

My parents did everything they could to support me, given the understanding and tools of our time. They created a safe and nurtured life for me on a small island, and they continue to support me in my adulthood. But life cannot be perfect. Life is not about good and bad, but about all people constantly growing. And growing looks very messy.

"(I open my mouth and) nothing comes out", oil and graphite on stretched canvas. Emily van Lidth de Jeude

The circumstances of my childhood were not what we consider to be ideal, but they’re also not at all uncommon. Like many of us, I live with intergenerational traumas from histories of war, colonialism, famine, and domestic abuse. These things are rarely spoken about, as our culture tends to look down upon expressing too much emotion or speaking about emotionally challenging topics. But the effects of my buried experiences are borne in my body as autoimmune diseases, and they’re in my paintings. The image above is one of the first I painted in the Songs of the Apocalypse series. It’s a depiction of my own face as it appears to me in dreams, screaming for all I’m worth to help the people I love (who are always suffering horrible fates in my dreams)… but no sound is coming out. And nobody hears me. As an artist I’m trying to break that helpless invisibility, not just for me but for all of us.

I am a woman in a world where one in three women has been the victim of physical or sexual violence, usually by a partner or close family member. So think of three women you know. Which one is it? Think of twelve women you know. How many of the four has told you their stories? I am a woman in a world where women are not only not expected to achieve, but are taught not to expect ourselves to achieve. A world where we’re expected to be happy to just survive.

"Will You Love My Heart", oil and graphite on 8 stretched canvases. Emily van Lidth de Jeude

I don’t call myself a survivor because I want to do more than survive. This is a portrait of me at one, four, eleven and sixteen. It’s called Will You Love my Heart, and is painted to Sinéad O’Connor’s song, Love is Ours. It’s on exhibit July 24-August 18 at the Silk Purse Gallery in West Vancouver. As a synaesthete, I usually paint music, but not just any music. The song that inspires a painting will have a very specific meaning associated with my own memory, so what I’m painting is my visual experience of that song combined with my own memory and emotion. Love is Ours is about holding onto the pieces of our broken hearts and keeping each other alive. In our boxes of personal experience we grow out into the rest of the world, and then will we be loved? Or shoved back down into our private little trauma boxes? I’ve spent my whole life since my teens trying to get out of that box, to find love and healing, and grow into the many links between my heart and yours (yes you—we’re all connected). 

I figure it’s a good idea to let my voice come out now, share my progress and hopefully inspire billions of others to do the same. That’s why I’m finally beginning to show the Songs of the Apocalypse series.

So think of those women again. Those 12 women, four of whom have been assaulted. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe your child is, or your partner or your mother or your dearest friend. What can you do in this moment to raise her up out of the box built of her trauma? What can you do to break the walls of the box? How can you change even one thing about the space you give her; the voice you give her; the respect you give her, that could help her find her own way out of the box? And how does your love make her strong?

I’m a feminist artist with a loving, evolving male partner and a strong, courageous daughter, and an extremely emotionally-aware son. Being the strongest I can be strengthens the foundations for everyone, including all genders, ages and classes of people. It even will combat climate change, colonialism, the patriarchy, and capitalism, because as I become stronger I can lean less on the cultural norms that hold up those false shelters. Creating a world where I can come out of my box and thrive means creating a world where everyone can thrive. Equality doesn’t mean bringing anybody down. It means using the pathways created by love to hold each other up.

A tiny white child's Christening dress is laid out on a pale yellow background. The dress has ruffles with a chain painted onto them, and from underneath, a baby peeks out, holding a doll to its chest in a protective way.
"Chain Dress", acrylic and stains on an altered child's dress. Emily van Lidth de Jeude

Listening for Birds: Cancer Is Not a Journey

A small graphite-drawn Swainson's thrush is swept up in a mess of green, white, and graphite swooshes. Abstract painting by Emily van Lidth de Jeude
“Go and Make Yourself Content, My Love” (detail).
Swainson's thrush in my mother’s garden, to the tune of the Unquiet Grave.
Painted with acrylic, graphite and coloured pencil, by Emily van Lidth de Jeude.

I was walking down from my parents' house to mine, over the crest of their driveway where the wind blows steady. Not like the rest of the property, through which it tumbles this way and that, scatters just a few leaves, or bursts out of a single storming fern. Over the crest of the hill at the top of my parents' driveway, the wind passes smoothly and calmly, sometimes crisp and smelling of leaves, sometimes damp with the weight of snow and sometimes full of the heaviness of summer and dragonfly wings. I've walked here alone and with my children after Christmas dinner, my heart and belly and arms full of treasures. I've walked here holding my chest against hidden sobs when I couldn't be what the world wanted of me. I've walked on my parents' driveway even when they lived in a different house and I visited rarely, and always it has been a place of the wind and the gathering and freeing of perception and feelings. A place of reckoning or accepting. Not that night.

