Emily van Lidth de Jeude – Page 5 – Social Practice Writer & Artist

Travel is Becoming Unethical: Hyper-Local Exotica in Artistic Experience

Dark, moody photograph, taken from just above a stream, which runs away between yellow-brown rotting grasses in a meadow, all surrounded by leafless winter trees. In the centre of the frame, a woman in a long black raincoat and rain pants runs, splashing, along the creek. — *"Mama running in the water", by Taliesin River*

One of my favourite natural events is when the meadow floods. That's when the rain comes fast and the creek that normally flows through the alder forest comes out around the trees to run across the compact paths between long grasses, creating two- to thirty-centimetre-deep creeks that speed along, where in summer, bare-footed dogs and children run. In winter, I've run these temporary creeks in bare feet too. I know the feeling of the mud and wet grasses between my toes, and the fear of stepping in drowned dog poop. The joy of the immersion is too great to be daunted by the threat of poop. As I've grown older, though, I've come to appreciate the benefits of good rain gear and tall boots, which allow me to dive into my landscape without physical repercussions.

Diving into landscape is something I've been thinking about a lot, lately: How, through residencies and travel and schooling or working abroad, artists aim to really immerse ourselves in different landscapes, to come home refreshed and inspired; often longing to return again to the exotic and wonderfully wild places we visited. We make art during or after these travels that sometimes explores the longing, the wildness or the bodies-in-place-ness of where we were; sometimes the brokenness of our human emotional existence across a diversity of different locations.

But pandemic and carbon-footprint considerations have led many of us to think deeply about the value and sacrifice of these muse-journeys. It's not only the air-travel that's a problem. There's also a problem with small villages taking a great percentage of their income from residence-tourism, or just tourism in general; when the actual residents of the community become dependent upon visits by people who will never actually become engaged in or contribute to the community as residents do, but only as grateful residence-artists. I live in a small community that gleans some of our income from tourism, and I know exactly how damaging a million tourist footprints are to the ecology of the place my own bare feet feel at home. I know how they take photos of this beautiful place, but never deeply understand the ecology; how they go home to write travel-blogs that extol the quaintness and quietness of my home but fail to capture the realness of our people; the political and social crises we feel, and even the imminent threat to the forests, fields, and beaches they're photographing. Once when I was small, my parents were out by the road cutting a tree into rounds for firewood–a gruelling job they did every year to keep our family warm–and some tourists drove up and stopped to watch them. They never got out of their car; just stopped to watch for a while and then drove away again.

I felt the other side of this problematic story keenly during my own residence in Amsterdam, a few years ago. I stayed and installed a project in the Goleb Project Space run by my friends Igor and Go-Eun. They welcomed and supported me graciously and while my experience was expansive, I noticed that the below-surface politics of the centre were very different than what I was experiencing as a visitor to the space. I wondered how my presence there had perhaps displaced others' work or intentions; how my ideas had changed the dialogue or intention of the group. Goleb is in one of the more mundane urban areas of Amsterdam, so I didn't think too much about my ecological impact, but one afternoon that changed. I was walking along the gracht (a small waterway for which we have no English word), getting closer and closer to an adorable family of coots, attempting to photograph them in what I thought was a remarkably interesting way, and a pair of men sitting on a bench nearby told me off for disturbing the wildlife. I reminded myself of the tourists I complain about, here in Canada. I had truly no idea of those coots' ecological value, nor who the guys on the bench were, or the stories they brought to that moment. It was all just an afternoon distraction from the project I was working on.

Then came the pandemic; the shutting down of most international travel. And the growing list of climate change disasters claiming our cultural, personal, and ecological heritage. Personally, I can't reconcile travel with artistic purpose anymore. I'm not even sure I can justify travelling overseas to visit family. So I'm thinking a lot about how we can be engaged and inspired by place without the inherent damage of travel.

A tape- and sticker-covered brown cardboard box sits on a wooden floor. Some of the stickers say Un-Boxing! and the tape says Border Force. The box is addressed to Julie Upmeyer, Plas Bodfa, Anglesey, North Wales, UK. — *The Un-Boxing Exhibition, arranged by Gudrun Filipska, Caroline Kelley, Lenka Clayton and Carly Butler of the Arts Territory Exchange, on arrival, here at Plas Bodfa, in Wales. Photo by Julie Upmeyer.*

What if travel isn't necessary to become immersed in landscape, or even to experience exotic places? We've already proven quite thoroughly that many of the business- and organizational-meetings we used to travel for can be done over the internet. I joined my brother's birthday dinner by video-chat, and have attended a couple of symposiums by Zoom. Artists have always found ingenious ways of making art in collaboration and across time and space through the mail, telephone, internet, and travelling exhibitions or projects. For me and many others, the creative solutions were often borne out of financial or temporal necessity, but now perhaps we can make these choices also out of concern for our future.

A handwritten letter on handmade rag paper lies displayed on an old green-carpeted wooden staircase. There are rotten-leaf prints on the paper, with pencil-writing around them. Lower down on the staircase, the envelope is displayed. It is addressed in pencil and stitched with thick sturdy twine. — My work about my own Pacific Island, on a staircase in Wales.
Plas Bodfa. Photo: Julie Upmeyer

I'm including photos, here, of the Un-Boxing project I am honoured to be participating in, this year–a travelling box of works that examines ideas of place, travel, gifting, and time, as well as the delight of opening parcels. It seems a bit meta to me, and I can see how it might inspire a lot of searching and thoughtful dialogue. My entire experience of this show, so far, has been through others' lenses. For me personally it's reignited my passion for the hyper-local: If this is the view of my experience through others' lenses, what is the view of my experience, through mine? Or their experience of my contribution, re-experienced by me? I'm not a huge fan of navel-gazing, and now this sounds like meta-meta-meta, but maybe in trying to reevaluate our engagement with space and time and each other we can find new ways of experiencing.

In a symposium I attended virtually today about mobility, spatiality and virtuality in Iceland, artist Zuhaitz Aziku of Strondin Studio suggested that we need to "make people realize that they're buying experience. Because you cannot ever buy experience." The experience is what comes from what we put into anything. Whether Zuhaitz intended this or not, he made me realize that experience doesn't need to be far away to be exotic. I've been exploring the exotic of my own backyard for over forty years. How can there be anything exotic in my own backyard, when my body knows every inch of it so well? Because, as Zuhaitz helped me to realize, my experience of this place changes with every moment. My intention and what I take away depends on how I engage, and that, too, changes with every moment.

