Mr. P's Words

Two Titanics

2012-01-30T15:09:00.001-08:00

Analogies often run aground. Two old codgers, like great ships in somewhat laborious progress upon the waters of life, are my dear friends. The one I've known for about five or so years, the other for some thirty. Both are older than me, the one being in his mid 60's, the other in his early 70's. And 'codger', though seemingly a discourteous word for older souls, I see as an honorarium bestowed on one who cogitates, a thinker upon our thinking. Both converse readily. But their thoughts are in stark contrast, despite their physical similarities. Lanky and lean, charming and witty, both are old world gentleman, both are considerate and genteel. Yet the younger becomes bleak and dark of outlook. He wears the wake of his progress as a scourge upon mankind. The older is accepting and integrative, and though physically hobbled by a recent stroke, carries himself with an air that declares the world and its constituents to have a right to be here. Yet the Titanic analogy, inasmuch as one is about the imminent demise of the ship of state, and that the other is about our overcoming that demise, fits. We passengers, caught in the moment of seeing our worldly progress for what it is, have much of a decision to make.

Comfortable with the Titanic comparison, my 60+ year old friend was at pains to point out that we were less likely to strike the proverbial ice-berg than to find ourselves without supplies, without sustenance for all of us, and without a harbor to save ourselves in the gathering storms. Our world is going to hell in a hand-basket, and the carrier is ourselves, mankind, or at least, charted and steered by those in power. We grow too large for ourselves. We are the cancer on the host. We are too late to altar our fate. Yes, mixing metaphors is as much a part of the conversation as are the Malthusian sensibilities. His 'the glass is more than half-empty' pronouncements has mankind much misdirected, mix--aligned, mis-informed, and basically blind. Meanwhile those of us who can dance, dance foolhardily to the band, others promenade the decks or blithely sleep below, and a host of unwitting others do little but serve the doomsday ship. It's unfair!

Tsho! It is difficult to come away from that bleakness in my friend with a sense of enlightenment. The dire predicament of mankind, if not the anger that he feels toward all shipmates, is quite the downer. Yet he is informed, politically astute, has written a book concerning the demise of the forests, is cultured and world travelled and engaging; but at root he feels we are withering up, our resources are too rapidly diminishing for us to replenish them, and though some of us, like Noah, may survive, the masses are awash.

Being with my other friend is like taking a breath of fresh air up on the outer decks while pausing to observe life. Man overcame, overcomes, progresses. Horrendous history is the story of survival. We are what we are, but through all the gloom and doom there is yet again and again renewed opportunity, renewed venture, renewed discovery. Modern man evolved from caveman; space-age man evolves from us. And though we are so rapacious and ravenous and ridiculous as to not yet collectively see our responsibility to the health of the whole, we shall get there, heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will. Optimism beams from my friend, he who has seen over 70 years of life, he who sees mankind wobbling and wavering and disjointed and even diseased, but loves it for itself, for its potential, for its possibilities, and for its connection to ourselves.

Sacred, or Scared?

2012-01-27T13:58:00.000-08:00

Sacred Sex (part B of The Sleeping Dog essays)

Birds and bees do it. Dogs and mice and cats and rats do it. There is little that is sacred about body parts rubbing together, instinctually or intentionally, until meaning makes it so. But in giving the act meaning there are multiple layers to be evolved toward fruition that is in and of itself still but a temporary moment of the livelong day, however blissfully protracted. Such is the subject of Sacred Sex at the Sleeping Dog Retreat, with the rain thrumming on the skin of the skylight in the octagonal sanctuary. The participants in the lecture now commence asking questions, making comments, and their well articulated differentiations between male and female, the pain-body of centuries of enculturation, enslavement, expectation, and mankind's selfishness unravels, releases in the universe. The psychic rub-rubbing in the hubbub of cerebral contentions here stirs at my thoughts.

Since any and everybody is capable of some capacity or other of participation in sex, in whatever guise it takes, there is little that is special or privileged or sacrosanct about it, unless we make it so. Every virgin wonders about the naked relevance of the physical moment, and usually, in western culture, is given to understand the specialness of the emotional entanglement as well as the physical responsibility sex involves. Experience soon relegates degrees of participation, degrees of feeling, degrees of enjoyment, and degrees of the attendant hoards of psychosomatic problems that enliven our world; it is shame and guilt and desire and envy and jealousy and power and lust and insufficiency that spirals around within us as we seek more and more to be fulfilled. Surcease and celibacy notwithstanding, there continues a mental agitation, physical discombobulation, and the fundamental want to participate. It drives our species. It drives nature. It drives, or we take control. But can we take control out of our heads and while into our feelings?

Control is not necessarily a pejorative word. It connotes the awareness of responsibility and direction and practice and participation as it impacts another, let alone all others. At best, it might be argued, self-control might curtail an unchecked population explosion. At worst, it might be argued, self-control might be repressive and punitive. Yet self-control is the very thing that elevates sacred sex as an enlightened gift given to another and to the self from the fulness of one's being; a free feeling, or why think of it as sacred at all?

"Do you know how much I love you?" It is an accepted phrase; we understand the gift to mean 'an enormous amount'. Yet it connotes that there are degrees and levels to love, and sadly, that love itself is conditional; or else, that love is apportioned more to me than to another. After all, if love is given to every-body, when is it sacred? If sex can be given to any-body, when is it sacred? Is there not a confusion about them being the same thing, sex and love? Virgins, especially, wrestle with that question. Experience teaches some of us that they can be very different indeed. Sacredness, in the fulness of its participation and enlightenment, is about a total release of inhibition and curtailments, a complete giving of the self in absolute assurance to the oneness of the moment, and as such, is rare. It is the very checks and balances and insecurities and inhibitions and uncertainties, I surmise, that might well stop us from having the other kind of sex at all. Complete freedom makes sacred any act to be elevated above the ordinary, the usual, the mundane, the selfish, and the expected. "Lighten up," some say. Well, precisely! Ha!

To Let Sleeping Dogs Lie?

2012-01-22T09:57:00.000-08:00

Something there is in us that does not like certain subjects mentioned. We prefer not to be bothered. Yet a group of us voluntarily entered the womb-like sanctuary of Victoria's Sleeping Dog Retreat, knowing full well we'd have to face into some uncomfortable stuff. Under heavy rain on the central skylight of the large octagonal, the room thrummed. Like reverse osmosis to a portal in the heavens, I thought, the dormant energy here seeks escape to the universe. But ensconced in the warmth of the gathering of laymen, professionals, counsellors, psychologists and their ilk, and seated in a semi-circle, all pointed toward the mesmerizing speaker, we soon succumbed to the lilt and waft of words that plucked at the unbidden images of the present, past, and then pointed toward the future. After all, which of us have not been wounded? Who has not hurt the self? Who remains a victim, a conduit to animosity and anger and vengeance and hate? Out with it. Out! Or should one simply let the sleeping dogs lie?

That innocence should be stripped from a child, literally and psychically, and that shame and secrets should attend the soul so much so that it now prefers to lie asleep in the otherwise engaging streets of life, is sad indeed. And at which point is the inner being, having succumbed, now to come alert? When threatened? When it perceives threat? When it hears the footsteps of strangers, or otherwise, and knows it has to move? The animal in us, anima or animus, easily yields to a fight or flight response. After all, like dogs through the centuries we psychically continue to trample the grass underfoot, to circle about three if not four times before proverbially laying ourselves down. It is our habits that easily remain. And having chosen our spot, having given in to the world-weariness of awareness and awake-ness, we sleep, perchance to dream. But for many, albeit unconsciously, we sleep with an ear cocked, an eye open. Fear inhibits freedom.

Shakespeare named many a curmudgeon a Dog. Yet the Buddha, Jesus, and all that is God would have us be forgiving, compassionate, understanding, integrative, and absorbing. Accepting is a different thing. Acceptance comes with condoning. And worse, accepting gives license for a really dirty dog to continue its defecation on the dignity and rights and innocence of those who come after one's own demeaning. Out! It is worth calling the dog out. It is worth facing down the creature and commanding it to desist or suffer the consequences. But how shall a little child do so? How shall an infected child call out when he has neither the physical strength, the maturational insight, nor the necessary support structures intact should he leap the fence? Suffer the children, the most dangerous of the dogs would bay. Others beguile. Out, Shakespeare would rage!

My crippled uncle knew not completely what he did. His actions stole from my boyhood the privilege to tell anyone my whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Shame collared me. Eventually I realized that the man was not malicious, merely self-serving. He could not help himself, or he might have redressed his desires. So too for the victims that attended The Sleeping Dog sessions. We each had our own reasons for being there. The problem for me though, is not so much that one lets oneself be free from the past, but that one now does what one can to stop (in Shakespeare's most derogatory terms) the dogs of our world from soiling the innocence and rights of others. Shame creeps into the shade of the soul, and lingers there not as a byproduct of enlightenment, but as a ball and chain that would better be used to pin down any dangerous dog, asleep or not.

A Maid for Memory (given The Help)

2012-01-21T22:26:00.000-08:00

Tsho! An essentially South African exclamation, it haunts me still. From her aged frame and care-worn soul it was the singular sound of disappointment. Her wizened face has by now likely assumed the mind's smudge of so very many other maids along the way, and I think her name was 'Hannah.' Not a Mrs. H., or a Madam, or a Lady, but just Hannah, or was it even some other name? She was possibly old enough to be my mother, or maybe even my grandmother. But back then, she was just the old maid belonging to another household, my girlfriend's household, in fact, over forty years ago.

We human beings have been like that, are like that: dismissive. The accord we give another is generally relational to our sense of kismet, our sense of an other's worthiness in comparison to our own. It's the birds of a feather flock together syndrome. It's the gathering of the similarly dressed, the similarly educated, the other most like ourselves, generally speaking. Racial and cultural differences apart, we naturally gravitate toward that which is familiar, expected, ingrained, habitual. And so, in the youth of my twenties, and in the presumptions of my privilege of race, circumstance, education, and culture, I easily took from old Hannah, the domestic, the maid, the very thing she'd been waiting very many years to deserve.

Canadians often ask me about South Africa. In the 70's it was a constant wrestle with change. It still is. But whereas the boil of too many people is now its problem, back then it was the yoke of legalized oppression. In the apartheid system prior to Mandela's 1994 release any person not of white skin as a birthright was doomed to servility. Sitting on a whites-only-bench was not allowed (let alone the same toilet.) Apartheid yoked the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Zulu, the Xhosa, and any and all other Bantu into the same envelope of separation from the whites. Apartheid relegated, mandated, legalized, and doomed non-whites to perpetual and inescapable subservience. Tsho! It was a difficult country to live in. Still is. The tensions of the opposites was palpable. Yes, people were kind and considerate and generous and thoughtful, but under the yoke of societal expectations and legalized differentiation (the maid was not allowed next to you in the car) there was a cloud of constant suppression. The USA based movie, The Help, highlights what was going on with social racism in the 50's. But we all are now well past that, aren't we?

My University of Cape Town friend and I wanted a washing machine. We'd secured a cottage up on Klaasensweg Drive, in the posh neighborhood overlooking the famous Kirstenbosch Gardens, and we'd furnished it, held weekend parties, become regulars on the road with my 20 year-old black Rover and his new blue Fiat, and we generally lived the life of privileged students on our way to becoming real men (whatever that might signify). My girlfriend mentioned that her family was thinking of replacing their machine. And somewhere in the transitions from the request to a price to collecting it I knew full well that their old Hannah, who'd worked with the family for very many years, wanted that old washer, but could not afford it. Or was it just that she did not have the right to claim her priority of interest in it? I knew that. But still, I ended up taking it. Tsho, indeed!

At Any Age!

2012-01-15T16:05:00.001-08:00

"I am a nonagenarian," she beams, testing me, her thick waves of silvered hair glistening in the refracted light as her head beside me bobs in the shallow end of the pool. "When I was your age I could swim like you. I'm Pat. How old are you?" I blink the chlorine out of my eyes and respond, suddenly feeling embarrassed at my sound, "Just a sexagenarian, I fear, ha!" She doesn't miss a beat. "Oh, still a youngster! Well, I can still drive!" Her hands come up out of the water and they drip as she mimes a steering wheel. "And I volunteer at the Victoria Operatic Society; I paint sets! Also, I send my knitting to the poor in Africa, and... I wish that mother would shush her child. Dreadful. In my time children were to be seen and not heard, you know!" I look into her eyes, smile disarmingly, and keep quiet. "Well, I'm Patricia. Pat. Hello...? Ah, Richard. Well, I must do my lap, bye!" And she bobs off in a dog paddle down the length of the pool, taking her bright blue eyes, remarkably young looking face, and vibrant buoyancy with her.

Perhaps I shall never see her again. In the long days of our melding with person upon persons, around whom we can maneuver with nary a nod, we are much like busy ant colonies, trudging in a general direction. Ever noticed how one or two stop for a moment to engage? They appear to pass on some conspiratorial message or other, then scurry on. The meeting between Pat and I, immersed in the fluidity of the moment, was like that. Her message of being engaged in life may well be transcribed as the proverbial 6.6: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise."

Being. Doing. Progressing. Contributing. We differentiate as we age. My friend with whom I go to the swimming pool is a septuagenarian. He brings his painful leg along. He brings his stoicism and his patience with life too. Sometimes he picks me up; other times I do the driving. His physical posture and evident age now hides his once having been the Principal of a thousand plus strong High School. We see people as they now appear. Who would think that he once tilted his lance at windmills, galloped off into the sunsets? Our 30 year relationship has run the gamut of our separate and together decades. We once lived together. We've been on shared vacations, hikes, done moving days, visited, phone-called, and commiserated. We've been best man at each other's weddings. A friendship is built of moments such as these. And in among these lines and the many moments actually lived are the many times I've taken him for granted too.

When he got into my car I did not ask how his weekend went with the four new dinner guests they'd put together. I forgot. I had my own agenda. I spoke of recently reading Brene Brown's 'Gifts of Imperfection', paradoxically, and we delved into the complexity of being wholehearted; the vulnerability of being fully authentic, and we both articulated the caveat: "Give not your truth that others may trample it." Now, if I didn't say that, then somebody, somewhere, is most likely being quoted. We much depend on reciprocity.

It is in the moment of meeting a new Pat, or an aged friend, or mayhap even a teenager that we deem or are deemed by the other be fit, to be worthy, to be authentic. Yet where our truly realistic life lies, I submit, is in not only what we practically do with ourselves at any given moment, but how we spiritually see ourselves in the swim of life, at any age.

Reciprocity

2012-01-11T20:23:00.001-08:00

She was seven or maybe even eighteen years younger when I first met her. I was busy working on a very large oil painting on a friend's deck on Denman Island, off the west coast of Canada. That late afternoon's sunset I climbed a golden cliff face up to her from the shore of the mile wide Lambert Channel. Calibra, my kayak, lay outlined like a dark torpedo up on a high rock way down below. Rugby legs, she called me. Twenty years ago. She was visiting her cousin, a war-bride, who still dwells on Denman. And now, this coming April, that same Nancy is about to turn 90. Lady Nancy Sinclair, my letters to far off Australia are addressed. Thirty years my senior, petite, blue eyed, blonde haired, she had had five children of her own. Yet somewhere in our very first meeting on that Kluane deck there grew a kismet between us that has reached across the distance and across time, and our communication has been frequent, steady, reciprocal. She at first returned every three or four years; once stood for me as my Matron of Honor; but of late her health has prohibited the long flight. And I've never been able to get to Australia. In the meantime, Lady Nancy, without intention, has taught me the fine art of letter writing.

How, where, why, what, when, who, and please tell me more are the touchstones of her paragraphs. There is hardly a sentence I can write without her remarking in some way about it, her asking me for more, or her letting me know that she can relate. Still, in the years and years' turning of the handwritten pages we have not yet discussed the death of Ramses, the relevance of the X-Files, and the likes of Gillian Anderson. Amazing how things are interconnected. Amazing how way leads on to way. Denman Island was so much more than just Passing Through. I happened to be there the day Ramses arrived.

Esoteric references are indeed mostly understood by the initiated. All the more reason to ask questions. The value of intimate letter writing is that one hardly need clarify who 'M' is, since both reader and writer are familiar. And like any good James Bond movie, the mind is full of imagery that fills in the blanks, so that when the Penny drops, we know at least one of the Bonds will be there to catch her. But it is in asking what may otherwise be overlooked, or what led to the penny being dropped, or how Ramzes and the X-Files get to configure here, in the first instance, that real reciprocity is invited.

The vitality of our Lady persists. Her twin brother, Denys Street, was one of the famous fifty trying The Great Escape. And Lady Nancy has not just that sad event, but so many other tragedies to relate as well. Yet all is done in a spirit of forgiveness, compassion, integration, understanding of the times, of history, and of the ways of man. And so, for Lady Nancy, there is no shriveling up, there is a perpetual interest in things other than the self, in things beyond our ken. It is in making things interesting that we are defined.

So when I write, or respond, I have Lady Nancy's lessons trotting like black Ramses about me. It's a point of reciprocity; it's about taking an interest in things sufficient to inquire, rather than expecting life to enquire after you. That's even what the great black himself did, one early sunrise in 2006 on Denman's Xenophon farm. He whickered softly, came over to where I practiced my lines for Tuesdays with Morrie, and nudged with his great black nose when I stopped. We give interest; it inspires others to go on.

New Year Resolution?

2011-12-31T15:52:00.001-08:00

"Fifty million is just enough to get me into trouble," my friend remarks as we gave him a Lotto Max ticket for part of his Christmas gift. We sit in his fabulous new house up on his private hill, overlooking a sprawling twenty acres, his horses in the barn snugged up against the winter cold, his three vehicles and a new farm-quad ensconced in the great garage, a log fire ablaze before us, glasses of excellent and very expensive 'Two-left-feet' red wine being quaffed, a delicious meal being digested, and the two young children now quietly abed. "You see," he continues, "I want to invest in a spaceship."

This much from the same man who at the start of dinner tells the delightful story of the happy fisherman who sits every day fishing from the dock, selling his fish to have just enough money. A high- powered financier tries to inspire him to invest in boats, a factory, specialized outlets, all in the name of eventually being so well off that he can retire to fishing from the dock, ...and be happy. Ha! Yes, we spoke of the value of giving others' work, and we spoke of economics, but in the end it was the worthiness of one's moment by moment existence that became our predominant focus. How to sustain that?

New Year's resolutions are a strange mix of wishful thinking and taking stock. There is the gratefulness we express for what we have, for what we've accomplished, and for the immediacy of friends and family and food and warmth. But there's more. There's this wish that gets articulated, albeit reluctantly, vulnerably, for the things one does not yet have. One person wants to quit smoking; another to lose weight; to take time to play more; to do more exercise; to watch out for too much alcohol; to stake more personal boundaries; to claim more personal rights; to learn to manage obligations. To...

...And you? All eyes turn to me.

"Well, I want to develop more of a sense of worthiness whether or not I'm being productive," I say. "Just watching ducks ought to be validation enough for my existence, or how can I validate someone else who does not appear to produce much? My life for too long has been predicated on trying to prove myself. Ha! Is it not enough just to be?"

Silence. Our hostess, a look-a-like for the intelligent young Emma Thompson, raises her glass: "To a human-being, not a human-doing, ha!" Indeed, such is the stuff of kismet.

Interesting that among our gifts for them and their children were three things that with this writing take on symbolic meaning. Not Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh, but for the little girl a snow-globe containing a porcelain butterfly reposing on a dandelion; for the young lad a professional yo-yo complete with an encyclopedia of its tricks; and for the adults a calendar of the insights of Tic Na Hahn. The nature we live with; the topsy- turvy of our physical being; and the very spirituality of our progress are among the cares and interests and loves of our lives. It is effortful. Can worthiness be without effort too?

Worthiness arises out of the harmony of being in the moment without necessarily needing to skip stones across still waters, or needing to shush the children, or feeling less than any given circumstance. We are indeed human-be-ings. But then again, for me, I'll get to just be-ing just as soon as I finish doing what I do here! Happy new year!

Winning Ways

2011-12-29T10:06:00.000-08:00

We are seriously cramped. Elbow room, road room, line ups, seating for all, food for all, fuel for all, water for all; Huston, we have a problem. Our space age may well produce food-replicators and a new bio-diversity, and we may yet indeed live in geo-spheres and explore worm-holes and even travel back in time (thanks to the CERN experiments under Switzerland), but for whom will the proverbial bell not yet toll? We are being crushed by the weight of our needs, of our indifference, of our lack of care for others or our lack of compassion for the whole. Crushed by our greed. It lies in a man's seed.

The mid to late-couple we met over a Canadian dinner on Boxing Day were of the New Age. Handsome and exquisitely beautiful. White teeth, evenly spaced. Lithe bodies, he about a head and a half taller than she. Very intelligent. Very articulate. Very travelled. He a Caucasian Canadian, she a Pakistani princess. Their company felt like a privilege. Married in Lahore, they painted a picture for us of oppressive bodies clustered at train and bus and airport terminals. I felt very uncomfortable at the sense of push and shove and at the grubbing for place and privilege and the winning over others. Survival drives an individual within masses. Density and crowded streets makes for no traffic rules, little compassion for the feeble, less compassion for the weak, and the sheer pressure of the constancy of physical bodies around oneself is everywhere, but for the singular moment perhaps of privacy on a privy. It's oppressive. Smells and stench. Such is the new world.

A day later my real brother, Andy, wrote: "We intend to spend the New Year on a beach camp on Masirah Island just off the coast of Oman. It will take us 4 hours drive and a ferry crossing of about one and a half hours with a fight to jostle for a position on the ferry as I believe that there is no order or rules! It is who has the gumpf to push in front of the other and fight for a place with the locals and camels and goats and anything else that they can drag on board or you are left behind to wait for the next ferry! I have been told that it is an experience that you have to live through at least once in Oman!"

Well now, for persons pained by physical movement, who hardly can afford to be jostled or bumped, and who find it aggravating to turn the neck, what of such ones? And when our roads are too full, and the 7,000 pedestrians killed per annum on the streets of Lahore are still not enough to enforce traffic rules, or at least to deter an irresponsible driver, then how does one exist within a paradigm of such rush and crush? When riots over the luck of a puck turns us into rats in the streets, and when the belly-bloated kids in desert-reduced countries are too many to aid, at which point do we realize? Enough!

Last night, after a Calgary dinner with friends in a Korean restaurant in the burgeoning Bowness neighborhood, and them telling us of a third-world North Korea versus (despite its denser population) the pristine South, we visited another set of friends who'd recently returned from Bali, and who spoke of India, and of China. Our friends had a set of statues, Buddha and the elephantine Ganesha, procured to remove all obstacles. On our leaving the lady of the house unexpectedly stooped to zip up each of my new winter boots (since I struggle to reach my feet), and in that small humble act she showed the essence of the winning way: Compassion is realized, moment by moment. One for one.

Sharks and Shivers

2011-12-28T09:52:00.000-08:00

The shark, its teeth as menacing as white hot spear tips, floated among the children. Some screamed in fear. One little girl was actually crying. Many of the older kids just laughed, tried to poke at it, enjoyed the Canadian fun. It was just a video, but I shivered.

Boxing Day in East London, South Africa, is a go-to-the beach affair. One takes a picnic and an umbrella, sun-tan lotion and bathing suits. The summer solstice just five days afore heats things to their zenith, and the sea gleams and the waves come crashing in and the froth bubbles and scurries its way up the sand. Children squeal with apparent delight in the sea-saltiness. Teenagers play beach ball and frisbee. Adults read, sleep, eat, slather lotions on and the air is scented with tropical oils and laden with the sounds only humans make.

