Grow Mercy’s Evolving Year-end List of Modest Propositions

New Year’s day is only one important day among 365 important days.

The first half of your life is spent finding yourself, the second half is spent breaking up with yourself.

The heart is a spotted pear — there’s no getting through without some bruising.

The mind is a sea star — able to regenerate its brilliant purple rays, capable of multidirectional moves, and often clinging to the same surface.

The soul at peace, is paradise.

It may be too late to have an honest conversation with a glacier, but we have to try.

We thought we couldn’t get blood from stone; but today, we can’t seem to stop the bleeding.

Tempting, in this climate, to trade the callus-building requirements of reality for the passive comfort of hoping.

A flash of insight can moon-rocket your life, then flop back down like an expired fish.

Please remember your moon-flight.

At just the right moment, laughing in church can deinstitutionalize God, at least for a while.

The individual is a phantom — in wonder and blunder we receive our selves through the eyes of others. 

Pack light. Most everything you need you’ll find along the way.

Should you want to find God, which is to say, should you desire meaning, learn to love the earth and her array of inhabitants.

Theology eulogizes the universe, while poetry befriends a birch tree. Theology says I come from the heavens, poetry says I come from Springside, Saskatchewan.

Our favoured certainties should routinely be set on fire to see what rises from the ash.

A tincture of cynicism is emancipating, but a full-meal is constipating.

The crushed grapes of relinquishment can sometimes be Beaujolais for the spirit.

If you press your face against a keyboard, canvas, soapstone, it sometimes opens a door.

Art enlarges our being and bearing, which is why despots of commerce de-fund it.

Science and religion are humble in theory, but never when monetized.

Things repair themselves if they are unplugged for a while, including humans.

Time is a line that swirls — so let it swirl.

Death and dying — hard, hard, hard — any kind of bromide, unfitting.

To counsel hope, can sometimes be malpractice.

The twin sister of praise is grief.

Don’t beat yourself up, worry, especially these days, is a form of prayer.

Grim, but better than thinking about the news, is putting together a 5000 piece puzzle of your own brain.

Don’t vomit outright. Some poisons you need to let pass through so you’ll know what to hate, what to tolerate.

Despite the crazed magnificence of our vanities, our true longing is to be each other’s joy.

The Big Bang is God’s dancing body. The shimmering fallout is yours.

The Second Coming, if we have the eyes for it, is us, in our unfolding inclusiveness.

There’s always more to be said about faith and love, but it’s time we heard from the chrysanthemums.

You would like the role you play in my dreams.

Remove your tactical cap,
Approach a blueberry bush on your knees,
Hug the dawn,
Love everyone.


Wishing you a bright and beautiful New Year!

Christmas Carols — It’s Complicated

In a Mideast manger a baby’s silence is so intense
as to shimmer a star and spur celestial-gazing Magi
into loading up their camels and tripping for two years
toward the promise of a great reorientation.

Two millennia later I’m standing in Best-Buy
wearing a mask, listening to the Claymation version
of We Three Kings while reading a news-banner scrolling
beneath the swelling busts of two clever anchors questioning
vaccines and Dominion machines and claiming
their capital “I” individual rights and freedom 
to ignore responsible citizenship.

Now I hear the puckish voice of Eartha Kitt singing, 
Santa Baby. But none of us LED-eyed shoppers recall
she was the consequence of a white plantation owner’s son
raping her black mother; that she was abandoned, used;
that she found her way, spoke out against the Vietnam war,
championed the rights of gay people and for all that
was black-listed by the CIA and couldn’t find work
in her own country.

And now Burl Ives is singing, Holly Jolly Christmas.
In line is a young mom helplessly trying to corral
her pre-schooler and my mind turns to that toddler
taking his first exiled steps in Egypt, already wandering
towards his own black-listed death because he got real cranky
with haters and oppressors and got all obedient and submissive
out of a massive love for this: our majestically frayed global ghetto,
and oddly, I have this sudden pity, which I know isn’t love,
but it’s kind of tinged with it, for those two anchors that live
beneath the shit they say; but this is no elevated moral achievement
on my end, more like some benign retention of Sunday school,
but maybe I should trust it because it’s not very much like me.
So I do.

Of course this is where the Vienna Boys’ Choir should come on
singing, Joy to the World, but instead it’s The Jackson Five
and little Michael winding up, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.
Now the clerk with blue mask and visor and polite eyes
is calling me from my prescribed distance. I step off the red X,
fish out my wallet, tap, make my eyes smile, polite-like.
Exiting the store I see the young mom, now mask-less and beaming
at her preschooler who is pirouetting in the half-empty parking lot,
frilly-red Christmas dress spinning out — Joy to the World!


 

This is me, Grow Mercy, thanking you for reading and wishing you, in the midst of much complexity, greater joy!

May Christmas peace drift up as high as your windows,
and blessings rain down all through your New Year!

I’ll see you down river, I can’t wait, I love you!

I came to fatherhood as delinquent.
A truant. My charter: imprudence.
And then, in one small announcement …  
well, let me put it like this:
There are upheavals in life so incandescent they rival the sun.
Moments so big they threaten to burst the sternum.
Such is the arrival of a child,
the entrance of a small deity into this realm,
coming home to live with you, as though, after all that,
this is somehow ordinary!
And while your parenthood apprenticeship has seen failures,
in the end, all your self-direction,
all your attempts to curate a carefree life,
are happily cast into the wash.

Which is why, in this time of pestilence,
quarantined by requirement,
isolated, as commands authority,
your arms begin to ache
at the absence of your grown children.
Or — vitally and more inclusively — all those
you love at depth, any and all those your mind and soul
have long borne to your heart — such, that you couldn’t
think of your life otherwise.

In such a place the simple sinuous memory of a hug
can bring water to your eyes.

What is more natural than a hug?
What is more unnatural than its codified banishment?
Dying for want of touch,
is not apocryphal.
But even this is eclipsed by our determination to safeguard
those we treasure.

So here we are, straining to see behind the pixels,
reaching through screens with both arms
to cup a face in our hands.

Barring that, we toil in our text mills,
haul words up out of the water,
drum-barked, rough-sawn to the cant,
slabs enough to make a word-raft,
send it out:
I’ll see you down river, I can’t wait, I love you!

LOVE

LOVE

Under the wet awning, a drum, auto-harp and tambourine,
and a singer, familiar with a great range of rejections,
          drums, sings,
strums time, keeps primal harmony,
          despite her broken history.

On the sidewalk under a line of full moon street lamps,
a group, comfortable with each other, are singing Gospel,
despite history and the bitter aftertaste of their sect,
they sing of forgiveness and abandonment
          to God’s mercy.

Through the weather-proof speakers,
outside the plate glass windows of Urban Outfitters,
come the new songs of the latest season,
          lyrics of loss and disloyalty, ash and envy,
and despite the odds come refrains of hearts aflame — 
          all the same old Greek gods.

Everybody in this city is singing
          of the one weary word,
romanticized, anesthetized, stalked, mocked,
soundly bruised and still unbowed, 
          somehow, undying and able,
they sing, for transforming.