Well, everything changes all the time, and that includes me. I don't work any more. Except for some things I like doing. That'll change too -- my savings are exhausted. I'm really happy. I have some ideas about what I'm doing next, but it's not time to share them yet.
I don't know whether to continue with this blog. I started it a year ago because I needed to work some things out about what I was doing and living with. I've stopped living with the things that were wrong for me.
I think this is a long leave of absence -- but I'm not sure. I'm sorry -- I don't know what to say.
Find a clean cloth for the kitchen table, the red and blue one
you made that cold winter in Montana. Spread out
your paper and books. Tune the radio to the jazz station.
Look at the bright orange safflowers you found last August—
how well they've held their color next to the black-spotted cat.
Make some egg coffee, in honor of all the people
above the Arctic Circle. Give thanks to the Sufis,
who figured out how to brew coffee
from the dark, bitter beans. Remark
on the joyfulness of your dishes: black and yellow stars.
Reminisce with your lover about the history of this kitchen
where, between bites of cashew stir fry,
you first kissed each other on the mouth. Now that you're hungry,
toast some leftover cornbread, spread it with real butter,
honey from bees that fed on basswood blossoms.
The window is frosted over, but the sun's casting an eye
over all the books. Open your Spanish book.
The season for sleeping is over.
The pots and pans: quiet now, let them be.
It will be a short day.
Sit in the kitchen as long as you can, reading and writing.
At sundown, rub a smidgen of butter
on the western windowsill
to ask the sun:
Come back again tomorrow.
I was at SandBay, off Georgian Bay, off Lake Huron, last week, just outside of Parry Sound.I don’t know if a sound is a Canadian geographic term or if it’s general – a sound is a large, wide body of water that connects two other bodies of water – in this case, Georgian Bay and FiveMileBay.There’s Parry Island on the east side of Georgian Bay, and the Sound is north of it, and Five Mile Bay is south of it and feeds back into Georgian Bay.A little confusing.
We went on a couple of picnics a short boat ride from my sister-in-law’s cottage. On PicnicIsland, where else?Here’s a couple of pictures I took at PicnicIsland.We are on the Canadian Shield here, an enormous slab of granite that includes Greenland, most of eastern Canada from the Great Lakes to the Arctic Ocean, and the Adirondack Mountains are part of it too.In the Pleistocene era giant continental ice sheets 1,500 to 3,000 metres thick receded over it – they carried off most of the topsoil, exposing the bedrock and carving lakes and rivers into the rock.There are grooves cut in the bare rock, left by those ice sheets.I just love it there – for me, it’s another one of those “thin places” that Ellie told us about recently.
I was taking pictures of those trees, and trying to remember a poem our Grade 8 teacher, Mrs. Dyment, had us memorize.All I could remember was the line, “and the pine trees leaned one way”.Thank heavens for Google.Here it is (and by the way, I didn’t understand this when I was 13, and it reinforces my view that children should not be made to memorize adult poetry like this or “In Flanders Fields” or prayers like The 23rd Psalm and the Our Father):
The Lonely Land
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the grey and cloud-piles sky
and in the bay
blown spume and windrift
and thin, bitter spray
snap
at the whirling sky;
and the pine trees lean one way.
A wild duck
calls to her mate
and the ragged
and passionate tones
stagger and fall,
and recover,
and stagger and fall,
on these stones –
are lost
in the lapping of water
on the smooth, flat stones.
This is a beauty
of dissonance,
this resonance
of stony strand,
this smoky cry
curled over a black pine
like a broken
and wind-battered branch,
when the wind bends
the tops of the pines,
and curdles the sky
from the north.
This is the beauty
of strength
broken by strength
and still strong.
