Episode 1- North of Ordinary: The Rope, the Pine, and the Torch

Canadian Grit: North of Ordinary. Episode 1: The Rope, the Pine, and the Torch

Before there was Canada, there was wilderness—untamed, unknown, and unforgettable. In this premiere episode, host Jamie Jackson, PhD (ABD), weaves history, reflection, poetry, and personal truth into a deeply human journey. From childhood wallpaper dreams to the burnout halls of Ontario public schools, this is a story about grit, memory, and why holding the torch of humanity matters.

You'll hear about early explorers like Champlain, the music and literature that shaped a generation, and the invisible systems we’re all swimming in. More than a podcast about Canadian history—it’s a reflection on identity, resilience, educator well-being, and what it means to care in a world that often forgets to.

Featuring voices from Rush, Springsteen, The Tragically Hip, and Colonel John McCrae, this episode is for educators, misfits, seekers, and humans alike.

Keywords: Canadian history, Champlain, public education, teacher burnout, Ontario schools, resilience, Gabor Maté, Rush, Tragically Hip, trauma, identity, belonging, existentialism, Bruce Springsteen, Paulo Freire, podcast Canada

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Are we ready? Let's go. Well, hey there. Happy May long weekend and welcome to Canadian Grit, North of Ordinary. I'm Jamie Jackson and I'm your host. I'm so grateful and so glad you're here with me on this journey. It's been a long time coming, so thanks for being here with me. Today on Canadian Grit North of Ordinary, we're going to discuss the rope, the pine, and the torch. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Hi there, it's Jamie. Welcome to Canadian Grit North of Ordinary, episode one, the rope, the pine, and the torch. Happy May Long weekend. Happy Victoria Day. And I'm sure you're looking forward to this long weekend. Hopefully it's not going to rain like they're saying or be full of black flies, which is usually what happens when I'm up at home where I grew up in Bracebridge or Muskoka. I'm a secondary school teacher with over 12 years in Ontario's public education system. And I'm also ABD in my PhD program, all but dissertation. I'm almost there. I have my five chapters coming along and hope to defend and convocate this fall and defend hopefully in the summer sometime. And I'm currently studying educational sustainability. My work and original research focuses on educator well-being with a specific focus on sustainable coping strategies and holistic public education reform in Canada. Over the years, I've taught history, civics, law, geography, world issues, French immersion, you name it. I've also had the privilege of teaching Canadian students abroad on five continents. So this podcast, like I said, it's been a long time coming. It's for every student I've ever taught. Every educator I've ever worked alongside. And it's for every Canadian like you who's tuned in and who knows that there's more to this country than what meets the eye. Here, we're going to dig in deep. We're going to dig into our histories, our shared struggles, our overlooked truths, our human potential. We're going to talk to public educators. We're going to talk to community leaders, artists, everyday Canadians, entrepreneurs, business owners, anybody who wants to contact us about somebody they know or even themselves who carry stories of grit, resilience, and vision. The show is rooted in the belief that by understanding where we came from through history, reflection, and human connection, we'll be able to shape a future worthy of our children and their children. So thank you for being here. Let's get into it. I'd first like to start with the following dedication for my maternal grandfather, Donald Hutton. For Grandpa, who taught me to love history and to never stop being curious. Who showed me ocean swells in the smoke-stained wallpaper in my uncle's childhood room. My face painted in wonder, admiring wind-taught sails of old ships. The first historian I ever knew. Your memory walks with me on every page and everything I say. This podcast and this work is also for my wife, Kate, my partner of 17 years. You're the most genuine one caring I have ever known. In August 2025, you will become the very ideal of motherhood as we welcome our first child, a baby boy. Boy, are we excited. What a blessing. This work, this legacy, and this love, they're all made more meaningful by you. This is for our future son, a couple months away, whose life I already cherish. May this work help build a world worthy of your spirit, a world of care, peace, and truth. For my parents, my brothers, family, friends, thanks for giving me roots, a nest, and wings. You're woven into every part of this work. For every public educator who has ever stood in front of a class, carrying this silent storm inside, well, this podcast is for you. The following is something I wrote and is a reflection of a lot of the work that has gone into creating and producing what you are now finally hearing. For the smoke-filled margins of iterative reflection where thoughts drifted, rose, and flashed like embers in the pitch black before my very eyes, where perceived loneliness met universal human meaning, from whose abyss the eyes and I emerged and saw. And now we continue to see it together. Yet therein, in that abyss, do I paradoxically continue to humbly and contentedly sit. Not so much alone this time, though, but also