Posts filed under 'Beauty'
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,
Erato
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 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.
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But how do I let him go? How do I let anything go? Or, is this the monastic journey?
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