Through a phrase from Brahms…which ran through my head for an afternoon, I have suddenly come to see that there is a universality which is not of the conceptual order, that is the key to the idea of music. – Gabriel Marcel

We live on the beaches of Hornby Island. Cheap way to live. But money ebbs. We pick up the quickest employment possible. Port Alberni, and a MacMillan Bloedel sawmill answer the call.

I work the midnight shift. All night I rake up flayed tree flesh beneath the shark-toothed grinders of the debarker; sweep the sawdust from under the headrig and the huge circular bucking saw that slices and partitions each log like Wonder Bread. I shovel it all down a shoot, back into the Alberni Inlet, where the sidewinder boats nose logs toward the jack-ladder to lift them into the mill. I work alone.

Every morning after my shift I stop for breakfast at the Alberni Cafe. Waiting for easy-over eggs, bacon and toast, I step to the jukebox and punch in E11. It’s slow that time of morning and the cook, who prefers Tom T. Hall (especially the song about Clayton Delaney), nevertheless, lets me reach around back and turn it up.

A few seconds and the 45 drops, the turntable whirls to life, the tonearm falls and bounces, the needle finds the groove and the speaker crackles and I hear the B-flat piano chord and the base run that starts high and tumbles, then:

“I packed my bags last night, preflight, zero hour, nine a.m.”

And the coffee’s good. And beyond the grease-gauze windows the sky brightens and shimmers, and I think of home, and I think of being alone, and think of everyone at the Bird House, on Burde Street—friends, some waking up and going to the mill, others, scattered though the house, sleeping. And I feel the pull of solitude and Something beyond; and I feel the equally strong longing of being with friends, who have become family…

“I’m not the man they think I am at home, oh no, no, no, I’m a Rocket man…Rocket man burnin’ out his fuse up here alone.”

And I am. A Rocket Man. Free. Floating above the cracked linoleum and chipped Arborite table, above Port Alberni, high over Cathedral Grove, up over the gulf islands where there’s magic; where boats bob off shore at night and stars shoot the lights out of each other in late summer and streak and fall into the Pacific, sending luminous waves to phosphorescent shores.

It’s a song that’s seared a place inside me, and whenever I hear it, it sets me to long moments of wondering.

Fifty years ago, working alone through those graveyard shifts, the song kept me hinged and lucid—more than escape, it gave the nod to my experience, kept me integrated with the island rock, and connected to a universality beyond the conceptual order—the long view, borne of solitude and the yearning for belonging.

The best version is still from Honky Chateau (1972).

  

 

In the coral hours of late afternoon, we sit on a large driftwood log,
our feet grazing the sand, curls of cigar smoke rising
straight up in the windless air.

Looking out at the ocean, he says, “Unreal.”
Awe’s not uncommon with him: some scene settles,
then summons his sight, to see what’s otherwise unseen.

I look out over the water: one hapless sailboat, its sail furled around
the boom, and in the foreground, two bathers, and a spattering of gulls,
nearer still, a sweet-sour tangle of dry seaweed.

I’m not immune to whatever it is he’s seeing and I almost spout
some thought about Creation, which may not have been false,
only tedious—a fly in the ointment and anointment of the moment.

For wherever he looks, he sees an abundance. God,
spilling out over matter, although he wouldn’t call it God.
“How is it we don’t sense something more?” he asks, fully aware

that his life attests to the receptivity of lasting mystery.
“How can there be evil?” he asks, fully aware that evil lurks
in human hearts and flourishes in indolence.

Then, citing Christ, “Let the dead bury the dead,” says the man,
who’s never read a word of scripture. And I understand that verse
in a way I hadn’t before.

We sit quiet, talk, in that spacious, unclouded way of friendship—
the spiritual audacity and naked security of sinewy trust—
where the ear is not lonely and the eye is not starved.

Sundown, coming on, “Unreal,” he says again.

 

 

Robin sings loudest out on the Shaganappi,
high in the cottonwoods, her shrill celebration of dawn lifts
my soul out of its shoes to touchdown on the helium-green turf.

I lift my eyes in admiration, I lift my coffee in a toast of devotion,
my mind turns to reverence, my instinct is to genuflect.
Everything in me bows down.

It’s Sunday, but my church is with the robin.
It’s Sunday morning and robin-song is my opening
hymn, my sermon and benediction.

Robin is not drunk on honeysuckle, as you may think;
she is filled with the spirit of first-light, the spirit of awe.
Robin cries life in the emancipating dawn.

My mind is the fluff of dandelion, my thoughts, a hive of bees,
but Robin is my rumination, her rhymed refrain,
my veneration, and I stand in quiet exaltation.

One sees with the eyes, comprehends with the mind,
reflects with the soul, still, seeing and comprehending
and reflecting are replete with mystery.

One loves the immediate surround or doesn’t love at all.
One disowns the prison of things, leaves all idolized needs,
to follow the river to its source, or forever thirsts.

It’s Sunday, but it’s Sunday every day.
Praise, and every day, bow down.

 

 

Those days, I was rotten with virtue, and God was on my lips and Jesus in my heart, and I walked like a man lending a hand to the Holy Ghost; the Trinity, always, just happy to see me.

These days, I stammer and halt to reach for the word “God.” Battered as it is, and left for dead by taut materialists and moon-eyed metaphysicians, or tailored and slick-polished by Peale-esque positivists, dewy TV-preachers, or militarized by a garrison of fundamentalists and anvil-eyed God, Guns & Country zealots, or leveraged by Father-God paternalists, as though the “Word became flesh” to reinforce male supremacy.

But yesterday, walking an aspen trail along the Elbow River, a deer leapt in the shallows and we stood blinking… the deer’s slender hooves unsteady on the gravelly bottom, some mystery twitching between us, some intense presence, a single shock of grace;

and in that bewildering, disabling, stoppage of time, I saw the fusion of this doe and those river stones, the aspens and the heavens, and me, a mere atom disappearing into it all and rising more intimately, more fully myself;

and God was in and on the breeze and whispered through the cinder-thick walls of my ignorance, (my unconscious devotion to the banality of my ego); and meaning flooded in, the truth of love and charity, flooded in; and faith was self-evident and God, too obvious, too present, to need a name.

Everything changed. And nothing changed.

I asked my heart, is this enough to hang a faith on, and so a life? This “spot of time,” this mystic clearing, that will surely recede and fade in the rolodex of weeks and scroll of time.

Let it be. Then. This is my faith, my tenuous discipline to keep alive an ember of memory, to breathe on daily, failing often, yet knowing that forgetting is poison, and breathing is faithfulness to the next grace coming.