VOLUNTEERS BUILDING HOMES FOR HUMANITY ON RESERVE LAND

Officials join one of the Neyaashiinigmiling families in a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their new home.

Here's another good news story being created off the beaten path not far from my home in Southampton.

On Saturday, November 24, four families on the Neyaashiinigmiing Aboriginal Reserve No. 27, formerly Cape Croker, received the keys to their new homes thanks to Habitat for Humanity.

The Build is a unique pilot project in partnership with the Chippewas of Newash Unceded First Nation, Habitat for Humanity and the Government of Canada. The Chippewas of Nawash occupy Neyaashiinigmiing 27 on the east shores of the Saugeen (Bruce) Peninsula on Georgian Bay and have created a new 19 lot development of homes that are being built by the selected families and volunteers from across Grey and Bruce Counties.

The families partner with Habitat to build their homes by completing 500 hours of sweat equity, or 350 for a single parent. They can then purchase the house with a no-down payment, no-interest mortgage. Many of those in the homes will not spend more than 25 per cent of their income on on housing.

On Saturday, a ceremony was held at the Build site on Sydney Bay Road that began with a special traditional drumming ceremony by Paul and son Jackson Nadjiwon and Algonquin Chief Wayne McKenzie of Notre Dame de Nor who had traveled from Quebec..

Neyaashiinigmiing Chief, Greg Nadjiwon, said that he was as excited as the families to see the project evolve. “This was because of the way the collaboration of partnerships, donations and volunteers, who showed up day after day to participate in the build, happened. There were 270 volunteers on the project.”

Chief Nadjiwon also took the opportunity to announce that Chief and Council had “… found the funding to make this happen and that six more builds were to be done in 2019. We plan to continue this very successful endeavour because this was not just about building houses, this was about building community and having community members come together. We plan to proceed until there are 19 houses and then we are moving on to a water treatment plant. It is our hope that the success of this project will open doors to allow other First Nations to address the chronic housing crisis that exist across the country.”

Major donors to the project included Bruce Power, the Realtors Association of Grey Bruce Owen Sound and the United Way of Bruce and Grey among others. Francesca Dobbin and Chief Greg Nadjiwon

Francesca Dobbin, Executive Director of the United Way of Bruce and Grey, announced several initiatives for the new family homes that included providing new beds (18) complete with bedding and propane assistance thanks to donations by several companies in the area.

Al MacDonald, Construction Manager of Habitat for Humanity, who headed up the Build, said that it was only through the help of the many volunteers that the project was completed. “We work very safely as there are so many people who volunteer from a wide variety of life experiences and who have never been on a construction site,” said MacDonald. “This is a meaningful experience and a community effort. Every volunteer who comes out is for the benefit of somebody else. Quality is also paramount and, sometimes, we do things over to build an incredible house. It’s also behind the scenes with the meals and coffee and support that makes it a community effort. It’s working with the families and the volunteers who, frankly, don’t have the skills to build homes but who learn and do the work that needs to be done.”

Several other similar Habitat for Humanity projects are also underway in Bruce Peninsula Reserve communities north of Saugeen Shores.

Hearing of projects like this once in a while provides us with a welcomed respite from our constant news diet of conflict and discourse around the world.

TURNING INWARD WITH "WHAT'S LEFT IN LIFE" THOUGHTS

It has now been almost six months since my wife Rosanne passed away. For the second time in 20 years I have endured the initial stages of grieving the death of a spouse. I honestly believed that I had it all licked -- feeling stronger both emotionally and physically, getting on with life with a degree of normality as I remembered it.

Then out of the blue last evening as I was preparing supper, I felt the onslaught of a heavy ache in my upper gut and chest. Tears began to flow. "Good God almighty, it's happening again. I thought that I was all over this sort of thing," was my initial reaction. It was all I could do to control emotions and to return to the priority at hand -- getting supper.

For the balance of the evening, and even this morning, I have struggled with the depressive thought that for all intents and purposes, my life is over...nothing of significance to live for, not that my life has been of much significance anyway.

After all, when you stop to think about it, what does life really have to offer an 80 year old of meager means...One who has seen it all and done most of it?  The question does give one pause.

Strange how grief can crop up on you when you least expect it or when you are, often unknowingly, most vulnerable. It is all part of losing something, or someone, of significance. Nothing is more final than death. What is gone, is gone, forever. What was, is no longer. That is the worst part of it.

As an escape or divergence, my impulse was to turn to one of the few things that satisfies a need within me -- offering my thoughts in writing on Wrights Lane

I have always felt that there is an inherent sort of comfort in wrapping myself in words, either of my own creation or that of others, and losing myself to a different kind of world for just a little while.

Well-written words on their own sing just as much as any song, and what’s more, they have the power to truly speak to you (the part of you that’s hurting). Because, regardless of how you’re feeling, there is undoubtedly someone who has felt like you before, and the power of music and words can bring about that emotion and re contextualize it in yourself and your current suffering.

Also, if I try to create, whether it be any form of writing or art, I feel incredibly separate from whatever is going on in my day-to-day existance. Creativity lets me truly bond with whatever art medium I’m working with, and I think that engaging in the creation of something you’re naturally passionate about is the best cure-all on the planet.

