Jocie's Blog

  Flying            I don't like traveling. I like being places, but not actually the getting there.   I think I have a reality-based fear of flying.   It’s based on knowing the reality: people make planes and people also make mistakes.   They call it ‘human error’ and it's sort of scary if you think about it.   There you are, hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, while the guy responsible for keeping you there is standing safely on the ground.   He might have a wife that just left with the plumber, or maybe a teenage son, and could have been thinking about mess his life is in while working on the landing gear, or replacing the fuel line in the big old piece of metal into which you are solidly strapped.         It's not like I actually get sick: I don't.   I just get scared.   I don't get "green" scared, like Chris did the time w...

 Before my experiences in Australia with the Aboriginal people there, I had a few adventures with the Indigenous people of Canada.   I wrote about my journey to Gil Island almost twenty years ago, when I was in Hartley Bay.  Every day was an adventure that year. I deeply wished my husband was there to share it with me, but was fortunate to meet so many new, interesting, and adventurous people.  I think it was in Hartley Bay that I first became aware that the world was not as big, or as scary, as I had previously believed.  The people and my time there all contributed to a growing confidence in myself, and helped me gather the courage to step out, again and again, throughout the rest of my life.     2001-Gil Island         Living on an Indian Reserve on the rugged coast of BC was a lot more interesting than you may think. Life had lots of color, and there were many real characters!   The r...

  Perspective         When I went to school in the sixties in Fernie, B.C., I was taught a little poem by my history teacher:   In fourteen hundred and ninety- two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.                 My school credited Christopher Columbus with discovering the Americas, and must have skipped the part where Leif Ericsson (eldest son of Eric the Red ) crossed the ocean almost five hundred years earlier, or possibly I wasn’t listening?   And the Chinese?   North Americans have always ignored the enormous role the Chinese played in the settlement of this country.   We charged them a head tax at the turn of the 20th C. to come in and slave on the railway and the gold fields.   But I think they were here before Columbus. When I visited the B.C. museum in Victoria, after a short stint in China, I couldn't get over the resemb...