Posts filed under 'Beauty'
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)
February 21st, 2008
The morning plays pel-mel on both sides of story-high plate glass. People scurry, scuttle like crabs, sideways, their lives lived on a slant, everything is akimbo, topsy-turvy, but not nearly as comic as the words imply. In fact to look at the faces, mine included, things are dead serious. And there are no connections. Instead, there is a perpetual race at every stop light, walk light, cop light, shop light, neon light, florescent light…but no florescence.
This is a day when a tree, full grown and green and growing still, must break through the concrete and asphalt in front of The Bay; leaf first, leaf after leaf after twig after branch rising to thick tapered trunk, stretching higher than a sequoia and wider than a cypress. It must, or we will all starve for oxygen.
But under that shade a climate is born and borne where we will lounge like the King of Hearts, freed from the asylum. We will rest in this adult Day Care and remember to ask the long forgotten questions. We will wander no more. And all the strident fundamentalist causes will pop like soap bubbles. And under that tree the world will find its imagination. And each of us will find our poetry.
February 15th, 2008
Three or four cells in me were hanging on to a memory of spring and this morning they were joined by a whole humming collection. I could feel the florescence.
The temperature had turned overnight and stepping out into the slush this morning I could actually smell a breeze from early April. Wether it came from the past of future I don’t know. What matters is that it came with a wisp of promise.
I forget how much my body is tied to the earth. Where have you gone Walt Whitman, John Muir, Henry Thoreau, Rachel Carson? (Please send more light.)
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Great naturalists
February 12th, 2008
One thing about being flat-in-bed sick for four days is that, after you’ve grown weary of reading and television, it gives you time for something like a mind search. The imposed silence and solitude of my sick-bed cloister gave time, outside of episodes of feverish unconsciousness that is, for picking through my soul’s innards. And what I found as I began to trudge along through all those coils were cysts and pustules of worry. Larger and more lethal than I had realized.
The joke that worry pays because 99 percent of what we worry about never happens exposes a shadowy truth about my mental makeup. I worry as a way to control outcome. Someplace inside I believe that sifting through every unhappy consequence of a given situation steers the outcome away from the cliff-edge. When I examine the logic I see the lie, but worry countenances no logic. Even when it does, I still keep the fret-practice because I believe it will at least prepare me for disappointment…or worse.
I thought I would worry less as I aged. It hasn’t happened. I’ve been conspired against. I lay the blame on layers of responsibility, but in reality the additions have been marginal. What I have is a well cultivated habit. That’s what I found as I went inside.
Hating the fact that I lose so much vital juice on stewing I wanted to (again) curb the thing. I’m not stupid enough to believe I’d ever put a stop to worrying, but reining it in seems doable.
That’s why this line from Psalm 51–that I read sometime while being ill–seemed to hold promise: “You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.” This spoke to me of a specific kind of displacement.
Mystics from all traditions say that the “inward being” or the “secret heart,” is where God resides. Christ said the Kingdom of God is within. God, as Wisdom, as truth and beauty and peace and freedom and Love waits within. Most often God is crowded out by a blimp full of ego and anxiety. Crowded out that is, by what’s not altogether real.
It seems to me that worry is a shell game, it puts on a show but it’s a swindle. To worry is to live within an unreality. That’s why, ultimately, it’s so useless. If it was a real thing it would be useful. So to displace the unreal with the real, to replace what’s fraudulent with what’s faithful is Wisdom’s education. Wisdom effaces worry. Sophia/Wisdom is resting in God’s presence.
But how do you find God’s presence within which you can rest, worry free? To long for it always, say the Saints, is enough. Failing that, long for the longing. Longing leads the search and the search shows that because God resides within in profound silence, God’s mystical presence can only found in silence. I suppose my imposed silence and solitude taught me something close to this. At least it rekindled in me the importance of meditation or “centring prayer,” which has been far too sporadic for too long.
A kind of conclusion: The way, then, to worry worry is to meditate.
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,
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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.
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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.
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.
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. 
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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 Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
