Friluftsliv, (I am bound to always use a lower case to acknowledge there are many shades of friluftsliv) in translation means “open air life”, but it is a word, that as mountain guide/educator Nils Faarlund would say, is, “saturated in values”. The word friluftsliv denotes a way; a wisdom garnered from the open air, of simple small group travel with the joy of being out on the land for food gathering and/or pure recreation at the centre. Friluftsliv can be, walking your dog daily in a city park, berry picking in the neighbouring woods, weekend outings with friends or a solo Arctic expedition. It is a state of mind/body/spirit.

As the concept of friluftsliv builds, one understands two prominent ideas behind the word. Firstly, “Nature is the true home of culture”. Or, to put it another way, “Nature is primary, all else is derivative”, as Thomas Berry says, “Nature is home.” Wilderness is an awkward concept and almost non-existent in Scandinavia, but overused in North America. With friluftsliv we belong. We must always show good manners when close to nature. Nature and ancestral traditions teach us this. Secondly, another common expression I hear among Norwegian Outdoor Educators is, “First, there must be joy”. We study first and adventure comes next. It is enough to be, to dwell well in nature, to find our joy with paddle/on skis with family and friends.

Educator Gunnar Repp has called friluftsliv, “an ecologically responsible life in the open air”. Fellow educator and long service mountain guide Nils Faarlund opines that friluftsliv more prominently acknowledges cultural traditions and values. For Nils, friluftsliv is a “Norwegian” tradition for seeking the joy of identification with free Nature”. This comes with a challenge to deny certain patterns of thought, values and lifestyles imposed by modernity. The Norwegian government in the late 1990’s determined that the concept was important enough to consider. Their definition at the time followed a conventional outdoor recreation well-being approach. Suffice it to say that friluftsliv, the idea, carries a complete method, tradition and a philosophy. At the heart of the idea is a healthy, active outdoor activity and identification with nature. Many educators in Norway are concerned that nature is being undermined by the activity as thrill-seeking or as sport itself and associated with gear and image. Arguably we do see that shift towards activity over “nature first’ in Canada. “Identification with”, is certainly different from “image of”. The former is intrinsically motivated and advances a clear psyche and well-being. The latter is extrinsically a drive and often delusional.

Miyupimaatisiiun, as best as I understand, means life on the land, for the Cree (specifically being Cree). It is framed by the connections between land, health and identity. Basic to Cree health are food, warmth and physical ability. In translation miyupimaatisiium means “being alive well”. Like friluftsliv is Scandinavian (some folks say it is best understood as Norwegian), miyupimaatisiium is Cree. There is no Cree word that translates into English as “health”. When one is being alive well, one is living a Cree way of live with “robust connections to the physical and spiritual northern landscape”.

Fitness for survival, particularly in winter, and the skill set and wisdom of traditional activities are central to Cree “health”. Miyupimaatisiium is to evoke a nature centered way of life. Bush food hunting and gathering dominate their practices (for men and women); in fact one’s identity is connected to such practices.

I hope it is easy to see parallels between these two cultural words of well-being. While most readers of Healing Matrix, (and as I) do not live in either of these cultures, there is much one can take from exploring these words for the wise lessons they teach. Among these lessons are: nature is a place of healing; nature is everywhere around us, not just to be found in exotic wild places; there is much to be learned from past traditions and finally, that, activity is important as a means to celebrate the greater enterprise of life in/within nature.

In a time when a family counsellor Richard Louv can coin the phrase “nature-deficit-disorder” and have wide instant recognition as to the meaning and implications (as I have observed recently), we might also recognize a need to return to what we have never really left.

