Could a small wasp expand my vocabulary? Reveal secrets of biology? I woke particularly early one day and found this beauty buzzing around my kitchen. I caught the wasp, photographed and released her–all in a matter of minutes. Then I began to investigate.

What I learned is: the Ichneumonid is a common reddish-brown wasp, with a slender 1 1/2 inch body, long antennae, and a curved ovipositor. It uses its ovipositor to lay eggs in the bodies of spiders, caterpillars and various grubs. The wasp is useful to people as it controls pests on crops.

Continuing my research, I encountered three words that were unfamiliar to me. Each word is connected to different aspects of ecology.

1. crepuscular, pertaining to twilight or dawn. In biology, it refers to an animal who is most active at those times of day when its not fully night and not quite day. The Ichneumonid wasp is crepuscular, attracted to the lights of buildings on the edges of fields or forests.
2. protelean. In biology, this usually refers to an insect that is a parasite in an early larval stage of life, but is not a parasite in an adult stage of life. The Ichneumonid wasp inserts its egg inside another insect. As the wasp larvae hatches, it consumes and destroys its host, eventually emerging as a winged adult that now feeds mainly on the nectar of flowers. The word protelean comes from Proteus, a Greek sea god who has the power to change shape, size and appearance.
3. holometabolous. In biology, the word is often used in conjuncture with metamorphosis. A holometabolous insect is one who undergoes four complete stages of metamorphosis: egg, larva, pupa, adult.

This word exercise led to a curious stream of thought. First, I wondered if these were merely technical words used by biologists and no one else. For instance, could the words be used in other contexts? Had someone like Shakespeare ever used them? For example, I found this sentence in a review of an opera based on Midsummer Night’s Dream: “It was a moment of pure magic and set the seal on an opera that shows [Benjamin] Britten not only responding to Shakespeare, but revealing, in a way few straight productions do, the play’s crepuscular strangeness.” (Michael Billington, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s Great Shapeshifter,” The Guardian, Aug. 12, 2016)

About the metamorphosis of an insect, I pondered how an insect could live one part of its life as a parasite and another part of its life as a symbiont living in close cooperation with another living entity. For example, a caterpillar eats the leaves of a tree. Yet as soon as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it now becomes a pollinator of the flowers of trees. One stage of life, it’s destructive; another stage of life, it’s helpful.

What is the advantage of metamorphosis for insects? Why did they evolve such radical changes to their bodies? Science writer Ferris Jabr suggests three answers: 1) As the young insect has a different diet and occupies a different ecological niche than the adult insect, young and old are never in competition with one another. 2) Metamorphosis is a survival strategy. If food were to get scarce, the insect could survive for extended periods in the semi-dormant pupa stage. 3) If an insect lays multiple eggs, it might be difficult for the parent insect to provide sufficient nutrients in each egg to bring the embryo to full term. However if the nymph hatches prematurely and learns to feed itself, using resources outside the egg, than this frees the energy demands on the parent. (Scientific American, Aug 10, 2012)

In this discussion, it’s worth noting that Insects are not alone in experiencing metamorphosis. Sea creatures like sponges and jellyfish also change their bodies in remarkable ways. These changes often involve a transformation from a fixed or rooted, filter-feeding creature to a mobile hunting creature. Nutrient resources change, energy requirements change, body shapes change.

These answers, while reasonable enough, omit one important area, how insects interact with bacteria. A radical mid-life change in diet might require the insect not only to change their bodies, but also to alter the bacteria inside them, particularly the bacteria in their guts. New bacteria support new functions. Could we say that these strategies (niche swapping, bacterial renewal) promote biodiversity both inside the wasp and in the environment around it?

In conclusion, a wasp taught me three new words. The words touch on aspects of animal behaviour, physiology, adaptation, and ecological relationships. All of which led to a greater appreciation of the wasp’s twilight crepuscular protelean shape-shifting world that encourages diversity and reinvention .

Celes Davar looks like a middle-aged biology professor who’s spent a lot of time outdoors. His hair is thin on top, offset by a neatly trimmed beard, big glasses and an even bigger smile. Though busy with clients from across the country, when he zoom chats with me, there’s no rush, no sense of impatience, no hurry to push an agenda.

It turns out Celes is a biologist, as well as chef, musician and tour guide. In his own words, he’s an “experience broker.” He worked for Parks Canada for many years in his home province of Manitoba. But his unique vision of tourism—experiential tourism he calls it—led him to found his own business, Earth Rhythms. He is not a consultant, he corrects me, he is a practitioner. This makes me think of doctors and medicine, and there’s a considerable amount of healing in his approach. Celes’ definition of sustainable is “do no harm,” a motto borrowed from the Hippocratic Oath. Sustainable habits are good, but from time to time they need the assistance of regenerative practice. This practice asks: can we restore that which has been harmed? 

