That title, “The King of Canada” startled me. I’d never heard it expressed in quite that way.
With my friend Heather, I saw Queen Elizabeth when she came to Banff in 1957; I handed her my wilted fist full of mountain wildflowers as her car passed by the intersection of Saint Julien Road and Tunnel Mountain Drive, near our house, on the mountain I grew up on. She graciously accepted them, sweat, ants and all. When I was young I thought she was dowdy and wore the ugliest hats, but as I grew older I came to admire her, and I now see how gorgeous she was as a young woman.
In my twenties I admired her son, Prince Charles, for his outspoken views on the environment and social reform, (for which he was ridiculed at the time). Sometimes I thought, perhaps she should step aside and give him a chance. I knew very little about him, or his mother for that matter, or rules and customs of succession, until that day in 2010, our last day visiting the Netherlands.
negative of Indian Paintbrush
In February 2010, in icy Haarlem, with no cafe's in sight, we go to Teyler's Museum, the oldest museum in Holland, mainly because it is too rainy to be long outside. It's an odd, dusty, rambling collection of amazing fossils, minerals, paintings and scientific instruments around the broad theme of science and art. Grey is the predominant colour. On the second floor I walk past a door with no signage outside it to indicate a current exhibit, but I hear music; golden light radiates from under the closed door. I open the door.
It's like walking from the dusty halls of history into the Garden of Eden. The room seems green and yellow, even the light, and the exhibit is Royal Gardening, botanical art from the eighteenth century to the present which includes tapestries sewn by Mary Queen of Scots and the florilegium of Marie Antoinette.
The main focus is watercolours from the 2009 Highgrove Florilegium, botanical illustrations of flowers from Prince Charles' ecological garden at Highgrove, his personal residence in England. The books are in cases but also on video screens so you see the pages of the books. There is a film about Highgrove, a totally self-sustaining ecological garden. The watercolours are exquisite, painted mainly by women botanical artists selected in an exhaustive world wide search.
I had never heard of The Prince's Charities, a cluster of charities, most started by Prince Charles personally, which focus on specific areas of sustainable living and development. They are funded in part from projects undertaken at Highgrove.
Indian Paintbrush in Sunshine Meadows, c. harmon
King Charles III took office at the perfect time, it seems to me. The world is finally ready for a symbol of where we might to be going with the world, rather than where we are. His work in the organic gardening movement, his brilliant combination of idealism and capitalism, and his care for history, culture, and heritage inspire me.
In 2017 Prince Charles commissioned a florilegium of wildflowers in Transylvania, where he had walked twenty years before. Perhaps we need a florilegium for the Canadian Rockies, although we already have, Wild Flowers of North America: Botanical Illustrations by Mary Vaux Walcott, “the Audubon of botany”, with 250 watercolors of wildflower life in the United States of America and Canada.
Tomorrow, May 27, 2025, King Charles III, our king, will deliver the Speech from the Throne in the Canadian Parliament.
I have known for a couple of weeks that I would write of yellow in this substack post, I didn’t know quite how it would unfold. All the early flowers of our 1/2 acre paradise have been yellow blooming. Forsythia, of course, but also marsh marigolds by the pond and yellow blossoms on a matt of green I don’t have a name for. Daffodils and narcissus, tulips.
I want to share wonderful projects which come my way. I am not a very dedicated substacker because I don’t charge and subscribe to very few paid subscriptions. You have to do the first to afford the second. Instead, this is an opportunity to bring light in from the outer world.
The Marginalian, Formerly Brain Pickings, Maria Popova’s long-running marvel is my favourite newsletter, full of links to art and writing on topics so needed in this time of great uncertainty and fear. Maria has just introduced Marginalian Editions: Extraordinary Books Brought Back to Life. Maria says, of this endeavour:
In nearly two decades of reckoning with my reading in writing, it has been my ongoing lamentation to see works of enduring beauty and substance perish out of print — because the ideas they conduct are not the easiest and most marketable, because amid a culture that reduces literature to a commodity and binds readers in a moral paradox they ask us to think more widely and feel more deeply.
As a former publisher, myself, I have always regretted that the focus on new releases dooms many books to one season in which to capture hearts and minds of readers.
marsh marigolds, c. harmon
My own new project, soon to be released, will be a new website, HARMON STUDIOS.
It will feature collections of mountain images by Byron, Don and Carole Harmon—a century of mountain photography, 1905-2005, by three generations of Canadian Rockies photographers.
Why a new website? Because I have never before managed to combine work of all three generations online and I no longer have a gallery. I want to present that continuity. It will have a blog: MOUNTAIN TALES from the cameras of the Harmon family (in no particular order). This will allow me to play with history. And, it will have an easier way to order prints than I have offered in the past.
