Archive for January, 2008
January 31st, 2008
I’m in LA, away from the cold. Away from the bone cracking temperatures that disallow airplanes to take off because it’s too frigid for the de-icing machine to take the frost off the wings. The magic degree for that to happen is minus 37. That temp was fortunately reached; but only after the sun rose and began its climb to the late January zenith. A few hours later the natives were telling me, "It’s cold here in LA.
From climate to culture, relativities abound. And what I mean when I use the word relative is not that everything is reducible to essentially the same thing, but that my everyday experience of life is relative to my cultural and geographical context. So while the measurement of temperature is not a relative concept, what is, is our experiences of what is hot and cold. But of course, herein–my relative experience–lies the seeds of another’s incomprehension. An incomprehension that can only be overcome through a shared experience.
I was confronted with my own incomprehension at the Russ Reid conference I’m attending. And it exposed within me a nervous protectionism regarding my job and Hope Mission that I won’t go into, but only say that I needed to recall the Californian who thought he was experiencing cold; because, of course he was. In this small act of recalling, I was, I realized, beginning to enact a shared experience.
How is it possible to have a shared experience of faith, of culture, of tradition? (These are the biggies.) Or how is it possible to have a shared experience of poverty, abuse, ill-health, emotional manipulation, addiction, mental breakdown, and on and on? Frankly, how is it possible to feel the viewpoint of the one in front of you?
Isn’t this why we’ve been given an imagination? Because we can’t live inside the hearts and minds, or even the shoes, of our acquaintances, neighbours, or co-workers, or even our friends and relatives. But we can imagine what it might be like, if we care to take the time to ask…and listen. Perhaps a good measure of our fear, our protectionism, our combativeness, is both birthed and nursed by lazy imaginations.
And so, my recipe…of sorts. Take a poultice of creative imagination, mixed with the essence of empathy–about a cup–and apply it to the welt of incomprehension. (A caveat, cooking, baking, whatever, has everything to do with timing and context.)
This acknowledged, know this: if the incomprehension exists both ways–which is often the case–the use of this poultice, should you be the one to make the overture, will make you vulnerable. This is however, the vulnerability practiced by Jesus and the long line of peace-making saints.
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Russ Reid,
Relativity
January 22nd, 2008
Van Morrison is in my head singing…."gotta make it through January, gotta make it through February," and I pine for summer and the stirring of a warm western breeze.
I was happy to see Brian this morning. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He said he spent a bit of time in jail…something to do with refusing to stay out of the subway and off the LRT. He likes riding the LRT. But he is back panhandling at Starbucks and things seem right again. (But how could they be for Brian?) He was glad of today’s slight moderation in temperature, and added that he was happy he lived here in Canada, away from the "crazy weather." I agreed. Then he said, "But February is coming and that’s always the coldest."
I recall a very cold mid-winter day years ago, so cold that my truck refused to completely warm up. A mile out of the city stood a woman, her hand weakly raised in a hitch-hikers signal. I slowed and stopped beside her. She seemed warm enough in a giant overcoat and scarf and Kodiak boots. She opened the door, laboriously it seemed, and she didn’t bother to look at me. She had high prominent cheek bones, a round face and deep watery eyes. She shut the door behind her we started off toward the city.
She said, "I had a dream about you." I caught my breath. "I know you, your name is Bruno," she added. I smelled the sour odour of disinfectant. I noticed she had no gloves on and in one hand she gripped a wad of tissue which she would hold up to her nose and mouth every few moments. She had soaked the tissue with Lysol. I remember hearing that Lysol when inhaled can make you feel warm. She never felt her hands freezing.
I stopped across from a Chinese café. This is where she was determined to get out. I wondered if I should just drive her to an intox centre, the Spady perhaps. Instead I gave her money for a meal and then gave her orders to throw away the Lysol and make sure to get something to eat. She offered a sexual favour for the money. I said no and tried to hurry her out of the truck. I felt shame, shame for me, shame for her. I said a quick prayer for her and drove off. She could have been any age between 20 and 50. I felt nauseous and helpless. I didn’t ask her her name, something I almost always do. It was the cold, I reasoned.