In the sea the shark was unseen, or surely people would have screamed. In the sea the shark was silent, or surely my sixteen year old brother, Mark, might have shouted enough to be heard. And in the tumult of Boxing Day bathers and the beach-game players his disappearance went unnoticed. Father and Stepmother were there. When they looked for him, called for him, began their walks up and down the beach, asked questions of others, made phone calls, even contacted the police Mark was nowhere to be found. Only, some hours later, some parts of the boy, chewed off, washed ashore. That this all should have taken place in a matter of hours, and that I only write about it now, nearly thirty years later, somewhat goes to show just how long a shiver can be.

But the hydrogen-filled radio-ballon sharks that floated in the video, as well as those that I was asked to assist in assembling from the two kits purchased for our Christmas festivities, were harmless. Silent, despite the mechanized ballast that moved the huge five-foot-long life-like-looking menace though the air, the sharks hovered upstairs in the bedrooms until the propitious moment. Once all seventeen people's presents had been opened, the great blundering things were suddenly amongst us: Surprise!

It struck me that my story needed no telling; it would perhaps cause our hostess to feel sorry for me, to be embarrassed, or would unnecessarily draw focus away from her intention that we have fun. And how many other triggers are there not always for all of us? A friend's wife died two days before this Christmas. Another friend gave up smoking, yet there were cigar-smokers on the deck. Another had given up alcohol, yet there was wine and drinks and bottles of booze. One person, often catching my eye, hoping to give no offense, quietly but certainly did not sing carols; her atheism not yet uncurbed sufficiently to be completely integrative. Another person, their pet having recently died, was rather gloomy in the presence of the two dogs. Who else was hurting, was reliving some baggage, some memory, some secret in the closet? How can one be expected never again to hear a gun-shot on the TV, see army fatigues, hear of some seedy uncle fiddling with children? Sharks swim around us in many guises; it is our ability to be larger than the present or the past, to take care of ourselves that matters in the moment, even though there be lifeguards and psychologists and loving others. And sometimes, it is but a shiver that forewarns us; we guard against being harmed, or doing harm in turn.

Christmas Confusions

2011-12-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

Guilt! Will this missive miss you? Or will you get it, and with it feel relieved that you've been included, not forgotten, overlooked, or neglected? We each have such long lists of friends to contact, to buy for, to be sure to contact. There are people in this very special season who once upon a time treated me with such kindness, gave me gifts, included me into their festivities, made me feel welcome; and now? They do not even appear on my list; not that I keep such a list any longer, for the sending of Christmas cards clouds my sense of obligation every December. To whom? There are simply too many people.

Where are you now? Do you still think of me and the time when...? But that's another story. We each have our stories. We each have so very many people we'd be glad to see, glad to let know we care. But then again, where does the congregation end? Do we simply pass by those in other pews, nod at those close enough, shake hands with those in close proximity, and even get to hug the ones closest to us? Do we sign and send all and sundry a card, give some a present, overspend on the budget? Merry Christmas!

I am confused. Deep in my bones I know I should try to contact each of the persons on my list of people, or at least because we are in some sort of correspondence, or those I knew in the past and always owe a sense of care and interest in their lives, but... There are well over one thousand people on my Facebook list alone, and then all the students and colleagues and theatre people and family and ... You! How are you now, really?

Deep in my bones I worry about the lack of contact, the apparent lack of interest (in the sense that lack of contact appears like a lack of interest), and deep in my bones I ache with hope that you are well, are happy, have forgiven me my trespasses (for Lord knows I can think of no one who has trespassed against me,) and deep in my bones I wish you love and peace and happiness and contentment.

My guilt stems from the inability to express those sentiments to every person I know, easily, economically, freely. I have no need to have the gift of care returned, the reach out toward another reciprocated, the warmth of my thoughts of you felt back. But my confusion arises out of the apparent generalities of such sentiments now. Or does an 'about me' letter (in January we did this; in February we did that) really reach out more?

Right now I am here, as you are there, and we have arrived together at a moment in which (if you're still reading) you may know I am speaking directly to you and caring for your happiness and welfare. Now if this was a card in my own handwriting with a stamp that I had licked you might altogether be more convinced, even if the words in the card were generally generic, sappy, and of course, appropriately seasonal. Hence my guilt!

Christmas with its guilt confuses me. How come I do not feel so guilty about the lack of contact during the rest of the year? Why should the sentiment about care for you and your welfare and happiness only be expressed during this season? Why not let you also know that I care whenever the thought strikes me? Well, let me tell you, in that case, I'd hardly be able to stop contacting you! Merry Christmas! In fact: Happy Every Day too!

Noisy Neighbour

2011-12-12T11:29:00.000-08:00

Vociferous Verbiage during Vespers

Something there is that does not permit sustained silence. Few of us may have the privilege really to hear it. Silence. I recall, about a decade ago, being on cross-country skis out in the Canadian backwoods and creaking to a stop, then holding my breath, and there was nothing but silence. Silence. Its magnificence is omnipotent, omniscient, omni-present. Heart beats. And then some chipmunk chatters, or a bird tweets, or a far off airplane growls through the blue. Our world is an orchestra of seemingly unrelated sounds, from car doors slamming through feet scraping through angrily shouting.

Such was the young man, even at a considerable distance across the trestle bridge, disturbing the quietude of the glorious sunset layering itself over the Victoria Gorge. Yet Canadians tend to be softly spoken. Generalities are often wrong. We know it takes only one example of the obverse for most of us to raise a contention. Yes, Canadians can be noisy too. And indeed, the vociferous verbiage came closer and closer.

Sunset over the gorge occurs in these wintry December weeks soon after four-thirty p.m., and it lingers long, often mesmerizing us with its hues. The Gorge, a wide lake-like inlet from Victoria, stretches in a long goose neck toward parts unseen, and as viewed from my balcony the sun loves to come hover over the wooden trestle bridge most late afternoons, silencing the waters, making mirror-smooth the glassy reflections, halting up even a breath of wind. People bicycling and walking on the Galloping Goose pathway below appear as if outlined in gold, huddled romantically into themselves, their voices no longer heard when they seem to murmur in reverie. I think of Virgil: "Sacro tandem carmine vesper adest." Sacredness attends with the red-hue of vespers. Why disturb?

But the voice of the approaching young man was really angry, really loud, really vulgar. He yelled into his cell-phone in a vituperative stream of verbosity, his violence a blazing prism in which he, at twenty-something, advanced upon my landscape, head down, free hand gesticulating, his red parka open and swishing about with his erratic pedaling at his bicycle on the solidness of the pathway. Why did his listener not just hang up? He wielded an argument as though he was solely in the right, and given the ugly language, the swearing, it had all the earmarks of a foul-mouthed fellow fighting with his girlfriend. He wended his way past my apartment block, past the adjacent old-folks' home, along the seafront, and was smothered in the hollow sounds under the road-bridge archway.

I recall a time when I was that age, and in wanting to dominate a girlfriend's unruly Alsatian, I yelled at it and shouted and used my Big Voice. My landlady said she could hear me down the block! I, I who now cares that we do not chase the robin off its nest when we slam a car door have made plenty of untoward noise in my time. I have not thought about who was sleeping, who was ill, who was disturbed, nor upon what silences I was intruding. We live in a world of noise, and we give out sound, sometimes, with a sense that the louder we are the more important we are. Still, it surely suites one more to watch the ducks, to see sunsets, and in compassion quietly to allow for the belligerent and intractable. Still, preference being what it is, something there is in the magic of hearing only a heartbeat in the silence. Silence. A Privilege.

Courage and Cowardice

2011-12-09T13:05:00.000-08:00

Hurting Courage and Hurled Cowardice

How many times have we not wished we'd spoken up? The dastardly deed takes place before us, the thing being said is harmfully wrong, the person about to make a mistake might be redirected. But we do not speak up, intervene, correct, step out of our own comfort zone. We demur. Such was my cowardice, this winter week of December, 2011.

On the beach the playful golden Labrador was perhaps only three or maybe even two years old. Although I could not discern his features, the dog's master was about my age, a man in his early sixties, late fifties, tall, grey bearded, wearing a woolen toque and black leather gloves, with a thick parka zipped against the wind. Even at a long distance he appeared a friendly enough sort; there was no aura of dominance, aggressiveness, nor even stand-offishness about him. In his right hand he sported a white sling-throw sort of oversized sausage-shaped flotation appended to a short rope, the which he lifted, twirled in an arc, then helicoptered above his head. The dog eyed it and jumped eagerly about. And then the man let it loose, and it zoomed up and away, straight out into the onrush of the frigid sea. The dog hurtled down the beach, hesitated for the slightest moment, then plunged in after the contraption. The tide was already taking the white floater out, but the dog swam, gained on it, grabbed it, gagged slightly in the salt water, then churned back. And within moments they both were ready to do it again.

Bits of intermittent sunshine reflected off washed up logs, glinted off rocks, layered itself in the foam of the ocean. But it was generally a cold gray day. I'd already walked some thirty minutes by the time I saw them, dog and man. My being there was something of its own miracle; it was the first long walk I'd taken in over eight years. Back in 2003 when I crushed my discs, my hiking days were over. And power-chairs do not handle beaches, nor do push-chairs for that matter. Ever tried riding a bicycle in deep sand? But over the last three months I've gradually increased my endurance, and though I cannot escape the nerve-pinching, the jolts and stabs and burning, there was a thing about the length of that beach that lured me along. Besides, many tossed-up logs against the shoreline provided resting spots, and the isolation from people allowed me time to meander at my own pace, step after step. I still had about twenty minutes back to the car to make. But I did not see myself easily stopping to talk to the man and his dog, even though I might've leaned heavily on my cane, there being no log right there for me to rest on where he was busy doing his throwing.

There was a certain courage in that dog. He evidently loved to chase after the throw-thing, despite the frigid water. There was a certain courage in my walking; I love to hike despite the payment my body exacts on me. Better to be there and to do, than not to be, in my mind. But does the dog know that it most likely will suffer from arthritis and joint discomfort at an early age due to the extreme temperature? Would the dog make a different choice if it did know? And more importantly, would its master? I should have told him. I could have told him. Cowardice! I've read enough, seen enough to speak with authority, with kindness; to be seen to come from compassion. But in that moment, albeit in the yoke of my own circumstances, I threw my golden chance away. And now, do I just wish to have done differently, or do I go plunge in and alter the future, hm?

One's Cup of Tea

2011-11-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

The Currency of A Cup of Tea

Expectation has no rights. Another's reaction is theirs. One might intend in one's work or writing or product of some kind to evoke an appreciation, but to expect to control the outcome is possibly to face disappointment; many a cook, comedian, actor, writer, singer, or artist has had to face into the unrewarding responses of stolidness, silence, disfavour, or worse, an evident disinterest.

The monks make a sand pebble picture that is a painstaking pebble for coloured pebble placement of precision on a part of the floor. And no sooner are the days and days and hours of work done than they sweep it all into a heap; the performance was the thing, not the product. Well, such is my ongoing lesson. If my door-sized paintings are to be appreciated by another, as opposed to my being sufficiently engaged in brush stroke after brush stroke (one of them a fifteen year project in particular) then I am certainly yet to be completely disappointed. Not everything is everyone's cup of tea.

Rendered in Renaissance oil-glazes and many taking several years each to complete, some twelve or so of my canvas works made it safely, just yesterday, to my apartment. I stacked them in various bedroom locations, the two largest along the lounge wall, where I happen to be working on my current canvas. Admittedly, these are works of intricate and apparently overwhelming dimensions; they challenge rather than entertain. "That long band of thumb-sized miniatures along the top are copies of the great works of art throughout history," I usually explain. Surrealism is not quite readily read; it takes mental acuity, esoteric or at least extant knowledge, a willingness to piece together the many juxtapositions, and an energy of concentration that we are not easily given to, unless we perhaps have paid the museum entrance price and specifically are there to view the paintings. Analysis takes effort. Ask Salvador Dali. My paintings are not pretty pictures.

Perhaps the most insulting term to me about them was delivered by my mother. About fifteen years ago. I had not seen her in over twenty years and I sent her a few photos of my work. The reply came in Afrikaans. The phrase that hurt, that was to teach me to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, was "grotesque". It is spelled the same in the Afrikaans language. Coming from my mother, it corroborated what I had expected from her, and therefore it actually hurt more. But it served to galvanize me toward producing my own product, being my own man, choosing my own visions, and depending less and less on the approbation or appreciation or approval of others.

Then why bother to write this essay?

A cup of tea takes energy to make. The steps involved are multifold. The blend chosen, the vessel in which it reposes, the artfulness of skilfully putting it down, or not, all of which combine, especially socially, to serve another. Even a child likes the currency of respect, of appreciation. Few artists of any genre truly do things just for themselves. Yet as these works of mine sit here, still chiefly unheralded, I am reminded of the lessons of my mummy. The true art of living is in making such a product as even a cup of tea with a consummate care from the first, whether or not the result is truly to be appreciated.

Fish Tails

2011-11-20T22:17:00.000-08:00

Fish-tails and Floundering

"You've got to know your purpose in life," my friend said, expertly maneuvering his big GMC half-ton on the snow-laden mountain road past the slower long-haul lorry. "If I wake you at three in the morning, eh, you need to be able to state it just like that!"

"Wonderful," I smile. "And what would you say?"

He pauses. "That's my problem. I just am not sure. Used to know. Used to think it was about making money and having things, eh, but then that changed a couple of years back. Now I know it's important to be helping people. But not to enable them. Just to help people out and to give them a leg up. But I know there's a better way to state that, a bigger purpose, eh, just not sure how to express it."

All around us the world is white with November's heavy snow. The road is sometimes only visible thanks to the balustrades on either side. Occasionally vehicles headlights beam at us from the opposite direction. We've a ten or even thirteen-hour proximity together in the cab of his solid-feeling vehicle, and as relaxed as my 62 year old friend is, he is focused yet casually alert on the treacherous road. Other vehicles here and there have slid off, some vacant as abandoned igloos, one or two with occupants now outside and digging unrewarded. Emergency vehicles have lights blinking. Police cars, like snow vultures, hover around the carcasses of some stranded vehicles. A semi-trailer lies alarmingly tipped over onto its side, right in front of Three Valley Gap. Further on an abandoned car lies upside down, somewhere along the Coquihala. But we progress onward in our quest to get my paintings from Calgary to Victoria, until...

"Here we go!" he gives me the forewarning, even as the half-ton's backside slides out from under us on a patch of black ice. "Uh oh!" and the vehicle suddenly points toward the drop of the valley far below with a sickening wrench, but almost instantly my friend corrects the alarming fish-tail and we're cautiously continuing the long descent onto the narrow bridge over the Kicking Horse River. "Long hill ahead of us," my companion nods at it, and the engine growls slightly as it takes the incline.

"Seems to me you express it very well," I venture.

"What's that?"

"Your purpose. It's expressed in your actions. You're a superb driver and a most helpful friend. I couldn't have brought all these paintings with me on a plane, and they're too big for my own vehicle, and I certainly couldn't load them alone, so thanks! If your purpose is to help people then you do it, as another good friend of mine says, with action. He says love is a verb. So thanks for the love, buddy!"

He chuckles, and grows silent. I think to myself, I know what I'd say if woken at three in the morning and asked what my purpose in life is, it is... But then again, your knowing what mine is is not nearly as good as knowing your own, eh? So? So what is it, hmm?

Flights of Fancy

2011-11-20T22:14:00.000-08:00

"I didn't know you are an artist," he said. "Got anything to show me?"

"Not yet," I responded. "My calling cards are stacked away in an Alberta basement."

And so the plan was born.

We have high hopes. We trust. We intend to succeed. We take risks. We invest in an uncertain future and brave the odds and fake it 'til we make it. We are driven by our want, by our idea, our concept, our ego's need to have its ends met. And in our very fancifulness we do indeed achieve yet more. Past success teaches us as much. But to what extent are we identified by that which we do, versus that which we are? And must 'versus' be the operative word, or can it be changed to a sense of 'conjoined' in the doing and the being? I am what I am?

As I write on this 17th of November I am at the Victoria airport, awaiting the flight. Snow is in the forecast and it's already snowing in Calgary. And within the roughly 1300 kilometres between here and there is a winter-bound road awaiting our return. My friend will pick me up at the airport later this afternoon and by 6:00 p.m. we shall have loaded my paintings in his vehicle and head back over the Rocky Mountains on the long road to Victoria. Somewhere tonight we'll get a motel. Sometime tomorrow we'll arrive back at the seaside. The flight booking for the whole journey was made several weeks ago. Once committed, we never did discuss whether or not we should let things depend on the weather.

Without the collection happening now the paintings will stay unseen until the spring, in April or maybe even March. Risking the winter drive would not make it worth it. But the difference between then and now is that the weather was not supposed to close in quite so quickly, nor so severely. Still, we persevere. Even my plane is now 20 minutes late. As I look out through the huge glass panes of the terminal the sky is black, foreboding, but all around me, life goes on. We humans want what we want. Some of us perhaps are ineluctably bound to schedules and expectations, but in the end we make a choice to stay with the commitment or to play it safe.

At issue is the reason I am convinced that fetching my canvases is worth it. It has to do with showmanship. It has to do with impressing others. It has to do with providing others with a product so that they may choose to buy the original, purchase a giclee copy, or commission me to do another work. It has to do with my being identified for what I do, can do, might do, like to do, and want to do. Yes, it is all because of my want.

We are creatures of want. In the smallest of things we manifest our wants. Eventually some of them become needs. Yet at which point can one let go and just be? Does it really matter if I never paint another painting? Does it really matter that another knows that I am an artist, once proven, and yet again to be? Does our fancy really matter, for a thee, or for a me?

Bathing Beauties

2011-11-15T20:03:00.001-08:00

People such as these are indeed beautiful. Would that many others would see them as well, coming out of the swimming-pool water, going in. They wear bathing suits and for the most part with an unselfconscious air, amble solo alongside the water on their way to or from the change rooms. I try not to stare. Others too seem not to notice. But then again the unstated atmosphere under the glass and steel dome of the swimming bath is one of absolute acceptance of half-naked attire and bare skin.

The changing-room for men is always the first challenge. The proximity of completely naked and unabashed bodies at the wooden benches in front of the pay-lockers can be overwhelming; one does not want to be touched by a naked or wet backside, however accidentally. And then there are the showers, both before and after the swim, where many men, sans bathing suits spend untold time soaping themselves from the chlorine. I admit I've wondered if the women are as free in front of each other. In the pool though, where everyone wears at least a swim-costume, neither men nor women, I notice, greet or show signs of recognition. In fact, since I have gone about eight times by now, there are some women and men who appear to give me the very slightest of nods, as though they recognize that our exercise schedules coincide, but that might well be speculation.

It's the beautiful bodies I wish more people could see. Perhaps because of the late afternoon hour, or perhaps because younger persons do not frequent swimming pools as much, very many people are somewhat closer to being seniors. Some are quite a bit older than me, some younger. But the bulges and the bellies and the wobbles and the veins and the hirsute and the bald and grey are all together in the water, or apparent on the walkways, or in the change rooms, and we all appear to accept and understand that bodies are bodies. That's the beauty of it. I see such different shapes and sizes as to make of us a species as interesting as any animal. We have such varied gates, such varied swimming styles, such different ways of being represented. And it's beautiful.

There is hardly space for vanity or pride in the swimming pool. One is what one is. A hair-do and makeup and clothing and jewelry is of no consequence. Whether one can even swim well is of no matter, as long as one is safe; it is the bravery to be there, to let others see you at your age and at your stage of physical development that is beautiful. It is the allowing of oneself simply to be. The pool water is of course the metaphor for our rejoining with the elemental; underwater the sound possibly resembles what it was like in mummy's tummy! Why then or now care what one's body, or another's, looks like?

There are people who are aided from their wheelchairs and let down on seat-crank-cranes into the water. There are other people who are heavy and lumpy according to what is popular, but who appear to be accustomed to the tight fit of their swim-pieces and come enjoy the water too, beautifully free in their acceptance of themselves. So too for a group of developmentally challenged young men and women who sometimes come, their limbs and body shapes and abilities different than others, but they're there, participating. True, once in a while there's a lithe-limbed young man or woman, but one hopes they're not being too aware of themselves. The beauty really resides in the freedom of the self just to be. Bathing beauties. Would that it were so outside of the pool too. Being beauties. Just people allowed to be.

Mastery of Musical Mystery

2011-11-08T08:40:00.000-08:00

Words were unnecessary. Michael Waters walked up to the platform in the small venue, picked up the guitar, and began to play. And notes, sweet music, the elixir of life poured around and about and through us. Easily it surged to engulf the shores of attendant souls and spirits, sweeping individual accords along, until as an audience we became ensconced in an ethereal harmony, attuned to every chord. Masterful music indeed.

Michael Waters is a consummate world-class guitarist. Music is his spiritual mission, not something he does to earn his way. After some thirty years of playing and evolving his style to its own unique evocation of hearing the spirit sing, without any words, Michael Waters has mastered the instrument to a level that makes it an extension of himself. His guitar is not some object on which one plays a song. His performance began as a mere trickle of sound, pooled into a melody, spilled over into a stream, gathered momentum to become a river, negotiated rapids and canyons and waterfalls, and then immersed itself into an ocean. We became as comfortable as babies in the amniotic fluid of a moving womb, taken wherever our repository of ethereal sounds drifted in its own wont.

Being in the venue, a small church in Victoria on Vancouver Island, November 5th 2011, quickly became a distinct privilege. It was as though sitting inside a cosy dome. Why only 40 or so others were there was a mystery; advertising had been good; tickets were only $10 apiece. Was our city such a mecca for 'things going on' that we were just a small representative of the many people attending other artistic venues? But thoughts like these merely disrupted the purpose of my being there; better to enjoy the music.

And the man, this artist, spoke French. English too. Before the concert he moved amongst us, chatting freely. His guitar on its stand waited on the candle-lit platform. Michael Waters was charming, sincere, warm, gracious, casually sophisticated, a man who's been places, seen things. It reflected in every composition, particularly when he shifted from the minor to the D major tuning in the second half. During intermission he spoke to us individually. Immediately afterward he opened the second set with the story of his life, told us of his mission to engage the spirit, spoke of his Oldfield, Renbourne, and Santana influences. And then he played, hardly ever looking up, with an intensity of flow and with his delightfully distinctive erudition of composition throughout to the close.

Austrian, Bavarian, Chinese or Zambian, people come together within music without need of words, of language, of awareness of syncopations, harmonies, or chords. Music has a spirit that reaches beyond the technicalities of grammar or spelling or precision. We conjoin our souls in sound. Music matters, yet needs have no specific meaning. We were not given the title of any one tune. No words evoked interpretation. Imagine a tune called The Trout, or Traffic, or Wichita Falls. Titles precondition us. But music that arises of itself has its own meaning, and that which I imagined, to be sure, was not that which others necessarily experienced. Our interpretation is naturally coloured by our own life's journey. And in the end, for me to describe Michael Waters' influence with and on music is likely to give my words an unnecessary intentionality all of their own, see? Or would you rather really just hear? Go buy his CD. He has four if not five of them. A treasure! (see: www.ladybirdmusic.com)

Above it All

2011-11-07T10:43:00.000-08:00

How to stay above it all? The lottery might do that for us. Being rich (and usually 'famous' ) puts us in the right style, we hope. Such heights of glory are easily ascribed to those who live in penthouses, to those who live much above our own means, both literally and figuratively. Sometimes we deem such lofty-living beings to have a higher degree of intelligence or energy, a greater degree of cleverness, of fortune, of acumen, of birthright, nobility, and even street-smarts. After all, perhaps such people work harder or are smarter to earn the right to live way up there. Envy, at root, has many tendrils.