I think we travel in order to escape the routine of our lives; to break our minds from the same parade of sensual input we receive every day. It's easier to take a different view if we remove ourselves from our routines. But maybe that's just lazy. Maybe we can train ourselves to look differently every day; to pass the same places but never in the same ways. Maybe we can practice closing our eyes and listening to things we normally only see, or lying down in places we normally only stand. When I stop running through the meadow and crawl, instead, I discover that rodents have created pathways under the mat of grass. I find insects leaving trails of detritus inside these covered runways. It's like an entirely exotic world to the one I stood in just a moment before. When I run through that meadow in the flood, I feel a kind of sensory freedom that doesn't in any way compare to the way that grass feels in the summer. I wonder where the rodents go when the creek runs through their pathways. If I learn all of this, it won't be exotic anymore, but something new will happen tomorrow; there will be new questions and new experiences and new ways of engaging with this space. There will be new ways of experiencing and inspiring. I won't have to leave this place to find them.

Can I live in place in my own backyard and call it a residency? I sure as hell reside here, and the more I stay home, confined by pandemic and financial restrictions; my own ethical concerns around carbon footprint and supporting large corporate airlines, the more I see the value in this. Maybe we can adjust the expectation of worldliness in our artistic practices for the benefit of our common future. And far from becoming navel-gazing meta, our practices will expand into our spaces in a way that they never could when we were busy escaping for exotic experiences. We can use our art as a means for researching, understanding, and bettering ourselves and our own communities, in place.

Originally published in October, 2021.

Why Feeling Matters in Public Policy

A painting, in oil, acrylic and graphite scribbles, of a close-up face, more-than-filling the frame, and screaming. The screaming mouth fills most of the frame. Predominant colours are white, orange, sky blue, and grey/black.

Last night I attended a devastating meeting in my community. On the surface it was pretty run-of-the-mill: A bunch of councillors and a few municipal staff members slowly picking their way through various presentations, decisions, and amendments. They came to the end of the meeting having checked a few boxes, put a few requests to bed or to progress, and made a few small changes to the contentious bylaw that much of the population feels will rip the heart out of our community.

As a member of this community for all of my life, I've been passionate about the things that tie us together. Some of those things are the big organized events, like our traditional summer festival and Remembrance Day celebration; the fishing derbies that used to happen when I was a kid, and the raft race. The events change over the years, but always hold us together, and are facilitated by a huge number of dedicated creative people, who look at their community and see the need for celebration. We're also held together by the little things, like stopping to chat with an oncoming driver in the road, or letting the community cat into the car for a ride. We're held together by actions like calling a neighbour for help clearing a dead deer or sitting down with Bob for an ephemeral but deeply interesting conversation.

Sometimes the holding together is very intentional. So many of us contribute time, ideas, and great heart to this community. In my own work and volunteer roles, I've been bringing newcomers into engagement with our wilderness, so that they can love and value this place as I do. As an artist I've grown in this rich stew of community to see the value of social practice around inclusion and diversity. I consider my work (both public and gallery-focused) a method of bringing out the voices of my fellow citizens and reminding us all of our personal benefit to community.

Most of the artists I know are somehow engaged in broad community visioning, and feelings are our language. When we sit around talking together, we talk about the big picture. We talk about the vibe of the public spaces in our community, and the vague drifting of public sentiment; of community values. We talk about the social-emotional gorgeousness we're trying to promote, and the social change that is or should be happening. We see the big web of emotional connection that makes a community whole; that tethers us to the place we live, and we work in our sometimes-mysterious ways to keep it alive.

Yes, these feelings and ideas can be vague, but we are masters of vaguery. The term "vague", like its linguistic origin in the French for "wave", might seem unthreatening. But a wave, however gentle, rarely comes alone, and sometimes builds slowly, unseen. Sometimes a tidal wave is a wall of water. Often it's just a going out of the tide, and then a returning, and returning, and returning, until the one unappreciated wave has enveloped a whole community. "Vague" is the feeling of community sentiment, and it can be just as devastating.

What devastated me about the council meeting was our council's lack of vision for that social web; that vague sentiment. During the meeting, various councillors mentioned that the bylaw was needed in order to "control" people, and that "not all people are our friends". They spoke often about controlling the population, but never about listening to it. They received a long series of letters asking them to consider the social damage caused by a pending bylaw that will severely limit access and enjoyment to our most popular public spaces. Letter-writers spoke about the casual gathering that will no longer happen after this bylaw is passed, and the councillors chalked it up to a lack of understanding on the public's part. The one councillor who opposes this bylaw spoke up to explain–again–his fierce opposition, and the idea that they shouldn't be pushing through a bylaw that is so publicly reviled. They carried on without acknowledging his words. Finally, they picked away at some of the wording of the bylaw, ostensibly to help people understand, without seeing the big picture. They didn't let any feelings they had to get in the way of their bylaw. They deafly ignored their populace, and carried on as though nothing had happened.

Is this a crisis of imagination? Maybe. Maybe we as a society are becoming less and less able to imagine a future we want to live in; to envision it so that we can create it. We're less and less able to see a future that is inclusive if we can't imagine how to converse or get along with those who we deem "not our friends". We know, in the abstract, that we need public policy that is expressly inclusive, but we, like our councillors, have forgotten how to include our neighbours. We've forgotten how to listen to the great vague voice of public sentiment.

The big picture in public policy is public sentiment. The public doesn't like this bylaw. We don't like that we haven't been consulted. We don't like that our letters were not read aloud, nor discussed for the many serious points they bring up. We don't like the feeling that a series of long complex bylaws will govern our footsteps and enjoyment of community spaces. We feel oppressed by this bylaw, and our feelings are what this community is made of.

As our community becomes more and more developed; more populated, more busy, more anonymous, we're losing sight of the importance of neighbourly compassion in our social exchanges. As our municipal government takes on more control, we have relinquished the desire to affect change, ourselves. We've given up. We are increasingly more likely to call the authorities to deal with dead deer or fallen trees instead of hauling them away, ourselves. We used to use them for meat or firewood; we're no longer permitted to do so. And as our social agency is taken away, we're growing more likely to call the authorities when a neighbour offends us than to bring over a drink and have a chat. Our crisis of imagination has led to a crisis of public agency.

And when I realized that the vision of that big picture–that public engagement–is missing from our leadership, I realized that we also have a crisis of feeling. We elected leaders to do a dry job of picking through legal documents and approving or rejecting requests, but we didn't empower them to feel. When they post on public forums they are expected to remain impartial. We expect that the work of governing should be done without emotion, but it concerns emotion a great deal. We need our councillors to have compassion for the woman living in a tent behind the library, to prevent them from passing bylaws that would outlaw her presence. We need them to notice the people feeling alarmed and horrified by proposed changes and ask themselves how those feelings will impact the big picture of our community. We need them to feel, so that they can take our feelings into account; so that we feel heard and empowered to engage in our community.

