Canadian social practice artist working with participatory performance, ecological systems, and community storytelling. Works span installation, performance, writing, and socially engaged projects.
Isabella Post, my great great grandmother, in 1863.
Trauma.
I write a lot about trauma, especially indirectly, because learning to understand and heal from it is my life-long journey. In fact, it seems to be at the core of many people’s life-long journeys. My partner only very recently found out that his grandfather, whom he lived with as a child, was a prisoner of war for a few years in the mid-to-late 40’s. How that may have affected his father, him, and our children is really unknown, but there are some hints. And my story is full of these hints too.
Why hints? Because none of our parents really talk about their own or their parents’ traumas. We’ve grown up guessing and wondering, and often hearing tiny pieces from aunts, uncles, and distant cousins. I think that our parents’ silence is perhaps part trauma response, and partly their way of protecting us. All valid, but now we know that dealing with the trauma is an important part of healing from it, and so for our own and our children’s sake, we’re slowly picking it apart.
My grain buckets. 2026.
Look at these buckets of food. I live in a 2-person household. I do cook all our food, but some of these take years to go through, and they did even when we still had two hungry teens living at home. So am I a prepper? A hoarder? Just plain crazy? Maybe all of the above, but also, I’m the product of my grandparents. I had six grandparents. Let me tell you about them. I only have a few bare facts, gathered from sparse partial stories of parents, aunts and uncles, but combined, they explain a lot.
My birth father’s mother was born to Ukrainian war refugees, trying to survive in the Canadian Rockies, during the many global hardships of the early twentieth century. By the time she had her own kids with her Irish refugee husband, in the late forties and early fifties, she had developed a knack for hoarding all kinds of things. When she died, she had so many bottles of hair-set; so many folded pink towels; so many, so many of all kinds of things. I have this tendency, as well. What if I might run out of something?!
My other father’s mother had her first baby, my aunt, during the Dutch hunger winter of the second world war. She told me that she had to sneak into neighbours’ fields at night to steal tulip bulbs to keep herself, my grandfather, and my infant aunt alive. There was so little to eat, but she saved the can of cocoa she’d had before the war like it was a beacon of hope. When I was a kid in the eighties, that pre-war cocoa still sat on our fridge. The ancient cocoa is gone now, but I buy cocoa in large quantities and store it in that can.
My mother’s mother lived through the great depression as a teen and young adult, in South Dakota. Her future husband, my grandfather, lost his family ranch around the same time. Then just when she was learning to cook and care for her growing family, and began moving about to various states, following her husband’s engineering career, the Dust Bowl arrived, and so did the second world war, albeit not in mainland America. My grandpa departed to do his bit for the war, and she was left to feed her youngest children, alone. There’s quite a bit of resentment in my family, I think, about some of her apparent coping mechanisms, but she did raise five children, and so did my grandfather, and now, here I am nearly a hundred years later buying twenty-pound bags of grain, because I just think that’s normal.
I imagine almost everyone in the world is at most a fifth-generation survivor of existential mass crisis. All of us are carrying some kind of trauma and surviving due to coping mechanisms that may also be detrimental to us. How many of our medical conditions, especially autoimmune, are due to our intergenerational traumas? What kind of species suffers endlessly from the effects of war, environmental devastation (by our own hand) and other selfish acts, and then, in blind trauma-induced ignorance, rage, narcissism or whatever, repeats the same acts every few generations?! Well… humans, apparently.
Thinking about how difficult it’s been for me to get even the vaguest handle on what’s happened in my own family, I have asked myself often why my parents don’t talk about these things. I see their own challenges and don’t want to make them worse. I can absolutely understand why not talking about it has been an effective coping mechanism for so many; how triggering the painful memories is not an option, and even how our parents protected us from these histories, intentionally. I also understand how necessary it is to start talking, though. I understand how the protection our parents gave us also became an empty hole where our own coping mechanisms could grow unfettered into addictions, isolation, and self-hatred, because we didn’t know where they came from, and couldn’t address them.
Connection is the cure for trauma. Yes, this likely means talking with therapists and others who can help us navigate the potholes and hills on our road. But it also just means loving. It means being open and honest and vulnerable; teaching ourselves to trust, again; to see others as *like us* instead of foreign. It means slowly working through our joys and challenges in community, so that we can learn, collectively, to build a society that we won’t need generations to heal from.
When I sit with my friends or my partner and talk about the things we don’t know; the fears we have for our children and our parents; for our future selves, and we dream up solutions in the form of utopias that almost seem possible… we’re healing. But more importantly, we’re loving. We're actively building that society where healing comes free with our first breath, and the love-founded voices of our parents coo, “welcome to the world, little one; we’re on this ride with you.”
Me at age 2-1/2, 1978.
“If intergenerational trauma can alter DNA, why can’t intergenerational love?” ― Alicia Elliott, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
It was summer; probably July, and so hot I was hiding in the house with my baby dressed only in a diaper, fanning us with damp washcloths, when Mum appeared at the front door. With a basket of kale and lettuces in one arm, a partly-eaten zucchini in the other hand, and sweat dripping out from under her straw hat, she said, “you’re going to have to get a handle on the weeds in your end of the potato bed”. She took a big bite of the raw zucchini in her hand and awaited my response.
“Oh. OK. Why are you just eating a whole plain zucchini?”
“I was hungry.” She said, as if it was a silly question. “Here.” She took another zucchini out from under the leaves in her basket and handed it to me.
“Thank you, Mum.” It was warm from the sun, but when I sliced it open, the inside was cool and refreshing.
I was thinking about this the other night, as I handed my partner Markus his dinner: a big bowl of fresh snap peas I’d just picked from the garden. Nothing more. Why would we need more? We have tons of snap peas right now, and really they contain everything we could want for dinner: protein, carbs, vitamins, and so much deliciousness. Later we felt a hole in our stomachs where processed food likes to be, so we ate a storebought bagel. We do grow all our own veggies and eggs, and most of our own meat and fruit, but we can’t really grow grains here, and we can’t grow junk food. Also, Markus loves bananas, and I love imported cheese. And both of us love a frozen pizza or storebought bread when we’re just too tired to make something more… which is at least once a week!!
We used to aim to be self-sufficient, but over the years our ambition changed. We raised our children, grew our garden and skills, and now live just the two of us again, with a quarter-acre regenerative veggie/flower garden, two cats, one rooster, eightteen hens and their many annual offspring, and about fifty billion weeds. We still want to be self-sufficient, but the meaning of that term has changed for us. We realized it’s more about community and mindset than it is about production.
First of all, we really can’t grow grains. We tried. About ten years ago we turned our rectangular lawn into a field of hull-less oats. (Awesome! We thought. We’re gluten free and we eat tons of oats; we can feed ourselves all year!!) Well… we live in a beautiful little rainforest clearing on the west coast of northern Turtle Island. We don’t live on the prairie. So we did actually manage to harvest a whole bucketful of oats (maybe a sixth of what our family consumed in a year), but it turns out hull-less oats still have hulls, and they’re basically impossible to remove. We didn’t enjoy our oats mixed with what felt like fingernail trimmings. And we discovered we could grow far more in that rectangle of yard if we grew crops that actually want to be in this ecology. Then we found out that some people just inland from us are growing oats quite successfully, and we can buy from a small local farm in a different ecology, that’s growing what we can’t grow. So now that’s what we do: We grow all kinds of brassicas, lettuces, squashes, cucumbers, potatoes, garlic, onions, celery, beans, peas, and many many flowers and fruits, and we buy our grains from farms a bit further inland.
We also learned that community isn’t just about the other humans around us; it’s about ALL the other beings. Most obviously, we understood that it’s important to entice and support wild pollinators, and since that just means planting lots of flowers (preferably native varieties that native pollinators will be drawn to), it was an easy and enjoyable adjustment.
