room for rambling

absentee

2008-02-20T22:07:00.006-05:00

Dearest roomforrambling, ye old and reliable friend. I apologize deeply for my having abandoned you to the greener pastures of food blogging. I am humbled by your perseverance over the years, waiting silently for me to grace your pages with words. How foolish ye must think me, turning from thee to the pleasures of the flesh!

But I have not forgotten you. I am simply finding my chief inspiration as of late in the edible things of this world.

It seems that the more I settle into my life, the more my need to reflect on it diminishes. I was just telling a friend the other day about my 30+ journals, tucked away in a wooden chest in a Winnipeg basement, chronicling the frivolous days of youth. I am still young I know, yet maybe a sign of growing older is that the happening takes over the reflecting. I know this is vague.

I don't want to stop reflecting, I just don't feel the need for it bursting through the crust of things anymore.

This site was started in a time of great upheaval, great unsettledness. Here I find myself, digging into the best things of life--companionship, opportunity, routine, and food.

Yet I still hunger for these pages, too. These little blips I've thrown out there in the chatter that is our collective "I am here!" Maybe they will find this as a relic someday, when the Internet is gone and all they have are pieces. Wouldn't that be something. The excavation of the ephemeral.

Part of me can't wait.

And just for fun, here's my current favourite picture. I'm not usually a "cute pictures of kittens" kind of gal, but this one is just so atypical, such a picture of determination in the face of the bleak colourlessness of winter. It's my gift to the blog I've been neglecting. Enjoy.

eat up

2008-02-06T21:13:00.001-05:00

Hello faithful readers! I have started a new blog, not to replace this one, but more as a reflection of new interests and obsessions. I decided it was time to house my food and drink discoveries in one convenient place, and so fresh cracked pepper was born.

I hope it is inspiring and enjoyable for all who visit!

speech

2007-12-11T16:33:00.000-05:00

I read at a local bookstore/cafe last night. It's strange reading aloud when you don't often get the chance to. Your words detach from your mouth and circle the room, quick to become separate entities. Suddenly, they seem like strangers. Your own voice sounds strained in your ears, wavering, like you've been crying. It is difficult to look at the people in the room. It is as if you are afraid to see how your writing has impacted them. Or if it has at all.

I often think of books, especially those of poetry and fiction, as private matters. Readings remind me that they are public matters. Shared matters. A reading can sometimes remind me of church--people, like so many congregants, suspended for a moment in the power of speech and insight, or just captivated by another's vulnerability. They can seem like the perfection of human contact--when the truth about one thing or person is channeled through a story and dropped, like a gift, at the foot of another.

Readings remind me to write as beautifully as I can. Writing reminds me to speak as truthfully as might be possible. And that is enough for today.

what the world eats

2007-11-28T00:32:00.000-05:00

I came across this photo essay in my internet travels. Today, when words seem stale, images came to vault me back into thought.

©Peter Menzel www.menzelphoto.com; from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. Ten Speed Press.

little things

2007-11-13T23:00:00.000-05:00

There are many treasures to behold in New York City. Just three days there and its surface only slightly scratched. We made a good scratch though, I think.

Every once in awhile I come across something that makes me feel a simple, primal happiness just by looking at it. I found these pottery owl teacups (made in Japan) at Anthropologie, a hip clothing etc. boutique on West Broadway. I didn't purchase a lot while in the city, but I had to have these. Now I'm just looking for a pot to match, because I didn't care for the one it came with.

They bring about the same feeling I get when I see a cat. There's just something so paradoxically innocent and proud about them. They exude contentment and sort of amused peacefulness. They'll be great filled with some genmaicha tea.

I also bought a small sampling of Vosges chocolate, wrapped up in a purple bow, with flavours like wasabi-ginger-black sesame and sweet Indian curry-cocount, robed in dark chocolate.

Besides the owls and the chocolate, I came home with some socks and a sweater from a discount store, and a few books from the Strand (birthday present courtesty of the in-laws!): On Beauty, The Old Man and the Sea, Letters to a Young Poet, and The Road. Oh yeah and a cute hat and scarf from a street vendor, plus birthday presents for my mom.

NYC may be shopping central, but I found it easy to resist the 700$ Prada sweaters and $1200 shoes. I was surprised by how repulsive I found much of the haut couture (aka high fashion). I'm not yet sure why, because I like art, and the two are closely tied.

For more pictures visit us on our blog or on Facebook.

obsessions

2007-11-06T11:17:00.001-05:00

People have been suggesting I post on here, via Facebook, and face-to-face (woe to that ancient, forgotten form!) I looked back, and yes, it has been awhile. As I thought about what to write about, Natalie Goldberg's words come to mind, "writers end up writing about their obsessions." In her workshops, she has writers make lists of their obsessions, so they know what to expect from their work.

So as I venture into the scary life of an artist (whom, she adds, are "never free unless doing their art"), I got to thinking, what are my obsessions? As I've divulged on here in the past, food is one of them. In all its forms, liquid, hot, cold, spicy, salty, or sweet. Love and friendship are two more. Self-understanding, God, religion, family, the outdoors, the future. And those are just a few.

And then there's exercise. Yes World, I am obsessed with working out. I think part of this is due to the fact that I have a lot of time on my hands. Another reason is because I am a writer, and so my work lacks a certain solidity. I often bake when I feel unproductive, just to revel in the feeling of having created something real. Maybe that's why I like to knit, too. But back to the exercise.

I also love it because it releases pent-up energy. I love to subdue my muscles, heart, tendons--all of me--to my will...I like to see what my body is capable of. I love to feel the exhaustion of having worked. In a society where we are encouraged to take the easy way, exercise connects us to our bodies. Movement used to be a part of everything we did; our bodies were made to move. I think we have to be creative in our current world to replicate that, lest we end up putting the miracle of our flesh and bones to waste. I'm not saying those who don't exercise are bad people...these are just my thoughts about why I do it so much. Whether it's taking a walk, biking to work (commuting on a brisk sunny morning is the cheapest thrill around!), or doing a yoga video before bed, it all counts.

I was talking to a friend the other night who was looking for inspiration to start moving more. I discovered this great site where I've been tracking my workouts since the spring. I've pasted my October record here for an example:
I find the little pictures inspiring...seeing all those little figures makes me smile. (Mark prefers the one on the Runner's World site which gives you bars and graphs and all sorts of cool extras.) But for those of you out there looking for a simple way to track your progress and inspire you, this is a great tool. There's room on here for everything...hiking, playing with kids, walking, and cleaning the house.

I have nothing literary or profound today, but I do have my obsessions. And to those I will strive to be responsible to--to indulge and yet to be aware of their power.

mint and pine nuts

2007-09-20T19:10:00.000-05:00

The other day a friend remarked in jest, on the subject of my blog(s): "Everything you write is about food!" I took a look back, through my own online chronicle and the one on which I share with a certain boy. She was right. I do write a lot about food. Not to mention think and talk about it. Many of my conversations with my mothers lately have included something along the lines of "hey, I made this amazing..." or "we had such and such for dinner." When it comes to subjects, of writing or of conversation, food is one of the most forgiving.

I began to think that I was probably predestined to like chopping, mixing and stirring, given my maternal history. But however accurate that explanation, it still seemed too one-dimensional. I have come to love food--its acquisition, combination, preparation and consumption--for many reasons, some on "my" terms, some on others'. Food is a source of immense joy for me, plain and simple. But it is for my mother to, so now I'm back where I started.

I think what I love so much about cooking is the range of simplicity and complexity it offers. How often in life can you open up a book, follow some directions, and come out with a pleasing, useful result? There is something so satisfying about it when life starts to feel like its not yielding much. Open book, find object of desire, follow steps, and your plate is heaping with a new creation. And even better is when you have almost everything you need for some obscure recipe (Israeli couscous? check. French lentils? got it) and only have to go out and buy two ingredients. Like mint and pine nuts. I wish writing a story was that easy. A pen, a page, some mint and pine nuts.

Maybe it is. Maybe I do already have most of what I need.

The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. ~Tom Robbins

(now who can write about food like that?!)

thumbs up to...

2007-08-23T22:41:00.001-05:00

...white eggplants.

I wasn't sure when I'd say this, but it's good to be home in Syracuse. Home has had multiple meanings for me over the last few years, but our little apartment above Terry's beauty salon is filling the role out quite well these days.

We bought this white eggplant today at the Central New York Regional Market. (Reason #1 to like Syracuse) The farm boy who sold it to us didn't know the difference between it and the purple ones but his older sister did. Not as bitter...sounded good to us. (We're enjoying it's quirky greeting too much to have sliced into it yet.)

Summer in Winnipeg was more homey and welcoming than I could have even hoped, but there's something about having your own little corner of the world--whether it's rented, borrowed, or owned. Whether it's in cafes you visit only once, or under the thin nylon walls of a tent.

Arriving in Syracuse three days ago for some reason felt different than all the other times. It felt a bit like slipping into a pair of perfect sandals you bought on sale but saved until bare feet season. They are the perfect fit, and you forgot how great they were. You feel excited and yet comfortable at the same time. Syracuse is like this sandal for me. I know some of its curves--how it might support me over here, perhaps rub a little over there. I really hope the excitement lasts, despite knowing it will be tempered by the everyday.

Buried in one of the four issues of Paste waiting for me upon arrival, I read (in an article on Winnipeg's Weakerthans of all things!) that the hardest thing in life is to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. The days of weddings and funerals carry their own "hypercharged momentum," but it's the "crushing weight" of the daily that deadens us to meaning. These words by novelist Walker Percy are not everyone's fear, but sometimes they're mine. Sometimes, despite my somewhat silver-spooned life, I fear the silliest things: a gray morning presenting me with few reasons to get up. A morning that the church bells are muffled by the sounds of the street--a morning that finds me uninspired, and without passion.

That morning hasn't come yet, but I know it will. And when it does, I'll always have eggplants...and comfortable sandals.

For more in the "Reasons to like Syracuse" department, visit us at Colony of Two!

preface to the unread

2007-07-15T13:07:00.000-05:00

How does one go about choosing a book to read? With so many slots of time in a day to be filled, and with so many possible literary interventions, how does one begin to decide? Words, in their teeming multiplicity, cry out to adorn our lives: the time between bus transfers, the minutes waiting for a pick-up, the parts of a day not easily labeled morning, afternoon, evening.

What makes us pick up a book, the collection of another's mental processes, the imprints of a human mind at work on some subject--love, betrayal, censorship. What is it we look for when we crack those alluring covers, with their stamps of approval: "staff pick," or "Oprah's book club?" Maybe we look for new meanings for the world. For order, for symmetry, or maybe just for newness. What ideals do those unread pages signify? I admit: to be more knowledgeable, cultured, entertained.

One of my struggles is always this: classic, contemporary, or something different altogether. I am not one of those author-groupies, who follows one particular author through his or her entire body of work until I have exhausted my resources. I am also not a mystery junkie, a chick-lit chick, or a erudite classicist. I am greedy for variety. I want it all. The beauty of the old works, the experimentalism of the new ones, and a little self-help or spiritual growth advice on the side.

This makes choosing a book very difficult for me. I know many people go purely on recommendations. But my sources are perhaps too prolific, and I have trouble extracting something from the cloud of "you HAVE to read ____" or "you haven't read ____?!!?" Sometimes I springboard from one to another, forging an errant path between themes, styles, and genres.

There are times when I read a book because I somehow feel I should, as in my last, the Brothers Karamazov. Other times it's more random, something I was given, or picked up in some used bookstore somewhere, in a moment of ravenous story-hunger. But I must read, for literature opens the doors in my head that have been fused closed by too many layers of paint. It caffeinates my creativity, and fertilizes my desire. It gives me a somewhere when I feel nowhere, another place when I am feeling out of place, intimacy when I am an island, solitude when I am scattered.

worlds a part (a story from India)

2007-06-22T13:46:00.000-05:00

Oh sad, neglected little blog! How I have crushed you under my preoccupied feet, and treated you with such undeserved contempt and scorn! You who have been such a faithful slate for my verbal wanderings, such an open door to vast expanses of writerly wondering. I return to you, hoping you'll receive these worn, forgotten thoughts.

Many of you have asked about India, on facebook and otherwise. There are a few reports "straight from the field" on our couple blog, but here I wish to relay one story that I think translates the whole of the trip quite poignantly.

While sauntering an evening away in India's hip yoga capital, Rishikesh, Mark and I were crossing one of the main bridges over the Ganges that bisects the town. This bridge is patrolled by a tribe of monkeys, who pace along the railings and swing from the cables, waiting for treats. Once in awhile, with a good streak of luck, a person can cross the bridge unperturbed by these mangy, red-bottomed fur balls. But not this time.

One particular monkey had stationed himself near the end of the bridge. Just when I thought this crossing would be a monkey-free one, there he was, perched mischievously on the rail. Now a monkey is not a particularly intimidating creature. Quite the opposite, actually. With their crouching stature, human-like features and matted gray coats, they are hardly a fearsome bunch. But there I was, in a new country, engulfed in a swarm of newness and difference. I didn't know what to expect of these little creatures, roaming free from zookeepers and unencumbered by the West's safety fences. These guys were wild and free to attack my head at will.

The bridges in Rishikesh are a constant rush of bodies, motorcycles and bikes. But near this particular monkey, the crowd had thinned a little, perhaps in deference to its unpredictability. As I summoned up my strength to pass this strange and ratty creature, backed by Mark's faithful encouragement, the monkey's little face contorted in an evil scowl and set its beady eyes upon me in a look of malicious intent. The combination of that wrinkly face, the foreboding frown and violent hiss, was enough to make me jump three feet backwards into the safety of the crowd of strangers.

A few seconds passed, and then one by one the brave ones (my hubby included) slipped by its watchful post to the other side. "Come on Jenny, just come. Just walk, you'll be fine," he assured me. And so once again I called on bravery (that virtue that is is so unused in our culture of luxury) to help me pass that furry devil.

Beside me was a small group of Indian women, dressed in black saris, and with their heads covered. They were older women, and they seemed to be traveling together in a tight-knit group. They too had held back after the monkey's display of discourteous behaviour. As I began to pass the monkey, I felt the hand of one of these women brush mine. Thinking it was just an accidental touch, I did not respond. When the small, leathery hand then firmly clasped mine, I knew it was no accident. I returned the grasp, and together, holding hands like two frightened school girls, we succeeded in running the gauntlet of our fear. She let go of my hand on the other side, but before descending to the street with her companions, threw me a delighted shriek of amusement. I will never forget her playful smile, as if to say thank you for conspiring with me.

Throughout our trip to India, as with other past adventures, I made an effort to accept a culture and a people vastly different from the familiar. Sometimes it was easy, as in the case of holding that old woman's hand. Sometimes it was difficult, and required great courage. But that one moment summed up a trip that will remain forever on my heart and in my mind. It only took a few seconds for that woman to teach me how similar we all are, in our silliest fears, our bitterest loses, and our loftiest joys.

Top Eleven reasons to smile

2007-04-30T08:22:00.000-05:00

11. The sky is a brilliant blue and I hear a chirping bird
10. My bike did some serious hills yesterday
9. I get pizza tomorrow instead of a journalism lecture
8. We had corn on the cob last night for dinner
7. We found a really eccentric local coffee roaster
6. I'm doing a free yoga class in half an hour
5. I got an advance copy of the new Feist album (due out tomorrow) for 6 bucks!
4. My parents were here over the weekend (yay!) and they brought us a bottle of Dad B's wine
3.We're now registered for the MB half marathon (yikes!)
2. We leave for INDIA on Thursday

and the number 1 reason I'm smilling today...

1. I'm gonna be published! (see April 10th's post...they want it!)

sauntering

2007-04-18T16:02:00.000-05:00

This morning I went for a walk. No running today, just the slow saunter of a leisurely walk.There is so much a runner can learn from walking. For me, it is chiefly a reminder: to enjoy the passing world, the melting world, the world around me speckled with brown and green. When I run I feel machine-like: the clicking pulse and pumping heart, the mechanisms of the lungs and muscles. When I walk, I am a grazing animal, free of fences. I leave the concerns of time and distance behind me, and I remember how to play.

One of my favourite New York State authors walks every morning. Thoreau says walking will keep me from rusting, should I “stay in my chamber” all day. He says there is “nothing in it akin to exercise…but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.”

This day, canopied with blue after so many grey ones, is a day worthy of so many small adventures. Warmed-up homemade tomato dill soup and a veggie nori wrap, finishing an article, an hour of yoga in my favourite room, gathering my wool for tonight’s first Syracuse “stitch n’ bitch” with 7 women I’ve never met.

But the best adventure was the walk. The sun on my skin is like the embrace of an old friend. The snow melting off houses patters like rain, and under my feet gurgles into a hidden urban brook. The neighbourhood comes alive as nature sheds its final coat of ice, people push windows from their dusty rigidity, and the mighty exhalation of adventure impels every one of my steps.

(picture is from my cycling trip last May)

idleness and barbeques

2007-04-10T15:06:00.000-05:00

I just sent my first official query to a magazine. Querying is what optimistic freelancers do in the hopes of getting assigned an article. It’s the first one I’ve sent to an editor I’ve never met. The first editor who is not a benevolent friend trying to help me get my words out there. It sounds self-depracating, but the pros tell me to expect rejection and then keep trying.

Classes are quickly approaching their end. My mysticism class is wrapping up with Moby Dick, a voluminous American classic dotted with spiritual and philosophical illumination—all on the back of the 19^th century whaling industry. Meanwhile, on the other side of campus (I’ve been listening to too much Carrie Bradshaw), journalism class provokes me to long afternoons in the sun pondering the craft of writing.

Take last week’s journal entry:

I want a recipe for good writing, but it is a pull-everything-out-of-the-pantry-and-get-creative kind of endeavour. It is full of holes and half-attempts. Cliches become casualties on the road to creativity, and my best risks just threaten an alienated readership. I’m taught what not to say, and how to be clearer: “Look, who would actually say that?”(I would.)

Current mass journalism seems to be the pursuit of clarity at the expense of beauty. It corrodes the temples of words I’ve built in my mind, making them seem superfluous, gaudy, ornate.

Perhaps they are right, and good writing is clear, full of what people would actually say, and only that. For I am no Austen, no Dickens, or Thoreau even. I live today, in the 21^st century of shortened words, of “text.” Of WTFs and LOLs and all the rest of language’s vestigial parts.

And so today, rather than writing, I feel like doing anything else. Wandering, dreaming of idleness, barbeques, a new tattoo. In joy the days slip by with ease. In the absence of joy, every minute is lead.

Cheers, it’s spring in New York State! Let’s go publish!

Riddle of blue

2007-03-29T16:00:00.000-05:00

While I was home in Winnipeg over the break, the question “so what do you DO down in Syracuse?” came almost every day. This has never been my favourite question to answer, but people are interested. These annoying life-check questions are part of what make friends friends. Thus, today a feeble attempt to sketch out my life as a legal alien living south of the 49^th parallel.

I think that part of the problem is that in the last few years, I haven’t really “Done” much, in the capital D-doing sense of the word. I got good grades, but I’m not in grad school. I haven’t even applied. Rare were the jobs I held onto for more than a year, mostly involving beverages of some sort. Easy to get and easy to quit. One University degree lies folded up between photo albums in my parent’s basement, next to my high school diploma. As the months tick on, I realize how much of it means little to me. As the years tread on, I realize that the little bit that does matter, matters a hell of a lot.

I didn’t become a teacher, a nurse, or a lawyer. I don’t own a power suit, and I don’t really want to. But then there are those old goals that poke their heads up now and again. The novel, the café, the triathlon. Little bits of envisioned selves that take smaller forms now: Reading in them. Sitting in them. Running and cycling—two out of three isn’t bad.

So, what do I DO down here in Syracuse. Being unemployed leaves a whole lot of time for doing the things I always said I wanted to do. I often miss the world of structure and routine, where earning a living through honest work keeps me sane. However, what will be will be, and here I am, on an F2 visa, unable to earn even a penny polishing wine glasses (one of my many, underappreciated skills).

And so, I spend my days taking free courses at the University, listening to my professors wax poetic about leaves or good writing. (Or gripe about the war in Iraq or bad metaphors.) I practice Haydn’s Creation along with singers who are better than me, but whom I hope will sing loud enough to drown out my squeaks. I knit, un-knit, and knit again. I learn to bake bread, grow sprouts, and incubate my own yogurt. I try to break a 9-minute-mile. I go to films and Health Expos and anything free, I lift weights and do yoga on Mondays down the street. I read books, and I stare out the window waiting for the day the sun will pummel the clouds out of existence. (When it does, I am invincible.) I spend far too much time on the Internet, but a satisfactory zero hours in front of the t.v. I try to write articles that might sell. I hang out at the library down the street, or sip lavender lattes in basement cafes with my hubby.

Life, as we know it, leaves little to be desired. And yet I am a hungry creature. Desire is scrawled across my being.

