Going Forward

My favourite word, next to, shenanigans, and maybe obfuscate (which sounds like a sport), is the word gracious. Gracious, is defined as to describe someone who is marked by kindness and courtesy with some tact and delicacy thrown in. It requires a certain presence, an inner stillness and the rare ability to connect, listen and not judge. 

Tall shoes. 

The word came to me this morning, while mulling over this Trumpian dystopia we are all faced with. It seems that the world is losing its mind over him, and justifiably so. I won't go into the details of his petulant need to bully. You already know about that. But I can't think of a better way to anchor our efforts to maintain our integrity going forward than to be gracious in everything we do. Everything. This does not mean abiding, or being the least bit complacent. This does not mean escaping, becoming insular and self-serving. This means catching those throw-away comments, denigrative remarks made in jest and gently hauling them up onto the proverbial carpet. This means getting the conversation going but with grace. 

"What are your thoughts?" "That's an interesting viewpoint. What made you decide that?" 

Through personal experience, I've found that this process, completely non-judgemental and non-confrontational, serves to draw the person into reframing their perspective. Simply by hearing their own words(therapy) they can discover a problem or a struggle that they never realized that they had. You become the facilitator. The easiest scenario to start from is when someone says, 

   Well, there's nothing we can do about it.

That's the insidious anthem of the complacent. Really, it's the easiest opener of all. Start with the sacredness of our human connection and go from there. You've got this. Just be gracious. You can't lose.

Broken Plate

While house sitting, I broke a plate. I notified the house owners this way:



I have broken a plate. Pick one:

Hemingway:

She finished her dinner standing in the kitchen. The sun had set. It was a cold, gun-metal grey day that she was glad was done. She was not partial to any particular part of it. She set the plate down, olive oil shining on it; the only addition to the knot of spaghetti she had made for herself. She began cleaning up. The plate broke. The day ended. No fish.

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

She finished her dinner, oddly, by herself, standing in the kitchen, one hip shot against the island. She toyed with the loops of pasta knotted on her plate. She heard the wind howl up and pass outside, like nails against nylon. The sun, almost timid in this cold, hardly rose, at least not like the julep-prone summer. Those days when the summer breezes lifted the sheers like angels in song and flight! She finished her meal and began fiddling with cleaning something. She wasn’t sure how that worked. She was never comfortable in a kitchen, but here she was. She twisted one of the water taps on and then, as she watched the water pooling in the sink, she reached back to grab her dinner plate. There was the slightest tap and then the plate fell in pieces. It fell. In pieces. She turned and looked at it. The sink filled. 

Cormac McCarthy:

In this world everything breaks. It is only time that marks the history of the event. A heart broken is the only breakable that can be hidden and yet it is the most painful. Everything else leaves a mark, a clue: Cattle through a fence, a busted femur from the fall off of a green broke horse or the bullet hole from a rusted 22 fired at the last moment in a drunken bar brawl. It was nice to have peace for a change. It was nice to be able to stand and eat without smoke from a campfire burning her eyes whenever the wind felt compelled. She stood and ate watching the birds through the glass window puffed up to twice their size in this cold. She stopped, took her guns off and set them on the counter in the laundry room away from her then walked back and finished her dinner. She chuckled and pulled a barb of black locust from her hair.

 “Magine havin’ a room jus for laundry,” she thought out loud. 

The sun eased down off of the day and the light with it. She finished her meal and set to washing up. There was no sand around to get the food off of her plate but there was a sink and a spigot. She fiddled with the toggle until water came not without protest. She watched it then pushed her hat back on her head. How this water came she had no idea. She turned and without thinking grabbed her plate. There and then in the space of a shot it broke. It sat there on the wooden island in pieces. The edges were raw and showed white like bone or teeth. She spit.

“Damn it. Ain’t a girl got no ability beyond what she’s had to put up with? Cain’t I be careful at all?”

She threw her hat off of her head. 

“Do I gotta break everthin’ I likes?”

Heavy Late Bombardment

 It is the scale that is troubling. My efforts to take it all in, really see it are exhausting; a relentless challenge always bounded by time. It bothers me, while I'm thinking, that time is passing. I must think faster to keep up. If time would stop, if I could do my thinking between the seconds so I would have the minutes and hours to piece together what I discovered, I wouldn't be so frustrated. But this damn scale of things...

I'm trying to piece together, or, make sense of, God and the universe. Right now, I don't believe in God. If he exists, I think he's an asshole. And I will gladly step outside with him if he's got a problem with my name-calling (I work out a lot. So I got that going for me...). Then, the universe and the fact that we won the lottery when it came to the earth. Any closer to the sun and we would be...you have to understand this:



 This earth is the only one around within parking distance. It started as dust and ice crystals four and a half billion years ago.  

Go outside and put your hands on the ground and think about that. 

                 WE ARE BONKERS LUCKY.

Yet we're treating this precious orb like something we can replace with a trip to the mall. Or Cost-co.

I've lost you already. You've heard this before.

Scale again. More pacing. What the hell?

While I don't think that the biblical God exists (You know, that bible held up in defiance by the hateful?), I do think there is something. Maybe it's laced into the dark energy wafting around, permeated by neutrino's, protected from radiation by the earth's magnetic shield. I don't know. But I felt it when I was in love. And I feel it when I listen to music. It's a delicate, but fierce power unlike anything else. It is profound; makes us authentic. You can't feel it and not be changed. This is the substantial framework of our humanity: our connection.

Piecing this together...

