Chapter 1: Jordan River
The noise in my head was quieting, and I was beginning to hear what was calling me. When I got close enough, I recognized that the voice I was moving towards was more than a whisper—it was a roar.
I remember the first time I came to Jordan River.
Winding around the corner, I began to feel a thread of magic seeping from the fog. Everything was greener and more alive. Something, I thought, maybe everything, was about to change.
I had known before arriving that the only thing that remained in the abandoned town was a small coffee shop on the water’s edge, the Cold Shoulder Cafe. I pulled in and ordered a coffee from the young person at the window. She reminded me of my sister. On the bench facing the ocean, I sat next to a vibrant old soul named Roley.
The sun reflected in Roley’s eyes, a bright ocean blue. I asked him questions about his life and suddenly, his eyes were wet. “There’s something healing about this place. Every day I get to be here, just be here.” I offered to drive him up the hill back to his home as he didn’t own a vehicle and the walk was steep.
“The entrance to a person’s home says something about them, you know?” He said as we approached an old and colourful trailer. Flowers bloomed from beds of repurposed rusty car parts, bike wheels, scrap metal, and old tires. Some would call it a junk yard. Roley calls it home.
Roley had been without a place to call home nearly his whole life. When we began to discuss more about his experiences he said, “the greatest stigma about homeless people is that they are unhappy. Lack of wealth does not mean lack of love. Joy transcends money.” To this day, Roley is still one of the happiest people I have ever met. He continued, “Homeless people aren’t asking to own something, we just want a place to be.” The wrinkles on his skin spoke volumes about his journey—the joy and the pain. “There’s always something to learn,” he said, “eventually your back hits the wall and you have to take a step forward.”
As I continued driving south, I came to the mouth of the river, known as “Diitiida” to the Diitidaht and the Pacheedaht First Nations. In English, the “People of the Seafoam.” On the left of the river was a logging operation. To the right, a vast open ocean. Cell service did not reach there, therefore, not many people did either. The way from Jordan River to the next town, Port Renfrew, is a single lane highway that leads to some of Vancouver Island’s last remaining old growth forests. Nearly 98% of the massive old growth trees in British Columbia have been logged, and what remains exists in small tattered fragments.
Before British colonizers and the paradigm of capitalism invaded Turtle Island (the continent of North America), the land of so called “Canada” was well taken care of by Indigenous land guardians. The more nature thrived, the more the people thrived. There was a reciprocal relationship between the land and the people: the water ran clean and the earth provided the people with an abundance of food. At the heart of people’s sustenance was water, fish, plants, and animals.
When fuels became commodities under colonial rule, labour power and resources from the earth were given dollar signs. This is when the land we call Canada became a resource colony.
In a pattern called “triangular trade,” European traders exchanged their goods for enslaved people in Africa, transported them across the Atlantic, and sold them to “landowners” on stolen, colonized land. The goods produced by the slave labour were then sold back to consumers in Europe. In this system, the supposed “uncivilized” Indigenous people of Canada were seen as a threat to development, forcibly removed, sent to residential schools, and stripped from their culture. The conditions were horrendous. Many women and children were murdered in acts of genocide, and those who survived suffered greatly.
Wendell Berry, a farmer and activist puts it this way:
The message is plain enough, and we have ignored it for too long: the great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by “creating jobs.” They come to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it… They are not interested in the good health—economic or natural or human—of any place on this earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says, “the buck never stops.”
Enslaved people were servants to merchants, farmers, the political elite, and even the church. The forced labor on the backs of Indigenous and Black people in Canada is the reason for it becoming a prosperous resource colony. Trade routes became railroads and trails became highways. The water and air were polluted to make way for industry to transport resources like lumber and oil to the Pacific Northwest and across the ocean to be sold.
Ironically, Canada is a place that is internationally revered as a free country, bringing refugees and immigrants from all over the world. Although many people have found a better quality of life by coming to this country, in reality, participating in modern Canadian society reinforces the oppression of Indigenous people and those living on the margins. The unsustainable way of life on colonized land keeps people dependent on government for survival, and the oppressive colonial wheel turning.