I have tried hard to gather knowledge, prove my skills, and justify myself to the world. (While the people that matter already accept me.) A perennial quest for uniqueness or essence, maybe. In the lives of those I admire most, I see a new goal: to live for today, with more compassion for others and more grace for myself. To live out knowledge and to work hard. To question and doubt, and yet be satisfied in a life of faith. It is a never-ending quest. But today, today the Syracuse sky is mysteriously blue, and I am on my way out to bask in its riddle.

ode to a finished book

2007-03-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

I finally finished Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace. The work of this mid-20th-century French Jewish activist-mystic (yet defying categorization), is now on my list of most difficult books I've "read." I put read in quotes, because sometimes, when reading, the clarity and meaning of words evaporates, leaving them behind as mere objects. It makes for an interesting reading experience: When words betray their purpose, to communicate, and leave me instead with a vague sense of things--of brilliance and truth, or at least of worth. There is something in her writing, something that evaded me right through to the last word. But I ploughed on, believing the discipline and, in her words, attention, to be somehow good for me.

I will give you two quotes. To complicate this post with more than that would be much too heavy for the general purposes of the internet (speed, surface, mass accumulation of that which quickly slips through the fingers).

"The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation."

"Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul."

Wow. That's all I can say.

ashes

2007-02-23T09:53:00.000-05:00

We walk through the town square, the church bells an antiphon to our rushed drive downtown. I think that as long as churches ring their bells, there is reason to be alive. Those bells bring majesty to the public doman, glory to the void of city rhythm. A man on the street corner bellows, his face pink, his eyes brimming with scriptural ammo: "It is only by grace that you are saved!!! Those ashes on your forehead cannot save you! Repent for the day is near..." He's partly right, but he's wrong about the ashes.

Ash Wednesday found us in St. Paul's Cathedral, kneeling at the altar, getting our foreheads dirty. There was a different message than the one we'd just heard on the street. This one reminded us to beware of religiosity, and of showing off our feeble attempts at righteousness. (Close the door, do this in secret.) These were softer words, rising up to a vaulted ceiling where the they formed little gold nets for our prayers. "Remember," he says to me, "that you are dust and to dust you shall return." He says this to ten, fifty, one-hundred people kneeled alongside me. He puts ashes on wrinkled, brown, smooth, and cream foreheads alike. The same words, spoken to many but new to each. The translation of Job I just read for Mysticism class ends with this .. . comforted that I am dust.

Why ashes, anyway? Why something so tangible, and yet so fleeting? (Gone, with a puff, like a seeded dandelion.) Before our time, people would recognize mourners by the ashes on their faces. The ashes showed that in their sadness the mourners had neglected the daily household duty of keeping the ashes in the fireplace under control. Today it might seem religious to walk around sporting ashes on your forehead. Like some kind of cross around your neck, icon-emblazoned t-shirt, tattooed Buddha on your arm. But there was a time when it was just inevitable. The stuff of trying to live, and work, and be human. Again I am surprised at the dailyness of of life and faith.

This spot of ash. I bent too low I hit the earth; old fire, powdered terra. The solid remains of fire touching my skin. What will not be burned, gracing my skin. We springboard into Lent (lenct, germanic root word for Spring), with sunshine on our shoulders and darkness on our faces. We are grateful to be light and dust.

better than tylenol sinus

2007-02-19T17:47:00.001-05:00

I think I’m finally kicking this cold. It began a few weeks ago, tentatively clinging to my sinuses, but as of the last few days has descended confidently into my throat and chest. Colds are the illness no one ever wants to hear you whine about. They’re as mundane as what you had for breakfast—only your significant other cares. (A little.) And so, I send my complaints out into the anonymous network of compassion: A blog post, like a faded fluttering prayer flag, beating its tired fibres against gusts of Himalayan air. Yes, that’s me.

Fighting a cold takes many forms: Tea with lemon, yoga, knitting, lots of sleep, skipping classes. But there are also some unconventional tonics: hockey games and beer, chilly walks around town tramping through snowdrifts, spicy ceasars, swordfish with homemade citrus pesto (thanks to a belated Valentines Day feast prepared by my resident chef).

Today the doctor prescribed snowshoeing at Green Lakes: pure rejuvenation to a cooped-up soul who has seen too much of her walls and the insides of mugs. The snow that fell over the past week has settled into each crease of tree and rock. It is a blue-white wash out, pocked with the colour of proud evergreens. Our snowshoes keep us near the surface, but on some of the really soft expanses, the snow pulls us in like a feather bed. We cut new trails; it doesn’t look like many have been here since the snowfall. Boughs and branches lean over our path, heavy with their burden of frozen water. My heart-rate quickens as particles of fallen seas resist my stride. I let them fall easily off the contraptions strapped to my feet. I breathe in air clean as menthol—it passes through me, fighting my puny cold with nature’s Cold. The sun had become a stranger, but today it returns to bless the passing of winter. It mingles with fresh shards of outdoor air, forming an elixir that just might scare this sickness right out of me.

Contrary to the old wives’ tales, I would highly recommend going outside when you have a cold.

lend me your ear

2007-01-24T17:28:00.000-05:00

How do you know when you’re supposed to be a writer? (How do you know when you’re supposed to be anything?) I have failed so far in trying to pin my interests on a particular vocation. Maybe it is because I love this earth so much that I don’t want to deny any part of it. Maybe that is an optimistic view, and I am really just lazy.

And yet I keep coming back to writing, and its impervious demons: How dare I assume that my words will count, that they will be worthy of even an ear? There is so much noise around us, thousands of messages breeding cacophony. My own voice seems obstructed by the words themselves.

How can I be confident in this journey when I have not yet seen the map, let alone the end? How can I obey when I have not yet heard?

I cannot be sure that my love of words should translate into writing. There are so many ways to love words. And so it seems, more and more each day, that writing is neither an act of confidence nor skill, but faith. And faith is one of those companions that no matter how persistently you push it away, it just keeps turning up in the strangest places. Faith just doesn’t know how to let go.

As always, I am full of questions. In my prouder moments I believe I could be a good mother, teacher, architect, counsellor, nurse, editor, graphic designer, chef. But in William Stafford’s words, the world waits there / thirsting after its names. Who am I to turn away? Adam has passed on his duty, and I feel incredibly small in front of the silence that longs to be turned into song.

a strange and familiar path

2007-01-18T17:05:00.000-05:00

When you haven't been a student proper in 2 years (not counting being a student of life and love and all the rest of it), the first day back you feel like a peasant before the table of the noble. Your intellectual hunger growls, lurches from its place of comfortable distraction. The bookstore shelves are a mile high, arching over your frame worn thin by labour and idleness. They offer the choicest morsels of wisdom, and you want them all. Names swirl before your blurry eyes; some names you recognize but many you don't. Names that have been lost in the backs of old journals. Names that have changed some of your friends' lives. Names that have indeed changed your own.

And you want to be let in again, to dig into your pockets and find the key to all this knowledge. You know it's there, beneath coins and crumpled bus tickets. This has been for so long a faraway world, and it is once again present.

I am finding that I still fit into those old muddy boots. The voice of instruction comes like a psalm. I am finding that even though learning can take a thousand forms other than academia, the University has remained a place that expands my vision and energizes my pursuit. I am finding that it feels good to come home, in this, as in so many other ways.

suos, cultores, scientia, coronat

2007-01-12T19:24:00.000-05:00

Things have changed just a wee bit as of late. I'm a married woman, I'm a resident alien (and yes that's a technical term), and a student again. To the left you will behold my very own Syracuse University student card. This shiny little card allows me access to books, weights, and vast stores of knowledge. Three of my favourite things.

You may also behold the new labels on my blog entries: Wired Magazine's technology hound, Eugene B. Blognerd, says "these easy to use little titles allow you to search for your favourite posts from the room for rambling archives. All at the click of a mouse!"

(Eyeroll. My husband is now really hoping I get enrolled in a course soon, and have something to do other than pester him with my giddy, nerdish moods.)

The otherwise boring drive down here was full of exciting distractions: Successfully crossing the border as a legal unit, a new travel mug (c/o Caribou coffee), fudge (c/o Illa), Lord of the Rings read by a grandfatherly British man, and catnaps (c/o grandfatherly man). But the award for "ultimate best time on road trip #2 to Syracuse" goes to sheep, who make me laugh more than any other animal. When you pet them, all of their wool and skin moves like a massive turkish rug draped heavily over their backs. It's delightful. (Thanks Todd and Anna-Ruth.)

So the ring on my finger now means a whole lot more than "I'm getting married." It translates to memories of the 29th and before, companionship, committment, shared laughter, and to spousal benefits at a great university. Not to mention having someone to share hummous and tabbouleh at meditteranean restaurants with. As we said to each other this morning: Well, here we are on a new adventure.

box a

2007-01-09T11:02:00.000-05:00

I think my posting is about to become somewhat more frequent. Tomorrow we will trek to the border, and cross over as a married couple (those words are still new and strange yet comfortably familiar.) The guards will pull out their pens and push their spectacles up their nose, and we will wait for the go-ahead. Another country awaits, not far from where we are now, but with so much that is other.

Once again my life is packed into little boxes. I spent the last 3 days moving stuff from point A to point B to point C. Those three days seem a write-off for meaningful existence. I was a conveyor belt. I was a shelf-stocker: what has value, what is long past its expiry date. The goodwill box is overflowing once more. It reminds me of how I felt when I started this blog, freshly deposited in a new, pulsing city. But this time it's we, and that is different.

The wedding is over. The event is past. The memories are now starting to take its place. Photos for sensations, videos for moments. Reminiscing for anticipating. Such is the rhythm of our lives.

We move tomorrow. I into the unknown of city and life, he into the known of school and friends. Both of us into the dance of being known and the mystery of yet still being unknown. What do you know?

jump in

2006-12-24T10:18:00.000-05:00

My writing has been infrequent, these pages empty. Not, however, for lack of words. Perhaps I am tiring of this form. Perhaps I am longing for the old ways of quill pens and parchment paper. But the technological side of me still lures me, begs me to throw my words at this teeming and cavernous Internet mass.

I don't know where to begin after all this time. Less than a week left of Jen-the-single-person, and I find that I am neither deeply mourning nor ecstatically celebrating its passing. I am simply welcoming it. Being single had its joys, its somehow pleasureable pains, its exquisitely lonely walks in the woods. I will miss the parts of myself that reflected the good things of singlehood. This is largely unexplainable to me. Yesterday at a family gathering it was said that to marry young is the best way. That may be the way of many, but not of us all. Did I feel the need to defend my 26-year-hiatus from wedded bliss? Partly, but I kept it to myself, wrapped up in my private cocoon of experiences.

I won't miss the wondering and the restlessness. It's not that marriage fixes a person completely, or covers over the wounds of other hopes turned sour. But I am grateful and excited to have chosen the journey. For the companionship that will provide a base and an inspiration for the rest of me. For the parts that it will heal and illuminate. Marriage does not legitimize a person, and I have always resisted it being seen as a stamp of approval upon a person's life. I'm looking forward to sharing what I (sometimes reluctantly) love about myself. I'm looking forward to the side-by-side. I'm looking forward to the challenge of another, facing me in a call towards selflessness.

Next Friday I will greet more than I will bid farewell to.

Amidst all the preparation of flowers, cakes and music, we wait expectantly for the Saviour of the world. What a tiny matter our celebration seems in comparison to this grand announcement.

Life seems so much bigger when you step back to look at it.

So let go, let go, jump in, oh well what are you waiting for?

And so jump in I do.

how to say goodbye

2006-11-15T15:21:00.000-05:00

"To understand things and people, we must love them." A simple quote. Walter Rauschenbusch. I don't even know who he is. Perhaps I should.

A simple quote, read from the front of Winnipeg's largest inner-city church. The one with the glowing orange cross on top of it. I think it must be one of the biggest. A cloudy Wednesday, and hundreds are gathered to figure out how to say goodbye. We are gathered to support his family. We gather to be part of the act of gathering. We gather for ourselves.

There are hugs, flowers, people moving in a collective grieving mass. "Did you know that it was exactly two years ago that we had him over for supper?" a friend reminds me. To the day. Wow. We drive just outside of the city limits, where airplanes line up for take-off behind us. A metaphor of movement surrounding the stasis of concrete and stone.

I have witnessed only three physical burials in my lifetime. I have attended my share of memorial services, but this part of death felt foreign. It felt too intimate, like I shouldn't be there. Like I should turn my back from the center of the crowd's attention, like my only role should be to provide shelter from the sheets of wind flapping against the family. It felt scandalous to watch. Voyeuristic.

What an earthy, gritty thing is death. Our hearts believe eternity, choirs, angels, and glory. Our senses witness soil, stone, salt, and November's vitriolic winds.

May your dying teach us even more than your living did.

autumn in an acorn shell

2006-11-01T18:43:00.000-05:00

A collage of my time in Germany, featuring Steffi (in the grey) Laura, (the blonde), Angela (below) Oktoberfest (blech), and at the end, my dear Ottawa cousins with whom we spent Thanksgiving. Oh, and the mosaic is one that I made, under Steffi's careful direction! Enjoy.

we'll drop these bags and search no more

2006-10-10T23:23:00.000-05:00

[Thanks to the Wailin' Jennies for that title.]

i am finished for now. finished with being crammed into small spaces, moving at high speeds with large groups of complete strangers. the novelty of travel fades;
planes become buses become trains become
the mundanity of the everyday car.

but along those roads, and beyond these skies
are the voices of those I have strained to remember,
and the mud on my shoe is thicker than before, and
my feet carry me
further back
than I ever thought possible.

there have been too many pasts,
words (now etched mockingly
on a cold computer screen)
used to pass between us
now it is me--wondering how you're really doing,
wondering what you're doing at all
wondering if you wonder the same.

i am finished for now, but i will always keep moving.
never further from those i've known,
please, i beg, let me come to you again and again.
i need your voices,
your dirty shoes,
even your coldest words,
that render me loved.

[pictures to come]

alles wir gut

2006-09-21T05:10:00.000-05:00

-which means, 'all will be good.'

The art of travel. A small book in the stuffy Frankfurt airport beckons me from the shelf. I don't have time for anything more than a short flip through it. Mobility, flexibility, newness, difference. To travel is to be human, with a body designed to walk 75 kilometres a day.

To travel is to trick the body, the mind, the senses. Rhythms dictated by light, breakfast offered in the new time zone, though it may be 2 am for the stomach. Time is made irrelevant and inconsequential. Time is reduced to waiting, and waiting to stillness. There are no hours, only the opening and closing of doors.

I am back in Germany with a very good friend. It's been five and a half years since I've set foot on European soil, but strangely, it feels familiar, warm, known. It's like returning to a scrapbook, train stubs and receipts jutting out from its pages, worn with years. This time it's less survival-oriented and more enhancing. There is less an attitude of acquisition and more one of perception. I have returned, it seems, not to a land once travelled but to a friendship unchanged by distance.

Sometimes it seems unbelievable that I'm here again. Sometimes it feels absolutely expected. The more I travel, the more I move, relocate, and explore, the more hospitable the world seems. Otherness diminishes, borders narrow, home is spread out. When I'm in another country there is a point at which nothing feels different. My breath, the weight of my body on the ground, is exactly as it would be anywhere else. In those moments of realization, in order to convince myself of the distance I've actually come, I must picture a map and the comparative distance those centimeters represent. How interesting that when travelling, we often think of our world pictorally rather than experientially.

As for the specifics: I'm finally naturalized to the time change. Finally convinced that time is just a construct, numbers relative to sleep and light. I've traversed Regensburg's many alleyways and cobblestone corridors, shied under the dwarfing vaults of her cathedral ceilings. Marvelled at her people's youthfulness, vitality, and fashion, over cups of steaming macchiato. Visited the world's oldest brewery at the kloster (monastery) on the curving Danube. Drank prosecco in the Bismarkplatz listening to children speak a langugage I cannot. Visited the hall of the gods with its busts of Kant, Goethe, Bach, and Schiller. Listened to covers of English pop songs over Guiness in an Irish pub. Caught up and reminisced about an experience on a ship in the Atlantic, seemingly long ago, but still burnt on our memories like the touch of hot iron.

And the sun is a lazy September coal, drying the sunflowers, and coaxing my skin to glow.

das capitals

2006-09-09T09:20:00.000-05:00

it seems as if i've switched, in the last few entries, to titles beginning with lower-case letters. maybe i'm feeling as though what i have to say lately is less important. maybe it's a confidence thing. maybe it's an aesthetic thing, but i've noticed that more and more people are jumping on this anti-capital bandwagon.

and then i thought, maybe it's a poet thing.

yeah, that could be it, because it's so much prettier to write poetry that fits along a single line and doesn't just out into the white space above, exerting itself like some kind of primadonna.

so there i go, reading into things that probably don't matter much at all, in the wide scope of things. but that is writing, that is criticism, and that is poetry. without them we would be stuck in the present. trapped in the constant momentum of doingdoingdoing. never stopping to ponder. never possessing the ability to look back. never wrapping our fingers, sticky with the present, around the world whizzing past us.

house of words

2006-09-06T10:58:00.000-05:00

Syracuse, NY. Sitting on a back porch, looking at a leaning fence and a blue house with a half-moon window. It could be any blue house, and any half-moon window, anywhere. In Winnipeg, in Vancouver, in any place I have loved. The sun is filtering itself through persistent grey clouds, too bright to look at, too dull to fully cheer.

A week and a half into my continent-trotting parade, and I have seen many states that look exactly the same as the provinces north of them. I have seen many freeways, the bloodveins of a restless nation, where people drive too fast and where there are too many greasy roadside distractions. Another week and a half and I’ll be looking out upon more of this state, from the window of a bus where I’ll sit, alone, in motion. Another week and a half and I’ll be heading towards Times Square: time to the power of two. Time, multiplied upon itself in the center of one of the world’s largest cities. And then I’ll wait for a plane to take me to another place, for awhile.

America, Germany, Canada, and back again. Loved, left, alone, embraced, family, community, alone, rejected, healed. The cycle of looking for home and leaving it behind, finding it in sounds and tastes and textures: The crunch of toast in the morning, the voices of friends by day, the softness of companionship in the evening. These are the things that are my shelter. In spite of the white walls, needing warmth. In spite of the scattered furniture and unpacked boxes. No matter what small messes I pile around me I find the lead weight in my heart and mind that binds me to

this ground

this home

this permanency

Prose that slowly burns off its skins of usefulness, exposing the raw stuff of beauty

that lies embedded in the poetry’s subtle gestures.

This is how we live; observing, accomplishing tasks,

carrying out our various modes of survival.

All the while pushing for the thing that makes it all worth carrying on at all.

The thing that for many of us is nameless, but stronger and louder than

anything we’ve heretofore been able to name.

Poetry, force your way through the mundane flurry of words I write.
Redeem this language. Brighten this day. Amen.

eclectic tomatoes

2006-08-11T13:54:00.000-05:00

Poetry inspired by rainy days. Photos from here and there. Preaching about good music and bad theology (both in my opinion, of course). Turns out the purpose of this blog has outgrown its original hat: as an update about "the Vancouver chapter" of my life. Yeah, it's become a bit of a catch-all. A little scattered, perhaps. Lacking focus, maybe. Eclecticism might be prettier as a decorating style than a writing one. Eclectic is one of those words that is so satisfying to feel in your mouth. Like a particularly cripsy piece of tempura, or perfectly roasted nut.

I'm slowly inching my way toward writer-dom, with the excitement of the month being my first internship! As a writer, this is pretty big news. Cahoots Magazine is a Canadian women's magazine focussed on art, politics, and womens' issues. I'll be compiling events, dates, and news from women across the country for a calendar. Harper's here I come! (ha ha)

I don't have much to say tonight,
either than that I've been staying up far too late
ripping duct tape with my teeth to tie around cardboard boxes
of journals and essays, coin collections and stuffed sheep.

No, not so much to say, but the knowledge of an early morning arising
to meet me, where I will be living again between lives
on the periphery, where interstates meet fields of sunflowers
and I go to greet another home.

Tonight is silent, as the grass at midnight
as the tomatoes clutching the sun's old rays
turning them to red flesh.

Tonight holds the summer and all its warmth,
words, ashes, cut grass, distance
we travelled to meet the day we will call new.

the r-word again

2006-08-03T10:19:00.000-05:00

The other night I was out for drinks, and someone said that they couldn't stand religious people. It never really became a serious conversation, and there were guffaws and light-heartedness. Still, my heart quickened and my blood seemed to thicken, a reaction common in me when met by attitudes that I strongly oppose. I felt the poles of passion and reason magnetize strongly. Of course I can deal with hearing things I don't agree with. Of course I can try to see the other person's perspective. But first I had to let that wave of instinctive anger sweep over me. Then I took my little teaspoon of anger, and tried to imagine how this person felt every time he was confronted with such "religiosity." And I was reminded of something.

Anger often surfaces as a reaction to injustice. That is why I think the first tremours of anger are good--they render us moral and alive. If it's been a long time since I got really angry, maybe I should be worried. So in a way, this person's anger was a wake-up call. Maybe it wasn't anger I felt at all. Maybe I understood exactly what he meant, and hated it too. Maybe I wanted to change his mind but knew what a feat that would be to even attempt. Maybe I just wanted him to meet one single solitary person who could move him an inch from his hatred.