Next we discovered the importance of weeds. With exception of a very small handful of troublesome invasives, most weeds are not only OK to leave in the ground, but very important. We started pulling out the invasives and leaving the edible and non-troublesome weeds. They shelter the soil and keep water in the ground. They feed the soil both by pulling nitrogen down into it, and by composting themselves there. They attract all kinds of insects, birds and other small wildlife. And we’ve found they even support our growing plants like trellises! And when they crowd out the veggies we’re trying to grow, we eat them ourselves or feed them to our chickens. They’re just a part of the ecology of our garden, and the food on our table.
Then mushrooms. Putting deciduous wood chips in some of our garden paths, and into garden beds that needed a bit more bulk or aeration meant making space for the mycelial network that supports our plants! We did put winecap mushroom spore into the chips so we’d have lots to harvest and eat for ourselves, but the mycelial network also moves in from the forest that surrounds our home, and that means we need to care about the trees! We learned that different areas of our yard actually have extremely different microclimates, depending partly on their proximity to the creek, but also on which trees are close-by. We ended up with a xeriscaped garden of fennel, strawberries, rhubarb, parsley, wild ginger and various flowers that have now been perennial for over a decade, right under our sequoia! I’d love to say that we are just so dedicated that we tailored everything we did to the specificity of the soil, trees, weeds and other features in each area of the yard, but… I mean really. Doesn’t this sound kind of overwhelming?? It is definitely overwhelming for us, so we simplified: Diversity. That bountiful garden under the sequoia was the result of just planting lots of diverse things and seeing what survived.
We just encourage diversity in everything, and accept that everything is an experiment. Things die, and they feed the soil; crops fail and other crops succeed more than expected. I have no idea what species of insects live in my garden, but I trust that the huge diversity of both insect and plant species I see means there are fewer devastating infestations. And over time this has proven to be true: the only pest we deal with regularly in our yard is slugs. We’ve learned over the years that some veggies grow wonderfully in some areas of the yard, and not in others. We’ve had fruit trees die and tiny shrubs become gargantuan and overtake their respective garden neighbourhoods. We don’t really understand the complexity, but we appreciate the signs of it, and try to manage the challenges that do happen without harming the garden community they happen in. That’s basically our job, now: Trying to live and work in harmony with the ecology of our garden in a rainforest, which is also our home.
This past weekend we hosted people at our ecology-centred regenerative food garden, to talk about growing food mindfully and in harmony with our surroundings, and someone asked about growing for CSA boxes. I *love* the idea of Community-Supported Agriculture boxes: you grow food, and community-members subscribe for a weekly box of produce from their local farm. I know a few people who have done this, and there always seems to be one common challenge: how to grow enough of the foods customers want to see in their boxes, while not giving them too many surprises. This leads me to the biggest thing I’ve learned about growing food: It requires a particular mindset, that many of us have now lost.
Earlier this month, when the chickens had been laying up a storm, and then we had a rainstorm and had a surprise crop of massive winecap mushrooms, we enjoyed a quiche of mushrooms, garlic scapes, fennel stems and parsley. (Yes, fennel-stems are delicious, as long as they're not too tough yet!)
It’s not just about “eating seasonally”. It’s about adaptability – flexible thinking. A successful CSA business requires a customer base that’s happy to receive surprises and work with what they get. It also requires farmers who know what’s valuable and how to take surprises and make them exciting for customers. An adaptable local-food mindset is about understanding where food comes from, and enjoying what’s available. Which may or may not seem “seasonal”, especially with our constantly-shifting weather patterns, these days. It’s not just about only eating fresh tomatoes in the summer; it’s also about accepting that some years there just aren’t many, and some years there are way more than we expected. We all know about too-many-zucchinis. But I’ve had a couple of years with too few! Those years made the bounty of other years feel much more wonderful, and it’s pure delight to pull frozen shredded zucchini out in winter, to bake with. Some years we get so many mushrooms we have to dry them for winter; other years we get a tiny handful and treasure them immensely. Often the mushrooms are full of fly larvae and we have to eat only the tiniest ones, before the flies get them! And always, always, we leave at least half of them to spore out on the ground, so we’ll have more mushrooms, later.
Growing our own food, or even truly eating locally or seasonally means accepting that we can’t have any old food any old time, and also being willing to adapt to what’s currently available. Which may be entirely unpredictable. It means that we may suddenly find ourselves in a greens-drought in the middle of summer, and end up pulling out preserved greens from last year, just when we least expected to! It means developing skills we may not have yet, like farming practices, food preservation, and cooking commonly-discarded parts of the produce. And most importantly, it means becoming curious and actually *wanting* to discover new things; new ways of being. This is not only the mindset that makes living off of regenerative farming possible, it’s also a mindset that brings a community closer. When we are compelled to feed ourselves as well as possible, as locally as possible, and as ethically as possible, we inevitably have to rely on others to help us meet our needs.
I absolutely love the opportunity to call my neighbours and tell them I have extra eggs. And likewise, they understand that there won’t be any extra eggs when the chickens are moulting, or when it rains, or snows, or when there’s a heat-wave. The neighbours understand that our chickens only lay when they’re happy! And they love eating happy chicken eggs. Every year we get a big bag of corn from the neighbours with the flattest, sunniest yard, where corn loves to grow. And sometimes we get a pot of honey from the other neighbours. When one of my hens goes broody I tell my chicken friends, and we all anticipate the brood, together. When a chick dies, or one of our treasured hens; we console each other.
This afternoon my brother and I sat on opposite sides of our parents’ red currant bush, filling bowls – plunk! plunk! plunk! – and talking about the drought, rooting cuttings, different areas we grow things in our yards, and just generally sharing ideas. We swatted various species of flies from our legs, crawled around in the grass and creeping buttercup, and listened to the birds, waiting to come take their share of the berries. Then we hugged goodbye and went to our respective homes for dinner and the most delicious red currant desserts.
Growing food means celebrating life in community. I see inklings of change all the time, and many tiny changes make big change. It feels to me like our society is growing to love the food we eat; to love living in a diversity of people, plants, and our ecology, and to love each other. What a beautiful world we’re creating!
Once, while downtown with my young children, I noticed a man walking by with a pin that said “invisible disability”.
“Gad, how awkward”, I thought. He’s obviously not that disabled, as he’s walking around, downtown. And as we carried on our way, I continued to wonder what on earth his supposed invisible disability was, and why he felt the need to declare it on his jacket. Could he have partial blindness, and the pin is supposed to warn people he may bump into them? Could he be deaf, and we should help him in case of audio-only emergencies like an air-raid siren? Maybe he just has cognitive decline or a mental health problem. Likely that. Yeah. A mental health problem that causes attention-seeking and makes him feel sorry for himself because he just can’t deal.
I found a clean-looking bench and sat my kids down to consume our sandwiches. Gluten-free bread in those days was a novelty, but necessary for my son, so our sandwiches were rather hard and crumbly. I’d made up for the tasteless bread with super-tasty salami and tomatoes. No mayonnaise because my son was also allergic to eggs. Maybe the pin-guy just had food allergies and felt sorry for himself, but why would he advertise it?
I was a young mother at the time, still flailing to just understand my own kid’s food allergies, and pretty entitled. I worked my butt off with parenting, teaching, and running community programs. I prided myself on working hard, and I couldn’t imagine anybody more tired than me; more in-pain from lifting children; more deserving of accommodations or understanding. I certainly couldn’t imagine that one day I’d have an invisible disability.
