Category: Spirituality

The Trail to Friendship

7/1/2015

I think it’s time to quote Stephen King, who wrote, in the third foreword to his book ‘On Writing’, “…the editor is always right.” He also wrote, “To write is human, to edit is divine.”

I haven’t written these blogs all by my lonesome. No way, Hosea. I have an editor. Sue is my editor and it’s Sue who corrects my usages of ‘had’ and ‘have’, ‘practice' and ‘practise’, ‘take’ and ‘bring’ and all the other language practices I have learned or not learned to use correctly over my life-time. As a matter of fact, as I write this, I’m thinking that the last ‘practices’ I just wrote, might, by the time it strikes your eyes, be spelt ‘practises’. (Ed. note: Not this time, Larry, though I can see why you might think so!)

Oh, and then there’s all that punctuation! You see, I sometimes add too many punctuation marks, put them in the wrong places or don’t use them at all when I should. Then it’s up to Sue to grab her grammar broom and sweep some of them away. Or scoop up her grammar pepper shaker and begin jiggling a few of those there punctuations into their grammatically correct hideaways.

Grammar could make a person scream, “Bloody hell!”, if it weren’t for an editor. Tenses getting all tense, co-ordinate conjunctions constipating the writing flow and the proper use of ‘taking’ and ‘bringing’. I mean, it all gets there, doesn’t it, whether you bring it or take it?

Then there are those possessive endings, passive and active verbs, quotation marks gone wonkers, and on and on and on. AND ON. Per se and ad infinitum.

                          “I’ve an inkling to stutter and stammer
                       In an effort to subjugate grammar
                       For although I love words
                       I adore the absurd
                        Punctuated, pauses; tend to enamour.”
                                                            Mike Youds, T’talking

When I write this blog, I often get passionate about an issue, whether it’s about language snobbery, earth degradation or what I perceive as our society drowning in a deluge of social media dribble. See what I mean?

So, when I’ve finished writing what I have written, and then handed it to Sue, I’m expecting she’ll temper my passionate over-kill with a few cautionary pixels of advice. I listen to her advice, because I don’t want to piss the wrong people off. And when I say the wrong people, I don’t mean those who are in power, but the folks who regularly read this blog. Thank god I’m not paranoid or full of conspiracy theories. Would I write this blog if I were? However, I don’t always listen to Sue and then I do or don’t pay for that decision.

Sue also does all the blog set-ups, as I’m not as familiar with the computer as Sue, nor do I want to be. She also chooses some of the pictures from time to time, or suggests quotes that she finds on her beloved computer.

So there. I didn’t want my readers to think this is all me, me, me. It’s also Sue, Sue, Sue. And it only took thirty-three blogs to say it. What a guy.

Note from "Editor Sue":
Every writer has an editor and I feel lucky to be Larry's. He has a unique way of looking at things that I find thought-provoking, so I thoroughly enjoy reading what he writes and occasionally having my suggestions accepted.

***

Cross on Eskasoni Hill

A few weeks ago I drove to Eskasoni. It’s a Mi’kmaq reserve in Cape Breton. One of the reasons I went there was because of a poem I read. Here’s a portion of it.

    “In Eskasoni there is a hill you may climb
    There is a cross and the image of the Blessed Mother
    You may climb as we do, especially on Good Friday
    Then maybe we may look upon each other as friends
    Like we wanted you to since the day you came.
    Na ntalasutmaqnminal mawita’tal-Our prayers will join
    Aq we’jitutesnu wlo’ti’.”-We will find happiness
                                                    Rita Joe,    There is a Hill

A hiking friend from Eskasoni, had given me a fairly good idea where the trail up the mountain to the cross could be located. Also, when I drove through Eskasoni, I could see the giant cross standing on top of the mountain, so I knew its general location.

I turned into what looked like the trail. An Aboriginal woman, on the way up her steep driveway, stopped her car. She rolled down her window and shouted, “What are you looking for?”

Her voice wasn’t particularly friendly. There was a little park nearby and she was probably wondering what this gray-haired guy had in mind while poking around the area.

I asked her if she could tell me which trail leads up to the cross. Her face went smiley and she directed me to the correct path.

