Archive for April, 2007
April 30th, 2007
I made a ’Grow Mercy’ business card using one of those perforated 8 1/2 by 11 business card sheets from Staples. There’s 10 cards to a sheet. I used one sheet.
I was going to a conference on publishing and not having gone to one before thought, well, you never know. A card can be a timely hook, a connection in-waiting. If nothing else, the card attempt would be one more exercise in overcoming a neurotic hesitancy at promoting myself.
Writing is one thing, putting myself out there as someone who has something to say and believing that other people should know what that is–that it would do them good to know–is another.
When I got there I forgot all about the cards. I was among other writers, all expectant and bumping into one another with stories happy and sad and incredible. I met Dianne, a middle-aged woman who on her own had spent three years traveling around the world on a motorcycle. She had a book to pitch.
At the end of the second day, at the "writer’s market place," I did give my card to three people. I gave one to Jannie Edwards, an Associate Dean at Grant MacEwan, and a published poet who later that evening performed one of her poems. Her reading cast a spell. I gave one to Sue Paulson, interested, kind and encouraging, and representing the Canadian Authors Association.
And I gave one to Wendy Morton. She took my card, read the heading, "Words for a non-violent world," and said, beautiful.
Wendy said "beautiful" to everyone. Because for her people are endlessly fascinating. Walking poems, all. And so her ubiquitous ’beautiful’ never rings hollow. Saturated by poetry, there’s heart enough for all.
She’s a pilgrim poet. Enjoyed so much she’s sponsored. (Check her biography) Poet of the sky and of the road. Like those ancient Russian mystics who walked across the country praying out loud, believing that their strange calling somehow shaped the world, but that even if it didn’t, the praying had to be done. For Wendy, the poetry has to be done. And so she travels. Flies, drives, walks. A radiating force for beauty.
I had no idea as I worked the cursor giving lines and colour to my small stamp of identity that I would be "poemed." To me, that’s the wonder.
Later she catches up to me and asks, "Are you Jewish?" I say, unaccountably, "No, just a wanna be." She laughs, "You could be, you look Jewish."
And I remember the quote by Elie Wiesel that I used on my "business" card. (Wiesel writes about Judaism, the Holocaust, and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide.) He said, "Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds."
And this of course is Wendy Morton’s secret magic. In committing random acts of poetry she displaces separation and creates moments of grace. From this ground sprouts a possibility, a deed. She may have no idea how much building she does.
For Wendy:
Her eyes are lit from within,
by an embroidered soul,
that’s been mended two or three times.
Her arms circle hearts,
while words hang from her wrists,
down the backs of walking poems.
A silver-grey garden child.
Her hands in loam feeling for new potatoes,
up to her elbows in earth.
A rooted pilgrim
penned by the Douglas fir and the Otter
and Jaun de Fuca waves.
Wearing a denim smock,
the kind a long-ago girlfriend used to wear
when we lived on a beach on Hornby Island.
Technorati Tags: Wendy Morton, Poet of the Skies, Canadian Authors Association, Sue Paulson, Jannie Edwards, Beauty, Random Acts of Poetry, Elie Wiesel
April 27th, 2007
While surveying the North Saskatchewan’s last iceberg I turn to find this seagull contemplating a journey.
One consideration: A question lingers in his gullish mind. The question of whether or not to live by the Rule of the Yellow Line. A question that only recently rose to the surface after he noted a major, well, slight, difference in the appearance of the rings around the bills of his companions. The question now arises as to rank, class and jurisdiction.
The Rule of the Yellow Line is inexorable. Once the differences are manufactured true inherent commonality is lost and conflict is not merely possible but inevitable.
A second consideration: This journey is a gull’s version of the Yellow Brick Road, leading to the magical Emerald City, which we all know is Seattle.
A third consideration: What do gulls need with lines, yellow or otherwise?