Well, our lunchtime visit to our new penthouse friends, a beautifully attired and retired septuagenarian couple, was as if being hosted on a ship's prow. From far below the massive expanse of deck the sunlit sea glistened through the guard rail. He is English, tall, handsome. She is Swedish, beautiful, graceful. The apartment itself was the epitome of cultured elegance. Ivory, teak, silver, gold. Original oil paintings of all sizes adorned each room, some dating back three-hundred years or more, still in original frames, and many depicting a long- standing family heritage. Colourful Persian rugs festooned. A grand piano waited, a violin as ancient as time atop it. White leather couches and antiques complemented the decor in a tasteful sweep of genteel and sophisticated apportionment throughout. Variously sized glass showcases housed a variety of china, ivory figurines, a ship, and coloured stemware. Refinement of taste, dignity, and decor permeated; a magazine-like picture of picturesque perfection.

And then came lunch time. A virtual Delacroix of August-hued artistic delights decorated the table, with tapered colour-coded candles circumscribed by miniature garlands and an unobtrusive centre piece of low lying exotic flowers. Twin pairs of silvered ring-doves reposed at the top of each of the four place settings. Yet intimacy and ease abided, despite the formality of setting. A large gold doubloon of chocolate rested on each serviette. And then came the meal. A delectable cheese and broccoli soup with a wafer of biscuit was followed by a plateful of delicious gourmet delicacies, laid before one like a Gauguin masterpiece of colour and culinary expertise, topped off by what appeared to me as a special Swedish creamy pastry. Our genteel hostess seamlessly interchanged plates, prodded the conversation in a balance of interests, and ensured our every comfort. Our engaging host was the epitome of good humour and mindful considerations. Whether courteous about James the Fourth (or was it the Sixth I mistakenly blurted) or Bloody Mary, or the modern day marvels of computer evolution, we discoursed without censure. Our caring observations were of integration, of acceptance, of interest for more knowledge and of compassion for others. Attitude, we concluded, is not easily a matter of choice. And then our hostess was asked to play.

During the sonorous and exquisite tonality of the blend of piano and voice, it came upon me, privileged to be there, that these are people who indeed are truly above it all; people who live in appreciation and grace and acceptance and inclusion of the diversity and complexity and hardships of life, for their story also was full of the surmounting of many hardships on the way from a past to a present. And far from being in some sort of lofty overlordship, they were so evidently happy to host us. To see us. Just happy to be.

My Friend's Haircut

2011-10-29T20:16:00.001-07:00

My Friend's Haircut

"Problem is, I have to get my haircut" my friend says over the phone. I think a moment. "Then I'll come with you," I say, "I can wait in the car or perhaps even have mine done too." There is a pause. "We'd have to make an appointment for that, I'm afraid," he says, "but if you'd like to come along I'll pick you up and we can go swimming afterwards, that is, after we've also been to my dealership. I've got to get the car quickly checked before we leave for Phoenix tomorrow. But I do want to go to the gym, okay? See you at three."

He arrives on the dot, as we say. He parks as near as possible to the entrance of my building since I have to use my cane to get to his car. And then we set off. We talk with the easy familiarity of two people who've known each for nearly thirty years. Phoenix rises up in our conversation within the gamut of what we did yesterday and slides into whatever happened to This person and then That person, along with which we analyze the paths least or most trodden, depending on the circumstances. After all, that one became an alcoholic and this other one became a womanizer, and then there's yet This Other fellow who is a closet introvert, given that his impeccable manners would not have the public suspect as much. And next my friend nudges his car into a spare parking spot. But the block he has to walk, albeit with his own limp and the ever-present boot-brace he needs is too far for me, and I let him know I'll happily wait. He hands me the car keys so that I may listen to the radio, or adjust the windows for air.

Some forty-five minutes later he is back. I'd used the time to tap at my iPad, to watch the passersby on an autumnal October Wednesday, and to enjoy the moments to myself. "What have you been working on?" he asks, easing himself into the driver's seat and then starting off. I close up my machine. "Been working on this essay called Room for a View," I offer. He picks up on the phraseology. "Ah, not with a view but for a view, eh?" And next we 're into reminisces about the four panes of the Johari Window (the which he'd first let me see into, back in the 80's) and our continuing inability to see ourselves completely. Our chatter meanders along and then he turns into the dealership where, once we've left the car, we continue talking in the waiting room about the pitfalls of myopia, of closed-mindedness, of absolutes, of certainties, and of unbridled egotism.

The car ready for us, we drive back toward the indoor pool complex, and we pay our entrance fee and he goes to the gymnasium and I go to the change rooms and prepare for the pool-water, do my weightless exercises, my workout, my challenge of increasing my endurance, my attempts at overcoming the perpetual nerve pinching pain, and then at last come out of the changing room again. I am exhausted. He is sweating but uses a towel to dry his face and is ready to go. I tell him of my having to do my math classes immediately after swim class back in school days, and how the slightly nauseous feeling now puts me back in that time. Yes. We are our past and our present and our future too, we know. Yet that which we now do prepares us for that very future. In that case, for both of us, we're getting fitter for it, ha! Finally, he drops me off at my place. Good-bye!

And now, three days later, I realize: I never even thought to look at or say anything about my friend's haircut!

Room for a View?

2011-10-28T11:42:00.001-07:00

"Declare your point of view, please," my friend challenges, "absolutely! Completely!"

Absolutely, I respond. It's the sort of word one sometimes uses, even though it's about a specific view-point held, an apportionment of the whole, a segment of the truth as one knows it, an avowed verification personally understood. Totally! Even by such a word we mean within the context. For some such partiality of view is just not good enough. Yet, how possibly to be conscious of Everything, The Totality? Even our Gods have many names, differing adherents, diverse religions, faiths, beliefs, and many disclaimers too.

Perhaps, given that we innately and essentially have the potential to be entirely, totally integrative in our intuitions, interests, feelings, understandings and intentions, some of us are not readily drawn or given to being a This or a That. Such seeming fence-sitters are neither blue nor red nor an eagle nor a bull to frustrated political, religious, or sports-team builders. Yet to the eclectic, being a This or a That is to be curtailed amidst the galaxies of our entire universe to a given planet, moon, or star. Within universality the conscription of the self to any one co-ordinate indeed circumscribes. By contrast to this ease of accommodating variables, by contrast to having an esemplastic sensibility in its growing willingness to encounter myriad generalities, there are some who practice strict adherence to specificities. Some even proclaim a particularized reservation at the proverbial pearly gate. Some expect a room with a view. Others believe that they'll be served by willing vestal virgins. Pedigrees especially. Such are some of mans' beliefs.

Mongrels, mayhap, are more integrative. They are not too choosey, nor too selective; a simple preference guides them as opposed to inbred habits of selection. Integration’s essence is an accretion of acceptances. Whomever, whatever, whichever, whenever is all par for the course, an anathema to those attached to tradition. Integration has it that one has predilections, choices, practices preferred principles, yet becomes comfortable that all practices and principles exist. Even the worst. By such inclusion even of evil integration absorbs, contains, and minimizes the apparent ubiquity of the negative. To push against it is to encourage its pushing against you. So one works with dark and light, and the balance is in the very art of living. Mongrels tend not to be specialists.

Integrative preference leads naturally to Godliness over Hellishness, Light over Dark, Positive over Negative. Enlightenment is a journey, not a product. Choice is paramount. Degree and predominance of choice habituates us. We are works in progress. Which part of Everything is not? We all are in the classroom of life, communing together, evolving as conscripted, or as we will, or choose, or think, or even as we prey or pray.

Prayer, OMG, is like a natural connection to malleable potential. Belief in God, for an integrationist, is a belief in Totality, in Everything, in One, in Plurals, and even in All the Fragments too. Humans basically bind under the spell of love, community, with intention to be kind, honourable, caring. But? And the divisiveness commences. Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and Zoroaster among others were men who inspired millions; yet we but peep mostly through the holes in the solidness of fences around ourselves to take in a bit more of the view at a time, and so too investigate yet more light. Would a room with a window not otherwise have its vistas, absolutely, completely obscured? Hmm?

What's in Your Jeans?

2011-10-24T11:26:00.001-07:00

Contributing to The Whole, hmm?

"You can't do that!" they say. And yet someone swam the channel, flew the plane, broke the previous record, went to the moon. Indeed, where would some of us be without the surgeons who experimented with cornea or titanium implants? We evolve! In an essay entitled "Intelligence and Energy Fields", hereby truncated, scientist Jim Francis talks about changes to our group-genetics, our evolution. A friend of mine responded: "I find it to affirm that which I feel to be true. Though not necessary, it feels good that one's assumptions are corroborated by science." Indeed, yet its contentions are controversial:

"Over the past 5-10 years, hard evidence has been produced which is having its effect on the scientific skeptics. Dr. Karl Pribram, a prominent American brain surgeon, sees the brains neurones 'out-picturing' the physical universe, similar to the holographic process. He suggests that our brains are exposed to the entire concept of the universe in the same way that any minute part of a hologram contains basically the same information as the whole. British scientist, David Bohm came up with the same Holographic Theory... But probably most amazing of all is the theory that British physicist Rupert Sheldrake has proffered. Basically he has proven repeatedly through laboratory controlled experiments that different species of animals appear to be "plugged" into a dedicated intelligence field which is universal to that particular species. For example, when enough mice in a group have learned a maze, they ALL suddenly know the maze - whether they have run it or not! It now appears, after a BBC television experiment, that if enough humans have learned something, then it becomes easier for all humans to learn it. Sheldrake calls this shared intelligence the Morphogenetic field.There is an interesting parable about this called the '100th monkey'. A very bright female monkey on a small Japanese island was taught to wash potatoes in the seawater. She then taught other members of the tribe to do this. When approximately 100 monkeys had learned this procedure, many other remote monkey tribes started washing potatoes in the same manner. But the interesting thing is that they were situated on other remote islands! That is, they had no possible way of acquiring this knowledge other than by some form of intuitive universal "sharing". The BBC in London tried out Sheldrake's Theory on 8 million viewers. They showed on prime time TV a difficult puzzle that only a very small percentage of their viewers were able to solve. Then the correct answer was also given. Shortly after, the same experiment was repeated in another country. A far higher percentage of these foreign viewers were able to get the puzzle right the first time. In the form of a universal pictorial concept, language and customs were not considered to be a factor. The BBC and Sheldrake concluded that as the correct answer was now existing within the human morphogenetic field the human race now "knows" the answer. Basically Sheldrake's Theory explains how we develop intuition and 'intuitive' functioning to a degree. What Sheldrake is saying is that there is a 'larger' mind for each life-form and each individual life-form 'programs' that larger mind. But probably the most startling experiments came from Cleve Backster, a polygraph (lie detector) expert. Operating from his San Diego, Californian laboratory he found that plants react - at a distance - to human thought. He initially connected his polygraph equipment to a Dragon Plant to test for possible "plant stress". He decided to generate stress by burning the plants leaves and sure enough the polygraph machine registered a strong reaction. But he hadn't actually burnt the leaves - he had only intended to do so, with emotion and intent! Skeptics who tried the same experiment without genuine intent couldn't get it to work. Backster scraped human cells from a volunteer's mouth and connected these to medical EEG equipment. He found that these cells reacted instantaneously to the donor's emotions, even when they were geographically separated! White blood cells were found to be particularly susceptible to emotion. (This may explain for the first time why people with strong positive emotions have better health). This intelligence field could explain how Subjective Communication (the ability to connect with other people's minds) works to create win/win situations, as well as remote viewing works (the ability to see people, objects and places in the past, present and future) as well as remote influencing (the ability to transfer emotions and heal people from a distance)". End of Jim's essay.

Well now, reductio ad absurdum yields that no given group of gifted students would relieve the rest of us from being in school! Yet I am galvanized by the concept of our collective intelligence residing within each holographic unit of individual genetic makeup. Although we may not know the caring ways that most of life's gardeners tend to any given maze, our collective intelligence is quite evident in the historical meme structures of our evolutionary stages, from primitive man through familial bondage to warlord ego to societal divisionism to inclusionary didacticism to egalitarian expectations and so on.

Now then, how many people will it take to regrow an amputated limb before we believe we too can do it? How many strangers have to prove themselves before we freely can be trusting? How many Dulcinea's have to rise up in our consciousness before we comprehend life to be greater than what we see? What, indeed, is our sense of life?

A "collective consciousness" said Jung. "I just want to know God's thoughts, the rest are details," said Einstein. And "Thinking about our thinking?" say I, the better to understand our collective quest, our individual purpose, our reason for being. Knowing a bit about gene changing we may indeed more purposefully increase our conscious intentions to contribute to the health of the whole. Yes, our Gods gave us reasons for our being here (we've been taught) but we tend to diversify and to quantify and to separate and to en-culture and to fragment until, paradoxically, the individual takes on a paramount importance without necessarily noticing its need to nurture itself with responsibility to a whole. Seldom do we truly conceive of that whole as Everything. We tend rather to see the whole in terms of Humanity, with everything serving us. We claim our Intelligence and our Energy Field as our own. And we lose sight and touch and the feeling of living in grace and flow with the universal prayerfulness that is our psyche exercising its psychic powers, albeit subconsciously or not. Challenged by the vicissitudes of our evidently unfair lives, we move from our preferences to choices to entrenchments to a need to isolate our self-progress, spiritually, mentally, and psychically as we seek to fulfill our own cellular and molecular psycho-epistemic sensibilities, knowingly or not. We are rather sperm-like in our atavistic selfishness, are we not? After all, we beat out a billion others to be born! So then, let us think carefully what it is we carry in our genes.

Now then, come, let us pray. Hmm?

Dulcinea and Quixote

2011-10-20T19:18:00.001-07:00

Dulcinea and Don Quixote

My seventy-one year old friend cuts a quixotic figure atop the adult-tricycle. Lean and tall and oversized for the trike, he wobbles ahead of me like a proverbial Quixote aboard a small donkey. Aware that he might look silly, he does not care. He is fixated on trying to get the rhythm right, given his last hip surgery, but more especially, given the oversized prosthesis-looking boot on his right foot. Since his stroke my friend has had great difficulty putting any weight on that ankle. He's gone through various programs and seen various experts, but with no relief. The knee high plastic boot slides into an oversized shoe, but the dimensions of his foot won't allow now for the front wheel safely to steer. His life now very truncated from being an active sportsman, hiker, and cyclist, my friend soldiers on. His immediate concern, however, is to get the contraption under him to obey his will. But after several tries we give up. The trike is too small. And then she appears on the corner, a woman of his age, the sunlight in her silver hair. Dulcinea.

Somewhat behind him, and being a faithful sort of smaller Sancho these past twenty-plus years of our friendship to my friend's height and age I note the interchange between the two. Living in the same neighbourhood complex they know each other and each other's spouses from several years past; I am the new face, but I am not here introduced. The distance between Dulcinea and Quixote is too great, and as they pass pleasantries across the road of the familiar I busy myself with adjustments to my own trike. She is perhaps eighty, tall, stately, silver-haired, carrying a shopping basket, and neatly attired in a dark below-the-knee skirt and a white collared blouse that flutters in the breeze from under a petite jacket. She radiates an interest and energy in the new contraptions, smiles across the distance at me, then excuses herself and glides away. She needs to get back to her husband, I learn. He has Parkinson's disease. She is his main care giver.

The next morning my friend phones. Dulcinea is in the hospital. Last night she had a stroke. Her husband is alone. My friend and his wife will visit the hospital again in the afternoon; my friend's wife was there last night. Our poor golden-lit lady of yesterday afternoon's sunlight is now paralyzed on one side. Life is not fair.

My friend can still drive. He picks me up in his car in front of my apartment and we go to our mid-day rendezvous at the swimming pool. We've discovered this joint get-together that gives us exercise, immerses us now in the amniotic-like fluids of getting our old limbs re-co-ordinated, that rejuvenates our being. We get lung-fulls of air. Life is not fair.

Dulcinea perhaps never knew the impression she had on me. She perhaps did not give that quixotic moment of our meeting a second thought. Nor did I. But now, from where I sat upon my creaking steed she represented an essential vitality that still resonates with me: an older person, beautiful in her energy, interested in others, interested in things, in life, and caring to reciprocate a smile across the distance when she didn't need to. That she should so be struck down seems so very unfair. But then again we needs accept that which is. Still, I wonder, did Quixote himself not find his very passion riding upon the view of seeing things not as they are, but as they might or at least ought to be? Hmm?

The Lizard Tale

2011-10-19T14:43:00.001-07:00

The Lizard Tale (A rather Personal Tail): October 15th, 2011

The horridly squirming thing in my seven year-old hand was very real, visceral. I let it go but the lizard was already skittering away from me. The wretchedly broken off part kept wriggling and writhing like a living little snake on the bare concrete. Fascinated, I looked at the lone tail's wild gyrations, but caught a glimpse of the damaged creature's bleeding stump just before it disappeared. I felt a resonating remorse. All I'd wanted was a pet.

At twelve years old I had my own tail removed. The coccyx (embarrassing word) was rubbing against my pelvis and causing me great jolts of pain; in fact, the stenosis and disc degeneration of my life had begun. But I was determined to overcome this congenital condition; my bedridden mother and her plethora of pills as well as the care she needed bothered me. So despite pain I played rugby, cricket, tennis, and rather stupidly, showed off in weight-lifting. I bicycled, tried gymnastics, and even ballet. Then the South African army conscripted me; the real torture to my spine was to have little surcease. Five years later I was a stowaway aboard the S.A. Oranje, biked my way up Britain and worked cattle and hay and potatoes and cemented in a massive bollard on a dock in the Orkney Islands. Then I found refuge in Canada, but at twenty-five I needed a spinal-fusion with chips from my hips. Regrowing that old tail was not going to be easy. Initially with a contraption under my chin (to keep it up, ha!) and plaster-casts and braces I again hiked and biked and canoed and kayaked and cross- country skied and then even played squash, but the chronic and inescapable pain increased quite dramatically. After eight years of seeing various gurus who all told me I'd have to live with it the rest of my life I decided no more meds, no more docs, no more babying myself. So even at fifty-two I danced in shows, then pushed a car, and crushed my discs. They put two rods and ten screws in me, and as Titanium Man I tried to walk again, but it was short lived. These past six years I've been in a power-chair, since I cannot push myself. I've lectured and theatre-directed from it, and gave up my bike, my kayak, my skis, my squash and tennis racquets, my hiking and my dance shoes, and I've gone through successive jerks and jolts and stabs and burnings and unending pain in the name of what? Karma? Ha! Would that I had never done that lizard wrong!

That they regrow their tails now invigorates me! More than half a century later I recall that bereft lizard and get excited by the possibility of our regaining that which we've lost, not just metaphorically or psychologically, but physically! Imagine if we were to know of enough people who regrew their amputated limbs? Imagine if we, like the lizard, were simply to believe we could grow it back? Imagine if I were to stand and walk again, go longer, dispense with my chair, my cane, my lean on things, and my need of some help.

Well, a long languid curve of pier, like a giant lizard's tail stretches out into the sea and on past the ships' berths here in my new hometown. Broad and flat, it beckoned. It took me half an hour or more to walk its concrete length to the lighthouse and back, albeit with my cane and many rests along the way. I pay, yes, but from hardly able to stand I've been increasing my walk, step for step, over the past three months. And now I'm trying not at all to rely on my old crutch-stick. The quest for yet more endurance grows. Imagine, one day the x-rays may even show that I've regained my old tail! Ha! Now wouldn't that be a positive tale to tell!

A Sense of Life!

2011-10-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

A Sense of Life!

My friend struggles to articulate it. He sips at his 'Habit Cafe' coffee in our hometown of Victoria, B.C. His brother in England is really living! He has a life! That's what my friend envies, that's what so few of us have, he says. And it's not about what he does or who he is, but what his life is about, and when you see it you know it, my friend concludes. (I want to ask him if he sees it in me, but my ego is not ready for him to say no.)

I keep giving thought to my friend's meaning. A week or so later I see him at Habit again and still the answer remains the same. It's complicated. It's a quality of engaging life that you seldom see, that is missing in most, that one ought to lead. And again I cannot ask if he sees it in me. I wonder, why should I be so bothered by another's approbation? Surely what I think of myself is more important than that which another thinks of me?

My own brother still in South Africa, Peter, younger than me, often used the phrase: A sense of life. He determined an other's worth by it. He predicated the phrase on a person's passion for life, their interest in things, in others, in knowledge, in gaining, acquiring, collecting, doing, contributing, and being aware of the potential within. Were he to see this paragraph he may well add more precisely to what he means by his use of 'a sense of life,' but my understanding of his meaning is what I've gone by.

So too for each of us. We go by our own understanding of what it means to have a sense of life. We seldom necessarily need care what another's is, until their own sense intrudes on our own sense, and then the conflict begins. Problem is, we don't really know our own, don't really articulate it, own it, appreciate it, perhaps, until threatened.

So the challenge arises in me. How do I own my own sense of life? How do I take each moment and accept or invigorate it, invest it with intent, mindfulness, meaning, grace, dignity, value, worthiness? Is there any one thing we do, any moment that we are, that we exist, that does not deserve such a sense of being in communion with a greater whole, a greater sense of conspiring with the universe? (If conspiring be understood as 'breathing along with,' the which I learned from the song: "...by the fire, we'll conspire.") Well? The depth of that which we are is seldom tapped. Perhaps my friend intimates as much subliminally; I have to own up to my own sense of life. At what levels am I simply cruising with that which I am, undeveloped, unfulfilled, unquestioned, unleavened?

There arises in me a greater compassion for those similarly stricken; we are the afflicted. Lest we are self-aware we are ineluctable victims of our self-centric base needs, our familial upbringing, our ego-centric self-fulfillment, our societal structures, our ego-ic need for control of others, our pretence at egalitarianism, and at last our wrangling through the disproportionate unfairness within the whole of realizing our own enlightenment at being an essentially Integrative Being in the first instance. A sense of life? I would submit that it arises in the very sense of being responsible for each breath we take, rather than letting breathing itself simply stay automatic. In this living metaphor, thanks to suffocating a little, and then getting some air, there is indeed gratitude for a sense of life! Thank air! Thank breathing! Thank God! Ha!

Guest Response: Brother Peter's Sense of Life!

