The Spring Blooming of Inspiration

Inspiration is one of the many blooms of spring and early summer. No where are the blooms more abundant and spectacular than at commencement ceremonies now taking place across the continent.

Some of the best commencement speeches with their notable quotes can be found at graduationwisdom.com. The co-ordinates for the best 2013 speeches are: http://www.graduationwisdom.com/speeches/best-commencement-graduation-speeches-with-inspirational-quotes-2013.htm

That page also links to the best speeches of other years.

Maria Shriver

A 2012 speech that attracted much attention was given at the University of California Annenberg by Maria Shriver of the Kennedy clan and former First Lady of California through her marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. The speech was entitled The Power of the Pause and urged students to change the state of our communication, which she believes is out of control.

An excerpt: "Change it from criticism and fault-finding to understanding and compassion. Change it from nay-saying and name-calling to acceptance and appreciation. Change it from dissembling and dishonesty to openness and explanation. Change from screaming to speaking."

The full speech can be found at Shriver's website: 
http://mariashriver.com/blog/2012/05/power-of-the-pause-maria-shriver-commencement-address

Reflections from a Campfire

Thoughts on the May 24 holiday weekend. Excerpted from the newest book Bears in the Bird Feeders: Cottage Life on Shaman's Rock.

   The cottage campfire is a magical thing, especially in a society driven half-mad by cell phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other quick hits of less-than-thoughtful communication.

   Slip out of the darkness and take a seat on the log where a dozen people are gathered, staring pensively into the flames dancing inside the circle of granite stones. The first thing you will notice is the silence. People are in no hurry to talk. When someone does speak, it is not in the short, sharp pings so common in today’s wired society. It is often slow, measured, and even thoughtful.

   A campfire’s magic slows people’s heartbeats, thought processes, and their tongues. The flames are speed bumps along the path between grey matter and lips. It is hard to imagine hearing around the campfire the tactless snippets of comment that zip daily across omnipresent blogs. The campfire draws people into itself and absorbs the heat from over-spinning minds, redistributing it as reflection, focus, and warm good feelings.

   As complicated as the world has become, the campfire has remained the same over the millenniums since fire was discovered. It is the same at St. Nora Lake as the campfires that flicker along the coast of the Great Australian Bight, the Congo jungle, or somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Bears in the Bird Feeders link: http://www.dundurn.com/books/bears_bird_feeders

Saviours of the News Business

   I’m sitting in the banquet room, enjoying my coffee and waiting for the Ontario Newspaper Awards ceremony to start when I gaze around the room and say to myself: “So these are the people who are killing the newspaper business?”

   That is what some desperate publishers of dying newspapers believe. They are hacking and slashing the people who produce their news because they cost money and apparently possess skills not needed anymore.

   Toronto’s Globe and Mail is hoping to drop 60 of its 770 staff through buyouts but it’s a good guess that there will be layoffs. The Toronto Star also is hoping to cut 55 jobs, many in editorial. The Vancouver Sun and the Province cite unprecedented revenue declines as the reason for staff buyouts that almost certainly will be followed by layoffs.

   It has been roughly two decades since newspapers began their steepest decline in profitability, power and influence. Newspaper owners and publishers have had all those years to invent ways of saving their businesses but have failed miserably. Their response to newspapers in crisis always has been to cut the staff that produces the news that customers value. 
   Corporatization of the newspaper world brought in many run-of-the-mill executive ‘geniuses’ who have come and gone, leaving behind much wreckage and broken dreams. None of them left poor.

   Most remarkable in the decline-of newspapers story is how the journalists have adapted to trying to produce, under increasingly miserable conditions, the only thing that matters in newspapering: news that explains who we are and how we live our lives.

   You can’t help but admire these people as you watch them walk to the front of the room to collect their awards, now sponsored mainly by organizations not part of the newspaper business. Many of the recipients are young and here on their own dollars because some newspaper operators won’t even pay the tiny awards entry fee, let alone the costs of getting to the awards ceremony.

   These are the people who will achieve what the millionaire owners and operators failed to do: restore the news business as a vital part of society, in whatever new forms or formats that replace the traditional newspaper.

On the Trail of Stupid People

   The splitting ax is feeling heavy, so I set it down and decide to stroll out to the highway. It is still chilly for this late into April but the sun is bright and I might get to see the first signs of new life poking through soil just freed of the winter snows.

   At the highway, a glint catches my eye. It’s a juice bottle tossed from a car window. Then another glint. This one a beer can similarly pitched from a vehicle travelling Ontario Highway 35. There are more, lots more, bottles, cans and cartons.