Originally published in July, 2021.

Creating Hope as an Exit from Existential Fear

This has been a hard, hard month in my province. We're reckoning with our responsibility regarding both climate change and colonialism (which are inextricably linked). Our province is beginning to locate the remains of thousands of murdered indigenous children, at the same time as our towns, farms, wildlife and even humans burn, in the climate-change-fueled fires we're now accustomed to. And all the while we're trying to save the last remaining stands of old-growth forest on this land… with very little success, so far. Colonialism, capitalism, consumerism and industrial terrorism are huge foes and how can we not feel small and weak? Terror and hopelessness abound. Two generations of kids are growing up without hope. And now they're looking at their parents and seeing no reassurance, because we adults are scared, too. We have no idea how we're going to pull out of this one. I think the only way out is through.

Yes, to some degree, it's necessary to recognize the fire and just run like hell. It's necessary to make sure our neighbours know about the fire. It's necessary to point out that the torch and gas are in our own hands. But then… where do we run to? Through the fire and out the other side? Where's the other side? And why even bother? The concept of "through" requires us to see an exit on the other side, and we have to want that exit.

The exit we want is joy. Harmony. Peace. Love. Those are things worth running to. So we have to find joy, again–or create it. We have to create hope. We have to find reasons to stop fighting and instead start working for change, and, even more importantly, we have to make that change joyful. We have to know that the place we're headed is the place we want to be going.

You get back what you put into the world. Most of us know that, at some level. And yet many, including myself, are feeling and putting out a lot of fear. I think I put joy into the world wherever I can, but maybe I can do more! Maybe instead of dwelling in the anger that my friends' missing siblings might be among those buried children, or instead of raging against the industries and "isms" that are creating climate change, I can make an exit door.

I know it's hard. Sometimes I just want to hide–bury my face in the pillow, or in the tear-soaked sweater of my partner, and wallow in my hopelessness. Sometimes I want to spend money I don't have on something I don't need and just pretend the whole scary world doesn't exist. That's OK for a minute, but then I have to look up again from my sorrow or my distraction and be real.

I guess for all of us, the ways we "look up" and get busy creating our exit doors will vary. For me, it's working with other parents and teachers to find positive ways of encouraging exploration and discovery in learning. In helping others overcome challenges and find hope, I feel more hopeful, myself. But it's also the small things.

A photo of a bowl of flower-salad from above, on a black background (tabletop). So the image is a circle of ceramic (the edge of the bowl) with flowers arranged across the surface of the salad, within it, in a rainbow. Lines of blossoms from left to right are: deep red nasturtiums, orange nasturtiums, warm yellow nasturtiums, pale yellow rose petals, green parsley, blue bachelor's buttons, purple and yellow violets, and pink rose petals.

This is a picture of my salad. My family grew it in our garden, and picked it for dinner last night. We gobbled it up with a huge amount of joy. The diversity of colour, scents, flavours and ideas contained in this bowl looks to me like a visual story of hope for the people of our world. Despite all odds, and because of diversity, this abundance of life persists! And I eat it and am a part of my own ecosystem. And my wild and unkempt garden not only provides food for me, but shelter from the heat; shelter from the storm; shelter from the fear. My salad isn't enough to change the world. I know that. But in every small way that we cultivate hope in our own hearts, we bring more hope to all of our actions, and to the world. Maybe the small things we do at home give us courage or hope enough to make bigger changes in the world, like supporting those neighbours who suffer directly from colonialism, forest fires, and loss of hope. Having hope, too, is a great privilege, and once we've accessed it, we need to share it–by both small and large means. And when we all have hope, we can tackle the really big problems, like colonialism, capitalism, and consumerism. Or maybe those "isms", which thrive on a population devoid of hope, will just starve when we stop feeding them, and start feeding hope, instead.

So how do you create hope? What is your joyful exit door? What is your vision for a workable, hopeful future? How can we make positive change in our own lives and work towards change for our whole community; our whole world? How can we change our lives, our employment; our communications so that everything we do is working towards the future we want? And how can we be generous; how can we hold each other up, make joyful, hopeful futures for each other to run to?

I want to be running toward something.

Originally published in July, 2021.

Why Public Art by Kids Matters so Much

There's a rambling little debate going on in my community right now about what kind of mural should go up on the lock-block retaining wall that acts as the de facto welcome sign to our island. This wall faces the ferry dock, and forms the north side of the pedestrian walkway from the dock to the rest of the island. This is the plain concrete wall that, for generations now, has welcomed commuting adults and teens, newcomers and old-timers as well as untold numbers of tourists to our small island. Sometimes it sports blackberries trailing down to catch our shoulders as we pass by, sometimes obscene or public-shaming graffiti, and almost always an assortment of hardy edible weeds that pop out from its crevices. But most noticeably, it's a boring grey wall of concrete lock-blocks.

Once this wall had a vast mural painted by kids from the local school–each block was painted with scenes of local wilderness or animals. Another time there was a big plywood mural of the island and local information, painted with students from our middle school. Yet another time, the wall was the stage for a temporary piece of public art made by one of our local artists, which peeled and disappeared over time. For a few years now, it's been just a boring grey wall of concrete lock-blocks.

A very wide photo of an eight-foot-high lock-block concrete wall, painted pale blue, with a diversity of children's paintings on it. It looks like each child has used one block to paint. The lowest tier has mainly paintings of whales, dolphins and fish (and a rainbow), the middle tief has mainly paintings of trees and land animals, especially deer, and the top tier has paintings of trees, landscapes, many birds, a sunset, and a big rainbow. — The Nex̱wlélex̱m/Bowen Island lock-block wall, as it was once painted by local kids.
Photo by Singne Palmquist

So now there's a call out for proposals from artists who would like to paint it, and an ongoing debate about whether it should have been offered to the island's children. I'm an artist; I'd love to have my work up in my own community and in fact have been talking with other artists about a collaborative work depicting local wildflowers for this wall. I love the idea of something that pleases and educates at the same time. But now I'm going to champion kids' art, for this wall. Because I think the many benefits of a mural painted by local kids far outweigh those of a more polished, "adult" mural.

Belonging

One of the best ways we can build sustainable community is to encourage engagement and concern for home and community. We need people to care that this is their home and feel that it deserves looking after. We care about things we feel ownership of. Kids feel ownership of their artwork–especially artwork that was designed and developed by them and displayed publicly in their home.