2011-10-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

On 2011-10-16, at 3:53 PM, Peter Pentelbury wrote:

My Dear Brother
Much as a drunk stumbles through life inebriated - he is still making an explicit statement: that life is not worth coping with; not worth the effort of facing a daily grind and being aware that, no matter what the circumstance - life is still worth fighting for. Worth living.
A quality that even the most flea bitten street dog will hang on to tenaciously without conscious cognition.
So, too, sadly, do most people live their lives. Hopeless heroes clinging on to whatever vestiges of what was perhaps once their expectations...when I grow up I'm going to be a fire-fighter... an astronaut... a famous writer...sculptor...musician...actor...philosopher...all of the above - so that the world will recognise and adore me as the next Clark Gable...Tom Cruise......Einstein....Picasso...all of the above....anything but the true me.
We seek endless approbation when we are uncertain of our own worth - an acknowledgement no matter the value from the source given. Like mindless lemmings the world seeks to emulate the "Hollywood Stars" and ignores the day to day true heroes.
Theirs is an explicit sense of life that threatens to drown those few heroes who do not manage to recognise their own implicit self worth.
I walk into a room or a house and immediately I can tell the IMPLICIT philosophy - the psycho-epistemology - of the person inhabiting that room by the things he EXPLICITLY surrounds himself with - whether he is consciously aware of it or not, his surroundings are a reflection of his innate implicit philosophy- his personal "Sense Of Life"
Show me what you read, paint, write, collect, find of interest, hobbies, friends, love..... consciously chose to do - and I'll show you the epistemological motivation that drives you implicitly - and thereby unwittingly- explicitly, making a statement of what and who you are... the drunk on the street corner - or the man who takes each chapter of life and, whatever it delivers to him, makes the most of it; learns and grows from it; and moves on stronger and wiser - or cowers more and more into a corner seeking escape from the bottle... blaming the inevitability of the hopelessness of it all...
I think it was Descartes who wrote: All men live their lives in quite desperation...victims of circumstance - I may be mixing my metaphors and philosophers - but such is my explicit nature of what I hold implicitly within:
On my tombstone I want the following words to be en-scribed: "He refused to live life either quietly or desperately - but on its own terms.."
We all seek some form of approbation in the end...do we not? Whether it be from a "God" or from the loved ones left behind.. or from our artistic works and expressions - we need to leave a stamp of proof of our existence that says: I am somebody of worth...was somebody of worth..... explicit statements of what we are implicitly within.
Which brings me back to unconscious - unwitting day to day heroes.
So few of us have a conscious inner defined philosophy of life. We pretend to have: by the craven idols and the worship of whichever deity is fashionable for the decade or the millennium - no matter the contradiction in logic. But that is so seldom a conscious cognitive choice - more often an inherited social or parental one. It takes a brave intellectual being to stand up and explicitly question all the so-called value systems that he has been force-fed his whole life - and that implicitly, within, he is unable to put an exact finger on, but says: Wait, stop ... I disagree, because...I can think for myself.. these are my carefully considered and rationalised thoughts... given as objectively as I can... based on the following concrete cognitive observations... (explicitly stating what he implicitly has learnt and thought about and given due consideration to and therefore objectively and rationally deduced - not just: "inexplicably feels...")
And few are articulate enough or certain enough to be able to outline their own Sense Of Life for themselves - or to be able to rationally and articulately object to the enforced subjugation of the Sense Of Life imposed on us by others ...(Church, family, teachers, institutions, governments...) In other words - we are either victims sucking at a bottle - or we are helmsmen taking the oar, no matter how severe the storm, determined to make a conscious statement and choice for ourselves...
I remember a previous missive written to you ...by whom would you like the top hat doffed by - the mindless masses - or the single individual who can recognise the value of the action and the full cognitive value, respect and worth it implies...? i.e an explicit action prompted by an implicit cognitive rational value system...
So, yes, when we "see it" in others - we instinctively "know it" - but thereby lies the conundrum - from whom would you like the hat doffed by... explicitly...implicitly.. thoughtfull consideration... or mindless approbation...?
And the answer to that is also a reflection of each of our own personal, implicit, "Sense of Life."
So yes, we do need to articulate and "Own" our own Sense of Life - and explicitly " live" what we implicitly feel, think, rationalise within... with or without the approval of others... It is our own consequential lives for which we must take our own consequential actions. Whether we do so rationally - or mindlessly sucking on a bottle - again depends on the worth of the individual.
And no, we do not have to articulate our own brand of philosophy and Sense of Life - like a preacher from a pulpit with hellfire and damnation - but by our own quite actions, works, deeds ... One painting, book, musical composition - can motivate and move one other person to achieve their own goals and life path determinations ... and leave a thousand other people indifferent - it is your own implicit philosophy that made the explicit statement in that art form that reaches somebody...and perhaps reached nobody. And if it reached nobody - it is not a reflection of our own self worth - and that is the most difficult criteria of all to face up to... what if nobody likes it..? Nobody appreciates the intellectual and artistic and epistemological value of what I am trying to say.. express....? Well, why care? The work stands as its own monument. Its own statement. As do our lives... We need to accept value from within .. and perhaps, yes.. one moment of "recognition" from an individual of cognitive worth...after all, we are creatures forever looking in mirrors, are we not?.
And so we conspire...
Colin Wilson in The Outsiders outlined succintly the endless dillemma of all men of great artistic and intellectual abilities - how to maintain and sustain that level of "intensity" that drove them to create their great works of literature and art and music and science - for somewhere in-between there had to be a "down time' - and that I think, is what we all struggle with - the down-time of self doubt and uncertainty and ... what if...
And yes, the depth of what we are, and are capable of - is seldom tapped...
Indeed we are the afflicted ones ..
But, as said ... I refuse to live my life either quietly or desperately - I own my own "Sense of Life" because I know what it is, and I have defined it for myself, and I am comfortable thereby...
I do not need to conspire with the universe - the universe needs to conspire with me (post script to the tombstone).
And no, unfortunately, God is busy blinking, so, thanks to Ayn Rand for some cognitive rationality in the universe...
My hat is off...
Much love, Peter

Fear or Favor?

2011-10-12T20:56:00.000-07:00

The loneliness of the far-away runner was very evident. He runs through my thoughts still. As my vehicle swept around a steep curve of the rocky-mountain road in the heart of British Columbia, the golden sunlight glittering off the autumnal yellow of the larch and aspens, I have on the long slope of the valley road ahead of me this sudden image of the backside of running jeans, a red plaid shirt, a brown leathern vest worn by a twenty-six year-old with longish dark hair bouncing from under the ubiquitous dark blue, or was it a black Canadian cap? He had the hurried lope as of someone not out for exercise, but rather as of one anxious to be somewhere else. Entirely alone in a landscape that had no towns in either direction for very many miles, he heard our onrush and turned and stopped and stuck his thumb out, but as we whizzed by he momentarily dropped his head in a dejected way and stooped over with his hands to his knees for breath (I saw in the rearview mirror,) and then continued running after us.

The instant of indecision was upon me. A fellow traveler in distress? A fellow human needing help, assistance, a lift? A hitchhiker as I too frequently had been at his age? His face appeared unkempt, unshaven; mine oft does so too. His eyes appeared searching, rather than friendly, as can mine, but perhaps because he focused on my wife in the passenger seat and then glanced into the car, rather than catching my eye, I did not feel the connection between he and me, brief as the encounter be. Some delicacy of my sensibility was awry, and in that slight fear the moment took over, and I did not stop, but left him to deal with some other fate. Does he run still? Did someone else stop for him? Was a murder reported on the unforgettable autumnal day of that far-away highway?

What fear has not been inculcated in us all by the movies we see, the news reports, the stories told, the warnings given? We are no longer easily able to offer a stranger at the door a non protective stance. We are afraid of the unknown. We wear helmets and belts and even carry mace and have identity cards and cell-phones and money belts in the name of protection. We are F.O.I.P. obsessed in meetings over the privacy rights of individuals without even knowing precisely what the acronym stands for. We wear tags and bracelets identifying our belonging, our permission to be, our declaration or proof to others that we are safe. And distrust is a state of dis-ease as we encounter the other, the stranger, the lost or the anxious or the... god forbid, the shifty-eyed. We clutch up our closest, clutch our hands into fists, firm our jaws, and get ready to fight or take flight. Fear of otherness, unusualness, alien-ness, and even difference drives us away.

Approximately ten kilometers along we passed a faded red civic doing only about 90 in the 110 km/h zone. The lone older man looked like an upset father, his large face staring grimly ahead from behind thick black-framed glasses, and as I zoomed by I imagined him looking in his rear view mirror to see if his errant son had been taught sufficient of a lesson. But that last bit is very much my construct, my story, my imagining of how that distinctly out-of-place young man came to be. Still, how many other vehicles passed the runner by? Why was he out there? And when, for me, will he no longer be my singular moment of fear pounding over and over at an everlasting pavement? Or is prudence, at any time, the better part of a pretence at being virtuous? Was he, is he... okay? Hmm?

Lazy Lying: Culpability's Children

2011-10-11T17:25:00.000-07:00

"Two hours wait? We hoped to reach Calgary," I blurt up at the ferry terminal attendant. Even as I speak it I know I'm lying; right from the start we'd planned only to drive half way. Why do we say such things? What provokes the exaggeration other than to bolster the ego, elicit sympathy, gain favor to be put in the fast lane, to put another in their place? The attendant looks slightly hurt, as though she's tired of passengers laying the blame directly on her. But I receive the docket, go to lane seven, and switch off the engine. Two-hours wait-time instead of driving is a long way.

Those little lies we tell have their origins in deep wells. As children we learn to cover up our mistakes once the consequence is perceived as too harsh. I submit that we have a natural wont for consequence, an awareness that we've done wrong or should own up to something, particularly once we've gained the use of language, independent mobility, awareness of thought. Dogs can act guiltily. A cat I had knew it should not be in flower pots. But once the punishment, the result, the consequence for my actions taught me that prevarication eases things, it became a ready escape. Without a mentor to take me in hand in terms of the honour and integrity to be had in a greater wisdom, the little lies sometimes evolved into big ones, and the spirit gets sullied by the pathway of deceits.

Integrity as a concept is more difficult to come by than we may at practice imagine. A myriad choices lie before us at every opportunity to satisfy our investigation into our personal power. Almost always we are con-scribed to action due to being social beings within a social context of expectations inculcated by our conditioning. But all by oneself becomes the real test. As a lone castaway we may indeed make of a basket-ball head a social consort, but we will devolve into less and less good manners in front of it as we perceive its immutable stare to eventually become harmless. We react based on expectations. So we learn that truth has great value, or we learn that truth can be harmful to ourselves, to others. Truth as truth is most tested in situational-ethics. After all, ethics has as its first tenant that the least amount of harm be done.

Subtly of lying is the art of the survivor. Not wanting to face the music (though what music except the death march should be so harsh as to deter one from truth?) we create a background reality of relief from guilt. "Did you take your pills?" the nurse asks. "Yes," I answer, thinking of the last time I took them long ago but she didn't precisely specify. After all, she so berated the fellow next to me for not taking his that I do not choose to have more of her wrath. And therein lies the crux of the issue: were she to have been sweet and gentle, reminded him how crucial to his integrity the contract with the condition he is in be taken (along with the pills) then I more readily would've faced the music. But who wants a bassoon-full in the ear?

As for the ferry-lady, she did not deserve my lie. I think to have my crippled self wheeled by my partner back to apologize, but the chair is tied to the rooftop, the distance too far. Yet I remain guilty; in so leaving off, or not even thinking again about the lie, who and what else may become crippled? When is a truth best not told? What harm may not be done by untruth? Mia culpa per diem per se. (Such are my daily faults.) Truly! Ha!

Now That I Am Alive Again, Amen! (May to October 5th, 2011)

2011-10-11T17:20:00.000-07:00

Heaviness weighs on my chest, literally. Angina makes it difficult to take deep breaths, leaves me without a sense of much air at the slightest exertion. My brain at times feels leaden, befuddled. And so the pink beta-blocker and the little blue aspirin and Lipitor, that tiny white rugby-ball, become a daily ritual. And next week the angiogram will reveal this or that, and the cardiologist will do this or that, and soon enough i shall be yet more alive again. In the meantime, there is a definite limitation to my energy.

Alarmist sensibilities will provoke sentiments. We live in the now, no matter what the current state of our journey, and we wish each other health and happy birthday, or merry Christmas, or even good day as if it were some special and distinct delineation deserving apportionment to be set apart from every other day. But to those of us with an actual struggle to breathe and thereby living with a somewhat foreboding sense of immanent foreclosure, one resorts to treasuring the moment by moment existence of air and light and movement itself. There is a checking in of memories, of regrets, of things left undone. But why, were i to be more alive again, should it be any different? Does one not take the baggage along with oneself, the love-letters unsent, the stitches dropped, the unsigned canvases, the photos in the mind, the scars of our past, the joys and loves that sustained us?

Death is not to be feared; Living is, particularly if "feared" is understood in terms of apprehension, dealing with uncertainties. Death completely releases; Living constantly requires. Death leaves all of the self, of a thee or me, for others to deal with; Living requires the self to participate. Now that i am alive it takes something of an effort to be, to breathe, to take my medications, to watch my diet, to watch what i say, to be responsible for my actions, to consider my impact on others, to focus clearly. Regret to say, Death leaves others with the sorrow and the ache of grief and the loneliness of moments insufficient by themselves, but for the self death is mayhap a release into the ethereal, free from pain. At least one hopes so! The cartoon of the fellow in hell whistling at his wheelbarrow of work while the devil prods at him, saying “we just can’t seem to get through to you”, resonates. Does one still have to put up with pain after death? Is that where we get our concept of hell? Ha!

Thing is, as I now lie here in this hospital bed awaiting the invasive procedures into my heart, I am quite aware that the day shall end with yet some further recommendations to live more better. More exercise, more water, more cardboard-tasting foodstuffs, more rest, more care of the self. Amen. Should there be more meds or more surgery, well, all that is designed to make one well too. But between last week (with the first paragraph of this current missive and the typing of this current sentence) there lay the long hours of the journey of days from there to here, literally and figuratively. So too for each of us. We journey from now to now, day to day, and being alive, we do but give unto the moment. Let such moments then be special. Once we are gone what would we have of those remaining but that they should appreciate and enjoy and love and be more better too, day by day. Amen.

And now, as I type but eight hours later, I'm pleased to say the angiogram revealed an essentially good heart, ha!, and provided that the prescribed medical path of pill-taking is followed, it's been given a clean bill to go on ticking! Amen! What a fuss!

Now That I Am Dead

2011-09-13T15:41:00.000-07:00

Now that I am dead will you recall me with more than I am? Will you talk of our last hug? Will you remember our last talk? Will you think of the glisten in my eye, the tone of my voice, the pressure of my hand? Will you remember all our hello's and goodbyes? Or will your memory of me, like our memory of others, become a smudge of generalities?

Remember the last time we played tennis? Or was it horseback riding we did? Recall when I grimaced at the lemon? Remember when I offered you unwanted advice? Do you remember when I tripped too? And what about the time I broke your dish, your faith, your trust, your belief that I was really listening? Am I to be remembered for all those other little and large foibles, or is it even necessary that you recall the whole of me?

There is a last time for everything. I turned the corner. I stopped. I climbed those stairs and I came down them too. I pushed the chair in for the very last time. I thanked you for the meal. I even said grace. And I brushed my teeth, combed my hair and looked in the mirror at my face. Were you watching? Did I impact you? When I wrote your name, when I spoke of you, looked at you, smiled for you, was it necessary that you be there?

Now that I am dead you will somewhat remember me. Naturally. Others will amplify or detract from my memory. There will or may be retained a general sense of my physicality, but that will slip away with time and what I said or stood for will perhaps remain for awhile. And with your death, and with the others who knew me too, I shall disappear altogether into the ether. Are our graveyards not full of such ghosts? Who amongst us recalls things about our great-great and even not so great grand-ancestors?

Now that I am dead my story, inasmuch as we each have individual stories, will become a series of sentences boiled down in the retelling from some paragraphs to some mere phrases, and eventually to a date or two. Here lies Nobody We Know, born '52, died '11; so it goes. He or she must not have been important somebody might dare to submit, for there is no record of her, nobody knows him, and the offspring are no longer able to be traced. Huh? Is it necessary that one leaves a by-product, a legacy? Yet so it goes too.

Still, we leave traces, each of us, in every breath. We take in and let out atoms that are as aged as the universe, and incrementally we affect all with our thoughts, our deeds, our emotions, our beings. A beach is less for a single grain of sand not being there; a sea is less for a single drop not being a part of it; a universe is less for a single molecule not being included. Were you or I such a grain or molecule, would we denounce the existence of another? And now that I am dead I am but transformed into some other energy that remains within the totality. After all, which or what part of Everything is not?

So now that I am dead do not concern yourself with missing me as much as you might miss yourself; your part in this universe is as important as any other's part. Shall that grain of sand feel less than an atom of whale? Shall the indigenous native feel less than the sophisticated usurper? Shall the uneducated feel less than the professor? Shall you feel more or less than I? We each play our part. We each go on. Even if I'm now dead.

Ninety-Five and Still a Model

2011-09-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

Hilda Doherty is a life force. About to turn 95, she still is a grand-dowager in the true sense of the word ‘grand’. Tall, elegant, beautiful, and with an interest in others that glistens with care from her eyes, Hilda always glows within a room-full of people, takes on the interests of all those around her, and holds court as though each and every one of us is her special consort. Hilda Doherty has the gift of giving.

Glorious and Free was the play. Glorious and free was the way Hilda entered the audition hall. I’d never seen her before, but instantly knew i’d found the lead character. At that time Hilda was already a young 80. I thought she was a young 60! Written by me for Calgary’s centenary, back in 1996, and spanning the development of theatre in Canada up to the turn of the 19^th century, my play needed a brilliant mind, a powerful stage presence, and a miracle. Hilda represented all three. She was to perform in the role of a 90 year old man. As the disguised female twin of her famous thespian brother, long dead, she had to be completely convincing to an unknowing modern-day audience. She had to disguise her body, her voice, and her female mannerisms and instincts in order to portray not only a male, but a leading man. And at play’s close she was to reveal herself as wonderfully woman, feminine, and not only fed up with the limitations of roles for women in theatre, but with life in general upon the history of women. When near the end her voice tone abruptly changed, the beard and then the wig was taken off, the bandage around her chest began to be unwrapped, and her explanations came as to why she had taken on the guise of pretending that she was her deceased brother in order to secure better roles, to be a respected role player in society, and to participate in life as a fully fledged human being, the audience gasped. They had had no idea. Hilda was a tour de force!

And we became friends. I would visit her and her always supportive daughter, Mary-Anne, on occasions, and we’d have dinner and scotch and talk of life. In fact, Hilda would drive herself through some dark Calgary winter nights up from her city apartment to my northerly neighbourhood and join our Askers Group at various times. A gathering of young men and women, fresh out of high school, they came monthly to discourse about the questions of life. Hilda, in her 80’s, they in their 20’s, me in my 40’s, and all of us asking questions; what a mentor she was to us all. Hilda set the example of having an interest in everything, of caring about everyone, and of doing so with dignity, grace, good humour, and love. Her favourite word for any and all of us was, darling. Her other word for any and all of us was, sweetheart.

And could she be funny! In Same Old Moon, which I directed for Liffey Players, Hilda again played a lead role, but this time as an ornery aged biddy who, in front of the audience, prepares for bed, removes her teeth, and unceremoniously dumps them into the glass of water on her night table. Ha! Dumping the dentures was Hilda’s idea, as she sought to make the character real in rehearsal, and we immediately incorporated her improvisation into performance. The audience giggled, guffawed, and hooted! Hilda made life come alive!

Making life real, that’s Hilda for you. At about to be 95, and as I write this in preparation for yet another visit to her, I know that Hilda will still be interested in me and mine, and ask questions. Still my mentor.

X Marks the Spot

2011-09-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

That X still haunts me. Painted so slyly in dripping dark green on the brand new fender of the light grey sports car of a backyard garage in Northern Rhodesia, I can only own up to having done it now, some 55 years after the fact. I can speculate why as a very little boy I so erroneously, so spitefully made the mark. I can speculate why I lied about it. I can speculate why I still speculate. Yet in doing so will I be able to let the ghost go?

Four year olds are quite willful. Uncle Neville, as he was called, used our big backyard garage with its two barn-like doors to build himself a sports car. He arrived with the vehicle's chassis and engine and steering wheel intact on a flat-bed truck, and once off-loaded, in my mind's eye the fiberglass body of the thing seemed to spring up under the reek of epoxy glue and spray-on paint. It was all quite interesting. It was all out of bounds. Except that by the window in there I had my two guinea-pigs in their cage. I think I wanted sunlight and shade for them but I don't think I thought about fresh air.

Neville was a kind enough fellow. He was wiry and handsome, I suppose, and he seemed to like my young aunt very much. She was about thirteen or maybe even twelve years older than me. She took him sandwiches and cool-drinks while he worked, but I was not allowed to be in there with them, counting teeth. Still, I got a good enough gander at the progress of the car whenever I went to feed my pets, and I looked forward to one day going along for a ride. My mother, however, was indignant at the idea of me in a sports car, especially one made of glass, no matter how many fibres it had in it.

Trouble is, the guinea pigs died. I came in one morning and they were very dead. I recall being most distraught. I recall thinking that someone had poisoned them and I recall feeling that it was because I was not wanted in the garage. So I cannot recall whether it was that day, or another, but I took up the paintbrush that happened to be there and dipped it in the nearby can, which I think was left open, and I made the X, quite big as I recall it, possibly as big as my head. And no one saw me. And then I knew that as long as I never told anyone they could not prove it was me. For certain I was very much afraid of the consequence; at that age I'd already been beaten enough to know that owning up to a misdeed was downright foolish. In Africa, children did not own up to things. Trouble is, I recall most of my escaped incidents a lot. Better to be beat?

Problem is, that X has indeed haunted me all my life. Yet like many a dark spot on the map of my mind it has become not so much a blemish as a treasure. It has taught me a thing or two along the way. In dealing with others, particularly children, I've examined the value of fear as opposed to reason; in dealing with myself I've examined the values of regret, of honesty, of worthiness, of conscience, and consciousness, and determined that each of the mistakes I've made in my life (and there have been very many) have taught me along the way to be a re-evaluator, a thinker of my thinking. Still, knowing all this now, in my 60th year, would I as a boy change my not owning up to my misdeeds and so suffer immediate consequence? No, the hidings would decidedly not be worth it. What's more, I may have become a person who stops himself doing wrong only for fear of consequences, and I ask you now, where's the ghost of a value to our society in that?

Garage Sale Glories

2011-09-11T15:22:00.000-07:00

Selling one's stuff is a seminal process. It involves so very much energy. There was the initial search, deliberation, and purchase; the lugging around of the thing, the relevant degree of care or upkeep, practical, emotional, sentimental. Who gave me this? Where did I get that? Why did I ever have that? Can I really dispense with this? Have you any idea about the story behind this one? And then there's the price. How does one put a price on stuff that one has had over years, that costs a lot to replace, or that might just as well be given or carted away?

We seem to collect and cherish and use and have about and around ourselves so very much. Having once lived from only what I could carry on my back I came to realize that I was very limited by comparison to others in my Canadian community. Then came there a winter of discontent. And another. And once I began to furnish my rented or purchased dwellings the practical, useful, and collectible soon became more than a car-full of things for which I demonstrated care. Our lives are indeed a gathering of moment by moment wants and impulses. Even as I sit in the outdoor shade and write there are people in my garage picking over the pricing of pieces suddenly discovered to be wanted to have. And no matter the docket value, they'll invariably negotiate for less.

It is in moving somewhere else that we most likely find no need of something any more. Certainly that's been my case. Were there a listing of all the material things I've both acquired and dispensed with over some sixty years of living it'd be longer than the list of gifts the elves supply to Santa at Christmas. It seems that people's presents are one thing, but then there is also the stuff I buy for myself.

What is it in one such as me that feels bereft if not owning something? What hole am I hoping to fill? Is it really important to exclaim that I have that music, have read that book, have the next gadget on order, or indeed know what you're talking about? Is it an incompleteness that is driven by a need to validate the self, to make the self happy, to give a surge of excitement at the discovery of some treasure or other. Do you have any porcelain, the elderly man interrupts me to ask, only I need to find it to complete this set I have and I've gone from garage sale to garage sale for years.

Sorry, I answer compassionately, and watch him go. I wonder, is searching happiness?

But now that my semi-read books and once-or-twice heard CD's and polished mirrors and still working lamps are being packed off to other people's houses I can but reflect in the light of day on their personal value to me. And surely I can determine to curb the next impulse to fill the vacant spot I note in myself that declares a must-have feeling so strong as for me to locate in which pocket I left my wallet. Surely I can limit expenditure to the practical, the necessary, and.... But what of aesthetics? Are they not practical and necessary too?

At the end this Garage Sale day, or at the end of life's last sunset, I surmise, it is not that we own stuff that matters, as much as that we are not owned by stuff at all, ha!

Black Swans, Betwixt and Between

2011-09-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

(with thanks to The Beatles, Taleb, Graves, and Dillinger)

We can't live in a yellow submarine. Cognitive dissonance immerses us in indecision; to submerge or to surface? To stay in harbor or to set out to sea? To plot a mechanized course or to sail seemingly free? In which element does one find oneself settled most comfortably? Is life merely a matter of choosing, or do we indeed stay concomitantly cocooned, closely ensconced, endemically encapsulated, academically certain, and ineluctably closeted by our infamous penchant for predilections, preferences, and powers that be?