   In 696 steps along one side of the highway I record 37 items thrown from passing vehicles. That’s one piece of garbage for every 18.8 steps. The tally breakdown: 17 pop or juice bottles, 7 paper coffee cups, 6 plastic water bottles, 4 beer cans, and 3 cigarette packages. That does not include other garbage such as pieces of paper, plastic bags, miscellaneous pieces of plastic and metal and other garbage.

   696 steps, roughly  one-quarter of a mile. Imagine the tons of thoughtlessly discarded items along the hundreds of thousands of miles of North America’s highways.

   Littering is against the law in most jurisdictions. However, the cans and bottles along those 696 steps are more proof that you can’t legislate a stop to stupidity. Stupid people stop doing stupid things only when the rest of us work to make doing stupid things socially unacceptable.

The World around a Campfire

   This is official publication week for Bears in the Birdfeeders, my new book of recollections and reflections of the huge joys and little agonies of cottaging.
   I signed copies of the new work for interested folks attending the Cottage Life Show last weekend. It was enlightening to hear what time at the cottage means to them, their friends and their families. Everyone I spoke with agreed that cottages, whether owned, rented, or visited, are places where we just might find the keys to making the world a better place.
   It’s hard to imagine North Korea’s Kim Jong-un spending an evening around a cottage campfire with other world leaders and still wanting to unleash his nuclear missiles.
   Also it’s hard to imagine sitting by a forested lake for a few days, then returning to the city to vote in favour of filling in part of Lake Ontario to accommodate more air traffic along Toronto’s downtown waterfront.   Cottage country is a vital component of the Canadian psyche. Bears in the Birdfeeders is an attempt to share an understanding of that psyche.   Cottage Life Magazine and its related enterprises has been sharing that understanding with the rest of us for many years. Thanks to them for that, and for being so accommodating to me during the show.
   For more details on the new book, click the Bears in the Birdfeeders tab at the top of this blog.

The Tragedy of Stereotyping

   I get challenged occasionally for the view, expressed in my book Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry, that society continues to stereotype Native people. My defence is that although outright racism is not much seen anymore among intelligent people, stereotyping is still around, subtle but rampant.

   How stereotyping hurts is powerfully put forth in the novel Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese. It’s fiction, but remember the words of journalist-author Albert Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

   Indian Horse paints the tragedy of an Ojibway boy whose love for the game of hockey is destroyed by stereotyping. The type of stereotyping we’ve all witnessed in hockey arenas and elsewhere.

   It is a beautifully crafted and brilliantly written novel by Wagamese, an Ojibway from Northwestern Ontario who became a noted columnist for the Calgary Herald.

   Indian Horse is fiction that reveals truth and flows with important life messages.

   However, you don’t have to read Wagamese’s books to view the power of his writing and its messages. The opening lines of his web page http://www.richardwagamese.com/are these:

   “All that we are is story. From the moment we are born to the time we continue on our spirit journey, we are involved in the creation of the story of our time here. It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind. We are not the things we accumulate. We are not the things we deem important. We are story.”

   I wish I could have written that. 

Pope Francis and Canadian History

   The recent election of the new Pope got me pondering Canadian history and the lack of attention it receives in our education systems. How does anyone get to that bizarre connection?

   Pope Francis is a Jesuit priest, the first from the Society of Jesus to reach that exalted position. The Jesuits helped shape the early development of North America, Canada and the northern U.S. in particular. They came to Christianize the Indians soon after Canada was discovered.

   Jesuits are not ordinary parish priests. They are highly-educated, famous for their education methods and travel a higher intellectual road than most of us.

   The most important thing the Jesuits did for Canada was to leave written observations of the New World and its people. The Jesuits in New France sent written annual reports to their superiors in Paris. The reports were called Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France and were mainly narratives describing in detail the country, its people and how it was developing.

   The Jesuit Relations are a rich source of information on events that shaped Canada into the nation we know today. Anyone spending time reading the Relations will gain a better understanding of what Canada is and why it developed so differently from the United States. The Relations should be part of the curricula of every Canadian education system.

   American historical writer-editor Reuben Gold Thwaites compiled the Relations into 73 volumes early in the 1900s. These English translations can be found at http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/relations/. Also, Canadian scholar Allan Greer has compiled a small selection of the Jesuit Relations that gives readers a peek into this vast storeroom of Canadian history. It is titled The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Bedford/St. Martin’s 2000).

   Canadians generally are not very knowledgeable about their country’s history and often know more U.S. history than their own. And, that’s a shame considering the vast history resources available to us.