It’s warm and kind in the
sun, but sitting here in the shade, in my small back garden, the cool of autumn
is tickling my skin and reminding me that Labour Day is around the corner. I’m
not ready for this! Perhaps no-one is, including teachers and kids heading back
to school. And here in Toronto, where we’ve had an unusually cool summer after
a long harsh record-setting winter, we’re feeling a little robbed of warmth and
renewal.
You can’t tell that though
from looking at gardens and farmers’ markets. Somehow the tough winter helped
many plants and crops thrive, in a kind of “if you weren’t killed by the cold,
then you are stronger and more vigorous” kind of scenario. Thus the stone
fruits are full of flavour, the arugula and sorrel in my garden are still
luxuriant, and the cool weather has kept the lettuce lively too. The bees are
humming, working hard, sucking at the chive flowers and the remains of the
phlox and lilies, the flowering arugula gone wild, and the odd daisy.
Meantime next door the
neighbours’ little kids are playing in water, splashing and squabbling and then
laughing again…a last hurrah before the older child heads to kindergarten next
Tuesday.
I think of school as a
process of socialisation: we learn about the diversity of characters and
interactions from spending time with people we did not choose, in a relatively
orderly environment, and with distractions, such as learning, to help us stay
on track and focussed. If school helps us maintain respect for ourselves and
others, and learn to discern and work with the differences between us, then
that’s a huge accomplishment. The marks and “benchmarks” are so much less
important!
Up the street, speaking of school
and turning points in the year, the campus of the University of Toronto has
been mown and tidied and repaired and touched up, in preparation for the
arrival of students. Awkward first year students and their worldly possessions
are being unloaded in front of residences by their parents this weekend; the
cooler at-ease-in-the-city upper year students will be around in a week’s time.
So now is the last day to get to the University bookstore for supplies before
the huge long line-ups start. The next time for easy access will be in four
weeks.
And so the world turns in this
safe-feeling Toronto of no war and predictable seasonal cycles.
But across the water people
are suffering in fragmented and war-torn landscapes. Syria is a catastrophe, and
parts of Iraq too, and in Ukraine Putin is flexing the muscles he first used to
wrest Abkhazia and North Ossetia from Georgia. The era of the cold war, so
static and buttoned down, and full of bluster, with two clear “sides” must feel
desirable to some people in retrospect, just as many in the ex-Soviet Union
after 1990 spoke fondly of the certainties of life under the Soviet
dictatorship. But now we’re in a new era and have to feel our way and figure
out how to stay open to the wider world.
It’s too easy to turn our
backs on the pain of others. Their pain and suffering make us uncomfortable;
perhaps we feel guilty for being so well off in our peaceful place while other
suffer. But I do think it’s important to keep thinking about the individual human
beings on the ground, anywhere and everywhere in the world. They deserve our
attention, our respect, and our help.
Food is a thread that we
can use to help understand others, in fact to help visualise ourselves in their
place. Even as there are rocket launchers attacking, in Gaza or Syria, there
are home cooks figuring out how to feed their families, and bakers heating their
ovens to get the day’s bread baked.
And that visualising of the
daily food preparation, and family meals of others, in turn helps us remember
that we are all on this planet together. It helps us have respect for the
people we share the planet with, just as, when we were in primary school, we
were all in the classroom together, with our differences and our difficulties,
embarked on trying to understand what was going on and to learn.