Catastrophe forces change. The black swan swims into our awareness. N. N. Taleb's metaphor in which a Black Swan eventually surprises us with its major impact, which may not necessarily be 'bad', forces us into a paradigm shift. Its apparent suddenness startles, provokes, hurtles us toward some new insight, establishes some new platform from which now to make a stand, or sets in us some new sea to sail. Yet after the fact we tend to rationalize our new stances very predictably. Recall when he said this or she said that, or what about the time we did this and they did that, or how about the insight I gleaned at that age that now leads me to this door? Way leads onto way, and indeed the predictability of where I am now at could've been forecast by any Luddite, ha!

Other instances of our ineluctable and intuitive shifting of consciousness, in due course, are indeed gradually wrought by the mindfulness of moment by moment accretion, but at some point that which 'was' is absorbed into that which now is, and the predominant reality changes from a stance, a belief, an ideology, to a larger whole. Our cognitive dissonance, betwixt and between, is the issue. We are fearful when feeling ungrounded.

Vacillation has its value. Many a premature decision would better have been made had I personally waded deeper into the dissonance that assailed me, but my instant want to be gratified greatly predestined me to pay for my mistakes. Perhaps. On the other hand, it is having made those same mistakes that propelled me toward making many other decisions, and each brought me to this point in time, which is as unfixed in the metaphor as it is in the mind. We would rather be sure of ourselves. We would rather know what is meant. We would rather have a value, have values, have certainty, have stability, have habits, have each other than be alone out there on a proverbial sea of anxiety. And only if what lies betwixt and between, port to port, destination to destination, platform to platform, and even thought to thought made sense, makes meaning and purpose and import and reason clear and worthwhile, are we at ease. Who likes to be out of control? (Dillinger’s psych-geometrics constantly shows how seldom we choose to be uncertain.)

Paradigm shifts are as cities in a journey; they are not necessarily hierarchically ranked though indeed one may encompass more than another, and knowing two or three gives one more awareness of yet more than only being limited to just one's own. Hierarchies in consciousness, however, are about becoming more integrative. Yet what lies betwixt and between is the real voyage, for in it are all the variables that may occur, that might be chosen, that may be engaged. Still, some will sleep on the way. Are we there yet, they say. Yet when awake to the shift in consciousness, to the shuffling off of What Was while gaining what is Anew, there is much lightness of being, like dissonance dissolving. Or do we just take ourselves with us, irrespective of what lies betwixt and between?

Seven Sages in Seven Ages, ha! (with yet more apologies to William and Clare)

2011-09-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

We are Everything; Good and Bad. Yet in the writing of my “Three Ha’s for Seven Ages” it struck me that each of the first six acts appeared as though bereft of goodness. Silly of me. Not one of them is entirely negative. Not one of them ought to be declared insufficient, inadequate, insupportable, inescapable or even irreducible. In fact, the inherent value or goodness of each role or part or Meme that we play is the very reason we sometimes are reluctant to give up that role as a predominant part of our repertoire. It is for reasons of their great value to us that we find ourselves caught up in the habit of so perpetually playing our perseverant part, given our penchant for specific predilections, and proclivities. No wonder, as we head to an eventual grave, we thereby may happily cling to one or the other of our favored roles that best suits us in any of Seven Stages.

First, in utter self-centricity we are self-sufficient. This is not self-actualization but rather a non-need of any others’ approval, an ability to find shelter and food and entertainment independent of the company we keep. It is that skillful and crafty state of depending on no one, of sensing how to survive, of learning the tricks of the trade and deploying the arts of self-hood such that there is no need to impress, no need for an audience, no need for an ‘other’. In the seeming selfishness of the very young we readily see it; a veteran like me oft stumbles too. See how subtly it may build yet again on any of us playing with the possibilities in Role Seven? In letting all ‘just Be’ (which is the very essence of Total Integration) are we not perhaps unwittingly beginning again with an ultimate reactionary focus on ‘just Me’? Where else then, do we have yet or not to be?

Our Second role, having not yet enough of the self to exercise it as Selfishness, happily succumbs to the needs of immediate others and give our loyalty and dependability and trust and servitude and humility. What fortunate people our family members may indeed thereby be!

Most invigorated of all, the Third Role drives us to succeed, never gives up, overcomes all difficulties, can be counted on to lead, to achieve, to attain, to gain. It is that which will not be traduced, abused, calumniated against. It is that which will not be left by another in the dirt.

Our Fourth stage makes us loyal community members, staunch supporters, gives us national pride, gives us a sense of compassion beyond ourselves and in our congregations gathers us into prayer and political groups and foster-care groups and charity organizations that do great good.

The Fifth act contributes inclusively. It employs and deploys the other, the different, the unique, the colour, creed, and clan. It provides opportunity and mobility and plans for growth, and it drives an economy toward stability and discipline and order. Bravo the Boss! Your loss, his loss.

The Sixth age is our check-point of reality over nonsense, our insurance that standards of education and housing and health and even religion are as fair and equal as possible, and it is very vocal in the face of unfair practice, ethical disputation, and argumentative bias.

And the Seventh, most heavenly of all, is that age where everything is important and nothing really matters; a moment by moment mindfulness no longer here nor there. Still, beware the selfishness of selflessness, ha!, lest there be little good in mere belly gazing at the bye and bye.

Three Ha's for Seven Ages! (with apologies to Shakespeare and Graves, ha!)

2011-09-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

When old and ready to go, shall we have played all the potentiality of our parts? In our integration, is there release in the surcease of the seas of troubles? Predominantly, do we clutch with our penchants, predilections, and proclivities? Can we not so much end them as absorb them with deep joy into the light that is our time before the brief candle is put out? Do our petty yesterdays all go to dust? Do we indeed rage, rage against the dying of the light? Or do we cling to one or the other of our acts, one of Seven Stages?

Our First venture is self-centricity. Wound up in the immediate need of this or that being right, our emotion, intellect, spirit, and physicality is interdependent; a stew of passions and wants and the dismissal of an other's proximity, however conventionally espoused. In the suffering of the very young we readily see it; a veteran like me oft stumbles too.

Our Second role is that of concentricity. We have not yet enough of the self to exercise it as Self and must needs have immediate others, like forever dependent children, in the family of our cognizance before we can feel validated in our individuality, attendant as it is upon the approbations, inclinations, perturbations, and manipulations of our brothers and sisters. Even in old age, we may too easily recline into dependency on familiars, ha!

The Third play is most invigorated of all; it is Iago asserting himself. Very strong, we will want to prove domination over and above all others, control others, negate others, use others to bolster our own upward mobility. Though expected of the aggressive, it's seen in the progressive pandering to the audience for centre-stage, for proving others inferior, for putting others down. It gathers clans and clubs and political structures and poses at the head; in the light it boldly leads the charge against an other, in the dark it schemes from behind and then can pridefully accept the laurel despite those betrayed in its wake.

Our Fourth stage gathers and groups and quantifies and solidifies gullible communities into organized structures that, pitted against each other, will fight unto death for a cause, for a belief, for a way of life. Perhaps longest and largest of our roles, we find ourselves caught up in the habituated constructs of our forefathers, in the conditionings of our societies, our cultures, our values systems, our sensibilities; we hardly dare break free to reach across the boundary dividing a group of You from a group who I believe is Me.

The Fifth act appears most inclusive. We strut our stuff, accept the other, the different, the unique, the colour, creed, and clan, until what any one doer-does does not suite; then we dismiss, vilify, negate, and judge. So too does each judger also play a juror.

The Sixth age is epistemological, solipsistic, synthesizing, and overtly ontological. It thrives on knowledge rather than religious, spiritual, or mystical meanings, and contrives equal opportunity for all. It promulgates a potentiality within each yet to be realized, if only others were not so tardy, stupid, dumb, ridiculous, self-centered and such idiots! Ha!

And the Seventh, most heavenly of all, is that age where everything is important and nothing really matters; a moment by moment mindfulness no longer here nor there. Ha!

Three Wise Saws of Modern Instances

2011-09-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

3) Entelechy and Enlightenment: Clear?

At what age may one declare oneself? Experience would seem to bring wisdom, but many a child has made an adult think twice. Metacognition, though muddled at times, mounts in clarity to aspire toward yet more, or what's enlightenment for? It is the degree of our perception, our awareness, our entelechy, our habituation that is at issue. And, as some would have it, ability to comprehend big words, hierarchy of education, fluency of language, ease of synthesizing ideas, cognitive comprehension skills, and care to progress are among the arguably amassing factors in the articulated ability of the declarant at any given moment. Yet what of childlike clarity? What of you and me?

Entelechy innately inspires the aspirant. Yet habituation can encapture the rapture of a special moment and merely relegate a proponent to practicing its limited precepts within yet another paradigm in the whole; a Ken Wilberian holon. We but tread on a pathway, footstep for footstep, yet a full apprehension of that which is on our journey, as we may readily concur, is limited by our proclivity for habituated perception. Still, what makes a human look beyond the metaphorical horizon, and so invigorates the inner juices as to overcome the inertia of an itinerary that otherwise would have one but be on the mental treadmill? Entelechy engages enervation; enlightenment engages endlessly. Clear?

Dabrowski's five Stages, Grave's nine Memes; models for mankind. Our advantage in being aware of the particulars allows for reference checks in our thinking, adjustments in our behaviours, consciousness of our correlations. We can fake it 'til we make it. We can adopt the new paradigm and predominantly practice its percepts and precepts until we walk the talk, strut our stuff, feel no longer fake. But within, when we look through the glass darkly, we often fear the dross and dregs of that which went before; we often eschew the inclination to progress into that which lies ahead. Who do you think you are, resonates; where do you think you're going, stagnates. We lose sight of integration, and we batten down the hatches, for as Topol's Tevye would have it, if we bend too far we'll break. Why else do we not easily, naturally, happily, readily, climb the Gravesian rungs toward our graves, or drive ourselves with ease and delight through Dabrowskian dioramas? Models for mankind do not necessarily inculcate in us a natural curriculum; we need nurturers, we are in wont of worldly wise wizards, we are often tenuous without teachers. We would rather follow, congregate, conglomerate, coagulate, than be utterly responsible for ourselves.

Understanding takes effort. Looking things up, having things explained, allowing things to be convoluted, accepting things as they are, being in the now, breaking old habits, instinctually being integrative; these are the challenges of life. We prefer, mostly, to keep it simple. We react. Proactive, inactive, we react. The paradox is that it all really is simple; it is ourselves who bifurcate, complicate, hate. It is ourselves who quantify. It is ourselves who vilify, nullify, and disproportionately deify. Intellect vies with integration. Knowledge yields to ontology. As Einstein says, I only want to know gods thoughts, the rest are details. Intuition is immediate. Understanding, now that takes effort.

Entelechy is our innate drive; Enlightenment is what is. Now is only now. Ha! Clear?

2) Ducking Civil Disobedience, Consciousness and Consequences

Sitting ducks! That's what the quaint hodgepodge of forlorn looking dories and yachts and even a beat-up old houseboat are like from the viewpoint of the Selkirk trestle bridge. Once in a while, mostly male, someone clambers the craft and battens down or brings supplies, but mostly, beer in hand, occupants sit smoking and shoot at the old proverbial breeze. But the boats themselves hardly ever move. Anchored over years in the Victoria Gorge, they've become fixtures in a landscape, freeloaders upon a scene, takers of opportunity, compatriots of no consequences. They pay nothing. Without a clear jurisdiction, the confluence of three or perhaps more counties created this pocket and water, and so boaters, learning of this free camping spot, have unconditionally moved in. More come, monthly, and eventually, perforce, there'll be such a plethora of the poorly moored things that someone will have to shut it down, demand payment, set up a fee system and a regulator and a sheriff and a patrol officer and a bylaws officer and build docks and institute safety regulations and create a non-slippery slope up off the waters and onto dry land. Oh, and the council prepared to take on the liability will of course be the one to pay and thereby its constituent taxpayers will be effected too; ain't that the way? After all, ducking laws is not civil disobedience; conscionable protest is.

When any one of us wittingly or unwittingly or especially purposefully knowingly takes advantage of life's seeming freebies we conspire to accrete toward a community so effected as for it to take action against a sea of troubles, and by opposing them, end them. When one smokes in public places, takes short-cuts across a lawn, sneaks in when there should have been payment, gets away with an extra item in the grocery or restaurant bill, a parking spot that should have been paid for, an indiscretion that might have been avoided, an overstepping of one's social bounds it is the cumulative effect on society that perhaps not so gradually builds up to a point where we are so law-bound as no longer free to rely on that antiquated adage, that of having common sense. Recall no validation of identity, no demurring at a personal cheque? Recall a handshake as one's bond, a code of honour that was not observed due to fear of consequences, a time when there were no security tags, checks, pat-downs? Yes, breaking a law to prove its invalidity is indeed civil disobedience, but is done despite consequence to spite consequence!

Directly proportional to a sophisticated society is its amount of laws. Which part of ‘Respect Every Thing And Every Body’ does one need subclauses and adjuncts for, like dangling prepositions up with which those in authority will not put? We create laws when we care less. Unfortunately we appear to need laws to keep us morally right, committed to contracts, honoring our debts. And unfortunately, we generally do-do things out of a fear of a bad consequence, or for our want of a good result, seldom simply because we comprehend that our actions impact another, a larger group, nation, earth, biosphere, or universe. True civil disobedience, on the other hand, like that exercised by a Ruth First, is done with clarity of purpose, on behalf of us all.

From moment to moment, however, such fullness of consciousness indeed eludes us. Would that the crafty sailors on the Gorge be ducking those odds yet still be thinking, civilly, responsibly, of the consequences for you or me.

At This Point in Time. (An Aftermath Appreciation) Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 10:21pm

Focus in each moment allows for one to stay appreciative: then, now, and next. The surrealism of socializing on the same day in the Montreal morning, then in an Airdrie early evening, and yet again late in Calgary that same night is somewhat bee-like being in a garden, each investment its own reward. Comparisons often make the present less than what was before, or less than what is expected next, so perhaps one is indeed better off completely to be in the moment, now, however apparently sparse or marvelously mellifluous the present presence of the proverbial pollen.

Poetic license incenses some; others get lulled into soporific sensibility and ride the words willingly; a magic carpet of woven meanings that for some, thread for thread, is discounted, disregarded, disused, and deemed but a weave of wordsmithing; for others it is appreciated for the surreal sake of the multiple-meanings within the measure of a given journey. Time is like that. Perception is like that. A glance is like that. Intuition is like that. It is in our varied states of unconsciousness that we each latch onto an immediate, at best, with which we can identify. So wags the dog’s tail. So dots an i and crosses the t. Expectation is patterning. Patterning is programming. Programming is didactic. Didacticism grounds all magic-carpets, truly, indeed.

Appreciation is a warm glow of gratitude that pervades one’s mood, filters through one’s emotions, and percolates in the chambers of the inner being. And it can be fickle, short-shriven, abandoned, and even forgotten in the passage of the journey from here to there. Like postcards symbolic of an entire vacation we carry with us the pictures that re-envision for us a time-past that, ideally, was wonderful. At times the picture of the past remains willfully woeful. Ouch! Yet when the aftermath of appreciation continues way past the event; even the embarrassment and pain of some spills in life can eventually have one smiling. Eventually. It seems to depend where one is at, at this point in time.

My father once wrote about his distaste of the phrase: This point in time. He was at pains to explain the shifting essence of time and our inability to curtail thought, deed, or intention to a precise point. Yet he very much was conscious of crossing t’s and dotting i’s. My father, when I knew him, was a man deeply disappointed with a great many things, and at this point in time, though I give it no exact period, he is perhaps better off. In pace requiescat. Is that not so much the point of our time here on earth? Or must we wait? Indeed, why wait?

We find it so difficult to pronounce things as they are, recall things as they exactly were in the precise present, envision things now with the reality of feelings we expect to have when there. A pain of past or happiness of future, or vice versa, at this point in time, escapes us. We are so very conditioned not to be in the now, breath for breath, in and out, right here, right now.

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor toward...” wrote T.S. Eliot, and herein lies the hub. Appreciation right here, right now, gives me a sense of lightness of being, of riding my magic carpet across the vicissitudes of tide and circumstances, and it propels me moment by moment in an aftermath of all that went before. Aftermath; the sum total. Aftermath; that which was, is, and is yet to be. And at this point in time, with deep appreciation, I share such abundance of gratitude for the now, at this point in time, and at this point too, with thee! Past, and Present. Or do i speak entirely of just a new way?

The Twelve Epistles (A Gift Box)

2011-08-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

1) Purgatory Revisited.                                                           (Sunday, July 31, 2011)

The road is lo-o-ong. The song resonates. And my regular road (dubbed “Purgatory Bridge” by a friend whose surname is, of all names, “Neway”) lies across a trestle bridge about the length of a city block, spanning the Victoria Gorge. On most occasions small boats glide to and fro through the central causeway beneath the wooden rattling of the road-wide bridge. There are the ubiquitous sea-kayakers, bright blue and red and yellow; there occasionally goes a small green pickle-shaped taxi-boat; there sometimes is a squat inboard-engine vessel, or a sleek small yacht, their tippy masts not quite tall enough to scrape the undersides of the causeway. But on the surface of the trestles, whether you are beside me in my power-chair or if on a bicycle or if running or walking or merely standing to one side to gaze down into the water you will be disturbed by the rattle of planks, the unevenness of gaps, the knots that give rise to tripping, the nail-heads that stick up for want of another pounding, and the commotion of the traffic of life. Being on it is enough to shake the fillings out of one’s teeth, to rattle at one’s rib cage, to compact one’s vertebrae, to dislocate one’s neck. And for each its very passage lies in one’s choice of going from one side to the other; we but take on the consequences of our expeditions.

Familiarity disassociates. Used to the racket one can assume to be inured to the contagion of sound and bumping. Fortified by experience, one can choose the mystic pathway amongst the loom of evident contraventions, stiffen the core muscles and take comfort in the belief of the temporal nature of the enterprise. Fortified by experience, one can accommodate the taxation, the toil, the tithe, the pith and momentum of the passage, for in experience lies endurance, acceptance, integration, patience, and even success. One does reach an end.

But in the meantime is the passage always to be reconnoitered with such severity of inspection that one tip-toes amongst the hobgoblins and groans and grunts at every bruited bump, or can one knowingly steer course for the other side, look up and around, and acknowledge the sunset, the reflection on the water, the wave of the kayaker, the smile of a passerby, the wag of a dog’s tail? Having chosen to go to the other side, to journey, to progress, to passage in the way of living, where is there not a contrivance to hinder us? What might we not accomplish or comprehend should we stay immured by caution or even by cowardice ensconced in the seeming safety of our room for a womb? Independence is greatly realized in our mobility, if not physically, then at least mentally. It is our willingness daily to tackle the ruts and bumps and nail-heads and knots and rattling at our cage that determines the smoothness of our acceptance, the grace of our evolution.

We progress from now to now. Mindfulness of each moment is not about the ooh and ouch or wow and how of existence as much as it is about the way. And having chosen a path, as we know, way indeed leads on to way. Yet again and again, let me then not be a-feared of any such purgatory bridge; it too is a causeway unto yet more. And is not the striving to be born, the very call of life, not a reaching out of the dark into the light of yet more?

We need heed the things that go bump in the night, yes, but to cross the bridge of fear rather than bury oneself under the blanket is to find, more often than not, that the sound was only in the life-force of the wind. One breath at a time. One bridge at a time. Now for now.

2) Hamlet, Meetings, Mitch, Meanings, and Morrie:           (Thursday, August 4, 2011)

We humans are fundamentally ontological. We discern meaning from our being. We take chance and circumstance and coincidence and weave and wrap and unravel and postulate, sure that somehow there is meaning in the measure of things.

Hamlet believed the ghost. Hamlet took conscience and made out of consciousness a trap by which to catch a king. Hamlet risked truth for concealment, and in such guise of madness did so o’erthrow his Love that she, being the quintessential Ophelia of classical and o’erwraught disposition, did drown drown drown down by the river. So too for our meanings; we succumb to the truths we give them rather than face them squarely for what they are: circumstance made co-incidental with but a hint of humor.

Re-visited during my summer break in Victoria by each of the three persons playing ‘Mitch’ to ‘Morrie’ in ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ (a play by Mitch Albom based on the truth of visiting his old professor now stricken with A.L.S.), I am struck by the coincidence of time, chance and circumstance. We meet in reverse order of chronology, Perry, Donovan, and Jay Newman. Perry Burton, marvelously adroit as the evil King Claudius in Hamlet, diabolical on the outdoor lawns in the gloriously setting sun amongst the red and gold Arbutus trees on the grounds of Camosun College, wades in amongst the audience at the end of the play and comes directly to me, propped up in my wheelchair, to ascertain my readiness to re-assume the role of Morrie, and to re-assure me of his interest in playing Mitch. Within the week Donovan Deschner, a former student of mine who in the mid 90’s played Juliet’s father Capulet, and then played Mitch to my Morrie in 2009, arrives as a house-guest; life imitating art. But the real con-incidence arises in the same day arrival on Vancouver Island of Jay Neman, who as an actor had previously performed in several shows under my directorship, but first approached me in 2004 with the script of Morrie, and so began the saga of some 35 Tuesdays with Morrie, in many various venues, and subsequently some eight or so shows with Donovan, at the Centre for Performing Arts; life imitating art. Coincidence? Perry, Donovan, Jay, all within a week. Saw Perry on Friday. Donovan leaves Thursday after lunch; Jay arrives that same Thursday for dinner. What meaning be there in all of this?

The cornflowers by the walkway just after the Selkirk Trestle (dubbed Purgatory Bridge) are in bloom in August. They too are a part of Morrie Swartz, of Vic Peters, of Hank Gerlhoff. Each, had succumbed to ALS, amneo-trophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the ALS symbol of the perseverance of hope and the triumph of care over the inevitability of the disease is worn on the lapel, flutters down down down into the graves. Vic, whom I met soon after I assumed the role of Morrie, became my friend. He was a multitalented man who ran marathons, hiked, played guitar, crocheted rugs, carved wood, made wine, and wrestled with his disease to the end. I loved him. Hank, met through Vic, became my friend too. He was a man taken on a journey by his faith. The voyages of his past are documented in photo after photo that he submitted to Google Earth. The voyage of his future lies in his belief that he will meet his wife in heaven.

We give meaning to life. We watch it unfold and in the crossroads, the interstices, the warp and weave of the straight lines and the clutch on the curves we find significance. Or is it all coincidence? Perry, Donovan, Jay, and their Mitch to my Morrie, all met in August, 2011; what of that? Now, then, now?

3) A Hand for Humor!                                                            (Monday, August 8, 2011)

Humor has its drawbacks. The first comedian presenting at ‘Hecklers’, the basement bar of Victoria’s Radisson Inn would make much of that first line for openers. He persisted in the lewd, crude and the rude. And despite ladies present, his imagery was that of the uninhibited, the exhibitioner, the perverse shocker, the assault on the senses. Yet he had more hands clapping than I could count. And I realized (ladies and gentlemen), that on this Friday night, well after dark, with drinks, women, men, and the spotlight given to the exposition of comedy, that I was in for a tasseling and titillating test of integration.

Yet the Master of Ceremonies soon enough advanced the action. And while he was speaking it struck me that though genre specific, though differentiated, potentially divisive, dislocating and downright dirty, it is in each and every moment that we are tested for readiness to be aware, absorptive, assimilative, compassionate, and inclusive. What part of Integrative is not? What part of Whole is not? What part of Everything is not? Preference is all. And so prudishness and perversity lie together abed in the sea of allusion, illusion, and inference. We are but mankind adrift; flotsam and jetsam in The Universal Energy.

