Posts filed under 'Beauty'
May 13th, 2008
Now back in the inner-city I can ponder my skunk. (Annie Dillard has her weasel, I my skunk.)
The skunk is brought into being through immediacy and for all of her life lives in her given immediacy. She knows, intimately, her active seasons and her times for hibernation. She knows, biblically, her time for the hunt, for foraging, begins at the gloaming. Her’s is a dusky world that she does not question. Her’s is a dank, malodorous world–the fetidness, her preferred cloister.
And what of her scent glands, those two anal sacks that contain a hatred most foul? She disdains their use but will let spray after a single warning. Unlike her Spotted cousin who’s warning is past ostentatious–a high handstand, the Striped skunk stands facing her menace, arches her back, stamps her front feet, and shuffles backward. This was enough to send me scurrying when as boy I cornered one under a grain bin. I poked once, saw the signs, was innocent enough to get the message and left the scene.
The mother under my failing shed need not worry about using her mechanism. Thankfully, her perspicuous grunts that follow my rattling and moth ball seeding has shown she’s not rabid. But what can I learn from her, this solitary creature who prefers twilight?
The wisdom of a skunk is poise and containment. It’s her discipline. Even her markings, a balance of black and white manifest her sang-froid. And she will fight for this balance. Self-respecting, self-transcending, and self-willing–willing an exquisite singularity–she’s a beautiful creature in her own rite.
She’s a hermit in community with bush and beetles who would love to live off of nothing but grasshoppers. She has found her place, was never out of place. I on the other hand, leak will, and waste energy, and live out of joint with this minute.
But now I’ve written her into my life and know that it in some sense it is possible to live like a skunk. The possibilities are immediately present each morning. I can watch the sun glint off the chrome of a passing car.
May 11th, 2008
If a meditation/polemic on Mother God interests you, here’s a link to an article I had published in yesterday’s Edmonton Journal.
(Photo: Cover art for Lost in Wonder -Esther DeWall)
And Happy Mother’s Day!
May 7th, 2008
Regrettably, the posts have been sparse…I have been travelling and, not so regrettably, I’ve been at the cabin watching….
Blithe seagulls ride thermal drafts and sing in their coarse-throated way. They are high into the blue. High enough to blend in, appearing like micro-clots of cloud. Hairy woodpeckers, dizzy from pounding away at a young poplar beside the cabin, take a break in the sun, re-reddening their tiny crowns. Squirrels scold and tease and robins pull worms out from under a mat of leaves, like perfect quilters pulling fat bits of thread through cloth.
In the mean time I’m obsessing about ways to move a mother skunk along. She’s taken a home under the shed and I fear she may have young. It’s May so the possibility is there. I’ve considered marking my territory with my own urine, not knowing if this is an offence for her, or if it’s of no consequence, or inviting. Who knows, really, the way of skunks.
I’ve also thrown the rest of the mothballs as far as I could under the shed where her run is. I know about mothballs. They worked a couple of years ago when we had a skunk, perhaps the same one, under the cabin. She moved out in a couple days.
I check back occasionally, rattle some wood planks that rest there, and listen for a response. She’s still there. I hear her grunting. It’s a guttural spastic-larynx effort. Something between a cough a hiss and a moan. I try imitating it but it’s beyond me. I haven’t the cords or the chords, for it.
I envy the skunk. A thoroughly humble and innocent creature, that at the same time understands the world begins and ends with her. And who am I to her? A passing annoyance. Perhaps she pities me. Pities my consciousness, my future and pastness. She has no quarrel with me, it is I who am dictated to, she controls the game. And it’s me who’s reduced to hissing and moaning.
April 22nd, 2008
It’s Earth Day! Now if we could only see the good earth it would certainly help work up a conscious appreciation. Currently, our slice of earth is covered by great sheaves of snow…snow that’s still coming down at a cruel slant.
But one thing that did help was my morning coffee. Since I normally dispense with paper in favour of porcelain, or in Starbuckian parlance, a-for-here-cup, I got it free–in honour of Earth Day. So take a few minutes off, head to Starbuck’s (where they’re doing their part), order your coffee to-stay and enjoy a free cup…and think about the lovely earth under all that snow.
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April 9th, 2008
In Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and Glory, the priest, known only as the “whiskey priest,” does not find his salvation…at least not in any way that would be recognized by his church. He is, as he himself says, a bad priest, given to drink, slipshod at his clerical tasks, and somewhere along the way he fathered a child.
