Obsidian Blooms

Images from the Colony

2012-02-10T19:39:00.000-08:00

Our time winds down.

No adequate way to describe being here.

Spaceous, Peaceful,
A generous face of Life on Earth

Above is the barn, from the road that leads down to the tiny village of Austerlitz in the direction I'm coming from. It's two miles back, gently rising all the while.

Millay called this place Steepletop.

The Berkshire Hills surround us.

She lived here from the late twenties until her death in 1950.

The barn was bought from a Sears catalogue

This is the barn from above, from the new 'main' building, built about 15 years ago.

The latter's common area is pictured below.

Edna had about 700 acres here. It stretches in three directions from these five buildings.

On the fourth side is State Land, which also borders the colony on other sides.

One of Ponczka's favorite things is the swimming pool and garden,

standing a few yards from Edna's house and from the road

in the middle of forest.

It's been an amazing expanse of open days.

We've both luxuriated in hours of time with our work,

no demands from the world crowding in,

paced by the sun slowly gliding across the sky.

It's been much warmer these last days. Ponczka's spent a few blocks of time, painting landscapes.

Millay had a small writing cabin built,

above the pool and on the way to a tennis court which lies on a high rise.

Below is Marzena's beginning at capturing a view from the tennis court

We're leaving here soon.

Taking a lot with us

Millay, or Vincent as she was called

acquired success and fame early.

She spent her last decades here, and was buried deep in the woods

near where her Mother Cora already lay

joined there later by sister Norma, who founded this Colony

Spaces were created here

And Space endures

Edna's House

The Writing

2012-02-07T12:56:00.000-08:00

I woke two or three mornings ago feeling something between despair and resignation. My novel project had been like a chimera during my first days here, bulging and shifting with its various shapes and dimensions. I’d arrived here with a concept I wanted to play with – that I’d had in the back of my mind for years, but had never figured how to do anything with. A few pages from my recent writing with Judith, and another few from years ago, seemed to offer me a way in. I played with all the different associations that arose from juxtaposing my concept with these fragments, and came up with several possibilities.

My downfall has always been plot – not good for someone who wants to be a story-teller. I get lots of creative bursts around themes – meanings, paradoxes, tensions and cross-purposes to explore. But when it comes to translating them into specific characters and situations, caught in predicaments and having to make choices, I’m often at a loss. It’s not so much that I can’t construct likely scenarios; it’s that I have trouble creating scenarios I believe in. My own plotting often feels artificial and forced to me. I can “see the wires” too clearly. The few fiction pieces I’ve actually completed and derive satisfaction from, represent times when a character embodied a concept or point of view I wanted to write about, and actions flowed naturally from that character. But sometimes I feel powerless trying to find or create a character who lives and breathes my abstract theme.

The question/theme that has gripped me has to do with “genuine versus false”. More specifically, I’m intrigued by the fact that, if presented with two identical objects, we will value them very differently if one is “real” and the other “fake”. Why? To me, this is a fascinating question that has much more to do with the assessor (we human beings) than with the object itself, be it a coin, a painting, a head of hair, a breast, a politician’s record, a degree, etc. There are obvious answers to this puzzle, but also not very obvious ones, and many, many aspects that I’m not even close to fathoming. Which I think presents a perfect scenario for writing.

The approach to writing that I love and value most is: writing to discover, to explore, to answer questions and discover new ones. So I’m very definitely in that camp of writers who start a project with no clear idea of where it’s going to end up. And that’s how I showed up at Millay a little over a week ago. And for days, there was no clarity, no handle. I kept finding openings, the beginnings of paths that vanished a few steps in, or splintered into a complex of side routes, or took me to the edge of a cliff. And...my resistance. Despite what I’m claiming about an ‘open’ approach, some pathways that present themselves aren’t attractive, or they’re scary, like that cliff’s edge. Or, after an initial section that seems to promise wonders and surprise ahead, they turn right back into an ordinary city street , populated with nothing but fast-food restaurants and dollar stores.

That’s what brought me to my recent morning, balanced between despair and resignation. The notion of a semi-solid possibility that I’d gone to bed with the night before, had proven in the morning light to be flimsy and full of gaps. I had all these pieces of something, but nothing to do with them. A protagonist had presented himself days before, but I’d had only false starts in trying to place him or understand his motivation. I thought I might have to abandon the entire thing, or risk wasting the entire two weeks. I feared that my lack of a “plotting bone” was going to prove fatal to my aspiration. I felt uninspired, almost empty.

And something shifted. Something coalesced between my theme and my character, and suddenly it was very clear what was happening to him and why it cracked his world open and sent him on his arc. And then, so many of the pieces I’d constructed earlier in the week began to fall in place. Not all of them. But the trial and error of facing the blank sheet of paper scrolled into the Beast several times a day had paid off. A couple of hours after waking with such an emptiness, I was full again. And the writing’s been coming pretty steadily since then. It’s still shifting, but now it’s doing so within a charged and flowing arc.

What’s mattered?

Allowing the emptiness, the confusion, that uncomfortable space with no answers in it.

Pulling back from the abstractions now and then to see how they link to what I’ve lived, known and felt.

This amazing gift, this luxury of time, space and silence that Millay offers.

Studio at Steepletop

2012-02-04T12:27:00.000-08:00

The work unfolds. Everyday it takes a different shape. Some days I go along, other days I resist.

Amazing what time and space will do.

Unexpectedly, we've had the Millay Colony entirely to ourselves for almost a week now.

A previous colonist left a few hours before we arrived on Sunday.
THANKS for the scallop risotto!
Three others are due over these next days.
Calliope is off to the Superbowl.
Imagine - the person who manages residencies here is named for the Muse of Epic Poetry.

We spent our first night in the Barn that you see in the photo background. That's where I spent my residency years ago, and I specifically requested space there this time.

When Ponczka learned spots in the new building were free, the battle of wills began.
She won.
The new building IS more comfortable, and more practical:
the kitchen is here, internet is here, studio lighting is better, it's less drafty.

But it's so much less romantic! So much less writerly!

Oh well. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE, according to the old sci-fi movies.
Yesterday, I lugged the Beast down to the Barn and wrote in my old studio for awhile. It satisfied the craving.

I found my name where I scratched it into the wood of the doorframe in May 2K, with the message, THRIVE! So many other names since, the ones from earlier years fading.

We inhabit an extraordinary space here. Not just spacial, but temporal, creative...who knows what else. We feel like beings with mountains for beds, clouds for pillows.

Every gesture comes out a dance.

Genius, Power, Magic

2012-01-31T11:26:00.000-08:00

Those are words that Goethe uses to communicate the impact of pursuing ones aspirations with boldness. It's one of my lifelong favorite quotes, one I've taken inspiration from as I (so hesitantly and self-consciously) tread my way forward. Yes, I've had my bold moments, and yes, so many of them have proven powerful and magical. The 'genius' part recalls one of my other favorite quotes, from the poem "Desiderata", by Max Ehrmann, which includes the line, "...no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should." There does seem to be something genius about how things work themselves out when one stands behind a cause, a belief, a commitment, how - going back to Goethe again - "...a whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way"

I'm back at The Millay Colony for the Arts with Ponczka, for 2 weeks. I was first here almost 12 years ago (and blogged about that here in May 2010). She'll be painting, I'll be writing. And we'll be walking the roads and the State Park next door, huggling up for afternoon naps and probably drinking too much wine. In short, we'll be in Paradise.

Where the boldness comes in is that I decided to write a novel while here. Seems impossible. And there comes a quaking in my gut as I tap out those words. But a queer energy comes with it too. The notion first came to me in one of my weekly sessions with my writing partner Judith a couple of weeks ago. When she and I write, we sit down and go at it for an agreed upon period of time, sometimes doing a fifteen minute warm-up, but always ending with a solid hour, pen-to-paper, or fingers to keypad, nothing more than brief pauses to catch your breath allowed. Amazing how that works. There always come the moments when the mind becomes blank, the writing has caught up to the thinking. There is something like panic as the control of the conscious mind is lost. What will take over now? What will come out?

Well, something always does come out. Sometimes gibberish. More often something more. Eventually, always something more. Sometimes, brilliance. Sometimes, nakedness. Sometimes, a coalescing of what's been tumbling about inside, but which that so careful, needing-to-impress, needing to be right, to be error-less, conscious mind has been unable, unwilling, un bold enough to put together.

Judith is a tigress. She faces demons and bogeymen and dreams relentlessly. And writing together gives us both courage. And, what do ya know...genuis, power, magic...it's all there, everywhere. It hides in every mote and fiber of creation. Waiting for us to breathe it in, tease it out. Waiting for now, for us to be present enough, open to the world and all that's in it.

Learning the Changes

2012-01-25T22:12:00.000-08:00

            Change is a currency of my work. In social work we sometimes measure our effectiveness by the amount of desired change we are able to help bring about in the lives of our clients, and by the amount of negative change we help them to avoid. Much of it has to do with the ability to change habitual ways and modes of thinking. And, it has lots to do with overcoming the discomfort of change: feeling those different feelings, allowing the aches of newness, awkwardness, fear.

            Trauma leaves its imprint throughout the lives of the youth I work with. And trauma can be so hard to recognize when it comes disguised as the everyday, as the stuff that marks your progress into adulthood and respect. Denizens of the streets, the shelters, the walk-in centres are expected to have survival stories and losses, and conflicts and betrayals to recount, and to rant or laugh about. They are expected to share in the common pool of hard experience that makes life what it is, that shapes the accepted norms, and endows the common knowledge of the community. Trauma is rampant among these street kids, in all its manifestations. But when the abuse you’ve suffered - and inflicted - is the common stuff of growing up, it doesn’t command the attentive and empathetic ear of your listeners.

            In a few weeks, a colleague and I will begin convening what we’re calling The Change Workshop. It’s meant to be part seminar, part support group and part resource sharing. We’ll be introducing concepts and tools relating to change, and laying out a variety of strategies for personal growth. I hope that the workshop will achieve the nice balance of challenge and embrace that characterized a Twelve Step group I attended regularly years ago. That group developed an intimate and almost symbiotic process, as those of us who gave up our dependencies at roughly the same time learned whole new ways of being social beings.

            We intend for the workshop to be a place where members can feel safe to honestly explore what change means to them, how it frightens, inspires and eludes them, to enumerate its costs and its fruits, what they’ve learned from it and suffered by it. Its bound to be a very mixed story, and the complexities won’t diminish as we dig deeper; rather the emotions triggered will become more palpable and universal and ripe. And ripeness means many things.

            So, I’m thinking a lot about change, and the role it’s played in my life. In my own case, there’s never been enough change. I’ve always wanted more, and the fact that I haven’t had my fill sometimes leaves me with a feeling almost of having failed. In this workshop, I will have to guard against being too pro-change, and perhaps not sensitive enough to the losses others will have experienced.

Havana Good Time

2012-01-16T20:43:00.000-08:00

Back from Havana.

There is so much I think and feel about the trip, but few words. It’s partly about being in a place where the living is different, and finding no way to communicate deeply about it with the people there. Of course it is. It’s difficult to talk in a deep way with neighbours and co-workers and friends lots of the time - about how they live, what they feel about their community and government, the quality of life.

But even when it seemed possible, and respectful, to ask a probing question, it was difficult – because of language, because of time, because I know myself to be instantly on the other side of many divides. And maybe it’s not so that every Cuban I encountered saw me was a foreigner, as someone with different ways, values, priorities, a different kind of importance, a different kind of nuisance. But there were all the barriers inside my own head: What’s someone going to ask me to give them, or buy from them? What’s the Spanish word for this? Am I being friendly, unfriendly, rude, too easy? Would it be okay to ask...?

I tried speaking and responding to almost everyone, and I tried being much less responsive, which meant ignoring a lot of the calls and questions: Taxi? Where you from? Do you want cigars? But looking back, I see I was mostly on the receptive end of exchanges, not getting in lots of questions myself. And when I did, there was the language, the time and the circumstances.

And still, good connections were made – with wonderful Tamara in our hotel, helping us negotiate with cabbies and travel agency reps, and Alex, the brother who approached us in the square and whom we encountered every other day, who coaxed us about going to his club, and to one of the Paladors – the private kitchens that serve up meals, and Felipe, the pedi-cab rider who warned us against police and walking in certain sections after dark. I had a brief chat with Ramses Rodriguez, the drummer, and chats with a few other tourists, from Canada, the US, Denmark, Iran.

But the really social part of being on vacation was being with Ponczka, my Bardzo, my Running Buddy, my Woman, my Love, My Marzena, my Sweet Hamburguesa (her latest nickname, Spanish for hamburger – with the “h” silent). We have such a good time together I can hardly get over it. We walked up and down, though mostly in Veija Habana – the Old Towne. We saw some of Centro, and the Jazz clubs were both in Vedano, and we did the double-decker bus tour, but it was mostly between the water and the main drag that Includes, Centro Park, the Telegrafo Hotel, where we spent our first night, the Capitolio and the Opera House.

Ponczka is my perfect travel companion. We make a nice pace together. And we manage to balance her desire to plan every step of our itinerary against my desire to roam aimlessly, her desire to snap photos with mine to sit with a coffee on a patio, my want of jazz, hers of elegant old buildings.

We ate well and simply. We’d heard and read that the food options were poor in Havana, but there was really fresh and tasty fish everywhere, and the prices – even in the Tourist Pecos – were very reasonable. And the flip side of food not being a central attraction is that I actually lost weight during a vacation.

There’s one thing that irks me, and that has led to a new commitment when travelling in less developed countries from now on. No more bargaining with artists. It becomes kind of an irresistible habit to bargain when you know you’re in an area designed to separate tourists from as much of their money as possible, especially after you discover that vendors will usually snap up an offer of half, as though they want to finish the transaction before you change your mind.

But even at the prices asked for, the art – and there was lots of good art in the tiny galleries in doorways and former store rooms – comes really cheaply. Since getting back home the other day, as we build and mount frames for the canvases we brought, I know that we got by far the better end of the art transactions. Ponczka feels this too, though, as a painter who herself works shows where she has to fend off low offers, she’s much more tenacious a bargainer than I am.

But we realize that it would be a huge support to these artists we meet and admire, if we paid them according the valuation their work would have in our market, rather than in theirs. So that’s what we’ve resolved to do. When we see art in less developed areas, and appreciate it as art – not merely quickly produced copy work – we will pay for art, and feel more deserving of what hangs on our walls.

A Different Drummer

2012-01-11T22:27:00.000-08:00

It's been a special week here in Havana.

We've spent hours and hours walking the streets, mostly in the Old City, admiring the buildings, catching the energy of the people, endlessly answering the question about where we're from, and then absorbing the knowing, sometimes admiring comments about Canada, the US or Poland. And I think what gets to me most - in terms of the absurdity of politics - it the realization that most of these people will never have the opportunity to visit these countries they express so much interest in.

A highlight has been the music. We hear the traditional Cuban "Son" style of music played everywhere in Old Havana, especially versions of the Buena Vista Social club classics. But for me, seeking out the jazz clubs was a priority, and we really struck gold.

On Sunday we visited the Jazz Cafe, and tonight we've just returned from La Zora y El Cuervo, and both nights we took in really good acts: Roberto Fonseca and Temperamento the first night, and Michel Herrera and Joven Jazz tonight. Both groups featured talented musicians, but the one who really blew me away was the drummer for Temperamento, one Ramses Rodriguez.

Rodriguez gave the best drumming performance I've seen in a long, long time, maybe ever. His fluidity, endless creativity and his rhythmic drive kept the entire act pulsing with energy. He reminded me of the best recordings I have by the likes of Tony Williams, Billy Cobham and Brian Blade. Simply INCREDIBLE! And thank goodness, he and other musicians are able to travel. I spoke with him briefly and was told that he frequently travels to the US, Canada and elsewhere. If you ever get a chance to see him, don't miss it. The man is a revelation.

A Yank in Old Havana

2012-01-06T17:23:00.000-08:00

Vieja Habana! I can hardly believe I'm here. As an American, I'm used to thinking of Cuba as the one place in the Americas I can't go. But here I am, in the land of Fidel and Che, of Teofilo Stevenson and Ibrahim Ferrer. It's been a little over an hour since we arrived, after a two-hour bus ride from the distant airport. And at our hotel, we found the electricity out and water off, and so were sent to another establishment for our first night. And you know - I'm already enraptured by this city!

As I've read. amd was warned by others who've been here, this once glorious city is crumbling. During our short ride through the town, we passed one ornate wonder after another. Some are encased in scaffolding as the process of restoration takes place. Others are left collapsing and unattended. Yet others are boarded up. Many of those that look as though they ought to be boarded up show the common sign of tenancy that is everywhere in Havana, laundry drying on a line.

But despite their delapidation, these are beautiful structures, or once were, and it's easy to imagine how impressive Havana was in its glory days. We've had glimpses of the plentiful street art, and of the parks and the boulevards. Many of the streets are alive with pedestrians and people simply lounging, and well...I'm immediately drawn in. I know that Ponczka and I will spend many hours walking during the coming week.

And Oh! I've already had two lifetime firsts in this first hour. We were transported from one hotel to the other in a 1955 Chevrolet! I don't know the model - I'm not really that into cars. But it was one of those old, lumpy beauties, with all the right curves and lines. And, if the vintage designation of cars was back then as it is now, then this vehicle might have been produced in the very year I can into being: 1954. What a beautiful machine, with its upholstered seats and the hood ornament in the shape of a jet. We were told, that its guts are pure Toyota however.

My other lifetime first? I've now had the experience of using a bidet. It reminds me of the joke about the hick who marvels that in his swank hotel, each suite features a water fountain!

Make Eyes, Toronto!

2012-01-03T22:37:00.000-08:00

I'm looking at the front page of The Grid, the free toronto weekly. It announces the 2001 Mensch Awards, to "50 people who made Toronto better this year." I love the concept. What are the many acts of civic engagement worthy of acknowledgment? I haven't looked at the list yet, but it immediately got me speculating. How many of them had specific resolutions for the year? And how many of those resolutions was aimed - directly or indirectly - at the idea of improving the place we live?

I have to look at my own intentions and efforts. I've volunteered places and made contributions to one cause or another - which I won't enumerate here. But the inspiration to specifically improve the place I live? That, I have not acted upon. And yet, I have a clearly defined and persistant annoyance with Toronto, one that shows no sign of going away. Which is: that Torontonians avoid public contact with strangers. I've posted about this before: "Land of the No-Look Pass" October 2010. Maybe I should do somethng about that, take that on? No doubt!

So here I am, making a resolution, in the form of a promise to my city. I'm going to do something about eye contact, see if I can't tease a few more face-forward acknowledgements from people.

I'm going to start a movement: "Make Eyes, Toronto!". I'm going to present my case, my ingredient for making Toronto a better city, more friendly and liveable. Which is: by looking one another in the eye, by taking the time to recognize strangers as human beings, by developing a different sensibility around public contact with strangers, finding ways to connect that feel safe, are engaging, and that pull us deeper into the fabric of social life.

How will I go about this? Posters come to mind. Small posters, 4x6 or 5x8 maybe, at various eye levels, with a graphic of a pair of eyes, and the words: Make Eyes, Toronto! Maybe another blog, with those words as a title, propaganda for eye contact - all the reasons in favor. I could write up a few pieces to send to local publications, like The Grid.

It's not at all 'me' to do something like this....I don't know that I'll actually do it. But I know I won't if I can't even write about doing it. And I like the idea.What response might it get? What could it lead to?

I'm going to encourage people to look one another in the eye, and to smile or nod, say good morning or hello. I'm going to ask Torontonians to acknowledge one another and to consciously greet one another.

I'm already imagining the kinds of reactions this might get. I know that to even consider doing this makes lots of people uncomfortable. Looking people in the eye is a kind of invitation. People may feel that they risk unwanted and unsafe contact by making invitations to strangers. That's a fact.

But, aren't there dozens of times and situations - every day - when it would be perfectly safe and non-intrusive, to smile at someone you would normally pretend wasn't there? How about the person across the aisle on a bus, or in an elevator, or while standing in line.

If the notion is at first intimidating, consider that initially, until you get the hang of it, you can direct you glances and smiles at people who are too distant for either of you to initiate conversation. In traffic, to the person in the car opposite you instead of alongside. or a person in that bus going the other way. A gentle step into this public mode could be to shift our ways with people we see regularly, but are impersonal with: those cashiers bussers and mail deliverers, ticket-takers and grocery shelf stockers that we pass every day.