All I could manage was a calm, "so how do you define 'religious?' " To which I didn't really get an answer. Then the conversation slipped away down the eavestroph of forgotten words, and something else replaced it. Religion says very little about God. Religions says more about us and our inadequacies. It is the way we reach towards something more beautiful and more true and we are. We can find God in it, but we must be very, very careful not to get in the way.

My fingers tingled and I longed to show him a glimpse of what it is like to be persued by God. My heart thudded and I feared all that conspires to try to show me the allure of running away.

glimpses and digressions

2006-07-19T16:02:00.000-05:00

I took the "Make Poverty History" advertisement off my blog. In my latest copy of Geez I read about a new one: Make Affluence History. It's funny how a simply parody can open your eyes. Mass assumption: less is bad, more is good.

Speaking of more, what do changes in your surroundings do to you? I am housesitting a type of house I am not accustomed to. Sometimes it is like wearing someone else's clothes. I am very far away from downtown. I have two options: spending my savings on gas, or putting in long days in the (bike) saddle.

Speaking of bikes, I just got my first two (significant) articles published in Momentum: a Vancouver cycling magazine. I'm feeling like a tire: pretty pumped. (If I still have readers after that double serving of cheese, thanks be to God!)

Speaking of readers. I think I'm almost over the fact that I don't get very many comments on this thing. I'm more thankful in fact for the verbal feedback. I've been at two gatherings lately where people have come up to me and told me how much they enjoy it. It's nice to be able to see their eyes and not just their words.

Speaking of words, I just finished my first Iris Murdoch book. I am wondering if the next book I choose will be about betrayal. This has been a random, unexpected trend. My last--The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and this one The Sacred and Profane Love Machine both have been.

Speaking of Love: I think I might be getting it this time.

how many banjoes can you fit on a blade of grass?

2006-07-12T15:35:00.000-05:00

Every year the Winnipeg Folk Festival feels a little more like home. I think it's safe to say that I look forward to this event more than Christmas, and with so many old friends on the rollicking bandwagon, it feels just as festive. This year I dragged Mark out for his first festival, and was he ever a trooper! We volunteered on the Admin crew,-- a nice change from the sweatin' buckets of La Cuisine. ("Is the granola done yet Jen?" "I don't know, it's +40, do we really need to bake it?") This time around we had fans, and no ovens. Just paperwork.

For some reason I didn't take many pictures. I guess I'm just getting used to the weekend so much that it doesn't seem like a novelty anymore. I think when something becomes so familiar, it acquires that "homey" feeling I opened with.

This year I wasn't running around like a stress case, trying to catch all of the amazing acts I wanted to see. I felt generally more relaxed. And proud--proud that all those people were drowning their city sorrows with the soothing strains of music--right in our own prairie backyard.

I saw a shooting star. I cried tears of bliss at a concert where Ruthie Foster sang a song for her deceased "big momma." I cried tears of laughter at one of T.O.F.U.'s lyrical extravaganzas. I saw old favourites like Hawksley and Greg MacPherson, jumped around to K'Naan (a Somali-born rapper) and Flook (Folk Fest's token Irish party band), and marvelled at Inuit throat singer Tagaq's brave mainstage performance. I settled underneath a tree to hear Crooked Still belt out their revved-up but honey-sweet bluegrass. I talked to James Keelaghan, and he sounds as pretty as he sings. On Sunday night we took in an art-infused performance by Christine Fellows and company, and then retired to the sounds of Bruce Cockburn's twilight kissed finger-picking. I went home with a Neko Case shirt, a $4 piece of art from an art vending-machine, and more Folk Fest memories to last me until next July.

The pictures below are as follows: Mark and I, me harassing my little brother, and a shot of the duct-tape cuffs Mark and I handcrafted while on a slow Admin shift. Think we should go into business anyone?

gratitude

2006-06-26T23:45:00.000-05:00

Harry Lehotsky is a Baptist minister and rabble-rouser in the core of Winnipeg's downtown. In the last few months, he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His legacy is long, though his life sentence is short. I have worked off and on at one of his church's ministries, the Ellice Cafe and Theatre, and have been privileged enough to see a true servant at work.

Tonight I went to "A Big Harry Night of Fun," a fundraiser put on by the West End Biz. The money raised will be put towards a new mural that will be added to the neighbourhood's increasingly colourful streets. There were speeches, dancing, tributes, and sermonettes. My favourite part of the evening (besides all the donated baking and a reference to the Cafe as "Le Hot Spot") was when Joan Hay, an aboriginal community activist, got up to speak and pray.

Her prayer was a simple, conversational, ground-level statement of gratitude. It went something a little like this:

I am not waiting for You to answer all my questions or fix my problems: I am thanking You right now.

I am not holding out for change or for things to suddenly turn better: I am thanking You right now.

I am not waiting until I get that job or achieve that goal or become who I want to be: I am thanking You right now.

I am not waiting until I've made sense of my past and put things in order so that I may understand: I am thanking You right now.

How often do I think of prayer as some magical wand or worse--vending machine? Prayer is talking to God, in spite of what might come of it. In Gord Downie's words, it is looking up to the sky above and saying "Hey Man, thanks." Pretty simple, and I like it. When we cease to be grateful, we are blinded to what God is doing in our lives.

muddy waters

2006-06-24T00:32:00.000-05:00

The cloak of familiarity is heavy
my shoulders droop
with its weight and warmth.

Every turn the old haunts,
faces I know or recognize
and have forgotten (me).

At a bright cafe on the corner of the dusty intersection
of Ellice and Sherbrook
I am mopping floors again.

Not forgotten: Re-placed.
Dis-placed.
Missed. Gone.

I can't find you, Great Prairie City.
Isolated, plain, caracature of ice and fire.
I am lost among thousands of my own footprints.

I trace my nostalgia in yours.
Shoes, frames, books, sweaters, receipts.
Pawn shops a testament to our constant "too much."

I am back and I am dragging my feet.
finding my place,
Trying not to be afraid in a house too big for one.

The skin of the places I've been is peeling from my heels.
There is movement latent in my bones.
Orbit and Axis meet in a confused dance.

For now I'll just keep sending out homing devices
like Noah's dove
hoping for a handful of soil from the solid earth I've heard so much about.

close as a tattoo

2006-06-21T00:00:00.000-05:00

Now that I've succeeded in surprising a sufficient number of people in my life, I'm ready to show the world my first tattoo! After years of journal-sketches and toggling back and forth between images, I decided on a compass rose, the beautiful symbol found on old nautical maps. (Thanks to Mike at Stark Raving Tattoo in Victoria for his beautiful work!)

This new mark on my body symbolizes the two poles I often find myself struggling between: home and travel, stasis and momentum, permanency and adventure. The prophet Isaiah said "Whether you turn to the right or to the left you will hear a voice behind you saying: This is the way, walk in it." That kind of faith--found somehow in even the seemingly random wanderings--has always given me a sense of direction that is more comforting that latitudes and longitudes.

I might lose my way again. I might make new trails that branch off of the ones others think I should be on. I might fall, I might follow the wrong star. I might wander, but as Tolkien says, I will not neccessarily be lost. Something will always point me Home. Some wind will always push me, sometimes gently and sometimes not, towards my own True North.

even while pelted with hailstones. . .

2006-05-30T16:03:00.000-05:00

. . . Neko Case kept crooning. This girl is my current favourite vocalist. She has a voice that
barrelled down into the Gorge behind her, and continued to fight the hailstones that had started to pelt her 1 minute into Star Witness. Graciously passing the coat offered her to her backup singer, Neko kept singing, as if conversing with the antagonist sky. She raised a hand to the clouds, as if in a humble offering of mortality. It was only when it was truly impossible and dangerous to continue that Neko surrendered along with her fans--huddled together under tarps and umbrellas on rugged prairie above the Columbia River. Thus, hers was the most memorable performance of the weekend for me, and if she wasn't on the bill for the Winnipeg Folk Festival this July, I would be very sad to have missed her.

Besides contracting some kind of strange stomach plague, my first Sasquatch Music Festival was a success. It was my first outdoor festival of the rock genre, and a few highlights stand out besides Neko's war with the weather gods: 1) I actually enjoyed Nine Inch Nails' performance (it was like full-body massage set to lightning). 2) I realized how much geography can interact with music: there was something about Iron and Wine's feverish back-porch folk that was heightened by the desert stretching out around him. 3) Sufjan Stevens is a really nice guy (yes folks, I talked to him!!!) 4) I'm not sick of seeing the Hip live and they sorta do make me feel proud to be Canadian, even though Gord Downie is an eccentric lad, 5) live music knows no comparison and has not, cannot, will not ever get old for me.

Favourite Musical moments: Mercir's electronic version of Sufjan's Chicago, The Flaming Lips' s sing-a-long rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, Beck's "Puppetron" (marionettes made of his entire band, acting out the entire performance), discovering Laura Veirs and the Headphones, Ben Harper's energetic delivery of With my own two hands, and waking up from a mid-evening doze to Death Cab for Cutie's I will follow you into the dark.

Being surrounded for 12 hours by such great music often has a saturating effect on me. That's why I appreciate the Winnipeg Folk Festival's approach so much more, there's more to do, and you can return to your campsite (yes, Sasquatch has a "no re-entry" policy, which is awful in my books). Despite all of the amazing music, I started to feel numb sometime Sunday afternoon. You almost need a break, in order to let your ears get hungry again.

That said, I wouldn't trade this weekend's experience for the world. But I might for a settled stomach . . . for more pics, click here.

running returning

2006-05-24T11:12:00.000-05:00

I am afraid it's been so long that I wrote here, that whatever faithful audience I had has stopped reading. Oh well, that wouldn't be the end of the world, only if blogs were worlds. Parallel universes and such. A possibility, I suppose.

My trip is over. I am now an unemployed, vagabond drifter, no longer a traveller "proper," as a loaded touring bike helped testify to. Two days now in Vancouver. Two in Washington for this, a few more days in Vancouver, and then . . . home? Ah yes. Home is that little brown bungalow in Oakbank that is now up for sale. Home is a brick house in Wolseley, stained with memories. Home is a sunroom on Beverley Street. Home is the back room of the old Banff Post Office. Home is this apartment. Home is my tent pitched on a grassy knole. Home will be many more things, too.

If my soul were a compass, I feel like it would still be wavering, still trying to find true North. Like all the peaks I climbed during my summer in the Rockies, we'd round a bend, striving for the peak, and then the true peak would emerge, far off in the distance and luring us further with its increased altitude. How much of life is like this, "a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing," as Olive Schreiner says in one of my favourite novels. But yet this is not dismal, it is not empty. That our strivings end not in our own great worth, but that our worth was and is there anyway and all along, is of great consolation to me. But I'd still like to find North. And if not, South or West or East would do, too.

It's good to be back to my virtual home. There is still room for rambling . . . have no fear! And if I'm only talking to myself and my few relentless readers, that is fine by me.

and behind every tree was another goodbye

2006-04-29T02:02:00.000-05:00

Malani and I climbed Grouse Mountain this afternoon, affectionately referred to by Vancouverites as "the Grind." I did this not only for some cross-training for next week's "launch of the grand tour," but for some good fun and sense of accomplishment. Our efforts were almost thwarted before even beginning, as the trail is still officially closed to the public. Being the deviant, mischievious lassies that we are, we found our way off the well-trodden path.

As for the hike, it's a gruelling 1 hour natural staircase; a good workout but not a great natural experience. If you like beer, food, tourists and gondolas waiting at the top, this hike is for you. If you like scenery more diverse than treetreetreetreetree (don't get me wrong, I like the trees, but), then you might want to look elsewhere. For some reason today it struck me as ridiculous, this fencing and developing of natural space that belongs to all of us. Being told I couldn't climb a mountain was like being told I couldn't breathe, because someone owned that air. More and more as the day went on, as I rode in seabuses and gondolas, I pined for an unmediated nature. Solitude and silence, not the smell of gasoline and the tinkling of coins in cash registers where only hawks should be.

The rhythm of my step, step, steps lulled me into a calm acceptance that my time here is done. The view from the top brought me a sense of wholeness, as if seeing the city from on high allowed me to move beyond it. I felt like a little girl again, learning perspective and proportion by looking at a large object from a distance and "measuring" it with my fingers: Wow, Vancouver is only 2 inches wide. I could hold it in my hand. I could blow it away like a dandelion seed. I could put it in my shoe and carry it with me.

The day of departure is approaching, and excitement has elbowed nostalgia out of the way. I know she will come though, revealing herself in future whiffs and memories of these past 8 months. "I'm glad you came to Vancouver with me," she said. I'm glad it was here for me to come to.

These last days have held many beautiful moments. The scent of the cherry blossoms is like roasted honey, and I cannot leave my apartment or open the window without wanting to drink the air. Outings with friends. Long, lingering afternoons. Ignoring "what needs to be done."

I just returned from an evening with friends. People I've known for only a short time. They are like frayed ropes I want to singe together with the flame of time. I wish my bike could carry it all. But I know better. Wanderlust travels light.

a message to the future

2006-04-26T00:54:00.000-05:00

I write, and in my writing is both truth-making and lie telling.
Fiction: to fabricate. To weave, to make up. To lie, with a willing audience.
To find truth through the portals of the false.
Why do I write? Why do I publish it for all to see, in this way?
Maybe because I want to be known. Maybe because I want to be trusted. Maybe because you’ve chosen to trust me.

Choosing to trust is possibly the most important decision we will make in our entire life. It renders us smaller, more incomplete, and a hell of a lot more vulnerable. Choosing trust makes skies possible when we live in a world of beginnings and endings.

I was at a wedding on Saturday night and sat with strangers. Strangers have a way of making a night magical. Beginning in anonymity and ending in a finale of future familiar faces. They were curious about me, why I liked to blog, why I blog at all. I proceeded to convince them that it’s not blogging. It’s writing. Actual, real live writing. Just in a different form. We talked about how it is like permissible voyeurism. We talked about how people try to communicate via their blogs, and whether or not that is a good thing or just a neutral bi-product of our technological age. Somehow it seems cheap or stifled to say things this way that you wouldn’t say straight to someone’s face. As in all our most impassioned declarations of the baseness of people in general, I am probably guilty of this too. I’m just glad that I have no major vendettas right now. It’s just these musings, and my new bike blog.

We throw these words to nowhere, not to be caught by pages or clasped in boxes . . .
Where will these pixels find their beauty, how will they be remembered if not bound?

I left a message to the future
Call it futile, call it vain
Call it tryin’ to cheat the hangman
Call it ego, call it aim
Left a message to the future
Maybe they’ll find it, maybe not
Past is past, past is present
Tomorrow's when it’s all and gone (-James Keelaghan)

Maybe this is all just trying to leave messages to the future. Trying to do justice to our epic lives, to our sense of being special, being set apart.In a conversation today about the psychology of journaling, a friend suggested that this writing business is really us just wanting to write ourselves into our own story. This seems plausible to me. Surrounding ourselves with those who can tell us who we are. Building up that edifice with words generated from the chaos of our experience. And on and on and on.

a new blog for the masses

2006-04-22T02:44:00.000-05:00

It's flashy, it's the latest, it's Jen's New Bike-a-licious Blog!

Since I'm about to embark on a wee bit of a solo adventure, I thought heck, why not start a blog about it? (Beware: This public-sharing-of- the-processes-of-your-thoughts business can be addictive.)

I will be documenting my antics periodically over the course of my trip (Hopefully more than once, depending on Internet availability on the Island and yours truly's desire to look at a screen instead of the majestic Pacific waters) at A Turn of the Wheel.

So for those of you for whom there's been insufficient "action" on this here blog, check out the new one, rollin' in to a browser near you.

Simply beautiful

2006-04-21T16:02:00.000-05:00

This is a beautiful song accompanied by a beautiful video. I wanted to share it with all of you, because it seems to be a celebration of simple love; like a child's love for teeter-tottering, which makes you feel a bit more like a bird, the jumping of your insides that take you a little closer to heaven.

"If she sees me on her way, Hallelujah, then forever in love we'll stay, Hallelujah. When she meets me with her tears, Hallelujah, I will give to her all my years. I won't shush her when she whines, Hallelujah, I won't ditch when trouble finds, Hallelujah."
The background is mountainous and moonlit, which gets me even more excited for my cycle-tour to Vancouver Island.

Thanks to Ben for introducing me to this website, where there are some fantastic videos of Sigur Ros, (as close as you can get to live!) Feist, (very cute video) and others. Here's to music videos on blogs, and discovering bands like Viking Moses!

inscriptions

2006-04-18T13:03:00.000-05:00

I read two friends' posts today. One inspired me to think about how we go about this business of understanding ourselves; self-interpretation, as it were. The other got me thinking about the little closed-circuit language systems of specialists in various disciplines. Academic jargon, discourse, elitism, and all that. And then I started thinking about how these two activities are similar. . .

The first friend wrote "I wish I could get to the point of understanding myself without requiring constant interpretation. Then again, sometimes I think we all know ourselves, we just choose to confuse ourselves because we don't like the conclusions we arrive at." How true is this! Is the truth of the self really so dark and unfathomable, as we so often think? And why does this notion seem to correspond more with youth? The second friend wrote about how the language of specialists (ie: philosophy, medicine, music, anything) can exclude people from contributing to and understanding valuable things. He wrote about not wanting to get lost in language so that it would inhibit his ability to create. He wrote about how creating is part of being human, a notion reminiscent of Tolkien and the Inklings' idea of "co-creation," that our human creativity is part of creating alongside God. Maybe his feeling of the way that discourse tends to obscure is the same feeling that we have when we start trying to label ourselves with all kinds of "I am this's and I am that's." It's the fine line between language used for communicating and understanding, and language in the service of silencing and abusing.

So here we are trying to understand ourselves. Trying with . . . language. Maybe the key is in the creating. Maybe we spend our lives learning our own language, hearing ourselves spoken back to us. Maybe the "constant interpretation" is what we need to weed out the lies we've been told or come to believe; maybe the act of interpretation itself IS the ongoing creation of the self. Maybe we like to confuse ourselves because we tend to prefer darkness to light. And I'm not the first to say that.

I am honoured to know such brilliant people. People who make me think about real things. Now everyone should go read some Woolf.

"It was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge . . ." -Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

"It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer." -Virginia Woolf. The Mark on the Wall.

deliver us from bad lighting

2006-04-17T03:31:00.000-05:00

The ocean has delivered unto us another winter. A cold snap to accompany Eastertide; winds and rain thwarting the coming of spring, slowing the blood that should rush more quickly in our veins, sun-powered. Here on the coast, we wait in shivering expectation. I am sad this year that I did not usher in the Easter celebration with the preparation of Holy Week. I meant to go to church on Good Friday. I meant to go on Saturday too. I meant to fast from something. I got called in to work.

On Thursday night I got together with friends. We talked about sin. One of the funniest quotes of the night was "if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, what's the road to heaven paved with?" Someone said "beer." It was meant as a joke, but the laughter that followed was of the kind that only familiarity can breed.

Yesterday morning I was able to celebrate Easter at Christ Church Cathedral here in Vancouver, on the corner of Georgia and Burrard. I've never witnessed the ritual of smoking the altar, but it was strange and beautiful. When I finally fell asleep last night, the smell of sandalwood and cedar was still in my hair, and the voices of hundreds pushed wildly against the walls of my heart. The beauty of the higher churches, the ritual gatherings of Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox and some Anglicans, somehow seems more appropriate for the intensity of the Easter celebration. Yesterday I participated in something that liturgy uniquely gives: the sense of glory, carefully prepared for, meticulously ordered and beautifully executed.

I wrote this on Good Friday. I was going to publish it but I didn't have time. So here it is:

What is this day, this week, this Christian life without community? I find myself wanting it, craving the presence of others, craving it bodily and reaching out for it in my soul. Today is a still day, a sombre day, a day where death bleeds into possibility and destruction is overlaid with hope. It is too hard, alone, walking down the streets, drinking coffee even among friends. I come home, and without a Bible (I sent it home as I'm leaving here in 2 weeks) turn to the Internet for the Easter readings. Somehow it just isn't the same. I was going to go to church tonight but got offered an extra shift. Sigh. I start thinking in deal-makings (always the mark of slipping into piety, into thinking we're so Godly, into thinking we've evaded the need for God), "I'll go tomorrow." "I'll go Sunday morning too." The deals aren't really with God, I don't think, but more with myself.

I want to hear a good sermon. I want to hear in a choir the vastness of grace resounding and the relentlessness of life breaking through.

After last night's talk about sin, it is interesting to consider today, this very day, as the day that it was rendered powerless over our spiritual destiny or existence. We concluded that not everyone calls it "sin," and that other faith traditions and religions have their own words for the concept: Immoral, unethical, wrong, bad, tragic, disastrous. "Sin" is loaded with religious connotations, and somehow it's helpful to strip it of that and see it in other lights.

Is sin the possibility for wrongdoing? Is it guilt? Miscommunication, misguided intention, or simply the possibility that exists for us to fail? I heard once that it means "missing the mark." Well, that could be said of a whole lot of things.

