15 July 2024: I’ve noticed that ‘narratives’ have been a big theme for me in the past few months. The realization in therapy that I have fabricated narratives about myself - told myself stories about myself - which are now holding me back, and that I could choose to reshape some of those narratives if I wanted, was a very meaningful, enlightening, experience. That makes it all the more serendipitous that I started reading Seeing That Frees by Rob Burbea yesterday. Well, maybe it’s not serendipity as much as now being the first time that I felt ready to take on the (gentle) challenge contained within the book’s pages and give it the attention and space it deserves. Seeing That Frees is a much deeper exploration of that ‘reshaping narratives’ piece, engaging with its cosmological and psychological implications and offering a pathway to decreasing dukkha. I’m excited to learn more and metabolize these ideas.
“Finn Slough is a survivor. It has survived the loss of its raison d’être—the Fraser River’s rich fish stocks—and original inhabitants; it has survived a greedy developer and the precarity of a homesteading existence on borrowed land; it has survived the tossed beer cans and barbed insults. It has survived a full century and more, drawing on its past resilience to weather each new crisis.”
Saw a firefly trapped underneath a leaf and lifted the leaf to free it. How unlucky for that firefly to have been flying right underneath that leaf as it started falling. The next day, I saw a firefly and a fly bump into each other mid-flight and freak out. T joked that it must have been the same firefly :)
Lifting up each one of my thoughts and going “Does it decrease dukkha”, à la Marie Kondo.
Filed under:
“Places that feel important.”
““The thing that challenges people about Finn Slough is that it is not playing a role in the capitalist system,” says Dorrington. “We’re living on land that is under dispute and some people like to call us squatters, ignoring the fact that every non-Indigenous person in BC is a squatter.”
Finn Slough, Dorrington believes, exists in opposition to the hectic rhythms of contemporary life. “I think part of the reason people are drawn to it is because it speaks to things people are subconsciously longing for,” he tells me. “Nature decided to make the slough, to make the tide go in and out. Those are things that I think we are always longing for, and we respond to them very strongly.” ”