Observations of Seagulls and Humans at a highway campground June 15, 1997:
On the ground, graceless,
Chattering, nattering over scraps of insignificance,
Defecating beside tents, hypnotized by traffic,
Discordant, dissonant, dumbfounded and dazed
But in the still air,
Soaring, sailing, diving, rising,
a ballet of gliding grace,
a symphony of symmetry,
In silence, we too soar upwards,
the path always new, seeming to make it up as we go,
No need of a map up here, its charted in our hearts.
Technorati Tags: Seagulls, Beauty, Spirituality, Violence
April 26th, 2007
Last night was one of those times that made me proud to work for Edmonton’s Hope Mission. We held our Annual Spring Banquet, a fundraiser of sorts–the preparation for which has been shredding my days, exhibited by my lack of posting. Anyway, all the convention and propriety of your average Banquet was present. All the good-natured banter of a well run better-than-average banquet was also present. But what brought it all to life was the subsequent graduation ceremony.
A Hope Mission graduation is, as you might expect, of a different order. Of course there were the presentations, the certificates, the pins, and a kind of procession. However, the graduates themselves were a curious mix of ages and backgrounds–from desperate to privileged–and their achievements were of a different sort. There were six month grads, one year, and two year grads. The time they had been clean…clean of crack, crystal, alcohol, gambling…
Some of the guys ventured to talk about their recovery process. The phrase, "grace of God," was a sincere refrain. All attributed their success so far to a mixture of faith, earnest desire, a stable place, a structure, and most of all, connections with Chaplains, or councilors, or intake workers.
One moving moment was when one of our Chaplains read a letter he had received from a son of one of the one-year grads. The letter spoke of dark times, estranged times, but now, of hopeful times. The son praised his father for making it this far–for crawling "out of a hole so big." The father sat on the stage in buoyant silence. The letter ended, "I love you dad." The audience stood and applauded.
But for me the highlight was Andrew. Andrew, six-foot-four, 40 or 50–hard to tell, snappy black suit, head shaved clean as a whip, comfortable in his kit, comfortable behind a mike and with a perpetual smile. He talked about how he never really had a problem with booze, never got into it, ’cause it interfered with his drug habit. He talked about a long stretch of spending thousands a week, then, finally becoming the guy who hung around food courts looking for scraps. By then, as Andrew put it, he was a "picturesque 145 pounds." Slumping about the downtown malls, lurching about the streets, months away from a bath and even farther from clean clothes. He was the guy you avoided.
Mercy still operates. Andrew made it through our six-month "Break Out" addictions program. That was over four years ago. And for the past two years he’s been working at our men’s shelter as an intake worker. That, and running five or more AA or NA meetings a week. Grace flows in.
Technorati Tags: Hope Mission, Addiction Programs, Graduation, AA, NA, Grace, Homelessness, Spirituality
April 23rd, 2007
Monday morning’s should never be this bright. All baptized and beautiful. They’re too easy to betray with our Monday morning shoulders-up-to-our-ears attitude.
But here it is. A Monday dressed in bright yellow lace. A rare Spring sun melting more of the ice still caught in my joints. And air that wants to move right to the bottom of your lungs.
But all this was lost on Dan this morning. Dan has pan-handled the local Starbucks’ for more than a year. And so I have a breezy conversational friendship with him.
He’s young, twenties maybe. Shuns shelters, preferring to always sleep outside–whatever the weather–he tells me. I believe him. Dirt has worked far into all his creases. Hands, face, neck anything exposed.
Able-bodied, eyes showing intelligence, he’s one of those who should be, could be, you’d think, raised up. But there is something severely wrong with his heart. His heart is not able-bodied and his intelligence is not enabled. And beauty has skipped over him.
This morning when Dan saw me coming he smiled and said, "Dare I ask?" I told him sorry. He had caught me empty-pocketed today. I asked him how the day was, hoping to translate some of the soft early light. He said he’d seen better. I said, "But you’ve seen worse." He said, "No not really." The brightness of the day not merely lost but mocking. Not even a reference for better or worse.
