Dance with Necessity

Butter and flour and milk and broth. White sauce the old-fashioned way. Chicken over egg noodles just like we used to make it on the farm if you don't count the jar of gourmet fire-roasted red peppers, and the dash of poultry seasoning I learned how to chop and mix and dry myself. Chop and mix, stir and taste. Sipping a honey lager that glows golden on the counter. Boards of Canada on the stereo, night deepening outside as Vancouver joggers flish-flash past, as lights go on over the bridge, creating the shimmering view from the side streets.

There is comfort in this: chop and mix, stir and taste. Simmer and cover. Wipe and sweep and adjust the burner. I find myself smoothing the over-worked, inflammed passageways of my mind as I chop and mix, stir and taste. Like the shuddering subsiding of sobs into peace, the unanswered questions, the grating doubts, the baggage of the day and the week and the years, subsides in the kitchen's warm light.

Afterwards, there will be the pool of lamp's light and the pages to write in. The questions will emerge again from the evening's shadows, but less threatening than in the noonday glare, tamed by the affirmation of life that is this: chop and mix, stir and taste.

For unto the day is the evil sufficient. For this moment we need to nourish. For at this time we re-affirm that this matters, the nuance of two dashes of pepper or three, the flick of the whisk, the curl of white milk into the savory golden pan. This matters and is beautiful, as does and as is everyone around the table, whether a dozen familiar faces, or my own blurry reflection in the darkened window pane. Feed and be fed. Love and be loved. Move to the necessities of life with no grudge, but with grace. Allow the routine to heal you, the bathing of time -- often so annoying in its demands. The repetition, the turn and turn again, becomes a dance of acceptance. A waltz with necessity, but with gratefulness.

Chop and mix, stir and taste. For this thy bounty, we thank you.

Little Gidding

Reading T.S. Eliot for the first time in a long time tonight,and newly impressed by his thought & prowess.

The opening from "Little Gidding" struck me as particularly meaningful and familiar, these frozen March days. Days like these I find myself pondering the uncomfortable (or sometimes too-comfortable) suspension between inertia (hibernation?) and growth (or "generation" as Eliot calls it later in the same poem). When this tension holds me between the two poles, I feel my own familiar life become strange territory in the witching hours of frozen, golden afternoons. As Eliot does, I ask "where is the summer?" I suppose it's the sun, plying the soul's sap with light.

"Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic,
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but Pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the springtime
But not in time’s covenant..."

‘O Sole Mio

I’m what you might call a romantic, and since moving from a small northern town into Vancouver, I like discovering anything about the place than can be remotely romanticized: “Oooh, look at that beautiful graffiti!” My roommate, on the other hand, is one of those no-nonsense, small-town, northern girls – what you might call a pragmatic. So when she began complaining about a guy who sings up and down Tenth Avenue, my ears perked up.

“I mean my God he’s so annoying!” she exclaimed one day, taking her runners off.

“Who? Who is?” I asked desperately.

“The guy who always sings at the top of his lungs in Italian. You’ve heard him.”

“No, no I haven’t,” I replied, practically frantic at having missed so rare a specimen.

“Well you will,” she predicted darkly, walking off to her room, “I mean, how much attention do people need to draw to themselves?”

I could have answered that one, but her disdain for the singer only made me want to hear him more. And she was right, I did. His deep, resonant voice filled the air one summer night as I was lying on my bed reading a book. I stared out into the dark, transfixed, wishing I knew what the song was. From then on, I heard him all the time. He sang in the rain, he sang in the sun, and he definitely sang by twilight – which seemed to be his favourite hour.

I tried to cajole my roommate into liking him. “Maybe he’s from – you know – the old country or something,” I suggested. “Like, maybe they walked around the streets of the little town singing and drinking espresso and red wine.”

“Well that’s ok in his village or whatever, but in Vancouver, people drink their espresso quietly!”

I didn’t mind so much. I wanted to see him, this phantom.

And then one unexpected evening, balancing too many bags of groceries from my limbs in a most un-romantic way, I spotted him – a small elderly gentleman, chest out, literally vibrating with the notes. He tipped his hat and kept going, leaving the milk and eggs and me in a wake of music.

It was one of those rare moments when the city rewards you for believing in it.