Why now? Our cultural narrative is constantly evolving. Frequently, (usually?) the past is either re-contextualized in an unfavourable light or simply forgotten. I am aware of the uncomfortable and often tragic colonial past in North America, one my family has played a part in. (I am also writing about that in a separate project). Nevertheless, now, perhaps more than ever, humanity needs concrete ways of connecting to nature and I believe my family’s photographs make a contribution in their own small way.
My grandfather’s photographs, wildly popular in his own heyday, 1905-1925, were almost forgotten after WW2. I keep resurrecting them, every twenty years or so another project, because they have moved me deeply, and I know they have moved others as well.
MORE TO COME IN FUTURE ANNOUNCEMENTS. For now, a sneak peak.
Having a Smoke on Jonas Poboktan Divide,1924, B. Harmon; Tom Wilson's Cabin, Kootenay Plains, 1971, D. Harmon; Laughing Falls, 1981, c. harmon
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Photo of graffiti in Niagara Falls welcoming people to the 51st state. Hamilton Spectator, October 7, 1987
In 1969 I was in my final year of a BFA degree in theatre at University of Alberta. I was one of several students invited to read poetry by Canadian authors at Hurtig Books in downtown Edmonton. I don’t remember what I read but I do remember being nervous and over-awed to be reading in this bookstore owned by the feisty, and already influential Mel Hurtig.
NAFTA was a few years off, but the debate over Canadian sovereignty and the pros and cons of so called “free trade” with the USA were hotly debated. Mel Hurtig was in the vanguard, using his bookstores, then his publishing company, finally his own books to champion a view of Canada’s potential. In 1972, he became a founding member of the Committee for an Independent Canada and served as their national chairman. In 1985, he was founding chair of the Council of Canadians.
I was in Toronto for much of the 1970’s. Although I didn’t know it then, I was in the midst of a flowering of Canadian culture unparalleled since, and it was bound up with cultural nationalism. The colonial yoke of Britain, which had guided and oppressed Canadian culture, was falling away. Canadian owned and operated publishing companies, such as McClelland and Stewart, Douglas & McIntyre, Raincoast Books, but also small presses like Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press, which was founded in 1976, and NeWest Press of Edmonton, founded in 1977 where publishing Canadian authors, who were becoming known internationally. Artist owned and operated galleries, such as Grunt Gallery, in Vancouver, ( which is still going strong), sprang up in every city. Theatre companies such as Tarragon Theatre, Factory Theatre Lab and NDWT Company (N’ere do well thespians) were producing Canadian plays. Much of what we now take for granted, as Canadian culture, was birthed in this period. We can look back and see Canada pre and post NAFTA.
“Sovereignty is a very precious commodity, one of the essential ingredients of nationhood. Once forsaken, it can be lost forever.” — Toronto Star, October 6, 1987.
Toronto Star business writer, David Crane wrote, also in 1987, “rarely has a self-respecting nation given away so much sovereignty for so little.”
I don’t recall how many “Fund the CBC” campaigns I’ve lived through. With each one it was a leaner, starving, more wrinkled public broadcaster we were trying to save. McClelland & Stewart is now an imprint of Random House, an American publishing giant. Cross border access for performers is not equal: Americans are much freer to work in Canada than Canadians in the USA. Etcetera.
Free trade is not solely responsible for what has happened in the music industry, but the fact that it is controlled in North America from the USA plays a pivotal part. I know this bit because I am married to a musician. With music distribution largely controlled by monster streaming services, such as Spotify, musicians have been cut the slimmest piece of humble pie: Spotify pays royalties of $.003 - $.005/play. You have to have 5000 plays of a song for each $5.00 you earn.
At least we can still produce home concerts.
Home concert in Vancouver at our place, 2013. Jerry Desvoignes and Gary Sill are in the photo on the left.
I’ll close this post with a piece I wrote about a series of plays which might not ever have been produced were it not for the extraordinary enthusiasm and support for the arts we enjoyed in Canada in the 1970’s. Perhaps the current trade war is waking us up, in a good way.
St. Nicholas Hotel by James Reaney
Part 2 of the Donnelley Trilogy
1974
Under a full moon in February of 1880, a mob formed in Biddulph township, a few miles north of London,Ontario. Using clubs, a pitchfork, axes, a spade and guns, 40 or so men slaughtered five members of the Donnelly family, including two women. The identities of the killers—among them a police constable, magistrates and a justice of the peace—were widely known in the area, yet despite the presence of an eyewitness, who escaped being killed by hiding under a bed, no one was ever convicted of the crime.