A.J.M. Smith
It also made me think about Tom Thomson, member of the Group of Seven, a Canadian painter who loved and painted and died in northern Ontario.He’s a Canadian cultural icon for certain sure.I think if you went to school here in the ‘50’s through the ‘70’s, you’d be able to look at a painting and guess by the style it was by Thomson, even if you hadn’t seen it before.Beautiful paintings.A fisherman and canoeist.Thomson’s death adds to his legendary status.He went canoeing in AlgonquinPark one day, and was never seen again.The official verdict was accidental death by drowning, but there have been rumours of arguments and speculation that it was homicide, ever since. That's not what matters, though, the paintings are.
There used to be a professional dance series every winter at the local university. One of the women I went to church with, faculty wife, would buy tickets and six or eight of us would go, and go somewhere expensive for pretty desserts after.
One time we had seats in about the second row of this really small theatre. We think about ballet as airborne, ethereal, delicate ... We saw sweat, and the muscles that tightened and clenched, nipples erect, heard the "thump" after she leapt and landed, and always the footfalls or the slide of her foot across the stage was audible. It wasn't ballet she was doing; but it's one of those, "You can never go back from knowing it's like this," moments.
She was very tall, too tall to be a ballerina in a company, blonde, slender, elegant. After the intermission, she was wearing a yellow leotard. Dandelion yellow. It was just her. She did this dance. She had no props, okay, just her and the music, but she made me see what she was doing so clearly.
She had a bag of rocks. She carried it or dragged it everywhere, and it bent her double trying to shift it. She hated the bag of rocks. And yet ... She'd put it down in a corner of the stage and move away from it, and all the time she was away she'd watch it, then go back and get it. She unpacked it and took out some or all of these rocks ... and then she put them back. They hampered everything she did: got in her way, slowed and bent her, hurt her sometimes. And she couldn't give them up.
There has to have been a transition I can't remember; I remember the ending. She squatted on the stage and her body strained hard and she reached between her legs with both hands and gave birth to this bag of rocks. The part I can't remember is how we knew it was inside her; it had been outside, but giving birth is unmistakable. I was in labour with Tom from two a.m. until they found out he was oxygen-deficient and did a section cuz the labour wouldn't progress, the cervix needs to open 10cm and mine never got past 6, even with the pitocyn drip they used from 9 a.m. to make the labour. I had hard contractions every three minutes from 9 a.m. when they started the drip til 8 or so when they said we have to do the C-section.
I have never done anything that was harder physically. It starts out being the kind of hurt your muscles GET from labour, from work. Carrying or pushing. I think now Lamaze breathing is a type of self-hypnosis -- it didn't work for me. It hurt more than I could have believed: full-intensity every three minutes, there wasn't time for me to get a normal breath in between and I was sweating and crying. Months later, the resident who'd been with me told me that there was something about the angles of the uterus and pelvic saddle bones. That baby would never have come out; I'da just kept doing that until one or both of us died, if it wasn't for the section, and I'd always have to have sections if I had another baby.
So somehow, this dancer convinced us she could give birth to this bag of rocks, and she did. After that she was able to treat it kindly or lovingly, and then walk away from it forever, and you could see in her posture that she WAS free, finally.
I've always thought of my own bag of rocks since then. The people-pleasing and the lies, mostly, for me -- they were a bag of rocks, heavy ones, I carried around all the time and they prevented me. And I couldn't leave them, and sometimes I was even aware, this is me putting another rock in my bag. And God gave me what I needed to put it down.
I did a course at DivCollege, we read St. Benedict’s Rule, and had to write out our own Rule of Life.“Shit,” I thought, “I don’t have one.”But I do.I had to learn, the hard way, the Twelve Steps, starting over 20 years ago.So in my daily life, I do things that St. Benedict would have recognized – I pray.I meet and talk and listen with others on the journey.I do something just like an examen.I read St., Francis of Assisi’s prayer, “God, make me a channel of your peace …”And I’ve been told that the way to get the things I want into my life is to LIVE that prayer.
One of the most important things, and hardest, was Confession.You know, Anglicans are kind of dry about confession.We do it all in a group in the service on Sunday morning, and no-one has to say anything out loud.There’s no private confession on Saturday evenings.That’s probably good – how would you STAY in a state of grace all through Saturday night?