For more, see:
N. Adelson, “Being Alive Well: Health and the Politics of Cree Well-Being", University of Toronto Press, 2000.
R. Louv, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature–Deficit Disorder", Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 2005.
"Theme Issues, friluftsliv in Pathways: The Ontario Journal of Outdoor Education". Summer 2000 and Summer 2002. See www.COEO.org

Bob Henderson teaches Outdoor Education at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Starting as a camper and a canoe-tripping staff member at Camp Ahmek in Algonquin Park, he has developed a lifelong interest in Canadian travel heritage and travel guiding. Beginning in 1994, he continues to write a regular heritage travel feature for Kanawa Magazine. In 1995, Bob completed his PhD concerning approaches to travel guiding from the University of Alberta. He takes pride in baking a golden brown bannock and leading a spirited campfire singsong. You can contact him by sending an email.

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Etymologically, the word Tantalize comes from Greek mythology and is tied to a person named ‘Tantalus’. Such were his misdemeanors in life, as the myth goes, that the Gods decided to punish him in his afterlife by keeping him hungry and thirsty in the midst of a pool of water under a fruit-laden tree.

As the story goes, Tantalus was invited to the table of Zeus in Olympus. He brought back nectar and ambrosia by stealing and revealed the secret of Gods to his people. And he did not stop there. Such was his consumption with the whole affair that he even sacrificed his son Pelops whom he cut up, boiled and then served to the Gods. However, all the Gods except one, did not fall for his ploy and refused to partake his offering. Outraged by this blatancy, Zeus ordered Fate to bring Pelops back to life and reconstitute him. Gods then punished Tantalus by making him stand in a pool of water under a fruit-laden tree where he could neither be able to drink water nor pluck fruits.

Tantalus, thus, becomes a symbol of temptation without any gratification—he, who stood in the pool of water under a fruit-laden tree but every time he bent to sip water, it receded away and each time he jumped to pluck fruit, the braches flew away. For Tantalus, it was all ordained by Gods as a punishment for his diabolical deeds.

But the story does not end at Tantalus’s afterlife admonition, we all are a symbol of it and replay his story each day in our life. Are we not always ‘tantalized’ by the illusory materialism of the modern life? Tantalus also becomes a metaphor of the human mind that keeps us tempted, on the tenterhooks, and forces us to flit from one desire to another without ever coming close to gratification; although we stand in the pool of happiness we eternally remain sad, craving for things that are inaccessible and depriving oneself from the available sources of happiness. The only way we would differ from Tantalus is that he suffered deprivation in his afterlife while we undergo his tease everyday in one form or the other, in our very ‘present’ life.

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A stone, a rope, a pear, a stick, whatever. Some of them came rapidly down; others took longer, depending on the air resistance. Some looked repulsive and others beautiful. For some it hurt when touching base, for some it was a smooth landing. Some came with a bang, others just whispered to the sand. The noisy ones were not a favorite of them all and yet nobody could deny the beautiful Niagara Falls.

Perhaps, the only ludicrous sight is a man falling from a height without any aid. With bungee and parachute it IS undoubtedly thrilling. But imagine slipping from the branch of a tree, a precipice or tumbling down a scaffolding? Even a fall from bed in sleep is not funny at all.

And yet there is the other fall that is so peculiar to the human race, the fall from compassion, virtue, kindness or benevolence, the one that triggers violence, bombings, murder, war and destruction. Of ending our own species? The fall that neither creates a thud, a bang or a twang. . . just an echoing silence, benumbing the sense of pain.

We have never learnt from history, so there is no point raising the question (which is sure to again fall flat). We are doomed . . . since the first fall from innocence.

But it is never too late. GRACE, do not let us plummet down. May we all understand the significance of that fall. Don’t you think when an apple fell, it expressed the message of humility?