Park bench diatribes and roman candles

“Last time I saw Jesus, I was drinking Bloody Mary’s in the South.”
- Over the Rhine

I’ve been taking the headphones of my ipod off more often, recently. It’s amazing what you hear, and strangely enough, what you see, when you aren’t plugged into that song that is plunging you into some internal reverie.

As in tonight, the man with the shopping cart sitting on the bench outside the library, yelling out for anyone who would listen, that he’s “antI-election, antI-RE-election, antI-Republicans-in-MEXICO!!” I have no idea what that meant, but as he paused to pay me a fairly classy compliment amid his diatribe, I concluded it was rather charming anyways.

Or the older gent who gave me a half-bow outside the theatre and said he liked the armful of white flowers I was hurrying through the night air of South Granville.

Or the young guy with a sherpa hat and massive beard and tunic and electric blue sneakers rambling past me across UBC’s grounds singing “I’m bound for the promised land” at the very top of his rather quavery lungs.

Time would fail me to tell of the slim mother and young daughter arms slung around each other as they peered in shop windows, the silver-haired man with the fedora who sings operas in perfect pitch and in stereo sound as he strolls down our street, the girl in the coffee shop who smiled at everything slightly manically, the young pan-handler who thanks me for refusing him every time I pass the liquor store.

Now, I know there’s a danger of treating people as a collector does – as odd curiosities that one can put on one’s shelf and admire from a distance. And stereotype. But I think that really looking, really listening, couldn’t but do me a world of good, and seems to do a number to stereotypes in the process.

There’s something in these moments when a flame of humanity jumps out at you – something unexpected. Not surprisingly, it’s often the ones who seem in need or at very least – vulnerable. I am coming to agree with Kerouac:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'”

I say commonplace things all the time, but I agree with the sentiment. And I think in those who are perhaps a little more on the edge, a little less dogmatic in their days and actions, I see a bit of holiness walking the earth, mixed in with all those other uglier elements of human nature. Incarnation is, after all, a messy thing.

Losing Our Souls to a Piecemeal Space and Time

The early autumn rain is streaking my window, pattering in time with the music. Pulsing red blooms fill a glass on my desk. A candle glows by the modest stack of books.

The moment is simple. I’ve been trying to understand this promise of wholeness. These rare moments when concentration is possible almost without effort, when fragmentation seems to disappear.

Faint staccato as the rain grows harder. A dissonant piano chord.

Julia Kristeva diagnoses the modern malaise partly as the result of living in what she calls, “a piecemeal and accelerated space and time.” We have built a culture of show, a society of spectacle. We identify ourselves closely with images fed to us by capitalism -- by entertainment, advertising and propaganda -- and we lose all sense of our identity. Instead of experiencing those images that bombard us constantly as something outside of ourselves, we begin to experience these images as real. We identify so intimately with a set of images that we think they are us. They distort all sense of inner space, transgressing our boundaries. We may think we know our own desires, but often we are simply desiring what we have been told to desire, the need has been “artificially produced” (McAfee). We have become pawns of the external economy, and it is not merely our money that is being manipulated, it is our very sense of self.

“Modern man is losing his soul, but he does not know it,” Kristeva states. In her paradigm, those who wish to fight against this, must work to create an inner space, “ a secret garden, an intimate quarter…a psychic life.”

I identify strongly with this diagnosis. Easily distracted, easily fragmented, feeling pushed and pulled by desires that often defy classification into “real” and “societal pressures,” I find myself hyperventilating for lack of inner space. I spend my days sifting through an overwhelming tide of floatsam: collecting a hundred bits of news via a bewildering array of RSS feeds, monitoring human blips on the radar known as status messages, checking three inboxes, counting minutes, compiling lists and electronic calendars and bookmarking, sending, noting. After a day of this, I am incapable of holding a thought together for more than 30 seconds.

What is perhaps more sinister, I find that without constantly interrogating my desires, I too begin to identify with a set of images which I find I never consciously chose in the first place. That look, these stores, those activities, that music, this restaurant, that publication, this pose. Good enough if I told myself, I like this. But often, I don’t. Often, I’ve swallowed the hook somewhere without realizing it.

Distracted, fragmented, with an artificial sense of self.

I find it a bit ironic that culture was created as a way of imposing wholeness and order onto chaos. Now the forces of our culture are fragmenting us, the creators of culture.

I’ve been brushing up a bit on early ancient religion. All those creator myths about a god rising out of the chaos, the struggle to find a strong enough deity that could subdue the sea, the rivers, the “the womb of chaos.” The dividing of the earth, heaven and water into manageable entities. The establishing of rites to keep the chaos at bay.