Step Four is “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”Step Five is “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”Ugh.Step Six is “Became entirely willing to have God remove all these defects of character,” and Seven is “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”
Four and Five were very hard.There were things I was deeply ashamed of having done.And the person I was going to tell – well, people who were supposed to love me had this habit of going away and leaving me alone when I didn’t do what I was supposed to.I had to tell someone I love the worst things I’d done – I was very afraid of what would happen next.He’d go away.I knew HE wouldn’t, but that’s what had always happened and I couldn’t see past that.What was more frightening was knowing what would happen if I didn’t.I’d be the one who went away.I’d have stopped being honest with the one person in my life I’d committed to myself to be honest with … and I’d stop being able to face him if I wasn’t.And, I’d go back to the life I had before, when I acted like a good girl, and did what I was told, and wanted to explode all the time.I didn’t, mostly, I did other self-destructive things.On the first Sunday in Lent, last year, I did it.I gave it all up to him.And that’s when I got free of that bag of rocks.I was like a bunch of helium balloons, that someone had let go the string of.
On the Thursday, I met with my Parish Priest, and did “The Rite of Reconciliation of a Penitent”.Confession and Absolution.I’d told him – I’m not telling you what I DID – I’ve done that.When the time came to fill in the blank, I just said, “The things I gave up to Bob on Sunday night.”It was enough.Steps Six and Seven.Then there was making amends …That’s a story for another day.
I go back sometimes and look at my bag of rocks and pick it up, and sometimes I even carry around new rocks for a while, an experiment ... But way deep inside, where babies grow, I KNOW that bag of rocks is NOT me anymore, and I don't have to have it, and I know how to put them down if I do carry them. And I'm upright and free.
All right, having a baby is hard, hard work. It was awful when I was going through it, and I'll admit, I begged them to turn off the pitocyn, just for 10 minutes so I could stop crying and get a grip. They couldn't. Poor Steve, the resident, was almost in tears telling me he couldn't.
AND I GOT THE BABY AND I'D DO IT ALL AGAIN IN A HEARTBEAT. Your body forgets pain. I remember that it hurt that much and it is impossible to go down inside and make it hurt again like that so I can feel it. Women have more than one baby because your body forgets and the end results are worth everything you give for them. I remember the shame and fear I had before I told someone what I’d done and who I’d been.But they don’t hurt me inside any more.And feeling like this is worth what I did for it.
All that was triggered by the Inward/Outward message in my e-mail box this morning:
It's heavy to drag...
William Stafford
It's heavy to drag, this big sack of what you should have done. And finally you can't lift it any more. Someone says, "Come on," and you just look at them. Trees are waiting, mountains. You never intended that it should come to this.
But Now has arrived and is looking straight at you, the way a lion does when thinking it over, and anything can happen. It's time for the cavalry or maybe the Lone Ranger. But they won't come. Maybe the music will spill over and start it all again. Maybe.
Source: The Way It Is, New & Selected Poems
I was gonna share that with a friend and say, "I know what this is," and it turned into this post. I never intended “that big sack of what I should have done” to come to what it was, and the Lone Ranger isn't gonna be able to rid me of what's inside me. But the Now can if I'm prepared to cooperate with it. And the lion looking at you thinking it over ... Lions have been important for me the last couple of years – two years ago, I listened to Bruce Cockburn alla time -- "Had another dream about the lions at the door and they weren't so frightening as they were the time before and I'm thinking about eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me." And now, lions and ecstasy are linked for me.
You’ve heard this before, if you’ve been hanging around, but it’s a new video and a live version.
Margaret Atwood is certainly a Canadian Cultural Icon.She’s been publishing since the early 1960’s – she has a terrific volume of much-honoured public work.When I was in high school in the early 1970’s, we read Surfacing.When I was in college we read Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature and The Edible Woman.Lady Oracle is still one of my favourites, and my sister has every Atwood novel, first edition, hard cover, usually autographed.I’ve been reading poetry this year, and I have Morning in the Burned House and The Door on my bedside table right now.