Seize that foothold and hold on. . .
Manjit

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Only the first story has an actual storm. But fighting that is routine job for Christi dwellers. In fact Sonny has always been “chasing” storms. It is the other storm that has exhausted him and connected lives. It is always the other ones, a force to reckon with, in all the stories. The ones for which nobody is prepared, the ones which sway everything, even the sturdiest of souls. In ‘Waterwalkers’, Alicia is storming in the backdrop and although Sonny is at Janice’s only for work, he and Nora have united after about eighteen years and scenes from their past togetherness and their lost son Max flash off and on. The misgivings, the regrets, the sorrow is ranting in the characters' hearts as the world is brawling with the winds outside. Or Benny, of ‘In the Tall Grass’, unable to forgive his father’s violent, atrocious attacks on Edwin Butler’s operated knee, “which actually popped and made a “thwack” sound.” Any amount of his mother’s justification that it was “just violence, nothing deeper. Basic brutality. . .”, is unable to calm his raging inner moral storm. And he reflects: ”What I think, simply, finally, is that my father made a mistake. . .he knew he’d surrounded himself with people who could never conceive of doing what he’d done and not one person there would ever spend a night in jail.”

In ‘Corpus Christi’, Edie has suffered a miscarriage and had to have an emergency hysterectomy. The fact that she cannot have children has rendered her hopeless and imbalanced. Donnie, another character has beaten somebody up and both have ended up in a mental hospital, storming their lives and everyone else’s. Johnston reflects: “To know them, to understand who they essentially were, you only had to know what they’d lost. This was explicitly clear: Everyone could be seen that way.” The most forceful, however, is the triptych of Minnie and Lee’s stories, strategically placed even in the book, each after three stories, which is a saga of Minnie Marshall, a widow and a mother diagnosed with lung cancer, battling to live and struggling to find an apt way to die. Her son Lee has taken leave from his teaching job, so he can help brave the living dead storm in their lives. They are planning Minnie’s funeral on which she wants to spend the least. On the other hand Lee wouldn’t mind spending a fortune. The futility of it all, of life itself and the awareness of this existential dilemma is a heartrending situation that throws the whole world and its preoccupations meaningless. Lee is “swept over the edge and weeping for all of them [the world?], weeping like a man who was dying or a newborn child, blind and terrified and gasping for breath.”

A modern book, Corpus Christi is wrought with modern themes. For one, communication fails the characters. In ‘In the Tall Grass’, Benny’s mother voices, “I wonder what you know about me”, Weley Wilson in ‘Outside the Toy Store’ approaches Mrs. Anna Eichhardt, a mother of twins, who was once his beloved and wonders: “She could have said anything. Though finally she said nothing at all, but turned her back.” The reason of fire that destroys the house is never explained in ‘Two Liars’, and Toby deliberates: “I felt my father was only waiting for the right time to explain things to me, the chance of that happening was as slim as it was a month later, when he died”. In ‘Buy for Me the Rain’, “though [Lee] wanted to encourage [Moira] before she drifted off, to thank and exalt her, he said nothing.”

Life is absurd, there is no absolute truth, and everything is relative, circumstantial, depicting the complexity of the outside mechanized world. In ‘In the Tall Grass’, George Kelly gives Benny his ring as he is going to kick Butler and contemplates ending up in jail and Benny is unable to make sense of it all: ”Maybe depending on his son in this way was insulting or humbling or liberating or confusing”. Characters are always in a quandary and in a mental state of conflict whence every choice you might have made could be equally right or wrong. The woman of ‘Anything That Floats’, who could have been with Gibert instead of her husband Vince, seeing her son Tyler’s obsession with snakes, muses: “Truth is a coiling, slippery thing, and you can receive it any number of ways”. That although Philip Bundick (‘Birds of Paradise’) has come to know about his wife Fancy’s affair with Luis, Jesse’s dad, it does not “necessarily” mean that it would end up “tragic”, its like, even with open eyes, sometimes you fail to see, like “when you‘re in a dark room and although everything is black, you suddenly realize your eyes are open.” It is strange that Lee’s thoughts wander on and to the librarian in St. Louis when he is talking to the doctor on the phone about his mother whose days are numbered or even the thought of his girlfriend Moira at his mother’s funeral fills him with “fluttering optimism” because despite her leaving him several years before, Lee knew “she wouldn’t miss his mother’s funeral”, so even when Leiland Marshall “buried his mother, he kept shifting in his folding chair, hoping to see Moira Jarrett.” Johnston is refreshingly honest in the depiction of psyche and he even voices his vision in ‘Two Liars’: “Sometimes there’s a difference between telling the truth and telling everything.” For sure, he tells it all.