I was walking down from my parents' house on the evening we came home from our first trip to the Cancer Clinic, two weeks after the sudden and unexpected removal of a stage-four tumour from my mother's brain. I was walking down that driveway and there was no wind. The driveway felt flat, although it's not, and it's rocky, but the rocks were dead that evening, which they never are. The April grasses and blossoming trees were bereft of colour. Impossibly grey. There was no birdsong, no frogsong, not even the sound of leaves, and when I looked at the hillside I thought it might just go away, if my mother died. When my mother dies. She keeps reminding me: "We all have to die, sometime." But I don't want those words. That was one of the many logical thoughts that evaporated when the doctor told us we won't be returning from this trip. And we stared blankly into the empty air and our tears were silent.

I find the word "journey" as people use it for cancer absurd. We use it like we can pack for a trip and just take in the ride. But it's not that kind of ride.

Glioblastoma. Someone should make a horror carnival ride called Glioblastoma. You get in a little comfy bucket seat and it chucks you out into the sea. Then down a vortex you go, into a drain where you almost drown but NO! You're not allowed to drown! There are things to live for and places to see and you might have a few days or weeks or months or years of good life, so LIVE!!! And you can't feel your right side, and you can't find all the words that were here just yesterday, but now more than ever, you want to, need to LIVE!! So you come out of the vortex on the chemo train, where you get whipped back and forth over trestle and track without warning or reason through whacking slaps of sheer terror and poofy clouds of deep love and acceptance: A bird? NO! Slash! You're going to die! Slash! Maybe not so fast–Slash! Everybody is trying to help you–Slash! You're so strong–Slash!–Take some more pills–Slash! Love, love love–Slash! 

Love can't save you and everybody's talking to you like a child–Slash! Now you're the wise one–Slash! Let's finish your sentences for you–Slash! We could get an ice-cream!

Slash! You get to meet the guy who will administer your death–Slash–but only when you want him to–Slash–Be GRATEful!!

Slash!

Nobody wants you to die!–Slash–Let's go shopping!–Slash

Why are you so tired?           Slash.

Slash. 

You fall out from the carnival ride one sunny morning, and you smile up at the sky and look for birds. 

But there aren't any. 

My mother loves birds. My whole life has been decorated with her hushed exclamations of "oh! A warbler!" and "Did you hear the snow geese go by this evening?" My mother hears things many of us don't notice, like the pips of babies and the tone of ducks that tells her whether they're coming or going. When my father gently delivered a helpless baby owl into my childhood, my mother raised it on chopped liver and caught mice until it grew up and flew to the trees. But she heard its voice separate from the other owls, and she answered it, and taught us to make the hungry-teenage-owl call, too: Psssshhht! Pssssssshhhhhhhttt! That owl and its offspring came back to visit us for decades.

Terminal cancer is a strange thing. We want a timeline. Something to hang a hat on. To work with. To put in the calendar, and at the same time we want to live in the moment and not have to plan for death or even how to visit with all the loved ones. But just to sit and hear the birds. Except the chaos of medical interventions, social supports and emotional upheaval means not a minute exists of just. Peace. 

Until one day, we can't take the chaos anymore. Out of necessity we ignore the forms we're supposed to be filling out and decline the offers of new prescriptions, new dosages, delivered meals and all the services we know are needed. One day we just need to be.

This week I saw my father's eyes in a rare moment of stillness. They used to shine with his intensity; they used to sparkle and shoot beams of aliveness. But recently they've looked tired, and there were big wide tears balanced on his lower lids and he was just making a sandwich. I don't hear so much as I see, and I am starting to see again. I saw my brother's cheeks, this week, taut with small lines of agony as he pulled me into his arms and didn't let go. As he asked if he can take our mother to have her broken arm looked at. Cancer is not a journey. It's a horrible carnival ride, and sometimes we catch glimpses of the world, as we spin. Sometimes, also, we catch glimpses of the beauty that brought us here to begin with; that holds us up through the fear and the changes we didn't see coming. My parents walked out, hand in hand, today, to look at the blossoming of the world they share.