January 18th, 2008
This morning I was in conversation with my muse. Well she’s not really a muse, but I don’t know how else to describe her. Still, I want to name her after Erato, the muse of lyric and love poetry, but she’s far too impulsive and precisely imprecise. But then, maybe I’ve just described love poetry. In any case I hadn’t seen her for such a long time so I asked her what happened and where she’d been. She said,
Oh, it’s going to be a long walk back, but the walk must be taken, and frankly, I could use the air. You see, somewhere, last year, I don’t remember, fall perhaps, I lost my bearings. There at the foggy conjunction of worry I lost my power to observe. I was assailed and even seduced by anxiety and drawn shallowly inward, taking nothing with me except a tin shield. A kind of day to day shell-shocked existence took root.
Well, I had forgotten that every perfect outward gaze is also a look deep inside. I lost the connection. And with it I lost the courage, the force, the energy to gaze. Lost the taste for it, and so the ability to blend and produce new flavours, new shapes and colours. So now I’m going to trace my steps backward–which how ever you cut it, is forward movement–and walk as long as it takes to find that murky crossroad. If all goes well, I’ll then emerge from the mist on a new path.
With this, her coffee only half finished, she left the table and walked out the door. But not before hooking up with the tall thin man. I had barely noticed him sitting silently in a corner. He gathered himself, a bit stiffly I thought, got up and took the offered hand of the nameless muse who is not. He straightened visibly and as they left they shared a laugh.
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Muse,
Erato
January 17th, 2008
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky. (Psalm 85)
Moishe the Beadle said to a young Elie Wiesel that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer. (Night, Elie Wiesel)
If this is right, then, as the Beadle knew, it is our questions that draw us close to God, not our answers. And not even God’s answers. Because God’s answers–when they are not merely our own answers thrown up against the sky–dwell in mystery and misapprehension at the depths of our hearts until at some tear in time, or at the end of our life, or in the next, they bloom, and seem to have always been understood. On that soil questions and answers are indivisible.
But if this is true about questions, well, then our search must not be for the grand answer(s) but for the right questions. Because questions make a path to the garden of mystical truth where love and faithfulness spring up from the ground and where righteousness and peace kiss.
Now, this is of course a mystical move but how else can I "understand" things I can’t understand? How else can one endure the brutish side of humans and still have faith? For Wiesel, who witnessed and suffered the unspeakable, God was killed in Birkenau, and Auschwitz. And even though I believe what the young Wiesel held true, how can I argue with his giving it up? And while I believe that the life of Christ holds the key to the questions of suffering and violence, in the presence of Wiesel I could not speak a word, but only listen and grieve.
January 12th, 2008
I feel the pressure of accepting coffee cake because the barista is enthused about it. And so it begins.
I want a day without pressure. I want a day that is kept at bay. But how? How do you keep the blur of it from flooding your early morning and washing away a delicate form in the snow, the alive sharpness of frost in air, the dark trail of wood grain in an empty chair, or the familiar smell of espresso? How do you release yourself and become intimate with a moment?
The right song can wrap you in its arms and stop time. Also, a black and white photograph of an empty street, perhaps in Mexico, save for a bicycle, sews up a second. Too, the red sweatered back of a reader and her book and coffee, and above her the play of neon light on a window across the avenue. And now the mocha voice of Ray Charles in Georgia, slows the blur. A second of swagger here would break the rhythm but there is none from Ray, not on Georgia.
But then, I suppose, it’s not time stopped in its tracks that we crave. It is rhythm. Because rhythm is the willing handmaiden of awareness. And noticing is living.
It is possible that the big reason we have been dropped into this world is to simply notice it, notice it in all its radiance; and to be mindful of all its creatures, in all their broken glory.
Noticing…like the very same barista who anticipates my direction and hands me the washroom key without me asking. Not a moment pressure there.
,
January 9th, 2008
"On January 1, 1953, at age 44, Mildred Norman Ryder adopted the name Peace
Pilgrim, put on a pair of canvas sneakers, donned dark blue slacks, blouse, and a tunic - on which she had sown her new name - and set out to walk the length of the USA leaving from Pasadena, CA. She chose blue for her clothing because it is the international color of peace. She chose Pasadena because she wanted to set off walking ahead of the Rose Parade where thousands of people could see her. On that first trip, in the midst of the Korean War, the Cold War, and at the height of the McCarthy era, she walked 5,000 miles from California to New York, from coast to coast and from border to border, sharing her message of peace."
A quote from Mildred as to the timing of her walk.
The world situation is grave. Humanity, with fearful, faltering steps, walks a knife-edge between abysmal chaos and a new renaissance, while strong forces push toward chaos. Yet there is hope. I see hope in the tireless work for peace of a few devoted souls. I see hope in the real desire for peace in the heart of humanity, even though the human family gropes toward peace blindly, not knowing the way…I think that those of us who have found the way to peace, should be shouting it from the housetops.