There had been a time he was considered a good priest. A time when he believed it himself. And if not quite believing it, believing he could aspire to such as long as stayed within the structures of the church with his piety out front and hardened around him. 
But it’s when he’s on the out, living within the givenness of his “sin,” that God meets him. And it’s in a soiled and stinking and overcrowded prison cell, where he finds beauty and his own humanity. Here in the company of his own, the weakest kind of flesh, his heart swells with the compassion of Christ. Swells even for the immensely pious woman who counts herself far above the fornicators, thieves, drunkards and beggars that share the cell.
This, then, was the “whiskey priest’s” revelation: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…that was a quality God’s image carried with it…when you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth and how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
- The prison scene is not only one of the great pieces of English literature, it is a scene of profound theological depth.
- Greene published this book in 1940. In 1954 a ban was placed upon the book by the Vatican.
April 6th, 2008
Friday evening was a Cuban reunion of sorts. We four couples (and some friends) who had shared company in Cuba, gathered at the Blue Chair cafe to hear the great Bomba. Three of the six-piece band are from Cuba. 
Our friend Philip, who has no social hesitations, soon discovered the details of the Cuban musicians, and would have, if it were possible, invited them back to his place for an extended concert. This is something he successfully accomplished with another band during our stay in Veradero. I listened in as Luis, the leader, explained to Phil how his association with an artists community allowed him leave of Cuba as well as an ability to make return visits. This however, wasn’t the case with the drummer from Matanzas. Such are the mysteries of Cuban emigration.
I was again reminded of our visit to Cardenas. On that late February day we rode a short ten miles from Veradero to Cardenas to met Oscar, a friend our companions John and Odette had met on a previous visit to Cuba. Our taxi, after its race with a 58ish Pontiac–a race that gave us several life-flashing-in-front-of-our-eyes moments–drove into what John called, “the real Cuba.”
The “real” Cuba is an eviscerated thing. Like the two-days-dead chicken we came across on a sidewalk at the edge of the city, it’s splayed body open to reading. But Cuba is harder to read than chicken entrails.
The checkered entrepreneurial glory of the 20’s–50’s was long gone. But so too were the dreams of a struggle that was to sweep away a corrupt dictatorship and leave a collective, in want of nothing, in its wake.
Today Cuba is one animal with two backs. The increasingly prosperous Cuba, paid for by tours of whites; and the decaying Cuba, haunted by principals of a revolution that looks out from billboards and sides of buildings through the eyes of the two (once) revered revolutionaries. But 
those eyes are now full of smoke, the revolutionary symbols, the beret and star, cigar in teeth, the bearded profile, the fatigues, rendered hollow, bereft by the gutted sugar cane factory, the eternally postponed train, and the kneeling and prostrate habitations.
We walked this prone, prostrate Cuba for an afternoon. Narrow streets, fissured and pock marked, cracked open domiciles slumping on burdened sidewalks. Cinder block and and concrete squares. Blistered paint on the ironwork that covers window holes. And occasional architectural intrigue, as with the stone cathedral–closed to comers.
And other sightings and impressions: Clusters of young people sitting on sidewalks, backs to the walls. Old men, selling guava, shouting in the street, lost faith in ideology, a child playing with a 30 foot length of video tape. Two young men playing dominoes on a make-shift table held on their laps. And everywhere, underfed horses pulling carts for passengers–calling them coaches would be an overstatement. And ubiquitous bicycles exceeding load limits–one man balancing a washing machine on what had to be a fortified rear fender.
Later in the afternoon, Oscar, our new friend and guide, hailed us a buggy and off we went to his house. We clacked along curling pavement, and across 
cracked stone intersections. We rode the wrong way on streets designated as one-way, but the traffic rules are suspended, all except the main streets.
Upon arriving we met Oscar’s mother, a compact woman who smiled incessantly. We were invited to sit down in the front room and were offered coffee and rum. We talked of family. The neighbour was introduced as Oscar’s second mom. She also smiled constantly. We asked her, through Oscar, about her family. We were told of children, uncles and aunts. The neighbour very much hoped we would come to see her home as well.