I thought of the lines in the poem:
     “You may climb as we do, especially on Good Friday
                                   Then maybe we may look upon each other as friends.”

A Station of the Cross on Eskasoni Hill

All along the route up to the cross, are Stations of the Cross. As I looked at the pictures and read the words, I thought about the suffering being shown in the stations. I meditated on some of the hardships the Aboriginals have suffered as they’ve tried, and still try, to fit into a society which seems set on its present course of pursuing infinite growth and the resulting destruction of the natural world. How they’ve had to learn to forgive those who were connected to the residential schools. Places that were established, not to segregate the aboriginals from the colonists, but, as was infamously said at the time, “…to kill the Indian in the child”, by removing them from their families, and refusing to allow them to speak their own language.

                    “I lost my talk
                     The talk you took away
                     When I was a little girl
                     At Shubenacadie school.”
                                                          Rita Joe, I Lost My Talk

Also, treaties signed in good faith were broken and the list goes on, and as I looked at the stations of the cross, I thought, this is why many Mi’kmaq can relate so naturally to the Easter story.

                    “If we are slow
                      Embracing today’s thoughts,
                      Be patient with us a while
                      Seeing
                      What wrongs have been wrought,
                      Native ways seem not so wild.”
                       Rita Joe

Eskasoni Statue of Mother Mary

By the cross is a statue of compassionate Mary. All kinds of gifts were strewn at her feet. I left a pewter bear paw with her before I climbed down the mountain and returned to a world that is so different from the ways of the spirit.

                “When the stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
                  Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
                  What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
                  To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’?
                  And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
                  O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,
                  Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.”
                                                                    T.S. Eliot, Choruses from ‘The Rock’

Brook Racing from Uisgeban Falls after Many Days of Rain

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Missing Out

19/9/2014

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I’ve spent years hiking, mostly by myself. Because I love being alone in the forest. Sitting on a rock, a log, or any piece of natural furniture is more comfortable for me than reclining on expensive furniture in places where I have to be careful about what I say, how I say it, or what I might knock over or spill. However, some couches are more pleasant than others as butt resters.

And lately, the folks up here have decided, and have spread the word around, that I’m a trail guide. Even though I’m not as familiar with this area as I could be. And I’ve met some interesting people on the rugged Cape Breton trails.

Also, I’ve never stopped being amazed at how helpful and friendly the folks up here are. They accept us for who we are and last Sunday we even received an email from a fella who said that Cape Breton was a better place because Sue and I had made it our home. Well, that nearly knocked my socks off. Both of them.

As many of you know, Sue struggles with some chronic diseases, one of which can impede her ability to walk far. But, she gave it the old college try and actually joined our group on a hike to the Uisgeban Falls. It’s a magical place and she didn’t think she would be able to make it all the way. But she did and that’s a feather in her emotional cap. The big surprise was that her post-hike pain was no different than it was before she hiked the trail. I’m sure many of you are happy to hear that.

Sue's Favourite Tree on Uisgeban Falls Trail

Which brings me to the mentioning of a new book that was recently published: the second edition of “Guide to Cape Breton Highlands National Park”. The author is Clarence Barrett, a retired Highland Park warden. His first edition was very popular. To write this updated edition, he once again hiked all 26 official park trails and then rewrote his descriptions.

If you’re travelling to Cape Breton this is certainly a book to add to your library. Here’s a link to Parks Canada’s information about the book: http://www.capebretonpost.com/News/Local/2014-08-24/article-3845394/New-park-guide-edition-being-launched-this-week/1

My old Mac

I got a new computer for my birthday. Happy birthday to me… and that’s one of the reasons that this blog is late. Excuses, excuses, excuses. But, I have been tearing my ^*%&^%$ hair out trying to get up to speed so I can just plain sit down on my asteroid and write this blog and other things that I tap out on a computer keyboard.

However, I do try to get a blog out every two weeks or so. I know folks who have a blog out almost every day. Which I’ve heard is an excellent way to keep your readership up. It might also be an excellent way to empty your idea coffers, or at least mine.

