Archive for December, 2007
December 31st, 2007
We turn towards the hope of a new year and no matter how disheartened we are from past experiences we hope again. We adjust the sails to try and catch a new breeze or to try and get a better angle on a familiar wind.
We are all acquainted with the doldrums, that belt of stagnant air between the hemispheric trade winds. We also remember meeting confusion and anger when caught in cyclones. What we desire and what is right to desire is that zephyr-like wind that both refreshes and moves us deep into our givenness.
That said, here’s some Grow Mercy sail adjustments for 2008: Just a preliminary qualifier–You’ll recognize that I have yet to deliver myself from a certain romanticism, nevertheless, don’t dismiss the notion that we are free only when doing what the deepest self likes, even though, as D.H. Lawrence has said somewhere, “Knowing what the deepest self likes, ah, that takes some diving.”
So, to the the diving and to the jibing: Go deep. Do the work. Let go of the rest. Look to your faith, look to your passion, and to your strength. If there is such a thing as a gift, try to use it up, even though, if it’s a true gift, it will never be exhausted. Don’t hold anything back. Let it take you, let your gift lead you. It knows the way.
After all, we are after the freedom that brings happiness. Not to desire happiness out of a bend belief that it’s a fickle and inferior human state is morbid. In any case, secretly at least, we all desire happiness as part of everything we do.
And happiness is what I desire for my children and their children. Happiness, never as task master, but ever always as companion. Like having the best kind of flower-child for a friend.
Happy New Year!
December 29th, 2007
Anything I’ve ever said about experiencing the truth through narrative, or returning to story so as to glory in the ordinary, or the search for a second naiveté, or the quest for wonder and beauty, can be placed in a small footnote under Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry:
Advent
We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.
And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.
O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we’ll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason’s payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.
December 26th, 2007
A really good book isn’t comfortable. It’s probing, convicting and full of challenge without being prescriptive.
Perhaps fiction still carries this off the best precisely because it can never be prescriptive. I also find more and more that good poetry, both dark and love-soaked, from Sexton to Rumi is also revelatory and freeing. But there have always been non-fiction titles, essays, memoirs, that make the connection and move me.
Without sounding like this is the right answer to a Sunday School question, the Gospels are this for me as well. But this wasn’t always the case. Quite likely because, for me at least, Sunday School and later Church, took the story and made it a code, then took the code and made it an absolute and in turn destroyed the story not realizing that the story is the only thing capable of carrying the truth.
I now see the gospels as creative non-fiction. That is, behind each book is a single active imagination grappling with a piece of reality, trying to make sense of a jumble of events. But this imagination is embodied and is writing from within an historical and cultural frame, just as I read embodied and shaped within my own history and culture. The magic is that there can be a connection. The wonder is that there can be a ring of truth at depth. But this is the beauty of great creative non-fiction.
It happened for me again the other day. Reading the gospels in this way reached an area in my life that needs so much surgery that I fear I may die in the O.R. before being able to look back to say, yes, Steve, there, right there in that place where you spent so much time comparing yourself to others, working out ways where you might be seen as set apart from the hoy-poly, right there is where you now spend a little less time, time that you now spend listening and engaging in a bigger world around you.
When this happens I again become aware that the story that has reached me is much grander than I had ever dreamt. Because it’s a story not based on the exclusion of something or the expulsion of someone better or worse–as if I could actually judge that–but based on a love story. It’s a story of a mother and her baby. A story of a gathering community around a person who becomes a victim and who returns only to forgive. And of course there is nothing special about this community. It is not over-above or underneath anything.
December 20th, 2007
It’s early and dark. In the south-east there is a place were the sun will come up, should it choose. Indications are good. So I wait for the first signs of brightening behind the city-scape.
Winter waits too. The soil of summer-fallow waits, bulbs wait, bamboo is excellent at waiting, geese wait until the time is right. Beavers don’t abide waiting, but orb weavers don’t seem to mind. They spin and wait as long as it takes. The earth spins too, waiting for its equinox.
But light bulbs, street lights, clocks, little chips in computers, never wait and will never care to wait. And we use them and anything else we can think of to train the waiting out of our lives.
The world of industry is bringing waiting to an end. Commerce keeps company with the future. Companies race each other to see how far they can project themselves into the future, or how much of it they can drag into the present. A destruction of both.
There is madness here that we’ve normalized. We forget that this life, our second womb, has something to do with waiting. Waiting, not like Estragon and Vladimir, but waiting without excessive effort in acceptance of a serial now.
Advent is the season of specific expectation. A time for rekindled waiting. A rendezvous with a midwife.
In Advent, we wait in a commemorative way, for the birth of Jesus. But as people of the paschal mystery we are always anticipating some kind of birth and some kind of resurrection, in the knowledge that there was a birth and that the son has risen. We wait as one waits for dawn.
I can’t see it yet but soon the east will grow lavender. Behind the berm of buildings across the North Saskatchewan river, the trees high on the bank will become skeletal as behind them the light strengthens.
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Advent,
Waiting
December 18th, 2007
There is little beauty on the streets in late December after the snow has been salted and sanded and ground to slush and powder by tires and lies in ridges and heaps like apocalyptic wreckage and pools in potholes and depressions like acid. Beauty is not here. At least I do not see it. It must be found under and above all of this.
In the winter, in the city, beauty must be found in the faces of sidewalk passengers and in the microbial life beneath the frozen sod. And it must be caught that beauty and therefore hope is in the valency of all organisms above and below any cold grey median. Beauty and hope rest in our capacity for uniting.