It’s important to recognize, too, that often times, suffering brings about the best writing. Pain leads to many of the greatest songs and symphonies. The power of either losing yourself to the world created from words, musical notes or a paint brush, or creating a new world from your suffering is something that we all can look to when there seems to be nothing left, if there truly is nothing.  Then why not try to create something?

And, how do I go about creating that something?  I turn inward, because I am all that I have left.

I have to realize that I am temporarily being sucked into a familiar and painful vacuum, but this too shall pass. Maybe, just maybe there is something better in store for me tomorrow, giving renewal to a belief that Life's the greatest...Live it to the fullest!  You just never know what's in store for you.

Life is like a sine wave. It's a continual test of endurance and self-reliance, full of changes and surprises to the very end. It is not like me to back away from change and I like surprises.

That's the way I look at it, anyway.

Thanks for listening!

THE TRUTH TODAY NEEDS TO BE CONSTRUCTIVE AND ADAPTIVE, OTHERWISE IT IS NO BETTER THAN FAKE NEWS, BULL ROAR OR A LIE

In this day and age it is really difficult to know what is truth and what is not. We are living in a period when one man's truth can be written off as fake news by another with little attempt to justify opposition. There are no longer any beliefs, positions, issues or institutions that are sacrosanct. 

At best, selective and deceptive half-truths have become the order of the day.

It has been suggested that one way to understand truth is simply to look at its opposites, namely, lies and a form of deception commonly known as "BS". The liar must track the truth in order to conceal it. In contrast, the bullsh*tter has no regard or sensitivity for the truth, or even for what his or her audience believes.

Those who lie and those who tell the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as understood, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The BSer ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, BS is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Following his defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Mark Antony heard the rumour that Cleopatra had committed suicide, and consequently stabbed himself in the abdomen—only to discover that Cleopatra herself had been responsible for spreading the rumour. He later died in her arms.

"Fake news" may be as old as humanity, but in our Internet age it has spread like a disease, swinging elections, fomenting social unrest, undermining institutions, and diverting political energy from health, education, and good government. Initially, “fake news” referred to false news with large scale popular traction, although Donald Trump seems to have extended the usage to include any news that does not serve him.

Those who are alarmed, or who feel they are in a minority, might take comfort in the words of Søren Kierkegaard:

"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion — and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion… while truth again reverts to a new minority."

The Correspondence Theory of Truth: Truth is a property not so much of thoughts and ideas but more properly of beliefs and assertions. But to believe or assert something is not enough to make it true, or else the claim that ‘to believe something makes it true’ would be just as true as the claim that ‘to believe something does not make it true’.

For centuries, philosophers have agreed that thought or language is true if it corresponds to an independent reality. For Aristotle, “to say that what is is, and what is not is not, is true." For Avicenna, truth is “what corresponds in the mind to what is outside it." And for Aquinas, truth is “the adequation of things and the intellect” (adaequatio rei et intellectus).

Unfortunately, but perhaps also fortunately, the mind does not perceive reality as it is, but only as it can, filtering, distorting, and interpreting it. In modern times, it has been argued that truth is largely constructed by social and cultural processes, to say nothing of individual desires and dispositions. Michel Foucault famously spoke, not of truth or truths, but of “regimes of truth." Categories and constructs regarding, for example, race and sexuality may not reflect biological let alone metaphysical realities.

The Coherence Theory of Truth: A thing is more likely to be true if it fits comfortably into a large and coherent system of beliefs. It remains that the system could be a giant fiction, entirely divorced from reality, but this becomes increasingly unlikely as we investigate, curate, and add to its components—assuming, and it is quite an assumption, that we are operating in good faith, with truth as our aim. So conceived, truth is not a property, or merely a property, but an attitude, a way of being in the world.

'Truth' is not a feature of correct propositions which are asserted of an 'object' by a human 'subject' and then are 'valid' somewhere, in what sphere we know not. Rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds. All human comportment and bearing are exposed in its open region.

The Pragmatic Theory of Truth: All the better, perhaps, if we can actually do something useful with our system and its components. If truth leads to successful action, then successful action is an indicator of truth. Clearly, we could not have sent a rocket to the moon if our maths had been wide off the mark. For William James, the truth is “only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving”.

If something works, it may well be true; if it doesn’t, it most probably isn’t. But what if something works for me but not for you? Is that thing then true for me but not for you? For Nietzsche, who makes himself the natural friend of two-penny tyrants, truth is power, and power truth: “The falseness of a judgment is not necessarily an objection to a judgement… The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding…”

Short-term or long-term, and at what cost?

The Deceptive Theory of Truth: That a thing fits into a system, or leads to successful action, may suggest that it is true, but does not tell us much about what truth actually is. Beyond that, the correspondence theory of truth doesn't tell us very much at all, so thin as to be almost or entirely tautological—and perhaps for a reason.