One thing I try to do is respond to comments made on my blog. If you don’t get one from me then it’s because my comments didn’t get through or my website machine wouldn’t let me. You see, I’m relatively new to the blog world and sometimes I try to respond but I can’t get it to work. I think it’s because I don’t have all the blog ins and outs down pat. So, I apologize now for any comments I haven’t been able to respond to. I tried. Really.

Oh, and if you write a response please make sure you add your email address if you think I don’t have it. It’s supposed to come to me through the website, but doesn’t always seem to make it.

Anyway, back to the new computer. Cripes, I got so used to my old Mac. It’s twenty years plus old. It’s been everywhere, man. Had lots of sticky fingers tapping and thunking on its keyboard. Had plenty of little kids playing computer games on it and it has been dropped once or twice.

My New Mac

Oh woe is me, though. It’s not easy trying to master this new computer and I will give you an example.

I am, if you haven’t already suspected, a person who uses more of the creative side of my brain than my not creative side. Surprise, surprise.

Now as you might have read in an earlier blog, I bought myself a new camera. Only a little over a month ago, I think. It’s digital with all the funny-pictures-on the-screen stuff and with knobs, buttons or cranks spotted all over its smooth, black body.

And I have, as mentioned earlier, become known as a trail guide. So this means that I get to guide hikers into the forest. And, during the hike, I take pictures so that the fella who runs the recreational activities in Victoria County, (that’s the county I live in), gets to see pictures of the hikers and the beautiful places we walk in. He often posts them or pins them to his ‘wall of shame’.

So, I go home after a hike and hook my camera up to my new computer. Sue used to do this but now this technologic fledgling, who is me, has jumped off the tree and has ever since been wildly flapping his wings, bouncing off pixels and leafy start buttons and repeatedly crash-landing into digital bushes. Over and over again.

(*&^@%#$%&!!!! I mean, Sue used to be able to take my articles from my twenty-something-year-old computer and put them into her computer and her computer would translate the ones and zeros into an understandable language and then send it out over the internet or print it out for me. Now her computer looks at my new computer’s efforts, shrugs its shoulders and spits out these nasty, impossible to understand, bits and pieces of bits.

Yesterday Sue, whose computer acumen and expertise I trust, looked at one of my attempts and its pathetic appearance on her computer screen and said, “This is scary.”

Does one have to be a mind reader to understand some of the computer jargon?

I’ll give you a specific example.

To get the pics to my computer I have to hook my new K50 camera up to Mac. I use a thin black cord called a USB cable. The next thing I do is turn on my camera. Why do I turn on my camera now instead of before? I don’t know. Because it’s says in the Bible somewhere?

Then there’s a little box that pops up on my computer which I have to click on to IMPORT my photos. I was told this was the button I had to click on using my mouse. And that’s another story. The mouse, that is.

The pix are then supposed to slide along the inside of the cord and pour into some empty picture station where a tiny zit gets them to line up and stand at attention in order of entry .

This IMPORT box did not make sense to me. So I asked Sue where the EXPORT box was.

You must use your imagination to see a vision of the expression on Sue’s face when I asked this question. But come on. I took economics in high school. I was taught that if you live in Canada and you ship products to other countries you are exporting them. If you are receiving products from other countries then you are importing them. Do you understand?

You see, my photographs are coming from my camera. My camera was here first. I figured that I was therefore from the Camera Country. Oh Camerada, we stand on guard for thee, and I was sending out pictures to the strange place called MacBook Pro. So therefore, am I not exporting pictures?

So, how the hell am I supposed to know which place is my country and which place is not my country? How can I sort out import and export if I don’t know this? For poop sake, I’m dyslexic and this doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.

Oh god, I have so much to learn about the camera, let alone the computer. Have you noticed a change in mood in this blog? A little more hesitation in the sentence structure? Words that don’t sound so appropriate?

Where the hell is the thesaurus in this new computer? Maybe it dropped out when I took Mac out of the box. I mean when I buy a hammer, I don’t want to have to spend a long time learning how to use it before I can bang nails into wood. I just want to bang nails into wood.

Then there is my stacked-to-the-throat-with-new-gizmos camera. I’ll tell you how much I have to learn about this wonderful toy.