Now that my kids are grown and I live with a serious invisible disability, I still don’t want to advertise it. Because shame. That pin-wearing guy was much more courageous than I am. I mean to challenge my shame with this photo:
Here I am in my usual morning location, writing this article. This photo was taken by my partner and caregiver, Markus, because I asked him to. The weird black thing on my face is an acupressure clip for migraines. I tidied the nightstand for the photo. Now I’m out of breath from doing so.
In early 2020 I was a parent, a visual artist, a self-determined learning consultant, and a leader of art and wilderness programs. I also grew many of our family’s veggies, in a garden I loved. I spent a lot of time hiking, crawling and climbing around in the wilderness with kids. Then I, my daughter and most of her class that I’d been teaching, came down with a sickness that nobody could identify, because although our symptoms matched those of the then-new Covid-19, there wasn’t yet any test available to confirm it. After a week of fever, some blacking-out and a visit to urgent care, then a few weeks of ongoing respiratory symptoms, we recovered and went back to work and school.
By March, I was exhausted. My body hurt everywhere, and I developed a new, ongoing respiratory issue; I felt like I couldn’t get enough air, and was given asthma inhalers of two different types, that made the symptoms much worse. I had a headache all day every day, but I told myself I can handle pain, and kept working. After a day of work I’d be wheezing and shaking in the evening; sometimes also with a fever. I cut back my work days to only two per week. Then one. Then one every two weeks. And by summer I was flat-out in bed, most of every day. I eventually learned that the name for one of my major symptoms is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. It’s basically a circulation and autonomic nervous system issue, and means that if I’m upright for too long, I get blurred vision, dizziness, nausea, and will eventually pass out. I spent the latter half of 2020 and all of 2021 mainly in bed.
I had Long Covid. I still do, but those first two years were the worst. I couldn’t get out of bed for more than about five or ten minutes at a time, maybe three times a day, without suffering intense shooting pain, wheezing, dizziness, blurred vision, and fever. My partner helped me to dress and undress. He washed me, and administered the many trial-medications and supplements I was offered. He worked gratefully from home and took frequent breaks to bring me food or tea, to keep up with errands, and sometimes to feed me or help me to the toilet. On the occasions I did leave the house, my son would walk behind me and push gently up on my back to help me walk. My daughter, also suffering from Long Covid, but less severely, would curl up beside me in bed, where we spent endless hours just keeping each other company. My kids took over most of the cooking, garden and chicken duties. I find it difficult to talk about the extent of my physical disability in those years, partly because my symptoms were dismissed and mocked by so many physicians, at the time, but also probably because I carried around a huge ableist attitude. And because my disability was invisible.
The most obvious invisibility was that I was in bed. No longer able to attend community functions or even just go to the store and bump into neighbours, I was no longer part of my community. This experience forced me to realize something I’d never believed, before: Most people don’t really miss you, when you’re gone.
But as the years went by, and more and more was learned about Long Covid, my health did improve. I benefited greatly from the BC Women’s Hospital’s Complex Chronic Diseases Program, and a series of interventions that slowly brought me to the point where I am, today: I can spend hours of every day out of bed, mainly in the afternoon, and therefore can go out in public once in a while. Despite POTS, arthritis and other inflammatory pain, I can do at least a couple of “big activities” each month, such as watching a show, attending a family gathering, or grocery shopping. Sometimes one per week, if I rest thoroughly for the week in-between, to recover from the resulting fever, viral flare-ups, nerve, organ and joint inflammation. If I don’t rest, or if I am unfortunate enough to pick up “a slight cold”, as it’s known to others, I can end up with months of shaking, untreatable fever, passing out from lack of oxygen and/or pain, pneumonia, bronchial, sinus, and urinary infections, or pleurisy. I’m now allergic to at least one antibiotic, because of this, and have cataracts from prednisone. So I’m very, very careful about masking in public, sticking to my treatment regimens, and how much I go out. I’m not as careful as I should be around staying home, because it’s lonely, here!
This, too, is a kind of invisibility. When I’m out in public, people see me and tell me I look so healthy! I say “yes! I’m doing really well!” and then return to my house, where I curl up on the couch, my partner wraps me in a blanket, and I wait for the fever to subside.
Once in a while I mention my reality to people. In a sentence or so I try to describe my symptoms—an effort, I guess, to break the invisibility shield; create some kind of connection. And while some people are curious; compassionate, even, many sort of drift away, or roll their eyes. Sometimes, out of love or concern, they offer advice: I’m suffering because I got vaccinated, or otherwise because I am an anti-vaxxer. I should try going paleo, or vegan, or eating only meat, or mainly blueberries. More reasonably, I should see a therapist, or a doctor, or maybe get some exercise. I get it. I really do. I have the same propensity for offering unsolicited advice, myself, and know it comes from a good place. All they can see of me is that I’ve put on weight and am not out working in the community. They care about me, but my experience is largely invisible. They don’t know that I’ve already seen over a dozen specialists, tried even more interventions, and that as much as it physically pains me to put on weight from lack of exercise, exercise itself makes me put on weight by causing inflammation and more hours lying in bed.
I am SO aware that this sounds like a pity party. If you’re still reading, I commend your patience and tolerance. I’m still here because, as I healed, I discovered there are in fact millions of (by one estimate 400 million) people living with Long Covid, and fighting for others’ visibility is worth confronting my own shame. In 2024 I created a wearable art piece and performance called (dis)robe: Hospital Gown, that included the faces and common symptoms of over three hundred Long Covid patients. The intent was to advocate and create visibility for this massive group of people, but I also learned a lot, in the process.
I learned that most of us are women. I learned that while some had pre-existing health issues, many were very active, healthy people. Long Covid doesn’t seem to discriminate, and may not, in fact, be a result of laziness or incompetence. The list of symptoms is very long, but many are common to most of us. All of us have been discriminated against, either for mask-wearing, sitting down to rest, using mobility aids, or for being anti-vaxxers (most of us aren’t). I’ve learned that very few have actually been helped. The number of people who were or are still dismissed by medical professionals is alarming. The number of medical professionals who still treat us with disdain is sickening.
A few days after my second Covid vaccine in 2021, my partner brought me in to the ER, as I was wheezing, blacking out from either lack of oxygen or the excruciating pain in my chest, shaking, squirming uncontrollably, and running a moderate fever. My partner pulled our car up to the doors of the ER, but I couldn’t get myself out. He ran inside and luckily found friends who were there with their elderly father, and they helped me in to the waiting room. The place was packed; there were no beds, and everyone was stressed. Because I couldn’t see, was wheezing loudly, and was in too much pain to speak clearly or state pertinent facts, my partner tried to describe the situation to the intake coordinator. She barked at him that I could speak for myself, and told me to stop hyperventilating and get my act together. My partner tried to steady me in the chairs as we waited beside an unused stretcher, until he couldn’t manage it anymore, and just put me on the stretcher, without anybody’s permission. The ER doctor came by every few hours, offering me opiates for the pain, which I’m allergic to, and every time I declined she rolled her eyes and left in exasperation. Eventually she told me to get a thermometer and go home. Nobody even looked at my lungs, and thankfully, I did eventually recover.
In 2025 I lost a friend to pneumonia. She was a mother, like me, to a teenaged child. She wasn’t formally diagnosed with Long Covid, because our system hasn’t yet managed to find, diagnose, or treat all those who are suffering. She thought she had Long Covid, and as someone who knew her well, and saw the similarities in our symptoms and the way she was dismissed by medical professionals, I don’t doubt she did. Her official cause of death was pneumonia, though. It will not be recorded as Long Covid, and nobody cares, even so. Well… I do. Juanita is one of the people for whom I’m writing this. She was extremely courageous. Lots of people, including me, were put off by how forward she was; how open and honest about her life’s challenges. People like to ask you how you’re doing, and hear back “great, thanks! How about you?” They don’t actually want to know. My father told me this when I was a teenager and I thought he was just obnoxious. Now I know he was right.