Life is in bonding. Sometimes, it is only the slush that divides us. It is to us, to clear it away. Clear it away through word and song and art and touch and prayer, even as we wait for the earth to again turn it’s face to the warm light.
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Advent,
Pagan Advent
December 17th, 2007
Bob MacLaughlin died Dec 9, 2007. His funeral was held this past Friday in Clyde, Alberta. The hall was full.
Instead of flowers, people brought musical instruments and laid them beside the urn containing Bob’s ashes.
Here’s the eulogy I gave Bob.
Always remembered, always cherished
Sable Ridge Reunion…
December 16th, 2007
I watch evening’s documentary on Rumi and find my morning in his poetry.
Be silent, like a fish,
and go into that pleasant sea.
You are in deep waters now,
of life’s blazing fire.
Why do you worry?
And at morning coffee I find myself in a Psalm watching for love.
Singers and dancers alike say,
“All my springs are in you.”
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Rumi,
Psalms,
Springs
December 15th, 2007
Today was sucked into another day. You could think it a new day if you allowed yourself to be fooled. You could believe its lie, let it tell you its gauzy seductions, like, “I promise I’ll change, I’m not the day you think I am, I’ll show you something shiny and bright.”
But I’ve seen days like this come and go. And there all the same, They promise you something in the morning then leave you and run off with someone else an hour before last call. They’re hussy days. Easy to spot the cheap cracked makeup and frayed cuffs. Well I’m not buying, and I’ll set no expectations.
What I want is a real day. A brand new day, and something far more substantial than the one Sting sang about. With Sting it always comes down a blush of adolescent crush/love. “You’re the tunnel, I’m the train.” Please! If it wasn’t for Stevie Wonder’s harmonica I’d…
No until some dawn sneaks up on me and surprises the venetian blinds off my house, I’m saying screw it. I’m not going to try make something of my day…like I ever could. I’ll let the day jerk me around and I won’t feel it cause I’ll make myself limp. That much I can control.
… … …Okay, maybe there’s a problem here. Maybe it’s kinda like this:
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Another Day
December 12th, 2007
This morning it was comforting to hear the shopping cart stopping beneath our window, then the muffled rummaging made by its driver, then the loose rattling as it was pushed further up the alley. There was sanity in the simple sounds of a collection of cans and bottles jostling about inside plastic bags stacked in a wire cart.
I’m aware that these sounds represent failure and tragedy as well. But this morning, at 4:30 AM, in the wake of shifting sleep, and in that vulnerable off-kilter bubble of time before the morning routine has had a chance to orient, in that vertiginous place where cares turn into dark derisive caricatures, it was the shopping cart plowing through shallow snow that moved through all my tangled inner lines and brought some straightening to my mind.
Fitful sleep brings sketchy dreams. But last night, if I did have a dream, I forgot it. Probably a good thing.
But I do wait for the good dream. One reason I think is because dreams are the closest experiences we have to transcendent glimpses. They give us, occasionally, I think, a sight line to the other side of death. And, or, equally important, they give us comfort, some hope, they give our souls a safeguard.
Months, perhaps a year, after my father’s death, I dreamt him. He was wearing a magnificent blue suit in which he was completely relaxed. He sat at the head of our old dark oak dinner table in the middle of our store that he had converted to living space. When he moved in his chair there was light just at the places his suit folded and creased. His kids were sitting around the table. All of us leaning into some story. Then he was laughing, and we were all laughing. And that was the dream. And it was all that was needed.
December 10th, 2007
Surely everyone stands as a mere breath.
Surely everyone goes about like a shadow.
Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
And now, O Lord, what do I wait for?
My hope is in you. (Psalm 39)
Robert Bruce MacLaughlin died yesterday. Rose called from the hospital room, the family and most of the band was there. I pictured the room. They would all be holding on to each other.
The day before yesterday Debbie and I had visited. That day the mark of death was upon Bob in a way it hadn’t been before. His grey body, like an empty carapace, was not the body of Bob.
And there were no more words from this man who had always carried the conversation. There was only groaning with what I thought was the deep intent of an articulation that never came. There was uneven breathing, sudden movements of eyebrows and eyelids and uncomprehending eyes.
And there was hand squeezing. This much there was. There was hand squeezing. It was his hands that looked the same, looked like Bob’s hands. Perhaps because so much of his life was in his hands, death seemingly could not take his hands.
We sat through the afternoon and watched a water-colour sun set in pastel outside the hospital room.
This room was a home for the past two and half months. A room where the windowsill filled quickly with vases and a rotation of flowers, where walls were eventually covered with pictures from family, cards from friends, home made posters from school children, drawings, placards, billboard notices, and more pictures. And there was music, in the end, classical.
This was home for more than just Bob. Home for his lady, his family, his close friends, some who faithfully came and sat at this side every day. Home for all kinds of grieving love and longing.
And now this man, who accepted much, readily accepted others, who picked up a friendship after years of gap without missing a beat, as if time evaporated, is now evermore accepted.
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That said, here’s some Grow Mercy sail adjustments for 2008: Just a preliminary qualifier–You’ll recognize that I have yet to deliver myself from a certain romanticism, nevertheless, don’t dismiss the notion that we are free only when doing what the deepest self likes, even though, as D.H. Lawrence has said somewhere, “Knowing what the deepest self likes, ah, that takes some diving.”
Front Porch Pictures