In the lumber industry, big logging corporations will go for the biggest timber first because it is more valuable in the market. In 2004, Teal Jones—a Canadian logging company on Vancouver Island—purchased the rights to a Tree Farm License known as TFL46. Even though the land is on unceded (ie: stolen, un-surrendered, unyielded) Pacheedaht territory, the Canadian government granted Teal Jones the right to harvest lumber from a forest ecosystem that has not been impacted by humans for an entire millennia. A forest with unique biodiversity like the endangered marbled murrelet and rare lichen. This impeccable, rare, and fully intact Old Growth watershed is called Fairy Creek.
Beneath the trunks of these ancient trees are vast underground networks that carry messages and impulses through the forest floor much like the activity in our brains. Ecologist Suzanne Simard says that “the trees in a forest are often linked to each other via an older tree she calls the “mother tree.” These are the biggest trees you’ll find in a forest network, and they will pass nutrients to seedlings during critical times. Not only are these big trees vital to the survival of the forest itself, as homes and hubs for countless species, but also to the survival of the human race.
We rely on intact old growth forests to store the carbon that we create. It is a beautiful exchange: we breathe in the oxygen that trees release, and they breathe in and store the carbon that we breathe out. Though, in the past decade, we have produced unnatural amounts of carbon and cut down nearly all the old growth forests on the planet—re-releasing the stored carbon back into the air and limiting our access to pure oxygen. With every tree that falls, we suffocate a little bit more.
Teal Jones offered the Pacheedaht nation a sum of money for the right to log the trees; though, mere pennies compared to the profit that Teal Jones collects after taking down old growth forests in a method called “clear cutting.” This is when an entire forest and its ecosystems are wiped entirely by a single type of logging practice. This method of logging is very unsustainable. Although tree-planters are hired to re-plant trees where the old ones were, forests are not that simple. Trees, especially ones that are hundreds or thousands of years old, have complex underground ecosystems. When they are cut down, these vast networks of information die with them. While cutting down these forests are a temporary gain for Teal Jones and their investors, it is a permanent loss for all of humanity. The root of these logging operations are greedy and nearsighted, and they violate every human’s right to clean air, clean water, and clean soil.
I knew very little about these practices before I came to Jordan River. I barely knew that the place was a logging town, and I was fully unaware of the rate at which the forests were being destroyed.
All I knew was that there were waves, and I came there to surf.
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In Jordan River, I spent more time alone than I ever had in my life. Days would go by without human interaction and I doubted myself a lot. “What am I doing here?” I asked myself often.
After the initial discomfort that came with being so isolated, I stopped asking myself what I should be doing and focused instead on who I was becoming. I questioned my questions, and I doubted my doubts. I asked myself what it was I was avoiding, and who I am when I’m not in motion. How is one supposed to sit still when the momentum of society demands us to give up all the time we have?
Until then, I had lived in a world where the most common question I received was “where are you going next?” and more seldom, “where are you now?” It made me anxious when I didn’t know the answer. To stay somewhere too long felt like a waste of time. There was so much more to see and do. I was constantly in need of a new destination. I needed constant movement to occupy my mind. To distract myself from the fear that maybe I’d never find somewhere I wanted to stay. Somewhere that felt like home.
But I did so at a cost. I was speeding through life, later to learn that life was speeding past me. I was creating reels that looped different backgrounds to the same routine. As I came to this realization, I accepted that I needed a big reset. I needed to allow my body to rest, my mind to slow down, and to listen for the sound of my true voice. I decided to invest my savings into myself, so I quit my job, endeavouring to see what would happen if I gave all my time to the things I desired to do without doing it for money.
At first, I wrestled with my thoughts. I woke up following an anxious voice that convinced me there was something I needed to do or somewhere I needed to be. Even without an alarm, my rise to consciousness would be interrupted by a very conditioned mechanism in my brain that would shame me for waking up too late or not being productive. When my anxiety hit a new peak, I turned to yoga to quiet my mind. I joined a 30-day yoga challenge and committed to starting each day listening to a different voice.
