REFLECTION
'An Invitation' by Geoff Frasier

“L'Chaim! So much life. So much creative power. A small patch of ground the size of my hand is home to countless varieties of green-leafed plants: clovers, flowers, grasses.

So much life. Moss and tree roots rising up through the cracks they make through the concrete in their own good time. A row of bricks, once level, now bowed to the will of a tree's roots. Life thwarting the best laid plans of us settlers.

Dates: A stone commemorating Elva Olson Michael (1913--2008), who tended the garden. A World War II plaque commemorating four fallen young men (1944). Etched on the corner of the church building (1879). How short our individual time is here. How recent this structure in the context of the 15,000 years and more the Indigenous peoples have lived with this land.

The Invitation: We are living creatures too, part of all this life and creative power that is happening everywhere in our midst. We can live with the land and not merely on it and extracting from it, lest those mosses and tree roots crack right through us and keep on growing as always. I think of dancing and how essential it is to Indigenous peoples and to my own Scottish and Irish ancestors. Life is not static as we pretend our structures to be; it dances. We can live dancing with the rhythms of Creation. This is the Way. L'Chaim!”