held and seen, cared for and sustained. Under the iridescence of the darkness's watchful, glowing eyes did I manage to grab, gasping. Hold of the blazing buoy, such salvation from the pitching and swelling, such thunderous violent darkness there. There, on a jagged, rocky precipice, where I had but one hand free, the eyes, the eyes they threw to me, an ancient rope. Around a young but mighty pine tree was my fist clenched, my steadfast anchor on that soilless, barren ledge. Who placed this young pine here? Gnarled roots clutched to exposed granite with the strength of wrought iron, the tenacity of life. With one free hand, I grasped the rope they sent, tied it to my waist and the pine, my best bowline. In the last moment, lost balance, sleep of faith, I proffered everything. To the expanse and the abyss, I threw myself out, reaching, grasping. For anything, really. Maybe anyone. I lost hope the rope would find any purchase. Yet it did. In their spirits. I heard the voices of the eyes through the page. There they were. Bearing witness to my nearly extinguished passion. Their glowing eyes slowed me. Sustained me. Cradled and breathed new life into waning embers of my soul's previous licking inferno. Epilogue Part 2 Restless Dreams of Youth Lyrics, Longing, and the Fight to Remember Ourselves Before PhD theories and citations, I had lyrics. Not just background noise or teenage soundtracks, but my own divine cultural scripture. Truths we were not allowed to say out loud in schools or staff meetings. Truths that I hid inside chords and choruses that often haunted my drive home. I grew up in the in-between. Between the bright lights and the far-unlit unknown. Between the shopping malls and the classroom walls. Between the dreamer I was and the system that kept whispering, conform or be cast out. Russia's 1982 subdivisions isn't just about the suburbs. It's about systems. Education, economy, emotions, humanity. These systems package people for production where, quote, growing up, it all seems so one-sided, opinions all provided. The future, pre-decided, detached and subdivided in the mass production zone. Neil Peart's ominous and true lyrics speak to the point that what begins as safety can in the end become suffocation. quote, nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone. This mass production zone is what too many of Ontario's public school hallways and classrooms have become. It fuels the burnout in public education staff and workrooms. It exists as dissociation among our communities, students, children, educators, and it's never seen on report cards or reported in our newspapers. Canada's The Tragically Hip offers insights into such parallel disillusionment, where consumerism and busywork have become disguised as purpose. Education, too, has become a storefront. Units, outcomes, rubrics, data, walls. Even dreams get labeled, priced, and shelved, all boxed up and ready to ship in the world container. A psalm for the psychologically frayed. There's a world container with your name on it, and a billion ways to go berserk. When the country quits on you, it must be dinner. And the Himmler on this one is, there's no dessert. Go suck some souls, be a reader, get used. Laugh at a funeral or two. Laugh till all the chameleons turn black. Laugh and laugh till you're told, please don't come back. Those are lyrics from one of my favorite Tragically Hip songs. Songs, which is also the namesake of the album World Container. And I use this because in present day Canada, I would suggest that many of us know the weight and burden of this world container, both on ourselves and on the future hopes and aspirations of people and children in our care. So many professions and public services are working with resources that continue to shrink year by year, budget by budget, hope by hope. It's really like we're being told to laugh at funerals. to endlessly shift shapes, to suck souls, get used. And so, to protect ourselves, we quite naturally shroud our true identity. We become afraid of judgment, of not being perfect. We may often hide our genuine feelings, faking incredulity. We keep our tone light instead of digging into meaningful topics and deeper human relationships. Going back to the hip, we ask, as if it's a joke, how to get so late so early. Time flies, my friends. Bruce Springsteen's 1975 Born to Run, a smash hit, confronts the disillusionment of modern life in the West. He delivers it like a fire sermon, singing directly and intimately to the fraud, perhaps, that is the American dream. Or life in the West. In the day we sweated out on the streets of a runaway American dream, at night we writhed through the mansions of glory in suicide machines. Sprung from cages on Highway 9, chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected, and steppin' out over the line, Oh baby, this town rips the bones from your back. It's a death trap. It's a suicide rap. We gotta get out while we're young, cause tramps like us, well, baby, we were born to run. But this podcast is not about leaving, nor running away. It's about staying and reclaiming the road beneath us, because it got so late so early, and we do not have the collective energy to keep running. Running wouldn't help anyway. As Bruce said, you know, the boss. The highway, it's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive. Everybody's out on the run tonight, but there's no place left to hide. This podcast is not about running and hiding. It's about remembering the purpose