Home place

A slow "Island time" day today, I was looking at the book "Islands in the Salish Sea" and thinking about maps. This book is about a community project begun in 2000 involving 17 islands from Saturna in the south to Quadra in the North in the Salish Sea (also called the straits of Georgia) between the mainland and Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. A map is a picture that speaks a thousand words. It can be about geography, history, native stories, spiritual history, economy, energy, ecology, flora and fauna, marine life, or personal.

Stan Rowe, one of Canada's first ecologists established the phrase "home place'.(which I love!) He says "Not only are we in the Earth-envelope, we are parts of it, participants in it, born from it, sustained and reproduced by it. To really grasp this symbiosis is to change radically our appreciation of humanity in the world....and what we (appreciate) not superficially but in our hearts and imaginations has great power over how we act."

The organizers of this project (it's not a new idea..) were hoping to unite all these separate islands into thinking about what was important to them about living there and then artists would depict this information on 17 very different "maps" of "home places" that are being threatened by all sorts of modern challenges of population and ecology. And to make visual what is great about living in these islands and the need to protect that. ...and how similar the needs are. It was a great success, and the resulting maps are fascinating and well loved, and gathered in a book.

So I'm blipping my simple map of our (and our next door neighbors) end of the island which I made a while ago solely as a trail map to give to people so they'd know where they were in our trail system and a few of the special landmarks. Now I'm inspired to make another layer on this with the particular flora and fauna that make it special -the "old growth" trees, the orchids, the midden left by the first nations etc. Where to stop?
It would be fun to do our little island -only 2 miles long, but that might take more organizational, educational and social skills than I can muster. Today H and I walked around the island -it usually should take not much more than about an hour, but we ran into 4 sets of neighbors and had 4 chats turning it into more than 2 hours, and fueling my thoughts about everyone's similar and also different ideas about this island living. We have only been here since 1990 but when we came there were only trees and a well. We spend 40% of our time here now, have built some structures, but basically are trying to protect what's here.... -it's definitely a "home place".

Sorry for so many words today. (I couldn't seem to explain in less...) tomorrow NOT.