My father had Parkinson’s. It was, eventually, a very visible disability. Although unfortunately, before he used a walker, people sometimes just saw his wobbliness and assumed he was a drunk. When people asked him how he was doing, he often said, “better than I could be!” It was a way of seeing the positive in what was actually an extremely challenging, progressive disease. He also liked to say his cup was so full it was overflowing.
I guess I’m following my Dad’s lead on this. When people ask me how I’m doing, I might answer that my chicks are growing adorably, or I’m sure loving this weather, or maybe that I’m so happy my kids are living well in the city. Sometimes I take my Dad’s lead and say something that hopefully points at the ongoing challenge of my disability while sounding positive about it.
Disability.
That’s still hard to write. Even though I have a disability parking tag in my car. My car that mainly my partner drives, because driving taxes my system too much. I lie there with the passenger seat reclined and my feet up, heating my body with the seat heater, trying to conserve energy and circulation for whatever we’re driving to. I haven’t applied for all the disability benefits I am supposedly entitled to because the process is too much work, and (mainly) because I’m ashamed. Internalized ableism. Gad, how awkward.
I long for the life I once loved: leading adventures through the bush, running art programs and tromping out as an installation and performance artist, making change in the world, for the better. But I hold my adorable chicks; I make an excursion from my bed to the sunshine. And I remind myself that I have an invisible disability, and I’m better than I could be.
Mid 1980's. Behind the loose rehearsal set for our play, I was stuffing my winter socks into my mother's bra, transforming from my role as the sandwich-board-wearing, singing pig to the obnoxiously-vain queen. I was nervous about my fellow actors watching me put this giant bra on over my t-shirt, and remembered Julie's words from when we'd been swimming at the beach just last summer. She'd been changing into her swimsuit, under the veil of her shirt, and said, "I don't know why I'm shy; I have nothing to hide!"
Julie was my best friend's mother, the cooker of tofu dinners and the owner of fluttery, gentle hands that tucked me into bed on the hundreds of nights I slept in her home. She was the giver of twenty-five cents' allowance to any child who happened to wake up in her home on a Sunday morning, and the offerer of hugs, should any of us need them. When she offered me the role of the pig and the queen in her and Jack's new theatre program, Tir-na-nOg, I accepted because I loved her. I accepted because I knew I'd be safe with her. And I was.
And in the refrain of the play we performed, (yes, of course it's normal for a play to have a refrain!) we sang,
My leaves, they fall, like yellow tears My leaves, they fall, like yellow tears My bones, they are bared, to the bite of the wind I am fading away; I am fading away
…because, collectively, we young performers were a tree, and the wind, and whatever else we needed to be for the beautiful, heart-full, obscurely profound story we were telling to the handful of parents who came to watch us.
Close your eyes, follow me, come and see Close your eyes, follow me, come and see
The words of this song still permeate my dreams, now that I'm fifty. Now I'm fifty, Jack and Julie's little theatre school has nurtured two generations into adulthood, including my own children. They worked with a local developer to build a space for their dream, and have been operating out of this little space for decades, now. On the east side of the building is a wide open room full of props and costumes, some chairs, and the spirit of so many imaginative group adventures that have echoed off its walls, over the years. It's the space where Jack gathers children's ideas around a story and helps knit them all into an adventuresome script. It's where Julie flits through the developing story, reflecting and celebrating each child's contributions with a kind of joy that infuses the whole room with glittery delight. On the west side of the building, Jack has built a spectacular theatre. It's small, but supremely functional, and his beautiful curved walls, trap doors and secret passageways have inspired much creativity for the children who use them. The set is empowering to children, because it gives them a way to work with their resources and surprise people with ingenuity. Julie paints the set; the backdrops. Julie brings the ephemeral magic to the space. This building, and the nurturing of our children's dreams within it, are a foundation of our community, you might say.
Tir-na-nOg production of the NeverEnding Story, 2013.
Tir-na-nOg isn't just the Land of Perpetual Youth. It's the place where youth is a key to growth. A place where imagination, delight and authenticity play with each other in the spaces between children's faces. And adults'. Because now many children stay with Jack and Julie into adulthood. Some have gone on to very successful careers in the performing arts, but no matter where their life-paths have gone, all have had their lives enriched, their confidence bolstered, and their prospects widened by the lessons they learned at Tir-na-nOg.
My own first child was one of these. Taliesin knew Jack and Julie personally; had played with their grandson in their small apartment above the theatre school, and had gone to see their school's plays multiple times, as well. He wanted SO much to be a part of this magical world. But he was also one of the shyest children I'd ever known, so actually going in to the first day of theatre class proved to be impossible for him. We tried again every week, even taking homeopathic stagefright remedy, arriving before the other children, and more acclimatization visits… to no avail. After six weeks, Jack worried that Taliesin was missing too much of the year's program, and suggested maybe we should wait until the following year. But Tali was determined, and somehow just the sound of Jack's soft gentle voice gave him the confidence he needed, and… he just went in!
Taliesin's thank-you letter to Jack and Julie, after his first year at Tir-na-nOg.
That year Taliesin created a non-speaking role for himself, but then started taking on speaking parts, and eventually leading roles with many many lines, that he diligently practised, while also making himself costumes, often with friends who were also in the program. Taliesin went on to create YouTube videos about science topics he was interested in, as well as animations and comedy. He acted in various school plays, but his dream career is not theatre. That doesn't mean the gifts he got from Tir-na-nOg aren't still serving him.
In adulthood, Taliesin became a digital artist, building upon the creativity and confidence nurtured at Tir-na-nOg. And he also ended up working part-time for the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, while he lived in Vancouver. He became that quintessential inspired science-show-guy, excitedly demonstrating rocket propulsion and other seeming miracles to a crowd of parents and kids! When I went to watch his show, I cried with joy. In the audience that day were a few children, and as he looked out into their eager and shy faces, I saw the same look in his eyes that I know from Jack. He saw them. I mean he really connected with those kids; took their questions at face value and, gently but enthusiastically, made his science show theirs. When he brought up a kid to help him demonstrate, that kid knew he was safe up there on the stage, which is a gift Tali got from Jack and Julie, and now passes on to younger children, as well.
So many of Tir-na-nOg's alumni are spreading Jack and Julie's gifts to the world. Some even still live on the island and are more directly still associated with the school.
Jack and Julie's gift may be spreading into the world, but the fate of the theatre school itself is now in jeopardy. Jack is undergoing treatment for aggressive prostate cancer, and Julie has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The fact that they managed to keep the school operating so long with their current troubles is a miracle, indeed, but now they need our help. Our community is fundraising to pay off their building loan, so that the dream of Tir-na-nOg can continue, without their constant personal involvement. Donations can be made at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-jack-julie
And in our future, may we continue to see our children grow into their confidence. May we continue to see their dreams blossom, and Jack and Julie's gifts spill out into the bigger world. Maybe we continue to hum, as we walk along,
Close your eyes, follow me, come and see Close your eyes, follow me, come and see
After my dad died, in 2015, my Mum saw me grieving and told me to paint something beautiful. I didn't have it in me, and I painted a whole lot of anger and pain. Sometimes we just have to paint our truth. But… what we create becomes our truth, as well. My mother also told me–countless times throughout my life–that if I wanted to feel happy, I could just make myself smile. That's the last thing you want to hear when you need to be seen and heard; when your experience needs to be acknowledged. But it's also true. And it's been the way I manage the worst experiences life throws at me. I stretch my lips out sideways, rub my cheeks vigorously, and just grin. I fake a laugh until I feel how silly I am, and it becomes real. I paint the most beautiful things I know–the birds and trees and plants and wind and flowers–until their beauty fills up the void left by the pain.
