April 24, 2012

Greetings and Salutations, friends!

I’m going to do my best to avoid giving my opinion on some contents of yesterday’s lecture. In case you’re wondering why I didn’t write about the lecture last week, it’s because we mostly just talked about the Puritans and Pocahontas. I don’t really have much to say about that sort of thing, except that near Jasper, Alberta, there’s a cabin resort called “Pocahontas”, and we used to stay there as kids on vacation. We really felt like we were roughing it in our little one-room cabins in the woods except, of course, when we got to go swimming in that awesome pool. Then it burned down in the fires a number of years back. I think they rebuilt it. (Ooo-ee, did they ever! They no longer look anything like the “roughing” experience we enjoyed as children!)

Actually, maybe I could’ve talked about my childhood encounters with nature and country in the name of Pocahontas after all.

Shoot.

Anyway, among other things, one of the things discussed in the lecture yesterday was about how being “simple” was actually a good thing in American culture, because it signifies cultivation and industriousness. (Or something.) Although I’m not convinced you wouldn’t get smacked in the face with a scythe if you called someone simple in Canada (^^), I think the principle is rather similar.
Being simple may not be a good thing in Canadian culture, but living simply often is. Okay. I should reiterate. I don’t actually mean Canadian culture. I mean prairie culture. I’m pretty sure if you asked someone from Trana if living simply was a good thing, they’d laugh in your face and remind you that they live in the centre of the universe, and that they are just as good as New York, where people definitely do not live simply.

Aside from all those oil workers who earn quadrillions working up in Fort Mac, I’d say a lot of Westerners, though, pride themselves on being able to make do with not so much. To cultivate abundance themselves, and this sort of thing. If, for example, this isn’t the case (such as in Calgary, where everyone needs to walk around with an $800 Coach bag), they will celebrate their simple-ness by celebrating Stampede (see: Calgary Stampede) every year where they can boast their Cowboy-ness to assure the rest of us they’re able to live just as simply as we are. In designer cowboy boots, of course.

My point?

Oh, yes.

We Canadians (and yes, I mean Albertans and possibly Saskatchewanians) pride ourselves on not living too much in abundance, and if we do, we pride ourselves on the abilityto live simply if we were forced to. We prove this by going to the mountains at regular intervals to cook on open fire and look at the stars. It isn’t important to us that we bought that Jiffy Pop at Safeway before renting a plot of land in a crowded campsite where the tough ones rough it out in a tent and not an RV. The point is that we feel one with the land like our glorious ancestors before us and, through them, we channel the ability to live simply. [/tongue in cheek] (Actually, many of my ancestors lived in Krautland ‘til the 50s, and the ones that moved earlier only showed up in the 20s or so. But you totally know what I mean.)

So, basically, modern conveniences mean we no longeractuallylive simply. To prove my point, you should take a look at the link to the new Pocahontas cabins at the beginning of the post. But we like topretendwe are able to, andinsistthat such things are still virtuous and a vital part of the Canadian identity.

There are, of course, still Canucks who wear flannel and like to sit in huts whilst ice fishing in the dead of winter. There are others (yay, me included!) who actually enjoy backpacking through the mountains and living in the wild. But, really, only for five days or so. Bathing in glacier water gets old after awhile.

Living simply and finding abundance in nature is a great source of Canadian pride. Ask any of us. But most of us don’t actually do it. And if we do, it’s with full awareness that we’ll be back in our cushy beds in the next week or so.