How was Jesus "without sin?" Was it that he was born of some other substance, the substance of Divinity. It's not that he did nothing bad, for we know that he "grew in wisdom and stature," and growth is usually messy. He riled up religious leaders. He was a shit-disturber, and an agitator. He said things he shouldn't have, and was looked down on by many. He was sinless, but he wasn't safe. He was sinless, but he did things people called wrong.

Last night someone made a comment that made us all laugh. "I honestly thought I had never sinned until I was 10 or 11. I thought I was somehow different, that I had missed out on something, that I was special and sinless. I was a good kid!" This feeling testifies to the way we are taught about sin. That it is one-dimensional. So purely moral. What about the sin of bad lighting, as someone said jokingly. The sins of ugliness? Sin touches more areas of our existence than simply our behaviour. It is non-response. It is unwittingly participating in unjust economic systems. It is institutional and corporate as much as it is personal.

All I know is that the journey of Easter meant, or begun to mean, a whole lot more to me when sin exploded its tired vestiges. Sin is the possibility to screw up. The possbility to wound and be wounded, to misunderstand where we sought to learn, and to tear down where we sought to build. Christ was infused with holiness and perfection, and all the flickers of things gone right. He was a hybrid of God and (hu)man, and by simply existing, let alone dying, cross-bred our depravity with glory.

We may be tired of the story, or we may not get it at all. We may be confused at what actually took place in his body, emptied of life so many years ago. We may not really understand the hopelessness of the world, being so surrounded by the incessant laughter of a culture hopped up on pop music, fake tans and colgate smiles. But we recognize this weekend, held in Spring's cupped green palm, that everything will be fine.

"The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." - the prophet Isaiah

"Beauty itself is the fruit of the Creator's exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth, that intricate scramble and twine up and down the conditions of time. This, then, is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over." - Annie Dillard

Cliffs and catchers

2006-04-13T03:24:00.000-05:00

Awhile ago, while purusing greeting cards in the shops along 4th Ave, I came across one that has stuck with me. It read: "It's easy to fall in love, the hard part is finding someone to catch you." I'm not even sure who said it. It makes me think of falling in love, and its connotations of random, uncontrolled impulses. It makes me think of choice versus intuition. It makes me think of how the feeling of love relates to the actions of lov-ing.

It also makes me think of J.D. Salinger's notion of catching, in his benchmark novel of lost innocence "Catcher in the Rye." In the main character's most memorable speeech, he states that all he wants to do with his life is be the one who catches the children who fall off the unseen cliffs of innocence, unawares.

Maybe in this business of love we are like children, running and running in fields of rye, pushing through the rising stalks to be startled and delighted, to be frightened and tripped up. What if love were not the field at all, or those we met there, but at the bottom of some cliff we never saw, amidst all that enchantment. For so long I thought that love would be what I met in those fields. One who would chase me, and run along with me. One who would make me feel like I owned all that rye. One who would lift me up to see beyond the field to gently curved horizons.

When the cliff came, I realized that maybe love is in the catching.

(And I hope that was the real cliff and not a practice round.)

Sweetness follows

2006-04-10T02:02:00.000-05:00

I could have walked for hours today. There was nothing but the present. Nothing but the black iron twisting above us and the spilled coffee like milk-brown rivulets beneath our chairs.

Nothing but the sounds of other worlds where there is no time at all. Timelessness is always a character on such days. Or, the feeling of there somehow being no time within Time, if that is at all possible. I walked, with you beside me, through the molasses air, carried on wet woolen feet. What if I had been alone then?

We had talked about Escher and then around the corner and there he was. We all have stories like these. Someone mentions something and your world suddenly seems filled with that thing. What greater power parades in these these coincidences, chance or that wider one, awareness? It would have been there anyway. It would have been there, but we would not have seen.

The car was covered with cherry blossoms when we left. I showed you the For Lease buildings and the cobblestone where every step was framed. I told you that I would teach you everything you know. We laughed. There were many times my tongue slipped, as if escaping for water. I remember something about the stars being God's daisy chain, and us being robots; of words sounding like echoes and feeling like cool stones in the mouth. There were many things I saw for the first time, like doors pushed open into alleys and hiddencouryards. "That was another country," she sings.

I had a very social weekend. There were gelato in flavours I never imagined (aloe vera, rice, lavendar, guiness, balsamic, garlic, pesto, chai), talking to a very good friend, salsa dancing and new friends, and a long afternoon meander around some of the city's most (in)famous locales. A meander that led long into the evening...

I haven't been writing much lately. But somehow I ended up with words on my arm. Did I say something worth remembering? Speech is ducking beneath thoughts, faster than a blade. It's nice when sound takes over the ephemeral for a moment. When these voices triumph and for a moment fill the blackness all our grasping leaves behind.

(In)Dependent

2006-04-05T12:42:00.000-05:00

I wanted to share this painting, given to me by my friend Christyn Hall. She is a Vancouver-based artist who paints with make-up; nailpolish, mascara, eyeshadow, you name it. This piece is entitled (In)Dependent.

Because it's Lent I've been thinking a lot about materiality. All of my attempts at renunciation failed miserably, not so much for lack of intent as for lack of discipline. I've realized what dedication is required not only to acquire things (such as knowledge), but also to shed them as well. It is interesting that this time in the Christian calendar, this time of scarity and leanness, is the time where the natural world begins to swell and overflow with colour and abundance. As if the earth is mirroring the resurrection that is to come, in the Christian year. The cherry blossom-infused spring air gets into my skin. It crawls into my mouth and nostrils, filling my body, turning my blood pink.

The way God (or Spirit or Wholeness or Being or Mystery or whatever we choose to call Him/Her) chose to come to earth, via the body of a regular joe-carpenter, reveals some important things about this God. Ours is not purely a religion of spirit. Jesus was not blinked into existence. He worked wood and had cousins, he had a belly button, ate and drank, cut his feet on broken glass, and felt tears clear the dust from his face. Christ teaches us, among other moral and spiritual things, that our bodies matter. Our desires, our pain, and our ecstasy are the hands and breath and skin of God [him]self. We were made in the Image of an Invisible God. Look around you, God walks in the litter-strewn rocky paths of strangers. When we feed a stranger, we feed God. Maybe today God would've come as a dishwasher or construction worker. Perhaps, perhaps.

I think that Christians often let themselves get too weighed down with "spiritual" matters. "How's your relationship with God?" "Do you pray every day?" "How are you doing spiritually?" This is important of course, as we are so much more than just bodies. However, I tend to think that if we could learn to balance the spiritual with the material a little more, our planet and our time on this earth would be a whole lot more just. When we take the bread and the wine, we are reminded that God is substance, too. Church isn't just about blessings and prayers, it is about touching others, and about giving and receiving the physical nourishment of the substance of God. St. Paul said "In Him we live and move and have our Being." Our relationship with the Divine isn't (entirely) like our earthly relationships. It isn't simply a matter of "spending more time" with God. It is, I tend to think, as Annie Dillard writes, "all a matter of keeping our eyes open." And that can be hard enough.

One of my favourite novels, the Victorian Utopia, News from Nowhere, contains this quote:
"The spirit of our days was to delight in the life of the world; in an intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells." I want to learn to love the earth like this.

and a poem of mine:

I am etched on a thousand walls.
Memory, like cave-paintings, hieroglyphs,
flicker across oak thresholds and stuccoed ceilings.
Beauty is the soul's materialism;
innocent, honestly
silvering the edges around us.

My palm on the wall beside the bed,
Tunnels imagined, escape
or just plaster and wire
Walls like skin, cracking
from exposure to light,
breathing the constant breath
of heat and cool.

Notes from the 19th century

2006-03-31T02:58:00.000-05:00

Today I found a poet's words on the street. A poet I studied years ago, but today, whose words made more sense than ever. I give you these words from Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memorium. Just lying there, abandoned and dirty around the edges, perhaps lost in a moment of hurried frenzy. Why was I the one to notice them, to stumble upon them? I give you these words, words that have, undoubtedly, brought comfort to many others. Is this not the soul of poetry?

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope...
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds...
That which we dare invoke to bless;
Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess--
...No, like a child in doubt and fear;
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach through nature, molding men.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memorium

Word, yo

2006-03-27T03:04:00.000-05:00

Found this little game on a friend's blog. After having entered various versions of my name, this is the definition I liked best. Ha, the advantage of being human, being able to choose thine own definition. Poor words, they have to take whatever they're given...

Jennifer Anne Ward --
[adjective]:
Like in nature to a kangaroo
'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

The title of this post is dedicated to none other than Mark Barber himself.

Hyperthymestic for a day?

2006-03-25T04:56:00.000-05:00

I read on Al Daily tonight that someone has the opposite disorder as me, with my inveterate forgetfulness. A woman has been discovered who claims she can remember everything, in astonishing detail, down to the weather, day of the week, and events of random previous dates throughout history. I have often coveted this ability, or at least some scaled-down version of it. I begun to wonder what it would be like to live this way, neck-deep in the floods of past images, conversations and thoughts.

I am often frustrated at my lack of ability to recall learned data. I am sometimes left feeling like my education was a waste of time and money, yielding a vague set of proclivities and the rough sketch of character, but no actual, reliable, cold, hard facts. Why don't we come with instruction manuals? Fig. 1: How the memory card functions. For optimal performance . . . blah blah blah. Oh to hear a theory or notable historical figure referenced and not have to say "Yeah, I wrote a paper on that once." Which is to say: A previous me knew something substantial about that there thing. But if I've learned it, shouldn't it be in there somewhere? I just can't seem to get to know the little elf inside my head, the one with the the tag on his desk: RECALL DEPARTMENT. He runs around at will, dragging in things I thought I'd left stuck securely under my desk in grade four. He's a stubborn little bastard, refusing to comply when I want access to something of beauty or meaning, beckoning me from eight years ago . . .

But then I got to thinking, would I want to remember everything? My late grandfather had this compulsion for labelling. I think we still have a couple of those old labellers lying around our family cottage up in Gimil, with their thick orange-brown plastic and the companion letter puncher, leaving a white indent. He had everything labelled, from his clothing drawers, to every tool in the old shed, perfumed by the gas from the derelict mower. How was his memory, I wonder. But I do not remember anymore. I too have labelled my life, in meticulously-kept journals. (My beloved storage locker on Higgens Avenue can testify to this, bursting with words behind her plywood walls.) My years have been documented like my grandfather's things, and still, my memory suffers to find footholds. What makes us remember, what makes our memory serve us well?

Perhaps I should be more grateful for my selective memory. For the filter that keeps back the sludge of past hurts, old and stale regrets, dusty days and mangled intentions. But I think I could survive those, if only allowed past the NO TRESPASSING signs into all the good stuff, into the smell of the rolled-up slide show screen, and hot oil-popped popcorn on the stove.

I think I'd like to live one day with a case of this woman's hyperthymestic disorder. Just one day would be all I'd need. Just one adventure into a saturated past. Clear, bright memory, like columns of light piercing the thick blankets of forgeting, making them like transluscent rags. Moments dripping with joy and laughter, like honey. But then maybe I'd be too sad that those moments were not here with me now. Maybe that is why I do not remember well, because I am already far too nostalgic. Perhaps the things we think flaws are the very things that keep us alive.

Maybe I'd go crazy if I remembered everything. Maybe forgetfulness is a little fortress that's been built around my heart.

Two concerts

2006-03-24T01:18:00.000-05:00

Some pictures I took last night at the Blarney Stone pub down on Carrall Street. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Madriatic Woods at their second only show ever. I was honored to witness an up-and-coming Vancouver band show off their stuff. Let me know what y'all think of my photo editing. The red-orange glow of the room just needed to be enhanced.

At the break, a few of us were standing outside the pub, when a street musician decided to grace our presence with his guitar and vocal stylings. He played "Whole Lotta Love" for us, his long black braids swaying around his face, contorted in an expression of pure passion, eyes closed, intent on creating something for us. It was like a downtown Eastside private concert, just him and us, standing there on one of the most long-abondoned corners in North America. His voice echoed longer than than Led Zep's own front man, and his soulful rendition was more moving than an old Negro spritual, sung as the backdrop to an escape from slavery, sung in protest of an alien, white version of Christianity.

Wherever that man ends up, I hope he keeps on singing.

The Madriatic Woods Back-up Divas

Ben himself

Sometimes

2006-03-22T15:29:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I look back on previous versions of myself and pity those who knew them.

Most times while looking at current ones I wish I could see them from the outside.

Oftentimes I just wish there were a better word for sorry. One slightly more poignant, a little heavier on the tongue, a little less emptied out of meaning.

An ode to new weirdnesses

2006-03-22T01:37:00.000-05:00

Listening: I do dig a certain girl -- Devendra Banhart
Mood: Fugitive

I love music writing. Whether it be a particularly good review in Exclaim or Pitchfork, an overheard conversation, or a friend who can put someone's sound into perfect, provocative prose, I reminded how music and writing go together, like celery and peanut butter. (Ok, I won't quit my night job!)

I remember discovering the University of Manitoba's radio station, (while robotically labelling millions of tax returns, back when I worked at Revenue Canada) and being truly amazed at some of the DJs' abilities to reference, to ramble, to make their writing resonate with the same magic of the music itself. They were gods of some underground religion of coolness. They were the ones who saved me through that monotony, the ones who made the fluorescent lights and Transcona trash-talk somewhat tolerable. They later became my friends. It was through this radio station and other less-tuned-into ones that I discovered good music. To them and to others who have mentored and recommended and dragged me out to unforgettable shows, I am forever thankful.

One of the best compliments I've ever received is as follows: "Jen you are a musical lexicon." Thanks, David. For some reason it is really important to me, like good coffee and black Uniball pens, to have a consistent dose of new and live music in my audial diet.

When I come across a description of music, or a name for a new and emerging genre that fits better than a pair of old jeans, I am truly pleased. These moments are memorable, like when I read a review of Sigur Ros that used the term glacial post-rock. I still can't shed that shimmering image of what a glacier should sound like if it decided to sing the Magnificat. So when a friend with very good taste introduced me to Joanna Newsome, pictured above, I immediately resorted to the tantalizing task of celebrating her voice with words. My friend won, saying she sounded simultaneously like a very young girl and an old woman. I haven't heard enough yet to form my own witty opinions, but I came across the BBC's Collective Magazine's review, wherein I discovered Journalist David Keenan's term for a new genre: The New Weird America. And I love it. Devendra Banhart, another one of my recent discoveries, fits into this cave carved out by some of our era's most skillful songsters. The term is a call-back to the stylings of Old Weird America's darlings, such as early Bob Dylan.

Music is like literature. Does calling it American (or Canadian or British) mean anything, other than that the writer calls that particular nation home? Does it have anything to do with content, style, or in this case, sound?

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to see Spirit of the West live. Though I don't listen to them much anymore, SOTW were instrumental in my musical formation. They were one of the first bands I saw live. They were one of the first "not-specifically Christian" bands whose lyrics and melodies seemed more full of glory and grace than any packaged Christian pop group's ever did. They opened their Commodore Ballroom show with Canadian Skye, a building, soaring ode to Canada that would put Great Big Sea to shame. “Here’s where I feel it, funny how it’s, funny how it’s here…” I couldn’t help but dance. By the time they’d hit two of my favourites, “D for Democracy” and “Political,” I was transported immediately to grade 9, to sitting on tour buses with choirs and bands, to holding my little yellow walkman, to my few kisses that meant anything, to feeling undoubtedly free. I was surprised that I still knew every single word.

Sometimes going to see a show is a better investment for me than buying the album, if the choice comes to that. What do all of you connoisseurs out there think?

Tomorrow I am going to see a friend’s band play. The last time I saw him he described his music as “Dracula Folk.” We’ll see if my neck gets good and bitten this time around. I’d better bring some garlic.

So here’s to all those struggling artists, to those impassioned collectives of soul and raw ability to articulate our most profound disappointments and hopes.

Egomaniac slide show

2006-03-19T23:43:00.000-05:00

The pictures seemed to go over well last time (hooray for you faithful commentors!) so I decided to throw some more on. I've recently purchased a digital camera and can now share a bit more of my life with all of you! (It also helped that I had a resident photographer visiting.) So here's a peek at how I spend my days out on the West Coast...

"There used to be a bridge here!"

even bikes need some lovin'

gazing out over False Creek

the gardens at UBC

Catching a downtown sunset

sitting on the driftwood

Breathing in the cedars

Sippin a JJ Bean java at Granville Market

Well how did this one sneak in! Ok I promise, no more cheesy pictures. I couldn't resist, the composition on the left side was just so exquisite...

Sometimes just the presence of another person can be a vacation in itself, a time of rest, a time for renewal and a break from the regular patterns of our life. Sometimes you don't need exotic foods or a plane ticket, for another soul is enough to grab you by the wrists--as if you were a child swinging between grown-ups on a warm summer night's walk--and throw you to the sky. Monday faces me with promise and the gift of chosen solitude; with words to be written and plans to be settled. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said that Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week. Mondays would then be the first few pages, possessing the power to set you on your course for the week, to reel you in or turn you off, to push you with gusts of possibility forward into all those days not yet lived. Enjoy it folks.

I've had little time to post...

2006-03-15T16:11:00.000-05:00

because what I like to do the most,

is walk round English Bay with Mark

just before the world grows dark,

then waking to a rare clear west coast noon,

and later ski beneath the moon.

So all my time's been taken up-- and more
by candle light moments by the shore

and bike rides through the cherry trees.

So please re-join me soon to find,
more posts of a slightly different kind,
for until then you'll find me glad
to spend my days with this here lad!

Cheesy poetry by Jen

One Uplifts the Other in Learning

2006-03-03T18:23:00.000-05:00

Some of my favorite notions of friendship come from C.S. Lewis. Yeah, he's the one that wrote the recently-popularized Narnia books, which, up until Disney got ahold of them, were these secret chests of imagery I felt I was part of an elite few to know. When not writing books about children, Clive had some fascinatingly profound things to say:

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"

This morning I got up to a rather normal day off in the life of Jen, which usually consists of a numerous amount of "you shoulds..." piling up at my feet. "You should" bike the trails at UBC. "You should" go running. "You should" finish that article for the heritage gardening site. "You should" go grab an americano at your favorite Vancouver coffee shop, and visit your friends there. And so I did.

There seems to be a trend developing. I almost have Fridays off, and I almost always venture down Commercial Drive for a coffee. Last week I started up a conversation about cameras with the man sitting next to me on the Turks patio. Turns out he's a freelance writer in from Japan, and he recommended a great writing website for me to check out. (Thanks, wherever you are!) Today, while waiting in line for Kyle's perfectly pulled espresso shot, I ran into Kat, from my salsa dancing classes back in December. She's a pretty cool cat, pardon the pun, and all you locals should check out her concert review blog. (Guess who just figured out the quick way of doing active links? Oh, me me!) I love days that surprise you. Days that make you say with conviction what I said over the counter moments prior: "Yeah, me and Life are getting along pretty well these days." The hours melted into hours, leaving coffee-stained rims on the metal table; and I was reminded by her of why I write, why I moved here, why I am happily unsettled right now, and of the sweetness of instant connection.

I don't know why I am so surprised when I meet people so much like me. I mean, there's only so many ways a person can be, right? They are infinite, yet limited. By processess of socialization or molding or whatever term you may give it, our "raw matter" is shaped into the creations we become. Meeting someone who is a lot like you--liking the colour green, with similar music tastes, reading the same book(s), a "dabbler" of the many rather than honer-of-the-few. . . can startle you into the notion that somewhere along the chain of each of your development something happened to produce these twin qualities. It's like looking into a semi-fogged mirror; certain things remain clear while others are completely blocked out, unknown, underexposed.

Our little table brought Brandy, Lara, and Jen over, (a girl I had Thanksgiving dinner with in October and haven't seen since!) and I was reminded by Lara how Lent can become just like Valentine's day, Christmas, and New Years. A time where we are sort-of "forced" to love, to give, to resolve. Shouldn't we be striving for these things at all times and in all places? Shouldn't we always be looking to rid ourselves of the trappings that hold us? So, as a result of this conversation, I've decided to do a week-by-week Lenten journey. Each week I'm going to give up something different. This way I will achieve a greater breadth of renunciation, a greater range of asceticism. (Extravagant of me, I know.) Starting today, it's no alcohol. (Strategically placed during the week before Mark comes. I like drinking beer with him. . . ) It won't really be that hard, but I'm sure there will be times I'll just have to be strong. Like this weekend, for example! We'll see what no no's next week brings. I'm open to suggestions, or if you want to live your giving-ups vicariously through me. (This could get dangerous!)

Tonight's Gathering meeting is on Time. I just finished listening to Dee Carstensen's Time in preparation. For those of you not familiar with her angelic harp-laced folk melodies, here's a snippet of the chorus: Time gets me wound up like a clock inside my head/Time gets me spinning my own wheat/and when I think that there ain't one more inch/this worn-out heart can give/Time's gonna teach me how to live/ Time gets you wound up like a clock inside your head/Time gets you spinning your own wheat/and while you're losing what you've found you're finding out that's what you need/Time's gonna teach you how it feels.