But the author also suggests some possible solutions to survive the storms. An endorser of values, he tells us, family is important. Robert Jackson in ‘Two Liars’ becomes his mouthpiece and says, “THE ONLY IRREPLACEABLE THING IS FAMILY” or George Kelly confides in his son in ‘In the Tall Grass’: “Boy the only thing in this whole woolly world that scares me is losing you and your mother. I’d be in the tall grass without the two of you. I’d be in the weeds.” Loneliness has been a killer for Sonny and Nora and family time is what they crave, so “their time together threatened to pass within a breath” as the storm subsides.

The genius of Johnston lies in the fact that although the stories centre around stormy, gloomy situations, in the end these storms do settle, something that leaves the reader with a feeling, "it-might-be-insufferable-but-I-can-live-it." I would not exactly refer to it as an optimistic note but an “accepting note” would be more appropriate, which might in turn be optimistic, but with a difference. Consider the ending of ‘I See Something You Don’t See’: “Really, as with us all, that was all she’d ever wanted, someone to watch over, someone who would lie and tell her not to be afraid, someone who would always, always say, Don’t worry, I’m here.” Or even the ending of ‘The Widow’ when she asks Lee: “Tell me where you’ve been”. With acceptance, life suddenly seems bearable.

America has always been a lover of short stories, where the genre has flourished more than any other continent and Johnston has only added to the great tradition with this debut collection.

Anyone who reads Corpus Christi would already be looking forward to his next.

Corpus Christi
by Bret Anthony Johnston
Random House |Hardcover, 272 pages
Price: CAN $34.95 | ISBN: 1-4000-6211-X

Also available as a trade paperback.

About the Author: Bret Anthony Johnston’s fiction has been featured in The Paris Review and Open City, as well as many anthologies, including New Stories from the South: Year’s Best, 2003 and 2004; Prize Stories: The O. Henry prize Stories 2003; and Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1999. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he received a teaching-writing fellowship, he teaches creative writing at California State University, San Bernardino, and can be reached online at his personal website.

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Happiness is an imaginary condition formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
—Thomas Szasz

Not everyone in chains is subdued;
At times, a chain is greater than a necklace.

Beauty is not in the face;
Beauty is a light in the heart.
—Kahlil Gibran

A famous saint once said that the meaning of the Name of Allah is that worshippers should take refuge in there. In times of sudden danger all people call out, O my God!

Why would they keep doing this, if it didn’t help?
Only a fool keeps going back where nothing happens.

—Rumi

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2. Baloney
a) Truth
b) Related to meat
c) Nonsense
d) Partial

3. Canvass
a) Contradictory
b) Related to soil
c) To speak in political rally
d) To solicit votes or opinions

4. Defund
a) To deplete financial resources
b) To increase the finances
c) To withdraw support
d) None of the above

5. Farsi
a) Related to Islamic culture
b) An Arabic language
c) Modern Iranian language
d) An ancient vessel

6. Gaffe
a) Decent mannerism
b) A faux pas
c) A coffee club
d) None of the above

7. Indurate
a) To make hard
b) Soften up by wetting
c) Rock formation
d) None of the above

8. Mein Kampf
a) Autobiography of Mussolini
b) Autobiography of Hitler
c) Autobiography of a German philosopher
d) Anti-Semitic

9. Smut
a) Clean
b) Hazy
c) Related to dark soil
d) A sooty matter

10. In Toto
a) A product
b) Scattered
c) Complete
d) None of the above

================

Answers:

1. (a) 2. (c) 3. (d) 4. (a) 5 (c) 6 (b) 7 (a) 8 (b) 9. (d) 10 (c)

Your Score:
8-10 Excellent
5-7 Good
1-4 Need improvement

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The Artist’s statement
A strong subconscious urge to produce, coupled with a need to learn and nurture creative instincts acts as the driving force behind JD Howell's work. Howell draws from his daily interaction with people to create an emotional framework for his art. By combining and layering various images, his work depicts the confusion of human emotions.