When my mother was dying, I painted my car. I covered it with butterflies. "Why?!" People asked me. "Oh the resale value!!" But I did it because beauty. Because the local species of butterflies and moths I painted remind me of a happy day in my garden, and of the butterfly-effect, where small acts of beauty (like painting my car) might in turn create much larger beauty. I painted it because I don't want to live in a world where something as essential to my life as my vehicle is effectively just a gamble against the future, waiting to be re-sold. And I painted it because my mother was dying, and I needed something joyful to do, in between the doom and pain that pervaded our days.
It's not that the pain is really gone, of course, just because we create some beauty. We still need to deal with the horrors of life, and to heal the pain, itself. But at the same time, the world is carrying on around us, and we are contributing to how it grows, whether we're aware of it or not.
Decades of studies have shown us, by now, that the media we consume affects how we experience the world around us. What about what we create? What about how we create? I spent a few years creating social media videos about our local ecology and my nascent regenerative food farm. Making the videos forced me to consider the way I spoke about those things. Editing the videos made me think about how my words would come across to others. Publishing the videos exposed me not only to generally positive feedback from viewers, but also to other videos with similarly nature-celebrating themes that came up in my own feeds.
On the other hand, I've also landed in negative feedback loops, for example when posting my negative political views on our local forum. People fought me, I became angry and argued back, people stated all kinds of further negativity, and generally the conversations devolved, and community bonds broke. I'm not trying to imply that we shouldn't speak up for causes we think are important, but how we do it matters greatly.
What if, instead of calling out harmful things we notice (or in addition to calling them out, if they really need to be stopped imminently), we built the world we want, right alongside the world we don't want, and just lived in that world we want? Would others join us? I think so! Or maybe they'd all be building their own utopias, and one day there would simply be more of us living in joy than in fear and resentment. What if, instead of being ugly with our thoughts, we were beautiful?
It's not possible to be beautiful all the time. Sometimes we just have to curl up in a ball and let the sad times roll over us. But I feel like I come out of such times healthier when I've cultivated enough beauty inside of me that some of it is still there to blossom, when the tears dry up. Then there's more of me to go about building the world I want, by making all life's little choices in line with my vision for a beautiful world.
My mother's gone, now, so I have to summon the memory of her voice in my heart: Emily, make something beautiful. And I, like she, and like you, have to be that voice for ourselves and others. Go make something beautiful. Be beautiful. Find what brings you joy and cultivate it.
This is not AI. This is a photo of my hand drawing a portrait of three young men, with a reference photo open on my laptop, beside it. So it's a photo of a drawing of a photo! This photo was taken by an artist: me, Emily van Lidth de Jeude. I interviewed the young men and got them laughing together, to create a happy memory from which to draw their portrait. I photographed them during the interview. I then communicated with their family to determine how the final portrait would look. I then drew their portrait, and communicated more with their family to ensure the final product was what they hoped for. Then I sent the portrait to an art printer, who made a print of it, for their grandmother. Then I packaged up the portrait and delivered it. I spent dozens of hours creating this portrait, and the family evidently loves it. Why? Because it's real. It's their children. It shows a real moment of happiness and connection. It shows love. And it's not AI.
And now this image is an illustration for a blog post I'm writing, myself. Also not using AI. These thoughts are actually fully my own. These words are the way I think them, in my own mind, and share them with you.
This morning I received a blog post written by a person whose work I admire, illustrated by OpenAI. It's so depressing to see intelligent, thoughtful people write wonderful essays, and illustrate them with AI. Not just depressing because the result is so devoid of human connection, but also because the person who used the AI to illustrate is also becoming devoid of neurological connection. Yes–I'm serious. A 2025 study out of MIT showed that:
Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed weaker neural connectivity and under-engagement of alpha and beta networks; and the Brain-to-LLM participants demonstrated higher memory recall, and re‑engagement of widespread occipito-parietal and prefrontal nodes, likely supporting the visual processing, similar to the one frequently perceived in the Search Engine group.
(N. Kosmyna, E. Hauptmann, Y.T. Yuan, J. Situ, X-H. Liao, A.V. Beresnitzky, I. Braunstein, P. Maes, (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. (Preprint, Under Review.) p. 2.)https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872
So, this study was focused on writing with AI. Still, it seems blazingly obvious to me that using AI to illustrate our work is going to deprive us of our own illustration abilities. And I'm not just talking about our ability to draw or photograph well. These are skills that can easily be learned, anyway. I'm talking about our ability to conceptualize. I'm talking about our ability to understand how others think: what kind of an illustration might pique their interest in our work, and how that illustration might reach them emotionally (which is essential for impact). It's really about human connection. And when we lose that, what do we have left?
Julianne Holt-Lunstad states that "scientific evidence has been credibly demonstrating a significant causal effect of lack of social connection on leading physical and mental health indicators, such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, depression and dementia." (J. Holt-Lunstad (2024). Social connection as a critical factor for mental and physical health: evidence, trends, challenges, and future implications. (World Psychiatric Association.)) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11403199/
OK, OK… Let's not get all dramatic. We're not busy thinking about our future health, right? We're not busy thinking about the future at all! All 55 participants in the study I quote up above were university students, and the study lasted only four months. That's four months for significant brain disconnection to occur. Where do you see yourself in four months? Personally, I hope my brain-health is still improving, not declining. And same for my social connection. So from a purely selfish perspective, I don't use AI.
I am trusting (but also researching to determine that my trust is well-placed) that by continuing to engage in my own work, I will have a part in making my life and my greater community better. I trust that in researching, I still depend on my own observations and fact-checking, to be sure the information I'm gathering is accurate. I trust that in sharing this information with you, I lead with my brain and heart, instead of being blindly led by an LLM whose interest was programmed by a corporation who doesn't give a crap where I'm at in four months. I trust that the image I created and used to illustrate this article will remind you that I'm human, and I trust that being human is still worth a lot. I trust in our shared connection to support us all in the future we're creating.
I performed one of my wearable art pieces at the Museum of Vancouver recently, and they pointedly payed me properly for my work, as well as provided human-created promotional material around the event. It shouldn't be amazing to simply be respected and paid for my work, but these days it definitely feels amazing. And simply wonderful to be working with a team of actual humans on making this performance happen. Collaboration is part of being human.
Kudos to all the people out there still creating; still respecting other humans' work; still seeing our world as a community of creative, resourceful minds, instead of workers on a treadmill run by AI.
Grandma Frees the Ptarmigan, oil and graphite by Emily van Lidth de Jeude
The audio version of this story is available on my MakerTube.
Dear Little Emily,
You’re sitting on the floor of Mum and Pappa’s house, by the big brown bookshelf and the wide darker-brown row of Encyclopedia Britannicas. You have one open on your lap—number twenty-two—its huge brown covers rested against your bare knees, and you’re running your finger down the one of the many shiny, thin-paper pages of the PSYCHOLOGY section. Jeez there are a lot of things to say about psychology. But nowhere, not anywhere at all, do you see the word ‘psychosomatic’ popping up. Finally, after picking through hundreds of words you can’t bother to try out, you land upon this: PSYCHOPHYSICS, "a department of psychology which deals with the physiological aspects of mental phenomena." Mental. Grandma is a mental case, that’s for sure.
And amazingly, like the heavy book is calling her right out of crazy-land, the next listing in the book is PTARMIGAN. "A gallinaceous bird akin to the grouse." Whatever that means. It says it’s Gaelic, which is impossible, because you know ptarmigans are Canadian or Ukrainian. Grandpa is Irish and he never mentioned a ptarmigan. Grandma says ptarmigans live in Ukraine and in the Rockies, so. There they are.