So back to the theme of friendship which I somehow lost along the way, I'll finish with an observation I wrote last Friday in my new Moleskin journal (the legendary journal of Hemingway, Chatwin, and Van Gogh . . .good omens, think I):

The concept of friendship is stil unbelievable to me. The miracle of progression from acquaintance to mutual enjoyment to die-hard loyalty leaves me breathless. Looking around at pairs of companions, I wonder about the time those two chattering mothers, pushing their strollers now on a sunny afternoon, had only a cursory knowledge of the other. There is a light that breaks through, exposing our cracks, when friendship is found. We cannot plan for it. We can scarcely name it. We do not know when it will drop down on us. All we can do is raise our hands to the sky--perhaps the most honest gesture towards the Divine we can manage--and say "thank you."

(Yeah, and picture is again taken from Jordan Bent. I just really really like him. Entitled One Uplifts the Other in Learning. Acrylic on canvas. Sweet.)

The Opposite of Hallelujah

2006-03-02T17:32:00.000-05:00

Listening to: “The Opposite of Hallelujah.” Jens Lekman

I used to have a piece of calligraphy on my fridge, given to me by my friend Laura. It said "Enough is a Feast." It always made me stop and think before I opened the fridge. Well, usually anyway.

This quote came back to me yesterday, on the first day of Lent. This year was different than last, in many ways. For one, I spent Shrove Tuesday (the night before the season of Lent begins) as Mardi Gras this year. That’s French for “Fat Tuesday.” There were no St. Margaret’s pancakes for me this year. Instead, only some wobbly jello-shooters and cheesy decorations.

There’s something about nights of “forced partying” that really bug me. Of course, I often partake of New Years’ Eve festivities, birthdays, and other celebrations—they are part of our shared humanity. So I guess I’m torn on the issue. I’ve never really celebrated Mardi Gras until last year, where I flipped pancakes for about 2 hours, and then went out dancing at the Die Maschine (in Winnipeg) afterwards, reeking of grease. It was a strange experiencing both versions of the pre-Lenten festivities. The Church's and the culture's. In a basement in Wolseley there were a bunch of people chowing down on fat and carbs. Laughing and talking and joking. Later at the bar there were line-ups of people downing rums and whiskeys and ales, laughing and talking and dancing. They were both wonderful celebrations of being alive, but because we don't have to deal with scarcity, perhaps we can't possibly appreciate true abundance.

I didn’t start observing Lent until a few years ago. This was a gift later given to me by the Anglican tradition, my doorway into the widely-observed Church Year. Up until then, Easter would come upon us like a great storm, startling us like a loud clap of thunder, unintroduced. All of a sudden there would be food and lacy dresses and hats. Chocolate and hunts and bunnies and bustling grandmothers. It was all so wonderful and fresh, different than Christmas in its sunny promises, smelling of rich earth and lilies.

But what is feasting without fasting? What is celebration of life without the mourning of death? How can we know love without loneliness? Fullness without emptiness? The opposite of hallelujah is an interesting though. Thanks to Swedish musician Jens Lekman for that one.

I want to give something up this year. I really do. I have never done it successfully, and I believe it’s important to fully grasping the solemnity of the death of Christ. I mean, if we can’t take forty days out of our year to sit with the emptiness he felt in the dessert, the horrible paradox of his humanity and divinity, what does that say about us? If only to fully understand our own humanity, perhaps Lent can focus us away from the material by highlighting our very reliance on the material. We are both material and spiritual beings. We grasp at the things of this world-- carved in wood, etched in stone, housed in barrels--so that we can begin to seek out our own identities. We also cling to the non-material, relationships, memories, our ideas of self and God. And we do things like write and fling paint at canvas and run marathons and cook dinners, all in order to understand. To dream a little more of what it might mean to be human.

“We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little.” –Anne Lamott.

I’ve been struggling with what to give up. What would have the most profound effect on me? I’ve heard of everything from chocolate to alcohol fasts, to “negative self-image” fasts. The problem is, I don’t know if anything’s really THAT important to me, enough so that I’d actually notice its absence. I could go 40 days without meat, no problem. Same with chocolate. The only item of consumption I can’t imagine living without is coffee. I guess that makes it the perfect candidate for a fast. I don’t like that string of logic very much at all.

It is amazing how quickly the excuses come flying in: “But coffee helps you write.” “It’s been given to us for our pleasure by God!” “Why deny what you love.” "Oh you're not really addicted to it." And on and on and on.

And so the battle of the flesh and spirit begins…

I’d be interested to hear how everyone out there is approaching the season of Lent. For those of you who never leave comments (which is pretty much everyone, and I know who you are!) it’s really very easy. But I won’t feel like less of a person if you don’t.

89 Days of Alcatraz

2006-02-24T04:14:00.000-05:00

I am afraid to be alone sometimes, though without valid reason; I grasp for the tiny ledges of companionship that will keep me off the ground. I’d like just one more view of the night sky.

These pages slip between my fingers, fluttering in the wind, streaked with black ink. They are my second skin, bound to leather by string, fastening me tightly to the promise of words. My motivation for writing runs as clear as blood, but at least I know that words are my lifelines to the land of the living. When we can name we can create. Names become like cages for our ideas, because we are always trying to hold them for just a minute longer, begging them, please, not to grow up. Ideas, laughing like soft new babies. Unfinished and barely begun. Ideas open and bare and pink, without rows of teeth barring the world’s entry. Ideas not yet captured, ideas transparent as jars and holding silence.

“Hope is a revolutionary patience . . . so is being a writer.” I got this from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. I’m only 20 pages in and because of it, my lust for words has already grown to ever more consuming proportions. There are words everywhere, running like black tar over city streets, making my front bicycle tire slip as I ride home at 2 am. Across the city I am towed and tossed, as if a sail were attached to me, a white canvas where words would lodge themselves, thrown from the sky: Recompense. Forgiveness. Salt. Wound.

Patience: Persistent, relentless, unwavering. And I wonder when Hope grew so tall. Hope, after all, always seemed so sunny, tasting faintly of orange sherbet on cool August nights. The sentence jumped out at me because I had, somehow corresponding with my quarter-century year, learned a much different Hope. I was only looking for its name: Hope a lot more like revolutionary patience. Hope like some kind of barnacled twine tying me to an iron post stationed at the end of a pier. Hope older and smelling of the sea, Hope darker and pleasantly bitter, like chocolate.

How does that cat know where she is at this hour? What is everyone doing, sleeping through this calm, missing the city’s most brilliant moments, choosing instead to awake to her most garish extravagances of day.

What's heavier, words or the things they name? (thanks to Malani for this tangent.)

Click on the picture for the source site.

Up up and away

2006-02-20T21:05:00.000-05:00

Today is my brother’s birthday. I have noticed that birthdays have become less about gifts and celebrations, given that those closest to me are the ones furthest away. If I had rubber arms I would gather all of you to myself in one big greedy gesture. Like in that dream I have every year or so where everyone I have ever known and loved (or some combination of the two) comes together in the same place. It is a dream, I know, of heaven, of peace and of community. And a typical extrovert’s dream, perhaps.

Birthdays have become less about the advancing of years, or the achievement of a new set of arbitrary freedoms. Rather, I find that they have become more like days of honour. I wake, and the dawn rolls back to remind me of someone dear to me, past or present. I bring them closer, meditating on them, framing them with my thoughts, bending to kiss their foot like a devoted worshipper before a revered image. Too often this reverence doesn’t translate into phone calls, cards, or gifts, as it most ideally should. But it is any less generous? I am, of course, not trying to get out of gift-buying, for at its best it is one of the most tangible expressions of love. However, this shifted understanding of birthdays helps me understand something far more mystical, something I have chased all my life in varying states of confusion, frustration, and tedium: prayer.

When we honour the passing of a day of birth, we honour not a day nor a moment in history, but a person. When we hold that person in the front of our minds throughout an entire day, we are turning the self toward the other. Perhaps this simple turning is also the primary goal of prayer. When a person—their face, laugh, interests, presence—pervades our conscious life more consistently than in singular fleeting thoughts, is it as if the whole of our selfhood is consumed by them. They are there, in the spreading of honey on toast and in the selecting of oranges. They are there, in the donning of raincoats and rhythm of travel. They are there in the playing of music and the chattering of voices long into the evening.

I have learned and forgotten a lot about prayer. It has been a long time since I’ve knelt on a padded prayer rail, feeling the soft give of the leather under my knee, joining this age old communal and individual practice. I have tried to make substitutions for prayer, letting thoughts, intentions, and leanings stand in for the rigours of devotion. I have also been too hard on myself, deeming my prayer-life to be sub par when instead I just should’ve turned my attention to the new forms it had taken. There are many things that prayer is not. But perhaps there are many more things that it is, or that it can become.

I believe that the presence of God can be practiced in more ways than it can be denied. Can even the good and true actions and thoughts, on the part of those who don’t believe in God, proceed towards God? Does Christ thus re-route our misdirected thanksgivings and our most haphazard joys? Does true prayer happen even in the places we least expect it? Does it require conscious attention? Does prayer always and at all times have to be located only in the heart of believers?

And so my musings on birthdays have diverged into this new territory, where perhaps only the magic of dialogue can lead. And I see that there may be as many ways to pray as there are bones in the body; tendons to curl or to fold or to lay down before, and in holy submission to, our God.

"Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link." -Simone Weil.

Pictures: 1- Traditional prayer, 2- "Study for the garden court" by Sir Edward Burne-Jones (a poster I had in my room througout adolescence), 3-Tibetan prayer flags.

Nobody Knows How they are Loved

2006-02-16T18:43:00.000-05:00

The florist shop across the street is stuffed with Valentines day leftovers. Pink and red balloons keep each other warm, crammed together under the dimmed display lights. Pink and red maintaining the closed shop’s cheery façade despite the fading light; pink and red spilling onto the grey sidewalks of Westcott Street. Just a few days ago that shop was bustling with last-minute lovers.

February, the month of love. The shortest month, too. As I look back over a life of February 14^th’s, I notice how this day presents us with a variety of options. We can abstain from this frivolous, needless consumer dictate altogether, we can choose more creative ways of expressing our affection, or we can buy into the "50 ways to Love your Lover" offered to us at every turn. I’ve hosted “platonic potlucks,” been out on hot dates, had Chinese food with my brother, and, of course, served countless couples champagne at countless restaurants!

Every time a holiday or other noteworthy day comes and goes, I think of how it is being experiencing so differently, simultaneously. In all the moments a February 14^th holds, there are a thousand or more stories lived, a thousand or more secrets revealed. These days mark the passage of time in a communal sense. We live through them together, almost as if they are social rites of passage, moments that tie us to each other in mutual agreement. It is when we feel most like hobos on parade, solitary wanderers through this alienating world, these days unite us. They give us common interests, and at the very least, topics for conversations (and blog posts)! In certain cases, like Christmas and Easter, they connect us to the people and the traditions that have made it possible for us to learn this thing called faith.

Valentine's Day serves a variety of social functions, albeit less noble ones. There are as many reactions to February 14^th as there are people. Unfortunately for some, (like the woman we witnessed screaming across the airwaves on her cell phone), the day is a downer. For others, like the couple on the couch across from us at “Awful Al’s Cigar Lounge,” the day is a playground for public affection. And there are hundreds of Valentines Day experiences that fall somewhere in between these extremes. For those lucky enough to tumble into Valentines Day shortly after tumbling into a relationship, the day is but an insignificant blip on the screen of new love—merely one more day amongst the unfolding bliss. In this context, the lovers can do no wrong--a knowing glance slipped across the dinner table is as passionate as the perfect kiss, and a few moments in the presence of the beloved are worth boxes full of chocolate and fingers full of diamonds.

Then there is the next level: V-Day as filter. I’ve noticed that in more settled relationships, the 14th serves as a catalyst for the “fight or flight” reaction. When a couple’s first Valentines Day rolls around, say, a few months after being together, the l0ve-sensors seem especially sensitive. I’m sure many a well-intentioned man is dumped for not coming up with spectacular ways to wow their women on this particular day in mid-February. Valentines Day here is like a test one must pass in order to proceed to the next level. And this is where the card shops kick in, serving as Band Aids and cupid-godmothers for failed and failing lovers.

There are Valentines Days spent indulging chocolate addictions and lonely hearts with single friends, there are sympathy dates and blind dates. There are men sitting alone in neighbourhood bars, there are gentle bartenders pouring the healing wine. There are tears in the eyes of eight-year-olds when their bakers-clay Valentines break in their bag on the way to school, there are hopes and dreams locked behind the doors of closed florist shops, there are curses broken by a voice you wished you’d heard much sooner. There is the 28^th card and 378^th rose sitting on the kitchen table. There is the David Gray song playing on the radio: “This year’s love had better last.” There are spells cast by eyes reflecting all the good in you. And there are a hundred more besides, a hundred versions of love on the day all lovers wait for in hopes of feeling the ball in their chests pump just a little faster.

The Innocence Mission’s song “When Mac was Swimming” is a song about a family preparing a birthday party for their little boy, who is oblivious to the goings-on around him. There is a line in it that has struck me over and over again: “Nobody knows how they are loved.” Maybe there are things going on around us, above us, inside of us, that we haven’t named as love, just yet.

Credits:
Thanks to singer-songwriter Shannon Wright for the phrase “hobos on parade."

Thanks to Mark for the picture. And for other things, far too numerous to mention on this blog.

Born of dirt and laced with starlight

2006-02-06T04:24:00.000-05:00

I came across this site quite by accident. 5 minutes later and I had done the quiz too, perhaps out of my love for satire and irony. I can just see this sort of thing parodied in The Wittenburg Door or something of equal mockery value. So now here it is, folks, everything you've always wanted to know about my forays into the forbidden land: my ranking on the seven-deadly-sin-o-meter, published on-line for all to see! The modern-day confession, writ large in html! (Jen crosses her fingers, hoping that such a candid confession will cancel out some of the said pride.) Seventeen magazine ("Are YOU a good flirt? Take our quiz!!) meets fear of eternal damnation. Ridiculous. If Christians are running this site, Lord help us all.

Greed:	Very Low
Gluttony:	Very Low
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Very Low
Envy:	Medium
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	High

I'm not sure how such results were generated from questions like "What kind of car do you drive?" but apparently these things are important. (Maybe they just give "pride" out, as a default, to all the people who are just too good to accumulated high rankings in the other six. Since we're so perfect, we must be proud! Ha.)

This quiz has indirectly reminded me of one thing I despise: the scare-them-into-salvation tactic. There are people out there who think that fear is a legitimate way of introducing people to the ravishing freedom and extravagant beauty of God's kingdom. That, to me, would be like taking a child to the ocean blindfolded, or quenching his thirst with wine. The medium does not suit the message. The good is spoiled by that which he has not developed a taste (understanding) for. God seduces us with beauty and goodness and truth, and we Christians--said to be his likeness!
--come up with sin-o-meters and hell's flames plays! Like lego skyscrapers in the shadows of towering mountains, so are our plastic, tottering salvation-games. Should not God be the one who draws the soul forward?

The problem with pride though is that it goes in socked feet. It sneaks up quietly, and by a thousand new names. Even writing this is a prideful act, as I name what I believe to be "right" about my particular view, and in naming what I believe to be "wrong" about another. This is why I have such a great need for God's grace: because as soon as I begin to speak, I am already making myself into a little god. And so this silly little quiz makes me smile, because I know that the longer the bar is on that graph, the further God's arm reaches out towards me. And the further that reach extends, the smaller I shall become. And sometimes I am glad to be small. Small, said E.F. Schumacher, is beautiful.

I like the concept of humility the Bible introduces, as a counter to our obsessive, hamster-wheel attempts to run from pride. Paul says "think of yourselves with sober judgement, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you." For me this means knowing and sharing myself: my gifts as well as my weaknesses. The dance of celebration and vulnerability. Sober judgment is a balancing act indeed, impossible "under the influence," so to speak, of pride. When we try to outshine others, we all just end up brown and withered from the excessive heat. When we hide beneath the covers of our fear, the world shivers without the touch of our hand.

Humility, hummus, human. Sharing the same root word for, you got it, dirt. Humility is a call to turn our poised and pious gaze back to the stuff beneath our feet, and to those rooted there--in the matted leaves, dried up tears, and withered moth wings. Being humbled is to be reminded of the dust drifting through my veins like sediment in a restless river. It is to return momentarily to the myth of my genesis, be it by the rib, the tadpole, or the exploding star.
Your thoughts are most welcome.

(and if you're really really bored, take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz)

Forced into a silly game...

2006-02-03T01:29:00.000-05:00

Like those old email forwards we all pretended to hate when we were teenagers, but we really loved because they gave us even more reasons to be self-obsessed, Mark has forced me into this "4 meme." (see his tag here ). Rookie technocrat that I am, I have no idea what this term even means; all I know is that it is taking up room on my blog.

Four jobs I've had:
1) "If you practice ten times this week I'll give you only 2 songs to learn..." (piano teacher)
2) "Yes, we all live here, yup, it is kind of like a commune, yes, on site, no, I don't really get bored...see, there's a lot of mountains around, yeah, I'm from Manitoba, yeah, that's in the middle of Canada..." (server at Num-ti-Jah Lodge, Alberta)
3) "No, these sandals aren't particularly good for ankle-support." (MEC)
4) "WOW, compost actually makes dirt! " (community garderner/green team)

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1) Amelie (for the playfulness)
2) Before Sunset (for the dialogue)
3) Contact (for the themes)
4) Baraka (for the cinematography)

Four of my favorite foods:
1) ants on a log
2) baklava
3) calamata olives
4) the legendary Ward family googly buns

Four places I have lived:
1) Allada, Benin
2) Gimli, MB
3) Bow Lake, AB (see pic)
4) Winnipeg, MB

Four places I've been on vacation:
1) Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands
2) Montreal
3) Yellowstone National Park
4) between the pages of countless books...

Four of my favorite drinks: (there are many more)
1) "Red Red Wine, stay close to me" (preferrably of the shiraz-cab designation, but I'm warming up to Pinot)
2) Bailey's and hot water (first drank it after returning from a backpacking trip SOAKING wet)
3) "Boiled shoe tea" (aka: Lapsang Souchong)
4) Kathleen's special "porch coffee" : )

Four songs that move me:
1) Acid - Emm Gryner
2) Suitcase - Over the Rhine
3) Messages - Xavier Rudd
4) Wise Up - Aimee Mann

Four places where I've found myself:
1) Molar Pass, Alberta
2) Nutimik Lake, Manitoba
3) St. Margaret's Anglican Church, Winnipeg, MB
4) Vancouver, BC

Four things I've imagined myself doing:
1) teaching English Literature
2) co-running a rehabilitation/retreat center organic farm
3) being a yoga instructor
4) opening my own cafe

Four people I am tagging:
1) Malani
2) Matt
3) Marla
4) Adam (someone withOUT an "M" name!)

And now for something a little lighter

2006-01-31T17:41:00.000-05:00

Because my last few posts were perhaps a little overly erudite (hence one response from my Dad: "I need a translator to even understand your blog! Me--a baby boomer--has trouble grasping the concepts of you genXers!" ) . . . I decided to relieve you, the faithful readers (or "absorbers," as my good friend David put it) of my "electronic journal." I'm so incredibly sick of the word bl-g, by the way. Which is what my last post began as a response to, before it plummeted into the depths of media criticism.

Because I am also addicted to this site called the the Daily Mumps, which I discovered through Mark's Magnificent Page, I figured I've try my hand at some sarcasm. But maybe sarcasm isn't really effective if you pre-empt it like that. Oh well. Too late now. So, following in the witty style of the creator of that website, I've put together some captions for pictures I had just kickin' around. Enjoy!

After decades of bitter and rancorous sibling rivalry, Jennifer and Matthew--although it took every last inch of their self-restraint--decided to share the last piece of sushi. It was a brave, though last-ditch attempt, at familial peace.

With the recent demise of their father's entrepreneurial ventures, the kids thought they should start pulling their weight around the house. The new tv series Falcon Beach may not have been their idea of good art, but it was a fine place to carve out a lucrative acting career.

High on the treacherous Himalayan peaks, they had found the last surviving member of the long-extinct animal family. Now the only task that remained was transporting it back to camp where they could begin re-populating Earth with its former feathered creatures. It would be no small task, but they owed it to the world.

After getting over the initial loss of life on planet Earth, Jen and Mark embraced the possibilities of their new cube on Mars. Now the only trick was getting all that Ikea stuff to fit...

No really darlin', everythin's faaahne, I know exactly where the cows are...uh huh...now jes' pass me the whuskey dee-ar, come on, just hand it on over...

While the blissful, newly-engaged couple smiled for the camera, the hot air balloon attendant prepared himself for the worst.

Thhhhhhhhhhhhhat's all folks!

"Msg. in a bttl." : from Shorthand to Quicksand

2006-01-29T12:07:00.000-05:00

In all my recent thinking about technology's pathetic aesthetics (ha ha), I come across this article by Simon Dimenco. I like his call-it-like-it-is analysis of my (relatively new) discovery of "journaling in the commons;" aka: blogging. Thanks to everyone who has emailed me and let me know in person that they have enjoyed my blog: You know who you are!