Why not just put their artwork up on the fridge? Well we can, of course, but not "just". It's not the same as being given the respect of one's community by being welcomed to paint right on our most visible wall. Being welcomed by one's community is, of course, the nature of the meaning of "home", and we want our kids to feel at home. We want them to grow up with the idea that this is their home, that their home matters, and that how they engage with it matters. We want them to feel seen; to feel responsible; to feel that what they do makes an impact on their home and future. So we have to give them that responsibility.

Imagine how it feels to children who painted the wall, say, in grade five, to then be walking past it twice every weekday on their way to and from school in grade eight. Some will tease each other about it; some will feel embarrassed, some will ignore it, and some will feel a quiet or even loud sense of pride. Almost all of them will feel connection. They'll feel a sense of belonging. Maybe they'll walk down to the dock to meet visiting relatives, and escort them past the mural they painted. Maybe they'll take selfies with their contributions. Maybe they'll move away and come back to find their marks still here, a few years later.

Not every child will have an opportunity to paint this wall. Maybe just one or two grades, and maybe it will be repainted every five years. But the kids who didn't paint it may have siblings who painted it. They may just have witnessed it being done and feel the tendrils of connection reaching out. They'll know that this mural was done by and in honour of the children of our community, and they'll feel valued.

A large plywood mural is almost square, with a large painting of a green, tree-covered island, with beaches, houses, lakes, and a few sailboats, sea mammals, and birds in the blue water around it. The frame of the painting is covered with a series of small paintings of landscapes, seascapes, and other wilderness. — Nex̱wlélex̱m/Bowen Island plywood info-mural painted with local youth.
Photo by Singne Palmquist.

Learning

As a parent and educator I'm quite horrified by the many ways children are silenced in our culture; their ideas and skills unvalued, as they're seen as "still developing" in the system that is meant to develop them. Have we forgotten the meaning of development? It means growth. Children are not vessels into which we dump our own ideas for eighteen years and then trust to follow along like good little citizens. Children are growing people with their own ideas and skills and values, and they learn from experience.

Everybody learns from experience. You can read as many manuals as you like about how to fix your appliance, but the first time you actually open the appliance up is when you really start learning. So what do kids learn by painting a mural in their community? So much.

They'll learn simply from experience about materials: what type of paint is needed for this project? What chemical properties make it suitable and why won't classroom acrylics do the job? What types of scenes are acceptable, and why? Why has the council requested local flora and fauna, and what exactly are our local flora and fauna? What is the political and social work that goes into a project like this? And all the various applied maths, sciences, communication and language skills that come as a matter of course in the creation of this mural.

Why can't they just learn those things in school? Why can't they paint the school walls? Why does this painting have to be making a visual chaos of our lovely manicured community?

Chaos = Development

Because growth, development, and learning need chaos to thrive. It was the chaotic and random assortment of elements that evolved to become life as we know it, today. It was and is a chaotic assortment of peoples, places, climates and experiences that make humanity as we are, today. It was the chaotic rambling experiments of toddler-hood that gave our children the chance to develop skills they now depend on, like language, social skills, gross motor skills and dexterity. They learned all of those things from observing and experimenting, free-range, under our benevolent supervision. They didn't learn them in a school, from textbooks. They learned them because they felt at home in their homes, and made big messes and had big accidents. Our homes were chaotic. Now our kids are older, and it's time for them to be out in their wider community.

Our children are part of our community, and they are our community's future. Instead of being tucked away, seen and not heard, they need to feel they are part of it, so they can grow and thrive here.

A two-and-a-half-tier concrete lock-block wall is covered with medium blue paint, and images painted by children, including mainly fish and indigenous motifs, stars, sun and rainbows, people paddling indigenous canoes on the water, and Spongebob. — Kids' mural on lock-block wall at the Alert Bay ferry marshaling area.
Photo by Emily van Lidth de Jeude

Responsibility

We look after what matters to us. If we want our children to grow up to look after their home and community, we need to allow it to matter to them.

We used to have an old cherry tree near the lock-block wall in the cove. Kids would climb it and hang out there, waiting for their commuting parents to walk off the boat. But eventually someone injured himself falling out of the tree, and then the tree was deemed too old, so was surrounded by fencing, off-limits to our kids. Now the area has been beautified as part of an effort to create a more visually-pleasing entrance to our community. There are all sorts of gorgeous plants there. I love them. But do the kids? Do they care about a tidy garden that they were expressly excluded from, and forbidden to play in? I asked my kids. My daughter says, "It's just another place you can't go." And how long before that garden is a dumping place for their litter and midnight beer cans, because it was never something they cared about in the first place? We look after what matters to us.

So how about a playground? What if we put in a playground at the ferry terminal, and the kids can play in blissful harmony with the commuters and traffic and beautiful gardens. Sure, but what kind of playground? Is it creative, dangerous, messy; fun? Because those are the things that make a playground worthwhile. Imagine an area full of tools, wood, climbing-trees and ropes; dirt and shovels and paint. That would be an amazing place for feeling belonging, learning new skills, and developing a sense of responsibility. But these playgrounds tend not to be condoned, these days, because of the chaotic look of them in our otherwise manicured landscapes, and because parents are afraid of danger. But danger–risk-taking–is essential for learning and for developing a sense of responsibility.

A close-up photo of a different part of the lock-block mural shown in the previous image. All medium blue background, with paintings of hearts, suns, rainbows, and fish. The mural boldly says "Home", and "Say NO to farmed salmon". — *Another section of the Alert Bay mural. Photo by Emily van Lidth de Jeude.*

Risk-Taking

If we never take risks, we can't learn to manage or mitigate them. Learning is all about taking risks, and risky play is a big part of progressive education all over the world. Just like babies learn to walk by taking risks and falling, teens learn to navigate social situations by taking risks and making mistakes; suffering heartbreak and social exclusion. We take risks as adults when we choose partners, careers, or make big purchases. We learn from all of those risks, and that's how we grow as individuals and how we evolve as a species.

Our kids are part of our communities; our species. They need to take risks like painting a public wall or climbing public trees so they can learn how their community works. You know what the boy who fell out of the tree learned? In addition to some of his physical limits, he may have learned that he was valued in his community, when he was seen, held, and tended to by an adult who was not his parent.

Kids who paint walls take many risks, in choosing what and how to paint, in consulting with their peers, their supervisors, and their community, and they take social risks in walking past the mural they painted every day for a few years and navigating the conversations that arise. They take personal emotional risk in putting their artwork in a public space and facing the opinions of their community. And that social risk helps them to grow into their community–to become a part of it, deeply and permanently because they grew and thrived there.

A community that sits in stagnant contemplation of its perfectly manicured surroundings is not growing, thriving, or evolving. And who wants that?