Shortly an uncle of Oscar’s arrived. He manoeuvred his bicycle into the small portico and sat down on the edge of a couch. He was wearing a forties suit coat, faded blue baseball cap–permanently fixed–rolled up white slacks and sneakers with toe-holes worn through the canvass. He was 87. We asked about his occupation. He was mechanic and had worked on diesel trains. John asked about his life before the revolution and he pinched his lips and shook his head, as if keeping a lock on stories that could cost things untold. Stories now lost through a controlling, ubiquitous, inexplicable fear.
We talked of lighter things… Oscar had helped build his family’s house. A two-
story concrete square, comfortable, and by Cardenas’ standards, of a higher stratum. From the front room we toured the kitchen and bathroom and an upstairs with its three small partitions forming bedrooms. A small patio at the rear of the house had a large concrete sink and an enclosure with a pig. We returned from the brief tour and shooed away flies attracted to the sweet rum.
Oscar had retrieved a cd-player and put on some Latino music. John, and his wife Odette–who never misses a chance to dance–mamboed round the front room. We talked more and smiled at each other, and as guests, aware of a simple charm presiding over our time.
Our friends had brought Oscar gifts. Newspapers, reading material (Oscar loves to study language, and if there is a key to advancement and even emigration, it’s through language.) Also t-shirts, a new pair of Dockers and a CD-Walkman. Every item was passed around. It was Christmas, a birthday…more rum was offered, cigarettes were lit.
The father came through and shook hands, silent but smiling, retrieving a smoke and then leaving, to walk or wander. Oscar’s eight year old nephew arrived back from school. Neat and clean in his uniform. Without hesitation or instruction, he offered me his hand. Demure and smiling he moved on, bending forward and in turn kissing Deb and Odette on their cheeks and shaking John’s hand before skipping upstairs to change.
What will become of the light in the nephew eyes? What of Oscar? Of Cardenas? Earlier, while walking the streets by the crumbling factories along the shore, Oscar repeatedly dreamt-out-loud about his hope of leaving Cuba. A grey government migration building, imposing and vacant except for one car in the drive, spoke a death-knell to his hope. But still, despite this desperate longing came the Cuban laugh in all its expansive capacity.
There lives here a gracious horizon of life, perhaps ennobled by threads of hope, woven together. There is an obvious decrepitude on all the surfaces. Yet, from within, the colours of survival, of life and love and breath, shine through at places. All the colours of a vibrant spirit, of life not yet utterly defeated.
April 1st, 2008
In the first whisper of morning light I watched a 20 foot cedar move its slow movement outside the sitting room window at St Peter’s Abbey. A picture of a child running through tall grass by the edge of town moved in my mind. Later in the day I would walk the silent monastery halls, arm in arm with Father James, his 82 year old frame a little more bent, his step slightly slower, and he would say with that smiling voice, that he’s had enough birthdays. For most of his live he’s been a monk in community, and a hermit–so he knows how to let go.
But how do I let him go? How do I let anything go? Or, is this the monastic journey?
The evening before, over tea and raisin cookies, we talked, as we always did, about God, mindfulness, failings, innocence, history, loss, promise, personality, church… I’m not a great conversationalist, but in the presence of Fr. James I always feel elevated and connected through the simple give and take of words.
We talked about poetry too. On the drive to St. Peter’s Deb and I had stopped in Saskatoon. We took an unplanned detour and came across a used book store. I bought a book of Rilke poems. I didn’t know about the Duino Elegies–Rilke’s last work. I showed Father James my book, he laughed and said he was reading the same book.
How do you sustain the picture? The picture of the innocent child running through tall grass and feeling as though she was entirely in God and God was entirely in her? How do you sustain a shot of heart-gladness that makes you feel as though death is behind you? That makes you feel a depth of forgiveness that precludes any sense you needed forgiving. Is this too the (monastic) journey? The letting go of the picture so that it can return again…the perpetual letting go, so as perhaps to enable it’s infinite return?
March 7th, 2008
We walked on the beach, pushed along by a baby gale, and I thought the sun was surprised to be shinning. The ocean churned out frustration. Or perhaps it was simply at play, amusing itself and throwing its cappuccino waves on the few random rock formations that break up an otherwise perfect twenty-mile strip of fine white beach. Or perhaps this was ocean jazz, Caribbean sea jazz with Buena Vista riffs.
We crawled up on one of the rock outcropping’s and listened to the sea roar and wail–like the Cinco Leyendas at full throttle–amplified through a basalt gramophone.