I inform Celes that our Foundation are creating a Centre as a retreat for artists, people interested in nature and health, and other visitors. He tells me I’m in the tourism business. But he’s quick to add, there are many kinds of tourism. The difference between a superficial visit and a meaningful experience has to do with programming. This means visitors are invited to participate, to taste local food, to get a sense of the DNA of a place, and, most importantly, to share stories. This is a niche tourism, not large-scale industrial tourism. In conventional tourism, the goal is to increase the number of visitors, to increase volume and revenue. How many people, how much income? Celes calls these inappropriate questions. 

Niche tourism approaches the situation from a more environmental perspective, asking: what is the quality of experience given your capacity? If you can only handle a small number of visitors at a time, well, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, that might be an advantage. It might be what sets your centre apart from other tourist hotspots.  

Celes speaks of the promise of tourism as a place for good. This leads to a second question: can your centre be a place where people practice reverence for life? 

His third question: “What is the DNA of the place?” 

Fourth question: “Who are the ideal visitors or guests for what we have to offer?”

I tell Celes I can’t answer at this time. Our centre is just getting started and we’re still exploring. This makes some people uncomfortable. They ask, where’s the business plan? Celes smiles and assures me there’s nothing wrong with an identity quest. There’s even a name for it–emergent practice. What this means is to be thoughtful. What you want is to embrace good design practice. 

I’m aware that Celes has big clients like Gros Morne National Park, Tourism Newfoundland, the Fundy Geological Museum. How do these clients react when he talks about small-scale regenerative tourism? Celes answers that “people are ready to do different. They see the old models aren’t working. People want a new approach, but they don’t know what questions to ask.”

Many of Celes ideas come from the operation of his own experiential tour company. Celes hosts guests in his own passive solar home, feeds them gourmet meals from ingredients grown in his own garden, using dishes made by his wife in her unique pottery studio, then walks his guests across the local landscape, building fires and singing songs.

Celes continues to learn. He describes a conversation with his son. His son told him you’re at a stage of life where it’s not necessary for you to earn money by creating services. Your future income may come from reducing expenses. Celes agrees. That’s why he created the solar home, why he has the garden and land. He tells me, investors know that if they protect their money, their capital, its value will increase over time. Well, the same is true with the environment. The environment is only valuable as long as it is protected. Celes introduces a term I haven’t heard before, the “circular economy,” and recommends I visit the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website. 

Celes brings up a related topic: transformation. He’s not in the tourism business, he says, he’s in the transformation business. To this end, he states that studies by Howard Gardener and other educators have shown that the old model of learning is ineffective. “If I can just deliver knowledge in the right way …” No, Celes, says, people don’t learn by being taught or lectured to. They learn by experience. If you want to transform what people know, if you want to impact their lives, you have to do it through shared experiences. 

When I ask Celes if he’d consider conducting a workshop at our Centre, he answers yes, but only as part of a team developing a joint project. When he comes to our centre, we will have a shared experience working toward a common goal. I tell him I like this approach and I’ll brainstorming with our team to help make this happen. 

Congratulations to Joy Laking on the publication of her new book, The Painted Province, Nova Scotia through an Artist’s Eyes. This attractive paperback features over 200 paintings of Nova Scotia. Accompanying the pictures are stories of people, places, travel and adventure. Joy describes her first memories of landscape painting, growing up in a family of artists. She fondly remembers day excursions, painting with her father. They made an odd pairing, with Joy content to paint familiar things–subjects surround her at every turn–while the father searches out the perfect scene, which leaves little time to get impressions down on paper.

Joy is an inveterate traveller. Her book covers 40 separate areas of the province. Each image conjures up a strong sense of place. Once the artist sets up, working like the Impressionists and the Group of Seven, en plein air, she paints for hours and becomes a local curiosity. Villagers bring her food and pepper her with questions. Joy makes friends easily and her travelogue includes stories of her encounters and friendships.

The variety of landscapes and townscapes is impressive. Most images are watercolours. The water medium gives a sense of spontaneity to images full of detail and precise observations. In her book, Joy also shares some of her experiments with different media: her hooked rugs are delightful, as are her hand-painted furniture and collages made of things around the house. Throughout we see Joy’s tenacious pursuit of a theme through a hundred changes in weather, season, light and location. Water is a favourite subject. Bays dotted with islands and marked by tides, viewed from berry fields, through clusters of houses, wildflowers and clotheslines. What a wonderful record of the province! The personal stories and behind-the-scenes revelations of how Joy works add another layer of interest.