Here is an excerpt from the essay:

"And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing -- writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder. It’s just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same."

This makes sense to me. Media is simply the way we house our experience. We bring life to our ideas through words, that is how language functions, by defining the realm of sharing. Words enjoy the great priviledge of holding our ideas, of storing, as if in antique iron clasped jam-jars, the colourful and rich and fermenting conconctions of the years. So then does it matter how it is shared? This is something I think about a lot. How is the content of our speech affected through the different ways we choose to convey it? Which is of greater value: the message in a bottle, yellowed with sun and seawater, or the "cu2nite" I scan on my phone while shopping for potluck goodies? The above quote seems to suggest that the two are equal; at the very least it hints at the neutrality of media. It doesn't matter then how one goes about disseminating information, whether at the public square, as did Jesus and the Apostle Paul, or via this new "virtual" commons, as does Gordon Atkinson. It seems to say that the meat of the message is not in the vehicle used to bring it to life (the medium). It seems to say that technology in the form of publishing programs and software is only the great beast we ride into victory, neither to hasten nor impede.

Then again, sometimes I agree with Marshall McLuhan, that the medium IS the message itself, not just its temporary skin. Sometimes the manner in which I receive information, or love, or friendship, or counsel, actually matters. Go figure. I could learn that over the counter sipping tea with my roommate, or I could learn it from Oprah. Maybe it doesn't matter. Then again, maybe it does. But I'm not the only one asking these questions, am I?

I don't have the answers to this dilemma, hence the continued posting. I have this love-hate relationship with technology: long-sensitized to the innovations of the past (which were at the time of their introduction, equally jarring), but resisting those of the future. It's hypocrisy. If I can accept knives and bowls and pen, then I can accept iPods and Blackberries. Moreover, advancements in electronic media have made many things possible in my life: they have allowed me to maintain friendships, cultivate new ones, and discover things that I never would have otherwise come across. There are flip-sides to these perks however, dark sides if you will: have my real friendships of yesterday faded into false pursuit? Have we built simulations of communities to somehow combat our isolation from one another? Have we grown so bored with the journey of seeking that we've become ravenous for more and more and more? What has happened to the notion of too much information?

It's easy to say "it's not the tools themselves it's how you use them." But I often wonder if that's too optimistic a position, given our depravity. How have we used guns and steel? Not for any coffeetables I've seen. But the only alternative is rather pessimistic, that we are clay in the hands of our own creations. I don't know which I prefer. Even as I write this, I can see my own naivete glaring back at me like this lifeless computer screen. I wonder how this would've come out different in my little beat-up journal . . .

This post was my Frankenstein. Ahhhhhhhhhhh, he's chasing me down!

I'm going Hunting

2006-01-25T22:51:00.000-05:00

I wonder, was Gutenberg hated by traditionalists like some neo-luddites loathe the guys at Google? The media we consume is changing, in micro movements and in great bounds. I'm not sure how these changes are changing us, but I'm confident that they are to some degree.

I turn from my computer screen to a book, and its dry and slippery pages are suddenly and inexplicably pure betweeen my fingers. This thing in my hands was once a voice across the fire, maybe a soft hand on my head as I courted sleep. The light of the screen accosts my eyes. The barrage of information is laid out before me: stripped naked, and we've barely met. I did not work for this. I did not earn this. I did not find this. Yet here it is: what does it ask of me? Why am I so numb?

In a recent Details interview, Bjork (the Islandic recording artist) declared that she found nothing so "organic" an experience than sitting in the woods compsing music on her laptop. I admired her ability to synthesize the natural and the invention. The idea of the machine as powerless but for our touch, is liberating.

Still, for some reason it is only when I read or hear information that I feel I have truly gleaned it. Cultivated and shucked like corn for a feast. Pulled like bright carrots from the dark earth. When the Internet is my guide, I feel as though I have only absorbed such knowledge. Passivity, caught, as if in a deluge, chased by an encroaching tide, hunted. Am I one of the last children of books? Am I pushing against the gales of electronic media, or being refreshed by the foretastes of freedom it carries?

"If travel is searching / and home what's been found / I'm not stopping / I'm going hunting / I'm the hunter / I'll bring back the goods / but i don't know when." -Bjork-

I remember a time

2006-01-20T15:19:00.000-05:00

Why my mouth so dry
when outside the world so drenched with falling dew,
the sky has stolen something?
Lifted it off my tongue--
Giving back to the grieving earth.

From where does this sunlight in my body come
when that ball of fire beyond my reach,
warms the another distant part of the world?
Pouring through me, mis-matched to time--
Undercurrent of my bones.

I remember a time when I looked out of these eyes, when they were windows to the world, draped with lace and flowers and so unaware of themselves. Lately it seems they’ve become like little doors, tunnels to inner catacombs. Doors with heavy brass bolts and cryptic symbols etched into dense aged oak. Clandestine and alluring. Lately it seems as if I’ve been looking at my eyes, rather than through them—like I’ve gained a second set that stare and stare and stare right back: the meta-gaze. The gaze at a gaze. Socrates said “the unexamined life in not worth living:” an adage that juts out from the hats I wear like a peacock feather. A justification of what I call self analysis and others in my life have called over analysis. Maybe we could just call it knowing.

I remember a time when days and years and people just spilled out before me, like some kind of undeserved boon. A time when I didn’t both with the word “this year will…” when the calendar turned, too busy banging pots and pans with my brothers in the front yard. A glorious, purposeless activity that way just noise for noises’ sake: L’art pour l’art; art for art’s sake, that benchmark intellectual movement of the 19th Century.

I remember a time when questions were my soil, growing wild and ravenous blooms of scepticism. They’re still there I think, those deep forests, those dry deserts, only growing smaller and harder to reach. How do I get there--is it the yellow ring or the green? Yes, those questions are quieter now.

I remember a time when I didn’t think about age. Is it possible that as we accumulate years and experience, freckles and scars, that we actually move closer to truth? Is it possible that death will reunify us with our Creator and we will find ourselves created once again? Life would then be less like a line or an arrow, and more like a course; moving us closer to the moment of true birth. The more I think about it, the more I realize that death is a farce. Much more a beginning than an end. If we could only see beyond this (achingly beautiful) cardboard world.

Do I remember a time when there was no Time at all?

(Please see Scott Mutter's "Church Aisle" photo montage in a larger format.)

Arching towards Bethlehem

2006-01-16T19:08:00.000-05:00

Mood: Dreamy
Listening to: Say Yes! to Michigan--Sufjan Stevens

For those of you who aren't familiar with WB Yeats, my title is a referance to his famous poem, The Second Coming." What is it about the closing lines that stick with me: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Only a handful of poets can manage such epic resonance, echoing like a gong for decades or centuries after pen hits paper. Yeats shows us a God who is so large, such a massive collection of beauty, truth and goodness that the moment of incarnation is like the rolling-up of a carpet, the collapsing of an easel, the huncing-down of a great giant. This is no distant and insatiable deity, this is one who, at the moment of Christ, spreads his arms wide and draws them in, curves his back like a cat, and collapses into an impossible smallness. A changeable God--poured into the feeding trough of farm animals--like some cosmic game of hide-and-seek.

So why "Arching?" Being a Sagittarius on the Astrological charts, I thought it a fitting Yeatsian play. Not that I'm about to be incarnated or anything, but I fancy the image of aiming towards re-creation, purposefully and skillfully. Life is not one birth but many. And because I orient myself around that little cradle, tucked away in some negligible corner of the world, births have become a guiding trope for me.

Almost everyone knows where they fall under the stars, whether they place a lot of significance in it or only a few skeptical grains. Every morning at the coffee shop we read our hororscopes to each other. I've always positionned myself at the edge of these types of things, not sure where exactly to stand, not sure precisely what to think. The zodiac, after all, usually made its way into the "be careful of" lists of my youth--along with ouiji boards and fortune-tellers. It was always a tamer one though; perhaps its roots in Greek mythology lent it some kind of credibility. I've always liked my sign: adventurous, creative, philosophical, ardent, jovial, frivolous. I have nothing against looking upward to seek understanding. I have nothing against looking for patterns to existence. I also have nothing against those far-off firey orbs having something more to say to us than "gosh aren't they pretty," or providing a backdrop for first kisses and pacts of friendship. The randomness that sometimes topples my sense of well-being is countered by the idea that above me there might be a wild order and symmetry. That on the day of my birth there might have been a Centaur shooting his arrow across the canopy above me; shooting his small arrows towards perpetual re-birth.

We could probably find something true about ourselves in every astrological sign. When you're looking hard enough for yourself, you're more apt to find pieces everywhere. The other day one of our regulars, waiting patiently as I timed his espresso shot out to a perfect 25 seconds, asked me when my birthday was. From the numbers I gave him, he formulated a quick map of my life: my strengths and weaknesses, how others see me, what types of work I would be well-suited to. I may have raised my eyebrows briefly, sending him off into his day well-caffeinated and conversationally stimulated, but I didn't pay much heed to his theories. What is the merit in these things? How much stock should we put in them? I do believe some people are gifted in seeing beyond the scratched surface of reality, and I did find something strangely comforting in his words. Is it merely that our exchange went beyond that of normal acquaintances, that there was a rickety bridge built across the vast canyon that separates two human personalities?

Life is chasing the little clues written on yellowing papers, scattered throughout the world: tucked in mountain crevasses, floating on oceans, twirling in desert winds. Clues to find and cherish, to read and share, to question and to doubt. I'm not one to live blindly by any book; I'm one to live with eyes wide open.

Gadget legs and empty stomachs

2006-01-06T15:15:00.000-05:00

Listening to: Where Cedar Nouns and Adverbs Walk--the Most Serene Republic
Mood: Excitedly Undefined

Books smile at me from various corners of my apartment. I just finished one--Moon Palace by Paul Auster and was consistently pleased. It was one of those books that you keep looking at, even when you've finished it. One of those packages of pages and words that will sit beside you on the couch and lure you back to it. One of those literary treasures that you flip through with nostalgia after reading, hoping that the words might lift off the page and pull you towards them once again.

“I was buoyant in my solitude.” Just like that, such a simple line, and such a host of associations. A tiny ship on an expanse of water: pure freedom and fearful unfetteredness, together in an single image. I too have felt this buoyancy. Stepping on planes, reaching a decision, starting something new. Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favorite poets, says that it is a tremendous violence to begin anything. I would have thought it a birth, but even in birth there is blood, there is agony, there are cries. Beginings are great, loud cries in the smooth quiet of daily life. Wherever we are in life, in age, circumstance, or locale, beginnings present themselves, begging us for the courage to fight them. What shall we become if we cease to create?

The seagulls are ecstatic outside my window. If only it was for the sea, and not for dismal dumpster treasures. Now crows have joined them, perched on the telephone wires, black chess pieces to their white. Will they all fight together, or pick sides, sharing a piece of break amongst their own kind? I can't see their battleground; from my position on the couch I can only see the sky.

I think I live with one foot in every place I love. But God knows I only have two. Go-go gadget legs...

If God is telling me anything at all these days I'd think it would be to write. There are times when the character of our thought can tell us more than existence itself. Those recurring images, dreams, coincidences, and descriptive digressions. The world pours itself through my pen, performs the daily ritual of turning itself to ink, performing the alchemy of adverbs. But every writer knows that inspiration always comes when there's no magical pen in sight. When you're cutting a grapefruit on the counter and your mind is multiplying thoughts, attaching and attaching like all those little pockets of sticky, sour joice that make up the yellow globe in your hand. "Just focus on the grapefruit," I say, as if reciting a chant. The tasks of a day are just tunnels into another realm, where words and ideas swing back and forth on translucent tree trunks. I like the fruits I have to work for. Pomegranates. Mangoes. Grapefruits. Never with the "Here I am!" of apples, or the conveniency of grapes. Inside their flesh a thousand little mysteries.

I have been attending this bi-weekly event called Gathering with a friend. Aside from the fear of organized transparency that could plague any less-public newcomer, these evenings have been life-giving for me. The theme of our discussion last time I attended was "mindful consumption," a topic that revolved around food, but spanned into other areas of life as well. One woman spoke about a group excercise she'd participated in once, regarding an orange. They were to explain its textures and attributes for over an hour, slowly engaging all the senses around this single object of nourishment. The image was beautiful; she said it forever changed the way she eats oranges. For the past two days my roomate and I set out on a bit of a cleanse, attempting a whole week of eating only cabbage soup and various other vegetal bounties. Our organized effort towards not only a healthy new year, but a crash course in self-discipline. I wanted to remind myself to eat slowly and deliberately, to watch my body and mind respond to a different energy intake. At the end of the second day,in a state of tottering haziness, we decided it was no longer healthy. (Sometimes I can be so all or nothing.) Those two days of light-headed, internal purity taught me the difference between hunger and desire, among other things. Namely, that Gandhi I am not. When your transportation is located in the strength of your legs, fruits and vegetables don't really go the distance. Moderation may be a higher virtue than extremism. Mission: aborted.

Getting our bearings

2006-01-04T18:30:00.000-05:00

Last night I was reminded of one of the truest reasons for friendship: the importance of staying connected to the people who know us so well that they can spot even the most minute changes in our being. True friends are not merely ours to adore, and to adore us in return; they are those people in our lives who are granted the rare and joyful priviledge of calling us back to ourselves, over and over and over again.

From snow to salty sea

2006-01-03T01:58:00.000-05:00

A New Year. It always seems arbitrary to me, that nothing will change from the 31st to the 1st. Numbers on these expanses of time we call "days." Still I can't shake the feeling of promise that hit me as I toasted my glass of champagne.

After work today I biked the seawall, a 2-and-a-half-hour excursion around Vancouver's salt-soaked edges. Everytime I do this, I wonder why I don't do it more than I do. We all have these thoughts: why don't I spend more time alone? why don't I see that friend more often? why don't I read more poetry outloud? why don't I do those things I know bring me life but too often forget? I guess there's only so much time.

Christmas in Winnipeg was a full of friends and family, a smoky little cabin in the woods, late nights on snowy streets, the Nutcracker, and Wolseley watering holes. Perhaps the gem in it all was an unexpected connection with someone from my distant past. It is good to be back here though, surrounded by space and possibility. I forgot how beautiful this city is, and while I am tired of some things about it, I am not yet tired of exploring it.

Tonight as the sun set over English Bay it left a pink wake across the cloudy sky. The water was mercury-coloured, shimmering to sleep. On one of the beaches a man was sitting on a piece of driftwood with his bike next to him. Both were merely black outlines, detail hidden in the fading twilight, leaving only the shape of companionship in solitude; man and machine, wheels and a pulsing heart, a picture of perfect competence and subtle strength.

Reminders of faithfulness

2005-12-16T15:18:00.000-05:00

Hello to my few and faithful blog readers. I came across this piece on my friend Ben's blog, delighted to find that I had wormed my way into my friend from Idaho's internet maunderings. Read his post entitled "Artistic Liberties," a piece about an adventure taken in the fall of 2000, when we were younger, more adventurous, and for the first time, very far away from home.

Everyone needs a happy-list

2005-12-13T19:26:00.000-05:00

What does it mean to be on my way "home?" I think my upcoming visit to Winnipeg will tell me a lot about this feeling. Or is it a truth? Indeed homefulness has inspired many an adage, truism, proverb: It's where the heart is. You take it with you. It's where you decide to be. I have learned many of these things for myself, that there is a home in every place, every thing, every idea, and every person I've ever loved. If I live a life of movement through the vistas surrounding me, whether by choice or circumstance, I will have to leave home many more times. I will have to close more doors, I will have to accomodate homelessness, I will have to part with more mugs, picture frames and potted plants. I would rather this perpetual loss than utter isolation, insulation, the locked door of the heart.

Last weekend I was putting eggs florentine in front of my favorite regulars, a gregarious couple, also Vancouver transplants. Robert remarked to me: When you come back to Vancouver for the first time it will then begin to feel like home." I wonder if home is about returning--that sense of the familiar that you begin to hone--about imbedding yourself into a place.

I just finished attending a class on biblical "re-readings" with a Regent College professor, Dave Diewert. The other day, after finishing up my 5am shift at JJ Bean, I grabbed my book and found a cozy corner of the cafe. Dave came in shortly after, and close by, sipping his coffee. It's so easy to ignore people you recognize, laziness the best excuse for not introducing yourself, choosing private comfort over connection. I was glad that I said hello. We sat and chatted for awhile, and many of his own words could've come out of my mouth: "Sometimes when you move from something instead of into something you find yourself asking 'what am I doing here?' " I have asked myself that many times. But then again, the way I understand my surroundings changes every day. So reason isn't really a reliable guide. But then again, neither are feelings. So instead, I am left with placing my trust in the mysterious marriage of the two.

I remarked at how in a city as transient as this one, connection is elusive. The ties that bind us are much more tenuous. How does community happen among exiles and runaways? The modern city: a yawning mouth catching so many errant flies. (see artwork--Jordan Bent--Vancouver artist discovered at November's red-letter Eastside Culture Crawl). When I was twenty years old someone spoke words to me that still reverberate: "The tensions of home and away will be with you your entire life." Yes, the Christian life has its prophecies, divinings, palm-readings of a sort.

The other day at work I was talking with a friend about dreams, and the untapped knowledge latent in them. I was marveling at how much of our life we spend asleep, and I said "we're only really alive for like 45 years! That's scary!" But you're not dead when you're sleeping, she replied. So we're only conscious for half our life. I think of how quick God's people were, in the ancient times, to see a divine hand in their dreams. I think about how science, psycology, pop self-help theories, have co-opted God's canvases for their own mediums. Have arenas where God once played, spoke, danced with us, been stolen for other means?

The sense of freedom I feel right now is tantamount to the options at hand. I heard something in a sermon once, something about how the amount of options available is inverseley proportional to human choice. Translation: the more possibilities, the less actual freedom. It sounds backwards, but the truth is that your choice will end up being more random. If I stand in a bike shop looking out over a potential 1000, my choice will be random. If I stand in front of 4, my decision will be both more informed, and more intimate.

Speaking of bikes, I've finally acquired a "new" one. It's an old Nishiki hybrid. It feels so good to be hybrid myself, again. Adding a genius of a machine to the strength of my body, two efficient wheels to these sticks of legs. To feel the curves and contours of the land underneath me as I circle the sparkling city at 2 am. I feel invincible on a bike. As my bitterness at property crime wanes, I can finally hope that whoever is riding my former two bikes is as happy as I am. And that I am smarter for it.

Everyone needs a happy-list. One to keep around for those days when the soul gets dreary, when a cup of tea isn't enought and friends seem far away. One to remind you of what life is about. I started one once, but I've forgotten where it went. Last Sunday I was perfectly content and begun another in my head: Farmer's markets in December/soup on the stove made from what you already have in the cupboard/an indulgent bath after a run/the smell of lavender/Yo Yo Ma on the stereo/a visit home just around the corner/a new Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie to watch from Marla/dark chocolate in the drawer/three new messages on the phone/a clean bathroom and freshly-done laundry/the smell of beeswax/lapsang souchong tea steaming beside me/moving impossibly slowly.

Current musical obsessions: Over the Rhine and the Innocence Mission. Current favorite lyric: "I'm a mirror, you're a mirror too." (by The Super Furry Animals)

Good thing these blog entried aren't essays, because I definitely do not stick to a thesis! Rather, this is a place to try ideas. Please leave comments on anything I've said, I really value them!

On Advent and Vancouver's first snow

2005-11-29T05:38:00.000-05:00

This shot was taken in August, during a backpacking trip in the Skoki Valley with Adam. I've posted it here to commemorate snowy days long past for me now, here in temperate Vancouver. It is strange how the last time I saw real snow was in August. Really though, snow is a gift. (This goes out to all you Winnipeggers, slipping and sliding on the stuff, cursing your way over icy sidewalks or into frozen keyholes.) Snow is the cheeriest member of the precipitation family. Rain--the melancholic teenager, sleet--the attention starved sibling. Snow is slow and unassuming. I love those fat and healthy flakes, floating towards my tongue under the glow of street lights suddenly made magical. One of snow's best voices is in its delightful squeak, underneath your sled, your tire, your heel. I will miss the presence of snow this winter, even though Winnipeg will grant me a few days' jaunt in my winter play clothes. Still, a mere flirtation with winter will be a pronounced change from a former long-term relationship. Today it snowed in Vancouver. Coincidentally, I also sipped my first eggnog latte, at Starbucks (cringe), where I probably paid as much for one steaming mug of nostalgia as a whole carton would've cost me. (While fighting off a sinking sensation of guilt at my pre "Nog's Eve" indulgence!) In my analysis, this pathetic version of Snow does not really deserve its namesake, for it didn't even care to stick around long enough to even be heralded as such. Nope, off it went, melting into the (still green) grass, the pavement, our jackets, anywhere that would conceal its true identity. Cowardly stuff. Snow can't handle this city, and this city can't handle snow. Nevertheless, it provided a nice dose of Christmasy coziness for me, now that November's embers are cooling into winter's bleakness. First Advent is passed and we are summoned to a time of Waiting, Expectancy, Hope. I have been recently invited to think of the bodily posture of expectancy, and to translate it to my spirit, as I wait for the Kingdom of Heaven to be founded upon this earth. What does that actually mean? I look at the people around me at the bus stops I've been frequenting since my beloved bike (#2) was snatched from my embrace last week. Eyebrows raised, body leaned forward, gaze looking out and over the distant horizon. What would it mean to live through the Advent season in this manner, with this kind of expectancy, as we beckon "Come, Lord Jesus, Come."

