About me

My name is Gina Bearne.

After 18 years together, bride amid petals and joy!
After 18 years together, bride amid petals and joy! (2008)

Career – creating change and connections

For the major part of my career, I defined my life in terms of an ability to facilitate others, especially in relation to change, and create connections. I did this in the setting of community and statutory organisations in the UK, mostly with a focus on empowering people in contexts that have been coloured by pain and suffering.

Coming to Canada

We emigrated to Canada when I was 51 and, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself working as assistant to an Anglican Bishop in Toronto. Perhaps even more of a surprise was that I was able to bring to this much of the same spirit of helping to create community and being an agent for positive change. It offered me a wonderful overview of so many aspects of Canadian society and culture. I was privileged to meet some truly amazing and inspiring people.

Having passed my half century, I am increasingly inclined to believe that the world is changed most when we focus and build on what is best, rather than struggling with what we are getting wrong and what is most painful.

I have also reached a place where I can begin to allow myself to not do things.  Even as we embraced life as Canadians, I already knew that what I want to do with the rest of my life is simply to shift my focus from responding to pain to connecting myself and others with joy.

Return to rural life and the transition to early elderhood

In August 2016, we made a long intended move to rural living. I have been so blessed to ‘come home’ in the deepest sense to a place that is truly my sacred space.

Five years on, I feel I am emerging from a transition during which I have been trying to grasp the shifting shape of the person I am becoming in response both to aging and to a concussion in 2015 that has only really dissipated in the last couple of years and still affects me at times.

I am beginning to understand that ‘elderhood’ may require from me a shift of perspective.  I may no longer always have the stamina to ‘effect’ change, but I can still ‘affect’ what happens. We have built strong links within our community and I am humbled and gratified that it seems our ideas and suggestions are often useful to others. The ability to help grow and contribute to community remain central to who I am.

Alongside this, my deep childhood connection with nature and the natural cycles has surged back to the core of my existence, underpinning and illuminating every day, everything I am. My sense of community is rooted in the wondrous land on which it is my privilege to reside, as well as in the beings with whom I share it. 

I am also learning that in elderhood it may be that the focus of growth ceases to be forward or up, but instead in. Implicit in this is an acknowledgement that neither ‘productivity’ or ‘usefulness’ define me – they never did, but it has taken this long to begin to internalize this awareness.

There is a deepening understanding that it is not mine to fix anyone and a continuing commitment to the growth of authenticity. This is helping to reframe my ongoing desire to ‘make a difference’ in terms of being more than doing.

More than anything, though, I want to tap into the deeper wisdom, to the sense of spirit in and connection to all things, of the invisible world beyond all things; to do

what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.

(Mary Oliver, from Mindful)

And if I can find ways to share even a pinch of this with others, to enable one or two people to see with fresh eyes, to connect even a little more fully with joy and gratitude, then life will be rich indeed.

Poetry

I started writing poetry as a small child; it kept me sane during a time of great loss during my teens; intermittently, I have experienced moments of return; now I am trying once again to find my voice. I feel out of practice and clumsy, but we’ll see how it goes.

I wish you joy!

(Revised January 2022)

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