A friend from Australia was visiting. She has a good quality tiny camera. A quick shot thing which you can carry in your pocket like a pet Chihuahua. Anyway, we were talking about our individual cameras. I think we got to talking about the flash. This is where I pulled out the manual for my camera. It’s thick.

She asked me, “How many different languages is your manual written in?”

I said, “One *&^% LANGUAGE. English.”

It’s a friggen Stephen King novel full of Cujo mumbo jumbo. Like import, export, four way controller, JPEG, RAW, Button Customization.

I have been told that I should take up writing manuals for people like me. Ha.

***

         Let’s stop and think; Let’s know and feel

         That things like these are truly real,

         Yes, think how very rich are we

          When all the best of things are free.

                                            John Martin, “These Things Are Free”

***

Texting

I do think the virtual world is amazing, but sometimes I think it’s too enchanting and addictive. For example, there have been many times when I’ve been sitting outside on the patio of a local coffee shop. I’ve sat and watched the tourists and the locals bustling about or sitting at the little metal tables, drinking their drinks and eating their treats. Many of them, and I mean many of them, (sometimes even including me), are staring at their little prissy machines. Using their fingers to punch or rub commands into the magical virtual world that is hypnotizing so many of us.

Sometimes I’ve seen young couples at tables under romantic lighting, texting. And I’m sure they’re sometimes texting to each other. Whatever happened to the touching of hands? Leaning over for a little kiss? Rubbing your footsie up your lover’s leg? Now it’s being done with pixels.

“Oh honey, ooxx.”

“Yes, baby, XXXXXOO.”

“More, more.”

“XOXOXOXOXOXOIIIIIooooxx”

And while this human interaction in all its forms are going on, I’ve watched the crows, sitting on the power lines above the street, or on the post office roof or the steeple on the church, cawing their asses off. I can tell there’s some form of drama going on up nearer the sky.

They’re making different sounds or are buzzing each other and generally making a racket. I then take a look around at the flocks of pristine viewers and non-pristine viewers and nary a one is paying any attention. Not one. All caught up in their people or virtual world. Maybe some are even looking at the crows through their virtuals or are gazing at pixel crows on Google.

Which makes me think. Gets me wondering what would happen if this natural world, to which we don’t pay much attention, just vanished? How lonely this world would be if everyone was totally focused on the virtual world and on the human world and paid no mind to the real time world of wild others.

And what would happen if it got to the point where everybody was almost exclusively hooked up? Got to the point where we would all, for example, be checking the weather on our machines or on something imbedded inside our eye balls. Swirling our fingers down the little doo-dad screens, or poking ourselves in the eyeballs to find out whether we are going to get snow today, while outside our window there is a hell of a snow storm dumping all over our yards.

Just wondering.

“What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.”

Chief Seattle

Sunset on the Skyway Trail

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Blood, Ink and Words

3/2/2014

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“One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)
Walt Whitman

From reading the above poem, I would have to believe that Walt Whitman would have agreed with the idea that we write from the gut and not from the head.

So might Salman Rushdie, who wrote: “...the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”

And what is my opinion? I think that emotions are at least as important as logic and knowledge. Maybe more so. That feelings are to our creativity, as firewood is to our wood stove.

And sometimes that can cause a problem or two. Because writers flirt, play, manipulate, tease and struggle with emotional material. Like a lion tamer, who tries to get the lion to do this and that while said lion growls, hisses, roars and even charges at the tamer. Now most of the time the charges aren’t carried to their final possibilities and the lion backs off. But sometimes the lion doesn’t drop his eyes and back off. Isn’t obedient. His attack is for real. Then you have trouble.

Definitely out of the cage!

Which is, as I previously said, one of the writer’s main sources of literary fuel.

If the lion gets you then you’re emotionally bleeding. A lot or a little bit, and the lion may be out of his cage. Outside your writing office. He’s free to roam wherever he darn well pleases while you try to wrangle him back into his cage. And doesn’t he just love to cuff you around when you’re trying to sleep? Like a cat toying with a mouse.

Chaos is defined in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as: “utter confusion” or “the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe”.