My sister is upset. She owns property along the contentious Avon River in Mount Denson. Why is this river contentious? The nearby town of Windsor built a causeway across the water 50 years ago, causing this extraordinary tidal system to fill with silt. A river that once boasted the highest tides in the world and harboured an industry of proud boat builders, has become an ecological disaster.

This year, instead of repairing the situation, the government decided to widen the highway through Windsor by building a second causeway. At Hantsport, 14 km downstream, the Avon converges with a second river system, the Halfway River, where a dyke holding back ocean water burst a few years back. Again, the government addressed the situation by constructing an impenetrable rock wall to stop a body of rushing water that has no intention of being stopped. The silting has caused the river to disappear in many places. In other places, the water, having nowhere else to go, has pushed against its banks, eating away the land at a furious pace.

Janet showed us the riverbank where stately oaks hover above the eroded ground. Roots once buried deep into the earth are now stilts, pedestals made of gossamer. The trees’ demise is inevitable as water eats into the land and robs these giants of their stability. .

My sister and I talked about cycles of nature. Landscapes transformed as forest soil becomes water logged sand and then something else. Janet had been reading Silver Donald Cameron’s The Living Beach. In this book, Cameron describes a sandcastle festival on the Magdelan Islands. Artists and amateurs come here to craft elaborate sand structures on the public beach, cheered on by crowds numbering in the thousands. The castles are grand and beautiful, yet none will last longer than a few days as the surf rolls inexorably toward them.

Here are Silver Donald’s words: “There’s something very appealing about this–structures lovingly created in the full knowledge that they’re ephemeral, that they’ll be gone in a week, that no trace of them will endure after the first big storm … By the Earth’s calendar, all our works are sand castles–and so is the coast itself. There they stand, those glorious constructions bathed in pearly morning light, already starting to crumble. And built with joy in the knowledge that their destiny was to crumble. There’s a liberating acceptance in this gesture.”

Disappearing sandcastles are a metaphor for the shoreline itself. The shore supports an ecosystem that appears stable and complex, yet the entire system is in flux, and will change character in the space of a decade or a lifetime. Perhaps the change would be easier to accept, if human interference weren’t such a contributing factor.

Janet and I are walking along the salt marsh. At one point we pass a submerged dock, its twisted boards just visible through layers of sand and rock. The ground becomes sandy, then stony, dotted with a sharp, spiky grass. Through blades of grass, I notice a dark-coloured rubbery form, snap its picture. What is it? A lichen or an algae? Back home, I look it up on inaturalist. The identification is: green spongy cushion algae (codium setchellii). It’s also known as Dead Man’s Brains. It’s a close relative to the finger sponge algae (Dead Man’s Fingers) often found on our shores. It’s probably been there my whole lifetime, but I’m only getting around to noticing it now. It takes a river to wash away a forest to cause me to notice a tiny creature who may adapt to change more perfectly than all the giants surrounding it.

Friends gather at the Centre. There’s a peace here surrounded by the quiet beauty of nature. The group sit outside, buoyed by the hillside view. Linda Longmire opens the session by introducing the concept of mindfulness. The aim is to access depths that lead to wholeness, healing and joy. The means to this wholeness and joy is through the cultivation of a healthy interior life.  

A pediatric physiotherapist, committed to contemplative practices in her personal life, Linda began leading groups after training with the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation. 

The group share meditations, silences and insights, then break to walk the wooded trails under cloudy skies that break into a blaze of sunlight.  As participants move through the forest and along the shore, some find a much sought after solitude—a solitude experienced in the comfortable non-demands of others–with a saying by the poet Rumi (provided by Linda), an idea that feels like a gift:  “The eyes are here for seeing; yet the soul is here for its own joy. “

Linda is a writer; it’s a central feature of her practice. She ends the session with a journaling process and asks each participant to recall a moment of joy. What do you write when you write about joy? Does the practice of mindfulness change the exercise? In recalling joy, are you able to find a place within yourself that feels true and satisfying? Is it a first step that may need further practice?
 

Linda also brought copies of one of her own books. I flip it open and immediately find something to like. I like it so much that I create my own version of the poem. Lines 1 and 2 are Linda`s; lines 3 and 4 are my own: 

If all my weaknesses were windows,   If all my doubts were doors,  My house would be drenched with sunlight,   With visitors on every floor. 

Thanks Linda for a wonderful day and for helping us seek joy in unexpected windows. 

A wild flower misunderstood? Reviled for no reason? Such seems to be the case with goldenrod, incorrectly blamed for causing seasonal allergies. It is a bright golden, conspicuous flower that blooms in late summer and early fall. Take a minute to observe and you’ll see the flower attracts bees, butterflies and moths. It’s pollinated by insects, not by the wind. The real culprit here for allergies is ragweed, a thin easily overlooked plant which blooms at the same time as goldenrod and whose pollen flies in the wind in great abundance.