It's not only kids taking risks in this scenario. It's us, too. It's the adults who give the kids our most prominent walls to paint and just trust them. That's a huge risk, especially for those of us who are quite afraid of the chaos of childish experimentation. But it's a risk we have to take if we want to grow as individual adults or as a community. Is it like giving our living room wall to a bunch of monkeys with paintbrushes and walking away? Maybe. But I'd rather have something unexpected that I can learn from than live in a stagnant community. It's a risk we have to take if we want to grow.

As a community we are growing. Our kids quite literally are our future, and if we want them to grow into responsible adults who care about their home, then we need to make them a part of it, now.

Originally published in May, 2021.

On Teaching Art: Playing In the Wilderness Is the Core of a Good Education

In a forest of moss-covered cedar trees and logs, a giant mushroom is in the foreground. Four children appear from behind a tree on the left, looking very surprised; three of them with their mouths open, looking at the mushroom. A fifth child stands on a log on the right, gesturing towards the mushroom. — *Discovering a gigantic (and partially slug-eaten) mushroom here in Canada.*

My first outdoor art class was rather an accident. I was working with a group of kids from the American School in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, and decided we'd make a mural to revitalize the wall of a local underpass that at the time was covered with white supremacist graffiti. Taking the kids outside to paint the mural they'd designed was just the obvious next step in the process, and it required the city to drop off a ladder and high-vis barricades to keep us safe from passing cyclists. The city obliged, and we cloistered ourselves up against the wall and painted that mural.

Under an overpass, white graffiti-covered walls stretch across the middle of the photo and up to the left. A young man stands on a ladder, scrubbing algae off the wall, while two children stand on the ground below, scrubbing the graffiti. Orange barricades separate the people from the rest of the brick bike-path they are standing on. On the right side of the photo, a bus, a van and a smaller vehicle can be seen passing behind the wall, under the overpass. In the foreground of the photo, the edge of a field of grass is visible. — *Preparing the Wassenaar wall for mural-painting.*

But really we had to stand back quite frequently to look at the job we were doing, which meant stepping out of the barricaded area, across the busy bike-path, and onto the unkempt grassy area beside the overpass. That's where we took breaks, where we sat in the long grass and weeds and chatted, ate our snacks, pondered the mural, and generally did the work of assimilating all the learning that comes with designing and then painting a large mural in a public location–and confronting racism as a group of culturally displaced children. There, in the grass, we found little beetles climbing up the blades; we dropped breadcrumbs by accident and wondered about the safety of picking them up to eat them. We watched all the cyclists zooming by between us and the mural, and we soaked up the sunshine on our faces. We talked about neo-nazis, flowers, bicycles, the various countries we came from, different species of flies, the American School, flies stuck in paint, and languages of racist graffiti. I was nineteen, and really had no idea what I was doing with these kids, as a teacher, but the act of teaching taught me.

It took me quite a few years, more art classes taught for practical reasons outside, and parenting my own two kids into an unschooling paradigm before I realized the importance of that time spent sitting on grass in Wassenaar. I didn't originally take my classes outside because I knew it was the best place to learn. I took them because it was a place to let off steam; a place to find interesting textures for rubbings, collages, and still-life arrangements, or just the place we had to be to make the big art. Back in those early days I didn’t realize we were doing so much more than art. I took my own kids out just to escape the monotony of our living room, and the boring routine of meals, diapers, nursing, and play time. We did meals, diapers, nursing and play time in the forest, and let me tell you—that was not boring! And it wasn't long before I realized that we didn't actually need anything other than a snack and a spare diaper to go into the woods—that what we were doing there was so much more than just home in the forest: it was everything. Very soon, books, toys, and the stroller were irrelevant, and sticks, mud, water and plants became my kids' playthings. And playthings are learning tools. It wasn’t long after this that I started taking all my art classes outside for at least half our time together, and realized what I’d been missing, all along: connection.

The ecosystem that surrounds our curated homes is vast and complex and interconnected. It’s the seeming chaos that we tried to tame with our cities, boxes, and rules, but in actuality it’s the perfectly-tuned balance of millions of organisms, ideas and functions that we have not yet nearly achieved with our human-made system. Every concept humans dream up has roots in our basic understanding of the world and its natural systems.

Human-Designed Environment vs. Wilderness

The confines of a classroom or home are the curated attempt at a kind of intellectual ecosystem by a species that has become accustomed to putting things in boxes: to looking so hard at one object that we forgot to see the context it exists in. We put everything in boxes. We hang alphabet posters on the wall, keep fish or hamsters in a tank on a shelf for observation, and keep a stack of books, papers, or laptops for recording our observations. In this, we teach ourselves to exclude. We teach ourselves not to consider the wider context of whatever we’re seeing, because we’re afraid it’s too much for our small minds to fathom.

But our minds want to fathom! Our minds need to expand; to take time to sit and observe and wonder; to take subconscious note of all the millions of things that happen in the wilderness, from the slope of a leaning tree to the plants growing on top of it, to the smell of the soil, the mechanics of wings, jaws and elytra to the taste of sap. Our minds draw the connections between these millions of things long before we could ever articulate them.

One of the greatest tragedies of the current education system is our need for documentation and evaluation of learning. Students and teachers spend so much time documenting, testing, and evaluating that there’s no time left for sitting out in the wilderness, just assimilating. I can understand that, given the centralized nature of our system, the people at the top want to be sure every child is receiving the same instruction and meeting the same standards. But this is old. We’re progressing beyond the industrial society this system was designed for, where humans are needed to follow directions and work in factories. We’re on the edge of a new enlightenment, where the work we do with our minds is valued as much or more than our ability to assemble products. We don’t need the over-simplified, over documented fact-sheets of the industrial age, that break reality into such small pieces that it’s meaningless in the big picture. Our minds need a rich environment full of wonder, intrigue, and uncertainty to grow. The wilderness offers that.

Boxes vs. the Big Picture

As unschoolers at home, my kids were welcome to play and explore whatever interested them, free from the school system. But the fear I developed growing up in that school system led me to buy them a series of workbooks designed for their grade-levels. At some point my son was working on the science section (the only section he was willing to look at), and became furious. “This is a stupid book!” he declared. “They don’t know anything!” He was talking about the page that claimed killer whales eat other whales. He knew they ate salmon—at least those whales inhabiting our area at the time. And he knew that other killer whales ate seals and sea lions, but he didn’t care because they weren’t anywhere near us. I tried to explain that transient killer whales might, in fact, eat smaller whales, so maybe the book wasn’t wholly wrong. But both of us were dismayed at the description of something we knew to be a very complex system, as something so simplified as to be incorrect.

Humans are forever trying to make things simpler to understand them. It’s definitely simpler and less risky to put something in a box for observation than it is to go get to know it in its natural environment. If you put a killer whale in a big box with a smaller whale, I bet it would eventually eat it. But then you wouldn’t know anything about either species at all.