Chaos is like having a truck dump a pile of building supplies onto your front lawn leaving you to figure out which part goes where. And winter is coming. And you’re low on money.

What happened to our driveway?

Chaos plays willy-nilly with our normalcy. And yet it’s what writers play with. It’s their construction material. The bricks and mortar of the story that will get the pen smoking, or in this era, the keyboard.

Hazardous Activity

I think that writing should come with a hazardous material caution manual or sign. “WARNING, WRITING CAN LEAD AN INDIVIDUAL TO A FEELING OF BEING LOST. IF EXPOSED TO WRITING CHAOS, PLEASE WRITE IN YOUR JOURNAL IMMEDIATELY. WASH CHAOS OUT WITH AT LEAST AN HOUR OF EXERCISE PER DAY. TALK TO SOMEBODY YOU TRUST. WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. GIVE IT TIME. HAVE A BEER OR TWO BUT NOT MANY MORE. MOST OF THE TIME.”

I’ve also both heard about and experienced the problems that arise when writers try to write about emotional experiences they are undergoing in the present. For example, if you’re going through a divorce, it’s difficult to use those experiences and the emotions in your writing until the sensations particular to that situation, have had time to settle and work themselves out.

Or, using the wood metaphor, until the wood has had time to dry. When it’s at its best to get your wood fire turning your stove pipes red. Otherwise, the wood is too green. So can your present emotional experiences be too green. It takes time.

Emotional chaos can come to anyone from a whole variety of experiences. A new job, the death of a loved one, a lost relationship, a new relationship, a loss of faith, a new faith, or from those places that have long been locked away. The hinges coated with rust and the door heavy with moss and age.

However, when a writer gets it sorted out and can begin to write about it, then the writing will be the real thing. The blood will be on the page and what reader can resist reading stories written in blood?

And writers have an advantage. They’re used to dealing with creative chaos. They can write it into something meaningful to themselves and to others. Get the mangy old lion cornered.

When creative or personal chaos strikes me, I look at the sky, the mountains, the trees and the ocean or lake and I see how immense this universe is. It’s easy when you live in Cape Breton to see this immensity of the universe. Then, if I’m lucky, I can allow myself to let go and be gracious about the chaos that is supply teaching for my usual rascally rabbit muse. And I write.

As they say, the tree that bends, lives to grow another day, or something like that.

According to Grinder, (whom I am going to have to wake up today, before the rain turns the snow into mush, and then the cold turns the mush into )*(&^&^%^$% ice), “The snow blower whose shear pin breaks is a snow blower who will live to blow snow for another day.” I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

Sunday Drive on Cabot Trail

And where is our soul while all this is going on? Don’t worry, it’s safe, even if it has to go into hiding for awhile.

John O’Donohue, Irish mystic and Connemara poet, wrote:
“The light of modern consciousness is not gentle or reverent; it lacks graciousness in the presence of mystery--when the spiritual search is too intense and hungry, the soul stays hidden. The soul was never meant to be seen completely.”

Tolstoy wrote in his book, Anna Karenina: “He was nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love. His educators complained that he did not want to learn, yet his soul was overflowing with a thirst for knowledge.”

So hang in and believe that some day it will be a bloody wonderful story.

***

Speaking of chaos, have you been listening to some of our skilled politicians lately? The ones who seldom spin a lie, but rarely tell the truth? Now there’s a Zen koan for you.

"Cawcus" Meeting

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Write? Right!

4/1/2014

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And now down to business.

Plenty of us writers have a heap of trouble when it comes to turning off the negative brats who like to sit on our shoulders and tweak us with kick-in-the-gut comments. A friend told me about one. No matter what she writes, at some point, the brat will begin to whisper comments like, “Why bother, it’s all been said before.”

And it’s a good one. Smells rational. Makes some kind of sense, and listening to her tell me about her brat’s writing downer was enough to get my mind chewing on it. Forced me to take up time worrying instead of creating. Actually my tiny brat has spoken this exact kick-in-the-ass comment quite a few times.