Two days before the ocean was asleep, or at least somnambulant. Only a few barely imperceptible swells gave away its life. That and the colours, because nothing can be that beautiful without being divinely alive. The still deep also gave its light back to the sky. The entire horizon exchanging a thousand shades of aqua-marine; the colours in a photo-journalist’s dream.
Walking back we bent into the wind and collected orange and yellow shells and red streaked coral.
March 6th, 2008
There is a glaring difference between the Veradero peninsula and most everywhere else in 
Cuba. And from a certain philanthropic sensibility the difference is guilt inducing. In a limited respect, concerning the country’s two proximate living conditions, It’s like the reverse of the fly in the ointment.
We stayed at one of Veradero’s many all-inclusive hotels. From our room at the Isberostar Tainos we looked out across acres of visitor’s villas to the Straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. And on the beach we joined the well oiled and well baked, raising our Mojito’s in salud. But south of the hotels, ten miles away across the bay, was the city of Cardenas. The buses carrying tourists don’t stop here. Cuba prefers to hide a city like Cardinas.
As a tourist from a decidedly first-world country I found it necessary to accept my birthplace, my history, and my limited experience without rationalization or excuse, without forgetting or neglecting what I found and witnessed. Some of the 
tourists I observed stayed on the instituted turista path and moved with an established sense of entitlement–for some, perhaps it’s a defence. On the other hand spending the days in a slurry of guilt serves no one…unless it’s one’s preferred form of penance (I have some experience with this).
My practice–perhaps, hopefully, a kind of mindful detachment–was that I thoroughly and gratefully enjoyed the beach, the food, the people, our friends, our new friends, and pretty much all the toda inclusiva amenities. And at the same time, while walking the degenerated streets of Cardenas, and then meeting the Lopez family, I listened, engaged as well as I could, and joined our friends in giving gifts.
March 5th, 2008
I wasn’t prepared for Havana. While Revolution Square is a sensory blight, Old Havana is mostly marvel. And even though it has decayed, and is decaying still, you can nevertheless absorb centuries of Old World wonder. It comes up through the stone in Cathedral Square, and through the dark-with-age rock walls of the nearby monastery. And it hangs in the air of the porticoes and patios of long-gone family mansions.
But Old Havana–colonized by Spaniards as early as 1510 and designated a city in 1592 by Spain’s Prince Philip II and decreed “Key” to the New World–has been forgotten, its fallen walls symbolic of generations of neglect. Only since the USSR’s abandonment, because of its own dismantlement, has Havana been “remembered.” And this, of course, is only because of its “turista peso potential.” You feel conflicted in the knowledge but the pull to see and experience inner Havana leap frogs principle and jump starts the tourist in you.
Walking the narrow “Spanish” streets you will need to navigate the posers. I was completely taken in by the first one I saw. A “classic Cuban,” I thought… dressed in a natty coordinated suit and hat and smoking a cartoon sized cigar. Then, on the next corner was an ancient woman with a caricature scale cigar, and across the street was another creased old man…with a cigar. Take their picture and they’ll ask for a peso. Fair enough. Also, for a peso or two you can have your picture taken with a nubile, olive-skinned girl, clothed in bright layers of saffron and ocher dyed silk…yup, also smoking a cigar the size of a Taber corncob.
On the wharf along the Ave Del Puerto that runs along Old Havana, I tried my few Spanish phrases out on a fish monger, a seller of bait–fingerlings mainly. I had remembered that Che Guevara had a residence across the bay not too distant from the Christ monument and so I pointed, shrugged, and gestured, indicating 
a question about whether or not what I was pointing to was Guevara’s residencia. Unfortunately all the gentleman understood was my “Che Guevara.” He then dug deep in his front pocket and produced a three peso coin. Not the convertible peso currency I had but a Cuban coin with the likeness of Che stamped on one side. He offered it to me, repeating, “Si, Che, Che, Guevara.” I took the coin and attempted to give him something in return but he was having none of it and waved me off. I tried giving him his coin back and realized that I was insulting him so I gave up, smiled, and stuttered several gracias’. I took out my camera and held it up, he smiled and positioned himself, holding up his swordfish head. I snapped a picture. He waved and so did I as I walked on. In my mind at least, I’d made some kind of an old Havana connection.
(Click on any of the pictures for a larger view)
Previous Posts
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