Boxes are more predictable, and we like predictable. The trouble is that the world and everything in it is not that simple. So in boxing everything; in teaching our kids “the simple facts” of, say, anatomy, combustion engines, or long division, we ignore the greater context of not only how these things fit into the vast ecology that we’re a part of, but why they matter. That’s why it’s OK to forget them when the test is finished and we move on to the next subject. They were never important in the big picture because we never saw the big picture: The ecosystem of everything.

The thing is, though, that that ecosystem is the context of our lives. We didn’t come from nature thousands of years ago and then progress beyond it with industry and technology, we are nature. We are the ecosystem, and our minds, unbeknownst to us, are naturally evolved to live in, observe, and understand it. Everything we are is the same basic particles that comprise a killer whale, a turtle; a beetle, or a piece of sandwich fallen into the weeds and digested by microbes, on the side of the bike path in Wassenaar. Everything we have built came from nature. Not just the raw materials, harvested unseen behind a slim screen of trees by the highway, but also our ingenuity. It comes from nature. It comes from people walking through the wilderness getting to know it; people living for thousands of years in their own ecosystem, learning and understanding the ecology of that place until they know how to heal themselves with specific plants, actions, and technologies. Humans learned medicine from the wilderness, and then learned to make it into pills. I learned about my own body’s anatomy by butchering rabbits with my family, as a child. Humans learned engineering from stacking, digging, and weaving pieces of wilderness to make homes and all other manner of ingenuity—like birds build nests and bears prepare dens for winter. Children build forts and mats; crowns and shoes and gardens in the wilderness. And this play is where they learn the core skills they need to become engineers, physicians, caregivers, fashion designers, mathematicians, and politicians.

That’s a lot of things to become! And you know it’s just my random little list. It looks like hyperbole but it’s really a gross understatement. I can’t think of a single career that wouldn’t be ideally begun in the wilderness. Why? Because our minds are capable of more than we know, and more than we can articulate. In sitting, playing, or living in the wilderness we give our minds space to learn. That’s why we learn better, there.

Two large moss-covered maple tree trunks jut up on the right and left sides of the photo, leaning out, away from the centre of the frame. A boy in black shorts and t-shirt leans on the left tree, playing with some vines he is holding. A girl with a ponytail and blue t-shirt and pants appears to point upwards, clearly communicating with the boy. In the background, sword ferns cover the forest floor, and a screen of cedar branches fills the distance. — *Natural play in the forest.*

The Whole Picture: Interconnection

Getting to know our own ecosystems isn’t quantifiable. It’s not really so much about seeing or learning more as it is about seeing the interconnection of all things. What was missing from that infamous killer whale page in my son’s workbook was indeed just a lot of information, but more importantly it was the connection between all that information. Salmon is to killer whales what smaller fish are to salmon. And our local residents prefer chinook salmon. But where do they find them? And how do they interact or share territory with the transient (now Biggs) killer whales, who eat pinnipeds, dolphins and minke whales? What do minke whales eat? Who eats their poop? Oh yeah—whale poop is the fertilizer of the seas. Like rabbit, horse, and chicken manure on my garden. Like deer poop in the forest, and the leaves and berries that went into it, feed the ferns, trees, and the grasses that later were picked for the robin’s nest; the corvid that later stole the robin’s scrawny babies to eat; the blue eggshells that fell to the ground to be gnawed by insects and harvested for calcium. The picture goes on and on forever. It’s not just big; it’s whole. Try to put that on a spreadsheet and send it to the ministry for documentation of learning.

Really. I’ve tried. As an unschooling parent still enrolling my kids in a DL program in order to access community resources and group activities, I had to quantify my kids’ learning on paper once every term. I learned very fast that what my children were learning was absolutely unquantifiable; that an “education” in our province constitutes a list of checked boxes, but that what my children understood of the world was much more important. School-going kids also understand far more than is noted on their reports; more than they are seen knowing, by a system inclined to look at them mostly for the purpose of checking boxes. They understand the social connectivity of their class and school, of their families and the landscape of the places they are given to explore. If we want our children to know more about the world, we simply have to give them more places to explore. And if we want them to really become comfortable and fluent in complexity, we have to give them plenty of time exploring in the wilderness.

Exploring: Curated Experience vs. Free Play

Exploring doesn’t mean hiking along a trail. I mean, it might, if that’s where interest led you. But it might mean going off-trail, crawling into the underbrush, or sitting down to dissect a pile of bear poop. It might mean sitting smelling the wind, and maybe it’s autumn, and the wind carries a musky smell that turns out to be a very large rutting deer watching you from afar. He saw you first because he’s accustomed to this wilderness and used to noticing the changes. You’re the change in his wilderness, and now you’re a part of it. And you discovered something you didn’t expect when you sat down to smell the wind.

When kids play in the wild without direction they probably learn more than they would if the play was curated. Most times school kids are taken outside to play, the play is directed by a teacher. Maybe we play capture the flag; maybe we sit and read our books or go on a scavenger hunt. These aren’t harmful activities, but in the expectation of specific activity, they don’t leave much room for exploration. We learn to see outdoor spaces as locations for performing human-designed activities, as opposed to ecosystems to be a part of. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Take a group of kids into the woods with no expectations, supplies or instruction, and leave them to play. They will use their previous experiences, their broad complex understanding of the world, and their inquisitive minds to take stock of the situation and adapt. They’ll explore their surroundings. They’ll use whatever objects they find around (clothing, sticks, leaves, water) to act out and explore their ideas. It’s a lot like documentation, but freed from the constraints of ministry check-boxes and expected reporting methods, it will look like play. It is play. And it’s essential for learning. Just like in playing, a crow learns where the robins are nesting and where he might find his next meal. He learns how to slide in snow and dig for grubs. Play is essential for learning. In playing with kids in the forest, I learned the best things I know about teaching.

The wilderness provides the best playground for our imaginations, because it’s complex enough to house all our ideas. It provides the best place for learning, because, when we give ourselves time to just be there, we can discover and come to understand—intrinsically—the roots of everything. Without constraints on space, complexity, or imagination, we really can be wholly educated. We can become everything we want to be.

Originally published on Earth Day in April, 2021.

Reaching People; Alienating People; Being Unheard

This video by Rage Against the Machine x the Umma Chroma brings up something I struggle with a lot in my own work and in the work of people I really respect, like RATM. You try so hard to help people see their own strength in changemaking; their own worth and their own ability to make postive change, then you look out at the crowd of people supporting you, and you know a large percentage don't hear the message. They go home shouting about it, but they didn't hear it. Maybe that's because they didn't go there to be educated–I get that. But we keep telling ourselves, as artists, as educators, as community organizers, that even if just one person in that crowd goes home and makes some kind of positive change, we've been successful, but how is that really enough?