But what the hell. Psychosomatic. It’s not even in the encyclopedia, right? Like even the definition of Grandma’s craziness is not in the book, that’s how imaginary it is. And the encyclopedia, now you’re nearly twelve, and it’s nineteen-eighty-seven, is the biggest, most trustworthy source of information in existence. As far as you know, little me, and you know more than some eleven-year-olds, but not nearly as much as you think you do.
You’re thinking about the last time you visited Grandma. Daddy dropped you off there for a sleepover, which seemed like a wonderful escape from the terrifying basement corner that you have to sleep in, at his house. But soon you realized there are other kinds of bad.
You sat in the wooden nook while Grandma smoothed her long, pearlescent nails. They’re three times as thick as your nails, because she’s old (though not as old as most Grandmothers, Mum says), and her nails are all covered with ridges, which she fills with layer upon layer of nail polish. You heard the plastic scrape of her nails; the rattle of her bracelets, and you shifted your gaze to the pink and turquoise squares of the kitchen floor. She was still talking, and you were getting tired. “The Devil lives in her,” she went on. “He lives in her mind and when she dies he’ll take her away to his lands.”
This wasn’t the first time Grandma professed to understand the Devil’s behaviour, and it usually somehow involved Mum. Mum says it doesn’t matter because we don’t believe in the Devil, so you sat quietly just waiting for Grandma to finish. “People who leave their husbands are evil,” she continued. “Your mother has the Devil in her heart, and you were born from that woman’s evilness. You have to pray to God to take it out of you.”
“I don’t believe in God,” you said, then, looking bravely up into Grandma’s wrinkly face; her nose kind of lumpy, in a way that made you think that must be the Ukrainian coming through. The angry concern in her sinister eyes leaked out the wrinkles of her face and into the perfect curls of her permanent-set hair. She looked like she might bite you, but you were too tired to care. It would be hours before Daddy would be there to pick you up, and by this point you thought you might fall asleep right there on the table, next to Grandma’s hands, her plastic bracelets rattling beside your head.
“Your mother taught you to say that. She put the Devil in you.”
“I’m so tired, Grandma,” you pleaded.
She looked up then, again, from her nails, and appeared surprised. “Oh, yes, dear. Would you like some Sprite?”
“Can I lie down on your bed for a minute?”
“Of course, doll-babe,” she replied. “I have to go call in the sun.”
You walked down the short hallway to Grandma’s bedroom as she slowly descended the brass-rattle staircase to the basement door, where the sun had begun to peek through, from the cedar trees, outside. “Come on, Sun!” She exclaimed. And, “oh hello, how’s your morning?” She asked of some random bird flying through her yard. And you lay there on her perfectly pink bed thinking about the mystery of fibromyalgia that caused Grandma to stand in the doorway and soak up the sun, every time it shone; that caused her, also, to keep her house a few degrees above normal, because supposedly it helped her pain. Grandma says she has fibromyalgia. Mum, Daddy, and everybody else say she has psychosomatic illness. It’s all in her head. And the Encyclopedia Britannica, for all its wisdom, has declined to comment.
You woke up with Daddy’s hand on your back. Somehow in your thoughts you’d slept two whole hours away, and it was time to go home.
Home is a place of reason; a big tree-speckled yard full of food plants and flowering plants, some ponds, rabbits, chickens, a dog and a safe house to live in. No gods or devils, no ‘fairytales’, as Pappa calls them. You eat what you grow and you see how the actual world works. Everyone is upfront, or so they say. And illnesses are real—the kinds of things you can check with a thermometer and heal with cough syrup, chicken broth, and Earl Grey tea. Nobody has psychosomatic illness in this home. Nobody also calls in the sun, nor talks to birds.
Mum says it’s not really Grandma’s fault she’s crazy. She was born to parents who fled when Russia invaded, and that kind of family trauma can make people a little strange. Grandma says she remembers her own mother hiding up in the trees as her entire village was murdered. Grandma says this as if she herself was in those trees. Which is impossible, of course, since Grandma wasn’t born, yet. But she remembers. Daddy says Grandma is just wasting Grandpa’s money by keeping the house so warm. Pappa says it’s none of our business what she does with Grandpa’s money. You just wonder why Grandma doesn’t have her own money.
Times are going to change, little Emily. Here I am, writing you from twenty-twenty-five—a date you likely find it difficult to imagine. I found it difficult to imagine the year two-thousand only months before it arrived! But here we are. You’re grown. Me. We even had kids who’ve grown up, by now. Russia is beating the shit out of Ukraine, again, and Grandma didn’t die of war or fibromyalgia; she died of strokes, kind of, in the end. Mum died of a brain tumour, and so far as I can tell, the Devil didn’t take her, because I still hear her voice in my head, sometimes reassuring me, sometimes giving her opinions, and sometimes shrieking in alarm. Maybe it’s the Devil after all. Who knows. And I have fibromyalgia.
Yeah. You. You, when you’re grown up, little me, are going to have fibromyalgia, just like Grandma. And no family member is going to dare tell you it’s all in your head, because they’ll all watch you experience the pain and struggle that this stupid illness involves. In fact, one of the doctors who diagnoses you will mysteriously test a bunch of seemingly-random spots on your limbs for pain, and when they all hurt like bruises, she’ll explain that those pain spots are specific to fibromyalgia. She’ll then suggest self-treatment by using saunas, keeping your house warm, and perhaps also trying infrared therapy. Infrared light is contained in sunlight, little Em. The doctor will one day tell you to call in the sun. Well… metaphorically-speaking.
You’re not exactly going to start calling in the sun. But I do try to soak it in as much as my fair skin and hot flashes will allow. I sit out there on the porch, watching the yard of this place you grew up in and that I eventually raised our own children in. I see the garden where I still grow most of our food, and I watch Eamon, the raven who’s been living around here for a few years now, fly low over the sunflowers, and land under the walnut. “Good morning, Eamon!” I call. He doesn’t answer, but sometimes when I’m in the garden he calls, and I do answer. We play a game where I copy his calls, and he changes them. Or at least I think we play this game. Maybe it’s all in my head. Who cares.
"Did you shuffle off the pavements just to let your betters pass?" Oil and graphite on canvas. Artist Emily van Lidth de Jeude
Thijs’ face remained open and calm as he described his childhood memory of his Jewish neighbours being removed to whatever fate they met: “I remember the SS or Germans going upstairs, kicking them down the stairs, so they rolled right on our sidewalk, in front of our door.” I was interviewing him for an installation about the concept and feeling of ‘home’, and this was part of his response. I think that I, too, looked unphased by this story. We both have lived so long in a society that treats such traumatic experiences as passing news, and turns to chemicals, distraction, or denial to keep from dwelling on the horror.
But it IS horror. It’s horror every time a starving Palestinian child tries to get food and is blown to pieces, but still alive, briefly, to witness the cries of his mother. It’s horror every time a child holds the dead face of his parent, living only in terror, oblivious to what life will be like as an orphan of genocide, however short that life may be. It’s horror every time a girl, a child; a desperate woman is captured, owned, and brutalized to feed some sick person’s illness, and then silenced, for the good of the nation, or at least for the benefit of those profiting off the nation. It’s horror every single time a person of colour, an indigenous person, a woman, or a poor person is kidnapped by brutal masked agents of terror, hiding behind anonymity and the letters I, C, and E, or simply balaclavas. It’s horror while these people sit rotting in internment camps created with the intention of brutalizing their bodies, minds, and futures. It’s horror when a child is raised with such depravity that they applied for the jobs that mean brutalizing their fellow citizens; that they are willing to create more such depravity in hopes of rising above it, for the good of the nation. For the good of the family. It’s horror when we turn away, because it hurts so much to see, and blindly, through chosen ignorance, raise our own children to be unphased by the horrors that we condone, for the good of the family.