I honestly don't know to what extent I'll mount a campaign. I like the idea of the "eye" posters. Hmmm.... Regardless, I'm at least commiting to being more engaging myself. I'm going to 'be the change I want to see' as some sage apparently suggested. And we'll see what happens.

Burnout and a Bucket List

2011-12-31T09:39:00.000-08:00

I’ve been dancing on the border of burnout. My energy is down, my focus off. One of the reasons – if reasons are meaningful or necessary, and I’m not sure that they are – it that our team of four has been down to two for several months, but the homeless youth keep showing up. I’m distracted and even less organized than usual. It results in me being late more often, and because my work hours are flexible anyway, I often start my days later. But I’m also ending them later, because of all the above, but also because I’ve given up on multi-tasking, and am resolved to do only one thing at a time. It helps to be more deliberate, and to stick with something until it’s done. One effect is that I’m having more meetings and phone calls with my youth in the late afternoon or evening, sometimes answering my phone when they expect to be getting my voice mail.

Burnout isn’t a good thing. The overall result is that less gets done, and what gets done may be done poorly. No denying any of that. One small consolation is that the interactions I have with my youth can be exceptionally rich. I think this is because in my present state I’m more vulnerable, and so more like them, more intimately familiar with the inertia that binds so many of us to our circumstances. Change is hard; inevitable yes, but not always easy to mould into the shape of our dreams.

I can’t hide my burnout. It’s too obvious, and too real. And so I’ve talked with my boss about it, and to some of my co-workers, and to my clients. I let them know I’m getting things done more slowly, that I’m focusing my efforts more on the basics, the essentials. I put more responsibility on them to keep us connected. I tell them I just don’t have the energy to chase them, as I sometimes do when more fit.

Somehow, this burnout dance acts as a clarifying lens. For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about efficiencies. Specifically, I’ve been wondering how it is that we can engage in routine activities, aimed toward a goal, that produce few or no tangible results over a long period of time. But then, there’s that occasional single act, or conversation or intervention that changes everything in a moment. Some actions have great power. So, so many actions are impotent. But so often, we can’t tell one from the other.

I was recently with a friend who's in a position much more dire than my own. She's approaching a fork in her road at which she anticipates huge pain and disappointment, whatever path she chooses. Seeing no way out of her dilemma has shifted her relationship to the present, in a way both enlivening and alarming. First of all, she keeps reflecting, when she finds herself engaged in some activity, that it might be the last time she ever does it. Her last time in Ottawa, her last meal in a particular restaurant, or experiencing Winter solstice, sitting and drinking with me in a pub... It's a very healthy reflection, I think. She says that it makes her more attentive and appreciative of things that otherwise escape her notice. And there's been an element of relief, or release for her. It brings her into the present and out of the realm of those heavy apprehensions. And that, in turn, has led to a very intentional way for her to acknowledge and sort out her life. She's prepared a bucket list, and is slowly going about, doing and completing the things she feels she absolutely ought to do before departing life. That’s the alarming side – this willing consideration of ending her life. But I see that it is bringing a kind of peace, an ability to, on a deep level, take things just as they are, without the pretence or illusion of a future.

There are connections we realized, my friend and I, as we sat talking about my burnout and her bucket list. I can’t try and dissect that here and now – and we didn’t then. This is something more ‘felt’ than ‘thought’ anyway; something to do with making space and with suspending time, with values and with the brittle artifacts we carve out of expectation. Maybe not something to be reasoned. I asked my friend if executing her bucket list was leading her toward suicide. And she said she had no idea. Which seemed the only appropriate reply. Living just doesn’t work by such precise formulas.

Going For That Next Spin

2011-12-27T21:30:00.000-08:00

I Love that we've come past Solstice, that each day brings minutes more sunlight than the day before, that we're on that long, inevitable arc toward summer. The planet comes to another birthday, another spin around the sun as we mark it in years. Let's ride around too, so long as we can.

I remember this year clearly through my blogging. This has been a new voice for me, and I feel its ebbs and flows, note how one feeling or observation about some piece of my world burbles up here in words, while others do not, but come out somewhere else, or remain stewing and fermenting and deepening inside, awaiting their time. It's been encouraging to get your occassional comments, but even more nourishing to have you tell me, when we meet or speak, that you've been thinking about something I wrote, or that a piece gave you something pleasant in your day. I LOVE that!

Thank you all for coming here and exploring some of my harvest from walking about in the world. That's what this blog is more than anything else - feeling and reacting to being alive. Here. Now. In Toronto, in 2011, none of which is quite that anymore, such being the persistence of change. It's a record of some of the spashes that have accompanied my flow through life. Developing this voice, and this space, is growing me in unpredictable ways. And you out there, being ears I can whisper into, help this growth along. Thank you so much!

Reality Show

2011-12-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

     Okay, so I'm a bit of a tv addict. I can go passive in front of the small screen for sustained periods, and enjoy it. It's a guilty pleasure, and there's no denying that much of what is consumed while gazing at the tube is mind-numbingly insubstantial. But I'm here today to laud the genre of 'Reality Television' - at least some of it. Now a junkie will always defend his or her poison, and you might put this down to nothing more or less than that. But keep an open mind. I won't argue that television deserves the share of my lifescape that it holds, let alone that of the average North American. However, there's a merit to reality shows that shouldn't be overlooked. And I'm here to testify.

     So what's the particular flavor of my poison? It starts with Biggest Loser, the weight-loss marathon show that I blogged about a year ago. The favorites that I've added since, and that I watch regularly are So You Think You Can Dance? and yes, The X Factor. But it doesn't end there. Channel-surfing to put off bed time turns up all sorts of unexpected reality fare. (Did you know there's a match-making show on which this guy who lives in his parents' basement has a bunch of young women bunking up in the house while he eliminates them one by one? And no, that's not one that's hooked me) So occassionally I find myself watching an episode of The Amazing Race, Iron Chef, or Survivor! In fact, I've watched season finales of four of these shows in just the last week, and I'm eagerly awaiting the finale of The X Factor on Wednesday. Yes, I've got it bad!

     But wait! Before you write me off as a loser, living vicariously through the anything-but-real fantasy fodder of media tycoons, let me make my case. Which is, that these shows are often thrilling, authentic and inspiring windows into possibility! Yes, inspiring!

     I'm inspired watching a group of people transform both their bodies and sense of self, reclaiming movement and dynamism, as they replace an often life-long repertoire of putting off and avoiding life (Biggest Loser). I'm thrilled as I watch couples dashing around the globe, while engaging in all sorts of limit-breaking challenges (The Amazing Race). And I'm absolutely awe struck at the grace and power of dancers, stretching the limits of what the human body can do, combining athleticism and artistry, creating moving poetry with their bodies, on So You Think You Can Dance.

     The X Factor confirms for me that artistry and creativity is widespread, as is aspiration, courage and the willingness to dream. And sure, there are plenty of the deluded who show up for the auditions, displaying not a scrap of musical ability. I can't conclude anything about them really - there is sadness in some of them, desperation in others, a radiant joy and confidence in others. They are fascinating too. Among other things, they remind me that genius so often goes unrecognized. Van Gogh sold only one painting during his life - and that via his devoted brother, an art dealer. And Ornette Coleman, when he first arrived in New York with his plastic saxophone, was laughed at and chased off stages, for not knowing how to play.

     But as for the group of performers that made it to the playoffs - they all do magic with their voices, and with their showmanship. And the final three for tomorrow night's finale are dreamers all: a pudgy, thirty-something burrito maker, who first appeared on stage a scruffy, unkempt mess; a young, tatooed garbageman just out of rehab, and a young immigrant from the Caribbean who seemed absolutely ordinary until she opened her mouth and let out a blazing, electrifying voice.

     Survivor fascinates me as a kind of ultimate game. It reminds me of Thucydides and his epic work about the wars between ancient Athens and Sparta. He writes in his introduction to the work that war presents the best opportunity for studying man, because he reveals his true self when under the extreme pressures and discomforts that war places him in. And survivor seems to back that up, as contestants, placed in a pseudo state-of-nature environment, learn their true values and limits. Again and again they try - and generally fail - to maintain friendship, loyalty and principle, while simultaneously strategizing to secure the million dollar prize. I'm repeatedly thrown into wondering, as I watch the plots and aliances form and dissolve, "What would I do?"

     And when all is said and done, I don't know that there's anything that approaches The Iron Chef for the sheer intensity of creative artistry. I'm dazzled watching the competing chefs come up with multiple ways to prepare each show's 'secret ingredient', which could be anything from pork loin to pinapple, or, as on one recent show, popcorn.

     Each one of these shows inspires or moves me in some way. They remind me of possibilties I don't always make room for in my life. They tease out my dormant potential, support and encourage my dreams. Which is all good. I know that one of the complaints about television is that it can too easily become a substitute for living; televised dreams can become easy stand-ins for actualized dreams. It may be so. But that's choice too, isn't it? I have a rich live, but I also thrill at richness in the lives of others, strangers and friends. Will I ever actually take on one of the other-worldly and larger than life adventures that these shows tantalize me with? Not likely. But it seems to me that, just as books and movies, music and bedtime stories have all had their role in openning the world to me, these shows do as well. They make the world a little bigger, but also a little closer; they thicken my personal catalogue of "What I Might Do." And, in the larger realm of aspiration and possibility, they link me to you.

Party Serendipity

2011-12-18T23:13:00.000-08:00

     I really didn't want to go to the party. It was my third this weekend, and I was tired. I've been tired. And though I love the good neighbor friends, and don't see enough of them, I really wanted to lay on the couch and nap in front of the late football game.

     But we went, and there was a nice serendipity to it.

     Side track - I love that word: serendipity. It's been a favorite forever. First because of the sound of it - the bop and the bounce. But then, more sweetly, for it's meaning. One account of the word's origin is that is refers to the accidental discovery of Sri Lanka by explorers who were searching for someplace else. Apparently, it was such a wonderful place to stumble upon that its ancient name Serendip has come to stand for the 'happy accident', for that experience of stumbling onto something beautiful and unexpected, particularly when you are seeking something entirely else.

     So I guess you could say I went to the party expecting not to get engaged with anyone, but to merely make an appearance before slipping off for home. And instead I had two great interactions with great people.

     First, I found myself chatting with Andrew, a high school teacher of philosophy and math. We had a great talk, exchanging notions and theories about education, the cultural influences that affect achievement, the distribution of opportunity, and our own efforts and ideas for fostering social justice. The exchange enlivened me, made me glad I'd left the house. And it planted thoughts in mind about the work I'm doing, some reflections on a workshop I'm about to start, with clients dealing with life changes. In particular, our talk underscored the point that when people are making important choices for their lives, they can only choose among options that are present to them. That's obvious on the surface, but so much overlooked in this world of gross inequities, where one of the largest gaps between haves and have-nots is the opportunity gap.

     My other very special interaction was with Bronwen, who shared a very passionate artistic journey she's embarked on, during a needed break from her own teaching career. She's been taking small trips around the continent, to meet and study with creators of unusual mosaic art projects. Among other places, she was recently in Philadelphia, checking out the Magic Gardens:
http://geekadelphia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/MG01.jpg . And she's intending a trip to Los Angeles to check out the Watts Towers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Towers . I've known Bronwen for awhile, and it was so great seeing her so passionate and enlivened by her exploration, so bold and free in crafting this journey. Have a look at these links - they are fascinating.

     And keep your eyes and spirit open for the unexpected. The thing about serendipity is that it isn't available to those so deadset in their objective that they can't see anything else.

The Alchemy of Human Touch

2011-12-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

                Years ago, when I was twenty, and travelling in January from San Francisco to Boston, I found Myself standing alongside a highway outside of Cleveland, trying to hitch a ride. San Francisco had been warm, and Boston was home, and the detour to visit my brother, an inspiration that grew out of realizing how close to him my travels had brought me.

                I wasn’t prepared, either mentally or in the way I was dressed, for the assault of an Ohio winter. It may have been only an hour or so that I stood there that afternoon, but it took less time than that for my optimistic certainty of a ride to drain away, along with my body heat and my faith in humankind.

                You face a sea of cars coming your way, and at first you feel like the celebrity at a party, looking for the girl to dance with. There might be a timid rejection or two, but you almost feel that the choice is yours – only to decide who to ask. Someone will surely stop soon – who will it be? But after an hour, no longer able to feel anything but the numbing crush of cold in your fingers and toes, and the slush now oozing into your shoes, socks and pant legs, the shivering in your body threatening to dislodge purpose and memory, you want to give up. I wanted to give up – but give up and do what? Go where?

                And finally, a car stopped.

                It was a station wagon, with a couple in the front seat: man and woman, thirty something, white, working class. Regular people. He was driving. And I must’ve been a sight, because during my entire time in their car – which was less than thirty minutes – the woman was turned toward me, comforting and caring for me.

                I was cold enough that warming up was painful, and cold enough that I didn’t care about the impression I was making. I'd enjoyed telling people about my adventures in San Francisco, and that I was on my way back to Harvard. I wanted strangers to see me as a bright, adventurous young man, overflowing with life, insights and ideas. But in that station wagon that day, slowly making its way north out of Cleveland, I cared nothing for all that. And I was glad to be seen for the cold, lost, pitiful puppy that I was.

                Which brings me to what I’m writing about here, which is the magic of kindness, the lasting impression that generosity can make.

                This couple fussed over me. They found me a towel to dry myself with, and turned up the heat in the car. I think that if I hadn’t insisted, they’d not have let me out of their sight that night. But as it was, we weren’t headed in the same direction. They had a route change coming up shortly. So, while he drove, and we all talked, she took care of me, like a big sister reluctantly preparing to send a younger brother into danger. They’d stopped for food a short while before picking me up, and still had a half full bucket of fried chicken, which they began feeding to me. I learned that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and can’t remember another detail about them.

                When they had to pull over to let me out, they insisted that I take the rest of the chicken, and they gave me a bible – as a gift for my future well-being, and five dollars. I was a different person exiting their car than I was climbing in. I had the chicken to munch on, the five bucks – a lot back then. And it didn't feel so cold anymore. Their caring had somehow ended my waiting for that night.

                I was serene, facing the stream of traffic again, catching glimpses of one driver, then another, the faces flowing by. How many years later did it occur to me that they – that couple – stood as a fleeting moment in the eternity of my life, like a shooting star, here once, but somehow transformed into a lasting presence.

                We touch and move one another in such surprising and unexpected ways, we human beings.

                Years later, I stopped on another highway to pick up a young, lesbian couple, on my way home to Seattle from Olympia, Washington. It was cold that night too, and learning that they had no place to go, I invited them to stay with me and my girlfriend. One of them woke the next morning with a slight fever, so they spent two days convalescing in our home, huddled together in our spare bedroom. I wonder if the memory stays with them as it does with me.

                How many times I’ve been surprised, looking back at an initial encounter with a group of people – colleagues at a new job, fellows in a classroom, or in a dorm at university, neighbours along a street – at who would make a lasting impression, at who would change my life.

                I met Sari a year and a half ago outside a shop where my bike was being worked on. I’d overheard her conversation with one of the staff, and learned that she was an artist, and I introduced myself. She responded in the way that old friends describe being reconnected – as though we were resuming a well established acquaintance, honoring a connection that needed nothing to support it but our being there in that moment. During our chat, Sari suggested – no, insisted – that I go home and begin a blog, that very night. As it was, it was two weeks before I executed the order, but it changed my relationship to writing, shifted my experience of being a writer, and how it places me in the world.

                I emailed Sari the night I began this blog, and when I didn’t hear back, thought she’d simply passed it over. But last week - a year and a half later - that return email finally arrived. My message had been lost in her server all that time. And she’d found it. And over the last few days...has she read every single post? She's been commenting, and messaging back and forth with me, making fresh suggestions about developing my art. She planted a seed, and has now circled back to nourish again what she planted, this fascinating stranger outside a bike shop.

                I believe in these invisible tendrils that connect us, stranger to stranger, sister to brother, spirit to spirit. I think it’s part of the magic of being alive – that we work in surprising and unanticipated ways on one another’s chemistry, we tinker in one another’s souls, we make bridges for one another across chasms of the impossible. We transform one another with glancing touches.

                Almost ten years ago, I was in Yonge-Eglinton Centre, shopping for a bottle of wine. I can’t say for sure whether the feeling or the glance came first, but I became aware of a woman standing nearby, shopping for wine herself.

                What is it, that energy that suddenly enters a space, that sizzles behind a look, that stirs inside of a space and moves you, for no clear reason or logic than its own? It was there that day, in that wine section of an LCBO. And I did nothing about it. What to do? A stranger. An attractive stranger, but that, if anything, made it less possible to do or say anything. An energy, that’s all.

                So she left the store. I left the store, going the other way. I realized though, that I was turned around, so reversed myself. There she was, up ahead. I watched her, still feeling that energy, that something that doesn’t really mean anything. Nothing clear, that is. Attraction? Hormones? Can’t respond to every hormone rush, can you?

                And so I began the walk down the ramp into the subway. She, I noticed, was turning into the grocery store. In a moment, she’d be gone, like a parting that happens with strangers a thousand times a day. But in the moment before she’d have disappeared from sight, she turns her head and darts a look over her shoulder. From her eyes to mine. I stop, I turn, I follow.

                Now I’m walking straight ahead into the eyes of a stranger. And who is she? And what does she have to do with my life and the path I’m on? And how will she respond? But now it’s time to do something.

                “I felt that I should speak to you,” I said, or something like that.

                And Ponczka’s first ever spoken word to me was a simple, smilingly delivered, No. Then she laughed. And I must’ve smiled back at her. And we’ve been more than nine years together.

                Cars streaming along a highway, a stranger outside a shop, rogue energies binding us in mystery. Moments that come and go, not to be recognized from a distance, but suddenly there, ripe and rich and transforming.

What's To Vote About

2011-12-06T23:28:00.000-08:00

In the wake of Phase I of the Occupy Movements – and I, for one, am confident that there are phases II through VI to come - there's been much discussion about whether or not the movement should participate in electoral politics, with lots of occupiers expressing vehement opposition to the suggestion.

As a fringe Occupier – but a lifelong voter – I want to weigh in on the debate.

First of all, I implore both Occupiers and those that disparage the movement to consider a basic reality. The time will never come when 51%, or 40, or 10, or even .01 percent of the population is going to pack up a tent and occupy anyplace but their own home. Which is pretty obvious. But it also underscores the point, that needs to be underscored, particularly for the on-lookers and nay-sayers, that though the numbers of body's at Occupy sites and in the streets, and the growing number of Occupy sites in itself, is both impressive and meaningful, it wasn't ever the point. Those numbers are a dramatically elegant and powerful expression of a wide array of points, most having to do with dissatisfaction of one kind or another with our financial, political and social systems. Dissatisfaction with the way things are, with the status quo, with business as usual.

When one is railing against What Is, how natural it is to recoil at the idea of channeling that transformative energy into something so ordinary, so conformist and, on its surface, so counter-revolutionary as voting. When one votes, and when one supports a minority view, it is difficult to escape the oppressive sense that one is acting alone. All it takes is one unenlightened neighbour to nullify whatever you've effected by stepping into the voting booth, and that neighbor's brother starts the tide in the other direction. WHY BOTHER!!?!

Well, I have a couple of reasons why to BOTHER!

And they have to do with transcending the limited notions of what an election is in the first place. We cannot overcome the basic, defining characteristic of elections, that they determine a choice – among candidates and parties, among platforms and issues. Nor should we want to. But elections and votes are more than just that. And they tell a much more complex story.

So – what the hell is an election, anyway?

First of all, it isn't a race, a prize fight, a coronation, a rubber stamp, a mandate, or any of those things we've been told repeatedly that it is. If an election were a sporting event, it would be okay to say, when candidate A secures 51% of the vote against the 49% secured by candidate B, that it’s a decisive victory. But elections takes place in real life, and they affect the world that we inhabit. And in real life, such an outcome would be called a TIE. It tells us is that there's a huge divide, that the population is split on an issue, and a split population is a sign of serious dissatisfaction. In the real world, such a split would signal the need for a community to come together and seek common values, and solutions that stem from those values. That’s what at 51-49 split communicates. But our warped politics - and a duplicitous media - deceives us into accepting such splits as though the public has spoken with a clear voice. And if we ever have an election in which the split is 60-40 or 70-30, it’s as though the winner is granted carte blanche to completely ignore any voice in opposition.

