Larry Gibbons
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Voices From the Parlour

28/6/2022

2 Comments

 
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“Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.”
                                                                                                                                    John Muir
​
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Whose Woods These Are
A few days ago, I decided to hike to a little beach. To the wee flat area of sand and rock where I often sit on a wobbly piece of driftwood and listen to the quiet. 

​This little beach huddles along the Middle River. Here  the river is frothy and snappy. 
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Temporary Bridge Construction Site
I watched a merganser cruise on the water. It showed no fear. I took some photos and then scraped some sand and gravel with my feet as I tried to get the bird to take to its wings. I wanted to capture a bird-in-flight photo. However, I think he saw me as only another piece of uninteresting driftwood or a big, dumb boulder because it just kept merrily, merrily floating along. 
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Entering Red Island Beach
A few people have told me that in this area they feel close to the spirit world. They sense energy. I have, myself, had some rather interesting encounters on this little beach.

​This particular day, I suddenly had rumination. A memory relating to Sue’s disappearance and death.
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Canadian Tiger Swallowtail
Now I know that many of my blogs have, of late, been about Sue’s death. It’s just that her departure is still pretty fresh in my mind. So, you see, often when I have an ordinary blog subject to write, along comes another Sue soul searing thought and it just seems too potent, as a blog article, not to write about. Besides, it may offer some insight or comfort to others who are also grieving the loss of Sue or other loved ones.
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So Fertile
So, there I was, listening to the babbling of the river and wondering where the merganser had taken off to when my mind took a sharp right turn, and began poking around in a past event.
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Merganser
It was about a trip Sue and I took approximately fifteen years ago. Sue wanted to drive to Northern Quebec and visit some Indigenous friends that she’d taught with. 

​I remember the day we visited her friend, Maggie. We were brought into Maggie’s kitchen and were told that her friend was showering, so we waited until she was finished. Maybe had a cup of tea.
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At Corney Brook Falls
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I was knocked out of my socks, size ten, when I saw the greeting that Maggie gave to Sue. She was super-charged happy to see Sue and Sue was just as joyful. They were tearing up and I was fighting back my own. I could see that these two people really, really loved each other.
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Another Forest Critter
On a sad note, I learned that Maggie wasn’t well. When we went blue-berry picking, she had to sit and watch because she ran out of energy.
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One evening, maybe a year after we’d visited Maggie, Sue and I were, like every night around 11 pm, tucked into our bed. Suddenly, coming from the downstairs, was the sounds of women’s voices. It startled us, as we lived in the bush, with no winter road access.
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I thought our cats might have turned on the radio. It’s amazing how the scientific mind will desperately seek to find an explanation that makes scientific sense. Not that I have anything against science.
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Dominic and His Buddies
Well, the cats hadn’t turned on the radio and the voices had come from downstairs and the next day there were no tracks in the snow to indicate that we had visitors. So, we put this event in the category of, we haven’t a clue as to why we heard women talking downstairs in our parlour.
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Red Island Trail
A day or two later, we received a phone call from one of Maggie’s daughters who had managed to track us down. She told Sue that Maggie was dying and that she didn’t want to die until she saw Sue.

​The next day we drove the many miles to the hospital where Sue visited her. I believe Maggie died a day or two later.
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So, I’m still thinking these thoughts, even after the merganser had left the area. I’m thinking about the women’s voices, the phone call and then Maggie dying.
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View From Red Island Trail
And then, I was struck in my solar plexus and heart area with a strong comforting thought. Which caused me to choke up a sob, but not a sad sob. 
Sue did not die alone. 
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“What is essential does not die but clarifies.”
                            “Thornton Wilder”
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2 Comments

Forest Full Of Stories

7/6/2022

5 Comments

 
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View From Red Island Beach
“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposes, and luckier.”
                         Walt Whitman    
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Hikers On Red Island Beach Trail
On one of our hikes, a friend mentioned a quote she’d heard. It was “The universe is not made of atoms, but is made of stories.”

Another fella, at another time, told me that he sees each person he meets as being like a forest. 


​In my mind the forests are constructed of stories.
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I got thinking about this story statement after I received a particular phone call. You see, I had been waiting for about two years for a specialist to see Sue and help us cope with her dementia. Covid was the reason it took so long. Anyway, the receptionist phoned last week and I had to tell her the sad story. Of course, she was shocked and when I tried to give her a little bit of a positive outlook on the event, well in her mind it was a tragedy and nothing else. 
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Happy Hiker After Hiking Red Island Trail
It was a tragedy, but more than that because the universe is made up of stories and they add deep insight to the simple idea that it was just a terrible tragedy.
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Foggy Hiking Trail
Here’s another quote. 

“A rainbow is an arc of colours formed in the sky by the refraction and dispersion of the sun’s light by water droplets in the atmosphere. This is what it is. But that’s not what it means.”

        Kaleeg Hainsworth, An Altar in the Wilderness
 
​On Friday I went to a book launch for Shauna MacKeigan’s new novel. It’s called ‘THE LIGHT AMONGST THE GREY’.
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Forest creature
Shauna read a passage from her book. It was about a father whose son fell out of a fishing boat and was never seen again.

​Well, you can imagine that I found the reading difficult to listen to as she read about how the father imagined his son’s death and how horrible it must have been. Thought about how he’d never see him again. Lost in the ocean’s depths just as Sue is lost in the forest’s depths.
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Red Island Trail
One day, the father fell out of his fishing boat and almost drowned. He described feeling a sense of great peacefulness as he approached his death. 

​Luckily, he was rescued. However, this near-death experience helped him look at his son’s death and disappearance in a more positive way.
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House And Barn In The Highlands
I also felt a lifting of my stress and sadness as Shauna read the passage. I’m glad I went and I thanked Shauna for reading a part of her story. It was cathartic.

​So, what I’m trying to say is that some people look at Sue’s disappearance from the aspect of the atoms. Not the story. And it is hard for many of us, including myself, to realize, to really get it into our thick noggins, that we are made of stories and not atoms.
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So, when a person can’t see around the idea that Sue’s disappearance, while very sad, has a story and that it has positive elements, well then, the only way to look at it is that it is a tragic death of a bunch of atoms in the shape of Sue.
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Take Off
“Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.”
                            Elie Wiesel
And, Sue died with dignity. She escaped what she had feared for so long. Being institutionalized. She is in a place that mimics the stories in which she lived on this side of the veil. 
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Painting The Highlands
You see, Sue would laden our kitchen table and other surfaces with bird feathers, stones, snake skins, leaves, bark, hornet nests, twigs, tiny pieces of driftwood and other earth-related specimens. Tangible representations of her story and her close ties to the natural world. Now she is part of the forest.
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A day or two after Sue’s story ended on this earth I was amazed, while standing by the bird feeder, to see a large flock of blue jays who were making no sounds nor were they making any effort to fly away. It felt like a solemn time. My story told me they were having a moment of silence for Sue. 
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Taking A Photo At Red Island Beach
So, although Sue’s atoms are changing, the story is going on and this blue jay tale is one of many parts of the story. It makes her death feel much more mysterious and comforting than only being a tragedy.
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Cool White Pants
“Anyone who tells a story speaks a world into being.”
                            Michael Williams 
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Dominic In His Squirrel Hunting Blind
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They're Everywhere
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Spring Ferns
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