How many types of goldenrod are there? I found three distinct species without too much trouble, the Canada goldenrod growing in fields and roadside ditches, the seaside goldenrod on a salt marsh shore, and the silverrod (noted for its white flowers) in a sunny patch on the edge of a woods.

The plant is so common, so ubiquitous, that North Americans regard it as a weed, though it’s quite attractive, adds a splash of colour to mixed bouquets, and is perfectly edible (especially its young leaves, while tea and honey can be made from its flowers). In Europe, goldenrod is cultivated and grown in gardens. It also has medicinal properties. That’s right, instead of making you sneeze, goldenrod actually helps fight off the things that make you sneeze. Misunderstood.

How was your summer? A question we’re often asked. Usually harmless, but now, in Covid times, I feel guilty answering, it was good, I enjoyed the isolation while it lasted. One is not supposed to enjoy isolation. It’s different when you have a view, trails to walk, woods full of animals and birds. It’s hard to believe the world outside this retreat is full of fear, restrictions, suspicions, recriminations. During this period of limited contact, we received the sad news that Kathleen’s father died of Corona virus in a nursing home in Halifax. Kathleen wasn’t allowed to gather with her family for a service, though weeks later she and her siblings made a trip together to relive important memories.

I thought it might be a good time to start some projects. I took nature photographs and wrote about my photographs. I created nature identification cards. Worked outdoors, creating trails, building boxes for the garden, planted the garden. I read books and researched subjects related to natural history. Kathleen tried her hand at painting and surprised many with her playful, exuberant images.

Then the restrictions lifted a little. An artist-in-residence, Micha Edelstein, brightened our days at the centre. We heard daily reports of an innovative school Micha was redesigning, rebuilding, expanding. We were joined by a student apprentice, Ogen Newcomb. Ogen helped Micha with the school, and trained hours every day, running, stretching, biking, helping with the garden and exploring the local area. We had a volunteer managing the site, Jay Heffernan. He helped us in a hundred ways, made repairs, organized spaces and expanded our media efforts. Each of these–artist, student, volunteer–had special voices, unique gifts. I feel grateful for their contributions, though I feel I’m still digesting the lessons. We also had visitors, workmen and planners hired to help us move forward toward future goals.

We met our neighbour Shanna, a biologist who works for the environmental group, Coastal Action. Her group were hired by the town of Chester to test the water in the cove and around nearby islands for bacteria and other substances. We happily allowed Shanna to use our dock to launch her boat. The information gathered from her tests is shared with all the neighbours and local politicians, and it’s fascinating and heartening to see these folks work together to secure a clean and safe waterway in the area.

This summer wasn’t all work. Exercise and exploring are important to me and I often combine the two in bike rides. We’re fortunate to have the centre located beside one of the most varied and scenic bike trails in Nova Scotia, the trail from Chester to Mahone Bay and Lunenburg. Micha, Ogen and Jay, all joined in on these rides, as did Kathleen and other friends, and friends of friends. It’s more fun when there’s a gang. For one ride, we took the ferry to Big Tancock and toured the Island. The ferry ride takes an hour each way and offers a close-up view of many of the islands and points of interest in Mahone Bay.

We had a visit from our mentor Nigel Thornley and his wife Marlie, along with friends, Geoff and Faye Singleton. Kathleen asked them to describe a memory of nature when they were young. They were eager to share stories, growing up in England, sighting icebergs, saving puffins in Newfoundland and wild animal encounters in Ontario.

We enjoyed visits from Board members and artists, Alex Livingston and Heather Macleod, retired minister Curtis Macdonald and his wife Bev, and from Margaret Swain, a key member of our Foundation, retired principal, world traveller (on hold at the moment) and extraordinary community volunteer. We had a visit from a couple attending a college reunion. They brought deer meat from one of their children and vegetables from their garden. A neighbour dropped by, an athlete, I thought he might not fit in. Turns out, his parents and the parents of the university couple had been refugees in Europe, escaping communism, coming to Canada for a fresh start. They understood each other immediately. We served dinner. A woman with two precocious pre-teens was there. I worried we’d never be able to entertain these energetic children. They were happy to run outside, to be on their own in such a wide open space. But within minutes they were back, urging us to come look at the sky. Something unusual was happening. Flashes of light. Darkness. More flashes illuminating the tops of trees and low hanging clouds. Lightning. Distant rumbles. We brought out chairs and watched the sky. Then the rain poured down and we all ran for cover.