The big problem with elections is that they work by simplification. They are designed to reduce complexities to simple one-or-the-other propositions. And they accomplish this by rounding off. In two way elections, anything above 50 percent becomes 100 percent. Anything below 50 percent becomes zero. Winner take all. All or nothing.

This may be good enough when it comes to determining the occupant of a single seat in Parliament or Congress. But surely it isn`t good enough for coming to terms with a complex issue, let alone the entire body of issues dealt with by political bodies. Nor is it good enough to register citizen concerns and values.

For elections to have the impact on issues that they ought to, they need to be seen as instruments of measurement and communication.

Elections need to be looked at with fresh eyes, for their potential to be potent tools of transformation, not just rubber stamps to the status quo. After all, up until 3 months ago, no one would have pointed to public parks as effective instruments of social change.

Of course, another part of the reality is that, if only 50 or 60 percent of eligible voters participate in an election, then even a 70% result represents only one in three of the voting pool. And if we count those who never register, or who are disenfranchised for various reasons, the winning candidate or position is even less representative.

My point is that, if, as we do in the real world, we viewed levels of participation and ballot results as measurements of and communication from the citizenry, the numbers would tell us a much richer story than simply that candidate A defeated candidate B.

And this, I believe, could play a huge role in the broader Occupy / 99% movement, toward building an economy and a politics that serves ALL of us. Such an approach to elections would make it suddenly significant when a small party wins 15 or 20 percent of the vote. One in five or six citizens is a very substantial number, from any perspective except that of business-as-usual politics.

What’s needed then, is to separate the tool – elections and voting – from the sorry art of politics with which it is associated. One very positive and powerful campaign to refit this tool to better serve the population is the Proportional Voting Proposal. It was defeated in Ontario some years ago, but has been adopted in many places in the world, and will surely get another go in Ontario before much longer.

Even simple voter registration drives can become a tool for transformation that isn’t instantly embedded in the current scheme of party politics. On the most basic level, an election is a roll-call of everyone we live and work with, to agree on what’s for dinner, where to build the school, how we will take care of one another, what we want our city, province or state, our nation to stand for. If we don’t like the stale choices that we’re presented with in the voting booth, or the unmindful way the results are used and manipulated, let’s not blame that on elections.

The problem with elections is that they’ve been co-opted by a stingy, dishonest and self-serving politics. The solution is between the collective ears of the electorate. Where it comes to elections and voting, we have to begin to think outside the box. That worked out pretty well for parks, didn’t it?

Banana Bottom

2011-11-28T20:31:00.000-08:00

I recently reread one of my favourite novels, Banana Bottom by Claude McKay. I first read it twenty or so years ago, and that left a clear and deep impression on me. I've never forgotten the name Bita Plant, nor her spirit and love of life. And it is just that quality of life-lovingness that has endeared me to this novel and made it one of my great favorites.

McKay was a Jamaican, born in 1890, who emigrated to the US as a young man, and eventually became a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's and 30's. Though he lived in Harlem for several years, during much of the Renaissance itself, he lived in Europe and North Africa. His most famous novel, Home to Harlem, and its follow-up, Banjo, take place in the urban centres of New York and Marseilles, respectivel. Banana Bottom, the final of his three novels, published in 1933, is set in his native Jamaica, which he left at age 15, never to see again. And it reads almost as a love story to the island.

Banana Bottom tells the story of Bita Plant,a young, black girl, who after being seduced and ‘spoiled’, is adopted by white missionaries and sent to England for 7 years of refinement and a proper education. The novel begins with Bita’s return to her homeland. She is now perceived as belonging to a different social order, unfit for the simple life and the simple company she once enjoyed, and destined to serve as an example of the better life that western civilization offers.

Over the course of the novel, Bita interacts with representatives of every stratum of rural and small town Jamaican society, and ultimately rejects the narrow, hierarchical values of the elites, as well as the hedonism and ostentatious ways of the native pleasure seekers. Among all the suitors vying for her hand, she chooses the simple, earthy drayman, Jubban, who works for her father. There’s lots of examination of values, of one’s place and duty in community, and the challenges of simple desire – how to regard it and what to do with it. And Bita, though surely she’s a thinker, confronts her challenges with a combination of thoughtful analysis, intuition, and the movement of her heart and spirit.

So, it’s a book with a clear message and set of values to put across, but it does so with humor and naturalness. And its rich and multi-faceted examination of the social, cultural, racial and religious forces at work in the world it describes is gentle but deep, thought-provoking and life-affirming. The characters mostly fit the stereotypes of the time and place, but they think, feel and breathe, and so come to life – even those whose values and outlook can be easily rejected.

Often in reading historical fiction, I find it impossible to understand the actions and motivations of the characters. I love Dostoyevsky, but I often simply don’t get the passion that drives his characters in particular situations. I guess part of what makes Banana Bottom work so well for me, is that McKay isn’t afraid to tell as well as show, which is something that almost all instruction on fiction writing advises one not to do. Mckay makes it work, though. Throughout his novel, he shares bits of history, social custom and religious practice, and he breaks down the biases and psychological needs that inform his characters. And it all makes for a rich and moving portrait of a world that is decades removed, but still relevant to now.

Floating In A Different Season

2011-11-25T14:08:00.000-08:00

A gorgeous day today. I couldn't resist pedaling circuitously around the city as I travelled from home to drop-in, to office.

Going through Grange Park, I came upon this vision, this anomaly, this beautiful contradiction. Throughout the park, all the trees were bare, stretching their dark, naked limbs against the blue sky. And then...there was this one tree.

Makes Me Wanna Holla - Pt. II

2011-11-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

I despaired today.

I despaired at the inability or unwillingness of human beings to rise to the call of their humanness, in service to another.
I was self-righteous today, and over zealous in my challenging of others who would not – or could not – be bold, and do something right simply because it was right, and logical and humane, though it did not fit within the guidelines and the procedures they are saddled with.

Here’s the situation:
I found and arranged a rental for one of my young clients in a property owned and managed by Toronto Community Housing Corporation. She moved in on September first. I got a message from her last week that she wanted help with her utilities, but I only learned today that she’s not had any heat or hot water throughout these two plus months.

Today I was on the phone with representatives of Enbridge, the utility company concerned, a number of times, speaking to people in various departments, in a vain attempt to get service for this young woman. The problem is clear: a previous tenant allowed the utility bill to go unpaid for quite a long time, and service was ultimately shut off. Enbridge has been attempting to recoup its losses from TCHC and so far, TCHC hasn’t made good. Enbridge is refusing to give my client service, isn’t allowing her even to open an account, until their demands have been met by TCHC.

Today, I spoke with no fewer than six Enbridge employees, including two mangers, in various departments, including service, collections. They all acknowledge that my 19-year old client is not in any way responsible for the problem. They also know that she has done everything in her power to have the matter resolved. She remains ready – as she was when she moved in – to open an account and to take responsibility for paying for the service she hopes to receive. But all those I spoke with today remained adamant on the point that she will receive no service until the unpaid bill left by some stranger has been paid.

I am so infuriated at this situation. It’s getting cold here in Toronto. This young woman has so much on her plate already: issues around her income, plans around education and training, relations with friends and family, and her mental and emotional health. And now, two massive corporations, entrusted with responsibility for basic public services, are using her as a football to kick back and forth, over a matter involving a few hundred dollars.

I don’t see any justification for this treatment. It isn’t a life and death issue. Lots of my clients face far more serious issues than this. But there’s something so fundamentally unfair about this young woman being held hostage over a matter she has no responsibility for and no power effect. And I’m infuriated that two vast commercial entities, entrusted with the public wellbeing in their respective areas of concern, could be so unmoving and unresponsive on this matter.

I hope that when I am next in a situation when it is me who has an opportunity to be bold in the face of a rigid and impersonal structure , that I will rise to this level of consciousness and empathy that I have been championing all day. I know that it’s so much harder to act in such circumstances when you feel your own security to be at risk, when there’s a danger that the unthinking and unfeeling machine – massive with inertia – will turn on you should you dare to be insubordinate.

But if we can’t do this...what then?

A Worthy Occupation

2011-11-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

I finally made my first visit to the Occupy Toronto site, and I'm very impressed with what I saw.

In Toronto, the movement has encamped itself in St. James Park, a medium-sized plot, taking up a full city block just east of St. James Cathedral, and just bordering the downtown commercial core, but perhaps half a mile from the heart of Bay Street, which is Toronto’s – hence, Canada’s – financial heart. King Street forms the southern border of the park, so that many of those who commute to Bay Street will pass right by it on their way to the financial towers in which they toil.

My first impression, upon walking into the park along one of its diagonal walkways, is of a small village coming into being. There are tents of all types, sizes and condition pitched everywhere, but they have begun to take on the informal, impromptu order of a community. I didn’t consciously recognize the signs of this order at first, merely took in the impression of it. But later, I learned that committees have formed to take on certain areas of responsibility, like Logistics, Media and Food. I realize now that there was none of the random trash nor the foul odors that I’m accustomed to finding at urban encampments, when I encounter them in my profession as a Street Outreach Counsellor to Toronto’s homeless community. While some of the street homeless have found their way to St. James Park, or have been recruited there, it isn’t the culture and ways of the random homeless that has asserted itself here. It is in fact an Intentional Community.

There are signs everywhere - promoting various positions, thoughts, viewpoints related to the wide and increasing imbalance in fortunes that we experience in Canada and in the world. Many of them come across as gentle provocations, invitations to thought. And the feel of the Park, despite it being so densely packed, is open and inviting. People walk about variously clothed against the elements. Many are eating, out of bowls, cups and assorted other containers, with spoons, ladles and fingers.

The most impressive thing I come across during my brief visit is the small grouping of about twenty people, forming a loose circle just east of the gazebo, and discussing issues, logistics and strategy. They are mostly in their twenties, but a few are older. They are about to break into smaller groups to address a number of subjects: violence (and I’m not there long enough to discover what violence they mean); the Remembrance Day activities being planned at St. James Cathedral, and the proactive intention to avoid any negative interactions between pro and anti military sympathizers who might be there; and the overarching topic: "Why We Are Here". Individuals volunteer to facilitate each group, and others are invited to join whichever group they prefer. One of the two people facilitating this larger group, a well-spoken young man wearing a tuque and a skinny tie beneath his wool blazer, suggests that, if a breakout group is too small, others be recruited from around the park to give input.

A man who appears to be in his fifties and middle-class, in smart, casual dress, and wearing a soft, wide-brimmed hat, asks to speak to the assembled before they disperse. He appears to be a bit apprehensive about speaking, and his audience is slightly wary. “It depends on what it’s about,” says the young man. But once assured that the interruption will be brief, he invites the older man to share.

The oldster announces that he and two companions are from St. Catherine's, a small city an hour’s drive away. They are planning an Occupy movement in that city, and they’ve come to consult with the organizers and to glean some do's and don't's before proceeding.

There are pleased looks all around, and a smattering of applause. The man is invited to "speak to everyone", but the second of the facilitators, a young woman wrapped in a blanket and eating stew from a bowl, gives practical and focused advice: "You should take time to connect with all of the committees that have taken responsibility for different areas," she says. Which is when I myself learn of the various committees. "The people in those groups can give you the best overview, tell you what problems arise and the best solutions so far."

The older man thanks them and tells them what a model and inspiration they are. There are smiles, and a young man who’s been videotaping the whole thing asks that something he didn’t catch be repeated. I notice then that one of my young homeless clients is sitting on the opposite edge of the group, smiling broadly, clearly pleased about the circumstance in which he finds himself. I tried to catch up with him as the group broke up, but he’d disappeared into the group, which by then had doubled in size. I left and went about my day.

The impression lingered, however. As it always does, and always will, going to the encampment and experiencing it live, for even a few minutes, brought a sense of reality and context to this fledgling movement that would not have been conveyed through an hour or two of media clips. What comes across on television as chaotic, indulgent and unfocused (to the unsympathetic), in the flesh reveals itself to be, if nothing else, earnest. I haven’t bothered to report any of the specific political messages I saw declared on various signs, because, to me, they aren’t the point.

It’s obvious to everyone attending to the current, world financial crisis, that solutions will be complex and will take time. What the Occupy movement reminds me of is that, even while the media and politicians try to wean themselves from the conditioned obsession with daily and quarterly fluctuations in currencies and markets, to get at more long-term indicators and mechanisms of the global economy, they haven’t come close to digging deep enough.

What the Occupiers are saying – all around the world – is that is won’t be enough to restore smooth, predictable functioning to an economy that bases itself on fiscal and monetary values, but ignores human values. They are saying this in many ways, pointing out lots of specific aberrations and injustices. But it seems to me to boil down to a howl of protest, a loud and sometimes ineloquent insistence that we’ve simply gotten things all wrong.

In recent years, I’ve often reflected back on the world I was entering into in my late teens, and what’s happened since. In the late sixties and the seventies, it seemed that my generation was going to be the one to tear down the moral and intellectual mindset that rationalized and upheld oppression of all kinds. It almost seems as though we were raised to do so. At that time, in the US at least, income disparities were shrinking. Oppression based on race and gender and sexual identity were all slowly being eroded. And yet, all that while, we allowed our attention to slip somehow, or we began to take too much credit for our own well-being. And the current monstrosity that wears the guise of international finance was allowed to grow. We blew it!

And so, my feeling, as I walked through St. James Park yesterday, was a combination of appreciation, excitement and hope. “Look at them,” I thought. They don’t seem as angry as we were, and not so extreme in their rejection of us as we were of our elders. There’s a focus and confidence about what I’m witnessing in these movements that inspires and touches me. And it’s all encapsulated somehow in the fact of seeing my homeless client in the midst of this rag tag group of young, practical activists. They sought him out and took him in, made him a part of their community and listen to what he has to offer. Maybe they will succeed. They’ve already sparked imaginations, shaped dialogues and enlarged the playing field.

My request, to each one of you who may read this, is that you go to one of the occupy encampments yourself, that you not simply dismiss it. Explore it. Talk with the occupiers. And Listen. Despite what you may be hearing, the lack of focus, and the organic, embryonic qualities of this movement are its strengths. And each of us has something to give.

Running Out Of...

2011-10-31T15:43:00.000-07:00

...Time?

Is that how you finished the phrase? I wonder. I know it isn't just me for whom time is the one thing that's always running out. Curious, isn't it? Of all the things that could complete that simple phrase. Of all the things that I actually can and do run out of. Because an added paradox in the equation is that it never happens. There's always time. It never runs out (until the moment of death, anyway, and does it matter after that?)

Still, there's this notion - this feeling, really - of trying to hold onto something, or hold back something, that's slipping away. Like sand through an hour glass, or the last rays of light in the sky.

That last thought trips a potent coming-of-age memory. I used to be a night owl. I loved the hours after midnight. When I was in my teens and twenties it was a favorite time for hanging out, for getting high and philosophizing with a friend, for listening to music, and taking solo walks through the city streets. It was the time I did my most creative writing - when I could escape my self-consciousness and be more playful and exploratory with words. The first time I lived with a lover, those late hours provided my solitary time, for reflecting and journal writing, for checking in with myself in a way that was difficult in the light of day.

In those early years, there was a romance about the late night. I experienced it as an unending well that only got deeper. The later it got, the more removed I was from ordinary reality, and from the constraints that daylight imposed. The middle of the night was a free and magical space, made all the more special by the rarity of my ventures into it.

I can't remember when it was that I stayed up all night for the first time, but I'm sure I experienced it with ambivalence. I made it through to the other side. But what a disappointment to discover that the deep didn't continue to deepen! Of course I knew about dawn, the cycle of the day, the rotation of the earth. But it had always felt like the night brought with it a kind of suspension of the ordinary rules of things. The clock, beyond a certain point, wasn't really measuring time anymore, so much as fathoms of depth, or portals through dimensions. It was a bit crushing to discover that behind the last curtain was not 'beyond', but merely street sweepers, buses resuming their routes, and people trudging off to work and school. At dawn, my miraculous oasis evaporated like the mirage it was.

And perhaps that loss of innocence marks the beginning of my losing struggle with time. Because the toll of those excursions into night only began with the lightening to the east. The greater price, exacted by way of exhaustion, was the dimming or outright loss of much of the next day. Either I dragged my way though it foggy brained, or slept through it in that dream-logged place that doesn't know time at all.

One way or another, it seems that it was during my twenties that the 'running out' of time began, and it's been accelerating ever since. But I'm finding my ways around that.

My first line of approach is simply through realizing that time never runs out. It only seems so, in relation to something I either want to happen, or want not to happen. But in life, there's always something to want and something to dread, and that fact itself seems enough to somehow quiet the tyrannical ticking of the clock. It's that Buddhist thing again, living in the moment.

I recall a minor character in the novel Catch-22, who occupied himself with watching television test patterns and the like. His theory was that if he made himself as bored as possible, his subjective experience of time would stretch, and he'd live longer. But of course, it doesn't really work like that, except in the instant. Those empty seconds may stretch, but the days and months will fly by, with nothing at all to distinguish one from the other. But when life is busy and rich, the minutes and hours may seem to fly, but looking back, I'm always amazed at how thick with life my time has been, how full and generous the days become.

But my best tactic recently has been to renounce multi-tasking! I'm done with trying to do several things at a time. I've decided that nothing robs me of time like that. I've become very happy with doing one thing at a time. Sometimes that means going back and forth from one thing to another, to another. But increasingly, when I'm doing something, I try and keep most of my attention on it, and not allow myself to be distracted with other things I have to get to. And it's made a change. It seems to work as a kind of spotlight, highlighting whatever I'm doing, wherever I am, whoever I'm with, in way that ... well, that seems to make the passage of time just not matter so much any more.

And one other thing. I've finally come to accept that I'm just late for everything. After fighting it - unsuccessfully - all these years, I've surrendered. Aaaaahh! How wonderful. Time! Do what you want with me!

Embrace of a Stranger: Toronto's Public Art

2011-10-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

Years ago, when I was still relatively new to Toronto, I was at Yonge and Eglinton one Sunday afternoon, looking to buy a newspaper. As I walked along the sidewalk, I was approached by a young woman. "Can I give you a hug?" she asked, smiling up at me. I hesitated for a moment, long enough for a suspicious thought or two to arise and fade. "Sure," I responded. The attractive young woman put her arms around my neck, while mine circled her waist, and for a few seconds we stood embracing in the middle of the sidewalk. I smiled and thanked her, she did likewise, and we continued on our separate ways. I noted that she was with two other youngish folk as she walked off. They all appeared happy and smiling. I remember resisting the unwanted impulse to check if I still had my wallet. After all, I wanted to believe.

I recall this minor episode here because I'm thinking about this city's public art. Because, to me, public art is much like the freely offered embrace of a stranger. It's unexpected, capable of stopping one in the middle of an otherwise mundane passage. It can be touching and inspirational. And it feels good. By public art, I don't mean the momuments and large scale commissions by governments or corportations, though I generally like that stuff too. What I refer to here is the artful graffiti, the murals, the commissions of small business owners, and the displays people make of their living spaces.

I loved the murals that adorned the public housing of Regent Park when I worked there, most of it the work of school kids on subsidized summer crews. And I'm blown away by the graffiti art overflowing the alleyways south of Queen Street West. Awhile ago, I was intrigued by the hundreds of reproductions of a single, sketched portrait, with the name "Andrew" inscribed on it, that were plastered on walls and lamp posts all through the downtown.

A few weeks ago, as I rode the streetcar east along Dundas, from the far west into the downtown, I was struck by the numnber, variety and quality of murals decorating the walls of small businesses on almost every block. And my single favorite mural these days, is the huge, surfing body that adorns a building just south of OCAD, on McCaul.

I didn't care much for the moose sculptures that were popping up everywhere a few years ago, but there are two recent examples of serial street art that I count among my favorites. First, there are the spray-painted, monochrome, abandonned bicycles, which a quick google search tells me are part of "the good bike" project. I hear that they've become controversial, that there's a political aspect to them, and that there's been a "this ain't art" backlash. But I think they're beautiful and enlivening.

My other favorite is the recent crop of decorated utility boxes. I've seen about a dozen of them around the city. They're clearly done by different artists - the styles vary so much. Some are crude and simple, others more elaborate or skillfully rendered. But for me, the main appeal is that artistically inclined citizens have taken the time and opportunity to decorate what would otherwise remain drab, utilitarian cabinets. Looking on the internet, I discovered that these painted boxes are flourishing in spots all over the world, particularly in California. And some of the designs are inspired.