The hand is a great reference point. The thumb is thick and versatile, a symbol of the sexual/sensual basis of life. The forefinger is the action/adventure; it points and leads and instigates. The middle finger is the romance/sentiment; it clutches and clings and signifies. The ring-finger is the knowledge/esoteric symbol. On my own hand it is longer than my index finger, connoting more thought than action? The little finger is the spiritual/wisdom finger; it has the least leadership of the hand, the last we usually think of. And in the center of the hand are the palm-lines of the smiles and frowns; the downs and ups of our emotions. Great literature is like that; it has all of these elements combined. Shakespeare’s plays find their classical appeal in their ability to reach all levels of the populace; so too for the art of the Mona Lisa; so too for any effort at ontological insight that is not anemic; so too for epistemological attempts at evolving the psyche. Integration, consciously evoked, intellectually apprehended, emotively galvanized, meta-cognitively realized, or not, seeps into the interstices between the myriad fingers fiddle-fuddling amongst the five-finger discounts practiced by misdirected mankind, and raises the bar.

Donovan Deschner did that. He raised the bar. In the guest spot as the visiting comedian he brought the audience to insights of our ego-mania, insights of our being judgmental, insights of own inertia, insights of our attachment, insights of our predilections for positions of power, insights of our inability easily to transcend the paradigm. His was no set based on epistemological anemia, it was an enema designed to purge the up-tight, the morally pretentious, the ontologically challenged. And as his guest, as his former teacher, he even deigned to apologize to ‘Richard’ in the crowd, who presumably would not appreciate his reference to the splurge of spermatozoa pinning down the pin-hole in the date circumscribing one’s conception. No apology needed! Or am I too abstruse? Too obtuse? Ha! Too buttoned up?

We eschew and judge and condemn at our peril. Life is full and resplendent and funny and goes on whether we approve or not. Preference is not meant to be preclusive; it is meant to regulate the amount of times we engage in a specific activity; monitor the choice of purposefully encountering a specific proximity. And laughter, that great gift of real release, is the sound of the soul cracking out of its pent up shell, ready for NOW!

4) Gifts that Keep on Giving:                                                 (Friday, August 12, 2011)

We’ve all received them. There are trinkets we put on a shelf and eventually forget who gave them to us. There are mementoes one hoards that bear significance in their weight and feel, the story of receiving them a gift in itself. And then there are those mercurial gifts that resonate in the soul, ephemeral as a Buddhist’s meticulous sand pebble picture, made up of the moment and meant to be momentary, yet that keep surfacing in the mind and heart with feelings of gratitude.

Sometimes a word or two suffices. What clear eyes you have. What beautiful skin. What a nice person you are! Children, especially, formulate their concept of themselves by such gifts. We so easily can build or detract with a word, a gesture, a look, a seeming lie. Teenagers, especially, can be rendered fickle by such phrases. Years of their loyalty and appreciation can be withdrawn in an instant when the words appear unsupportive, intentional or not. And adults are no less dependent on the perception of intention behind the gifts of mankind; we are so formulated by advertising formulae as to believe there’s nothing better than whatever. Much of those sorts of gifts can be forgotten, even forgiven, over time.

Yet some gifts last through the years to be continual reminders of the person, the event, the era. Individual to each of us, mine are items like a glass-bubble paper-weight, a wire-horse, a poster for Romeo and Juliet, a bronze llama. They would mean little to anyone else. The stories behind each are fascinating ~ to me. Yet even more significant are the memories of other gifts seemingly lost in the proverbial sands of time: the car-load of care that arrived one seminal day in my youth; the phone-call made by a friend to influence my being hired; the radio brought by a stranger to introduce himself at my hospital bed; the buckle-your-seat-belt message as a magic-carpet was prepared to surprise me with opportunity for a new destination.

Michael Moore’s gift of a book has that momentum of a present that keeps on giving. Back in November of 1970, forty-one years ago, he inscribed it to me, then his student, with: “To Richard, Thank you for your friendship. May we continue the good thing here begun.” Reverend Michael Moore, that is. In a time when I took advantage of father figures, when I imposed myself on kindness and compassion, Rev Moore, our Religious Studies teacher, had been there for me. As I recall, he never proselytized. His three small children, about ten to fifteen years my junior, became used to my presence in their lives. But from the reception of that book, until now, even as I write, I did not see Michael Moore again. Way leads on to way.

Gifts can cement us. That book haunted me. It travelled with me across continents and displayed its spine in my many bookshelves over time, and I very often felt guilty about my neglect of what potential had been promised. The first words of its title are ‘Letters to....’ I never wrote.

And now, as circumstance and chance and generosity of spirit culminate to bring about a new accord, just before I head cross-country from Victoria to Montreal to meet the man, me in my 60th year, he at 77, I think of the gift of that book, and of the gifts we give each other in general, and I realize that gifts, far from being isolated in time, indeed keep on giving. Go give!

5) Far Flung Friends and Near                                                (Saturday, August 13, 2011)

The immediacy of friendship is all. There can be years and months and days separating us, and we hear a voice or see a soul and know accord, or not. It is the distinctions in the moments that define the true proximity of friends. With some I have sat in a room and yet they may as well have been in another country. Others have been silent beside me for a protracted time, yet whether by a fire or not, we conspire. There is an aliveness of feeling, of mutuality, of concomitance, of acceptance that ensconces friends, whether in physical proximity or geographical dislocation; we are creatures given to gregarious cohabitation, even if we indeed can impose on another's hospitality.

Perhaps it is the feeling of unconditional acceptance that most makes us comfortable with another. We are discomforted by conditions. My friend may well have asked me to remember to turn off the tap, but if I am feeling that he dislikes me for my error then my state of uncertainty prevails throughout ensuing contacts. And although all reaction is up to me, all non-attachment and acceptance and realizations are up to me, for I truly cannot control the conditions within another, although I might influence such conditions, there is a distinction between humans that appears chemical, magical, spiritual. Tremendous differences of physical types, of likes and dislikes may still not be dissociative; I have friends whom I deeply love irrespective of our differences. What is it then that creates between some of us this state of tension that disallows for ease, for perpetual accord, acceptance, integration?

Power struggles can be deceptive. Power may wear a cloak that smiles and bows and scrapes in obsequious fashion, disguising itself even from itself, but in its insecurity will not allow another person just to be without feeling some degree of envy, lust, greed, or deception. Authenticity is a difficult thing to come by. We are so uncertain who we are. We are unsure who we should be. We have this hoard of masks and roles and scripts that we've gathered and gleaned and practiced and we think the one is more suited to an occasion than is another, so we tread upon the stages of life in the guise of costumes and make-up and artifice. We are dismayed when there is a lack of applause, a sense of dislocation from our audience, a disconnect with our fellow actor. Power will have one of us the lead! But we are unsure upon whom the focus should be, and in that moment hinges our very insecurity. Is that why friendship has so many variables, so many varieties; we are but actors on a stage?

I go soon to meet a friend from forty years ago. Are you nervous, my wife asks. What if you have no real connection after all these years, other friends asked when I told them the story. I check into myself and recall that the cloak I should wear is authenticity, the words I should share should be truth, the interest i should practice should be consummate, and the acceptance I should have should be total. That's a lot of 'shoulds'! Indeed, should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? What part of being whole is not? What role other than the self is best?

When I meet my old friend I'd like him to be real, as I'm sure he'd like me to be. Friendship, true friendship, lasting friendship, is based on the premise of no less. Come then, friends, and let's just be.

6) But for the Grace                                                                 (Sunday, August 14, 2011)

"Back up, stupid!" the eleven year old yelled, his slurpee holding hand waving indignantly at the driver of the black Ford Escape. Still on his bicycle, the child had just crossed behind the vehicle directly in front of me, since it'd screeched to a stop astride the pedestrian intersection. The boy's tone had all the authority of the Entitled.

No! I thought. But the reverse lights of the black Ford Escape in front of my vehicle came on and the car, seemingly angrily, growled into reverse and catapulted backwards, straight into the much smaller brother of the boy, also on a small bicycle, also sucking on a big slurpee, also now making way behind the errant vehicle. No!

In my mind's eye the cold-drink hurtled in a pink spray from the stricken boy to splash all over my bonnet. In my mind's eye the child smashed up against my grill and the sound of his crunched bicycle stopped the Escape in its tracks. And the man gets out of his car and runs back to inspect between our vehicles and then angrily turns to the older brother, still straddled on his stilled bike and shocked into silence, and the man shouts, "It's your fault! Yours! You should not have told me to back up!"

In my mind's eye I see the older brother, years and years hence, a silent shell of a man, reduced by that awful moment of his own arrogance to a psychosis of insecurities. We take on such responsibility when we move, when we instigate, when we assume an action for ourselves or others. Such heightened state of awareness is to live in a state of paranoia, John Lennon is reputed to have said. That boy might've made the assumption many times over that he could tell others what to do, where to go, how to do it, when they were at fault. And his self-righteous presumptions might indeed have compounded the mistake, might indeed have led from one assumption to the next, until in his arrogant handling of a given moment, such as that specific moment, the result would have found its origins in all the times his peremptory ordering, barking at, entitled judging, hollering, assuming, presuming, and controlling of another might have led directly to that horrid crunch. Such was the impact of circumstance, chance, collision, and discord I now envisioned before me. No!

But the vehicle in front did not move. Its back-up lights did not go on. The little brother passed by unscathed, and the older brother, his righteous indignation satiated, with a single backwards glance pedalled on blissfully unaware of what was in my mind's eye.

We are creatures of the moment. Choice is appropriated according to our whim and want. We build up a collection of cautions based on experience. We build up a badge of authority based on precedence. And circumstance, that God who watches over us, or sometimes seemingly not, finds our lives woven into and around and about each other in the singularities of pith and moment. Given the circumstances of brother to brother, vehicle to vehicle, and mistake for mistake, there but for the Grace go I. You too?

7) Where Ego, i Go!                                                              (Tuesday, August 16, 2011)

We take ourselves with us. Shame, worthiness, bravado, pretentiousness, and me. In the moment I am everything. It is choice that might distinguish me; I am consciousness and unconsciousness at once. The balance between the positive and the negative (in terms of my own apprehensions that is) determines my disposition, my actions, my moods, my thoughts, my peace of mind. Even here, I give but a piece of it. We are indeed everything, and we disown any one part of ourselves at our folly. After all, what part of being whole is not?
It is in the daily dictum of life that we face a series of challenges, habitual or not. Our very domesticity requires a myriad decisions, our interactions with others necessitates reactions, and we each struggle with the constant choices between that which we feel we ought to do, ought to be, and that which our instinct is provoking us to do, or to be. And which of our sometimes disparate selves, Ego or All of Me, predominates? After all, we implicitly can conjure a problem of good ego and bad ego, a good me and a bad me. Good as in motivating me to be better, bad as in wanting me to show others that I am better than them; balanced as in producing in me a fulfilling of my potentiality, despite where another may be in doing and being. Breath for breath, what fools we mortals be!

Anxiety is the giveaway. That moment of being gripped by such concern that the me of all my involvement in life maintains its unsettling momentum since I am the one around whom all events revolve. Ego grips me. Ego guides me. I am responsible, accountable, attached to the outcome, dependent, involved, and crucial. It is all about me. After all, what part of everything is not? Ergo, says Ego, am I thereby not a part of everything?

Non-attachment for me is not lack of involvement, feeling dispassion, or appearing non-caring. Non-attachment for me is not detachment. It is acceptance. Non-attachment is the paradoxical sense of being totally in the moment. It is me being involved in the situation while utterly responsible for my reaction since the only thing for which I can be responsible is my reaction, even to my own instigations, plans, orders, projects, and passions. Ego within my peaceful moments of non-attachment is the living realization that my being affects others, and that such affect ideally contributes toward the health of the whole (as much as I am inclined within the context of my daily awareness.) Yet selfishness, as I reflect with honesty, dominates. Isn't my life, after all, really about me?

Me. It's such a small word. Me. It's such a limited subject. And yet all I have is the perceptions of my viewpoints, the apprehensions of my emotions, the instincts of my learnings, and the immediacy of my physicality. Me. In fact, I often do not relate to you as another me; I see me first and you second, or even last, for inasmuch as I relate to people around me I instinctually am more of an accord with the one than with the other.

Naturally I am self-involved, self-inclined, and self-absorbed. Well, if not totally then quite a lot. It is my process that I work out the kinks of being me, ergo, to loose my Ego. Loose that is, not lose, for to lose my ego would be to have negated an essential part of me. The same for thee? Or is this treatise indeed all about me?

8) Process, Progress, and Product                                              (Tuesday, August 16, 2011)

This journey to my old mentor is now underway. As I write the sunlit clouds are below the aircraft window of my early morning world, and the packed people on the plane are but fellow travellers in a drama that begins and ends with me. Or does it? Are we not all participants in each other's journeys, myself but an unwitting component of someone else's saga in this moment?
The beginnings of some of our stories sometimes find their moment in subtleties simply unknown to us. We see or hear or meet or think something that only finds impetus in our awareness very much later, after the seemingly innocuous incident, sometimes so far-flung down the progress of our lives that we no longer can recall just where the journey began. Often, after the fact, when we see the junctions of way that led to way and perceive circumstance and chance colliding with coincidence, we realize the origins of our stories, and we can relate them to others, collusion for collaboration for calumny, if necessary, in order to create a world of sense and meaning to our existence. Such is our ontology. Such is our epistemology. Such is our want. How else do I make the sudden turbulence assailing me in this rickety sounding craft of any significance to my story? It is in the singularity of its effect on me that I am caught; is life not indeed also about all the others on our journey?

Yet in this special journey of mine to the here and now, bumpy as it actually now is, fraught as in reality it historically was with dangers and adventures and mishaps, and yet also really well rewarded as it was and is with successes, there has been such a series of remarkable coincidences it begs the full telling. All in due course. Ha! Still, given the difficulty at this moment of producing this script in the tossing and heaving of this east-bound plane, I am about to reduce the present story to its elemental simplicity.

My old South African high school teacher, Rev Michael Moore, mentored me in the last years before graduation. He and his wife Myra, and their three much younger than me children had me around for dinners and teas and games on the lawn. At a time when I needed a father figure, and a sense of unconditional acceptance, the man was there for me. In 1970, at my leaving he gave me a book. The inscription spoke of our friendship, and of "continuing the good thing here begun". But I never wrote. And now, forty years later, with me in my 60th year and he at 77, given very many concomitant and generous circumstances, we've arranged again to meet. He happens to be visiting Montreal.

The Buddhist monks pick up a single selected pebble at a time, and with mindfulness place it in the order of incorporating it into the whole sand-pebble picture, giving each moment and action and thing its full accord. As I fly now to meet my mentor, with the regular and almost alarming tossing and heaving of my conveyance, with the mixed emotions of intrigue and interest and excitement and concern that this journey not be about me bragging my way back to validating my youth, and that it not be about me having expectations that this man meet my interests so much as that I may meet his, I take up this typing, letter for letter, word for word, thought for thought, aware of process, progress, and our collective heading toward some sort of product. Now, for now.

9) Mentorship and More                                                       (Wednesday, August 17, 2011)

Michael Moore and Frances await me at the arrivals gate. His daughter is no longer blonde, no longer eight years old. Now looking as though in her youthful 40's, she's the beautiful image of her beloved mother, Myra, who died in January of 2010. Michael has the look of a brother of mine. We joke that he would be taken for the younger. He is taller than I remember him, yet the handsome smooth face and sparkling eyes and humble demeanour are still there, and though grief still has him wrapped in a dark cloak he is immediately affectionate, concerned for me, retrieves my dropped neck cushion, and enquires after my flight. Frances drives us to her downtown Montreal apartment, and we enter spacious comfort and elegance, and are treated to a lunch of cold cuts and tea. That afternoon, while awaiting her husband Joe's return from his I.T. responsibilities as personnel leader at the bank, we walk the old Saint Lawrence river path, Michael and Frances taking turns pushing me in my chair, and we take photographs with our cameras, with the magnificence of Montreal as a backdrop.

Beside me on the bed as I write are two books. One of them Michael wrote, entitled, Grief Revisited: Myra, Shining ever Brighter. The frontispiece has a pencil drawing he did of Myra in 2009. On the back cover is a water-colour he did of her in 1954. The love between these two created not only a canvas for their community of friends and congregations, but also bolstered their three children, Frances, Elizabeth, and young Michael. Michael junior lives in Vancouver. Beth is in Johannesburg. Frances is in Montreal and Rev Michael is in Krugersdorp, South Africa. They are a family each of whom has been free to go their own way. But the foundation of their Presbyterian faith and their strong love for and lack of shame of their past has been so open ended that they have seen no reason to reject each other, to disassociate from each other, to not maintain contact. In fact, at Michael's news that he had reconnected with me, each of the children expressed fond memories of our moments together. They all three had come to my Danville house for a meal. They all three had played games with me. Frances even recalled the red jacket I wore on stage in the role of Judas, back in 1970.

Reverend Doctor Michael Moore, Phd, retains the vitality of those interested in others. He goes for a run every morning (and was up doing so shortly after seven.) He sustains several projects in South Africa, one of which is taking on full responsibility for a house of dependent adult mentally-handicapped people. He was one of two South African white men invited in 1976 to Zimbabwe conference for racial integration, where he discussed issues with the renown Desmond Tutu and Thabu Mbeki. He instigated integrative thought and awareness and compassion and care for others way back in the late 60's amongst many of us, the boys of Pretoria Boys High, and he was my mentor back then; a gentle man of kindness and good will whom I saw as someone to emulate, someone to become. Seventeen years my senior, Michael Moore is still that man.

The second book, Letters to Malcolm, was inscribed to me back in 1970: "Thank you for your friendship. May we continue the good thing here begun." It is now 2011, and having had a chance once again to have that same book in hand, Michael Moore wrote: "Our friendship moved to another level. With warm affection, Michael." Seventeen years my senior, Michael Moore, my friend, is still my mentor.

10) Running the Race                                                              (Thursday, August 18, 2011)

As I write in the 6:00 a.m. womb of my Montreal room I hear Michael Moore, at 77, getting ready for his 7 o'clock run. The human race is like that, running to or running from something. For Michael it was to escape his smoking addiction, years ago; the replacement clears his head for the day, a kind of meditation itself. Then, it was running from smoking; now, it is running toward clarity.

We hurtle along in our lives. The retrospect, from the advantage of those having run the race for decades, is a marathon that indeed gets more blurred with time. The milestones we passed or ran along with for a time (with names and outstanding people, like Neway, Jablonski, Butow, Edmunds, Zikmann, and Barnes) are esoteric to oneself and them, and not always alphabetical. They drift up into the rhythms of our lives to give colour and meaning to the miles or moments we've passed. Sometimes we even recall the bystanders, those with whom we did not so much run as notice that they too were concomitant to our event.

There is an inevitable sense of pace to running this race; the quickening and slowing and returning in the mind to where we've been and the noticing of the now and the wondering at where we're going. To make it mundane, or to make it marvellous, there's the rub. Blisters and pain and endurance are mixed with rhythm and rhyme and the matters of the mind and mind over matter as we move. Movement is all; stasis is an anathema to the soul. Moment by moment the clock ticks. Pace for pace, we draw toward some line that we do not necessarily see in the race of humanity. Some are desolate with dire predictions for the direction we're taking; some are resolute that we will succeed due to our innate humanity to care for the whole race. Some just want to win.

Michael Moore, out there running his race, runs on behalf of us all. It is that we be participating that is important, that we be cheering on or in the background providing the means by which others may run or facilitating the route by lessening the impact of detractions or aware that others are out there, running too, or picnicking alongside in moments of simple pleasure at our leisure that we too are participating in the human race, giving grace to the future, giving space to those beside, ahead, and even behind us, evolving as we collectively and individually do.

By the time I finish this missive, roughly an hour, Michael will have returned from his run. I shall be breakfasting with him, then preparing go on my way. Way leads on to way in this run of ours at living the life we've been given. We are but momentarily in the sweep and flow of the grand marathon of humanity, running however subliminally in the human race. It is not that one wins (for theoretically only one can come first), it is that one realizes the privilege of attending the event at all that matters for Michael. And therein we have the measure of a man; not that he be actually running, but that he be aware of participating. How else may one say that one has indeed had time within the human race? As for Michael, he runs at his own pace.

11) Peace, Prayer, and The Montreal Ducks                       (Thursday, August 18, 2011)

The seat belt signs have just been turned off and the aircraft is at 3600 feet, jetting its way away from you, Michael and Frances. Already, I miss you deeply. Yet in that missing (since we spoke on the way to the airport of attachment and non-attachment in the same breath as an essentially God-like concept of unconditional love) the sense of integration we experienced and the love we came so easily to feel and to share imbues my spirit with a deep sense of richness, of a lightness of being, rather like the present breakthrough of the sun as this aircraft has just surfaced above the dark of the clouds.

It rains in Montreal. While taking me from the airport to your downtown apartment there was a sudden afternoon storm of the "Tsho!" variety. It deserved an essentially African exclamation! It ensconced us in that interior-huddle-down and appreciate the safety and comfort feeling that I so love about storms. I glanced beyond the three of us in the new-smelling silver Honda, piloting us toward home, and the building-backed streets were grey and drenched and battered by rain. A lone cyclist, unprepared, pedalled her way resolutely. Proverbial duck weather, for sure, I thought. And the significance of the surrounding fluid and the rebirthing of our relationship struck me as a washing away of the old, despite its re-examination, piece for peace, unravelling in enlightenment. Even up here, as this creaky craft now glides in sunshine, I pray that such light pours on you.

Prayer at our luncheon was a moment in which we might have felt awkward had I not cared for participation; or more, perhaps declared myself (as we later discussed) an avowed Dawkins-son, that scientific purveyor of outright atheism. We human-beings are generally discomforted by those who are other-than ourselves, as much as we try to integrate and host and live with and even converse with such others. After all, do you like competition, one might venture. No, the other might curtly respond. And so might continue a contracted relationship. But when we are open and accepting and interested in everything (and everyone) we have a recipe for a true smorgasbord of conversation and sharing and swapping of ideas and thoughts and contentions and re-directions and lessons and insights and, indeed, the much-more-easier giving and receiving of unconditional love. Reception of love is as important as giving; we become a conduit to the process of love. Prayer in process is like love in action, an affirmation that we are connected and blessed; a declaration of our intentions and an articulation of what is in our hearts. Why should one eschew prayer? Why should one negate an act that in its essence is gratitude and grace for the past and present; a piece of peace for the future.

As i fly on, that peace lives within me, moment for moment. Such peace imbued our actions, our considerations, our hearts. We cried and laughed, joked and postulated, shared and questioned, and ventured forth. What a marvellously open-ended passage of time ensued. What a marvellously gracious gift of living prayer we experienced. Such too was the value of our watching for ducks on our peaceful perambulations; the worth of watching over one's soul in the waters of life. Such moments of peace continued over the deeper ruts and the rough-shod of our pathways; the simple watching of a duck while realizing the worthiness of just being there; a symbol so unconventionally carried in prayerfulness and peace into the busyness of all life. Peace. Amen. So let us pray.

12) The Code of Silence                                                        (Friday, August 19, 2011)

Pecoste Trugg taught me a valuable thing or two. His real name was Neil Anderson and he shared my Solomon House prefect study at Pretoria Boy's High back in 1970. He liked that exotic name, Pecoste. Perhaps his avowal one day to adopt it is why I have never found him, or why at our October 40 year reunion he could not be contacted. In many ways, I owe him a thing or two.

Neil taught me the value of words. "That's a powerful word," he would say, and I would immediately weigh in, and revise my options. He taught me the value of body language and the value of the smile; he advocated Dale Carnegie. He taught me the value of accepting an other's and others' values. He was casual to my formality, precise to my carelessness, and laconic to my intensity. And Neil showed me the value of hard work, for he was almost always at his desk, intending to study to become a brain surgeon. He taught me chords on the guitar, Dylan's 'lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed,' and Cohen's 'bird on the wire'. Though I still do not feel comfortable with the former, I cannot help but think of my long-lost friend whenever I play and sing the latter. But of all the lessons Pecoste taught me, the most valuable would be The Code of Silence.