It’s easy to buy cheap milk eked out of tortured beasts on tortured stolen indigenous land because my children need calcium, to bubble their water with a machine made on stolen Palestinian land, and to turn their eyes away from the news, towards a screen filled with shiny ads. To turn my own eyes away from how those ads are harming them, because I need time to make their dinner, and it's easier. It’s easy to allow the fascist few to benefit from our choices, for the good of the family. For the good of the nation.
What family?! What nation?! What kind of monsters are we that we can look but refuse to see?! I hear a siren right now outside my window, and I’m scared because I know that siren means someone in my community is scared, too, right now.
I can’t turn away. I can’t be the person who allows these horrors to happen, while I avert my eyes. Neither can you. I know that, because you probably looked at the news, today. You’re reading this, right now. Not to numb yourself, not to bolster ignorance, but to SEE. You’re trying to see. You’re looking to bolster community by being willing to share the suffering of others.
We know we’re bound to each other as humans. We know each child stripped of dignity, health, safety, love and life by the greed of the tiny fascist few is a part of us. We know, even, that those greedy few are part of us, so like we need to weed them out of our society, we need to weed the tendency to greed and ignorance from our own psyches. We need to rise up as individuals to save the whole of us.
I know this all sounds very big-picture. Very abstract. We want something actionable. We want to reject the rise of greed, hate, and fascism. But how? I’m working on that. I can’t say how it will look for you, but I can, at least, describe what I’m doing, and hope it helps inspire you to make whatever choices make sense in your life.
Ending Reliance on Fascist Corporations
Those photos of Trump surrounded by the tech billionaires whose private jet flights we fund with our digital existence were very enlightening, to me. I can no longer pretend a single one of them is good. Not even if they tout vaccines for impoverished populations or free transit. They’re a huge piece of the fascist landscape, and I can’t be supporting them. Obviously, it’s difficult to just quit these giants in a world that they’ve carefully arranged to be mandatory opt-in. In fact, we pay for the right to use these systems that we’ve been convinced we can’t live without!
Well, I’ve been dumping the tech giants at a steady pace for about six months, now, and I’m here to tell you it’s not only less daunting than I feared; it’s liberating!! It feels wonderful!! So here’s a list of the great alternatives I’ve found. And of course there are many more! Luckily, we live in a whole world full of caring, creative individuals, working in community to build a better world.
*NOTE: Rebel Tech Alliance, one of the groups building this better world, recently contacted me regarding this article, to point me to their amazing resource for this exact information! Do check it out; they've compiled a very useful list of options! https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/stopusingbigtech.html
…and here are my choices:
Facebook/Instagram/Twitter ⟶ Mastodon Mastodon, with it’s cute little Elephant logo, is wonderful for connecting to like-minded community. A bit of an adjustment in terms of how posting works, but not difficult, by any means. Yes, it’s part of a whole landscape of options, but you don’t even need to understand that to use and enjoy it!
WhatsApp ⟶ Signal For some reason I had the idea that Signal was for right-wing people. (?) Once I joined, I discovered that wasn’t true at all. It’s just for people. Some might be right-wing, but I wouldn’t know, just like you wouldn’t know that about your phone contacts list. It is, after all, just an app you can use for free video, phonecalling, and messaging, that uses your contacts list. But it’s an app that’s not stealing and selling your data. And yes it’s free.
News sources ⟶ Al Jazeera and local sources Obviously, this depends on where you are. But Al Jazeera definitely has a more open view of world events than any mainstream North American news sources I’ve looked at. And I augment my news intake by subscribing to local and indigenous sources that have more to say about my specific local interests.
Blogger/Website ⟶ Autistici/Noblogs Yeah!! I haven’t moved my domain name over yet, but I was honoured to be accepted by the good people who create and maintain Autistici. I’m slowly transferring all my previous content to my site there, and will redirect my domain name when I’m ready. This (moving all my content) is definitely the most daunting task I’ve undertaken, but it’s worth it, not to be chained to Google/Blogger.
Web/Chrome ⟶ Mozilla Firefox Mozilla is an amazing group of people fighting very hard to maintain fair and open internet. They make Thunderbird, which is a great email reader/system (I’ve been using it for decades), and Firefox, which is possibly the best, safest, most versatile web browser out there. Yes, it’s WAY better than Chrome!! Mozilla’s browsers are free, but you can donate if you want to. Of course the US fascist regime has cut their funding, so now is a great time to donate to such things!!
Gmail ⟶ Autistici I got a free email account with Autisici too, and use Mozilla Thunderbird to access it.
Spotify ⟶ Bandcamp I never used Spotify to begin with because the musicians I know were losing out to it from the beginning. But Bandcamp is where many of them publish, so that's what I use, or (for big-name musicians) I buy directly from their websites. Also, Bandcamp makes an expressed point of banning AI. Right on!!
YouTube ⟶ MakerTube Part of the PeerTube system, MakerTube allows creatives to upload very similarly to YouTube, but without the ads, constant AI spam, and data domination. And free, too, of course! I’m also slowly migrating my content to my new MakerTube account: https://makertube.net/c/emilyartist/videos (For video-watching, PeerTube definitely doesn't have the amount or variety of content that YouTube has, yet, but it's increasing every day! And it's real, unlike the AI dumping-ground that YouTube has become.)
Google ⟶ Ecosia On both phone and laptop, I search with Ecosia. I’ve installed it as the default search engine on my Firefox browser. While Google uses ads to raise their already astronomical profits and fund fascism, Ecosia provides the same search, but uses the ad revenue to fund reforestation. I am, however, increasingly irritated by Ecosia's deep dies to AI, and the increasingly useless search results. I may end up switching to something like Duck Duck Go.
Windows ⟶ Linux Ubuntu This was the scariest change for me, but it turned out to be both simple and amazing!! Not only are there incredibly robust and useful (free, open-source, decentralized) alternatives for every single application I previously bought or subscribed to, but the platform itself is only slightly different from the platforms we’re used to. Also: There’s an amazing community of Linux users ready to help me when I have a question!
Next I plan to replace the Android on my phone with Ubuntu touch, which will apparently relate seamlessly with my laptop, and be free (from costs, data insecurity, AND fascism!) I’m also going to get a fully repairable Fairphone.
Here are some of the apps I use, on Ubuntu. They're also available for use on Windows. Every single one of these is actually better than what it replaced for me. And free.
Word/Spreadsheet/pdf Processor ⟶ LibreOffice Image Editor ⟶ GIMP Video Editor ⟶ Kdenlive Audio Editor ⟶ Audacity Video Player ⟶ VLC (plays all kinds of things that popular players can’t)
There was one program I couldn’t get an alternative for, which is Blurb’s BookWright app. This worried me, because I do use it frequently. But it turns out there’s an easy fix for this issue! I installed Wine from the Ubuntu store, which emulates Windows, and thusly runs BookWright for me, effortlessly. That’s what’s going on in the background. What I see is just the BookWright app logo on my desktop, and it runs like there’s no background at all. 🙂
Freedom and Human Rights
At some point I realized that in almost every country, it’s illegal to live without buying or renting space on the planet. Sure, there are organizations trying to help those who can’t afford the luxury of shelter, but their goal is still to get people earning enough money to rent space. Eating is the same. You must make enough money to pay someone else to produce food, because growing it, while not always illegal, is at least only available to those who pay for space to grow it. As corporations like Nestle commandeer water resources, and municipalities begin taxing citizens for water-use, but not corporations for draining aquifers, many are now also unable to afford water. We always have to pay for our right to live. And who makes that money? Those depraved billionaires, of course. The only way to keep the basic human rights of taking up space, eating and drinking, is to exercise those rights.