It saddens me that, as with the bikes and some murals, critics sometimes come along and put a 'tag' on one of these creations, or deface it with random scrawls, or paint over it. But I understand that not everyone sees these efforts as 'art'. And I totally sympathize with the homeowner or small business person who sees the uninvited project as nothing more than vandalism. Different strokes for different folks, right?

But for me, these instances of public art are a positive symptom, of a city expanding in the dimension of community. Those who know me know that, while I LOVE Toronto, I don't find it a particularly friendly city. In fact, I often refer to the public coldness of my fellow Torontonians as the city's one blemish. In my mind, these tiny artistic eruptions resonate with that long ago embrace from a stranger. Like that hug, these murals and glowing bicycles and scenic utility boxes represent a positive and potent communal energy. They signify a consciousness of openness and sharing that stand as promising exceptions to Toronto's apparent standard of public aloofness. Like that chance embrace of long ago, public art is like a tiny bit of serendipity that eases my despair about our stingy public ways, our mute expressions, our wordless rides up and down the elevators. It embraces me, warms my spirit, and stands as a special ingredient of my image of the city that's my home.

Perfect Life

2011-10-25T23:04:00.000-07:00

I believe I have the Secret.

The secret to my perfect life is encapsulated in a short list of guidelines, rules of daily conduct if you will. They WORK. When I do these things daily, life is amazing: I’m balanced, productive, grounded in the present and I’m happy.

It’s wrong to call my list a secret though. It’s comprised of fairly obvious and simple guidelines, much like those that anyone would come up with who’s given much thought to the art of living well. A similar list could probably be distilled from most personal growth books or lifestyle seminars, or from spiritual practices. Not that I’ve explored enough of them to know...but I’m guessing.

I haven’t been scientific or systematic about creating this list. And it’s not in any final or polished form. It’s just that – over the years – as I’ve commenced any number of campaigns to get my shit together, to re-create myself, or to reach this or that lofty goal, it’s become clear that whenever I make real progress, it comes as a result of applying these elements, attending to these realities. So that gradually, this is what my own personal lessons for living distill down to. It’s my own list, in language that’s meaningful to me, and that fits the contours of life as I experience it.
Here’s my personal list of things to attend to daily:

Meditate
Eat Healthy
Do Good Work
Use and Move My Body
Be Loving
Write

That’s about it, really.

Of course, this list is both general and overlapping. It’s been longer and it’s been shorter. And I’m sure I’ll package it a bit differently the next time I try and encapsulate this great ‘secret’. Each of the six items is a kind of shorthand, and could be expanded upon, at great length. That would specify and complicate matters though, and without the guarantee of improvement.

I’ve termed these items differently at other times. For example, years ago, instead of ‘Meditate’, I’d have put ‘Pray’. And there’ve occasionally been elaborate regimens in place for items like ‘Eat Healthy’ and ‘Use and Move my Body’. And of course, the various religions and personal development sciences and psycho-therapeutic schools can offer up entire menus of concepts, tactics and beliefs to instruct and guide around the ‘how’ of each of these rules. But I no longer think that the ‘how’ is the meat of it, really.

What’s most important about my rules is that they balance and connect me, and they ground me as a human being in the world. The above is just the wording that works for me in a personal way.

My problem is that I’ve never in all my life managed to keep to my rules for very long at a time. Invariably, one or more of the six starts to slip. I miss a day of meditation, or go on a chocolate cake binge. Or I get indulgent and forgetful of my relationships, or slack about work. I get frustrated with my creative output and put it aside, or tired of going to the gym and so take up the remote. Yes, the human being loses focus and enters into drift, despite the angelic intent.

But even that’s okay. Eventually, I notice, I come back. My resolve and focus last awhile, then I slip again. It’s so hard to keep all six rules in place on the day-to-day. So much so that I’ve accepted this inability as simply something that is, a part of life, of being human. The inability to keep to such a simple set of rules – though doing so would transform my life – has become my most potent lesson in humility. It’s like ‘being present’: simple, natural...but for me, so far...impossible.

For all my slackness and failure to measure up, though, my list is a fine list. I’m glad I have it. Practicing these rules brings me glimpses of the perfection that life is. Mastery will undoubtedly continue to elude me. But I’ll keep right on trying.

Haul Out

2011-10-23T20:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, our boats came out of the water, onto the hard. A heavy, lifting crane arrived at 7am, and the twenty-five or so boats that occupy our tiny marina were lifted one by one, and set onto trailers, blocks and cradles. It was a cool, overcast Fall day, but warm enough, with us moving cradles and hauling cinder blocks, taking down masts and cleaning hulls.

The boats have a nude look without masts, sails and rigging. And with the boats hauled out of Ashbridges bay (the other two, larger marinas had their haul outs last weekend) there's a look of desertion to the near empty docks and fingers. Masts were coming down all through the week, in preparation. Vaughn, one of our most enthusiastice boaters, left his for the final afternoon, so he could get in one last, decent weather sail, after several days of raining and blowing kept us from venturing out. One well out-fitted 30-footer remains in the water at day's end. Nancy doesn't want the trouble of taking down her mast, so will take her vessel to the portlands sometime over the next couple of weeks, where it will winter in Ulee's yard. Which means that some of our group will get some late season sailing in, on her boat, before it too hits the hard.

Lyma prepared coffee, peameal bacon and egg sandwiches, muffins and pie for breakfast, chili and shepherd's pie for lunch, which was supplemented by Romanian sausages that Sebastian cooked up on the barbecue. Ponczka bought bottles of our homemade wine, and there was beer, and some of the guys still had rum and scotch, maybe marijuana, left over from the previous night's hanging out - the season's last with the boats still on water.

But partying and drinking were by no means a focus of the day. The mood was bitter-sweet, as always at haul out. It's a communal time, with all assembling to assist with one another's boats. There's catching up with those who didn't manage much sailing this year, or power-boating - we have those too. And for those who got out a lot, there's reminiscing, and a sense of having used the season well, and already looking forward to launch, sometime in May.

We've been in the marina for five or six years now. This year it felt more like a community than ever before. Several of the boater's virtually transplant themselves from house or apartment when summer rolls around, enjoying the mind and spirit shift of life on the softer element. It's more romance than indulgence, and more aspiration than adventure, but it absolutely feeds an appetite that straight city living can't satisfy. This summer, every night found a handful of boats occupied. And on weekends it became a small neighborhood, with visits among boats, barbecues in the yard,and gatherings in the clubhouse.

Through some magic that has yet to be explained, a number of our members are professional musicians, and quite a few others are committed amateurs, so it's common to hear guitars, keyboards and voices sounding out across the water. Yesterday, it was agreed that we'd have a final party next weekend. It'll be a good way to finish off the year, marking the end of one season and the beginning of another with celebratory music, acknowledging this point on the cycle, that will eventually bring us around again to rolling across the waters, and riding the waves.

What Home Is

2011-10-13T21:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meditating on the subject of home, what it is, what allows a place to grow into that designation. I’ve lived in quite a few places, for varying lengths of time. The places I’ve lived for five years or more number 5, and together count for all but about 10 of my 57 years. There are another 2 places I lived for two years or more. Another 3 where I lived six months to a year or so, and a few others where I spent a month or more. That’s quite a few addresses; lots of different places that served the purposes of home in one way or another. But really, when I think about it, only 4 of those places became home for me.

            I started out in Detroit and lived there my first five years or so. But I don’t think I would’ve considered it home if that was the end of it. Those were my formative years, sure, but in the early memories I call up, there’s hardly any sense of ‘place’ beyond the house I was born into, and those domiciles of relatives that were interchangeable with my own. But Detroit was home in my consciousness for a long, long time, and there was pride in that before I knew any other place. Because I was born there, and my mother was born there, because it’s the place my father adopted as home when he ran away from his birth place on the night of his high school graduation. And it’s the place I returned to for long stays, summer after summer during my teens, when my growth was marked in large part by the changes I saw in my cousins, and that uncles and aunts saw in me. And whatever other places have taken Detroit’s place as home, it is forever the place I’m from; it remains a part of me, and I part of it. And it’s the place my family roots begin.

          New York City was my next home, both in the sense that I spent the next chunk of my life there, and that it claimed me and I came to identify myself as a New Yorker. My individuality developed in those years. New York was the place I began to know myself, to make independent and life-changing choices, where I began to see myself in the broader contexts of community, calling, and the world. New York was the first place I made the conscious choice to leave, and from then on, my destinations were largely my own choice.

           But then came a span of a dozen years, during which I lived in lots of places – some that I loved. But the bar had been raised, so far as what it took to make a place my home. And the next place to meet the standard was Seattle.

This matter of home has much to do with the simple passage of time. But when choice is figured in, time spent in a place is no longer a simple thing; it can be a measure of commitment, or of hope. I lived in Seattle long enough for it to grow into home. It was there that I began to recognize that part of what home represents to me is the richness and personal resonance a place develops, from the layering of experience that comes with time. Like the difference between a short story and a novel, that between a place merely lived in, and a place that was home, is time and the blossoming of growth and change, including growth in attachment to and relationship with a place.

A particular nugget about how and why Seattle was home is that I watched others grow there. The person in my life who came closest to being a child of mine was ten years old when I came to Seattle. And by the time I’d left, she was an adult who’d travelled the world and was attending an out-of-state university. Similarly, I did social work there long enough that I began to encounter young adults who were settled into jobs and relationships, or graduating university, or serving long-term sentences in prison, whom I’d first met as traumatized pre-teens in a group home. Some of my most substantial romantic partnerships took place there, and my first writings to see print were composed there. Perhaps the best way to sum it up is to say that the “I” that moved to Seattle wasn’t the same “I” that left there twelve years later. I didn’t even go by the same name.

But finally, home became Toronto. I said earlier that I chose my cities of residence after New York. But, in fact, on more than one occasion that place was determined in partnership with a woman in my life, and that’s the case with Toronto. In fact, if not for the woman I married and came here to live with, it would have been inconceivable to me that I move to Toronto. It’s not that I had anything against the city. In fact, I’d never been here before the week I was married, and knew little about it. But I was – and still am, really – in love with Montreal, a place I spent large chunks of two magical summers in my university days. Yes, I love Montreal, like I Love San Francisco, and love Paris. But my time in these cities was transient, and my love had more to do with a time in my life, a freedom and sense of possibility, and with a romance of circumstance and mood and chemistry, than it had to do with growing in and knowing a place.

Toronto is my home in ways that transcend my love for such other places. I was first attracted to Toronto because it holds in its streets the rhythms and accents of so much of the world. But what I came to love is a city of neighbourhoods, where each feels open to all others. It’s not just a busy city, but also an alive city, in which movement and art, invention and expression serve the broadly shared purpose of good living.

There are also the ways in which my personal life has intersected with the life of this city. I’ve been blessed to experience Toronto through so many of its cultural and social facets. And in the course of that, I’ve transitioned through entire phases of life. I even contemplate the possibility of my last life phase ending here.

But all of this has me reconsidering my initial premise: that places become home by meeting particular, time related standards. Yes, it’s so...in part. But maybe this makes for only a difference in degree, rather than a difference in kind. I remember another place I felt a sense of home, but in an oddly concentrated way, and for a very short while. It was my grandmother’s house, in rural Indiana. I went there to stay with her, in the ninety-fourth year of her life, after my grandfather had died. I went there to be company to her, to take care of errands and some house-keeping (not much, mind you; grandma was incredibly able and active at ninety-three, and didn’t relish turning over her routine so that she could sit and waste).

I didn’t much like the tiny town of Shelburn and environs. The landscape was ragged and stingy, and the weather oppressive. I found the inhabitants mostly as alien as they undoubtedly found me, and there was little culturally or socially that interested me. So why do I include this reminiscence, then? Why does this memory well up so unaccountably? I guess to reveal something to me, to form a lesson, broaden a meaning, to break down an artificial delineation

Because there was home there in Shelburn. It resided in tiny doses, in the artifacts of family: in sepia photos folded in albums, in the biscuit dough that grandma worked by hand in the huge mixing bowl on the kitchen table, in the odors that lingered in the crumbling barn and the long-unused chicken coop, and in my grandpa’s Illinois railroad watch that she dug out of a drawer and presented to me one afternoon. And mostly, it resided in the single personage of that old woman, her tongue loosened for the first time in my memory, giving her over to sharing memories of my Dad and my aunt as kids, her marriage to grandpa, and their struggle with the local white folks when they became the first blacks to move into the community, even of her first time seeing an airplane, circling overhead at a county fair when she was twenty-one. Home resided in all that, and in watching her unwind her cascade of white hair every night, to comb it, then roll it up again, while she shared her wisdom, much of it to do with the faults and blessings of being a male member of my line.

It’s a feeling and memory of home that brings things almost full circle, like a psychic return to Detroit, but through a different portal. Home embodied in small, personal details, and almost disconnected from the broader environment. Suggesting to me that home is something carried inside, and released in those places that call it forth, that allow it to open and breathe, places where my inner reality somehow finds resonance.

Which takes me one step further now. Wasn’t that a little bit of home in Atlanta that summer, taking evening walks in Piedmont Park, and in the music building at Exeter, where I’d go at lonely times to pick at the keys of a piano? Don’t those love affairs with San Francisco and Paris and Montreal all contain a little bit of home, of the self expanded, of kinship spread thin but amplified, of love circulating out, then back again?

Free Fall

2011-09-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

I’m in my season.

The season of release. The season of settling, of coming down from the high of summer.
The season of hitting ground, then digging down, to the root of things.

It’s the time when time turns backward, peeking around at distant beginnings, while age reinvents itself, and youth comes into maturity.

It’s slow death generating new life.

Autumn brings the introspection that clears the sightlines to the stretched out world, drawing me into meandering walks, coagulating thoughts, dreams imploding to some core clarity that

I track down with deliberate, echoing footfalls,

Pick up from the dust at the side of the road,

Brush with tentative and questioning fingers

Then slip into my pocket, to carry me along.

Close Calls & Miracles

2011-09-26T23:48:00.000-07:00

So many close calls lately. So many that it seems as though Life is whispering a message I’m just not getting. There was falling a couple of weeks ago, and landing on the back corner of my skull, with almost my entire weight behind the impact. A miracle that I didn’t break my neck, and that aside from the knot that sprouted on the back of my noggin, there were no after effects, not even any pain. Then, just yesterday, I dropped my entire ring on keys into the lake while parking the sailboat. Miraculously, there was an old roofer’s magnet lying around the boathouse, and on the third try it hauled up what felt like the keys to my entire life. The remote to the car even worked. There’ve been a couple of close calls on the bike lately, and an instance or two of leaving something where it should have grown feet and walked off, but didn’t.

I often think of my life in terms of flow. When I’m effortlessly gliding through my days and weeks, I can’t help but feel that I’m doing just what I ought to be doing, that my own personal “universe is unfolding as it should”. So, if there’s anything to this notion, what might it mean to have so many things almost go disastrously wrong, only to suddenly right themselves? Should I be rushing to the convenience store to buy a lottery ticket every time some gruesome possibility eludes me? Or should I simply be more alert, attentive to my steps and choices?

It’s more observation than question, really. I decided years ago that, when it comes to the question of miracles – that is: Do they never happen? Or do they happen all the time? – my full endorsement goes to the latter. One might argue that, by definition, the miraculous can’t be commonplace. But there’s wonderful evidence that it is, and it lies in the simple fact of being, as in: me being here, and you being here. Biology tells us that in the human sexual act millions of sperm cells are released, each of which contains a different variant of the genetic material, and hence, a different potential person. Which means that every single one of us human inhabitants of Earth is the one sperm cell that made it, against odds of many millions to one. Miraculous!

Not that it matters what we believe about such things. Like they say, gravity works whether we believe in it or not. Personally, I enjoy reflecting on it...the wonder of it all. No ticket necessary. The lottery is won.

Wealth

2011-09-08T23:19:00.000-07:00

I have more than I can do with - so much extra. And this is sometimes daunting. There are so many actualities, and so many more possibilities. And I keep reaching.

Imagine a scenario: You and your favorite food...and an appetite! Nothing better than that, right? Well, whatever your favorite food is - let's say steak, just for the hell of it - no matter how perfect, it could use something to go along with it, right? So, let's add a baked potato, with butter, sour cream, salt and pepper. That improves on perfection, doesn't it? How about we add some asparagus? Maybe sauteed mushrooms. A really good steak sauce couldn't hurt. A nice salad to go with. Maybe an appetizer to get things started. Oh yeah, mustn't forget the wine. What better way to top off perfection than with dessert?

Then coffee, then brandy. Then a cigar. How about the music. And the setting ought to be just right: comfortable furniture, a nice room, with a view, overlooking something impressive, and close, but not too close. And the weather should be just so. And it should be early evening, dark but with a touch of blue lingering on the horizon, and a crescent moon rising. And...for company...!

Seems a little like my life, that. Something in that notion of constantly improving on perfection. Maybe a little neurotic? (is neurotic even a concept anymore?) My life is good, very good, even - yes - perfect!...like that single bite of steak can be. But nowhere in this perfection does there seem to be space for the concept: enough. There's only the space for the baked potato.

Is there something wrong with a something that always needs to be growing, that needs always to be expanding, improving? All my life I've heard something to the effect of "grow or die!" I don't know that I believe it anymore. My body isn't really growing any longer. But I'm healthy and continue to exist. Businesses talk about the need to grow, to generate profit, to diversify product and capture new markets. But there are not-for-profit's that work. Everybody gets paid, there just isn't any extra.

It seems to me that so much wealth - so much extra - has become tiring. And beside the point. Slow and same maybe, for awhile.

Clearing Landmark

2011-08-31T21:49:00.000-07:00

I am a huge admirer of the programs of Landmark Education. I’m currently finishing up a 10 part seminar series on the subject of Excellence, which has me re-enlivened in my work and recognizing some inauthenticities on my part which have blocked me in important areas. A few years ago, I took the renowned Landmark Forum, which was intense and brilliant in its effect of “clearing out” emotional and perceptual blocks that lie in the way of me being focused and powerful in important areas of my life. And twenty-five years ago, before Landmark existed in its current form, I was involved for two and a half years with the Breakthrough Foundation, a non-profit offshoot of Landmark’s predecessor, Werner Erhard and Associates. That program was my introduction to the ‘technology’ that Werner Erhard put together, that lies at the heart of Landmark Education and its programs today. And that long ago youth program remains one of the very best youth programs I’ve worked with, encountered or even heard about, in my almost 30 years in youth services.

But while being such an enthusiastic advocate of Landmark, and having such respect for the brilliance of its founder, I’ve always had a degree of discomfort with its evangelical zealotry. During those years I was involved with Breakthrough, I steadfastly resisted participating in the Forum. On my part, there was both stubbornness and insecurity at work there. I wasn’t going to be pressured into doing anything. I admired the intense and confronting ideas and tactics I saw at work, but would only give into them so far. While the rumoured notions of brainwashing were clearing absurd, there was a degree to which practitioners of Erhard’s technology bought into a kind of group-think, with its own language and value system, and I didn’t want any part of that. But, my insecurities came into play in that I could see how powerful this language and these values were, and I saw how much these practitioners credited Erhard with ‘transforming’ them, and I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone or anything for shaping my life.

Years later, having experienced psychiatry and 12-Step programs, having more deeply examined my religious upbringing, and beginning to derive the benefits of meditation, I no longer felt so vulnerable to powerful ideas and the changes they generated. I was both more trusting of my strengths and more accepting of my failings, and therefore had less need of total autonomy of thought and idea. And so, completely removed from the recruiting fervor of Erhard’s followers, and remembering the power of the methodology, I sought Landmark out, and enrolled in the Forum.

It was simply brilliant. It was everything those colleagues of mine from long ago had said it would be – a powerful inquiry into ways of being, that step by step invited participants to discover and remove ingrained ways of thinking and perceiving that limited ones Living. And yet, there was that zealotry again, that constant exhortation to bring your friends, bring your family, bring your workmates, and even the strangers that you meet, that they too might benefit.

To me, having been brought up in a Baptist Church community, this type of appeal was both familiar and off-putting. I’d spent much of my adolescence and young adulthood reconciling my appreciation of much of the ethos of Christianity with my rejection of the rest, and with my recognition that other spiritual practices had as much or more to offer in support of spiritual growth and love and life as the preachings I’d been raised on. Any message that came close to sounding like a call to “the one, true path” was immediately suspicious and distasteful to me. The desire to share ones learning and growth and even one’s enlightenment, so that others “can have what I have” is a generous a and noble intention. Except when it’s coupled with the certainty that there is no other legitimate path, that any other way is a wrong way, and that others must therefore be saved from their failure to know life precisely as “I know it”.