that brought us here together as Canadians and people who care and who wish to discover more about our own shared inner landscapes and to help our communities grow together. I remember staring at the wallpaper in my grandfather's spare bedroom. It was patterned with tall ships, three-masted and full-sailed, drifting across a vast blue nothing. I used to imagine myself aboard them, drifting across time carried by stories older than memory. My grandfather was not formally a teacher, but he taught me history like it mattered. He taught me to wonder, to question. to feel. His wallpaper became a first classroom. Years later, after he had passed and I had left the Royal Military College, I had found myself standing outside the childhood home of Colonel John McRae in Guelph, where I went after I left the Royal Military College to finish my undergrad. I just stood at the white picket fence of this small house, thinking about war, poetry, and what it means to serve something bigger than yourself. In those moments of quiet reflection there, I made myself a promise. I would pick up the torch, not through battle, but through the pen and my voice. I would carry the vision of John McRae forward, not just for some Canadians, but for all. I would honour not just his sacrifice, but his hope that Canada might be a place of peace, dignity, and shared humanity. That torch now lives in this work. It's alive in Canadian grit, which is an homage to all of the people who have served our country and served to make our community a better place, including public workers who are often silenced by the systems they serve. Toward the human dream. The best laid schemes of mice and men. Gong aft gagli. It's from Robert Burns to a mouse 1785. If you're in trouble or hurt or need, That's from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, 1939. Steinbeck's title of Mice and Men, drawn from Byrne's mournful poem, captured the fragility of dreams in a world shaped by cruelty, inequality, and silence. Writing in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s, John Steinbeck bore witness to the lives of those uprooted systems designed not to nurture, but to extract. The Grapes of Wrath, published two years later, sharpened that lens, showing how the poor, the kind, and the brave are often punished for their humanity. This podcast lives in that lineage, and I choose these books because they are some of the first that I read in high school that really impacted me as a reader and to begin understanding a lot of these deeper messages. And so Canadian Grit, North of Ordinary, is a record of past and present Canada, even though I know John Steinbeck is an American. However, this record of the past and present Canada is a record of accomplished and fractured dreams of everyday people who were called upon to be courageous or to show care or to work Thank you. What rekindles minds, spirits, and emotions when trusted public systems or other citizens do not? What stories are currently missing from policy tables? What can we do about it? And finally, how do we build futures rooted in relational trust, dignity, and care? Citizens, people like us, well, we're not bureaucrats. We are bridge builders, dreamers, and frontline responders that keep a system at risk in motion. In times of pressure and fracture, it is the artists, educators, and the most caring people who hold the line between memory and momentum. Canadian Grit is not meant to judge or explain away anything. I am not only here to critique but to make offerings, a vision of a more relational, resilient, and human form of education and living. A poem for the fragmented heart of teaching. They gave me a voice, then they punished the echo. I spoke their straining back to them, then they called it Insubordination. They said I cared too much. They said I said too much. But I was only speaking what the silence would not hold. It's a dull blade. Not death, but a slow forgetting. Of the teacher and educator I used to be. Of the man that I still am. And of the children that I tried to protect. This is not simply a history project or a podcast project. It's a reckoning. It's a passion. It's my life. It's a record of resistance. It is a hymn for misfits. It's a torch passed on. So I begin not with a theory or a statistic, but with a poem. Another poem. Because before there was analysis in my life, there was feeling. Just like all of us, we innately feel before we analyze. We need to trust those who take care of us when we're infants. Before I became a researcher, I was just a boy from Bracebridge in Muskoka staring at ships on a wall, searching for meaning in the paper seas and margins of my grandpa's wall. In Flanders Fields. In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow between the crosses row on row that mark our place. And in the sky, the larks, still bravely singing, Fly, scarce hurt amid the guns below. We're the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved, and we're loved. And now we lie in Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe. To you, from failing hands, we throw the torch. Be yours forever. Hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep. Though poppies grow in Flanders fields. