Photo: Barry Durant
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Location: Bison Ranch, Alberta

Man, time flies. I write up a blog, go and get busy on the ranch, and the next thing I know, a week and a half has passed me by. It’s amazing how when you have lots to do, the days just blend into one another, slipping away into the past. I guess that’s just fall on a bison ranch. We’ve been busy feeding and butchering animals, stacking hay, fixing fences and getting the fall chores done before the first snowfall.

In other big news, I just turned 30. I’m not one for birthdays, but this was a pretty magical one. I was sitting in the house on Friday night when all of a sudden… my entire immediate family showed up. They had all decided to hunt me down in the wilds of Alberta and surprise the hell out of me, and surprise me they certainly did. In conversations, I often tell people stories about my family, and while I’m doing so, I’ll say, “Man, I wish I could just teleport them here, so you could meet them.” ZING!!! Wish granted! They appeared out of nowhere from across the entire country, stayed for a day and a half, and then slipped away again, as though it were a dream. Pure magic.

This influx of family was synchronous with a chapter regarding the importance of family from the book I’m currently reading. The book, Dark Age Ahead, is the last book written by Jane Jacobs before her recent passing. If you’ve never heard of Jane Jacobs, she’s an amazing woman, who, through her books, has given us so much to think about in terms of how we build not just our cities, but, our entire man-made reality. She’ll be greatly missed… In this, her final book Jane talks about the signs that become visible as a civilization begins heads towards a Dark Age. In her own words,

“A Dark Age is a culture’s dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past…

The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and thus retain and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears. We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.”

The chapter I am currently reading is about how we’ve created a society in which families are rigged to fail. The breakdown of the family is a clear visible microcosm of the larger picture. According to Jacobs, things are unraveling.

Although this book is breaking open my head, I don’t need Jane Jacobs to tell me we’re in serious trouble, the signs are everywhere around us. The further south I travel, the more I come across my own signs that a Dark Age may be coming, but at the same time I am also coming across signs of hope, change, and the power of creating new possibilities. While we are faced with serious challenges, the growing awareness of these challenges, in itself, creates the possibility of us redirecting ourselves towards a brighter, healthier and more sustainable future. It’s books like Dark Age Ahead, and the enlightening conversations I’ve been having with people young and old, that truly give me hope. The other thing that brings me hope is the thing that seems to be pervading everyone and everything around me… quite simply, love.

Whether it’s the love found in a strong family, love found for oneself (often the greatest barrier we give ourselves), love for the land, love of clean air, love for your urban environment, love for your partner, love for your dog… love really does allow us to create anything our hearts can imagine. And I think this is key, I think we are often misguided into believing we create with our heads, when in actuality, we create with our hearts. As John Lennon said, all you need is LOVE. But it’s so easy to be distracted from those things we love, by things that we fool ourselves into believing are necessary ‘facts’ of life. The job we dislike but force ourselves to do, the chemicals we convince ourselves we need in our food, jobs created by governments in the name of employment that destroy vast swaths of our increasing fragile natural world. As my old assistant Forbes once wrote in a blog entitled real world blues “Welcome to the REAL world.” In my opinion, this real world we’ve created is often treated as the only real choice we have, the only way forward. Although much around us is quickly changing, people still see major shifts in the paradigm as unrealistic or simply too difficult. This is the way things are, welcome to the real world.

If you ask me though, I’d say the world that is truly real, is the world that remains when you leave all these stagnant ideas behind. The world that you encounter when you stand alone out in nature, in a field full of bison, or the world you arrive at when you start creating from your heart. You walk through the door, leaving the old world, leaving the outdated remnants of the industrial revolution, and find yourself back in a place of magic, the place you had forgotten existed. In this place of magic, you and nature are co-creators. In this place of magic we let go and the possibilities we’ve created quickly manifest into reality. In this place of magic we find ourselves able to instantaneously teleport our entire family from far across the country to Now Here, Alberta.

Peace,
d