For almost three decades, from 1953 to 1981, Mildred crossed the USA seven times, including two trips to Hawaii and Alaska, as well as Mexico and Canada. (See Marta Daniels’ article on the Peace Pilgrim)
January 7th, 2008
From my loft downtown I see two flags, a Canadian flag just above an Alberta flag. Both reach then hesitate, then sag and sputter in an uncertain breeze. This is the way of flags animated by breezes confused by tall buildings. This too, it seems, is the way of memory. Through a scene, a smell, a piece of music, a taste, a long ago moment unfurls and then retreats.
Twenty years ago, the blue Alberta flag on the court house in Mayerthorpe was periodically extending itself in a wavering air current. Framed by my office window in the grain elevator I can still see the flag and the brown foreground. I see grass lodged, fallen like a skirt at the feet of naked shrubs. And I see the train track, with its creosote soaked timber-ties embedded in gravel and two straight lines of grey steel running far north. Above it all was a brilliant blue sky with a wisp of white cloud left over from the previous day’s canopy.
Why this flag inspired memory? Twenty years ago I was dreaming about making an exit. After 12 years working for the Alberta Wheat Pool I was fit and ready for a change.
Perhaps it’s this early stage of the year that has me wondering about change. Or, perhaps it’s deeper. Either way it’s not like change is an option. To refuse to change is to age at a rapid pace. The only option, it seems to me, is cooperation with one or more particular possibilities, out there on the horizon of change.
January 4th, 2008
By a bus stop on Saanich road we set up our furniture. A sofa, arm chairs, a pole lamp–humped through the sagging front door of our listing bungalow, carried across the street and placed on the sidewalk under a ‘no parking’ sign. And there we sat drinking and smoking for half a day until the police came and watched us drag everything back across the asphalt past the stumpy caraganas releasing it all onto an overgrown front yard. In those days we stole time without trying or noticing. In those days time went nova and nothing escaped notice; nothing 
was lost or wasted or in need of redemption. We marked our lives under the shade of maples on boulevards and measured them by park boundaries and benches and cracks in concrete and tangles of driftwood. And we were never far from being in love. And when love ran out we fell in love with the idea of being in love. We were of no fixed address but never displaced. There was always space, place, and time. No one suffered and died under the weight of headlines. When the world grew large and unmanageable we sought out the islands. When the islands shrank we rowed out on books. When books sailed us too near the falls above the jagged rocks we berthed and hiked back to the buskers on Government street. Because on Government street mixed among the pretentious pillars breathed the mercy of their music. And beneath the egregious steeples lived the mercy of artists playing out scenes on cinder. And drifting above the sleeping poets, the laughter of office workers at lunch. All this we counted on, as I count on still, that mercy will always mix in, always recline within steel’s speed, always park itself under ‘no parking’ signs and twine its tendrils up and over the hard surfaces of life.
January 2nd, 2008
Yesterday I again came upon the thirteenth century Sufi, Jalal al-Din Rumi. My encounter with him was through the book "The Islamist"–which is Ed Husain's story of his early fascination and adoption of Islamic fundamentalism, his subsequent disillusionment, and finally his journey away from indoctrination.
During his move away from that extremist form of Islam he began reading Sufi literature and while visiting Turkey he "met" Rumi.
His story reminded me of this particular poem of Rumi's. Perhaps it can act as a kind of launch pad into the New Year. If and when it fits, consider it your Grow Mercy New Year's blessing.
Be with those who help your being 
Be with those who help your being.
Don’t sit with indifferent people, whose breath
comes cold out of their mouths.
Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.
A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.
If you don’t try to fly,
and so break yourself apart,
you will be broken open by death,
when it’s too late for all you could become.
Leaves get yellow. The tree puts out fresh roots
and makes them green.
Why are you so content with a love that turns you yellow?
Happy New Year!
From climate to culture, relativities abound. And what I mean when I use the word relative is not that everything is reducible to essentially the same thing, but that my everyday experience of life is relative to my cultural and geographical context. So while the measurement of temperature is not a relative concept, what is, is our experiences of what is hot and cold. But of course, herein–my relative experience–lies the seeds of another’s incomprehension. An incomprehension that can only be overcome through a shared experience. 
Front Porch Pictures