This is a list, from Wikipedia, of her published novels and books of poetry – there are short stories, anthologies, children’s books and non-fiction also listed.
She’s an activist – a feminist and environmentalist.I tried to find a link to her reading some of her own work – but I found this video instead, and I like it.
On February 14th, a friend in Tennessee sent me an article on Ted Kooser’s Valentine poems.She’d heard him interviewed on NPR, and reading some of his Valentines.I loved them, and I’d been given some book store gift certificates for Christmas, so I ordered the book with the collected poems. (The site hasn't been updated since 2005, so the book's not shown.)
The more I read his poetry, the more I loved it.Right now, I’m reading his Delights and Shadows (2004) and also The Home Poetry Repair Manual (2005).You know the way the information age takes you places – today I found “American Life in Poetry”, a weekly newsletter, with a poem, and Kooser’s very short introduction to the poem.I’ve been reading back issues (not all 162 of them) of the newsletter, and I subscribed to it.
Column Number 84 is a poem called “Amaryllis” by Connie Wanek of Duluth, Minnesota.
Amaryllis
A flower needs to be this size to conceal the winter window, and this color, the red of a Fiat with the top down, to impress us, dull as we've grown.
Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb half above the soil stuck out its green tongue and slowly, day by day, the flower itself entered our world,
closed, like hands that captured a moth, then open, as eyes open, and the amaryllis, seeing us, was somehow undiscouraged. It stands before us now
as we eat our soup; you pour a little of your drinking water into its saucer, and a few crumbs of fragrant earth fall onto the tabletop.
My Mum’s birthday was November 6th.Every year, I’d buy her an amaryllis bulb for her birthday.She would plant it in an 18-inch long terracotta planter shaped like a camel, lying down – the flower would grow where the hump oughtta be.It would bloom by Christmas.Mum loved them for the same reasons I didn’t – they’re huge, and bright red and ostentatiously flamboyant.That’s how she liked things.I like things smaller and quieter, modest and reserved.African violets.Forget-me-nots.Nicotiana.But I bought them for her, the reddest ones, at the supermarket.
Except, in 2006, it was different.Her cancers were diagnosed on September 21st.Thursday.On the weekend, my sister said to me, “She said the doctors said months.Christmas?”I said, no, not Christmas.“Her birthday, if she can start to eat.”So, I bought the Amaryllis bulb early that year.A friend had taken me to the Mum Show in the greenhouses in Gage Park, Hamilton.A commercial nursery had a table there, with much fancier, more expensive, bulbs than I usually bought.I bought one with red and white striped flowers.I gave it to her right away, hoping she’d see it bloom.
Well, she didn’t.It bloomed about 10 days after she died.Two stalks, four blooms the size of dinner plates at the top of each one.They looked obscene, sitting there in the middle of the dining room table, while they were still two green, growing shoots.I was there the day they bloomed, and my aunt too.I sent it home with her in her car.It bloomed for a very long time.
I’m only writing this because the poem made me cry. She didn't believe in God. The day before her birthday, she asked me if I still believed in an afterlife. I said yes -- no other matter or energy just disappears. I asked if Burnie, her second husband and the one she loved best, had believed in an afterlife, and she said she didn't know; they'd never talked about it. I told her that a few days before he'd died, I'd been sitting in bed with him, both of us drinking diet Cokes I'd smuggled in. (He was on restricted fluids.) That I'd said, "I'm going to miss you, Burnie," and he'd said he'd miss me too. I think that sounds like he was expecting to be somewhere he would.
In the last few days, we told Mum it was okay to go; that Burnie and my brother Steve were waiting for her. I do believe she heard, and I do believe they were waiting for her, with all my heart.
I’d been thinking about saving this up for a Friday night, to be a cultural icon, cuz Bruce Cockburn is one.But I changed my mind.
Two years ago last month, God got hold of me in a way I’d never felt before.This song became the anthem of my healing.“Had another dream about the lions at the door, and they weren’t so frightening as they were before.And I’m thinking about eternity.Some kind of ecstasy’s got a hold on me.”