I’m sad for Dan. I’ll keep talking to him. And pick up after him. And give him money and even offer some direction, as I’ve done. It’s the least I can do when I feel this much beauty on a Monday.
But maybe I was set up to see. Yesterday, while walking under a blanket of grey cloud, I found this message scribbled on a sidewalk:
And I believed it. I believed this message, for me and you.
Technorati Tags: Beauty, Spirituality
April 20th, 2007
It’s unnerving to have someone who lives on the surface sit at a table next to you in a place like Starbucks. These people engage others around them with the first thought that comes into their heads. They have boundary issues.
She was a middle aged lady, blue coat and matching blue backpack. She sat down at the next table and searched me with something just this side of a stare. It didn’t matter that I tried poker-facing a non-acknowledgment.
She asked, "So, is it a good morning?" "You off to work?" She had a strong voice that carried above Dianna Ross. I sputtered through my raised coffee, "Ah, yes, just a coffee before I go."
"The coffee is good," she said, inhaling a thin stream from her lidless paper cup.
Then, adjusting her black wool cap, leaving her pack at the table, she stepped outside, leaned against a window, lit a cigarette and took three drags. And just like that stepped back inside.
A man in a black business suit had settled into a chair. He was across the aisle. The lady said, "You look nice, all dressed up. What do you do for a living?" The man, struggling to recover, gazed past the lady and mumbled inaudibly.
Another man with a laptop walked by furtively scanning for power outlets. The lady noticed and enthusiastically offered her spot. He declined saying he could manage.
And so it went…her curiosity and enthusiasm breathing down our necks, her presence writ large, projected above our walls, her simple energy ravaging our layers forcing us to redraw our lines until she finished her coffee and left.
We all breathed a little easier and got to mending our fences.
She has boundary issues.
Technorati Tags: Starbucks Log, Boundary Issues, Beauty, Spirituality
April 18th, 2007
Strad
 |
I was alerted to this Washington Post article by a friend who takes time for beauty.
The article asks: Is beauty still beauty outside a frame? Is beauty still beauty if it’s not recognized? Can we recognize beauty out of context and beyond our pet categories?
Read, watch and listen
It’s a bit of a classical music as well as a philosophy refresher. But far more, it’s not merely another observation on our distracted spirits, it’s an experiment with a moral.
Be surprised, relieved and convicted.
Technorati Tags: Joshua Bell, Washington Post, Gene Weingarten, Pearls Before Breakfast, Beauty
April 17th, 2007
How do you grieve over Virginia Tech? It’s impossible to know. I only know about the lead weight that sat on my chest while I watched the confusion of details coming over the air waves last night. Know only the desire to shield those I love from seeing and feeling the same things. I watched for more than an hour. Enough.
For those of us outside the circle of parents, aunts and uncles, girlfriends and boyfriends, outside the circle of fellow students, outside the Virginia Tech community, it is proper to be struck dumb and to feel profound sadness.
It is also proper to struggle with making sense of the thing–as long as we end up short of doing so. And viewing the act as utterly senseless is a reasonable way of making sense of it. That’s as good as we can do, for now.
As one media personality put it, "There are evil people who do evil things. There’s nothing more to it than that." For now, this may be as good a response as any. Better than–as is already happening–the left blaming it on the National Rifle Association and the gun culture, and the right blaming it on the fostering of a libertine culture.
In time, there will be, must be, time enough to strive to give names to the thing. Because, while it may be true that there are evil people who do evil things, it’s not true there is nothing more to it than that.
But, for now, while we wrestle for reasons, before we offer answers, it is right for us to place our hearts, our prayers, our thoughts, upon the lives lost and upon the lives of their families and friends.
Technorati Tags: Virginia Tech, Massacre, Violence
April 15th, 2007
The Jesus Seminar is dead! The Jesus Project has come! Hail CSER! (Curiously, CSER, as I’ve discovered from the Jesus Dynasty blog, is being pronounced Ceasar.)