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, 1915. Courage, my friends. Tis not too late to build a better world. Don't let them make you think you're alone. You're not. They may try to isolate you, divide you, silence you. But we've come too far. Together, and we have too much to fight for. So walk together, speak together, dream together. Tommy Douglas Whether we're unpacking a moment in history, exploring a modern challenge, every episode of Canadian Grit will be about finding meaning, courage, and connection in an increasingly disconnected world. Like David Foster Wallace's Parable of the Fish, who don't know they're in water, we often don't see the systems we've been swimming in our whole lives. This podcast aims to lift us above the surface for a clearer view. My hope is that these stories, the interviews, and reflections in this show will help you to reconnect with yourself, your family, and your own roots. I hope that I can help you reimagine the kind of world that we could build together. The themes I'll explore, resilience, identity, history, wellness, education, sustainability. While they're more than academic, they're personal. For all of us, they're human, and they're essential to our future as Canadians. We'll tackle tough questions and embrace hard truths. We'll always remain grounded in good faith and a shared desire to learn and grow. We'll revisit Canadian history, not just to remember, but to reclaim and to draw strength from the people who came before us. At Canadian Grit, you'll hear about leading thinkers of our modern times, like Drs. Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, Nell Noddings, Paolo Freire, Peter Levine, and Candice Pert, whose ideas have helped shape my own understanding of trauma, education, and healing. You'll also meet everyday Canadians who are forging new paths, boldly, quietly, and full of heart, adding to their communities, surmounting challenges, giving back. We're not waiting for superheroes. We are the ones we've been waiting for. So let's get moving, together. I'm incredibly pumped to be exploring with you, and we're starting right now. I truly cannot express what it means that you're here listening. By the end of each episode, I hope you'll walk away with more insight and belief in yourself, in our world, our communities, and in the kind of Canada we can build when we walk forward together. Before we dive into the rich tapestry of Canadian history in episode two, I want to leave you with a question, or rather a few questions that I hope stir something in you. Who were you before you came into this world? Before you were ever an idea? What do you remember? Maybe nothing. But does that mean you didn't exist? Could you prove Wi-Fi exists without a device? Could you prove that satellites exist? What is life? What do we believe? Why? What exists beyond what we can prove? A lot of it is tied up in our own memories and our own experiences, and that's what shapes our world. The David Foster Wallace fish metaphor and parable that I mentioned earlier. Sometimes just because something's unseen doesn't mean it's not everything. With these often unsettling but incredibly human questions in mind, I'd like to close with a favorite parable from Your Sacred Self by Dr. Wayne Dyer. The parable is called A Conversation in the Womb, a parable of life after delivery. In a mother's womb were two babies. One asked the other, Do you believe in life after delivery? The other, he replied, Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we're here to prepare ourselves for what'll be later. Nonsense, said the first. There's no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be? The second said, Well, I don't know. But there'll be more life in here, maybe. Maybe we'll walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we just can't understand right now. The first replied, well, that is absurd. Walking? It's impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous. The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is logically to be excluded. The second replied, Well, I think there's something, and maybe it's different than it is here. Maybe we won't need this physical cord anymore. The first replied, mother? You actually believe in mother? That's laughable. If mother exists, then where is she now? The second said, she's all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of her. It is in her that we live. Without her, this world would not and could not exist. Said the first, well, I don't see her. So it's only logical that she doesn't exist. To which the second replied, sometimes when you're in silence and You focus and you really listen. You can perceive her presence, and you can hear her loving voice calling down from above. So, who are you? What's your story of grit? What does it mean to be Canadian, to care, to remember, and to act? If today's episode moved you, inspired you, or just made you think, I'd love it if you could rate the show, share it with a friend, or follow me on Instagram and Facebook at Canadian Grit Media. My website is under construction, but will be open soon with book reviews, blogs, and a place for us to connect more. I thank you sincerely for your time, for your kindness, and your heart. We've only just begun. Join me for episode two, where we will continue this conversation about life, legacy, and what it means to belong in this country. I'll be diving into parables of birth and becoming, and we'll relate back to this parable and stories of names and identity, and why the act of remembering might just be the most radical thing we can do. Until then, stay grounded, stay curious, and never stop reaching out for something better. I'm Jamie and this is Canadian Grit and we are North of Ordinary. See you next time.