For Howell, each piece acts as a catharsis, extinguishing the anxiety that accompanies personal relationships or an insight into questions about himself and his own behavior. Using a combination of digital images and traditional drawings, JD Howell employs an extensive palette of color and texture to create a sense of depth that speaks to the soul. By juxtaposing both modern and dated images, Howell is able to visually portray emotions in a manner that is as defiant of time as the feelings themselves.

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Endowed with a prolific memory and keen intelligence, gifted with unique commonsense and possessing rare qualities of perseverance and tenacity of purpose, Lakha Singh achieved all that one calls success. But it is not the material success alone that sets him apart from the ordinary mortals. It was his single-mindedness, dedication to high morals and human values that made him a true philanthropist.

Lakha Singh’s father, S. Partap Singh Bahra and his doting mother, Smt. Pali, passed on to their son, the legacy of hard work, dignity of intense labor and unimpeachable integrity. The result was that instead of becoming complacent or giving in to his dire poverty, he struggled hard to secure a life of dignity and honor. The success story of this man from a crushing poverty to a cushy richness can inspire young men and women. But what really made him a man to be remembered with fond reverence was, his awareness and recognition to help the underprivileged and the neglected sections of society.

Among the early influences, Singh’s first cousin, Kishan Singh Bahra, left an indelible impression on the mind of this builder-turned-philanthropist. It was he, who imparted Singh the practical knowledge of the science of architecture. The relationship between the master and the disciple were harmoniously perfect without the hint of selfishness on either part. The master was willing to share his knowledge and the disciple staked his health and comfort and learned the intricacies of this art. Hard work paid rich dividends later when the young entrepreneur migrated to Kenya for better prospects in the early periods of post-independent India.

Lakha Singh did extremely well in his business in Kenya and his contracts ranged from building small houses to big ones for the distinguished in that country. However, it was the under the benign influence of a spiritual teacher, Sardar Pratap Singh that he took to incorporating spirituality in his life. Serving the langar, the community kitchen in a Sikh temple in Delhi, the capital of India, gave him true pleasure, pride, satisfaction and peace of mind. His wife, Sardarni Surjeet Kaur, was his constant companion in the service of humanity. She passed away in 1991.

As time passed, he roped in famous clientele in his business ventures and more money started pouring. Soon Lakha Singh became a wealthy business man. But riches never got into his head. He remained grounded to the cause of philanthropy. He gave liberal grants to educational institutes and one of his beneficiaries was the Government Girls High School at his native village, Chachoki. He funded the establishment of community halls and always stepped forward to help the needy and poor.

In consequence to his hard work, Lakha Singh’s name holds a place of prominence and honor in Nairobi’s Asian Brotherhood Society. This society is responsible for running a Ramgarhia Sikh Temple and a well-equipped hospital.

Pursuing his philanthropic spirit in India, Lakha Singh set up the ‘Lakha Singh Bahra Charitable Trust’ in 1982 with a Board of Trustees. This charitable trust was meant to grant scholarships, bursaries and financial assistance for the purchase of books and educational implements to distinguished and deserving students each year. During more than the last two decades, around 1500 students have been given merit-cum-means scholarships. Another important offshoot of this charitable effort was the ‘Partap Singh Bahra Memorial Hospital’ in Phagwara, Punjab. It was founded on April 4, 1993 to offer medical services to the poor and needy. Currently, this hospital is equipped with specialists in medicine, surgery and gynaecology and modern facilities for diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

Lakha Singh bade farewell to this world in 2004. However, the seeds of good work he sowed during his lifetime continue to blossom and help the needy.

If only all the wealthy ones out there, shared some of it with the less fortunate!

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