December light

Winter solstice marked at kilometre zero

By Sharon Harrison

The shortest day of the year in terms of daylight hours, many see December 21 as a time of hope, a turning point on the calendar. While the days are dark and short and cold, and will re-main so for a little while yet, the solstice marks a point in time when the light changes. It’s a small, insignificant change at first, barely noticeable at all really, but it’s there and quietly happening, even if not immediately obvious. From this day forward, the days get longer, daylight length grows, the darkness portion gets shorter, and so it’s a time of celebration, a time of new light. It’s no coincidence the date of the winter solstice was chosen for the third chapter of Conrad Beaubien’s Walking with Thunder adventures. The location was no coincidence either.

The Millennium Trail is central to the project, where a different section is chosen for each monthly donkey walk. In the extreme northwest corner of Prince Ed-ward County, southwest of County Road 64 and Gardenville Road, just west of Carrying Place, kilometre zero marks the Millennium Trail at Fort Kente Road. It is at this intersect of the winter solstice, and Jupiter and Saturn almost touching, appearing closer than they have in some800 years, where the very rare great con-junction unfortunately was obscured by cloud on this day. Regardless, walking with Thunder the donkey unfolded over several kilometres through a mainly wooded stretch of the Millennium Trail on a grey, misty, overcast day. “Very importantly, this road is a pathway that has heard the footsteps of First Peoples, children, grandmothers, people crossing from one part over, those are the things that we want to remember when we put our feet on the ground that there have been many here before,” says Beaubien.

Presented by Toronto-based, nonprofit independent arts producer De- RAIL Platform for Art and Architecture, landscape architect Victoria Taylor looks at the many layers of the Millennium Trail, all 46 kilometres of it. She examines the purpose the trail once served as an old railway line and its present day reincarnation as an outdoor linear public space, accessible for all to enjoy, where she asks it be looked upon as more than just a movement corridor. “What we wanted to do as artists is inspire new audiences for public art and for being in a landscape and asking what else can happen here,” says Taylor. “I was thinking about today and the solstice, and also COVID and the year that we have all had and how important it is for us to be outside.”

Designed to animate a western section of the Millennium Trail, the site-specific, community-engaged walks are part of a new temporary public art program. The COVID-safe outdoor event saw about 50 people experience the meditative walk with Thunder on Monday afternoon.

Taylor says she has been thinking a lot about the design of the public space and what it is that can inspire or not inspire how local artists and communities can come together and activate these types of linear landscapes. “There are just so many possibilities and that’s what we want to do with DeRAIL and artists that we work with,” she explains. “The important part of this is that we just spend time together in this time we are living in and reinventing ways of being together safely.”

For artist and playwright Conrad Beaubien, walking with a donkey is a dream realized and one 10 years in the making as he embarks upon a project spanning eight months. Committing to one walk a month, the project which began in the fall, will continue through the months of winter and into the spring. “We chose to go at this time of the year because these are the most difficult times for many people: the darkness, the cold, the health conditions we are working under, so it became very important to do it as an all-weather event and to just allow things to happen,” explains Beaubien.

As donkeys clearly hold a fascination for Beaubien, and this donkey in particular, one he has bonded with and befriended, he talks about the mythology surrounding the noble beasts and the meaning of the symbolism. “Maybe things will reveal themselves to me and that’s what it is all about,” he says. He doesn’t want people to feel intimidated with the donkey, noting how Thunder is a very gentle soul. “One of the symbols of donkeys which I really like is humility in the service to others and that’s what he is all about,” he says. “He is the hero of all of this really, it is not about me and a donkey; it’s about the myth of animals and animal spirit and what can we do and what can we learn from this and what can we, especially through times like now when our whole society is shifting, how we can do things and get things done.“

The project isn’t just about enjoying a walk in nature in the company of a beautiful creature on the darkest and coldest days of the year. It’s about discovering a new environment perhaps not traversed before, where the mental health element of just being outdoors in the company other others (safely, of course) in a COVID world is important to Beaubien to help alleviate the isolation and associated depression. “Being with animals itself is comforting, we all know that,“ he says. The meditative solstice walk included lanterns carried by a few courtesy of Krista Dalby and the Department of Illumination, and the walk was interspersed with several brief musical interludes by musician Kat Burns (known as KASHKA), where further meditative moments were enjoyed through the power of her gentle voice among the silence of the rural trail.

A GoFundMe campaign has been launched as a way to help interested individuals embrace the energy Beaubien speaks to and to break the isolation, where small groups of people can get together and learn a new craft or art form as an example. “It’s about pooling some resources so that anybody here with an idea can bring five people out of isolation and work with them; it doesn’t have to be about learning as much as about not being alone and that’s what we are about.” The journey of Walking with Thunder, along with details of the GoFundMe campaign, is documented at walkingwiththunder.com.