The most successful instagram post I've ever made was an in-progress shot of a dress that's about oppression of women; the objectification of the female body. In a very brief time it got thousands of views, and was worked into a German graffiti artist's work. The vast majority of the people sharing it were men. You know why? Because the breasts of the mannequin it sat on were visible. For the handful of women who felt seen, understood, and the smaller handful of men who understood the message, there were thousands who just consumed it like a piece of meat.

I love this video because they're not allowing us to just revel in the anger of the song and not question our lives, our heritage, our thoughts; our whiteness. Putting out something so blatant runs the risk of people choosing not to watch–of alienating any and all of the audience that didn't already understand or agree. Please watch this video if you think it looks stupid. Watch it if you think you already understand, or you don't need to know. Watch it if you think RATM is too white. Watch it if you think you're too white.

Anyway. These are my thoughts for the moment. This is something I struggle with in life and living and art.

Originally published in January 2021.

Why I Make Portraits the Way I Do

A graphite portrait of a couple looking into each other's eyes, surrounded by rose leaves and blossoms, and quite a bit of scribbling. The man, on the left, has a scruffy white beard and mustache, and a pair of glasses reaching behind his ears into his white hair. He has a wrinkled brow, and grins delightedly at the woman. The woman looks up into his face with a king of blissful smile. She, too, has wrinkles spreading out from the corner of her eye, and a pair of glasses that reaches into her long, straight, white hair. Roses have caught in her hair at the back of her head. The man is holding a small stem of roses in his hand, at the bottom of the frame.

The process I use for making portraits is designed to connect me with my subjects. If possible, I begin by doing a photo-session with the subject(s), then I download some songs recommended by the subjects, and put them on repeat in my studio. I choose a good photo from the session, and lay out the portrait using my handy projector, before setting up my laptop beside my painting wall and getting going with the real drawing work. I use graphite, I scribble, I cross-hatch, and if desired by the person who commissioned the work, I use gesso. There's not a step of this process that is dispensable to me, and I thought I'd explain why.

The reason for doing a photo-shoot is probably obvious. I need to connect with the subject. I've been commissioned a few times to make portraits as surprise gifts for the subjects, and while it's possible, it's incredibly difficult to know if I've captured the essence of somebody I've never met, just working from a photo I didn't take. The most beautiful portraits, to me, capture the essence of a person or relationship. They capture a moment in time. You want to look at that portrait and have a happy memory. So either I work from a photo that was taken at a very happy moment, or I make that happy moment. When we do a photo-shoot we talk endlessly throughout the session about what makes life (or the relationship if there are multiple subjects) special. I get into the nitty-gritty of what matters to the person I'm photographing, and by the end of the session, I'm in love. Yep. I love really easily, so if I've ever interviewed or photographed you, there is a piece of my heart dedicated to you. I'm going to make your portrait with all that love I have for you, and my memory of the time we spent taking your portrait.

That love is what the song-requests are about, too. It's a way of filling my studio with your personality. I've been given songs by artists in genres I didn't care to listen to, before, but by the time I'd drawn the portrait, and listened to the songs a hundred times over (no that's not an exaggeration), I hum the songs in my sleep and love them too. I've discovered some great artists this way, but more than that the spirit of the songs informs the work. I usually title my portraits, as I do most of my recent works on canvas, after a line from one of the songs I'm working with. If you've hired me to make a portrait, you probably already know I'm a synaesthete: I see sound. So when I make the portrait with the recommended songs playing on repeat, I'm drawing my own visual interpretation of the subject, the moment, the feeling, and the music… all mixed up on a flat surface, with graphite.

A graphite portrait of two teenagers (brother and sister) lying in the grass, with swirls around them. Their heads are together in the middle of the frame, but they're looking separate directions. The boy's eyes are closed and he leans on his hand, grinning as his face is flooded with sunlight. The girl holds her hand up to shield her eyes from the sunlight, and looks with a wistful smile off the left side of the frame. Grass seed-heads stand around these kids, and the girl is wearing a bracelet with beaded strings hanging off of it.

So why use a projector? I know a lot of people think projectors are a terrible intrusion into visual art, taking away the artist's eye; the artist's interpretation; the art. I used to think that too, until I was painting portraits with watered down acrylic on used bed sheets (the MAMA Project) and couldn't afford to make a single mistake (because you can't remove or even lighten up a misplaced stroke of paint). I re-did a few of those first bed sheet portraits, and ended up throwing my precious donated sheets away, before resorting to the projector. Then I realized that the projector doesn't have to take away the soul of the art–I just had to learn to use it properly. It's a wonderful tool for laying out the structure of a person's face or body, to avoid making mistakes that would have to be fixed or reworked, later. The trick is to stop using the projector early in the process. I lay out the structure, and then I turn it off, turn up the music, and go back to the way I love to draw: scribbling and painting layer after layer, from my heart. But without mistakes of bone-structure or eye-placement.

The scribbling. To me this is truly indispensable. It's just how I draw, like others use watercolour, fine chalk shading, or bold brush strokes. I scribble. Call it cross-hatching, if you like; it originally came out of cross-hatching, and there's still a good amount of cross-hatching in my work. But straight-up cross-hatching doesn't have the energy and vivacity of scribbling. Scribbling is unscripted. It's emotional. It's how I let loose and let art happen. It's how my intuition deals with putting feeling onto a flat surface. It's the reason my hand-drawn portrait is more than the photo I took to begin with. When I work with gesso (and I prefer this, although many clients request only graphite), I get to layer the scribbling with a depth that graphite alone can't really muster. Then it becomes scribbling with texture and colour (because gesso turns graphite blue in certain light), and allows for so much more depth of feeling and movement in the portrait.

A scribbled portrait of a man, in graphite. He is hunched forward over a cup that's in his hand, but is looking out at the viewer, smiling. He has a partially-grey beard and is wearing a white Tilly hat. The suggestion of trees is in the background.

Recently I was asked to make a portrait without the scribbling, or cross-hatching. I did it, but although the client was happy with the result, I wasn't. I felt it didn't have the depth or feeling of my other portraits. My style isn't for everybody, and that's OK. It's who I am though, and a hand-drawn portrait is a big messy soup of the subject, the moment, and the artist. Just like it's essential for me to capture the nature of the portrait's subject, it's essential for me to let my own heart be present in the work. After all, I've put my whole heart into connecting with the subject, and that's where the feeling is. My heart is messy. That's the nature of my work.