It has been argued that to say that X is true is merely to say that X, and therefore that truth is an empty predicate. Truth is not a real property of things. Rather, it is a feature of language used to emphasize, agree, or hypothesize, or for stylistic reasons. For example, it can be used to explicate the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility: “Everything that the pope says is true.” But this is merely shorthand for saying that if the Pope says A, then A; and if he says B, then B…

For some thinkers, something can only be true or false if it is open to verification, at least in theory if not also in practice. The truth of something lies at the end of our inquiry into that thing. But as our inquiry can have no end, the truth of something can never be more than our best opinion of that thing. If best opinion is all that we can have or hope for, then best opinion is as good as truth, and truth is a redundant concept. But best opinion is only best because, at least on average, it is closest to the truth, which, as well as instrumental value, has deep intrinsic value.

By its very nature self-deception is hard to distinguish from the truth—whether our internal, emotional truth or the external truth. One has to develop and trust one’s instinct: what does it feel like to react in the way that I’m reacting? Does it feel calm, considered, and nuanced, or shallow and knee-jerk? Does it take the welfare of others into account, or is it all about me? Am I satisfied with, even proud of, my self-conquering effort, or does it make me feel small, angry, or anxious?

Self-deception doesn't ‘add up’ in the grand scheme of things and can easily be brought down by even superficial questioning. As with a jigsaw, try to look at the bigger picture of your life and see how the thought or reaction might fit in. Did you react from a position of strength or vulnerability? What would the person you most respect think? What would Socrates think? Talk to other people and gather their opinions. If they disagree with you, does that make you feel angry, upset, or defensive? The coherence of your reaction can speak volumes about the nature of your motives.

Finally, truth is constructive and adaptive, while lies are destructive and self-defeating. So we are left asking: How useful is a self-deceptive thought or reaction going to be for us? Are we just covering up an irrational fear, or helping to create a solid foundation for the future? Are we empowering ourselves to fulfill our highest potential, or depriving ourselves of opportunities for growth and creating further problems down the road? Is the cycle simply going to repeat itself, or will the truth, at last, make us free?

In retrospect, it takes a degree of honest soul-searching and fact-checking just to understand some things in a day and age where it is difficult to know what, or who, to believe.

Like Mark Anthony, some of us learn the hard way...Ain't that the truth!  

Because He Lives: I just had a feeling that someone in my viewing audience needs to hear this meaningful spiritual song at this time. Feel it, live it!

HOW'RE YOU DOING FRIENDS...?

...On getting out and making friends with people you have yet to meet!  (View video on full screen.)

A Stitch in Time – a timeless story of Remembrance

I meet David Gray quite regularly for coffee (he alternates two peanut butter cookies with a bran muffin) at Tim Hortons.  He also lives on the same street as I do. He often tells the story of his rather historic "quilt" and I share it on Wrights Lane, thanks to Sandy Lindsay of the Saugeen Times.

With the approach of Remembrance Day, David regaled members of Saugeen Shores Men’s Probus Club recently with the story of how the unique quilt with hundreds of hand-stitched names came into his possession. Here's the story.

In Galt (ON) when David was a young boy of 10, he belonged to what was then the ‘Karry on Kids Klub’ that consisted of 22 children ages four to ten who raised money for the wartime effort with a garden party in the mid 1940s. A quilt was made and people who wanted their name on it would pay 10 cents and a grand total of $86.00 was ultimately realized. David's sister worked on embroidering the names on the guilt.

David Gray making his presentation.

When the quilt was completed, it was given to the Red Cross to be taken to a Veterans’ hospital in London, England. The understanding was that if there were any soldiers there who came from the Cambridge area in Ontario, the quilt would be put on their bed so that they could see the names and perhaps of some they knew. Stories and photographs of the quilt were carried in the Galt Reporter newspaper.

After the war was over, the quilt came back to Toronto with the Red Cross and no one knows where it went after that nor the hands it passed through

One day however, a lady in Mississauga was looking for a bed for her dog and spotted the quilt at a garage sale, paid two dollars for it and took it home. When she later looked more closely, it was then that she discovered the names stitched on it. As David explains it, further research determined that there were four families connected to the quilt located in Cambridge, Mississauga, Waterdown and Guelph. The relative in Waterdown felt that that the quilt should go back to an original owner.

Through someone in Guelph, then Kitchener and then Galt, it began to make its way back ‘home’.

Eventually David's twin brother Donald, also an original member of the Kids Club, received a telephone call at his home in Galt (Cambridge) advising him that someone had a parcel for him...and when he received the package it contained the quilt created by the Karry on Kids Klub of Galt that his sister had worked so diligently on more than 50 years prior. Donald passed away in June and David became benefactor of the quilt.

"It was a quilt that brought people together long after the war ended but it was the children in the beginning who wanted to honour the soldiers and help them financially."

“One can only wonder where the quilt has been, how many beds did it cover, who did it help and, even after what must have been countless washings, how the names are still there and visible,” David adds.

*To check out previous "older posts" just click to the right below.  ⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⤍⬇⬇⬇🔻🔻🔻

LEST WE FORGET...

I'm leaving this Wrightwords video up until Remembrance Day, Sunday, November 11. Click on video ➤ to watch...Large screen view is recommended.