Is this the mindset that the promoters of Landmark speak from? I don’t think so. But it’s close, it’s related. And I’ve struggled to come up with the distinction to define it, to nail down what I find so unsettling about Landmark’s constant, ever-present self-promotion.

When I signed up for my current workshop – again, independent of any outside invitation or pressure – it wasn’t long before my old complaint re-surfaced. I thought I’d come to terms with the fact that, well, Landmark is a commercial, for-profit enterprise, after all. Of course it will use its success to generate new business. And who better to go out and get that business than those who’ve just enjoyed the rich benefit of an outstanding service, impeccably delivered? But I could not get beyond the sense that, on some level, integrity was missing.

To my great relief and surprise, it was Landmark itself that delivered the distinction that clarified for me the issue I’ve been having with Landmark’s promotional zeal. It came during session number 8 of my current seminar on Excellence. The distinction brought to light was Hidden Agendas. Boom! That’s it. The seminar leader led us through an exploration of the phenomenon: professing a commitment to one thing while secretly harbouring a different intent, a different purpose. We looked at how disempowering it is when motives are kept hidden, unrecognized, unacknowledged – how this keeps a person from having the clearing in which to act powerfully, in which to be that which will bring a commitment to fruition.

The issue is that Landmark participants are constantly being encouraged to bring others to Landmark, ostensibly so that they can benefit from Landmark’s teachings. But what goes unacknowledged is that this is part of a business plan, that there are attendance and income targets being considered. It’s not that the aim to help others isn’t real. Landmark, which is owned by its staffers, has a great product, of which it can and should be proud. But when its self-interest in conflated with its message of open expression, of “speaking from possibility”, of honest communication without intending a specific result, integrity is lost.

In my reflection over the years about my dis-ease with Landmark’s approach, what often comes to mind is my very different experience with the Ontario Vipassana Centre, the non-profit organization that teaches and promotes Buddhist meditation. These two ventures are related in a very significant way in that, through very different approaches, they generate remarkably similar teachings, about the power and freedom of being fully present to life, in the moment and free of the anxieties related to obsession with past and future. But the Vipassana Centre hardly sells itself at all. When you go to your first 10-day training, you can’t pay for the service even if you want to. Nothing will be accepted from you until you’ve completed the course. And even then, there’s no pressure to give, only the message that any gift will assist the organization in speading its teaching to others. And in the many years I’ve been on the Vipassana Centre’s email list, I’ve never been asked or encouraged to recruit others – I’ve only been invited, in the mildest terms possible – to bring others to guest events or introductions. It’s an organization that sustains itself by donation alone. (Info about The Ontarion Vipassana Centre, which is located outside of Barrie, Ontario can be found at www.dhamma.org. Interestingly enough, if you go to www.dharma.org you will find info about Vipassana courses offered by the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Massachusetts. The latter charges about $100. per day. Hmmm?)

Naturally, a for-profit and a non-profit entity are different creatures. There’s nothing inherently wrong in deriving income and making a living from a product that is essentially spiritual. But the spiritual, transformative, growth-generating principles at the core of the product must be honoured in the presentation of the product, if integrity is to be preserved.

I intend to present this reflection to my seminar leader and to others connected to Landmark. I’m hoping that it will be well received, because I believe that what Landmark offers is invaluable. I can’t but believe that in eliminating this inauthenticity, it will become a more vibrant, a more meaningful and a more effective company. Acknowledging and taking responsibility for its Hidden Agenda will create a huge clearing for Landmark. And inside of that clearing...? Oh, what Possibilities!

Man, on a Pier, in the Dark

2011-08-24T12:52:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine is drowning. He is angry, obsessed with the circumstances of his undoing, and with the ocean of indifference that washes over him, wave by wave, day in and day out. Maybe it's his anger that has kept him from drowning. Because he's determined to have justice. He did not place himself in this sea of troubles. He should not be here, but on firm land somewhere. Or in a boat at least, with a steady hand on the tiller, the power of the winds held comfortably in the fold of his sails.

My friend won't swim to shore, because drowning is his evidence, his proof of how he's been wronged. Difficult enough to get anyone to pay attention as it is, treading the deep dark waves, with only the occasional piece of floating detritus to lend a bit of buoyancy, while he lifts his voice in a roar, demanding his vengeance, his day of retribution. How much less chance of being heard once he is safe and dry again.

His story is that he was walking alone on a pier, in the dark. He was doing nothing more than passing his time, attending to nothing but to the stuff of his everyday, making it more real by remembering it after, or by looking ahead to what it would be. He could hear the surf, but could not see it. He felt the spray of the ocean across his face, a heavy, stinging blast occasionally slapping him out of inattention, to notice the chill in the air, the dampness gathering in the fabric of his thin jacket.

The truth is, he was aware of nothing more than a shape that brushed up against him. He will say that the shape was a man, and that the brush was a shove. He will say that he felt the malevolence, and further imagine that he was being stalked all the while he walked there, his aggressor waiting for the moment of his ripest vulnerability.

During his hours and days in the life-draining waters he has put various faces to the shadow. His past is peopled with enemies, declared and not, and with the envious, and with those secret agents of reasonless hate. And though he has no solid clues, my friend knows that, as there is logic and reason and justice in the world, when his day comes, he will point out his prosecutor and name him. He will no longer be shadow, but flesh, like his flesh, bone like his bone, with thoughts and dreams of his own, however twisted by spite. This tormentor will be named, and then will know how things come around, that there is a right order, and how courage prevails over slinking meanness. And on that day, in that future, my friend will be dry and content. Fulfilled.

But I say to my friend: swim instead. I ask him to raise his arm and to beat his anger usefully against the waves, then to do it again, until he is moving. I ask him to choose a direction in the blinding mist and foam, and to believe in that, instead of all the rest. Save yourself, I say to him, because there is no one else. All the rest are phantoms. I ask him...but you see, I'm not there, but only a whisper in the wind myself, which is nothing against the roar of nature he's battling, and the tumult of his own anger. That he will hear me is my own whispered wish, and only if dreams speak to one another is there a hope.

And the Poor get Poorer

2011-08-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

     They are shockingly obscene statistics, particularly for the self-proclaimed "Greatest Country on Earth". In the USA, the top 20 percent of the population owns 84 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 percent owns less than 1/3 of 1 percent! These facts are presented and discussed in a PBS piece I've linked to this post. One of it's commentators points out that this distribution of wealth is comparable to that of China, where half of the people are still peasants, and to some of the poorest despotic regimes in Africa.

     One of the more depressing aspects of this imbalance is that most Americans have no clue of this reality. They/We actually imagine that we're living in a far more egalitarian society. As reporters do an informal street survey, asking people to guess how the US stands in terms of economic equality, one guy even suggests that the US is an egalitarian society, that the bottom 20 percent owns a portion of wealth roughly equal to that owned by the top 20 percent!

     The other day, Warren Buffet, one of the world's wealthiest men, wrote a piece in which he calls or substantially higher taxes to the ultra-wealthy. He modestly asserts that while his own skill (which he calls the ability to judge value) carries far less social usefulness than that of a nurse, the structure of our economy rewards him vastly more than it does that nurse. And he calls for a re-balancing. But while he does so, a substantial number of citizen voters (and a disproportionately larger segment of the rich politicians who claim to represent them) demand that the rich keep their historically low tax rates. They demand this on principle, and as moral rightness. And they call for the slashing of the 'entitlement programs' that keep the shrinking middle class barely afloat, and the working classes mired in poverty.

     The notion that taxing is the stealing of peoples' money ignores the reality that it's only the 'community' that people create (and the markets, laws, infrastructure, shared language, customs and values) that makes "wealth" possible. And when the quirks of a market system lead to a reality where people can become billionaires by virtue of paying someone to shuffle papers (money & stock certificates), or by guessing right about the ups and downs of markets, while others labor with their bodies and minds yet can't escape poverty, something is drastically out of whack.

     I can't but feel that my generation - the Boomer Generation - has failed miserably to sustain the vision of fairness, equality and justice that was glowing ever brighter as we came of age. We exited the 1960's full of fire about social justice and ending the various forms of oppression. But along the way, we became addicted to our toys, complacent in our comforts, distracted by the accelerating amusements of technology and the explosion of individual choice. We've been enflamed by the battles for rights assigned by gender and race, by religion and sexual orientation. But it seems we lost sight of the battle for basic resources, for housing, for education, for the simple opportunity to live and raise families free of crushing economic pressures. We've created an economic system built on the imperatives of competition and the need for relentless growth, and it's led to a country that now boasts the largest percent of its population behind bars, a growing number of its children growing up in poverty. Basic health and education are increasingly out of reach. And our streets, airports and borders look more and more like those of a police state.

     Is this the America we want?

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec11/makingsense_08-16.html

Making Wine

2011-08-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

I imagined that making wine was hard
That it required some esoteric knowledge
or a paranormal sensitivity at least
Same as being happy
As meeting and keeping your right love

But the only hard thing is the truce with time
Believing in the possibility of wine, with only grape juice on hand
Other than wait, there is so little to do
Only choosing the grapes...for flavour and sweetness
Then letting time do it’s work
Time, and maybe biology... or physics
Or whatever science it might be

I pour the juice into the green glass carboy
Shaped beautifully like a rolling tear
And fermentation begins, filling the house with sweet odors
And the burbling chatter of the airlock

There’s the invitation to go on with life
keep my appointments
generate all the plans and accidents of my every day
Nothing to do here
The magic is propelled by its own incantation
a murmuring conspiracy of grape and germ and air
I’ve done my part
The rest happens when I’m not looking
Not being the hero, the mover, the cause

And so the world takes on a different hue and tone and weight
From not exactly waiting, nor being passive
Merely riding out that truce with time
The gist of which is: pick grapes when they are ready
Siphon off the first fermentation, when it is done
Wait some more – but not treading time, rather in forgetful being and doing in the world
The wine will come

Then the bottling and corking...
And I know – I’ve known all along
About all the promises made, kept and broken,
The sunrises, sunsets and moonshines
The passings and meetings and lingering
Greetings and goodbyes
That have passed in the making of a bottle

And I’m faced with a truth
That there is no making of wine
Because wine makes itself

Who, What and Why

2011-08-08T22:38:00.000-07:00

    I received a phone call from a landlord the other day. I was surprised to hear from him because the last clients of mine that he'd rented to had become a nightmare for him. They were a group of friends who'd seemed to operate well as a unit. But when the young woman left, the two guys proved incapable of maintaining any standards. They'd invited friends and acquaintences to camp out on their floors, and the place had been trashed. They let food containers, empty cans and bottles and dog feces accumulate on the balcony, and they got into arguments with other tenants, some of whom had threatened to move out. One of the visitors had bombarded a middle-aged woman with obscenities when she refused to admit her to the building. It turned out that the woman was a relative of the building's owner. And random street kids had begun to stop by at all hours and even to scale the balcony when there was no quick response to their shouts for admission.

    So while this landlord had previously housed two other pairs of my clients, who'd done well and had never drawn negative attention to themselves, the last situation had soured things, and it went without saying that he wasn't likely to take in clients of mine again. Though the relationship had ended respectfully, and with sincere good wishes and empathy of both sides, I hadn't expected to ever hear from him.

    Except that now, several months later, a problem had arisen relating to one of those other rentals, that had seemingly gone so well. My clients had left the building some months before. The couple had broken up, after one of them suddenly spiraled into mental illness and returned to the streets. The remaining individual, had quickly fallen behind with the rent, and in order to make up the shortfall, invited a cousin to stay with her, with the landlord's reluctant consent. When my client found the situation unworkable, she too left, leaving the apartment in the hands of the cousin. He too fell behind in the rent, but took no successful action to do anything about it, eventually abandonning the apartment and all its furnishings, which the original young couple had received free from a local furniture bank.

     The reason for the landlord's call wasn't any of this. He didn't hold me accountable for the actions of the cousin, nor for his arrears. And though he'd lost some income on non-payment of rent, and would pay out more to have the belongings cleared and the apartment returned to rentable condition, this scenario wasn't too far off the routine run of things in the low-end rental market. The reason for his call was something a bit less usual.

     The tenants, when abandonning the apartment, had left four cats behind. When the property manager entered the premises, after posting notice, he found two malnourished adult cats and two kittens. It was a wonder the animals weren't dead. They were found during a period of stifling heat, and what water and food might have been left out for them was clearly long gone. The landlord was calling for my help.

     Technically, the cats were now the landlord's responsibiliy. According to the Landlord Tenant Act, the animals were to be treated like any other property. If the landlord wanted to 'dispose' of 'the property', he had to post notice, then 'maintain the property' for 30 days. Not surprisingly, this landlord wasn't willing to do that. Even if he did keep the pets for the month, there would still be fees he'd have to pay to turn them over to Animal Control or the Humane Society. The landlord confided to me that, if he couldn't come up with any better solution, he'd simply have the cats put out to the street, to fend for themselves.

     And so, I took the matter on. To make a long story short, I was able to reach an agreement with the landlord, and with a helpful supervisor at Animal Control, that 'for the well-being of the animals' I would pick them up from the apartment and deliver them to animal control as 'strays'. This was done, and the personnel at Animal Control took them in without question, though with an eyebrow raised at the notion that I'd 'happened upon' four stray cats. But they, like I, recognized that, in finding a way around the technicalities of the law, we were saving four cats from certain misery or death, and giving them a shot at adoption.

     What sticks with me about this episode is trying to imagine the frame of mind that led someone to abandon the apartment with four live cats locked inside. And, it led initially to some thoughts about my own clients, supposing them somehow culpable, though, so far as I know, they had nothing at all to do with this.

     But this situation made me angry. I wanted to assign blame. I found myself judging, and I determined that anyone capable of such callous indifference to innocent life was undeserving of support in their own struggle toward fulfillment. I wanted the suffering of those cats to be a lesson - a lesson underscored by a like suffering - to those I judged indifferent to any suffering but their own.

     But I cannot go forward from that place. It's too narrow, too locked in, by the rigidity of judging, by the harshness of a zero-sum mentality, by the brittleness of my own certainty as to the state of the mind and soul of another. How to judge? How to assign blame? How to assess sin? And, if there is some kind of blindness operating here, is it a condition of the eyes alone, or a disease of the soul?

     Is this a convoluted, intellectual path to negotiate over a few abandonned cats?... Maybe. And maybe it's not far enough. I haven't come out where I imagined when I began writing this piece. It was originally intended to suggest an uncomplicated moral lesson. But now that seems more difficult to arrive at. And not quite honest. I have only to remember my own obsessions, my own locked-in preoccupation with complaints, mistreatment, with real and imagined pains, to also remember how such things can swallow up the very sun. I can imagine (because I can remember) that the person who left those cats did so convinced that it was the most generous, humane and hopeful act possible. The intention to give moral instruction seems pretty arrogant, and beyond the point. Anyone can be judged guilty. But does that in itself change anything?

The Transient Village

2011-08-05T23:32:00.000-07:00

    They spring up every weekend between late May and early September - temporary encampments, of people who have travelled from the cities and suburbs and the small towns, to enjoy a couple or three days close to nature. The campgrounds begin to swell with new-comers on Friday afternoon, and by Saturday the congregation reaches its peak. The village is formed.

    Cars and pick-up trucks park on the individual campsites, and tents of various kinds spring up between them. Others bring trailers of various types, and yet others come in small or full-sized recreational vehicles that are like small mobile homes.

     Most campers are couples, families with their children, or small pockets of friends. But often there are gatherings of large groups. They might be sprawling, extended families, associations of friends or neighbors, or groups gathering to celebrate some occassion or anniversary.

    These temporary communities spill over with children, splashing in the lakes, running in packs along the paths, rediscovering and inventing ancient and new games. Adults make their own fun, going on excursions to hike in woods, to kayak or powerboat on the waterways, driving into the nearby towns or exploring the countryside. There is occassional music to compete with the sounds of the birds and insects, made with instruments and voices, or blaring from car radios. The beer and wine begin to flow by mid afternoon, and they animate the camp fires that spring up at dusk and burn until the early morning.

    On a Saturday evening, these appear as entrenched little villages. Hammocks swing between the trees, cook stations sit on picnic tables, and camp chairs form circles around the fire pits. Clothes hang to dry and tarps are strung up as protection against the rain that is never so predictable.

    On Sunday - or Monday, if it's a long weekend - the camps begin to be broken down. There are always the few who begin packing up right after breakfast, perhaps because they've come furthest, or are simply anxious for the highway or for home. By mid-afternoon, the village no longer exists. There remain only a few occupied campsites, and they are scattered. Some of these are merely lingering, waiting for the rush of campers homeward to diminish, or just stretching the getaway for as long as possible. There are the privileged few who are here for another day or two, maybe a week. Occassionally, a family that is hopping cross country, park by park, camp by camp.

    It feels like part of an ancient process, this springing up and subsequent dismantling of villages. Neighbors for a day or two go their separate ways. A home is erected or inflated out of a trailer or the back of a car, only to be collapsed back into it later, leaving no trace that it ever was. The transient community that forms under the stars might be a modern counterpart of a nomadic tribe, except that the bonds between us are more abstract and far flung. We'll never come together in just this combination again.

Where Music Comes From

2011-07-30T16:36:00.000-07:00

Young Adash pulls his guitar from its case. He begins to pick and strum, and, at first, it’s a bit jarring. There’s nothing prepared or practiced here. He picks one note, or three, and he follows it with others. I recognize the slightly muddy aura of a guitar strummed open-stringed. This is the instrument itself talking firstly, Adash only follows it, pressing down on a string and responding to the vibration that shudders or twangs into existence, born into the air, into space.

This isn’t music, exactly. It’s an exploration into sound. It’s a tactile “What might this sound like?”, followed by a “Let’s see what plucking this note will do.” It’s music by questioning, by being willing for the surprise to spring out of the instrument and direct the hand to do the next thing.

I’m enjoying Adash’s music. No – not music – the sound he invites from his guitar. And so I walk to the car and I retrieve my alto, take out a reed and put it between my lips, allowing my saliva to soften it, preparing to play.

Play is what this is. The essence of music, not? Adash is nowhere close to professional. But this is a responsive, second-by-second musicality. It reminds me, it remembers me. This is what all novice musicians sound like in that early period, when they are willing to allow an instrument to be teacher, to teach its own voice, its own expressions.

I get my sax put together and go and sit by Adash. He looks up and, for a moment seems to slow and shift away from what he’s been doing. Maybe he’s expecting the standard, “Do you know ‘Body & Soul?’ type of question.” But instead I ask him just to keep on doing what he’s doing. Which isn’t a fair request, really, though it’s the best one possible, if something needs saying. I know because I remember doodling. I did it with my guitar, thirty years ago. No time, no money, no talent – I thought – for lessons. No space for taking this seriously. Only space for playing. Which isn’t really ‘doing’ anything.

Playing? That’s what it’s called, isn’t it? Playing music. A game, a joke, a free-hearted, goal-less exploration of vibration and sound, the confluence and the channelling of something like meaning, like feeling, like living, into something called notes.

Adash and I play together. And it’s some of the freest playing I can remember. He lays down gorgeously invented, brilliantly found foundations, and I dance upon them, stumbling and weaving through the notes that materialize, in the scales that arise, in the patterns that seduce and invite us.

This is music. Not something remembered. Not something reached for. Just a bubbling presence, a potentiality breathed in, an afternoon suspended and flowing in time, so much so that it stands still while it floats and bobs and weaves. Music being discovered as where it is. In the thin air. Everywhere. All ways. Now.

Felling a Tree of Heaven

2011-07-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

Our backyard is a small one - approximately 14 feet by 30. That's less that one hundredth of an acre. From our tiny yard we can see the back windows of more than a dozen neighbors, and from our upper floors we can peer into more than a dozen yards.Despite its size, our yard is luxurious. It's outdoor space inside of a city, a space where things grow. And despite being crowded in among so many other yards, it offers privacy, and a sense of retreat and of tranquility. From the yard, one can hear what's going on inside the house, in neighboring yards, and in the surrounding streets. Splashes of music and television and conversation waft in, but they don't feel intrusive. I imagine that my neighbors pay as little attention to what goes on in my yard and inside my home as I attend to what goes on in theirs.