Basically...(would you stop with the clock already?) I feel that this deep, sacred connection as humans is being assaulted by the shallow, attitudes of the incoming American government. Gains made in outreach and inclusion that had the potential to pick up momentum towards a remarkably productive and cohesive society may have influenced the rest of the world into finally getting over the needless oppression and judgement stalling progress. But all of this is under threat to be shredded. The cotter pins have been pulled. People don't matter unless they're shareholders.

And the earth? Well, how much time is left now?

 I keep trying to think of the right words to bring about sanity. I keep trying to come up with a process to shift ideologies around oppression and judgement, to stop us from sliding backwards, being complacent. I go to bed at night hoping that I will have a dream that will explain it all. 

Time. Time. Time.


 Damn.

Check In

It's been a strange year. It's been tough to navigate between wanting to holler in the streets, or do my best to find normalcy at home. Things aren't normal, though. I can't fool myself into believing that they are. The people who have managed to do this are sleepwalking. You can tell by the look in their eyes. Go ahead, they're so beyond sensation that I'm sure you could draw on their faces and they wouldn't notice. 

What does it mean to you to be human? Remind yourself that this planet that we are screwing does not need us. It is only other humans that need us. This, on paper, seems simple, but it's not. We've made things almost ridiculous for ourselves with bogus frameworks that don't serve us but we are too timid to let go. Figure out your connection to the earth and each other. Find your music and share it. 

Try harder to be loving. Keep trying until you get there. I'm not talking about just being nice; I'm talking about being authentic in your boots and loving your fellow human. Family, of course, is important, but not at the cost of being

anaesthetized to the rest of the world. When you find yourself standing next to someone who folds their arms, shrugs their shoulders and says, "Well, there's not much we can do," take that as your cue, because that complicity is how we got into this mess. 

The scenario that drives me nuts is the idea that "those people have chosen to have that experience." If that's the case, then YOU have chosen to have the experience wherein you are a witness. You have chosen to be put in the position of having to make a choice about how you react. 

Are you going to do nothing?  Seriously?

Sound Track

It's raining. I can hear it. I am listening, drawn to its perfect noise, like the sound track to a film noir movie. This rain, it slaps agains the paving stones underneath the downspout like a hand clap. It moves against the trees and the side of the building like pin-filled waves. It falls and drips over the yard light like honey. There is no law, no amendment for it. This rain follows no party, has no allegiance. It does not care for you. 

But that's a lie. 

Really, that is a lie.

Spit

The wind rides through like a gang of 

Sharp thieves, shaking down the trees.

"Turn yer pockets out."

It blisters across the lawns,

Through the summer furniture left out,

Chairs upturned as if guests left in a hurry,

Noses into the corners and slides through the Fence,

Thorough, like a shadow.

It reeks of brittle edge,

Unrolls blankets of harsh change toward winter.

"Ain't to be trifled with."

Spends the day, hollerin' 'n spittin', 

Stuffing treasured remnants of the warm fall in 

Saddle bags, under hats, in torn pockets.

Someone, it's the grocer's kid, 

Hauls off on a green-broke mare,

Undetected, out the back lane,

No saddle and a quick-made bosal,

Hell-bent to summon spring.

 This Pause

There is poetry in us. All of us. It waits, gently biding its time, woven deep throughout the lengthening tapestry of our days, fuelled by our subtle senses that guide us along our human struggle. Then, a connection is made; there is a realization, an understanding, and up it comes in a moment. The format; size and shape is boundless, big as human thought. Over the last few years, I've found this source in Charlotte Hale's Gallery in Mirvish Village in Toronto. The gallery closed November 1st, a casualty of the coming Mirvish Village Development. In this ending I pause, and consider the shape of what was.

Charlotte Hale's Gallery (Charlotte Hale & Associates), 588 Markham Street, opened in December of 2013. Charlotte welcomed both world renowned, and new, emerging artists to come and hang their work on her gallery walls. She was focused and stubborn in her belief that good art was important and that there had to be a way to get this message across. There had to be a way, even in these difficult times, to gently rouse the general public to the sensuality of art; its ability to access the human heart and soul if allowed; to rouse the public to art's emotional power; a catalyst for drawing out something remarkable inside the viewer as they take part in the process simply by looking. She wasn't selling widgets. Charlotte was, in a way, trying to match people up with a different paradigm through sculpture, photography, and painting. An Herculean task. It was difficult.

But magic did happened as people came, both visitors, and regulars from the neighbourhood, and found themselves forming solid bonds with each other. For me, it was the conversations around the art that opened me up. It was the delight in meeting a new face that turned into a good friend. It was the joy in seeing the joy in another as we ran into each other. It was having the chance to interview so many in the Village for Gerald Pisarzowski's, The Mirvish Village People, and through that, to realize just how special the entire neighbourhood was.

I don't think I took it for granted. Charlotte and I often spoke about how wonderful Mirvish Village was, powered as it was by the artists and business owners: some eccentric, many charming, all unique. I felt, for the time that I was involved with the gallery, that I belonged. I felt I had earned my place there on my own merits,

... and, baby, it had been a long time since I had felt that.

I am sad that Charlotte's gallery is closed. I am sad that Mirvish Village, a thriving, vibrant artistic neighbourhood is being dumped for another tedious condo. But if this is the way things must go, I am, at least, tremendously grateful to have been a part of it. I have Charlotte, and a cadre of the loveliest people as my dear friends. They have all added their poetry to my tapestry, and it is lovely. 

In this pause, I think I am lucky, indeed.