2. Letting Go
3. Scattering Seeds for the Earth
4. Who Speaks for Planet Earth?
Camelot and a Medieval Cathedral
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, I. Translated by Joanna Macy
Welcome to my little corner of the internet. My name is Maureen, and I live in southern Ontario, in a magical city built into a forest. London stands on the traditional beaver hunting grounds of the Algonquin, Haudenosaunee and Attawandaran (Neutral) peoples; and the longstanding Indigenous groups of this region are the Anishnaabe Peoples, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Lenni-Lenape Peoples.
The Haudenosaunee and Attawandaran history means the very ground that supports us is rooted in principles of negotiation and peace-making. Here, there are people from all over the world, with resources available to all of us because of it.
I grew up in the very conservative city of Calgary, Alberta—a western city that was mainly preoccupied, then as now, with the production of oil and gas. But I lived on the last street of the city, where a small dairy farm sat just behind us, a ‘gentleman’s’ farm was five houses up the street, and empty prairie stretched out at the bottom of the street. I was lucky enough to grow up in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, leading both a rural and urban life. I rode horses almost before I could walk, fed the dairy cows our cut grass on Saturdays, and delighted in their velvety noses and sweet breath scattering the small leaves, their gentle tongues brushing our hands. We had birds—meadowlarks and crows, sparrows and wild geese. There were butterflies and bees everywhere in the summer, and ants on the ground toiling away that we could watch for hours. And behind me was the city—glorious Calgary, full of Celts—Calgary means ‘clear, running water’ in Scottish Gaelic, after all—nestled in a valley of two rivers, the Bow and the Elbow, all contained and watched over by those stunning Rocky Mountains.”
I grew up as a romantic child—my very first choice of a book was not Alice in Wonderland or Heidi, but The Enquests and Adventures of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. By age 10, my favorite book was T.H. White’s The Once and Future King—filled with tales of King Arthur and his Merlin, Morgana, his fairy-witch half-sister, the romance of Lancelot du Lac, and finally, bittersweet, sorrowful, burned into my memory, The Candle in the Wind—the last story of how the whole kingdom fell, when Arthur’s dream of a united and just society came to an end.
I can still hear Richard Burton’s voice, beloved and rich and full of longing, from the 1960 musical Camelot, where he played Arthur:
Ask every person if he’s heard the story
And tell it strong and clear if he has not
That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory
called Camelot . . .
I’ve carried that romantic child with me all my life, through the beauty and the terror, as Rilke says in this poem that scares me half to death. I’m a daughter of Sheela na Gig, the Celtic Goddess of creation and destruction, a priestess and prophetess here to remind us how deeply we’re loved by this cosmos.
But I grew up feeling ‘less than,’ running from my mother’s abuse, afraid she’d kill me, and that terror followed me through years of betrayal, hospital stays, and despair. I often felt like Arthur after Camelot fell, watching my dreams of a just, united world crumble. But stories and music saved me—John Denver, Richard Burton, Mandy Patinkin, the voices that reminded me to keep dreaming, to keep building.
Years ago I attended an annual environmental conference in Aspen Colorado put together by John Denver’s (1943–1997) Windstar Foundation, which had been founded in 1976. John was an American singer-songwriter, environmental activist, and humanitarian whose music often evoked a deep connection to nature, the human spirit, and a longing for simplicity and peace. His songs are filled with imagery of mountains, forests, and open skies, reflecting his love for the Earth and his advocacy for environmental causes.
I had a chance to ask him a question after he had given his usual Saturday afternoon talk. Even though he had carefully avoided even looking in my direction for the three days of the symposium, attendance at the conference was a little lower than usual and only 2 other questions were being asked. So he didn’t have much choice but to call on me and nod for me to ask my question. I stood and tried very hard not to let my voice betray the tears behind the question. “How,” I asked, “do you keep going on, working on these environmental issues year after year, knowing how little progress is being made? I grew up in Calgary,” I added. “The land there is so beautiful, and its so heartbreaking any time something like clear cutting is done, or open mountain mining. It’s a blight on the whole landscape, it upsets the environmental balance, and is often destructive to the animals.” He nodded: he knew the land I was talking about well. He had vacationed in Alberta, sleeping under the stars in Jasper National Park, enjoying our slightly-more rugged Rockie Mountains. he kept going on with his environmental work, year after year without any seeming progress, without falling into despair. He took the microphone, put his hand on his heart, and said, ‘We are building a medieval cathedral, and we know we will never live to see it completed. We just have to carve our stones as carefully and as perfectly as we are able, and add them to the foundation, making it strong.’
I heard him—I really heard him—and I’ve been carving my stones ever since, as Sheela’s emissary, flaring up like a flame, making big shadows for the divine to move in. I’m still learning how to manage that role—how to balance my whirlwind with my humanity, how to love fiercely without burning out—but this blog is part of that journey. It’s my cathedral, my stones—my stories, my music, my dreams—for you to build on. What’s your stone? What keeps you dreaming of Camelot?”
HEALING OURSELVES AND THE EARTH 