Archive for August, 2008
August 27th, 2008
Two women of indeterminate age sit facing each other, alternatively lifting banana bread and porcelain cups filled with coffee to their mouths–all the while chatting. They talk of landlords, brothers, and pets. They are well known here at the S’Cup and when the head barista comes by the taller woman notices her glasses 
and comments on the change which turns into a short conversation about elementary school and eyesight. When the barista leaves the ladies settle back into the comfortable chitchat of people with no fixed schedule.
Beside them, in one of the comfortable chairs, a woman in her early thirties chokes back a muffin. In a moment she receives a call to which she responds, in obvious anger–"I’m not angry…if you have anything to say to me leave a message"–and hangs up. She seethes, sighs, stands and walks out the glass doors.
In the mean time a silver-haired businessman makes it his job to supervise window-washers and advises one of the servers to reprimand the two young workers for leaving phantom streaks on the windows. She nods gravely as the man makes the world work better and agrees to have have words with them–and then, takes appropriate action and promptly forgets the exchange when the man leaves.
When my turn comes to leave I pass a man on the sidewalk who, like Seymour Krim, is barely able to contain the riot in his soul. His hatred for me, inexplicable but palpable, has already dealt me a blow–even as his eyes show me that I’m not worth the momentary pleasure it would give him to have his fist fly into in my teeth. I walk by him reminded that we live in a dangerous world.
I’ve been shown also that we live in a petty world–live in an angry and lonely and misconceived nether-world–but that we live as well, in an engagingly glorious world. I have, at times, been a conspicuous part of each of these worlds–and will be again. But it is my lucky circumstance that I have a preference for the one with no fixed schedule. Time enough to notice an-other, and desire the exchange of pleasant words.
And to that end, it is my fortunate circumstance, perhaps even a luxury, that I understand that it is as much a crime to fail to accept the givenness of my life, as it is to fail to try and change some of those givens.
August 22nd, 2008
I walk in very tall grass. Its green is beginning to drain and I smell the colour orange. The ripening heads are over my head. They tilt and swing. The grass stings my face in the wind. I receive a light flaying. Like a baptism. I am alone but unafraid. The sun and sky are eternal and friendly. I can walk or run. It does not matter. I can love or hate. It matters not. I will miss dinner. I will eat grain. I am inside and outside. It is all the same.
I wish again for tall grass. Grass to be lost in. Knowing that inside and outside is all the same.
August 20th, 2008
These are the dog days, the fog days, the automaton days, days of sleepy restlessness when the vice of shallowness snuffs out the bit of light I normally cast over the entrance of my tent. Days when I forget who I am, and forget to be who I am. I forget that what was realized was right, and go on my way unrealized. Here, shallowness passes for substance. The glib for the ingenious. My "being" gives way to role and I become the mere total of my functions.
These are the days of acedia…what the monks call the noon-day demon. The demon being identified not by simple laziness but by a sluggishness and oppressiveness of soul. Identified not so much by a lack of caring–although on a particular level it is certainly this–but by an inordinate degree of caring about the cosmetic and the petty. The noon-day demon diverts energies away from realization to undifferentiated restlessness. And I, yielding, fall in and inhabit these days, get stuck in them…as I believe we all do from time to time.
But then, with respect to acedia we might just as well be speaking of our culture. Caught as we are in a post-modern depression. Not recognizing that it comes from wearing ourselves out in busyness, and in exhausting ourselves in current techniques for comfort and security and recreation. Not realizing our communal indifference is symptomatic of a lack of spiritual depth.
And so by cultural default, we are spiritual skimmers, enamoured by spirituality but not spiritual effort. And we, in a kind of perennial Enlightenment hangover, remain beguiled by "critical distance" and rationality, which serves us as a refuge from the mystery of faith, and the pain (and joy) of true consciousness. Not that we don’t require apt refuge from real pain, it’s just that acedia is a false harbour and ends in emotional and spiritual death. In the grip of acedia we keep distant all things that would awaken us or require us to look into ourselves, examine our habits, and renew our disciplines.
We’ve had cataclysmic moments of collective awakening. Tragic as they were, arresting as they were, we were soon back busy, restless and comfortably numb, our collective spiritual torpor cemented and protected by 24 hour news channels.
But we are, of course, our culture. I am, my culture. And unless the knee cap of my mind meets the sharp right angle of a metal door jam, and the hot wire inside flickers to life, I will continue dissipating across some cracked-dry inner landscape. My thoughts like dusty indolent pigweed, tumbling, without resolution, only adding to the common malaise.
Those of us snared by acedia must find ways to extract ourselves, pass go, collect 200, and find ourselves fit for another round. Wether it is through a Dantean heartfelt rush of repentance, or a monastic waiting and watching, or through contemplative reading, or an outside event or encounter, or perhaps an epiphany, however the break-out is achieved, the break-out is imperative for personal and communal flourishing.