CSER, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, has launched what they hope will be a more definitive Jesus of history/Jesus of mythology study.
Here’s an extract of a letter by Dr R. Joseph Hoffmann, the current head of CSER, explaining the "why" of the Jesus Project.
It should be stressed that the Jesus Project, contrary to some advance media speculation, is not an attempt to disprove the historical Jesus. By he same token, its goal is not to create a historically plausible figure from the bits of evidence available, but rather to assess the nature and weight of the evidence itself. Attempts in the 19th and twentieth century to discredit all elements of the gospel record were pronounced a failure, though largely by a theologically driven method of inquiry. The JP will solicit the skills of New Testament scholars, historians, and social scientists in its deliberations. It acknowledges the bias and partiality of previous efforts to address this question, but regards the question as significant and deserving of greater attention than has been given it in previous decades. The proliferation of new theories of the non-historicity of Jesus, whatever their merits, and defenses of the historical Jesus whatever their weaknesses, make this an important area of investigation in the new millennium.
What’s fascinating to me about the inauguration of the (yet another) Jesus Project is that it is shows the impossibility of leaving the subject of Jesus and Jesus’ historicity alone. Buddha seems not to have had this problem.
From Lee Strobel’s, "Case for Christ," to Earl Doherty’s, "Jesus Puzzle," to G. A. Wells’, "The Jesus Legend," from inquiries mythical to corporeal, from early Gnosticism to postmodern Christendom, Jesus remains something to be externally discoursed and internally engaged.
Will keep you posted on the JP. Hail CSER!
Technorati Tags: Joseph Hoffman, CSER, Christianity, Religion
April 13th, 2007
A week of technical bugs and glitches has sapped me of the little creativity I possess. I’ve been bedeviled and it’s not over.
In this muted state / man, I just can’t celebrate / only objurgate…so here goes:
Today, in pockets across the continent, people will be honouring the memory of Thomas Jefferson by celebrating his birthday.
The gentleman of Independence was a hemisphere shaper and a gardener. He was, in the strict sense, a dialectician.
As you may recall, he even has his own version of the bible (The Jefferson Bible) which was, for over two hundred years, given to new members of congress.
His bible consists of the four Gospels–sans miracles–strung together into a single narrative. In essence, it’s the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth without any reference to angels, prophecy, genealogy, deity, or anything that smells supernatural.
It is the Testament stripped of it’s "artificial vestments," revealing the "pure principles" of Christianity.
Jefferson was sincere in his rewriting. He was after a kind of Christian system, an ultimate system to eclipse any and every Platonic or Kantian system. He says, "Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus."
But even with all his cutting and pasting, his private hyper "Jesus Seminar," he couldn’t stick with the extraction’s essence.
In a well-worn quote that serves every autocrat from time immemorial, that continues to serve every President and Prime Minister, regardless of democratic intensity, that is, that serves every Bushite, and Harperite valiantly holding onto the principle of (sacrificial) redemptive violence, Jefferson says, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
Now what would the essential Jesus, "Jesus Unplugged," say to this?
Technorati Tags: Jefferson Bible, Christianity, Violence, Peace
April 10th, 2007
Bits of grainy snow. Sky of graphite. Walked home from work dodging arcs of slush bursting from Bridgestones.
Here it is, the tail end of Tuesday and it’s already tempting to put the world off until the weekend. Wrap the day in old newspaper and lay it away ’till the sun comes out.
But, a smile penetrated the pogonip; falling on my snow-scowl.
You embarrassed me by your shameless geez-it’s-soupy-out-here-but-what-the-hell. Were you resurrected too?
You noticed how I needed that? Of course. But then you knew all along how we all need each other. The corners of your eyes said we meld, or we miss it all. That’s what I think. And why put up with any other kind of world?
Technorati Tags: Beauty, Christianity, Peace, Spirituality
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