A couple of days ago, I cut down one of our trees, seeking to free up the air and light, to return to us a more open view of our graceful space. And because I've never known what kind of tree it was, I did some research. Surprising how difficult it proved to identify it. I'm still not sure I got it right, but that's okay. Tree of Heaven? How can I pass on that! Until today, I didn't know there was such a thing.

When we moved in eight years ago, the yard contained no trees. There was only the patchy lawn and a few shrubs. The first tree we planted was a memorial for Meggie, Ponczka's Brittany Spaniel that died shortly after we moved in. We buried her ashes by the back fence and marked the spot with a birch tree. Sometime later that same year, we planted four young conifers along the east fence, then a crab apple tree near the back deck a year later. In the meantime, we re-sodded the lawn, and a few more shrubs and flowering plants went in. A single pot of ivy has gone rampant, completely engulfing half of the fence separating us from one neighbor, all the walls of our deck, and on the way to claiming the rear wall of our house. About three years ago, a maple seed took root, and it's now stretched and filling out, angling for the best of the afternoon light.

The maple tree's main competition is coming from a former stalk that Ponczka planted about a year before the maple showed itself. She'd liked the look of it, and harvested it from near her office. It surprised both of us when it quickly grew into a tree, bulking up and outstripping the conifers, the crab apple and then the birch in about two years. This - it turns out - is the Tree of Heaven, so named because of how quickly it shoots its single, straight trunk right into the sky. It's a nice looking tree: it's branches angle out broadly, creating a nice canopy, and the leaves evenly line the reedy branches, a half-dozen or more to a side. And it keeps growing, towering over the birch and maple, and even over our third floor deck.

Our once sparsely planted yard is now a mini-forest, lush and tangled with growth. We'll soon be able to string a hammock between the Tree of Heaven and the maple, they've grown so robust. We now only catch glimpses of the surrounding homes and yards through all the interlaced foliage. The sounds still permeate, but muffled as they are, they enhance the sense of distance separating us, creating for us a cool oasis for enduring these dog days.

The tree I felled was not the giant I've described, but its offspring. A tiny sprout we overlooked two years ago became a sapling last year and by last week was itself on the verge of overtaking the still slender birch. Situated on the fenceline separating us from our neighbor to the west, it already overhung both yards, and threatened to obscure the rest or our yard from the kitchen window. So we decided to take it down. It was surprising how easy it was. It had reached a height of more than twenty feet, the trunk with an eight inch diameter. I de-limbed it first, then sawed off the top half. I finished by chopping away at the root until I could dislodge the trunk from the soil.

As quickly as it appeared in our yard, the speed of its removal was surreal. In some of the online descriptions of the Tree of Heaven, it's referred to as a weed, due to its rapid and invasive growth. We'll want to be on the lookout for others shoots that spring up unplanned. But as to our first Tree of Heaven - it's firmly entrenched. The books say they only live to be fifty or so, but that's almost certainly enough to see us gone. For now, it remains the lord flora of our little urban forest. And we're happy to watch it grow.

Insect Revelation

2011-07-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

I had a very surprising experience at Cape Croker this weekend. Over the last several years, Cape Croker has become a spiritual grounding point for me. Going there always presents opportunities for quieting my mind, and for clearing myself of the build-up of demands, expectations and dissatisfactions. Time takes on a different quality. Removed from all the things that would become chores at home, I'm left at peace to act on a whole different set of impulses. I always take my sax along, and being here always leads me to play. I hiked, I wrote, I napped in the hammock and I read, and I floated limp-bodied on the waters and let the tide carry me. And I had an experience unlike any I've ever had before and would never have expected.

As I wrote about awhile ago, I've been going through a kind of cleansing and regrouping during the last weeks. A major element of that has been regular meditation. Vipassana, the Buddhist tradition I practice, is all about acceptance of what is, and the means to the equanimity it offers is via a hyper attentiveness to bodily sensations. Unlike the foggy trance I once imagined meditation took one into, Vipassana meditation generates a really sharp awareness of all of ones sensations, but particularly the tactile.

Now, with all its wonders and beauty, Cape Croker also comes with its multitude of insects. The ants, flies and mosquitoes are everywhere, and it wasn't always easy to remain peaceful when the creatures were swarming, biting and stinging. But I've been trying not to have too much 'attitude' about insects. At home, I swat, squash and stomp them when they're on my food or in my face, but I try not to get angry or in a frenzy about it, or to go out of my way to bring death to their entire populations.

Over the weekend the creatures were maddening some of the time. But with the help of Off!, it was mostly tolerable. Until it came time to meditate. Coming out of a swim, and before I'd applied any Off!, I decided to do my sit yesterday and I determined that I wouldn't let the insects detract from it. I was going to take the notion of acceptance to a new level. The insects are natural to this environment I love so much, so couldn't I simply accept them as that, and overcome my usual aversion?

It was difficult at first. When the first ants began to crawl, and flies descended onto my skin and scurried about, and the mosquitoes buzzed in my ears, it took everything to remain still and to continue my sensory scan. I recognized how geared up I was for the anticipated bites and stings. And I realized how uptight I was about the creatures invading my ears and nostrils. The sensation of them on my skin, in rapidly growing numbers, was repellant and provacative; it felt so unnatural not to react.

And then, my sensations underwent a shift. As the bites and stings did not come, and as the creatures approached and skirted, but didn't enter my cavaties, I began to relax. And then I began to take in the sensations they produced in the context of the natural setting. The feel of their scurrying legs and wings was accompaniment to the brush of the grasses and twigs surrounding me, and to the breezes that danced in the air, and to the droplets of moisture that descended from I can't imagine where. The movement across my skin was no longer bothersome, and in fact, it soon became pleasant. The totality of all the faint, light lines of movement became like a shimmering, tickling caress. And finally, on top of that, came the sense of curious, exploratory life that all this tiny movement represented. And then it began to feel almost that life was lightly tickling me. What a surprise, what a pleasing joke, that just as the sun presses down with its warm embrace, and the waters cradle my body like an infant's, that so to, even the insects could welcome me with their touch, and leave me feeling so at home.

Culture Skirmish

2011-07-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

I’m standing on a borderland of cultures. Queen and Bathurst on the west end of Toronto’s downtown. It’s the tail end of the morning rush hour and I’m waiting to see if one of my clients will show up. She’s a nineteen year old who is being bombarded with a whole slew of stresses these last months: breakups and emotional blackmail, a parent arrested, a landlord threatening eviction, drama a fistfights among friends. She’s experiencing the dulling efficiency of booze to numb her and the encroaching enticement of crack; discovering the power of her sensuality in her arsenal against lonliness, and its very different power as a porn commodity. It’s all so much that suicide becomes an inviting dance partner on her horizon. But she doesn’t want that dance, and has instead opened the door to counselling, has in fact become a demand for it. But when I phoned last night to tell her that a colleague had arranged a quickie, shortcut intake, she suddenly cooled to the plan, was full of excuses. “I’ll be there anyway,” I told her. “I have to be. The guy pulled some strings to make this happen.” That made her angry. Emotional blackmail again? “Well I don’t know,” she said via text message (she wouldn’t take my live calls). “It’s just not a good day for me.” “Fine,” I told her. “I’ll just go, and we’ll talk later.”

So I’m there now, in front of the clinic, waiting, hoping she’ll turn up. A small group of Native Canadians are packing their sleeping bags into a grocery cart and about to make their way to the Meeting Place, the Drop-In across the street. The Health Centre makes no bones about them sleeping there nightly, so long as they vacate once the doors open. One of the guys is one of the first people I ever housed through Streets to Homes. He and his girlfriend have shared a tiny bachelor in a run-down low-rise a few blocks from here for almost two years now, but he still prefers to sleep outdoors with his friends most nights. We share updates while they pack up, and while a steady stream of young office workers crowd from the streetcars to the various businesses nearby - tech, fashion, publishing and retail.

There’s an entire range here: those who are at the pinnacle of the culture, in their designer wear, in sleek hybrids, on scooters and expensive bikes. They frequent the bistros and boutiques and the high-end tech and fashion shops that are springing up, replacing dying, old businesses that thrived in the last century. Then there are the young fringe-dwellers, with their multitude of piercings, tattoos and hybrid hairstyles, some of them on with skateboards or their own different class of bikes.

It’s fascinating to see this inter-mingling: those at the very point of the culture’s forward thrust, those trying to break the culture sideways in various directions – political, musical, sexual, conceptual – and then, all those almost beyond the fringe, living off of the dregs, some threatening full release into self-destruction. These require an entirely different level of metaphor; the angle of relationship is more skewed. Those on the outside came to there from every segment of the culture. Some, if you probed deep enough to where it seemed to matter, would reveal beliefs that are entirely conservative; others would espouse progressive beliefs, or thought patterns that were woven along spiritual or mystical lines.

Heavy in the equation is an element of dispossession. It’s not only the sense of the new coming in constant waves that replace the old and the dying. It’s also the sense that what’s being sought so avidly through the sharp commercial energy, leaves out something that was sought and thought precious before. It’s as though life has been simplified, but in a way that devalues flavours and accents that can no longer be tasted or heard. There’s a sense something like that of waking from a delicious dream that’s fading so fast in the light of day, that even as its flavour lingers, there’s a certain knowledge that you’ll never be able to explain it or recapture it. In fact, you know that quarter of an hour later it will all have evaporated, and whatever notes you’ve jotted down, as signposts, will ring hollow and meaningless.

It sounds and feels grim, put into words this way, but the experiencing of Queen and Bathurst this morning is anything but. What I’m feeling as I lounge near the intersection, is a settledness that transcends the shifting skirmish. It’s a feeling that says, “once in existence, impossible to destroy.” It’s reassuring, somehow timeless.

I’ve sometimes, as an African American descendent of people who were enslaved, reflected on the experience of the native people of these lands. While I, in the body of my forebears, was taken from my land and culture, and stripped of my knowledge of it, there has always been the knowledge – to my own generation and the ones that have followed, if not always to those that preceeded us – that Africa remains there, rich in culture and history, with a population too large to decimate. It is a gift that I think must be similar to the gift of being a parent, of knowing that the individual self will be survived, by something larger and more permanent. But what must it feel like, to be indigenous to a land that has been overrun by the other, where hardly a trace of what was yours remains, where even your numbers have been reduced to a hardly acknowledged fraction, to a presence that seems sometimes to be merely symbolic? It must be painful on a visceral, existential level, and I sometimes wonder if it isn’t this pain that animates what sometimes appears to be a determined and defiant disconnect with the dominant society.

But there’s life here on this corner rather than death. When one is part of the seething crowd, it’s the crowd that seems to matter, to be the focal point. But when standing here, silent and still, it’s different. Time takes on a different energy and weight. I get then that while the wind makes the weather, it’s the rocks that endure. The skirmish is among styles as fleeting as breezes. That which was solidly in existence, is not so easily destroyed. That the wind won’t carry it may only mean that it’s too heavy for the wind, weightier and slower moving, richer and slower to the touch, subtler to the taste.

My nineteen year old came after all. She sent a text message, just at the time of the appointment. “I’m walking down from Dupont,” it said. “I know I’m late, but I’m on my way.” “That’s okay,” I messaged back. “I’ll wait here for you, and we’ll make something happen.”

Makes Me Wanna Holla!

2011-07-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

I'm at ING bank, trying to open an account. After years and years of watching those "Save Your Money!" commercials, I finally decided to have a look, after receiving a joke of a 2 cent interest deposit into an account at another bank that's holding hundreds.

So, I found an ING product online that seems to fit, and that offers a measurable interest rate, so figured - Why Not? It looked like it was going to be easy. I set up an automatic deposit schedule and - since I haven't actually written a check in years - decided I would go to their 'cafe' location to drop off an initial deposit along with my account information for the transfer.

At the ING cafe I was told that they 'don't do cash', and that I wouldn't be able to open my account with a credit or debit card payment either. And, though I know from my sales days that it would be legal, I also couldn't simply make a check by hand-printing one with my account information. No, it would have to be a bank issued cheque. And this was needed because of 'legal verification requirements'. I was assured that my own bank would give me a counter check. But I visited a large downtown branch of my regular bank, TD Canada Trust, and was told that they don't do counter checks. If I want a check, I'll have to buy an entire box of them - 200 minimum, I believe. And why would I want those around!?

So at this point I figure...Why does ING even want me dealing with my other bank? What if I walked in the door and said, "Finally, a bank I can do business with. A bank that will respect me, and respect my money, and care for it as I would myself."? What about that?

The surprising answer is that they'd tell me to get lost. In kinder words, of course. But ING won't give me an account unless I already have an account with another bank. Jason here explained it to me. It has something to do with the fact that ING isn't full service yet. And something to do with the 'legal requirements' I've already mentioned.

So the company that seems to be making its way by convincing consumers that we're abused by regular banks, requires us to deal with these other banks before it will do business with us!

And while we're on the subject of banks...Do you have a credit card? I do too. And these days, you can use a credit card almost anywhere, from fast food outlets to convenience stores, right? Guess where you absolutely CAN'T use your credit card? Try walking into any full-service bank and using it to get twenty dollars! Unless it's a credit card issued by that bank, even if you have your account and do all your financial business at that bank, they will tell you that they have no means of doing business with you via that card!

Weird, huh!? And aggravating!
And it absolutely Makes Me Wanna Holla!

Time Travelling on a Tune

2011-07-10T23:13:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of days, I found a number of new links on the internet, to my Mom’s career as a singer in the 60s and 70s.

Mom was a preacher’s daughter, born in Ferndale, Michigan and raised in the north part of Detroit. Granddad and Tootsie (the nickname an older cousin bestowed on our Grandmother) lived off of 8 mile road, and the Mt. Beulah Baptist Church wasn’t far from there. Mom was a smart, imaginative, dreamer growing up. She sang in the church, but may have had more of an interest in writing, going so far as having a small chap book of poems printed when she was still in school. I know that she and her cousin Earl talked a lot about how they intended to travel the world when they grew up.

Her first steps away from home were going off to college, to Bluefield, West Virginia for a time, then to somewhere in Oklahoma, I believe. I don’t recall with certainty what she studied, but I know that she dropped out in her final year, to marry my Dad, a charming, sweet-talking man even now, in his late eighties. He’d run off from small town Indiana to the big city of Detroit, on the night of his high school graduation, and returned there after a couple of years in the military.

When he met my Mom, he romanced her hard, taking her to clubs and ball games and shows, and had even the serious Reverend Hardwrick so won over that they had use of the family car whenever they wanted. Mom put her other ambitions on the shelf for awhile, married Dad, had two kids, and before long, seeing the world seemed the furthest thing from possible.

But it wasn’t a very happy marriage. Dad liked the ladies more than a marriage could contain, and somewhere in there, Mom began to nurture the seed of her own liberation. The story is that the seed broke ground the day she was riding in an elevator and singing a tune to herself. There happened to be an agent in the elevator with her. He said something like, “Hey babe, you got some sweet pipes”. And next thing you know, Mom is doing gigs in local clubs, then going on weekend trips to Columbus and Cleveland.

From there, things changed pretty fast. Mom got called to New York, and went. Dad, after awhile, loaded my brother and I into the family car, and followed her there. A year or so later, she got a chance to travel to Berlin, to be part of an international revue titled, “Schwarz/Weiss” – Black/White, that featured black and white performers from several countries. She was supposed to be gone a couple of months, but the show was a hit and she emerged as its star. When the show kept getting extended, our ever game Dad loaded us up again and surprised Mom when we all appeared at her hotel room door.

We were actually a good family there for awhile, bouncing from city to city while Mom developed a reputation and a career. My brother and I learned German and thrilled at being intrepid explorers in foreign lands. Those were the Golden years of our childhood, and created a bond between us that nothing has ever weakened. Ever since then, I’ve felt sorry for the vast majority of chronologically close siblings who fail to nurture any sense of special devotion between them; but I’ve come to understand that my brother and I had blessed circumstances in which to do so.

Dad may be coming across as the bad guy in this story, but it didn’t end up so. There isn’t a bad guy, or a bad gal. When our parents saw that their marriage just wouldn’t work, they did the smart thing and ended it, before the grudges and arguments could become a fixture in our lives. He returned to New York, then did a round trip a year later to take my brother and I with him. The plan was that we’d go back and forth between them. But that never materialized.

Mom’s career peaked over the next few years. She finally travelled the world, as she’d always intended. The next time my brother and I spent substantial time with her was when she came through New York as the star entertainer on the around-the-world, maiden voyage of a luxury ocean liner. It was apparently just too complicated a life – professionally and personally – for her to feel she could adequately parent us. Which was absolutely the tragedy of my young life. But, on the flip side, my brother and I were fortunate enough to have a father who, despite the entreaties of relatives on both sides to allow them to raise us (because no single man, especially one who liked to play like James Kirby, and who worked nights, should be trying to raise no two kids all by himself in no New York City!) insisted that he was going to raise us himself and love doing it.

Of course there’s lots more to it. I will always be proud of Mom that, in the late 1950’s, she, a young, black woman, broke away from a narrow and unhappy life as a housewife, and turned herself into a globe-trotting, jet-setting, diva glamourpuss! The parts of that I shared with her are infinitely precious. Among my best memories are the times I’d come from school and have long, deep, searching, anything goes conversations with her, while she dressed and made herself up for her show that night. And I missed her enormously all those following years when she wasn’t around.

So you can imagine the thrill when, every now and then, when I do a google search, I discover a missing piece of Mom’s life. The last discovery came as a result of my brother finding some long lost photographs, and that spurring me into doing a routine search. Amazingly, these last finds include a few seconds’s worth of video, close ups of Mom singing, fronting a band and wearing a sleek, glittery gown and stole, and a curly, almost platinum wig. It’s a clip from some 1970 Eurocomedy, and she’s off-screen as the camera focuses on the antics of a nightclub’s patrons. But Wow! It’s about the first moving image I’ve had of my Mom since she died twenty years ago.

I’ll have to send a note to the person who posted the clip, thanking them. What a treasure! What a lovely, heart-warming gift, to see my Mom again, smiling, singing, doing her glam-glam thing!

Music & Technology

2011-06-24T17:00:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been living in a world of music. Awhile back, there was a great Neil Young concert at Massey Hall. In a couple of weeks we take in The Black Keys. And tonight – opening night of the Toronto Jazz Festival – the Queen herself, Aretha Franklin, is delivering a free concert to the masses on an outdoor stage. Yes, there's music everywhere. But it's not primarily the live acts that have me feeling music in my bones. What's done that is a couple of pieces of wondrous technology that has brought new life to the collection of vinyl albums I started when I was a kid way back in the mid-sixties.

They are: the iPod and the EZ Vinyl Converter turntable and software. Last Christmas I received the perfect kind of gift: something I really wanted, but felt it would be indulgent to get for myself: a massive, 160 gb iPod classic. I really wanted one because I figure that it will hold the entire content of my approximately 1,200 vinyl albums! With room to spare!

Now I've hoarded vinyl lps since I first bought The Supremes Greatest Hits and Up Pops Ramsey way back in junior high school. Those are the very first albums I ever put down money for, the first with my big brother, Rhett, and the second all by myself, after my father's introduction to Ramsey Lewis's instrumental, pop-jazz version of Sam & Dave's "Soul Man" generated a taste for more. I'd been buying 45rpm singles for years – James Brown, Kool & the Gang, the Isley brothers…, but buying albums felt way more serious, and from the start, my albums were my treasures. Other early purchases were Coltrane's My Favorite Things, a remembered favorite from among my parents' albums, that I'd used to put on when I was going to bed, so I'd fall asleep to it; Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay, The World of Jazz, a 'various artists' compilation that first introduced me to a later favorite, Horace Silver, and the breakout Blood, Sweat & Tears album that I heard for the first time while hanging out at Sam Goody's in downtown New York.. Albums were even more valuable to me than books, which after reading, I was glad to leave behind at that early stage in my life.

Over the years, as I went away to prep school, then college, then did a series of jumps from city to city, I always carried my lps with me, or had someone hold then send them to me once I got settled. And my tastes were expanding all the while, as new friends introduced their favorites and I made discoveries in second hand record shops.

I stopped buying new music for a few years when vinyl made it's big disappearance in the early seventies, but continued to fill gaps in my collection at garage sales and occasionally when friends gave up on their turntables for cassettes and then cds.