No, it was not that rather debilitating boyhood code of don't fess up or squeal on another; it was that experientially empowering practice of seeing to it that 'what the right hand does the left should not necessarily know'. It involved doing works of good, of leading from behind, of living in the grace of an inner power thanks to the self knowing it'd rescued the fallen bird, given to charity, helped another, or instigated a productive project without overt or known reward for the self. In fact, without either of us able then to articulate it, Pecoste was advocating the highest of mans' virtues in each of several epistemological models: the selflessness of action on behalf of others without the need to be acclaimed.

Well, there have been times in my life when I've been the recipient of such actions by others. The essential lesson of leading from behind was affirmed for me during my undergraduate studies in the late 70's in Canada by Dr. Mary Richardson, who pulled me aside and first introduced me to the concept of gifted education. "True giftedness," she intoned, "is in the art of giving of the self to others; it is at the top of every hierarchical model. Begin with Kohlberg." Well, Kohlberg began in me the acquisition of an upwards spiral of evolutionary paradigms, such as Maslow, Johari, Gregoric, Dillinger, Dabrowski, and Clare Graves. They each empowered me with articulation, yet paradoxically, in the very esoteric mention of their models, they perhaps now leave you feeling lost in these words, disassociated by my ramble. "Knowledge is just a tool," I can hear Pecoste Trugg intonate, "never presume someone without it doesn't have the potential." But more importantly than having knowledge, Professor Mary Richardson would remind us, would be inculcating in your students "a sense of enduring interest in and generosity toward others."

As the continuing recipient of such generosity, I am humbled, grateful, and indebted. The code of silence? Pay it forward.

What Judas would not say, Amen!

Where Ego, I Go!

2011-08-19T08:46:00.001-07:00

Where Ego, I Go

We take ourselves with us. Shame, worthiness, bravado, pretentiousness, and me. In the moment I am everything. It is choice that might distinguish me; I am consciousness and unconsciousness at once. The balance between the positive and the negative (in terms of my own apprehensions that is) determines my disposition, my actions, my moods, my thoughts, my peace of mind. Even here, I give but a piece of it. We are indeed everything, and we disown any one part of ourselves at our folly. After all, what part of being whole is not?

It is in the daily dictum of life that we face a series of challenges, habitual or not. Our very domesticity requires a myriad decisions, our interactions with others necessitates reactions, and we each struggle with the constant choices between that which we feel we ought to do, ought to be, and that which our instinct is provoking us to do, or to be. And which of our sometimes disparate selves, Ego or All of Me, predominates? After all, we implicitly can conjure a problem of good ego and bad ego, a good me and a bad me. Good as in motivating me to be better, bad as in wanting me to show others that I am better than them; balanced as in producing in me a fulfilling of my potentiality, despite where another may be in doing and being. Breath for breath, what fools we mortals be!

Anxiety is the giveaway. That moment of being gripped by such concern that the me of all my involvement in life maintains its unsettling momentum since I am the one around whom all events revolve. Ego grips me. Ego guides me. I am responsible, accountable, attached to the outcome, dependent, involved, and crucial. It is all about me. After all, what part of everything is not? Ergo, says Ego, am I thereby not a part of everything?

Non-attachment for me is not lack of involvement, feeling dispassion, or appearing non-caring. Non-attachment for me is not detachment. It is acceptance. Non-attachment is the paradoxical sense of being totally in the moment. It is me being involved in the situation while utterly responsible for my reaction since the only thing for which I can be responsible is my reaction, even to my own instigations, plans, orders, projects, and passions. Ego within my peaceful moments of non-attachment is the living realization that my being affects others, and that such affect ideally contributes toward the health of the whole (as much as I am inclined within the context of my daily awareness.) Yet selfishness, as I reflect with honesty, dominates. Isn't my life, after all, really about me?

Me. It's such a small word. Me. It's such a limited subject. And yet all I have is the perceptions of my viewpoints, the apprehensions of my emotions, the instincts of my learnings, and the immediacy of my physicality. Me. In fact, I often do not relate to you as another me; I see me first and you second, or even last, for inasmuch as I relate to people around me I instinctually am more of an accord with the one than with the other.

Naturally I am self-involved, self-inclined, and self-absorbed. Well, if not totally then quite a lot. It is my process that I work out the kinks of being me, ergo, to loose my Ego. Loose that is, not lose, for to lose my ego would be to have negated an essential part of me. The same for thee? Or is this treatise indeed all about me?

.

But for the Grace

2011-08-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

"Back up, stupid!" the eleven year old yelled, his slurpee holding hand waving indignantly at the driver of the black Ford Escape. Still on his bicycle, the child had just crossed behind the vehicle directly in front of me, since it'd screeched to a stop astride the pedestrian intersection. The boy's tone had all the authority of the Entitled.

No! I thought. But the reverse lights of the black Ford Escape in front of my vehicle came on and the car, seemingly angrily, growled into reverse and catapulted backwards, straight into the much smaller brother of the boy, also on a small bicycle, also sucking on a big slurpee, also now making way behind the errant vehicle. No!

In my mind's eye the cold-drink hurtled in a pink spray from the stricken boy to splash all over my bonnet. In my mind's eye the child smashed up against my grill and the sound of his crunched bicycle stopped the Escape in its tracks. And the man gets out of his car and runs back to inspect between our vehicles and then angrily turns to the older brother, still straddled on his stilled bike and shocked into silence, and the man shouts, "It's your fault! Yours! You should not have told me to back up!"

In my mind's eye I see the older brother, years and years hence, a silent shell of a man, reduced by that awful moment of his own arrogance to a psychosis of insecurities. We take on such responsibility when we move, when we instigate, when we assume an action for ourselves or others. Such heightened state of awareness is to live in a state of paranoia, John Lennon is reputed to have said. That boy might've made the assumption many times over that he could tell others what to do, where to go, how to do it, when they were at fault. And his self-righteous presumptions might indeed have compounded the mistake, might indeed have led from one assumption to the next, until in his arrogant handling of a given moment, such as that specific moment, the result would have found its origins in all the times his peremptory ordering, barking at, entitled judging, hollering, assuming, presuming, and controlling of another might have led directly to that horrid crunch. Such was the impact of circumstance, chance, collision, and discord I now envisioned before me. No!

But the vehicle in front did not move. Its back-up lights did not go on. The little brother passed by unscathed, and the older brother, his righteous indignation satiated, with a single backwards glance pedalled on blissfully unaware of what was in my mind's eye.

We are creatures of the moment. Choice is appropriated according to our whim and want. We build up a collection of cautions based on experience. We build up a badge of authority based on precedence. And circumstance, that God who watches over us, or sometimes seemingly not, finds our lives woven into and around and about each other in the singularities of pith and moment. Given the circumstances of brother to brother, vehicle to vehicle, and mistake for mistake, there but for the Grace go I. You too?

Gifts that Keep on Giving

2011-08-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

We’ve all received them. There are trinkets we put on a shelf and eventually forget who gave them to us. There are mementoes one hoards that bear significance in their weight and feel, the story of receiving them a gift in itself. And then there are those mercurial gifts that resonate in the soul, ephemeral as a Buddhist’s meticulous sand pebble picture, made up of the moment and meant to be momentary, yet that keep surfacing in the mind and heart with feelings of gratitude.

Sometimes a word or two suffices. What clear eyes you have. What beautiful skin. What a nice person you are! Children, especially, formulate their concept of themselves by such gifts. We so easily can build or detract with a word, a gesture, a look, a seeming lie. Teenagers, especially, can be rendered fickle by such phrases. Years of their loyalty and appreciation can be withdrawn in an instant when the words appear unsupportive, intentional or not. And adults are no less dependent on the perception of intention behind the gifts of mankind; we are so formulated by advertising formulae as to believe there’s nothing better than whatever. Much of those sorts of gifts can be forgotten, even forgiven, over time.

Yet some gifts last through the years to be continual reminders of the person, the event, the era. Individual to each of us, mine are items like a glass-bubble paper-weight, a wire-horse, a story written just for you, a bronze llama. They would mean little to anyone else. The stories behind each are fascinating ~ to me. Yet even more significant are the memories of other gifts seemingly lost in the proverbial sands of time: the car-load of care that arrived one seminal day in my youth; the phone-call made by a friend to influence my being hired; the radio brought by a stranger to introduce himself at my hospital bed; the buckle-your-seat-belt message as a magic-carpet was prepared to surprise me with opportunity for a new destination.

Michael Moore’s gift of a book has that momentum of a present that keeps on giving. Back in November of 1970, forty-one years ago, he inscribed it to me, then his student, with: “To Richard, Thank you for your friendship. May we continue the good thing here begun.” Reverend Michael Moore, that is. In a time when I took advantage of father figures, when I imposed myself on kindness and compassion, Rev Moore, our Religious Studies teacher, had been there for me. As I recall, he never proselytized. His three small children, about ten to fifteen years my junior, became used to my presence in their lives. But from the reception of that book, until now, even as I write, I did not see Michael Moore again. Way leads on to way.

Gifts can cement us. That book haunted me. It travelled with me across continents and displayed its spine in my many bookshelves over time, and I very often felt guilty about my neglect of what potential had been promised. The first words of its title are ‘Letters to....’ I never wrote.

And now, as circumstance and chance and generosity of spirit culminate to bring about a new accord, just before I head cross-country from Victoria to Montreal to meet the man, me in my 60th year, he at 77, I think of the gift of that book, and of the gifts we give each other in general, and I realize that gifts, far from being isolated in time, indeed keep on giving. Go give!

A Hand for Humor!

2011-08-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

Humor has its drawbacks. The first comedian presenting at ‘Hecklers’, the basement bar of Victoria’s Radisson Inn would make much of that first line for openers. He persisted in the lewd, crude and the rude. And despite ladies present, his imagery was that of the uninhibited, the exhibitioner, the perverse shocker, the assault on the senses. Yet he had more hands clapping than I could count. And I realized (ladies and gentlemen), that on this Friday night, well after dark, with drinks, women, men, and the spotlight given to the exposition of comedy, that I was in for a tasseling and titillating test of integration.

Yet the Master of Ceremonies soon enough advanced the action. And while he was speaking it struck me that though genre specific, though differentiated, potentially divisive, dislocating and downright dirty, it is in each and every moment that we are tested for readiness to be aware, absorptive, assimilative, compassionate, and inclusive. What part of Integrative is not? What part of Whole is not? What part of Everything is not? Preference is all. And so prudishness and perversity lie together abed in the sea of allusion, illusion, and inference. We are but mankind adrift; flotsam and jetsam in The Universal Energy.

The hand is a great reference point. The thumb is thick and versatile, a symbol of the sexual/sensual basis of life. The forefinger is the action/adventure; it points and leads and instigates. The middle finger is the romance/sentiment; it clutches and clings and signifies. The ring-finger is the knowledge/esoteric symbol. On my own hand it is longer than my index finger, connoting more thought than action? The little finger is the spiritual/wisdom finger; it has the least leadership of the hand, the last we usually think of. And in the center of the hand are the palm-lines of the smiles and frowns; the downs and ups of our emotions. Great literature is like that; it has all of these elements combined. Shakespeare’s plays find their classical appeal in their ability to reach all levels of the populace; so too for the art of the Mona Lisa; so too for any effort at ontological insight that is not anemic; so too for epistemological attempts at evolving the psyche. Integration, consciously evoked, intellectually apprehended, emotively galvanized, meta-cognitively realized, or not, seeps into the interstices between the myriad fingers fiddle-fuddling amongst the five-finger discounts practiced by misdirected mankind, and raises the bar.

Donovan Deschner did that. He raised the bar. In the guest spot as the visiting comedian he brought the audience to insights of our ego-mania, insights of our being judgmental, insights of own inertia, insights of our attachment, insights of our predilections for positions of power, insights of our inability easily to transcend the paradigm. His was no set based on epistemological anemia, it was an enema designed to purge the up-tight, the morally pretentious, the ontologically challenged. And as his guest, as his former teacher, he even deigned to apologize to ‘Richard’ in the crowd, who presumably would not appreciate his reference to the splurge of spermatozoa pinning down the pin-hole in the date circumscribing one’s conception. No apology needed! Or am I too abstruse? Too obtuse? Ha! Too buttoned up?

We eschew and judge and condemn at our peril. Life is full and resplendent and funny and goes on whether we approve or not. Preference is not meant to be preclusive; it is meant to regulate the amount of times we engage in a specific activity; monitor the choice of purposefully encountering a specific proximity. And laughter, that great gift of real release, is the sound of the soul cracking out of its pent up shell, ready for NOW!

Hamlet, Meetings, Mitch, Meanings, and Morrie

2011-08-04T13:22:00.000-07:00

We humans are fundamentally ontological. We discern meaning from our being. We take chance and circumstance and coincidence and weave and wrap and unravel and postulate, sure that somehow there is meaning in the measure of things.

Hamlet believed the ghost. Hamlet took conscience and made out of consciousness a trap by which to catch a king. Hamlet risked truth for concealment, and in such guise of madness did so o’erthrow his Love that she, being the quintessential Ophelia of classical and o’erwraught disposition, did drown drown drown down by the river. So too for our meanings; we succumb to the truths we give them rather than face them squarely for what they are: circumstance made co-incidental with but a hint of humor

Re-visited during my summer break in Victoria by each of the three persons playing ‘Mitch’ to ‘Morrie’ in ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ (a play by Mitch Albom based on the truth of visiting his old professor now stricken with A.L.S.), I am struck by the coincidence of time, chance and circumstance. We meet in reverse order of chronology, Perry, Donovan, and Jay Newman. Perry Burton, marvelously adroit as the evil King Claudius in Hamlet, diabolical on the outdoor lawns in the gloriously setting sun amongst the red and gold Arbutus trees on the grounds of Camosun College, wades in amongst the audience at the end of the play and comes directly to me, propped up in my wheelchair, to ascertain my readiness to re-assume the role of Morrie, and to re-assure me of his interest in playing Mitch. Within the week Donovan Deschner, a former student of mine who in the mid 90’s played Juliet’s father Capulet, and then played Mitch to my Morrie in 2009, arrives as a house-guest; life imitating art. But the real con-incidence arises in the same day arrival on Vancouver Island of Jay Neman, who as an actor had previously performed in several shows under my directorship, but first approached me in 2004 with the script of Morrie, and so began the saga of some 35 Tuesdays with Morrie, in many various venues, and subsequently some eight or so shows with Donovan, at the Centre for Performing Arts; life imitating art.

Coincidence? Perry, Donovan, Jay, all within a week. Saw Perry on Friday. Donovan leaves Thursday after lunch; Jay arrives that same Thursday for dinner. What meaning be there in all of this?

The cornflowers by the walkway just after the Selkirk Trestle (dubbed Purgatory Bridge) are in bloom in August. They too are a part of Morrie Schwartz, of Vic Peters, of Hank Gerlhoff. Each, had succumbed to ALS, amneo-trophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the ALS symbol of the perseverance of hope and the triumph of care over the inevitability of the disease is worn on the lapel, flutters down down down into the graves. Vic, whom I met soon after I assumed the role of Morrie, became my friend. He was a multitalented man who ran marathons, hiked, played guitar, crocheted rugs, carved wood, made wine, and wrestled with his disease to the end. I loved him. Hank, met through Vic, became my friend too. He was a man taken on a journey by his faith. The voyages of his past are documented in photo after photo that he submitted to Google Earth. The voyage of his future lies in his belief that he will meet his wife in heaven.

We give meaning to life. We watch it unfold and in the crossroads, the interstices, the warp and weave of the straight lines and the clutch on the curves we find significance. Or is it all coincidence? Perry, Donovan, Jay, and their Mitch to my Morrie, all met within a week in August, 2011; what of that? Now, then, now?

Pin Pricks in the Dark

2011-08-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

The “Victoria Splash” is very special. Forty thousand people congregated around the Philharmonic’s huge barge in the harbor, the sonorous music swelling from the cavern-like tent over the orchestra, the multiples and multiples of people with their own portable deck chairs seated in rows and rows from the dock-side edge along the ledges of the sea wall and up across the sectioned off streets and over the great lawns in front of the majestic Empress Hotel and the imperious Parliament Building. In the four-hour slowness of the Canadian setting sun, in the seemingly made to order absence of wind-gusts or broiling clouds, in the calumny of the choreographed swoop and dive and glide of flocks of silent sea-gulls, in the riveted attention of the vast and superbly polite audience, in the clarity of excellent sound, the harmony of accord and appreciation of both raw and tamed beauty all around the Victoria Splash, held annually at the beginning of August, is the island city’s front-yard celebration of a lifetime.

Kayaks and rowboats clustered and clumped and clanked gunwales in front of the barge; the best seats in the house. Two daring-doers, gaining attention, sat atop precarious lawn-chairs on their paddle-floats. Around my partner and me, as far as the eye could travel in amongst the myriad people, there were no police, no authorities, yet there was no alcohol, no smoking (although the sipping of a sherry would have given a touch of sophistication to my sandwich, and the aroma afterwards of a pleasant pipe would have been peaceful), there was just a munching here and there of sandwiches, cherries, home-made cold-salad dinners. Some people had purchased hot-dogs from nearby vendors. Later, the smell of caramelized popcorn drifted enticingly amongst us. Some people had been there since early afternoon. We’d arrived soon after four. Others were still coming, and the press of bodies around and behind us grew denser and denser toward the magical 7:30 start time of the Orchestra as the main event.

Virtuosity does not necessarily arise out of a single person; it can be a collective of thousands of fingers and movements all streaming together to arrive at a perfect accord. Yet the virtuosity on the violin of the eleven year old girl, Alice Haekyo Lee, was truly mesmerizing. It was as though time stood still as she played the first movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.1 , introduced by concert-maestra Tania Miller, herself the consummate public orator and gifted synthesizer in articulating a spectacular night of conglomerated citizenry, colorful flowers, co-operating weather, and resplendent sound. The orchestral pieces of Jarre’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’; Moncayo’s ‘Haupango’; Strauss’ ‘Roses from the South’; Rossini’s ‘William Tell’; Saint Saens ‘Sampson and Delilah’, J. Styne’s ‘Gypsy’; Coates’ ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’; ‘The Waltz of the Flowers’ by Tchaikovsky; Richardson’s ‘Winds of Kananaskis’; Lowden’s ‘Remembering the Beatles’; Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns’; and then the majestic sweep and glory and thunder of the culminating cannon and fireworks, at about 10.00 p.m. of the 1812, wowed. Virtuosity indeed arises out of the individual, and is given validity in the collective attention to which we give it accord. Seventeen-year old, Jeremy Richardson, honored by the orchestra playing his composition of ‘Winds of Kananakis,’ agreed.

And so too for the specialness of each pin-prick of light wending homewards. In a fairyland of flashlights probing the dark spaces, of small boats and kayaks with Rudolph-like noses plying the dark waters, of lit-up lampposts like isolated molecules in the blanket of the universe, we each are but a bit of light, a sole pin-prick of enlightenment in the dark; would that at once our collective and isolated home-bound fragmentation so readily re-unite in harmony and accord. Sound for sound. Light for light. Now for now.

Purgatory Revisited

2011-07-31T14:36:00.000-07:00

The road is long. The song resonates. And my regular road (dubbed “Purgatory Bridge” by a friend whose surname is, of all names, “Neway”) lies across a trestle bridge about the length of a city block, spanning the Victoria Gorge. On most occasions small boats glide to and fro through the central causeway beneath the wooden rattling of the road-wide bridge. There are the ubiquitous sea-kayakers, bright blue and red and yellow; there occasionally goes a small green pickle-shaped taxi-boat; there sometimes is a squat inboard-engine vessel, or a sleek small yacht, their tippy masts not quite tall enough to scrape the undersides of the causeway. But on the surface of the trestles, whether you are beside me in my power-chair or if on a bicycle or if running or walking or merely standing to one side to gaze down into the water you will be disturbed by the rattle of planks, the unevenness of gaps, the knots that give rise to tripping, the nail-heads that stick up for want of another pounding, and the commotion of the traffic of life. Being on it is enough to shake the fillings out of one’s teeth, to rattle at one’s rib cage, to compact one’s vertebrae, to dislocate one’s neck. And for each its very passage lies in one’s choice of going from one side to the other; we but take on the consequences of our expeditions.

Familiarity disassociates. Used to the racket one can assume to be inured to the contagion of sound and bumping. Fortified by experience, one can choose the mystic pathway amongst the loom of evident contraventions, stiffen the core muscles and take comfort in the belief of the temporal nature of the enterprise. Fortified by experience, one can accommodate the taxation, the toil, the tithe, the pith and momentum of the passage, for in experience lies endurance, acceptance, integration, patience, and even success. One does reach an end.

But in the meantime is the passage always to be reconnoitered with such severity of inspection that one tip-toes amongst the hobgoblins and groans and grunts at every bruited bump, or can one knowingly steer course for the other side, look up and around, and acknowledge the sunset, the reflection on the water, the wave of the kayaker, the smile of a passerby, the wag of a dog’s tail? Having chosen to go to the other side, to journey, to progress, to passage in the way of living, where is there not a contrivance to hinder us? What might we not accomplish or comprehend should we stay immured by caution or even by cowardice ensconced in the seeming safety of our room for a womb? Independence is greatly realized in our mobility, if not physically, then at least mentally. It is our willingness daily to tackle the ruts and bumps and nail-heads and knots and rattling at our cage that determines the smoothness of our acceptance, the grace of our evolution.

We progress from now to now. Mindfulness of each moment is not about the ooh and ouch or wow and how of existence as much as it is about the way. And having chosen a path, as we know, way indeed leads on to way. Yet again and again, let me then not be a-feared of any such purgatory bridge; it too is a causeway unto yet more. And is not the striving to be born, the very call of life, not a reaching out of the dark into the light of yet more?

We need heed the things that go bump in the night, yes, but to cross the bridge of fear rather than bury oneself under the blanket is to find, more often than not, that the sound was only in the life-force of the wind. One breath at a time. One bridge at a time. Now for now.

Mr. P's Words: The Hero Within

2011-06-09T16:42:00.000-07:00

Mr. P's Words: The Hero Within

The Hero Within

2011-06-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

Convocation Address: Centennial High, 2011: The Hero Within. By R. Michelle-Pentelbury

(Wheels to microphone; gathers entire audience of some 4,000+ in; takes a deep breath: )

Hello, one and all!... My thanks to each who nominated me to give this address; I’m deeply honored.

You know, Canadians love to ask, “How are you, eh?” Well, in this thing? ~ I get to say: “I’m doing wheely well.” (Ha!) My speech is supposed to be 15 or so minutes, so, I brought my own chair. Only, mine’s better padded. (grins, raises eyebrows) Jealous?

Now then:

Dr. Christison, Members of the Graduation Faculty, Centennial Staff, Honored Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls and Souls of All Ages, welcome to: Convocation!

Your convocation. As Justin Laverdure, one of our thirteen valedictorian nominees put it: we ought “to take in every moment.” Yet another graduate groaned, “What’s so special? Just so many names called up.” Yes, but how to make things interesting? How does one create a sense of wonder? My graduation wish for you comes from the Bob Dylan song: (sings) “May you stay-ay-ay, Forever Young”. (speaks) Inside you, that is; Dylan loves metaphors! The reality is, one day you will be my age, tall, dark, and handsome (ha!) But how to keep life interesting? Staying youthful, as we know, is not dependent on age, appearance, or the amount of one’s struggles. Already, despite many untoward struggles, I know so many of you that remain vibrant, giving.

