Riddle of blue

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.

how to say goodbye

"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.

we'll drop these bags and search no more

[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]

gratitude

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

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.

From snow to salty sea

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.

Everyone needs a happy-list

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!

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

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.