Vinyl not only takes up a fair amount of space, but it's heavy as hell, and once I got above the 500 album mark, moving the stuff was enough to have me reconsider any casual relocations. So the idea of fitting all that music on one tiny, lightweight digital device is still a mind-boggler for me. The EZ Vinyl Converter provided the last piece. Sure, there'd been ways for a number of years that I might have converted my collection, but they were too complex, elaborate or low quality for me to ever bother with. The converter is simply a turntable that plugs into a USB port on my laptop. It sends the music directly into iTunes, and from there it's one drag away from my iPod.

So, the marvel that I've been experiencing these last weeks is to be playing music while at work, while in the car, while riding my bike, while out of town, while walking, shopping, even while sleeping, that I've never, ever in my life heard outside of my living room or bedroom. Much of this is music that still can't be found on iTunes and other sites. And it's only been available to me when I've been willing to slip the album from it's alphabetically arranged shelf, clean it (yes, I eventually learned that if I didn't take care of the vinyl, the sound quality would go fast), and play it in 15-20 minute segments, after which, if I wanted more, I had to repeat those actions. No, that's not much of a barrier – it used to not be a barrier at all. But now, I push one button and the iPod will shuffle and play the music endlessly, like my own personal radio station, playing only the music I love!

The only constraint I face is that the music can only be converted in real time. I have to play the albums to record them. But that's a beauty of a constraint. So lately, while house-work, manuscript editing, socializing and even blogging get shoved aside, I'm sitting happily in the living room, pulling albums off of shelves and recording them. I've probably recorded close to a hundred, so far. Along with the several dozens of cds, which I loaded in no time at all, the accumulated kilobites barely registers on my iPod. I have hundreds and hundreds of albums to go.

I'm in Heaven!

Marijuana, Vipassana and Landmark

2011-06-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

Various paths to what we call Enlightenment? Maybe so? Pathways to altered states certainly. Potentially, to clearings, to openings and to shifts. I’ve entered onto all these paths and others. I’ve benefitted from them all, if benefit means the gaining of insight, of instructive looks from different perspectives that contribute to understanding.

Marijuana is my ‘mother drug’ to borrow a phrase that’s bounced around in 12-step programs. It’s the substance I encountered relatively early in life that I’ve at times used as a kind of life line, that has raised me out of a narrow, smothered sense of limited self, that pulled me into seeing previously unseen possibilities for myself, for how I might approach the world, deal with problems, reach for what I felt I wanted and needed. I realize that this is a view generally rejected by our society, that’s incompatible with a pervasive mindset in which things like drugs must be viewed as either good or bad, not as both. I’m a marijuana addict. It’s a substance that has ‘taken me over’ for long stretches of my life, that has blocked potential, turned me inward, provided an unhelpful and too easy escape from challenging realities at times. But, it has also been the boon, the blessing, the gift I touch on above, regardless of the fact that I’ve abused it so extravagantly.

Our blessings are our curses, I’ve come to believe. Our gifts are similarly our traps. But curses and traps are generated by our relationship with things – they don’t lie in the thing itself, be that hurricane, poison or false and seductive notion.

Vipassana is the Buddhist meditation practice I was introduced to over eight years ago. Far fewer words well up as I contemplate this practice. Which is appropriate, as Vipassana is such a silent, wordless, non-intellectual gift. Vipassana is a practice that produces a kind of stillness, and simultaneously, a profound energy. It produces clearing, opening, and a paradoxical kind of freedom. Paradoxical in that I can’t explain it, in that it takes everything away, then leaves even more behind, in that it makes no demands whatsoever and involves no imperatives to action – a gift that can leave one feeling profoundly naked in a way. (And, by the way – naked is good!)

Landmark is a corporation that teaches the pathways to freedom. It too is paradoxical, in that it never quite transcends its ‘corporateness’, yet, it exists as a constant invitation, even a challenge, a demand, that you transcend. Landmark is Vipassana intellectualized, then de-intellectualized; it is Vipassana de-mystified, then re-mystified.

While Vipassana hardly uses words at all, Landmark takes you forward with a very concrete and rigid vocabulary, but uses it to break through the illusion of language. And while marijuana invades the brain chemically, temporarily breaking down some otherwise rigid conceptual walls, Landmark works via a penetration of words and concepts that undermines the labyrinth of words and concepts our everyday lives trap us in.

Why this essay? I don’t precisely know. Except that: I’ve determined to once again put marijuana aside. I’m three weeks into an amazing clearing, which followed a kind of farewell binge, which was amazing, beautiful and wondrous in itself. I’ll miss the spark of what a tiny curl of smoke can do, the conceptual explosion of creative insight that can result. It’s not true that the brilliance we come into when we’re high is all illusory and false. It’s just that we can no longer see it when we’re sober again, just as the elaborate figures we see in passing clouds really do exist – it’s only that they exist in our minds, not in the clouds themselves.

And, I’ve just begun a Landmark seminar, which will serve as a context for my living these next three months. There too, the common perceptions break down. It isn’t brain-washing or delusional thinking that’s produced by Landmark and other New Ageist, transformative workshops. The distinctions, the tools, the technology is very real, it’s just that – as any of its trainers will tell you – it’s not True. But it’s invaluable and powerful to imagine yourself an eagle from time to time, and to soar free, even if you aren’t one.

As for Vipassana...well, it’s the bedrock I’m re-turning to. When all is said and done, I am a creature in a moment in time, a fragment of this interlocking, galactic reality. And what is more amazing than that? No words, no herbs, no concepts needed. Not even being is needed – it simply is.

Let's See What I'll Do

2011-05-31T23:09:00.000-07:00

I'm on the edge of a new life. A choice I will make today will change me and the world I live in, forever. And I don't know what decision I'll make. I'll try my best to look down the various roads and anticipate all the consequences of what I decide. Some effects seem so clear. But how many times before have I been sure of how a thing would turn out, only to be surprised by life?
But this ignorance is liberating. The most creative thing possible.

We want to live in Paris for a year. And in New York too. And we'd like to buy a crumbling old school building up on Cape Croker, and haul up the boat and start an artists retreat. And we saw the perfect place on Queen Street, for a restaurant where our specialties will include chili and waffles. And lately, I even dream of returning to Detroit, to be a part of its re-making.

Sometimes I get a feel to walk or bike home a particular way. There are many ways. I can take the Bloor Viaduct to the Danforth, then come down Jones or Broadview, for the view. Or, I can angle up to Rosedale Valley road and feel almost that I'm away from the city for two kilometres. Or down Church to cross on College and Carlton, or Queen, or even along the waterfront. Sometimes I feel I ought to go a particular way, and when I have that feeling, I'm on the lookout for some chance meeting or unusual circumstance. And I always get it. I'll stumble on a favorite colleague from three jobs ago, or a woman I once flirted with. Or, there'll be a new storefront, with a poster for an event I'll decide right then I want to attend. Or I'll stop for coffee somewhere and have a conversation with the bored server about the book she's reading or the school we both attended.

I don't really believe that anything is accidental. So I try sometimes, with my friends, with myself, to understand that none of the many particulars of how we dress and speak and hold our fork, the movies we go to, the people we get involved with, the work that seems to claim us - none of it is accident, mere chance. Every bit of it was chosen; not always by us, but chosen. And our becoming who we are is like a dance with cause and effect that begins before our first unsteady step.

No day that is like any other; no step that is like another step.
Endless opportunities for re-creating the World.

Conservative Before Their Time

2011-04-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

There's a saying about politics, that if you're conservative when you're young, you haven't got a heart, and if you're a liberal when you're old, you haven't got a brain. There's some truth to this one, and I say this acknowledging that I'm one of those old liberals.

Youth are hopeful, optimistic and have a tendency to believe in utopian dreams. So, the liberalism comes naturally. Which is just as it should be. As we age and experience disappointments, cynicism sets in. We realize how difficult it is to change the world, our dreams become more modest, and we're more likely to settle for solutions that are merely practical. Thus the conservatism.

But I'm not so content to go with this second generalization as with the other. I insist on remaining dreamy into my old age. Being optimistic and holding big dreams about our potential, as individuals and as societies, seems more than practical to me. It's dreaming that advances us, not the careful pragmatism of the status quo. Of course, reasoned conservatism has its place, but there are places where it seems so dismally out of place, and one such place is in the young.

And so, I'm a bit depressed about a recent interaction with some young folks about the upcoming Federal elections here in Canada. A multi-generational group of us was talking politics and I was shocked to hear from two young guys, both of whom I regard as intelligent and decent, that they intend to vote conservative. Now neither of them has struck me as particularly progressive, but I'd imagined that the conservative party's regressive social policies, its poor record on environmental issues, and Harper's autocratic intolerance of divergent views would be meaningful to them. But while acknowledging some philosophical differences with the conservatives, both guys asserted that the reason they were voting the way they are is basically self-interest. One said that actions the conservatives have taken lately have directly benefited the industry he works in. The other said that he feels the anti-regulation position of the conservatives will give him more latitude in his future career.

What bothers me most is that social consciousness seems to figure so little in their views. I worry that they can so easily overlook the philosophy and the positions they disagree with; that they can declare, on one hand, that it doesn't matter to society as a whole who they vote for or who wins, and, on the other hand, that it will support their own work and lifestyle choices to support politicians who stand for values that they are against.

It's sad that they have so little idealism, that at such young ages - their twenties - they are already so jaded and cynical as to discount the importance of their own values.

I must add that there was at least one other twenty-something in that group - a young woman - who was staunchly progressive in her politics. And among other young people I encounter, the question is rarely whether they support a progressive politics, but whether they do so based on knowledge and conviction about issues and principles, or merely because it's expected. I must give these young conservatives credit for that at least, that they don't seem to merely be jumping on a bandwagon of peers. They've formed their own opinions on this. But for their judgements and opinions to be so narrowly and cynically arrived at saddens me. I truly hope they aren't representative of the generation of leaders to come.

On the Edge of a Void, Looking In

2011-04-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

On Monday night, I phoned the police on a client for the first time in a decade. Then, on Tuesday, I almost had to do it again, on another client. In both situations, my clients were distraught, angry, feeling severly at a loss and disempowered. The first is a nineteen year-old female; the second is a twenty-two year old male. She, in her moment of crisis, was feeling a large degree of fear. he was experiencing the frustration of feeling victimized and misunderstood. Each was so emotionally isolated in the moment as to be unable to take in anything that was being said to them by me, or - more importantly - by the loving others who were there with them. In her situation, what triggered the call to the police was the fear that she would harm herself. In the other situation, what was almost triggered was the potential that in his rage, he would lash out at another.

These situations make me reflect on fragility and vulnerability. How do we endure what we endure? How do we survive the feeling the we are coming apart, that the space we are occupying cannot properly hold us and that something will give? There were moments, on both of these nights, when my client turned to me in fury and declared that we were done, that they'd never see or talk to me again. Thankfully, by the time the episodes ended, I was able to give each an embrace that they accepted, and to tell them that I care for them.

I think of the times in my life when I've been incapacitated by my emotional or mental state: deeply troubled, angry, sad, afraid.... I'm the sort that has strong emotional reactions to things. I can carry upsetting scenarios in my head and play them over and over. I can become distracted from what's around me by the dramas that play out in my head. I can easily shift into a frame of mind in which going through the motions seems pointless, which are precisely the times when it seems perfectly reasonable to do the outrageous. Why not scream at the top of my lungs? Why not hit something, or someone? Why not take this or grab that, just because it may offer some momentary distraction, or light, or enlivening pain? I've been close enough to see the potential of going rogue, of flipping out, of embracing the essence of "Don't Give a Fuck!"

But, lucky me....I can imagine such reactions, but I'm just not wired that way. When I'm feeling upset or lost, I generally take a walk. I like walks. They soothe me; always have. From as far back as I can remember, walking out has been a way out. And because I'm not a highly confrontational type, because I often prefer my own company to the company of others, because space and movement and peace appeal to me, I almost always and instinctively avoid things and situations that generate noise and confinement and pressure

I've never been diagnosed as having a mental illness, and I've never thought of myself as such. But I've contemplated the pros and cons of suicide, I've escaped situations that I simply no longer wanted to face, through getting high or by hitting the road. I've secluded myself from family and friends for periods of time. I haven't experienced any of these frames of mind, or of mental and emotional pain, to the degree that so many of my friends, colleagues or clients has. I've only approached those limits, those boundaries into severe dysfunction.

But what of those who veer ever so slightly further down that road toward dysfunction. What about being just a little less able to hang on when emotions are in turmoil. What about having just a bit less of a margin - of support, of respectability, of physical space (a home) to burrow away in. What if - when I find myself in challenging social situations - I had marginally less ability to express and advocate for myself, less in the way of material means to rely on, less of the simple physical and mental health I've been blessed with?

Both of these clients I write about might so easily have wound up in angry confrontations this week. They might have been arrested, hospitalized, beaten, or otherwise hurt, by well-meaning others even, or by themselves. I can't help but think about the narrow margins they walk, every day. Both of them have dreams, and very clear goals they'd like to achieve, but are sometimes blind to the many obstacles they will face on the road to achieving them. They each have gifts too, but where the clearing to display them?

These events haven't challenged my belief, or damaged my faith in what those I work with can do. But they've resensitized me - yet again - to the challenge of fitting into the world, with all its unknowns and all its surprises, and doing so gracefully. It matters in this business of fitting, of having a place, to know and to have command of ourselves. But even to the degree that that's possible, even as it's desireable, is it ever enough?

An Alternative Education

2011-04-14T23:38:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, the Toronto District School Board unexpectedly announced staffing cuts to its alternative high schools. These schools come in a wide variety, from French Imersion to Afro-Centric; Oasis, on whose community council I serve, focuses on Arts and Social Justice, Triangle serves the queer community, and the Skateboard Factory employs a business model in which students design, build, then sell, yes, skateboards, along with offering an academic program. Some schools serve high performing students, while others offer re-engagement opportunities to those who have done poorly in, or dropped out of the mainstream schools.

The staffs of these alternative schools are generally quite small, with as few as five or six teachers, who perform administrative functions as well as teach. Cuts of a single position to such schools theaten to gut curriculums, exacerbate safety concerns and, in some instances, threaten the very viability of programs.

So a call went out this week, for supporters of these schools to attend a meeting of the Board's Alternative Schools Advisory Committee. And the response was tremendous! Teachers, parents and supporters all came out and spoke eloquently, advocating a reversal of the cuts, and citing the many reasons why these schools are essential.

But most impressive were the voices of the students themselves, who presented themselves singly and in groups to defend their programs. Several of them spoke about taking their education seriously or finding it meaningful for the first time in their lives. They spoke of the special relationships they'd formed with teachers; how they'd been instilled with confidence, ambition, an eagerness to learn. They spoke of feeling safe, able for the first time to express and to explore their differentness, free from pressures and threats to conform. They spoke of their schools as families, and as loving communities, where they felt loved, valued and validated. They were bold, spirited, eloquent, and they moved the audience powerfully.

At the end of the evening, the Board President, Chris Bolton, led in the scripting of a motion to express the sense of the meeting, which he committed to introducing in the meeting of the full Board on the following night. The deal is not yet done - another board member present rebutted that, due in part to falling enrollments, the entire school system faced a serious budgetting challenge, and that alternative schools ought not automatically be exempted from cuts any more than mainstream schools, which he felt had come under attack during the meeting. It remained clear however, that the meeting was an effective exercise in citizen activism. One student present, who attends Oasis school, was open-mouthed with astonishment as she listened to Bolton taking up the cause. "I didn't think we could actually change anything," she exclaimed. And that lesson, in and of itself, made the entire chain of events worthwhile.

Below is the letter I submitted in opposition to the staffing cuts:

12 April 2011
Dr. Chris Spence
Toronto District School Board

Dear Dr. Spence,

I am writing you as a concerned member of the Oasis Alternative School Community Council, in response to the surprising announcement of staffing cuts to this school and to other alternative schools in the District.

I must say that I am shocked at this action, which threatens to undermine the viability of Oasis, and, I imagine, of the other schools that will be similarly affected. From a board that has so often, in so many ways, celebrated and championed efforts to create accessible learning alternatives to all children and youth throughout this most diverse of cities, this move comes as a disappointment and surprise.

Please allow me to share my particular perspective on why schools such as Oasis are so desperately needed, and why their staffing and resources need to be increased rather than cut. My background is in the social services. For approximately thirty years I have worked in detention centres, group homes, in schools and community agencies, with children and youth who for various reasons have found themselves out of the mainstream.

My presence on the Oasis Community Council came about as a direct result of my work for two years as a colleague of Dr. Vanessa Russell at the York University Teacher Education site in Regent Park. During and prior to my work there, I worked in Regent Park as a Youth Program Coordinator for Dixon Hall, and as the Coordinator of Community Engagement for Regent Park Neighborhood Initiative. In those roles, I worked closely with the staffs of the Nelson Mandela Park School and the Lord Dufferin School, and with the Pathways to Education Program.

All of my work, at these programs and in previous social service roles has underscored for me the vital importance of alternative routes to education. That such routes exist, and in as plentiful forms and configurations as possible, is so vitally important that I sometimes mistakenly assume that it can go without question. But sadly, as this instance indicates, that is not the case.

I know that others of my colleagues on the Oasis Council will be weighing in with you on the importance of the work that Oasis does. So I will seek to add a perspective which they perhaps will not. This is the perspective from my current work as a Street Outreach Coordinator for the City’s Streets to Homes program, where I work with the Youth team, serving individuals twenty-five years of age and under. My clients come from among the youth who live in the streets, parks, ravines and under the bridges of this city. They are heavily street-involved, meaning that they are heavily impacted by the drug culture and the criminal cultures. They are subjected to incredibly high rates of violence, both by others frequenting the streets and by police. The incidence of addiction and mental illness is very high among them. I could go on.

There is no question but that, along with housing, one of the most successful and certain means by which the lives of these youth can be turned around, is to get them enrolled in an educational program. And when these youth seek educational opportunities, the alternative schools of the District are absolutely their main resource. And while there are a number of successes that stem from enrolment in your various educational options, it is also clear that there would be more of such if there were even more, rather than fewer options for these youth.

A final point, which I think ties all of this together, has to do with the allocation of resources. So often, when critics look at programs like Streets to Homes, as when they examine alternative schools like Oasis, there is the complaint about the inordinate expense of these programs. The per capita staffing needs are higher. The costs brought about by the failure of clients to follow through and stay on track (absenteeism and dropping out) are enormous. Wouldn’t these resources be better spent on those clients (students) from a more reliable and dependable and success-oriented demographic? But what’s forgotten, or intentionally overlooked in these calculations are the extreme costs of not serving these ‘hardest-to-serve’. If schools like Oasis are brought to the point where they can no longer deliver quality programming through the cutting or staff and other resources, ultimately, the youth who are not served will suffer, and the costs to our society will show up in the building and staffing of more prisons, psychiatric facilities, and in funding lifetimes spent on social services, disability, and in treatment facilities.

In closing, I add my voice to what I hope will be a chorus of protest about this most ill-advised decision, to cut staffing where more staffing is urgently needed. Thank you for your attention.

Respectfully,

Craig Kirby
Oasis Alternative School Community Council

Call for a Voter Revolution

2011-04-06T21:46:00.000-07:00

A new Federal election was called barely a week ago, and I'm fed up already! The posturing, self-righteous arrogance of the major party leaders is galling. Each one of them gets on the stump and declares that ONLY THEY have the interests of Canadians at heart. The others are only interested in power, or in serving their tiny constituencies, or are simply inept or without conscience. Each gets up and declares his respect for the ordinary Canadian, and tells us that the others think we're stupid.

I'm fed up, but I realize the responsibility isn't with the politicians. It's with the VOTERS. It's with US, because we buy this trash, we condone it, we put up with it, and we vote for them despite it. We have incredibly short memories from election to election. We don't hold politicians accountable on the substance of their records, and we allow ourselves to be manipulated when they turn on each other with dishonest distortions of one another's records, They continue to play the political games that we allow them to play.

Rex Murphy of the CBC, in commenting on the start of this new season of the Canadian political circus, said someting that caught my attention, "People will start to be engaged when the politicians stop being false....Why is it so hard for leaders to say what they think in words they would normally use. Three sentences of what they actually, really mean , in their own voices and words, would change the style of politics forever." In response, a viewer noted that he was dreaming, because so long as the current style of politicking worked, it would prevail. Both of them are right. It's going to be up to US, the VOTERS to bring about the condition that the current style no longer works.