I’ve noticed, personally, that when I go into the city, I feel like I need to pay for food or entertainment, if I want to sit down. To buy a cookie if I want to use a toilet. Cities offer parks and benches, of course, but I feel like there’s a growing expectation that if we’re using the spaces, we should be paying someone. The right to simply rest should not belong to the wealthy.
So taking up space is part of exercising our rights. Drink from the creek. Begin to care where it’s coming from, and who’s polluting it. Sit on the sidewalk and learn to see your neighbours. Encourage them to sit on the sidewalk, too. Plant food crops in disregarded soil. We have the right to live a good life on this earth, with the gifts this earth gives to all animals. Live it.
Activism
I’ve been severely limited by disability these last few years, and haven’t attended a single protest. Luckily, protests are not the only way to act against tyranny! They may not even be the most effective way! My auntie reminded me of this when she sent me this poem, yesterday. With a dizzying array of health problems like strokes and pneumonias that have put most of her career as a poet, performer, educator and author on hold, she still managed to write this poem, record it, and send it out. So I took one minute out of my morning and shared it on my MakerTube and Mastodon! We can ALWAYS do something.
Maybe the something looks like growing our own food, and sharing the bounty with neighbours. Maybe it looks like writing to people in position to make political or corporate change. Maybe we can make change by choosing how and where we spend our money, or earn it. Maybe we reject industries and products we know to be harmful. My son messaged me yesterday to say he sadly forgot to ask for oat-milk in his cappuccino. Why? I asked him. His answer was that the dairy industry is terrible. We didn’t talk about the coffee industry, but it’s a small thing to request oat milk instead of dairy. Maybe coffee is next. We make a journey by taking one step at a time, and every step matters.
The solution to so many of the world’s problems seems to be thoughtfulness. Awareness. Like when I talked about drinking from a stream, to allow us to take stock of who’s polluting that stream, we need to go through our lives with our eyes open, so that we are compelled to make the changes necessary to live well.
The people who profit off of our ignorance pay big money to maintain that ignorance. But we still have the power to open our eyes. To witness and make choices. When Thijs watched his Jewish neighbours rolled out onto the street he didn’t look away. In fact, eighty-odd years later, he’s still telling the story. Still using his traumatic experience of witnessing genocide to educate; to help all of us to open our eyes.
We’re all witnessing genocide, today. We’re all witnessing a rise of fascism that is stunning in its similarity to what Thijs and many of our elders experienced less than a hundred years ago. It’s up to each of us to not turn away. To not accept. To not condone. To not support fascism.
I know it's not so simple. We're funnelled into supporting fascism with every breath we take. But this is war, now. We're dying from our apathy, and the only thing that will save us is taking responsibility for the change. Nobody else is going to do it for us. As Sinéad O'Connor sang in "Drink Before the War", "Somebody cut out your eyes, you refuse to see". They can force us all they want, but the choice to see or not to see is still ours.
It’s up to each of us to build the world that feeds the many instead of the few. It’s up to each of us to look at our own hands and be sure they’re doing work we’re proud of. It’s up to each of us to open our eyes and become aware of the consequences of every action we take, and only take actions we’re proud of. For the good of the family. For the good of all people, and the future and ecology that feeds us, we must open our eyes and choose to see.
"Drink Before the War" Oil and graphite on canvas. Artist Emily van Lidth de Jeude
This has become one of my favourite things to do. Every year I go out and label the weeds and trees in the place with the highest foot-traffic on our island.
I hope people see these and begin to notice a bit of the world around them in ways they may not have, before. I hope people also go home and find the same weeds, there. Sure, it's the simplest kind of art.
I'm just chalking rocks, walls, and sidewalks with plant names! But I really feel it might be one of the most impactful works I've done.
And yes, if you're wondering, I do have municipal permission to do this! So the credit for this also goes to open-minded officials and other citizens who can appreciate the benefits of art and education in our communities. 🙂
As artists, we have the power, ability, and honour of building our future civilization. Some of us may be doing so intentionally; many not. But whether we're aware of it or not, we are responsible.
Sci-fi is often touted as predicting the future. But does it? Writers and other artists imagine plausible eventualities based on current directions and capabilities… and then they often happen. Maybe the artists are soothsayers, or more likely we're just creative… and humans have evolved by being resourceful. If we're given a wild idea, we take great pleasure in making the seemingly impossible happen. So maybe artists are visionaries. That's not a pat on the back. Most of us want to be seen as visionaries, I suspect, but it's a huge responsibility.
What are we putting out into the world? Books, movies, and other art that may very well have been intended to warn us away from a dystopian future might instead be creating it; putting the ideas for such dystopia into our minds so that our resourceful society will create it. I'm not talking about some evil genius who sits in their dark basement playing apocalypse video games and then thinks, "ooooh I could destroy the world… bwahahahahaaaa!" I'm talking about all of us becoming gradually more and more accustomed to seeing and hearing about such dystopian events so that as they happen, we don't stand up and stop them.
What are artists supposed to do? Become blind Pollyannas and make fluff? Cotton candy dreams with no real plot and no intrigue? No, of course not. Nobody would look, at all. People like to look at what terrifies us. And art needs to deal with our problems, too; not just look the other way. I'm totally not immune to creating work that deals with humanity's pain and failings. But I also feel that we need to be creating work that posits hopeful futures. We need to be imagining the world we want to see, instead of the one we're afraid of.
And luckily, we have nature to look at, for inspiration. Nature is resourceful and opportunistic and ruthless. And extremely beautiful. The whole of nature evolves because of these things, and humans are definitely part of that whole. Nature limits itself simply because it's impossible to keep living if one devours all one's resources at once. I keep an ecosystem-integrated food forest around my home, which teaches me this every year. This year we're having quite an infestation of flea beetles. In previous years it was cabbage moths and one year–spectacularly–it was mourning cloak butterflies. But each of these infestations either destroys it's own habitat and thereby starves itself out, or attracts some kind of predator that eats it alive. Nature limits greed. So, despite my current paltry pea crop, due to the flea beetle infestation, I'll still have food, because my garden is diverse, and next year I don't expect to have such an issue with flea beetles. They've destroyed so many of their resources and attracted so many predators that they can't be such a problem, next year. Humans are in the process of self-limiting, as well, painful though it is for us as individuals.
Contrast my garden flea beetle situation to a garden where all that's planted is peas (because: monocrop=money). The flea beetles now threaten the entire garden, as opposed to just the peas and the odd brassica or tomato, here and there. So now all we see as farmers is the flea beetle problem. And we blast them all to hell with pesticides. Now we have peas, and we make money, but we're poisoning ourselves and the land, and most of the other species that live on it. So in a couple of years of this practice, we've devastated our ability to grow peas, or perhaps anything at all on that piece of land, because we no longer have the diversity of life needed to sustain… life.
It doesn't take much vision to see that that way of farming (or living, or envisioning our human future) is hopeless. It takes a little more vision to imagine and create a hopeful future.
As an artist, I'd like to be one who plants more diversity, in preparation for new ways of living, instead of just imagining bleak futures for us to tumble numbly into. Humanity might indeed extinguish itself by imagining negative futures. But the life of this planet will go on. Yes, it will be utterly changed, because human folly is powerful, and we're destroying life at an ever-increasing rate. But some kind of collection of species (likely including some humans) will carry on beyond our rather short-lived civilization, and will develop its own rich community of life when it settles into the cradle that this planet offers. This new collection of species will imagine itself and grow into what it imagines. And, like my garden, the more diverse this new ecosystem is, the more resilient it will be.
I love to feel the responsibility of such a future. Let's imagine!