It often happens when I’m hot into my writing time. The story is rolling along. I’m in cruise. The sun is bursting from happiness and sun spots and I’m feeling, really feeling what I’m writing. Big time empathizing going on with the characters and I’m right there in my scenes. I’ve forgotten all about plots and subplots and themes and getting my lane-way shovelled and where the story is going. Yahoo! I’m on a ride and it’s costing me nothing.

Then I hear the clearing of a raspy cutthroat. It’s an irritating sound and a warning that something is coming. But I’m so into it that I just keep a tap-tap-tapping. Meanwhile, the brat begins to tap me on the brain or to blow into my ear and I know it’s nobody I want puffing into my earwax.

So, eventually I’ll stop typing and that’s the wedge he needs. He’s got some of my attention. I’ve heard him even though I’ve tried to ignore him. The floor is his while I try to dust him off.

“It’s all been said before. What’s the use? Hee, hee!”

Oh, but he has more than that in his nasty repertoire.

“You’re going to die before you ever get anything worth writing down on paper. You started too late. What a waste of time, all that sitting on your ass. Didn’t you know you could have a stroke? You should concentrate more on wiggling your toes and getting the circulation going. Maybe you should be doing less writing and more exercise. Ernest Hemingway used to stand up when he was writing. And you’re ever going to be an Ernest Hemingway? Maybe you should write a play and not waste your time on this short story. Get a new computer. Study a course on, “It’s Not All Been Done Before”. Turn on the TV and watch the news. Join another writers’ club. You should be doing more networking. It would be helpful.”

On and on and on. Pow! Wouldn’t I like to.

But for my friend, one of the biggest ones is, “It’s all been said before. What more can you say?”

I say, a hell of a lot. And maybe it has all been said before but not by me and not in the way I say it. Which, unless I only use Newspeak, should give readers a little different slant on the topic.

And where, by the way, are all these magical manuscripts that have recorded all that I’m going to write? Specifically? Will they draw out the same emotions that my writing will? Anyway, don’t I write because I want to write? Right? Right? Then write. Right? Right.

Crow chatting with Evening Grosbeak

Maybe the brat gets to us because we don’t have a good balance between playing and being serious. Between gravity and fun. The holy man and the clown. And being a writer means that you are susceptible to the writing brats. They’re the fighters who protect the holy grail. They taunt. They swing their emotional word swords at us as they try to keep us from the writing that only we can do. We listen, we feel the pain and they toughen us up so we can eventually say, “Go suck an orange.” Or something like that.

Saying it with a playful attitude, of course. Because taking ourselves too seriously can kill the playful spirit which allows us the space to create what is deeply important to us. Serious play.

Of course this balance doesn’t happen overnight. But like so many things in life, if you want it too much and try too hard to get it, there is a good chance you’ll fail to achieve what it is you really desire and is important to you. It won’t turn out the way you want it to. I think romance works something like this. Of course, I’m no expert.

But hey, when you’re playing hockey, fishing, building a house, shopping, making love, skiing, whatever, do you say to yourself, “Why bother, it’s all been done before?” So have eating and drinking.

I’ve just had a scary thought. Maybe that’s what the players on the Toronto Maple Leafs team say when they’re playing. Frightening thought if you’re a Leafs’ fan.

Sidney Cox, in his book, “Indirections” wrote: “It is a waste to take on more gravity than you can develop the spiritual levity to have fun with.”

***

Running out of space to blow the snow!

Abominable Snowman

Enjoy the photos and the snow. We’re trying to. Yesterday, I attempted to drive to Baddeck but turned around and our laneway is buried at the moment. Our road hasn’t been ploughed in about five days.

I drove past a business in Middle River and saw at least five boxes that had brand new snow blowers in them. And the local gas station has run out of windshield washer fluid. Not surprised.

View from Gold Brook Road

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The Water Moves

5/12/2013

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William Carlos Williams in his poem, “The Well Disciplined Bargeman”, wrote:

“The shadow does not move. It is the water moves,
running out. A monolith of sand on a passing barge,
riding the swift water, makes that its fellow.

Standing upon the load, the well disciplined bargeman
rakes it carefully, smoothly on top with nicely squared
edges to conform to the barge outlines-ritually: sand.”

I’m not a poet nor am I always capable of understanding fully or even semi-fully what a poem means but this poem seems, in part, suitable to my present contemplations.