It’s not that the lions don’t show up at the door.It’s that I wasn’t so scared of them any more.Eternity.Ecstasy.That’s what I was able to pay attention to.
Tonight, the lions seem to be right outside the door, and I’m not so aware of the ecstasy’s hold on me.I suspect that like the lions, it’s still here – I’m just wonderin’ where it is right now.I’ve asked for help, and now this is my finding expedition.
I sure hope you guys all like Bruce Cockburn, cuz I love him and you’re bound to hear more.Still writing great protest songs, and songs about God, and the poetry of his songs speaks to me.And he does great fingerwork on that guitar.
I haven’t left you anything new in a week.Quick update – Dad’s home from the hospital; supposed to be seeing a specialist de temps en temps, on restricted fluids, and very low salt.In the hospital last week, I said, “Are you supposed to stay on the low-salt thing when you get home, Dad?”“Supposed to.”“Yeah, that’s what I thought …”I might post what I’ve felt and written, and I’ll warn you in the title – it ain't fun.
But for tonight, I'm tired and need uplifting, so …Everyone, meet Moxy Fruvous and “The King of Spain”.The video quality here’s awful; the audio’s good enough to hear the lyrics.This song was their first single, off the Bargainville album of 1994.
For those of you east of the pond or south of the 49th Parallel, “the Habs” are the Montréal Canadiens, of the NHL.
I’ve just watched Leonard Cohen singing “Hallelujah” his own self over at PJ’s, and I liked it more than I usually like his singing. (Except for “Suzanne”.) So here’s some Leonard Cohen to enjoy in silence.
Beneath my hands your small breasts are the upturned bellies of breathing fallen sparrows.
Wherever you move I hear the sounds of closing wings of falling wings.
I am speechless because you have fallen beside me because your eyelashes are the spines of tiny fragile animals.
I dread the time when your mouth begins to call me hunter.
When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful I want to summon the eyes and hidden mouths of stone and light and water to testify against you.
I want them to surrender before you the trembling rhyme of your face from their deep caskets.
When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful I want my body and my hands to be pools for your looking and laughing.
I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumours on our lips. it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside the door.
For everyone who suffered through the version at MadPriest’s earlier today, and especially for those who didn’t. This one’s from the 2005 Juno (Canadian Music) Awards.
And MP posted a better version here. And it's really lovely.
Last year, I spent a lot of time with my Auntie Jane.She had had breast cancer about five years ago, and it metastasized into her liver.The chemo really did slow down the rate of growth of the tumours.It also gave her peripheral neuropathy, and she progressively lost feeling in her feet and hands in the months before her death.She couldn’t walk, hold a fork sometimes, turn pages in her book.She couldn’t read her Bible, because she’d tear the pages as she tried to turn them.
When she was still able to read, she borrowed a book from her oldest sister, my other aunt.One day last May she asked me to copy a poem out of the book, and e-mail it to her daughter, who lives two thousand miles away.I guess this is the right place to say, we have a family of compulsive gardeners.The book she found this poem in is called "The Shape of a Year", by Jean Hersey.I believe it was published in the mid-1970’s.
The seed that is to grow must lose itself as seed;
And they that creep may graduate through chrysalis to wings.
Wilt thou then, O mortal, cling to husks which falsely seem to you the self?
-- Wu Ming Fu 12th century poet and philosopher
And the frontispiece of the book has this:
If your true nature has the creative force of Nature itself, wherever you go you will see all things as fishes leaping and wild geese flying,
-- Zen philosophy
Last year, on April 15th, I moved out of the place I’d lived in for 12 years with my husband and our adult son, into a room.It’s a university neighbourhood – the houses almost all have basement apartments, 3 bedrooms, share the kitchen and bath.I don’t have roommates and I love the family upstairs.And, I’m a grad student.A friend in London, England told me on the weekend, all his daffodils are blooming.I cried.I miss my garden.