Taking a day to remember

2005-11-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

So, it's Remembrance Day. I think that is probably the most beautiful-sounding holiday out there, just rolling off the tongue. That this day has been designated for remembering is something I am grateful for, but this year I notice that it too is becoming stained by commerce and the drive to consume. Even our most solemn holidays are being shaped by the impulse to keep moving. To keep busy. To get things done. What am I supposed to do, stay home and make soup? Knit? Think about war or some other depressing event?

I am a case in point. I went out for brunch this morning with friends, as if it were any other long weekend. Mind you, I did expect the city to be shut down, so out I went, tesing it: If I will go, will they open for me? Of course. Take my money. This is business.

Yesterday at work a few of us talked about how we'd spent various recent November Elevenths. To my chagrin, I couldn't remember. When I was young we'd have assemblies and afternoons off. We'd spend the week previous writing awkward poems in hopes of being picked to read aloud in the echoing gymnasium--smelling of rubber and basketballs and play. Every year the same man would come in and play the same haunting song on the trumpet. The one with that part that makes every elementary child's heart leap up for the first time in some sort of empty patriotic impulse. The song that was perhaps for us then the first strains of a pride larger than egoism. A glory bigger than the self. The halls leading us towards the gym would of course be decorated with little squares of red tissue paper that had been meticulously ruffled around the index finger and glued to a Flander's Field of felt. The year I remember most clearly is the one where I sang John Lennon's "Imagine" with my friend Maria; we were the soundtrack to a visually accosting slide show of images from the second world war. Our backs were turned. Everybody else had to watch and all we had to do was sing. I think even in the cold sweat of stage fright, we had the easier time.

Past those ritual assemblies of youth I don't remember most of my Rememberance Days. For most of us now they mean a day off, or at least time and a half. I don't doubt that this morning many ate their eggs benedict and sipped their americanos with a heightened sense of respect and a bright poppy on their lapel. I just marvel at how we so casually go about our normal outings, demanding that retail cater to our material hunger. As we waited for a table one of my brunch partners mused at what we weren't remembering--civil wars in his dual homelands Columbia and Egypt, all the wars ending and beginning, the war in the East. Later I stopped and looked around at the turtlenecks, the shoes, the espresso beans glimmering behind the bar. I thought of all the blood that had been shed for these things we indulged in so unthinkinglyon this Friday in November. I gave it only a moment, and then turned back to my breakfast. A sense of social justice is so seldomly translated into action.

On the bus on the way home a large man came and stood right in front of me. Maybe my "Peace" pin had set him off, or maybe he had some kind of prophetic message for us, his captive cargo. "I am the first-born son of a liberal-voting...went to a pentecostal church after I left Catholicism...I am grateful for the united states' effort to save the world...after 6 years of living in assonance..." all these unfinished, mumbled sentences. When the bus stopped he barrelled through the crowd, raising his voice, "OK folks we're going to get to that door, let's MOVE, I'm needing to get to that door now..." and then he was gone. The young man standing across from me smiled and said "that guy is on something." As I looked down at my poppy, and the guilty-looking pin on my bag, I wondered what war had been raged around him, with him, in him.

It's Rememberance Day and there's much to forget, much to remember, and much to take notice of in the people and things around us every day. This day is an ode to memory and to indifference. To battles unneccessary and un-fought. To pain we don't understand and to wounds we do not see.

In Dachau Concentration Camp, an iron gate remains. The German words for "Work Makes One Free" are set into its clasp. The picture at the top of this post is the International Monument that stands at the entrance to the site's Museum. I wonder what it is that truly makes us free, ignorance or memory.

"Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music; who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph! Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile, and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away." Amos 6:4-7.

As voices having aged grow stale

2005-11-08T14:13:00.000-05:00

Our lives tend to turn and turn about like the arms of a great mill in a steady wind. When a decision comes, it is like a squall or an abrupt calm interrupting life's mechanism, changing its intensity and altering its movement. The time for action, whether to take sides or choose a particular course, comprises some of the most intense moments of our existence. Our emotions and our rational powers come together to joust--to test the other's weakness, and to weild their best weaponry. Our desires balance upon the narrow beam of others' expectations, and our best reasoning is toppled by our wildest dreams. Voices that were once clear become parched with time's gravel. The fresh fruit of revelation grows pocked and brown, the sweet scent of promise fades to a stale unknowing. When decisions loom, the everyday is transformed. We are catapulted to loftier heights where every thought and word is heavy with significance. On this altar of deliberation, where we are fated to the sacrifice of one of our loves, we are prone to a unique sort of spiritual lonliness.

In the pull of the options and opposites that make up choices, I am prone to feeling strangely alone. Not the kind of alone, however, that is the result of abandonment or neglect, but rather like a pillar of plaster as the mold is peeled away. Decisions render me exposed, stark and solitary. In the seasons of choice this pillar reminds me of my stature--secured to the ground beneath me that is trust, faith, and knowing. All around me there is the no-thing space that gobbles up our failure, like a ravenous dark chasm. But when I look down, when I wiggle my toes, there is that very-thing which enables me to exist at all, and it seems silly to ask this ground of being for anything more. And that is why these images bring a particular kind of alienation. And that is why I feel so full of glory--even tottering as I do in the open air, vulnerable and breakable--because I have been given this body and this life.

But it is not entirely this way. Our existential lonliness is countered by the sages, seers, friends and lovers who journey with us. Some join hands with us momentarily, others for a lifetime. Counsel of all sorts takes shape in soft voices, sharp-edged epiphanies, and the rare neutral settling of inner peace effected by a word. When I stumble into a season of decision, I stretch myself out, like tentacles grasping for wisdom and insight. I become fragmented into little pieces, scuttling about for some wayward shard of sense. I comb through the debris and the treasure of other people's knowledge. I grow weary, and want to be whole again. I begin to stumble and to lose my sight, and I want to be strong and secure again. As the chorus of voices recedes to a hum, only one voice remains--my own.

When it comes to making decisions, being a cynic by nature and dreamer at heart make for a frustrating hybridity. I lean one way one day and the other the next, one reason to stay is countered by one thousand to leave, and back and forth they play. In the heavens where my God resides and which are all around me there is a great mind and a great heart that knows what I will choose. It would be much easier to be let in on this future, but it is not my own to know. It is much more difficult to travel in this cloud of unknowing that is faith, to stumble half-blind and only half-enlightened by what we have come to know so far. I may shake my fist at this power, or beg it humbly to speak, but perhaps to let it be still and work instead inside of me--my desires, my dreams, and my reasoning--is the only real choice I face, and the wisest choice of all.

And if a prayer is just a musing directed towards something bigger than we are, then we ask for these things: For self-discipline, refreshment, and in emptiness the fullness of the kingdom. For the courage to live openly, and to embark creatively rather than nailing down who we are, and what our lives are, into a small, suffocating box of a strategy. To see life less as a business plan and more as a succession of moments. A moment followed by a moment followed by a moment. And then a memoir. And then at the end of time, like a long and weary day, a wonder-filled telling of all the stories that we've lived by. Amen.

Stealing away on a sunny day (and a short piece about Winnipeg)

2005-10-02T04:42:00.000-05:00

My mom sent me these bright memories of summer, and aside from the amount of flesh I'm baring, they pleased me--dousing me with joy and a shot of nostalgia. The first is me and my brothers in Gimli, Manitoba. The second is my parents--the cutest picture of them I've seen yet. (They must be high. . . ha ha)

I am looking out at the mountains, backed by an orange sky, listening to CBC radio through my computer, and sending out words to land on familiar laps. I am sitting on a simple red futon in an apartment furnished just enough to take the edge off the echo of voices. A simple paper lamp from Japan. Some used jars full of spices. A table, a chair, and a burlap coffee bag from Nicaragua haning on the wall. I found this quote today, which came out of the 19th c. 'arts and crafts' movement, and it is fitting:

"To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To listen to stars and birds and babes and sages with an open heart. To study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions. Never hurry. In a word, to let the spiritual, the unbidden and the unconscious rise up through the common. This is my symphony."
-- William Henry Channing, 1898

I am fresh off my month of 65 hour work weeks. I do not yet know the full range of effects this has had on me, but I feel well in body and in spirit. I've still managed to find time to seek God, to socialize, to write and move and nourish myself. The anticipation of comparative freedom that the coming week will drop, like a brown paper package on my front stoop, is almost too much to bear. I am not afraid of boredom in the least, however, as there will always be books to read, words to write, people to love and places to merge with.

I attended a concert on Tuesday at the Orpheum theatre in downtown Vancouver that lifted me off this planet. The theatre reminded me of the Vienna operahouse; grandiose in design and plush in atmosphere. I saw Sigur Ros, an Icelandic group who play very dreamy, almost magical, score-like atmospheric rock. I described it to a friend as the music the stars and northern lights would make if they could dance together on a glacier. He said that coming from anyone else he'd be skeptical of such a description! Watching and listening to them, I felt waves of childhood mixed with a grand sense of the order of the universe. It is a rare thing when God's finger reaches down past the skin of our world to show it's maker through the music we think we are creating.

This week contained the urge for home, for various reasons. Why do we feel so limited even when girded with the strength of words? Nothing replaces touch, presence, eyes noses and mouths.

And so, in an act of trying to stretch my heart over two provinces, I wrote this little piece about place. Enjoy. (Oh yes, I've changed my settings so everyone can now comment on my postings, not just "members.")

The View from Not-Here

Newspaper clippings unraveled in envelopes have a firmness that internet links can only cheaply imitate. The other day I received one from my mother, a recent “View from Here” section of the Winnipeg Free Press. I unfolded the square, pleasantly heavy with ink, and read by the light of the evening sun, miles from home, in a city much further west. I read the author’s cheerful praise of my home city ravenously—as if her words were being spoken across a small table at Stella’s café on Osborne St. I read stealthily—as if it were some perfect but unappreciated piece of graffiti art scrawled across a forgotten square of exchange-district brick.

The motivation for my mother’s enclosure was threefold: she missed me and wanted me to miss the city I had so recently left. It also spoke of her knowledge of my interest in issues of urban identity; the beautiful, awkward musings of Winnipeggers on why their city is “one great” one, is indeed one of my favourite things. And lastly, I’ve always loved the place. On the back of love there often rides the accompanying inability for love's true expression; why do so many people either want to leave Winnipeg, or find some form of pleasure in poking fun at it? I've always been one of a (perhaps growing) few to trumpet the city’s hidden jewels, as the author of the aforementioned article highlighted in better detail than I could be bothered with. It still angers me when national publications, seeking to provide a written thematic “tour” of Canadian cities, simply skip out on Winnipeg altogether. As was pointed out however, perhaps we should be happy that this is the case.

And just as the greatest things always lend themselves to endings, last month the proverbial “gateway to the West” that is my hometown swung open and newness ran to meet me. It was nothing essentially “Vancouver,” and most definitely not the “un-Winnipeg” that drew me here. In fact as patchwork fields receded in my wake and Manitoba grew thumbnail on the horizon, the Pacific, rolled out on the carpet of the Rockies, seemed to loom like a great and insatiable god.

As soon as I was off the ground the definitions came: Oh the paradox that is Winnipeg; the central outsider, the landlocked wanderer. Like an adolescent trying on life, so we its inhabitants have donned our many, sometimes conflicting understandings of our (urban) selves. One day we are humbly picnicking in Assiniboine Park, the next we are sporting yellow billboards, flaunting our best traits. One day we are complaining about mosquito infestations, the next we are compulsively writing articles about ourselves. We are hybrids: dreamers fed by infinite prairie horizons, realists wrought by the harshest of winds. In the light of Vancouver—a city so more sure of herself—Winnipeg’s fog of self-reflection becomes clear. Surrounded by natural splendour, Vancouver is like a child of wealth lacking in self-awareness, for whom beauty has outgrown its wearer. As Shakespeare wrote, “some are born great, some are made great, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Winnipeg lies somewhere between the first two, bearing the fledgling greatness of blue jeans and back alleys. And I will be the second voice in this newspaper begging it not to grow out of them too quickly.

The recent article, which sought to stir up in us a quiet pride of place, reinforced the conviction I've always had about the city I left on the wheat-washed prairie. It is characterized by a plea to be noticed. I would add now that those happiest in Winnipeg are the ones who direct that desire inwards, to be noticed within itself, and by its own people. The author warned against betraying our secret, asking us to guard River City’s vulnerable turrets of charm from encroaching publicity. Perhaps the modesty running in our muddy waters makes us not want to sully them with brazen recognition. Perhaps we're allright with being the middle child of a nation, never trumping Toronto’s velocity, nor crown Calgary’s raucousness, but always coming out the champion of self celebration. At times we entertain the wish to rise above marginalization by other major Canadian cities. This is the impule that makes us love things like the Pan-Am Games and the Junos. However this is also what makes us dissatisfied, makes us want to give up--and when we do, to say goodbye. I wonder if contentment would mount upon realizing that we matter most where it counts—right here at home. But I suppose then we would be lacking in the disquietude that produces such great poets and lyricists. And worse, we'd have nothing to write about save burger joints on bridges.

If this piece had intent beyond mere musing, it would be that Winnipeg shouldn’t be so sure that obscurity is its national namesake. My experience has led me to quite the opposite conviction: On an unnamed peak in the Rockies I met a European couple who, upon learning where I was from looked at each other incredulously: “You’re from Winnipeg?! That’s an almost mythical place for us.” They were, for some reason, strangely drawn to it. Within days of my arrival in Vancouver I received a suspicious “I thought so” on the news that I had recently arrived from Winnipeg. Why? “Because you’re still friendly.” This seemed a tad extreme, and I scoffed at the ensuing prediction that I would lose my amicability after a good dose of metropolitanism. Days later, another remarked that my disposition clearly revealed a "prairie soul." Coming from the lips of strangers these observations didn’t carry much weight. They did, however, leave me feeling slightly smug. Sure, some have arrogantly applauded my advancement up the proverbial social ladder of Canadian postal codes. Mostly however, faces brighten to welcome me—if anything endeared by my hometown’s hold on me, and intrigued as to why I wasn’t itching to leave.

Above all, Vancouver and its residents have left me with the deepened conviction that geography matters. If place truly matters—our surroundings, our neighbourhoods, where we live, work and play—so does that which makes up the collective casing that is our city. On this thanksgiving weekend, I want to say thanks Winnipeg, for making me who I am, or for somehow extending what I brought to you as I walked on your concrete, and in your dust and snow and slush and sunshine.

Post Title Courtesy of: Over the Rhine.

Collapsed in the act of just being here

2005-09-20T11:31:00.000-05:00

"Wanderlust." by my new friend, Aleks Rdest

It's been a dreadfully long time since I posted last. I think this blog has become a sort of cross-section into my thinking, which has lately been like a swinging door. . . (a phrase I steal from Sarah Harmer). Work has consumed most of my time, but I've managed to fit life into the holes and craters it leaves in its glacial retreat.

I read in George Orwell's Why I Write, of a simple adoration of the world: "So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to love good prose, the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information."

~Here, a scrapbook of recent moments, favourite and found~

I am in a park by my house, at 37th and Prince Edward. One of the city's many parks, dogs running free, flurries of white, black, brown. Above me a metal sculpture bearing these words:
"This city now doth like a garment wear
the beatuy of the morning;
silent, bare.
Ships, towers, domes, theatres
and temples lie open
Unto the fields,
and to the sky."

The harshness of steel and chain-link grasping those jewels so humbly. There are many hidden treasures here, artistic flourishes, as if Vancouver were a great canvas.

An old man pushes his walker towards me, and slows down, as if to indicate his plea for company.

"I do this every day if I can," he said.

Those words will remain with me, I will carry them through my day. He was speaking of his daily amble, his morning mustering of strength. I am speaking them now as a collective mantra. A reminder to be grateful for even our footsteps. Life, something we do every day, if we can. And when we can't, there's a host of help at our bidding.

~

I am on my bike, riding towards Stanley Park. It is the two-week anniversary of my acquaintance with this ocean-skirted city and I have not yet dipped a toe in its hem. I come off the Burrard St. bridge, dart under a loud overpass, and am met with a vast blueness. The sun shoots off the rippling waves, the brightness staving off the hunger of my eyes. I cannot look until they adjust.

I've picked the perfect music for this occasion--Air's Talkie Walkie album. The ocean is mine, the tourists disappear and the afternoon sun leaves my skin tasting like the ocean.

~

A few days later I have the chance to see the city from the sky. A friend visiting from Toronto joins me for a climb up Mt. Seymour. I feel for once as if there's been a reversal. Place envelopes us, but up in the sky, it becomes ours to hover over.

~

Malani and I were recently priviledged enough to have an honourary 3rd wheel for a week. Aleks is an artist in Toronto, and her beautiful ethereal paintings can be viewed at www.aleksrdest.com. Aleks introduced us to the Vancouver art scene as we tagged along with her to SWARM, an open-house festival of sorts, of small artist-run centres. The evenings we spent roaming back-door galleries and drinking free wine reminded me of the truly healing effects of art. Standing before it, endeavouring to speak of it, to defend taste and beauty, to simply appreciate what most would never take the time to create. One local artist in particular, Leah Bridges, mesmerized me with her monochromatic series of dream-like scapes. The way she celebrated solidity and airyness at the same time reminded me of how we often try to shape or understand the present with the smudgy shapes of the past.

~

St. John's Shaughnessy Anglican Church, Sunday, Sept. 18th. I have gone from worshipping with a family to being on the outskirts once again. I now look into the ring of fellowship from a place of uncertainty, rather than dance around the fire at its centre. I wonder how we've come to the point where "church (s)hopping" is so commonplace, so acceptable, so encouraged, even. We are hestitant decide, to commit, or, heaven forbid, to stay too long and not be challenged anymore. I realize there are times to move on, and I have done it many times myself. I can't help but wonder though, at the effect of being exposed to so many faith options. Something in it seems flat, empty, random.

The congregation is at worship, a lively mix of two traditions I have known intimately. Hymns are sung in a celebratory timbre, choruses welcomed with upraised arms. I am a solitary individual within this community. I am a marble rolling slowly into the game. I am a wisp sunk a little lower than the canopy of puffy clouds.

It is ok to be on the fringe. Centers here are always shifting, centers evaporate where I am a minority every day. Where all are newcomers. I hear the Gospel read in English, Cantonese, and Japanese. The sound of the words tickles my eardrum. They are seagulls on a sandbar, flying away when I run into their gathering.

~

I am thrilled by the feeling of not knowing what's next. Of not knowing who I'll meet, or what I'll see. There is a woman I work with who is preparing for what "the scientists' say" is a massive earthquake due to hit Vancouver. Shall I stock away some extra chickpeas, or as Eliot says, dare I eat a peach? or should I just keep living. Later that night I am listening to a singer-songwriter I love from my home city. He sings "did you know the west coast is gonna fall, into, the ocean someday." The irony of coincidence. A great cosmic joke. Like the tenacious fall flowers, still blooming here, I turn my face to laugh at the sky.

"He is a sane man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head." - G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

Post title courtesy of the band, Stars.

Fall Minstrel Piece

2005-09-20T09:40:00.000-05:00

For those of you who don't have access to the witty and scholarly St. Margaret's publication known as The Minstrel, (now under the expert editorial proficiency of Mr. Andrew Siebert), here is an online version of my contribution to the fall issue. (They put me in the "sermons in stones" section. Maybe this one should be "lessons in leaves. . ." but then that wouldn't be as Shakespearean.)

A Measure of Parting

If J. Alfred Prufrock has measured out his life in coffee spoons, then I have in goodbyes. Eliot's words may refer to a number of things, but today they bring me a picture of a great sea. This sea could be one of virtue, of charity or of faith. It could be a sea of emotion, or of things much greater than we are. Whatever it is we picture, the sea is that thing's full reality, and the small spoonfuls we dip over and over into its fathoms are only tastes. My goodbyes as of late are like this sea, too voluminous to bear, and I am no Atlantis.

Goodbye defies the axiom practice makes perfect. One cannot practice loss. The warmth of intimacy betweensouls allows no room for even the slightest zephyr ofapathy. The sweetness of love and friendship contain a bitter goodbye deep within their pit. Thus, the very spark of acquaintance binds us to the pain of its counterpart. In Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis says "the happiness then is part of the pain now."