And now, when my city life feels like a swirl of bits and pieces around an empty center, I find myself making my way to the cathedral downtown. Perhaps that is ultimately what I am seeking of my faith, a center. A meaningful way to step out of the meaningless flood that threatens sanity.

“If the Lord had not been my help, my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence. When I thought ‘My foot slips,’ your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.”

Ultimately, for Kristeva, sanity can be preserved through love, through an attention to the particular, to the specific, to the individual. Through casting away empty monolithic definitions that dehumanize us.

I think the Psalmist might agree.

Listen to Your Life

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

- Frederick Buechner


Listen to the quietness about you. Listen to the look in your friend’s eyes. Listen to the light of evening spelling out each pale spine of the spider’s web. Listen to the dust under your feet. To the movement of an arm around your shoulders. Listen to the blackberries bleeding on tangled vines. To the cool shift of the breeze – just now. To the shoes lined up neatly by the door. To the stack of clean white paper on glowing, golden wood grain.

Before I beat my fists against the Silence once more, I am trying to relearn the patience of listening.

Picture Books

They were our favourites. The books my sisters and I would check out of the local library again and again as children. The ones with pages full of pictures that drew you into a perfectly-created world, one that was often precisely-drawn but full of atmosphere, heavy with an illustrator’s subtle magic.

The Storm Book, for example, with its tale of an epic storm rolling across a North American landscape, from rocky coast to hilly heartland. The page with the city at night, thin apartment buildings looming over a dark square shiny with rain, umbrellas spots of colour amid drowned streetlights and orbs of headlights and the rectangles of glowing yellow where people who lived in the city had drawn their blinds down…but not quite all the way. The cat looking out of the eighth-storey window.

Or the page with the mother rocking a perfectly-swaddled baby in the homey living room of some country house, a pale pink apron, a vase of drooping daisies, the radiators and the braided rugs so real you could imagine the heat, the roughness of the cloth weave, as the rain drummed the blackened windows and she waited for her husband to come home.

There was the “I Love my Home” book, with pages of different homes, all perfectly cozy and unique. The Victorian seaside house, the snug log cabin, the family who lived – can you believe it? – atop a grocery store! Or the houseboat that “floated by.”

“One Morning in Maine” was a favourite. All those blue and white lush ink drawings of rugged coastal trees and waves and boats ferrying the family to town to buy a new switch for the motor or new jars for canning blueberries.

I think of these books often now, a few decades later. I think of them on evenings like this, when someone urges me to look out the window at the sickle moon hanging over the city in the twilight, all the windows glowing different shades of yellow. I think of them when I see my sister stand by the lakeshore, dress blowing in the wind, holding her daughter up to see the view. When I see the awesome span of a bridge over a canyon, or a tugboat pulling a float of logs down the river, I think of picture books and the feeling they gave me as a child, that all was full of magic. That everywhere you looked there was a picture, and that this picture told you so much.

I think that as children, we didn’t simply like the drawings because they were pretty. There was something about them that both conveyed comfort and fed our hunger for newness. I would go so far as to say that these drawings conveyed the idea that there was something of endless discovery and even order and beauty in life.

Watching the city lights blink on across the bay, I often decry my tendency to “romanticize” the view. Curled in bed basking in the coziness of a lamp, a colourful quilt, a radio turned on low…I often shove aside the delight that bubbles to the surface.

But what is wrong with this tendency to frame moments? To see in the lit windows of my street, a storybook?

After all, to say that we must strive to see things “as they are” is ultimately an exercise in futility. None of us see things as they are. You cannot strip fully what informs the person’s gaze from what the person sees.

And isn’t it what we see things through that is perhaps most important? The experience and meaning we attach to the sight? If I can, in the moment I see the sickle moon hanging above the homes, dwell in the moment of flame that flickers in me, perhaps even reflect upon it, I may come to understand something important. Perhaps about myself. Perhaps about something else.

That to me, seems more important than seeing precisely what some might say the view out my window “literally” is – a quarter-moon above an average street in an average city. Oh no, it’s shining a pale gold, suspended in a smoky blue evening, with an untidy stack of large and small apartment buildings below, chock-full of wily cats, fuzzy pink slippers, and spindly old bicycles.

It’s a page from my life.