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.

ode to a finished book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

[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

-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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.