When I was a little boy of six or seven in Northern Rhodesia, central Africa, where I was born and raised, a lesson of dealing with struggle came to me in the form of a long black snake. It was a deadly African cobra. Limp, with a thumb behind its head, it was held up to my face in the thick fist of a hopeful tribesman. My Guardian Mother was indignant. “Ag no man. The thing is dead. We do not pay for dead animals.” The man became defensive: “Isee not my faultee, N’kosika. Aikona! This snakee; it too much struggle.”

“It too much struggle” got me thinking. We collected wild animals for distribution to zoos. Many came to us badly wounded. The struggle of life if you pushed back too hard, I learned, hurt too much, could kill you. Work with things, bend with things, but stay yourself! Go along with the pressure, but keep alert for your own opportunities. As John Wheler, our valedictorian nominee so eloquently put it: “It is about taking action to develop the potential within.”

Well, you’ve done that! You’ve taken the squeeze of some thirteen years of schooling and soon are about to be free! As valedictorian nominee Christine Liddell, of Student Voice, asks: “What’s your power, what’s your passion; what do you want of life?”

The theme of this graduation, as you know, is: “The Hero Within”. Well, heroism itself is usually a most public thing. We see a hero. But, The Hero Within? We all have to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Sometimes, endurance has to happen in the personal and private grace of our own space. We sometimes hurt where others do not see, and where the loneliness of suffering, and more importantly, enduring, is managed by our greater sense of accepting, including, integrating, and persevering. As the saying goes; pain is inevitable, but suffering? That is optional. Now, we all know that living life is about choosing our attitude. And now you are here! You! You. You made it. You surmounted all difficulties and YOU are here. Congratulations![app!]

Still, like a microcosm of graduations all over the world, here we sit in our gowns, looking rather like so many similar tadpoles. Ha! Well, despite our individual potential, are we each aware of making our own change? Do we consciously choose our changing? Or do we just let our natural metamorphosis into fully fledged adults just happen? As valedictorian nominee, Courtney Hockaday challenges: “Take risks, have courage, use your potential!”

Unexpected things will and do happen. Back in ‘64, as I turned twelve, we had to leave Northern Rhodesia before it became Zambia. A year later, in the Junior High graduation assembly of my poor-neighborhood school in Pretoria, South Africa, the headmaster said something that has stuck with me all my life. Ready for it? He said: “A gentleman, or a Lady, is defined not by what he or she does in front of others, but by what one does and thinks when all by oneself.”

“What one does and thinks when all by oneself!” That might have us checking into our private thoughts! To think about one’s thinking. Meta-cognition. Now, [snap!], thinking about one’s thinking is an evolutionary process. It prevents us from merely mimicking those around us, precludes us from becoming an unquestioning part of the group, the club, the clan. As nominee Natasha Baziuk puts it: “The world needs differences; each of us is unique.” That sentiment was also echoed by nominee Samantha Forsyth, as she stated: “Each and every one of us is special.”

Special. Yet we work well with partners, the team, others. This is what graduates from the Art Department did for so many Charities. Team spirit is why Centennial won the gold for Band and for Choir festivals. Gold for Robotics too, with graduates Zane Olson and Kevin Luttman, according to Coach Brown, being excellent ambassadors. A team! That’s why we won Provincial Gold for Volleyball and for City Basketball, thanks to coach Zelez, Lewis, and assistants. As valedictorian nominee Jessica Newman stated: “We follow coach Hebb’s tool-box theory; we use different tools for different situations.” Thanks to coaches Riddle, Sandbeck, and Weimer, wrestler Ryan Burns won the City Championship. In cross country, Matt Galea won City too. And thanks to coach Al Holm, Emma Morgan won gold in the triple jump and relay, along with team mates Thea Batel, Daniel Coy, and Meghan McKay. Nominee Jaclyn Olson reminds us, thanks to coaches Hebb and Cartier: “We won the rugby last year!” In Badminton graduates Crystal Lamb and Logan Man won Gold, thanks to coaches Hill, Doerksen, and Wong! Yet as Coach Wong so humbly put it: “It’s not about us teachers, it’s about the students.” The Art Department’s multi-involved Mr. Wolski said: “I just provide and hold open doors for students.” And you, and you, and you are those students! Indeed, once a dream has been attained, whether as a team or an individual, have yourself another, and another! Only, choose carefully your dreams! They should be much bigger than just your next date! Ha! In fact, at my age, if there was one thing I would caution you about your future lives, it would be always to make a careful choice, for way indeed leads onto way.

Choice. The South African Army gave me none. Conscripted into the army in 1970, after graduating High School, I was repeatedly drafted in and out of service over the next five years, call-up after call-up. You see, South Africa had this ugly and legalized system of racial discrimination called Apartheid. Communist backed guerilla-fighters were infiltrating the borders, so graduates like me, boys your own age, were conscripted to war. Conscription. We had no choice. Remember the lesson of the snake? Get trapped, squeezed too hard, go with it, don’t fight back; wait your opportunity. Well, after five years I went AWOL, absent without leave. (And no, it’s not quite the same as skipping school, ha!) I stowed away aboard a ship bound for England, the S.A. Oranje, then bicycled up Britain, hid in the Orkney Islands above Scotland, and eventually came to Canada as a political refugee. But there were serious consequences. I did not see my mother again for over 25 years. I missed my dad’s death by ten days. The price we pay for our choices can have huge ramifications; they affect others. Am I saying I should have stayed in the strife of Africa? No. But I might have been more considerate, more forgiving, more compassionate, and altogether less self-righteous toward my family had I not just thought so much about myself.

It is difficult for a young man and woman all on one’s own, as you may think you are about to become, not to think chiefly about one self. As you get ready to leave your families, please, think of your choices. Think of the consequences. Choose carefully, even as you go out from here today, and you perhaps want to party until you drop, or you perhaps are tempted to do things you may not ordinarily do; please, for all our sakes, please, think about the possible consequences to others. Always! Just this last October, at my South African high school’s 40-year Reunion, I saw my old friends again for the first time. Forty years ago we each had gone our separate ways. So many of us wished we’d stayed in contact. Close friends, John van Niekerk, Nick Hedenskog, had died; I did not even know. Indeed, the things one does, privately or publicly, affects others.

Back in 1994, here’s what a most forgiving Nelson Mandela, coming out of 27 years in a South African political jail, quoted at his inauguration as President of a Racially Free South Africa: [by Marianne Williamson]

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our very presence automatically liberates others.

“Liberating others.” Well, does it signify that despite constant pain I very seldom take even an aspirin? All movement, the slightest bump, costs me. My mother was bedridden with this same chronic degenerative condition from her mid-twenties. Her need for more and more drugs frightened me. Now, I’ve had several surgeries since I was thirteen, but then weaned myself off the drugs afterwards. Think about it, does someone else’s reliance on drugs and substance-abuse frighten you too? As graduate Mico Migilarese [Mill-ya-re-say], our Italian Stallion, imitating not Centennial play’s Mr. Darcy, but Rocky Balboa says it: “Adrian… you have to go the distance.”

Every one of us here has a story to tell. Each of us is pulled from within to become something yet more.

Yet where would we be without a little help from our friends? Valedictorian nominee Ledja Pengu, with gratitude, mentions: “…our families, all of our teachers, administrators, secretarial staff, teacher-librarians, guidance department, caretaking staff, teachers’ assistants, and student teachers too.” In fact, where would I be without Mr. Ed. and Mr. T.? Or all of us without Ms. Schaffer? Nominee Kaitlyn Kerr said that each of us is like a gemstone, and that inner “heroism lies also in being good listeners, supportive friends.” Indeed, as good friends we sometimes have to persist beyond our own self-interest. As good listeners we sometimes persevere beyond our own impatience. Like right now, ha! Patience. Remember that trapped snake? It reminds me of a thing I like to teach: We can only practice patience when we’re impatient; practice courage when we’re fearful; and given the freedom you are about to experience, I trust you’ll really find this one interesting: We can only practice responsibility… when we’re free.

True, only some of us get big breaks. Awarded persons. Awarded teachers. Awarded students. One valedictorian, thirteen nominated, over 500 graduates. One excellence in teaching award winner, well over one hundred teachers. Mr. Minaz Janmohamed, who received an excellence in teaching award this year, noted how dependent it was on someone nominating him. Coaches and players too: like our Mr. Rob Hunter, winning the Prestigious Lawrence King Baskeball Coaching Award. We all know so very many great teachers; we could nominate them for so many awards. Valedictorian nominee, Amy Leedham, would have us find gratitude for each and every teacher here. That truly includes our triple-H organizers: Team Hovan, Hep and Haney!

Yet as it says in the poem, Desiderata: “Above all else, do not compare yourselves with others, for always there will be lesser and greater persons than yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees or the stars, you have a right to be here!” Indeed, recalling Natasha Bazuik’s words: “Each of us is unique”

Unique. Like Robert Zimmerman. Back in the 60’s he would have been like one of you, sitting here. He most likely was told that he cannot sing; that his style was lousy; that he’d never amount to anything. But he persevered. He believed in himself. He found his authenticity and practiced his gift and gave of himself, to all of us. And he has become legend. Robert Zimmerman, known by all, as: Bob Dylan. His 70^th birthday, in fact, was yesterday. Some here, I know from my drama classes do not recognize the name, but almost all will recognize his voice (sings Dylanesque-like): Yeah, and how many times must the cannonball fly, before they’re forever banned? The answer my friend, the answer my friend, the answer is… blowing in the wind.”

Well, imagine if Dylan, really Robert Zimmerman, had allowed his light to be hidden, sublimated, or himself to be affected by the naysayers and gainsayers around him? His believing, or perhaps even more importantly, his accepting of himself gave license to all of us to be. This is what is meant by the famous Hamlet quote: “To be, or not to be?” To be you! To be authentic. To have the courage to live ~ with heart! Remember Christine Liddell’s words? “What’s your power; what’s your passion; what do you want?” After all, for each of us, there is no one like you! When you were born you beat out a billion other hopefuls. You made it to the golden egg and your very being, your very soul eventually found the light.

A quote I just have to share comes from a play called, “Man and Superman,” by George Bernard Shaw. It is a title quite appropriate for our theme of “The Hero Within”. Written in 1903, a whole 30 years before the comic book Superman was invented, Shaw said:

“This is the true joy of life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown out on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

True, you and I may well have to cross the jungles of Africa, swim the seas, fight off the lions and tigers and bears, oh my, but we have to take it step by step, and in each step we must find the purpose. It would have helped that poor struggling snake to know the famous prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” And your purpose? It is to do well. Or as our valedictorian, Suraj Sridharan, so succinctly puts it: “I don’t mean do well; do GOOD.”

Good, like the honest and fearless graduate, Naomi Eaton, who re-created the script, Pride and Prejudice, and involved over one-hundred students in the performance. Good, like graduate Janai Haupapa who midway through grade eleven came from BC, and keeps giving with her music. Good, like the always contributing graduate, Jacob Parris. And good, like the continually contributing Chelsea Herman, Anna Heiter, Ashley Haimila, Sarah Schultz, and Jess Cooper, who always give and give without looking for recognition. So do graduates like Sidney Fleury, Dani Paulich, Caitlin Black, and the ever helpful Duncan Hendrick. They do Good; like the constant contributions of graduates McKenna Stewart, Charlotte Myles, Brenna McIvor, Connor Chisholm, and Zlata Fridman. Good, like graduate Caitlyn Kashman, who this year published “Words of a Journey,” her book to help out teenagers. Good. It’s in your hands, for in such an act or thought lies the real hero within. As valedictorian nominee Dan Hansen put it, “to be the person who helps; to make the choice to help.” That is what the gentlemanly graduate, Steven Barber, always does. That is what our continually caring graduate, Amy Totten does. Good. It is in the acts and thoughts of a true Lady, or Gentleman. That’s what Danica Power, graduate and lead role of next week’s musical, Once on This Island, means by her Facebook listing of the essential qualities of a Lady or a Gentleman; it is a quality, you’ll recall, defined by what we think and do… when all by ourselves. Could I not keep on naming virtually every one of you?

In making caring choices, in overcoming difficulties, in supporting and giving to others beyond our own interests, we are indeed exercising the hero within. Each of you sitting here has done that. You each are busy climbing a personal and private ladder to the stars. Imagine if good old Robert Zimmerman had felt “less than”? Imagine if his parents or teachers or friends had persuaded him not to sing? And so, to close off, as Bob Dylan would wish for us, let us indeed stay, forever young. In fact, (looks over). Mr. Boutin, my guitar if you please.

(Mike Boutin sets me up; I don hat, sunglasses, and sing, using Dylanesque voice:)

May God bless and keep you, May your wishes all come true,

May you always do for others,

And let others do for you…. [stops, takes off hat and glasses}

Wait a bit. Let’s have others up here to help. (calls to back) Ready Mr, Edmonds? (Mr. Edmonds gets choir ready at back) Ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Mike Boutin! Mr. Jorge Ramirez! and Mr. Stan Sibbald! (they each come up with their guitars, plug in, while I sing, in my voice:)

1) May God bless and keep you, May your wishes all come true,

May you always do for others, And let others do for you,

May you build a ladder to the stars, And climb on every rung;

May you stay, forever young (x2; on repeat Stan, Jorge, and Mike join) .

2) May you grow up to be righteous, May you grow up to be true,

May you always know the truth, And see the light come shining through,

May you always be courageous, Stand upright and be strong:

May you stay, forever young (x2 on repeat Stan, Jorge, and Mike join)

3) May your hands always be busy, May your feet always be swift,

May you have a strong foundation, when the winds of changes shift,

May your heart always be joyful, May your song always be strong:

May you stay, forever young (x2) [calls: Mr Edmonds!]

(Choir repeats verse 2) May you grow up to be righteous, (etc.) ….. (I pick up last repeat): May you stay forever young.

4) (me) May you have a sense of wonder, keep up your interest too,

(Stan, Jorge, and Mike join) May you stay, forever young (me) May you stay-ay-ay-forever young!

Diamonds Take Time

2011-03-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 10:49pm

So, you wanted to know how one deals with continuous pain? Well, we take on our karma with grace, or we cry.

"Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional," the Buddha said. Well this journey for some of constant pain is debilitating, frustrating, enervating, and simply seems unfair. And like most things in life, we're left having to make sense of it all by ourselves, for another person's sense is not necessarily ours. It is the isolation of being in pain when there is no-one around to sympathize, empathize, or even bear witness to our endurance that pain really tests us, for in those long lonely hours, of what USE is our endurance and the suffering and the immobility and the harshness of our distinctive and seemingly unique reality?

It is precisely in those moments that the trick of minimizing the present reality becomes a personal practice, for I know that my own little clod of reality, as Shaw* would have it, is very much diminished in comparative perception of the universe, and of what I can do for it by honouring a larger totality than myself, by contemplating its vastness of potential, and of focusing on the creative, the generative, the mystical, the pragmatic, the absorptive, assimilative, inclusive and integrative potentiality that is the gift we all have, to whatever degree we realize it. And so, like the choice of opening or closing the icons on a computer desktop, I minimize the pain window, open up and explore the other icons of my cognizance, and rather than pushing against pain, or being annoyed by its perseverance, I dial up some other icon and overwhelm the pain with some other aspect of my unlimited potentiality, given that I grant the same unlimited-ness to each and all in the essence of our being yoked to everything. And the more adept I become at minimizing my response to one set of provocations, particularly pain, and maximize the choice of my chosen direction, whatever creative or focused endeavour I turn my mind to, the more I become accepting of the moment by moment by moment. Move but slightly and the stab indeed brings me back to the painful reality of physical nerves rubbed raw and sudden jabs of agony, but then the journey resumes; it is a constant journey of voyaging with my senses focused on the next destination, rather than on the rattle and squeak of the bone-based vessel in which my being travels.

Wisdom would have us realize our journeys are at once for ourselves and others; we are cells connected to every other cell in a continuous process of covalent bonding, osmosis, and essential evolution. We are learning, voyaging, taking on a sea of troubles. Impatience with the process is among our many difficulties. Diamonds take time. How do we slough off the entirety of the old as we progress through to the new? How many times shall we pass the travail? How do we make the transition permanent by choosing to let go of the past habituations, by truly metamorphosing to become the butterfly from our own caterpillar-like crawling toward our larger destiny?

We move with grace and gratitude, or we cry. And crying too, has its place. Choice is our privilege. What part of everything is not?
.........................................................

* This is the true joy of life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown out on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
(Shaw, 1903, Man and Superman, Penguin Plays, p.32)

Still Up for Acceptance

2011-02-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

Our problem originates in sperm. You and I were the first. We beat out a billion others. We journeyed more vigorously, more purposefully, more competitively than all the others, or if not, then by some accident of time and space we were the first one to meet the Glorious Goal. And now it remains in us; that deeply imbued atavistic sensibility that continues to invigorate us with a need to be better than others. So we judge and disparage and disassociate and condemn. We compete and deplete and disavow and dismiss. We claw, clutch, calumniate, confound and confuse. And we each want to reach Heaven, a heaven, the heavens.

Ignobility vies with nobility. There is intention and honour and integrity. We espouse the five knightly virtues, those of Frankness, Fellowship, Courtesy, Compassion and Cleanliness. And by cleanliness we connote purity of thought and deed. And by purity of deed we denote right intention, right action, and righteousness of spirit. And spirit is essentially evolutionary, we presume, or what’s a heaven for? We aspire to progress, to be pure, to be better than we were before, or why proceed through the lessons of life? Yet we innately understand that we or others are O.K. at any given grade level, at any given age, at any given level of development, at any given rung of hierarchy or of insight, enlightenment, progress or pilgrimage. Or do we? Therein lies the rub.

The friction between us persists. Judgment reigns. Differentiation fragments, apportions, divides, quantifies, equivocates and then dispenses with us. We clump in small groups, flock into larger groups, coagulate into clubs, name, nationalize, civilize, and condemn. The other is less than, or worse, more than. And the degree to which we perceive ourselves measured, apportioned, relegated or approved of, matters. It matters not only to our selves, but also to others. Why else would we choose schools, neighborhoods, cities, and even countries? Us versus Them. We versus They. Me versus You. Let’s compete! And who indeed amongst all of us herein shall be first? Shall win?

Integration is not completeness; and it is. The paradox is in integration’s complexity of seemingly being too accepting of the status quo without sufficient attachment to a preferred outcome. Between left and right is the metaphorical fence, and the fence-sitter can hardly perch without some or other instigation to have him declare himself. Passion, plans, preferences, and powerful actions are still the purveyance of being integrative; it is non-attachment to the product that apparently gives others the problem. Sew then wisely the seeds of instigations. Acceptance of the ongoing totality is not easily comprehended, it seems, or we would surely not be so contentious. Integration absorbs, assimilates, includes, incorporates, and accepts all of everything, infinitely. Yet in each of us, in the now from moment to moment, integration is a journey of enlightenment, a journey of awareness, a journey of evolution.

Evaluation or Judgment? Preference or Need? Heaven or Hell? It’s all really up for complete acceptance.

Still?

FISH FLOP

2011-01-28T09:50:00.000-08:00

SMACK!
Flung from forbidding fathoms to gasp at stars in a

Silvered universe of so very many shining moments,

Only to gulp at some superfl'ous little mite;

And fall forever backward to fluid with a resounding

SMACK!

Like a gunshot that reverberates and that makes the

Head come up out of the water of its own thoughts;

To catch a glimpse of distraction from the far flung

Depths of its own fluid way since that first emerging

SMACK!

Like a hardness of light and sound, signifying presence,

To begin movement and thought, constricted to surfaces,

Ordained by the environment of limited nature where

Even a third and fourth, and the very one millionth

SMACK!

Will not reach higher than the might of the fish flop

Nor than that of the head upturned, with the stars within,

While the surface still is seen as dust places to dust,

And stars are thoughts deeper than levels of yet another

SMACK.

r.f.p.
October 1995

It's All in the Pitch!

2011-01-25T18:22:00.000-08:00

Visceral and mesmerizing, IN DUE COURSE is the story of an old Zulu warrior’s pervasive influence on the gifted young Adam Broadford. In Northern Rhodesia the childhood promise Adam makes has their lives hurtling along a gauntlet of challenges. Worthiness of being is a thing to be earned. But due to Adam's self-righteousness, his selfishness, he is convinced he is responsible for once having sparked an enemy that results in murder, pillage, and revenge. His bid to escape his guardians when holidaying in England compounds his predicament. Forced to Return into the blistering birth of Zambia, his reactions create a cauldron of life-searing choices. In South Africa, in boarding school, he remains hounded by the ancient soothsayer’s prophecy. Conscripted as a sniper to the Zimbabwe border during the apartheid era, Adam attempts a different identity. But it is as a stoker on the railways that he determines finally to alter his seeming destiny. Still, must his last act for release from a childhood promise have to cost him his one great love?

In literary fiction born of clashing African cultures Adam's story of the search for an alternate life is a dramatic series of challenging incidents bringing him to terms with forgiveness, assimilation, compassion, and integration. Misunderstood by family, boyhood friends, and by his fellows, he intuitively strives for wisdom. Ultimately, IN DUE COURSE is not only the story of an Adam, but a story of us all

Ding Dong for Differentiation!

2011-01-10T11:49:00.001-08:00

Ring the Bell! I leave this profession of teaching after more than 35 years, and I have a declaration to make; an appeal to ring out; an alarm to sound. I am concerned about that dread topic, accountability; specifically, grades.

Excellence is our watchword. Yet I do not believe ‘excellence’ ought to be bruited about as a generality for students. I believe in putting people before product. I do not believe in putting product first. I believe in developing discipline and passion in the individual; I do not believe in conscripting a student to hate, loathing, despising, or even dislike of a subject. I do not believe in raising the bar so high for a given class that curriculum expectations are a series of frustrations and failures for an individual. I do not believe that a curriculum should equally challenge a general class, that a test should equally challenge all students, that a rule should equally apply to all pupils, that a standard should equally be applied to every learner, or that a student should have to take every level. I do not believe that I should have to take a subject beyond a proficiency level according to my life-needs or interests. (I personally have never used cosine theta, though no doubt my life over a bridge has depended on it, thanks to Penelope, who loves Math.) I do not for that matter believe in Drama 30 for Percival, per se, but since he chose it (or worse, was assigned to it) I am prepared to accommodate his interest and modify my expectations of his participation in order still to challenge him individually. I do not believe his grades should be a measure of comparative accountability. I do not believe in comparisons for grades. I do not believe that comparative grades are a measure of a program’s success, or a teacher’s success, or a school’s success, or a district’s success. I believe school is for everyone. It is for the individual. And for it to be so we, the education professionals and experts, should be allowed to treat students as individuals, to test students as individuals, to challenge and to promote the student entirely as an Individual.

What rings a personal bell for each is the opportunity to get lessons related to oneself, to have learning be made useful, to not have to be tested on the “clearly not my cup of tea” lessons. Percival does not care for Shakespeare, but loves quadratic equations; Penelope is just the reverse. Why require either of them to write the same test? Excellence as a goal of the product, per se, is for the rarefied few; to strive as a general populace for perpetual excellence is to court continual disappointment. Rather, let the individual strive for a personal excellence, strive for a personal best, strive to be the very best that he or she can be, and provide him or her with every individual opportunity to excel.

We ring the bell to summon the children to come unto us. Those children are as different from each other as their districts, their parents, their well-spring, and their stars have been aligned. Bells ring for individual reasons. It is for me in the particularized differentiation of lessons according to the needs of the individual that we prove ourselves as educators to be the most efficacious. I submit that implementing along with Penelope’s interests the rigour of an individualized provision for excellence may indeed have her becoming the very best of brain surgeons, and may well have Percival become the very best of mechanics, but whether no best Percival ever, or never a best Penelope, let the bell keep ringing individually for one, for each, and for all. Ding, ding, ding… Ding!