Fall brings change, and for me this year, many"badbyes," as a good friend wrote in a parting card. Another said "we can't believe you're gone." In our search for balance, we often meet truth when faced with its absence. Goodbyes tip the invisible scale of heaven, shattering our tidy togetherness, whisperingof some other way. The ticket meter at the airport swallows another and another. Goodbyes teach me to hold the things of this world loosely, while, paradoxically, never letting me forget the tragedy of renunciation. They strip me down again and again, plunging me into an unexpected asceticism. In a small, dark gallery in downtown Vancouver I read W.R.Rodgers' words etched on a painting: "There are no homecomings, of course, no goodbyes / In that land /neither yearning nor scorning / Though at night there is the smell of the morning." Goodbyes tether us to the questions we are hurled about our whole life: "What is it I've hoped for?" "What has caught me in this hurricane dance of longing?"

My life, albeit short, reveals the recurring motif of a uniquely autumnal sort of loss. Fall bears the train of melancholy more than any other season, but so elegantly she does so. Leaves fall like words unsaid, memories of warmth, crumpled tickets to sunshine's past charade. Goodbye, from the simple God be with ye (godbwye): How very many blessings we bestow upon those kissed by our most commonplace farewells. The fields will burn, like the seven embers of September, and on the breeze we will catch the faintest whiff of glory.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel;
to set budding more
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells...

Ode to Autumn-John Keats

From Such Great Heights

2005-09-17T22:43:00.000-05:00

On August 21st, I had the opportunity to climb one of my favorite mountains in the Lake Louise area, Mt. Temple, at a soaring 11,626 feet. I finally was able to import some pictures from our climb, and here is the bonus commentary. (Offered at no extra charge, to you, my faithful viewers):
1) the group, looking happy and healthy before we set out on our trek (^)

2) the quintessential summit group-shot, 6 hours later and huddled for body heat!

3) yours truly, in one of her upright moments. Having arrived only the day prior from the flatlands, I was struck by a mild case of altitude sickness, resulting in stumbles, light-headedness, and nausea. All this for a mountain. . . it must be love.

4) even amidst freezing temperatures, we still had time for a quick hug!

5) Adam caught me in the last few hundred meters of sheer pain

6) and the best part of scrambing. . . the scree-surfing down! What a day, what a mountain.

title courtesty of the Postal Service

When near is just as far away as far

2005-09-07T15:44:00.000-05:00

I am following a theme in my post titles. Would anyone hazard a guess? A juicy reward awaits you. Today's thoughts will follow the path of a lost wanderer, but "Not all who wander are lost." -(J.R.R. Tolkien.)

It is a Wednesday afternoon. My nerves remind me that snacking on the chocolate-covered espresso beans we keep behind the barista counter is not such a smart prelude to a post-work dose. I have noticed, however, that some of my most creative moments come with the help of caffeine. I think we all just need to accept that "No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness." (~Sheik Abd-al-Kadir) That's risky on in this age of relativity. I can see it now...coffee, the only remaining permanent and universal truth.

There is reggae playing outside the office window. The city just buzzes on days of uncharacteristic sunshine, celebrating it in every imaginable way. This city is a people-watchers' paradise. The other day I saw a car with about 50 plastic toys and bric-a-brac crazy glued to it's trunk lid. There is a homeless man in my area who has his shopping cart done up like a Harley. He stops in for a coffee every morning, contented with the routine.

I ride my bike down Commercial Drive's gradual slope each morning at 4:30 am. The city is crisp and still, the mercury is at its lowest. Everyone is tucked neatly into bed, while I fly through flashing yellow lights and past stores with their upside-down bar stools. That is, everyone except the handful of folks near Broadway Station, lying in their makeshift beds in the entranceways of Subway, Starbucks, MoneyMart. I can't help but notice the irony here.

Since I last posted, I've acquired another job. Since I'd already given my (then full-time) availability to JJ Bean, I had to add this new one onto an already fully scheduled plate. Thus, over the past few days I've felt like nature's wonder--the hardworking little ant. I'm only me, I don't have a nice mansion of a hill, and I can't carry something 100x my weight, but other than that the analogy works. I've decided to sacrifice some of the other things I value in my life just for the month of September, to build up a cushion for myself. Plus, I don't want to lose my job at either place. I'm enjoying them both so much.

My second job came only a few days after JJ. It's a restaurant called the Ouisi Bistro (pron. WEE ZEE) over on South Granville. The neighbourhood is more akin to Academy, for all you Winnipeggers, while JJ is on a street much like Corydon. It's a half an hour bike ride one way, so I am getting my excercise and seeing the details of the city along the way. (There are bike routes everywhere. I can take the "midtown ridgeway" route all the way to the restaurant--pedaling along merrily, pressing the button at major road crossings for all the traffic to stop for me. It's quite luxurious, save the sweat and the 3 am jaunts home. As I ride home I smell lusious curries and other ethnic foods wafting out of kitchen windows, mingled with the fresh smell of pine. The air here is so clean.) I was initially hired to be a brunch server, but after my first training shift my schedule suddenly read all nights! I asked Tim why, and he said "because you're good." I was pleased, as I like the atmosphere there better in the evenings. The staff is wonderful. I was hired just in time for our summer staff party--a boat "cruise" up the coast to a little inlet where we'll wine and dine for an evening. It's next Monday, I can't wait to explore outside of the city. The servers are all older than I am. Malani and I have observed that serving seems to be more of a recognized profession/career here than in Manitoba. We've deduced that perhaps it is because people treasure their days to go hiking, climbing, and skiing, and also the lifestyle here is more leisure-oriented.

I worked last night and we had live jazz-- a bass and piano pair. We're running a fundraiser for the New Orleans relief, as Ouisi is inspired by the cajun and creole cuisine of that region. We've had a good response to it, and even had a media piece done on us last week. (Jen's 15 seconds of fame, carrying plates of sauteed gator in the background!)

____________

On another note, Malani and I are cosying up in our little place at 1986th 38th Avenue East. I think when I last wrote we had just recently moved in. We celebrated our "one week anniversary" there this past Sunday night by going out (oh my goodness, Malani and Jen are leaving the comforts of home, is Vancouver ready for them!?) to RIME , a local music joint on "the Drive." We have an artist from Toronto, Aleks, staying with us for a week, so our slightly augmented party justified our frivolity. Since I spent the last month in Winnipeg constantly out socializing, I've been laying low while here, besides working. However, I think my schedule will begin to fill soon enough as I meet up with an childhood friend this Friday, and start to make friends at work. It seems that people are more receptive to new friendships here. Perhaps in a place that only a few clench with home's grip, we are increasingly open to others so gripping us.
Anyway, we heard the most beautiful instrument, but its name escapes me. It was a Chinese string instrument that sounded like a fusion between a fiddle and a sitar. It looked like it was made out of broom handles and tin cans. Genius. Matt--you would've revelled.

In the past few days I've adopted the role of breadwinner while Malani has stayed home to prepare dinner for us. This has become a source of much laughter for us!

Our apartment is slowly losing its empty, echoing ring. I've spent many hours roaming thrift and antique stores, garage sales and dumpsters for useful treasures. Malani dragged a coffee table home one afternoon, and I scored a desk, 2 shelves, kitchen table, small speakers, bulletin board, and chair all for forty dollars! The woman even delivered it to our home in her truck! I was so grateful, and dropped off a pound of Palomino Dark Roast Organic beans to her door the following day. We've been able to benefit from other people's rejects very well, and I am quite happy to be slowing the consumer cycle by doing so. Other than our one Superstore run, escapade, where we proceeded to entertain the entire bus with our "let's carry 200$ of groceries and household goods home in our travel packs!" escapade, we've managed to do all our shopping locally. Let me tell you, I knew the Asian's could do fish and rice, but my can they bake as well! I had a torro-root/pineapple dumpling for lunch today. Krispie-kream watch out!

Our next-door neighbours are a beautiful Sri Lankan family with two adorable children. The father supplements his income by working at a bagel shop. The day we moved in he delivered four fresh bagels to our door! Having not yet done our first grocery shop, we were in need of such sustenance. A few days later, the mother brought us fresh popcorn, complete with a wide smile and understanding words. Our neighbourhood does have some rough edges, but there is a warmth to its community-feel, and people seem to watch out for each other. Our landlords are attentive and pleasant, though Malani is much better at communicating with them! I have trouble understanding their accents. Thank goodness for my resident Asia-trotter who is proving to be most conversationally savvy!

The streets are filled with fruit and vegetable stands. The electric buses keep the air so clean, as they are powered by overhead wires you can hear wisk and zap when the city sleeps. I ate a full Japanese meal the other night, sushi and tempura and terriaki vegetables and soup and tea, for 5.95. I'm sure I walked out of there with a hanging jaw. I've been giving my bike a lot of love, adding new parts, borrowing neighbour's (and church's!) garden hoses to clean it, and keeping the chain running like silk. I am so thankful for the gift of self-propelled transportation!

I attended church for the first time since St. Margaret's on Sunday night. I was tired from a long shift, but felt as if a long thread was attached to me, pulling me ever so gently toward St. John's Shaughnessy Anglican. Or, perhaps it was toward something Else. I was a little late, but so happy that I made the effort to go. As I sat, once again, in a hard wooden pew, knelt to pray with the other congregants, and merged my voice in the final hymn, I felt moisture cover my eyes and that familiar pinch in the nose that is the precursor of liquid emotion. I sang, good ol' Praise and Worship (this is a very evangelical Anglican church), and listened to a singer-songwriter from Australia. I spoke to the youth minister afterwards, and the church is "in desperate need" of female leaders for the senior high youth group. His wife will be contacting me to have coffee in the next week. He also gave me an overview of the church's culture, and what life at St. John's is all about.

One thing he said has stuck with me. After I told him that I had just begun to look for a church, he said "Would you let me be so bold as to suggest to you to look no further?" I didn't take this as a religious marketing pitch, but rather as a caring gesture. I responded positively to him, saying that from my experience "church shop/hopping" can often lead to alienation, confusion, and bitterness. Making the decision to serve and care for a community, much like we do for the people in our lives, yields sweet fruit down the road. After the service I rode past the parish hall where everyone had gathered for tea, and looked inside at the mingling crowds. I had choosen not to join them this time but knew that I would return.

In between furniture shopping, putting miles on my tires, and just generally getting my life together, I've been writing quite a bit. I have been accepted for an internship with a local bi-weekly culture magazine (called Terminal City), and have been invited to contribute to some other publications as well. My writing is a god that must be appeased, whom I have been neglecting for too long now. The rumble is becoming a roar, and in this land of open air cafes and ample park benches, my pen need not sleep.

I am going to sign off now and bike down to Stanley Park. I have not yet been there, and have a free evening to go and cruise along the seawall. I will think of all of you as I watch the ocean swell in the palms of the rolling, friendly mountains (they are gentler here than in the Rockies). I am delighted that so many of you are reading my blog (thanks to Matt for just recently adding a counter to the site! I've recently hired him as my tech support. Matt, you can bill my office. Hee hee), and sending me so many loving emails as well. It is a priviledge to stay connected to my roots, even in times where they dangle a little more timorously. I am very joyful here, well-loved, well-fed, inspired, and challenged. I am understanding more and more how distance is bridged when I begin to embrace the place that has found me in it. There is so much that seems far from us in the world, so much we call "other," so much that we perceive as distant. In contrast to the title of this post, (borrowed, as so many words are, from a text of circumvented yearning), I have found that the far and the strange quickly becomes the near and familiar as it is lived in, loved and respected.

May your cups overflow-- whether cracked or in glorious splendour, whether fashioned from humble clay or choice crystal, whether lovingly used or gathering dust.

j

title courtesy of the Weakerthans

...in midnights, in cups of coffee

2005-08-29T15:19:00.000-05:00

That's how you measure, measure a year.

It's been five days in this new city and I've managed to secure a steady income for the time being. With 26 resumes dropped, slightly sore feet and a sunkissed nose, I sat down to wait. The next day I received a phone call from...the first place I applied! The store named after me (JJ Bean--Vancouver's own micro-roaster) decided that they indeed needed me as their poster-girl. I sighed modestly, tossing my hair over my shoulder in the light breeze. "I think I could fit you into my busy schedule." They complied. Drama aside, the "interview" yesterday went smashingly well. I stopped by the cafe to chat over an americano with Kyle, the manager, and 45 minutes later--not having covered anything "work-related" really--started my first "muffin shift" at 5 am this morning. Phew. Out of the fire and into the muffin pan.

I've now added Granville Street to my avenues of exploration. That one was alone, on Friday, and took about 5 hours as well. I bought a bed, in great condition, from a thrift store right downtown. Delivery, frame, and decent mattress for 130.00. Take that, IKEA. And the guys running the place were good for my days' entertainment. Downtown Vancouver can't seem to decide what it would like its identity to be. Or else it's just content being the eclectic, bustling yet laid-back, modern ugly-bluish-tinted condos meets turn-of-the-century "Gastown" architecture, tidy business suits brushing boho-beauties, cafe doors swinging open into outdoor stores and upscale restaurants, the fresh air of Stanley Part tickling my shoulders. I stopped at the Granville island market, which is the Forks x 50. The Vancouver Wooden Boat Festival was in full swing, and I stopped to listen to a small kitchen band play Eastern Canadian folk songs (and wished Anna was sitting there with me. ) I took a little water bus across for my 5 minutes of touristy fame.

Moving via public transit is an experience I recommend to all for the building of character, and shoulder muscles. With my water bottle and iPod in tow (Help! I have acquired a cell phone, an ipod AND a blog in less that 3 weeks. I'm barely a week here and already modern life has engulfed me!), I proceeded to move my stuff from our temporary condo on 41st to our new digs at east 38th and Victoria. Don't let the proximity of the street numbers fool you--it was not a quick jaunt. And being the frugal female that I am, I had to race against the clock so my transfer would remain active for the duration of my move. I was done in roughly 3 hours--almost but not quite!

Our new place is clean and seems safe, though it is lacking in shower curtains and its kitchen colours seems to boast of bygone days. (ie: the early 80s) It seems we are smack dab in "asia-ville," not Chinatown proper, but a more southeast asian stew of mom-and-pops, family-run grocery stores, hairsalons, and yummy bargain restaurants.

As I rode the bus today wondering how our culture produced the neccessity for getting up while it's still dark (no, haven't done this in awhile, guess that makes me bourgeoise by comparison), excitement washed over my sleepy consciousness. Part of it was admittedly the free coffee I would soon put my grateful lips to, but more of it was the sense of newness the early morning mirrored in its crisp not-yet-sunlight. I feel alive.

I just finished reading "the Alchemist" by Paulo Coehlo. It's gained a bit of a cult following, but aside from its at times cliche newageiness, offers some valuable wisdom. One of the things I came away with was a reminder to live for the present, which he ties in with the Biblical mantra, "where your heart is, there also will your treasure be." The book gave this little lesson new life for me. The promise of something inspires us to pursue it, and there is definitely something to be said for relentlessly chasing after things of we value. But perhaps it is better to love first. Perhaps treasure follows the impulse of the heart. For right now I am content to live less for the hope of a sparkling future, or in a state of pining for the sweetness of the past. The blessings of the present moment are rare and fleeting things, like tiny minnows in a great sea. They are asking of me only one small thing. My whole heart.

title courtesy of the Broadway production, Rent

A turn of the wheel

2005-08-27T14:52:00.000-05:00

There is saxophone music wafting in the open window out on 41st. (I don't think one can appreciate the beauty, if not poetic, of numbered streets until one lives in a city of them.) Kerrisdale Days are on in my new, but temporary up-scale neighbourhood. It is my third day here, and so far, everyone was wrong about Vancouver being rainy. The sun has shone every day since my arrival, except for, of course, on the eve of my arrival on Wednesday...when the stars took over its reign. I've been gone a week.

I've named this post for the first song I listened to in the Calgary airport, back on Saturday. James Keelaghan's voice gave me just enough of a taste of home without nostalgia too painful to bear beneath brimming tears. "The steady state of matter is said to be the norm/But wait for a turn of the wheel," he sings. "The things we never challenge are the things that never change."

I have spent a lot of time in airports over the past week. Thrill and anxiety mingle in those terminals of transitions, those mysteriously non-places. You can be anything. You can be nothing. All are without context. People in motion, stability a memory or future destination. I have waited for moving objects so much this past week. Objects to cart me like cargo, the ghost in their machine.

I cannot recreate what I saw passing into the Canadian Rocies. They unleashed some grandeur or some rectitude in my soul and I was unabashed, even in this small van of seven strangers. The towering cliffs echo my gains and losses, the peaks shout out remnants of glory I've managed to hang onto. Their valleys resound each parting of the past few weeks.

Later, on our backpacking trip, Adam would remark how the mountains were not really sublime for him. They were far from foreboding, rather warm, welcoming, a protective barrier. Once you climb one and are granted the view out over the strange, mottled mountain horizon, it is no longer possible to be intimidating.

I had a glorious time at Num-ti-jah, the lodge where I worked last summer. Despite a persistent illness, a nausea carried over from the day of my departure perhaps, I was able to climb Mt. Temple (Altitude: 3,543m [11,621 ft]), see the picture above (one of me is forthcoming!). I also backpacked into Skoki Valley for one night with Adam, until we got caught in a bonafide blizzard. (I experienced all four season in less than a week, I am sure.) No matter though, we hiked back and dried off back at Num-ti-jah playing scrabble by the fire. It was also a higlight to see Meghan, the Ward cousin who has proved herself to be the reincarnated Yaheweha ("mountain woman") of our family.

I arrived in Vancouver sore and tired on Wednesday night. Thursday was recovery day, with some promenading on 41st. Malani and I are condo-sitting for friends of hers, and they have a beautiful home equipped with good music, good wine, and a wonderfully soft cat. I quickly learned that Vancouver is synonymous with Starbucks (you can wave at friends from one to another), sushi (we ate it for lunch for 2.50 each--and it was good!), and health. I am continuously delighted to see elderly people out and about, on the bus, shopping in the markets and enjoying their neighbourhood. We barbequed salmon, and made a mango salsa with fresh herbs and a salad. There are fantastic bakeries here as well. We've been reconnecting, and reading out on the open-air patio that stretches around their corner suite.

I am feeling 100% healthy again.

Yesterday, my second day here, we walked for 5 hours straight applying for jobs. I left with 15 resumes in tow, and returned with 3. Once you get going, it becomes kind of like a game, and your confidence builds. We bused by our future apartment, and then down to Commercial Drive, which is voted by one of my favorite magazines (Utne) as one of NA's hippest neighbourhoods. Upon seeing a coffee shop named JJ Bean, I had to apply. My dad's childhood nickname for me was an omen, I guess. I would gage a prospective job site by its vibe, and apply at the ones whose energy I liked. I applied for a catering company run by a Winnipeg chef, at various restaurants and cafes pulsing with music, conversation, and art. We walked all the way down Commercial, Venables, back down Main, and home via 41st.

I cannot put my finger on the culture of this place. Metropolitain, mediterranean, Canadian, and very asian. It feels like a different country, but simultaneosly as familiar as an old pair of Birks. I could see a live act every night. Sigur Ros, Juana Molina, the Arcade Fire, Death Cab, the Killers and the Proclaimers are all playing in the next week alone! Rodin's sculptures are at the Gallery, and there are community events galore.

I've also applied for an internship with a local magazine called Terminal City, and for door-to-door sales with greenearthorganics.

Good Vancouver Karma Episode 1: After eating a delicious portobello sandwich and leaving my resume at a tiny adorably kitsch "chew and chat" eatery on Main, Malani and I wandered down past the strip's plethora of antique shops, furniture stores, and clothing boutiques. I stopped outside a pawn shop to envy some of the Brodie bikes (and grieve my latest loss), as well as eye some of the guitars. I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a deal going on. A young man was trying to sell his bike to the shop proprietor. "I can only give you 60$, it's the end of the season and it's just not likely it will sell." The young man apparently just wanted to get it off his hands. I meandered over and asked if I could look at it. There was a semi-awkward pause, which I filled with statements of growing interest as I examined the componentry. The seller now seemed more interested in me as a prospective buyer than the pawn shop owner. The owner asked us to leave if we wanted to conduct business in his shop! (5 minutes later we were futher "encouraged" to move down the street!) As it turned out, the young man was about to travel to Thailand and wanted to get rid of his mountian bike that day. We met up later than night to complete the transaction, and now a Giant Yukon-model beauty, the same colour and year as my beloved Brodie is mine...all for only 70 bucks! And just when I was about to sigh with contentment at how generous and well-meaning Vancouverites were, John smiled and said "I'm from Manitoba, too!" I returned to a phone call from JJ Bean wanting to pursue my qualification. (listen to me, I've been writing too many cover letters!) What a day.

I am about to embark on another job hunt down Granville Street this afternoon. I can't wait to keep exploring the city and all its wonderful quirks and unfolding vistas. Friendly mountains tumbling all over the place, a diversity of cultures, and delightful clusters of blackberries hanging over all the sidewalks. Where else can you get a pint of strawberries for 2 dollars, a mango for 50c and 18 pieces of sushi for 5.95?

I think of Winnipeg fondly but do not miss it yet. I do, however, notice the absence of all the fine folks I know there. From my heart to yours,
jen