Eventually, I stopped thinking so much, planning, and trying. I wrote daily affirmations of the things I needed to hear, and the ways I wanted to reprogram my thinking. There is nowhere you need to be. There is nothing you need to do.
I faced my fears of boredom, missing out, and wasting time. I played in the dirt, I drank a lot of water, and I spent a lot of time in the trees. I tried new things, made art, learned about bees, and foraged for mushrooms. I picked up hitch hikers and I spent almost every day next to the ocean. The ocean always caught my tears and I started to fall in love with myself and everyone I met.
I created boundaries around the relationships that distracted me from hearing myself. I studied nutrition and started noticing how certain foods made me feel. I stopped setting an alarm, and instead of starting my days in front of a laptop, I started by stretching. I made a point of seeing the sunset every day and I switched to decaf. I became mindful of my thoughts, and watched them race around when there was nothing that needed to be done.
It was a pace I had never allowed my body to come down to, and at first, it felt nearly impossible. Memories I had forgotten and feelings I hadn’t processed resurfaced when I allowed my brain and body the space to breathe. Which is perhaps why I had always found a way to keep myself distracted in the first place.
I wrote on a sticky note during this period of time, “the most powerful creations come from asking the most troublesome questions.” I posted it on my wall, and I started asking myself questions I had never thought to ask. I did not want to let my grief swallow my dreams. I dreamt big, but I often doubted bigger. The highs were high and the lows were low. On a low day I wrote, “What am I doing? What do I want? What do I need?” On a better day that followed, I wrote back to myself, “give yourself a break from feeling like you need to make decisions all of the time.” Even though my habits were changing, I was still reaching for something when I sat in the stillness.
Some days, I took a break from allowing anxiety to take the wheel. I took a pause from asking the big questions and trying to process the places I had been and things I had experienced. I found, in time, that it’s on the days of rest when the real healing happens. When I let go of what I think I need to do and allow myself to take a break, slow down, and give myself compassion.
I failed, a lot. Until I replaced setting goals and making progress with setting intentions and maintaining a vision for the future. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t give up. I let go of the ‘how’s’ and I trusted that if I kept my mind on what is true, that the details would figure themselves out. The desires I recognized in my dreams were soon pouring into my waking life in the most unexpected ways. Things I thought would take years to unfold were happening instantaneously.
Every person I met felt like a meaningful coincidence, or “synchronicity” as James Redfield writes about in the book The Celestine Prophecy. The themes and questions I was focused on seemed to be getting answered, sequentially, with each new encounter. Occurrences in my life felt destined, and the more I let go of trying to figure things out, the more these mysterious encounters appeared.
Redfield writes about a transformation that happens when we become conscious of these synchronicities. At first, it surfaces as a “profound sense of restlessness” that comes to an end when we become aware of what we’re searching for. We’ll start to glimpse moments in life that feel more intense and inspiring. It felt as though there was something, or someone, operating behind the scenes of my life.
I believe that if you make space for spontaneity and uncertainty, the universe will fill that space with magic. When you stop running so fast towards what you think you want, you’ll learn that what you truly want is running towards you—and more often than not, we are the only ones standing in our way. Rumi says “Don’t look for water, be thirsty. Your thirst attracts God because your longing for God is God’s longing for you. It is the most direct way back to God because it is the magnetic attraction of the soul for the Source. Like a moth drawn to the flames, we are drawn back to God by the fire of longing. The brighter the fire, the stronger the longing. And this longing purifies you. It burns you until there is nothing left within your heart but God.”
I spent a healing six months in the tiny house, and I thought I had done it. I had finally slowed down, and life was good. But as soon as the dust settled, the ground shook and another wave was close behind. The noise in my head was clearing up, and I was beginning to hear what was calling me. Until I got close enough to recognize that the voice I was slowly moving towards was more than a whisper—it was a roar.
At first it scared me, then I realized, it was me.
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