And I began to hear the birdsong, this evening. The teen-aged ravens are pillaging the robins' nests, to a great outcry, as you can imagine. We thought the black-headed grosbeak that my mother says only comes for a short time every spring had left, but it's been singing again. The wrens and towhees are hopping in the bushes, until they flit out to the pine, to make their plans. The offspring of our owl are impressing people along the trails, these days. And for some reason the flickers keep sitting around on the ground. My father says get the aphids out of my apple tree, but I can't reach them and we both know that's OK. Bats are out, tonight, delighting my peripheral vision. And as I walk up over the crest of my parents' driveway this evening, I hear the nighthawks dropping on their prey, all around me. The wind is warm, and it's summer now, and my parents are just watching a movie with a couple of mosquitoes like it's a normal evening. Just living this incredible life in an incredible world, and learning to step off the carnival ride and hear the birdsong.

How We Become

A drawing of a young child in a red dress with white flowers, and a red hood and red shoes. The child is holding a little black hedgehog and is surrounded by flowers in primary colours. Two snails and a lizard sit looking towards the child.
back cover illustration from Emily and Arthur, 1975

This morning I got up as I have almost every May morning for as long as I can remember, and went barefoot out of the house to wash my face in the dew and pick flowers for my mother. I don't know why I do it, and I don't know that my mother even knows I get that dew all over my face and feel so at peace in the world this way. Something inside me just feels this is right, so I do. I used to take my own children out to do it when they were little, but I don't think the practice has stuck with them in adulthood. Why do I do this? What makes it so important to my identity?

I came back home after visiting my mother to find this old book on my table. Emily and Arthur, by Domitille de Préssensé. It was there because my daughter and I were recently going through the children's books, reminiscing, and I'd pulled out a few of my old favourites. 

In these old books from the 70's, I saw how I became me, and some of how my children became, as well. The girl in the image above is Emily. She's wearing red–always–and holding her beloved hedgehog Arthur among the flowers. She has interesting things in her house like a "long stocking" that I always thought must have been a wonderful thing to have. And because my name is Emily, I grew up thinking this little red-clothed Emily represented me. Is she the reason I love to wear red? Maybe! Red just feels like it belongs with me! I remember feeling a lot like the way this Emily looks, as a child. I remember the feeling I had one May morning when I went out to find my mother some flowers and got distracted looking at woodbugs on the log where I eventually broke off a beautiful Turkey Tail fungus to bring in for her. I remember when I handed her that beautiful Turkey Tail with a couple of flowers how it couldn't encapsulate all the beauty of the woodbugs on the log, or the special curve of the broken wood, or the smell of the bark or the happiness of my heart. But I hoped she knew it meant I loved her. I became that girl on the back of the book–the one who is delighted by small found things–and am now a mother and artist who is also just still Emily. Still wearing red and going into the flowers to be me. How many Emilys have been somehow defined by this book?

As a parent, and former educator, and as an artist I know how much our childhood experiences mean to our identities. I sat wondering this morning how the idea of washing my face in the dew came about. I feel like I've been doing it all my life, but I can't ever remember doing it with my mother. Then I saw another of the treasured childhood books, and I remembered: The fairies drink the dew! When I turned four, my father gave me a book called In Fairyland, Pictures from the Elf-World, by Richard Doyle. In this book the fairies dance and fly and race snails… and drink the dew! I remember trying to drink the dew off the plants as a child, imagining I was one of the fairies. I guess somehow this became part of my personal May Day celebration. This is how traditions are born, how they grow and change and define us. And… this is the power of art!

A drawing on the left side of the page shows a stalky plant with three elves lying on its leaves. The elf at the top lies catching a dew-drop in his mouth, the two on the bottom leaf hold wine glasses up to catch dew drops.
page 13 of Richard Doyle's "In Fairyland, Pictures from the Elf-World", 1870

I always knew these and other images were drawings made by artists. Even the text of Emily and Arthur is a hand-drawn piece of art. Now I can see its influence in my own birthday-card making, and I can see how Eric Carle's rainbow of fruits for the Hungry Caterpillar informed the way I set up any painting, now. Nothing is complete for me without a whole rainbow.

So what have I given my children through the books I chose for them? Some I'm not so proud of, I confess, and some I can see in their life-choices, now. Obviously they were also more drawn to the books that suited their personalities–this isn't a one-way system of influence. And I chose things that suited them. We know that every move we make as parents will have effects on our children's psyches, that every mistake we make will cost them in self-doubt and therapy dollars, one day, and we hope they'll carry our triumphs forward as courage and happiness into their adulthoods. Our children become themselves in the environment they're given. 

But our sphere of influence doesn't end with our children. It grows from each of us into the world around us, whether we're artists or teachers or foresters, diplomats or farmers. We're all creating and influencing each other every day. The choices we make in the language we use, in every bit of media we consume, and in the products we bring into our lives all influence everyone we come into contact with. And through our contact we become ourselves, in community. Living with this in mind is self-determination. This is how we become, as a species, or perhaps even as a planetary ecology. It's good to remember that in everything we do, we have a choice.