August 15th, 2008
Today I wear a white T-shirt with nothing on it. I wear it blank as an affront to this world of mind-arresting slogans.
And I wonder…in an age of near reality surrounded by fabricated stimuli, does a body forget?
Reminded…
As I walk I feel a tenuous wake of air curl around my lenses and brush my eyelashes.
As I walk in the warmness that is an August morning I peel a small wooden match using my fingernails until I’m left with a point that fits easily between my teeth and I push out a poppy seed stuck there from breakfast toast.
As I walk I feel my heels compress the soles of my sandals and hear a gritty reply from the stones that lodge in the gavel parking lot.
And I consider that there is nothing wrong with our age that an attentive walk couldn’t fix.
August 12th, 2008
Things get taken. Things get lost. Things are never owned. We only get to use them for a while. In this life, renting, is a closer approximation of our relationship with things. Wether it’s a capacity, an opportunity, or an object, like my son’s first car, stolen during the night…things get taken, wear out, get lost.
We are fooled into believing in the permanence of ownership by the laws we write and the language we use. Yet truly, we are only tenants, lessees, boarders…never proprietors…never outright owners. It is, I suppose, possible to use the language of ownership as long as we realize it rests on a rolling sea of temporality. But in practice, we have bought into ownership as something fixed. We live in the unreality of "private property," private possessions. And the degree to which we give possession credence is the degree to which we are ourselves possessed. Owned by what we think we own.
Not that we shouldn’t mourn, grieve, get angry, over loss. To do otherwise would be robotic. It is what we end up doing with that grief or anger that informs our life. A position of ownership will have us obsessing over security and adding to our bondage.
You may recall learning that early residents of the land never lived by any concept of ownership. Ownership was quite literally a foreign concept. They lived, for the most part, as stewards. A concept our western sensibility has skewed irretrievably. Even, I suppose, in disputes of hunting territory, (however this was framed because territory was an unknown notion) "territory" was seen as a gift, not a right.
Perhaps it’s our material and mechanistic outlook that has contributed to all our ideas of possession. If our universe is all blind happenstance there is no-thing to be thankful to. Whether this is a good enough reason to believe in transcendence is questionable. But to be caught being profoundly thankful, (a ubiquitous human experience) with no one to thank, is stultifying and robs us of a certain pliability. Thankfulness, after all, keeps us from hardening, and is a prime way to hang on to things loosely.
And this hanging on loosely, what the monastics call detachment, is the way we must walk through our life if we are to have a chance at flourishing. That’s because the closer we live to what’s true about our world, the freer we are. The more we live in obligation to creation, the more we grow, the more we create.
So my son, after that very crappy feeling goes away, here’s to d’Artagnan II. May she run long, but never own you.
August 8th, 2008
No other place, no other time, would I consider leaving backpack, camera, and other belongings on a tarp while 10,000 people wander by. But it’s Folk Fest time in Edmonton and baser human elements are left at the gates.
Suburban suspicions and urban hides are shed and the micro-culture inside becomes largely free of cynicism, workaday rancour and obsessive security. It all seems to be swallowed up in the spacious moody melody of Cat Power, or spun off the hips and hula-hoops animated by the driving Mali-pop rhythm’s of Amoudou and Miriam.
It’s possible, when the swelter abates, and you’re prostrate on a grass hill, the deep groove of Aimee Mann’s Save Me rolling over you, to dream of "world peace." Viva folk viva fest!
August 6th, 2008
One morning, when I used to go to Ephphatha House, a small Catholic community of prayer, and a place of apparent "uselessness," a young girl who lived there told me about her cat:
She was sitting on a large stone on the path to the chapel, the cat lounging listlessly on her lap, and our conversation started on its own. I asked about her cat and she said, "Oh this is not my cat…and he hates kids. It took me a year to get his love and so now I just want to stay with him."
Besides the sweetness of a kid loving a cat that much, I just love the fact that at the end of her longsuffering experience, her patient experiment of opening herself up countless times with a kind of holy greed, that she found herself in love’s leisure, simply and naturally wanting the company of this cat.
I’m reminded of some lines from George MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul.
Those who would be born again indeed,
Must wake our souls unnumbered times a day,
And urge ourselves to life with holy greed,;
Now open our bosoms to the wind’s free play;
And now, with patience forceful, hard, lie still,
Submit and ready to the making will,
Athirst and empty, for God’s breath to fill.
and comments on the change which turns into a short conversation about elementary school and eyesight. When the barista leaves the ladies settle back into the comfortable chitchat of people with no fixed schedule.
Front Porch Pictures