I’m in Halifax for August to help my friend, Nancy Beatty, with her little boy David. Nancy’s in Neptune Theatre Company this summer with Keith Turnbull directing. She got me an invitation to be in the workshop for St. Nicholas Hotel, the Donnelly Trilogy Part 2 by James Reaney which Keith is also directing and will produce at Tarragon Theatre this fall.
We rehearse in a cavernous former spice warehouse, near the docks. The wood is soaked in cinnamon, cloves, allspice. The smell is intoxicating, the work riveting.
Mr. Reaney, the playwright, is at every rehearsal. He’s a small thin man with grey hair sprouting around his bald patch, a bristle mustache and horn rimmed glasses. He perches on his stool like a raptor.
The Donnellys is the true story of an Irish family who emigrated to Canada in 1842 looking for a new life free from violent feuds and battles over land, rents and religion. James and Johanna Donnelly were ‘blackfeet’, so called because they wore black shoes to indicate their resistance to the ‘whiteboys’ or ‘whitefeet’, a vigilante protest group which originated in northern Ireland, and then moved into southern Ireland. Protests against land reform legislation and collection of tithe’s for the Protestant church swelled into incidents of violence and lawlessness.
In Canada the Donnelly’s homesteaded in Biddulph township north of London, Ontario. Their Irish neighbours were the same mix of ‘whitefeet’, ‘blackfeet’ and ‘orangemen’ they had hoped to escape. The feud re-surfaced, first as contested land claims, then as fierce competition between rival stagecoach lines, one of which belonged to Will, a Donnelly son.
Stagecoach feuds are the focus of this play, but Mr. Reaney writes back and forth in history with scenes which allude to past events and others which foreshadow the future massacre. He has a script but frequently deletes scenes and rewrites them depending on what he sees on stage. The cast is part of a collaborative process. There are no sets. A chorus helps place scenes in time, creates sound effects; they mime horses, stagecoaches, windows, a train. Different people try out the parts though we know that Patsy Ludwig will be Mrs. Donnelly, Jerry Franken will be Mr. Donnelly and David Ferry will be Will when the play opens in Toronto because they played those parts in Sticks and Stones,The Donnellys Part 1 which was produced at Tarragon Theatre last year.
This way of working deeply excites me—the power to retell history through art, moving back and forth through time so connections can be made, the feeling of community, of everyone contributing to the production in an equal way. I cross my fingers, desperately hope I’ll be part of the cast of the Tarragon production in the fall.
I’m not. There are only four women in a cast of fourteen, most of the characters are men. I try not to let on how disappointed I am. Keith knows I do photography and asks if I’ll photograph the Toronto production. A bitter consolation.
Postscript
In 1954 Thomas P. Kelley published The Black Donnellys in which he demonized the Donnelly family and justified their murders. They had been accused of every crime committed in Bidulph County, a nightmarish replay of their family history in Ireland as scapegoats in the community. This was the prevailing interpretation of events until James Reaney set out to rewrite Canadian history, untangling the events the Donnelly’s were responsible for and those of which they were innocent, revealing the motivations behind the murders.
St. Nicholas Hotel won the 1975 Chalmers Award.
The Donnellys Trilogy: Sticks and Stones, Saint Nicholas Hotel, and Handcuffs is on the Oxford Dictionary of Plays list of the 1,000 most significant plays of all time.
James Reaney is quoted on his website:
I remember saying to my stepfather ...Wouldn’t they have a door with a lock on it? And he said, Noooo, they wouldn’t have had a door with a lock on it. They had a piece of burlap bag across a hole in their shanty.
Thanks for reading leaning toward the light! This post is public so feel free to share it.
When the brother of Airmid, the Irish goddess of healing and herbal medicine, was slain, her tears, shed upon his grave, gave birth to all the healing herbs of the world.
Chiron, of greek mythology, an immortal centaur with an incurable wound, is renowned for his wisdom in healing, the original wounded healer.
Chiron was the name given to the first heavenly body classified as a centaur. This poem fragment is from my long narrative poem, Yarrow’s Offering, in which Chiron is a character.
Chiron
I’ve a new home
in the heavens
my wisdom projected
skyward
sky centaurs
new discoveries in space
I’m asteroid
comet 95/P
planetoid (2060)
my ancient myth beams
teachings
to earthbound watchers
in lightcurves
occulation events
elliptic coordinates
my rings have been spotted
tail discovered
longest perihelion is Aries
realign with nature
I transmit
from night sky
seek forgiveness
courage and empathy
forsake violence
The archetype of the wounded healer has been know in many cultures and ages, embodied as selkies, shamans, Indigenous healers, supernatural beasts who are half animal and half human, medicine men and wise women. It is expressed through poetry, myth, oral teachings, art and literature.