Thursday morning, the Middle River was showing more than her whiskers. She was three times her normal width and many times her roaring ferocity. The cute purring little kitty I call ‘Cuddles’, was in a temper and had turned into a wild tiger on steroids, looking to terrorize the jungle.

"Cuddles" Morphs into a Tiger

The previous night we had been unable to look outside to see how high and tumultuous the river was, because at 11:00 pm, our power zapped out. So we couldn’t turn on the outdoor light to check the river’s progress from the comfort of inside. I did, however, venture out once or twice to check on ‘Cuddles’ before we went to bed. She didn’t seem too, too high at that time and gauging from how much snow had been on the ground, how hard it was raining, what the weather report had been, my ignorance of how much snow remained on the hovering mountains, and my state of being rather exhausted from whatever the day had entailed, I decided not to get myself tied up into worry knots.

When the lights went out, we scrambled for our lantern and flashlights, while the wind shrieked and rubbed its invisible bulk along the walls of our tiny 45-foot trailer. The walls shook and our windows rattled as the rain dribbled down our hot stovepipe and splashed in a hissy fit onto our wood stove.

At one point, we were trying to figure out which batteries were the new ones after we mistakenly mixed them in with the old ones. One of us trying to hold the flashlight steady while the other tried to sort the batteries out. To add to the drama, we were both worried that the large trees near our trailer might find it beyond their endurance to stand straight and true and instead throw up their branches in surrender, and flatten our trailer. Turning us into a can of sorry sardines.

The next day, when I reached into the top shelf of the cupboard for a box of macaroni and cheese, I found the box was soaked. Damn it, I should have waterproofed the roof when I’d had the chance. I’m hoping that most of the moisture we get this winter will be coloured white. Although I suspect that this leakage occurred because the rain was driven in by a certain kind of smart bomb sneaky wind.

This morning, I walked around the property. Saw that our landscape had been permanently changed. Learned that we had lost more acreage. Discovered new rocks and piles of both dead and still alive branches littered over our land.

Birch Departed

The saddest discovery was to see that the once tall, proud, birch tree, who had stood strong and proud against many a flood and wind, had finally succumbed to Cuddle’s force. Her massive trunk and limbs lying in the river while her roots and the soil they clung to withstood the frantic mob of waves. Some of the water jumping over the downed tree and the rest swinging to the left and turning our walking trail into another part of the river. There were other downed trees too, and it looked like the river had skinned off some grass and vegetation from the river bank. Ah, the power of the river.

Our Trail Became a River

Do you know what occurred to me when I saw the aftermath of the wild river’s rampage? I realized that the watery culprits that had caused all this damage hadn’t stayed around to gloat or ponder. No way. Those waters rushed onward and onward until they were pouring their molasses coloured plunder into the salty waters of Bras d’Or Lake. No looking behind.

And then I thought that, like shadows, we had slept in our bed while the river stormed by. Bargemen, “raking our lives carefully, smooth on top with nicely squared edges to conform to the barge’s outlines.”

I think I, like many writers, am aware of the drama that fills life to overflowing. Like the river rushing to the ocean. A maelstrom of creativity. And I sometimes wonder how much creativity I could stand to be immersed in. Because so many stories pass us by while we, like shadows, sleep in our beds or remain firmly raking sand on the barge.

What if the person at the door, who is trying to persuade me to join her religion, managed to persuade me? What mad, surging emotions would I find myself involved in if I joined this strange religion? What stories would I be able to write? Would the new experience leave my creativity lying in a pile of tossed, sorry manuscripts along the shoreline of life’s river or would I be creating more genuine heartfelt treasures?

The way I see it, we are sometimes going to be on the particular barge we chose or was given to us and we are sometimes going to be in the river. Whether we desire it or not. Besides, at certain key junctures in our lives, we have to be part of the creative/spiritual river if we want to be genuine. Roaring by the shore and not stopping to make sure everything is neat and tidy.

Isn’t creating fun?

“Sometimes the river becomes
a river in the mind
or of the mind
or in and of the mind...”

from “The Mind Hesitant”
by William Carlos Williams

Power Incarnate

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