Originally published in November, 2020.

Gratitude: ECUAA Get to Know

I'd just like to thank Emily Carr University Alumni Association for interviewing me for their Get to Know series. I was honoured and delighted (also for the opportunity to give thanks for my education, and specifically to mention Celia King).
Link to interview: https://www.ecuaa.ca/get-to-know-series/get-to-know-emily-van-lidth-de-jeude/

New Decade: How Connection Will Save Us

A graphite drawing of a deciduous forest in fog, with a light coming through from the distance. The forest floor is covered with uneven ground, mossy logs and perhaps rocks, and salal bushes reaching towards the light and the trees.
Artist: Emily van Lidth de Jeude

As we round the corner on a new decade, I find myself contemplative about the evolution of our species. What have we changed? Where are we going? What changes are to come? And, as so many ask these days, how can we save ourselves? How can we "be the change"?

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi

This morning I read that two firefighters have died fighting Australia's massive bush fires. That's 10 people dead so far this year in a fire season that's only half over, according to Victoria emergency services minister Lisa Neville. Over 1000 homes have burned so far, but it's not a shock, anymore. It's the news we're accustomed to hearing. I was, however, surprised to read that the prime minister apologized for having been on vacation at the time. His compassion is news; in our current human state of trauma and overwhelming feelings of helplessness, many of us have become dispirited, numbed by the constant reports of tragedy. We are accustomed to looking away. My children know that in every season people around the world die of heat, floods, storms, wildfires and other climate-related disasters. Sometimes we watch the smoke on the news; sometimes we're battling to keep it out of our own lungs. It's the end of the decade, the end of my children's childhood, and the beginning of a new epoch for humanity. And what can we do to save ourselves?

In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about her university students' inability to imagine a healthy relationship between humans and nature:

"As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision. I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can't imagine the generosity of geese? These students were not raised on the story of Skywoman."

I would like to suggest that connection is how we will save ourselves.

The other day I drove my kids past the recreation centre in Burnaby where I first kindled my desire to connect children with nature. Around two decades ago, before I had children of my own, I took my eight-to-ten-year-old art group out to the small planting of conifers and rhododendrons beside the parking lot at that rec centre. It was the only forest-like area between the mall, the skytrain and the office buildings. Beside the smooth concrete pathway, I and this group of kids dug our fingers into the grass and needles and found worms coming skyward after recent rainfall. We saved one from a puddle. We gathered cones and twigs, and the children discovered that cones actually contain seeds of the trees they fell from. Although I tried valiantly to connect our indoor art adventures to this one outing, it was plainly evident to me that the greatest learning we'd had by far was the short fifteen minutes we spent out poking fingers into the earth. This was the moment of connection – of discovering a sense of home and belonging in nature. I have spent the last two decades bringing people into the wilderness, welcoming them to these spaces where nature still displays its fabulous and curious habits, and beckoning them to feel at home. Because this is our home.

In the last decade forest schools have become increasingly popular; as have explorative and self-directed learning. These things, I think, are beacons of hope for our civilization. As we reintegrate with nature in a curious and explorative way, we become, as a species, attuned to our own existence, and better able to understand our own nature. As we discover the amazing interactions between other species in the wild, we discover our own interactions with them, as well. We discover our mutual needs and gifts. We discover our sameness.

But how will this help us survive the climate emergency? In very practical terms, explorative wilderness play helps people of all ages become more resilient and resourceful; both qualities needed to survive any time, but especially in the unpredictable time we're entering now. A few years ago, during the worst smoke season we've had yet on Canada's west coast, I bought an air purifier that barely managed to keep the smoke out of one room of my home. But I took my Wild Art groups into the forest nearby, to discover the clear green-filtered air and relatively smoke-free play areas. During the hot smoky season we found respite under the shelter of cedars and hemlocks, leaning our bodies against the cool logs and reaching fingers into the mud that remained from the previous winter's flood. The children learned resourcefulness as they wrote, developed and performed a play about consumerism (their own idea, but not surprising given the climate of fear in the forest fire season). They connected with our local recycling centre and second-hand store for props, and created other props and a set from objects found in the forest.

In addition to resilience and resourcefulness, the deeply-felt connection that nature exploration develops between humans, and between humans and other species, helps us to see the bigger picture. We discover the trees' need for moss, holding water like a sponge, as we discover our own need for the damp cool that that moss provides, and the shelter of the trees' leaves. Symbiotic relationships are everywhere, and the more of them we discover, the greater our perception grows; the bigger our picture becomes. Climate change is a very big picture. If we want to solve it, we need to understand the interconnectedness of all things. We need to know that we matter.

And mostly, in this world where happiness is sold on in-game-advertising and the price-tags on our brand-name merchandise, we can discover happiness in nature. The pursuit of happiness continues to be a ubiquitous aim of the human spirit, and we're not going to save our home and future by denying ourselves joy. Our salvation will not come from starvation and asceticism. It will come from abundance. We just need to start seeing abundance – happiness – in the things we need to save, and then we'll find ourselves ever more willing to save them. Saving the trees is much easier when the trees are our children's playthings; when we know their scent and the feeling of their cool skin on ours in the summer; when we have experienced their canopy protecting us from the heat and the smoke. Saving frogs and beetles and worms and slugs is much more delightful when we're not envisioning some far-away ecosystem we've never walked in, but noticing the appearance of worms after rain in our own neighbourhood puddles.

Wilderness isn't far away. Wilderness is happening in the city puddle under our feet, or, as we once discovered with the help of our trusty microscope, in the surface of an old moldy piece of cat food! Wilderness is, yes, in the Australian bush, burning up with its koalas heading ever closer to extinction. And it is also in the weeds along the edge of a forgotten urban alley. It is in the heart of the little girl playing there, digging her fingers in past plastic wrappers and grasshoppers to find the treasure she buried there last winter: A fir cone full of now-sprouting seeds, which she carefully pulls out, and plants again.

In the last decade we have become, as a species, accustomed to watching our home burn from the other side of the street, then turning our back on it and looking towards our cell phones for a quick emotional fix. We've become accustomed to blinding ourselves to our own feelings of despair and helplessness; using capitalist promises and lies to soothe our broken hearts. Now it's time to get back over there and put out the flames. I think about Robin Wall Kimmerer's despair at her students' lack of connection with wilderness and I think to myself that if we allow our children to find joy in the discovery of small things, the next generation will be the first to return to nature. When they reach university, the scope of their vision will be greater, because they have seen and known the wilderness beneath their feet. They will integrate the great technological systems of their day with the great system of the wilderness and those of us who follow them will, finally, be the change we already know ourselves to be.

Happy new decade. May we connect with each other and with our wilderness.