Modern psychology has embraced this idea, that the capacity to discover, in the darkness of suffering, rays of light and means of recovery, is the archetype at the bottom of all genuine healing.
This anthology, which is compiled from ten years of the online literary journal, Dark Matter Women Witnessing, is a vibrant embodiment of the wounded healer archetype. Wounded is the Earth and many creatures and organisms with whom we share this planet home. Humans also suffer within the present catastrophe of simultaneous ecological challenges, species extinctions, wars, political upheavals, and spiraling technological innovations which are beyond our ability to comprehend.
The healer in each of the sixty-seven authors, from six countries, who have contributed to this anthology of 79 pieces, has been ignited.
It is organized in nine sections: To Witness, Fired Anew, The Grammar of Animacy, What We Know in Our Bones, Songs of Undoing, I am Nothing Without My Dead, Healing with Land and Ancestors, The Music of Grief, and What it Takes to Breach.
I am in the anthology! My Body—An Eco-terrain, is in section two, Fired Anew. It’s about my experience with Lyme disease. This is how it begins:
I’ve become a country, my blood a river which carries bacteria, viruses, spirochetes to unsettled territory. The valley where I met these travelers, is beautiful but abused: It is littered with old shotgun casings, tin cans, hub caps, fenders of rusted cars. It is protected now, its name a local secret—location hidden, road closed….
Advance praise for Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Dreams Before Extinction:
Dark Matter: Women Witnessing is the most important literary magazine today.
Vibrant voices connect us to the sacred relationship between body, Earth and spirit. Like indigenous praise songs that bring down empires, the essays, poems, and stories in this collection prepare us for a changing world—inspiring radical joy and compassionate action.
—Laura Simms, award-winning storyteller, author Our Secret Territory, The Robe of Love, Becoming the World
ORDERING: Upstart and Crow bookstore in Vancouver has agreed to take orders and stock the book. Your local bookstore or library can order from the Ingrams Catalogue: Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 586 pages
ISBN: 978-1-960293-13-8
Requests for the book from bookstores and libraries will be of enormous help.
This anthology was published by Nature/Culture, a small woman-owned business that publishes the Writing the Land anthologies and other books of poetry that help connect humans with the rest of Nature from an off-grid, solar-powered location in Northfield, Massachusetts.
Thanks for reading leaning toward the light! This post is public so feel free to share it.
While the world of politics and social media spirals into chaos I reflect that January in Anishinaabe tradition is Minado Giizis (Min-ah-doh Gee-zehs), Spirit Moon, an apt time to launch a film about the triumph of spirit over chaos.
Gary and I met multi-disciplinary film-maker, Lisa Jackson, when she was working on her mind reordering multi-media installation, Transmissions, which was presented at the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre in the Woodward Building in Vancouver in 2019.
Lisa’s latest film, Wilfred Buck, is
a hybrid feature documentary that looks to the night sky and one man’s life to tell a story that spans generations. Our guide is the wise and irreverent 65-year-old Wilfred Buck, who’s been called the Indiana Jones of Indigenous star knowledge. NFB
Wilfred is an Ininew Dream Keeper. Based on his book, I Have Lived Four Lives, the film incorporates recreations of Wilfred’s mesmerizing Star Maps and traces his personal healing journey from residential school survivor to leader of Sundance ceremony.
Wilfred Buck recently launched on Crave, one of many partners in producing the film. The National Film Board is another partner; you can access it at this link, NFB. It’s free for community groups (or perhaps a gathering of friends).
Chiniki Chief Sitting Eagle, John Hunter, prepares for the Sundance ceremony, Byron Harmon, photo
This photograph was taken by my grandfather at a time when the Canadian government had outlawed all Indigenous ceremony in a disastrous attempt to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture. Some situations do improve, as Wilfred Buck demonstrates.
Transmissions Expanded is also worth a deep dive. It’s an online portal to educational materials related to Lisa’s Transmissions art installation.
Language creates reality. Nothing makes this idea more radically, physically apparent than Lisa Jackson’s new installation Transmissions.Dorothy Woodend, Listening—to Languages, Trees and Time, The Tyee, 19 Sept. 2019
“Transmissions invites us to untether from our day-to-day world and imagine a possible future. It provides a platform to activate and cross-pollinate knowledge systems, from science to storytelling, ecology to linguistics, art to commerce. To begin conversations, to listen deeply, to engage varied perspectives and expertise, to find our place within the circle of all our relations.” Transmissions Expanded website