And so, I'm wondering how we in the West can emulate the brave citizens of Libya and Saudi Arabia and Tunisian and Egypt, and foment a citizens' revolution to seize power from the autocrats of this debilitating game that substitutes power politics for reasoned debate and progress on policy. I think it may come down to a similar wholesale rejection of the political status quo - a kind of "throw all the bastards out" mentality that rewrites constitutions and establishes a new legitimacy from the bottom up. It's going to require a democratization similar to what's being sought after in those other lands.

Unfortunately, I don't have a plan on how to bring it about. But I have a couple of borrowed ideas about tools and tactics that already exist in some form that may be pieces of an answer.

My first thought stems from my experience as a voter in Washington State. There, and in several other states - most notably and famously, California - the initiative and referendum tools of democracy are used frequently and to pretty good effect. On almost every ballot, you will find measures - on the city, county and state levels - that have been placed on the ballot by citizen groups (initiatives), or that have been referred back to the voters by the legislature (referenda). This type of direct democratic participation, where citizens get to actually vote on policies, rather than on politicians, ought to take its place as a central and main thoroughfare of legislation. These tools put policy beyond the immediate reach of deal-makers, and they encourage citizens to become more responsible students of the pros and cons of measures, including financing. Very often initiatives and referenda detail exactly what taxes will me created or modified, and for exactly what period of time, in order to finance a desired project.

My second borrowed idea forms a more nebulous proposal. This calls for voters to promote and commit to standards that politicians would have to adhere to in order to receive their votes. These standards would have to be non-partisan to have a lasting effect on the overall fundamentals of how government is conducted. Otherwise, this would amount to no more than a splinter, political movement. An example of the type of standard that might be generated is that politicians refrain from attacking the character of their opponents, or from distorting facts, or their opponents records. Perhaps candidates would be subjected to university-style exams, in which they'd have to demonstrate an awareness of the positive aspects of policies they oppose, as well as the negative aspects of those they support. Non-partisan panels (or, more accurately, multi-partisan panels, made up of supporters of all candidates) would have to judge ads and speeches on their adherance to or violation of these standards.

The hardest part is this strategy is thatvoters would have to follow through and be willing to spoil their ballots, vote for alternate candidates, or abstain from participation altogether when the candidate of their choice violated the guidelines.

I welcome any response to these thoughts. Are any of the rest of you out there as frustrated by the state of affairs as I am? Any other ideas on how else to force politicians to present and debate their views with more integrity, and on how to democratize government, to make it more effective and less the political power game it is now?

Seeing What's Possible

2011-03-31T16:56:00.000-07:00

Ponczka has been dragging me off to yoga class most Saturday mornings lately. I resisted at first, in part from feeling that the practice was somehow in competition with the Tai Chi I've worked at for almost ten years, but that I've neglected lately.

It's a wonderful class though, and I find myself looking forward to it. It's different than Tai Chi, but the practices share elements too. Both are meditative, as much about conditioning the mind and awareness as the body. And both build strength and balance in both overt and subtle ways. And, like Tai Chi, yoga is more challenging, and presents much more of a workout than I ever imagined as a casual observer.

When Sheila, our instructor, has guided us into a particularly challenging pose – torso twisted, muscles straining – she often intones the words, "see what's possible". It's her invitation to us, not to assume we know our limits, not to stop ourselves at the border of the territory we know. She regularly reminds us not to overdo anything, to rest when we need to, not to allow ourselves to suffer in pain. At the same time, she coaxes and encourages us not to give up before the strain is upon us, not to anticipate and avoid that point beyond which we fear to go. She offers up the hint that our bodies will stretch more than we imagine, that our stamina will carry us further than we dare hope, that we are more than our image of ourselves.

And of course, she's right. How very much is possible.

A recent and unexpected call reminded me of this lesson in another way. On my way home from work the other night I answered my phone and heard a familiar but unrecognized voice speaking to me. There was the slightly buzzy, fuzzy sound of the void forming a background and suggesting either long distance or a poor connection or both.

"You'll never guess where I'm calling from," said Ed, after introducing himself. It had been a long time and I was glad to hear from him. I'd met Ed when I worked in Regent Park, trying to develop skills-building and mentoring programs for youth, in a climate where there was much cynicism and skepticism about such programs, for many reasons, some of which were legitimate and some not. Ed showed up at a community meeting to sell his Life Skills/Hip Hop dance program to an ad hoc community council of youth workers, and around the table he was met by a lot of impassive faces, a few rolling eyes and little else. Maybe the most legitimate reason for the response is that Regent Park, like many other impoverished and distressed communities, was often visited by transient do-gooders who don't understand what the community offers, in either resources or challenges. Once they do understand, they often disappear, leaving little behind, but far too willing to cash in on their brief experience.

But Ed was not one of these. Rather, he was an innovative and creative pioneer of sorts. He absolutely didn't look the part of a Hip Hop impresario. What he was, in fact, was a White, Irish, Catholic School teacher from one of the Eastern provinces who specialized in teaching the hearing challenged. But in his school, he'd observed, investigated and explored the dynamics of a diverse school body. And after noticing the way a couple of his hard-of-hearing students interacted with some of the schoolyard break dancers, he'd carefully and skillfully put together a program pulling together peer mentoring, goal-setting and performance. Ill Skillz became a phenomenon, to which Ed attracted a whole array of contributers and supporters from the performance, media and business communities. The students took their act to a wide array of venues, with great success, and set many of its members of their pathways to successful careers.

Ill Skillz had accomplished about all it could in his one school, and was on its way to garnering the support of the Catholic School board to expand the program. But what Ed wanted was to give the program to a community that needed it more and could potentially do more with it.

Long story short – it never got off the ground in Regent Park. I've never been the organizer, nor promoter that I've aimed to be. Ed and I tried some things, got a couple of kids interested for awhile, but never managed to generate enough energy or momentum to get it going. He and I hung out a couple of times, appreciating one anothers' efforts and visions. His Ill Skills continued to grow into a powerful learning, teaching, mentoring vehicle. I eventually left Regent Park too, and we lost touch. Until the other night.

It turns out that Ed was phoning me from Paulatuk, a tiny Inuit community in the extreme Northwest Territories, overlooking the frozen Beaufort Sea. It's name means "Place of Soot" because of the coal deposits in neighboring hills that smolder and give off smoke. It's a community of 274, and as a teacher, he's one of a dozen or so outsiders in the helping professions. He said he thought of me because a discussion in a meeting among these professionals brought to mind something I once said about how change happens incrementally. And he gave me a call and invited me for a cup of coffee when he comes to Toronto in a few months.

So Ed has been on my mind. When we have coffee, I intend to ask him how he came to carry himself all that way, to a place where he experiences -50C temperatures and wolverine invasions causing school shutdowns, storms with howling hundred kilometer-per-hour winds, grizzlies in the neighborhood, and alcoholic binges that keep kids out of school for days at a time. I'm pretty sure that part of his answer will be that he wanted to see what was possible.

Losing Libya

2011-03-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

What will it mean to the world, to allow the Libyan revolution to fail, when just two weeks ago it seemed the tide of liberation through North Africa was unstoppable? What will it mean to know that we in the West might have prevented that devastating outcome if we'd acted?

I don't know what it will mean?
I know that the certain dread I now feel, that Gadhafi will prevail, is as removed from fact, from any deep knowledge of the situation and the players as was my recent euphoria that Gadhafi was going down. I know that I don't know, and that there is a vast body of factors - historical, psychological, economic, spiritual, meteorological even..., and human...that I don't even suspect that I don't know.

Are there really so many pro-Gadhafi forces? Or is it that mercenaries have been bought with all those resources the people have been denied? Or is this a victory of fear against hope...fear that kept enough people off the streets and away from the protests, so that the necessary critical mass wasn't reached? Or, is it that the arms imbalance is simply too great?

Is it possible that the world's attention was diverted to Japan and away from Libya just enough that some psychic advantage in the collective unconscious was lost? Or is Gadhafi - ruthlessly moving himself up the list of all-time despotic greats - just that good at being so bad??

But, given that we don't know, that we can't truly know for certain, what has kept the west from acting? There are the geo-political factors, of course: sovereignty, the dangers of picking sides in civil wars, and the problem of the exit plan, and others. But, from a more natural perspective, is this hesitation the same as that which keeps us as individuals from intervening when rowdies are harassing a bus driver? Or when a frazzled mother is screaming at her kid in the check-out line? Is it a problem of empathizing or of failing to empathize? And with whom? Is it fear of picking the wrong side and going down? Or simply fear of taking responsibility? Or something else?

Standards depend so much on perspective. In Toronto, there is continuing fallout over police brutality against peaceful protesters during last summer's G-20 summit. And one of the sub-texts is: why didn't the good cops intervene and stop their overzealous colleagues? And, failing that, why don't some of them step forward now and finger the abusers of power? Mind you, this is the same police force that consistently blames residents of high-crime, low-income communities for not identifying and testifying against the thugs who live among them. Everyone champions loyalty, but loyalties compete on every level and between levels.

What troubles me, in myself as well as in the world at large, be that in community groups, in families, clubs and nations, and tribes of all kinds, is that loyalties and the ideas that fuel and prop them up, can be taken on so lightly, with so little probing or research, with so much taken for granted about who the good guys are, and why. Which brings me to an entirely different point than I expected when I started this essay.

What action would I stand up for regarding Libya? I support a fight for those who want some form of democratic participation for themselves. I'd support a campaign that would suppress Gadhafi's military. But I wouldn't want to "take sides" in the shaping of a government. So I'm already at odds with myself, because how to do one without the other? I can't divorce my decision-making from my values. What happens when the oppressed underdog whose cause you support becomes an even worse master? And how many times has that happened? So I find myself agreeing with a retired general whom I heard being interviewed on the CBC the other day, who said that, when it comes to an internal struggle between two near-equal factions, it's best not to step in before one side or another has demonstrated a clear advantage. What went unsaid, but implied, is that you then choose what relationship you want to have with the victor, you don't try and change the result.

Which makes all the sense in the world. But what I'm feeling is a positive rush that the UN has finally taken moves to establish a no-fly zone, and I hope that there will be even more direct military support for the rebels, and that somehow, it won't all amount to too little, too late.

I don't imagine I'd feel the same, if I was just off a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan, or even if I'd ever been a fighting man. But, can action ever wait until all doubt is gone, until every possibility has been considered and all options weighed? Or in the end, do we act as life moves us?

In STONE

2011-03-16T22:13:00.000-07:00

I read a tombstone in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery this evening.

Today was one of our first Spring days. It warmed to above plus ten, and in the late afternoon the clouds came apart into pieces that soon dissipated, leaving the day suddenly and unexpectedly bright.

Equinox is less than a week away. The patios are about to explode into life.
My bike will be out tomorrow for the first time this year.

And Mt. Pleasant is the first cemetery I ever came to love. I lived three blocks away for nine years and it became a favorite place to walk, and later on, when I began to take back my body, it was the first place I jogged in almost a decade.

It feels wide and open for the city - spacious and well tended, curved and rolling, inviting in the sky. And it’s also the place at-long-last teaching me the names of trees, because each of its dozens of varieties are tagged with its name, both latinate and anglicized.

It’s a peaceful place. Not morbid or depressing at all. Restful, reassuring. I never connected a sense of peace or of wellbeing with burials until I came to know this place. This place has taught me the reasonableness of a common ground for the dead and the living to meet, in memory, thanks, longing and grief, for yesterdays to be measured against now, for the reshaping of histories and relationships outside of the tyranny of time.

I happened to be passing, just when my long, complex and emotional day had worked itself through, and I steered the car in along a path, then slowed and parked. Eventually, I went to where I knew I’d find my name engraved in stone, in deep and clean block letters.

KIRBY

Not relatives of mine, that I know of. Just the sharing of a name. No, not morbid at all... Anchoring. Seeing it raises a smile to my lips. I imagine myself on both sides of the impassable border, and the gift glows warm inside me, balanced with that other gift I can only imagine.

And then, the rest of the inscription, in squat, even letters.

What it says is:

In loving memory of

CHRISTOPHER KIRBY

1833 – 1915

MARY ELLIS HIS WIFE

1842 – 1914

EDWARD CHRISTOPHER THEIR SON

1868 - 1932

DAISY ELIZABETH THEIR DAUGHTER

1877 – 1935

LILLIAN MARY THEIR DAUGHTER

1874 - 1946

So much story in so few lines.

Reaching After Art

2011-03-08T20:27:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading a volume of Paris Review interviews with writers. As I read, I’m aware of the voices I manufacture to represent these writers. It reminds me of the way Hollywood presents period pieces. Whether the cultural era represented is Roman, Greek or Egyptian, Chinese or Mayan, the rulers, the elites, the higher ups are so often given formal British accents. I do something like that in my head. I hyper-intellectualize these writers in my mind. As Hollywood does with its elitist accents, I place my writers in a world apart, distance them from my every day. Whether it’s from awe, respect or fear, I place them in a realm I can skirt around, catch a glimpse of, but can’t quite enter.

And sometimes, when someone asks me about my writing, or about my practice of social work, or about fusion jazz (or anything else about which I think I ought to have some expertise) I find myself going into a subtley altered voice. Trying to sound as though I have something all figured out. Slipping in the odd fifty-cent word that I hope they don’t quite understand. It’s not intentional. Not consciously intentional. It is a little defensive though, in the same way some of the responses of these authors gets a bit defensive when asked a highly analytical or intellectualized question about something that didn’t spring from the intellect.

I have a great friend in the artist Liz Quisgard, a hard working, prolific sculptor of colourful, highly patterned columns and knitted tapestries who, when asked what her works means, replies, “Nothing at all.” She presents no theories about how her work comments on the social or cultural milieu, or responds to certain psychic of spiritual forces, or represents the evolution or devolution of what has come before. “It is what it is,” she says, matter-of-factly. She knows her work well enough, and likes it well enough, that she doesn’t need to say anything else about it. She knows that she’s an artist with such assurance that she doesn’t need to define what an artist is. She just makes art and doesn’t bother with the rest of it.

Me...I’m not even close to that. I’ve been writing – not prolifically, but steadily – for decades. I’ve amassed thousands of pages of scenes, dialogues, reflections, scenarios, ideas and outlines. I’ve had a handful of short pieces published, but most of my output is in a state that can only be called “unfinished”. But I realize that this is – more than anything – a symptom of my unresolved self-image. Because, I’m still hugely uncomfortable claiming for myself the designation “artist”, or “writer”.

I make music too, but I have no worries or concerns about whether I’m a musician or not. Because it isn’t important to me that anyone consider me a musician, I’m free to happily make music without much concern about what others think – except for the neighbours that is, when it’s late and their kids are in bed. But writing? That’s a different matter. Because I’ve wanted to be a writer all my life. And in my heart, I know I am one. A contradiction, yes, but that’s just how it is. I know and I don’t know. I am already, yet am always striving to be. I reach for what I already hold in the deepest part of my being.

The Weighted City

2011-02-28T08:49:00.000-08:00

The city streets are heavy
and hold me down these old ways
Gravity thick as basements, the roads lined with streetcar veins
cracking with traffic in the three am narcotic glow

I follow the link of street lights
safe in their unendingness
silencing the fear of what lies around corners
Someone’s phantom dream, maybe my own.

At the end of all the boulevards, where the donut shops are closed
only silence and distant headlights waiting
The stillness is long-legged and brash
filtering through the thin and distant radio
leaking rooms of memory...and touches...
and fantasies that will stalk me back

I am seeking the fragments
of my ongoing, half true story
among those knit to me by this gravity

Story and rumour, what a city is built of
Not just this one, but every brother sister place
holding me home to weighted down memories
close and rutted like old scars
able to fade but not disappear
mimicking potholes of time and inertia

Jimmy Carter in Egyptland

2011-02-24T20:03:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Carter, US president from 1977 to 1981, keeps popping into mind lately. There are two immediate causes: first, the peoples’ protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, that have seemingly ushered in the possibility of something resembling democracy for those countries; and secondly, the flurry of tributes and remembrances of Ronald Reagan, the president who succeeded Carter, on the occasion of what would’ve been Reagan’s 100th birthday.

I voted for Carter in 1976. By the time of the 1980 election, when Carter was bidding for a second term, I was thoroughly disillusioned. I abandoned Carter and went with John Anderson, the rogue republican running as an independent. Both Anderson and Carter were trounced by Reagan, whose campaign had, among other things, promised a return of dignity to the office, and to an unflinching pride in America. Flag-waving is not an innovation that can be credited to Reagan, but I think it was him that elevated it to the point that no aspirant to the office can fail to proclaim ceaselessly that America is the Greatest Country on Earth – past, present or future, and stand a chance of winning an election.

One of the big problems with Carter was that rather than champion America’s greatness, he challenged Americans to a higher standard of goodness. He was critical of America’s dependence and our culture of entitlement. He challenged us to sacrifice, and to have higher expectations of ourselves, and – what stands out for me these decades later – he championed the possibility that America would pay more than lip service to the values of democracy and human rights around the world. He pushed to make a commitment to human rights a fundamental platform of US foreign policy, a factor in determining which regimes the US would support.

His efforts failed, however. He was considered weak and indecisive. And his approach to international relations appeared to be naive, soft and unworkable. Ironically, his undoing can be traced to one glaring instance in which he did not hold to his human rights agenda. Carter was unwilling to break with the Shah of Iran over that ruler’s oppressive rule. And when the Shah fell and US citizens were held hostage in the new Islamic republic – not to be released until the day Reagan was sworn into office – Carter’s ineffectual leadership was underscored.

A phrase that was widely circulated in those days was “America’s national interest”. Carter’s critics argued that the way a foreign regime treated its own people was of little importance, so long as it supported America’s anti-communist agenda, and upheld an international balance of power that kept the Eastern Block in check.

With the advent of Ronald Reagan – the Great Communicator – all of Carter’s moralizing went out the window. There was nothing wrong with America or with Americans. No, we didn’t need to discipline ourselves or contain our hunger for resources from the rest of the world. We didn’t need to examine our role in supporting repressive regimes that joined with us in our Cold War against the Soviets.

How unfortunate though, that we Americans have been content to have our “national interest” defined so narrowly. It seems to me that, particularly since the breakup of the Soviet bloc, there has been a huge opportunity for the US, as the sole world super-power – to begin to change the international playing field, to shift and broaden the definition of national interest, to recognize – in line with the principles and the realities of interdependence between nations and peoples – that we cannot ensure our own freedoms by supporting the oppression of others by “friendly” regimes.

Sadly though, there’s a persistence to the notion that suppressing anti-Americanism is a legitimate reason to maintain dictators. We’ve heard it throughout the last month – the worry that President Obama erred when he called for Mubarak to step down, because Islamic militants might succeed him, or because other dictators would lose their confidence in America’s backing. Of course it’s true that revolutionaries and democratic movements are likely to distrust a superpower that has for so long talked the talk of democracy and human rights, but has only walked the walk for the benefit of its own. And of course it’s far worse than that: in too many instances, like Egypt, like Iran, we’ve funded the very armies and the prisons and the secret police that are the instruments of oppression. We cannot escape the consequences of these truths. But better to acknowledge the realities, to make reparations where possible, to legitimately support self-determination, knowing that others may determine to oppose the very policies and priorities that we ourselves ought to have opposed. Better to mend our ways and to risk the consequences of democracy and freedom.

Because how can a people be free who depend for their freedom on the oppression of others. Isn’t that a fundamental lesson that runs all through the history of the United States?

And so, back to Jimmy Carter. A most imperfect president, indeed. But as the years pass, and other administrations take their turn on the world stage, my estimation of Jimmy Carter continues to rise. What I most admire about him is his attempt to lead morally, and with a sense of responsibility to a world community which the US is bound to serve, not be served by. I don’t think we Americans were quite ready for him.

I think...I hope...that Obama has the potential to be another such president. I believe he has demonstrated a similar willingness to be led by principle, to elevate the legitimate needs and interests of the world’s dispossessed, to transcend the fearful, zero-sum, self-absorbed fixation on the stability of America’s consumer economy. And if I’m right about Obama, then let me be wrong in my sinking despair that we Americans will once again prove ourselves not ready for the good man we entrusted with our highest office.

Clearing Out the Basement

2011-02-08T09:44:00.000-08:00

Shoes I don't wear anymore
A huge umbrella and stand, used for outdoor art shows, before we got the tent
The outboard motor for the sailboat. Somewhere, the sails
Video Cassettes of "The School Yard Bully", produced by Regent Park Focus with some 7th graders I worked with at Mandela Park School
Boxes of old letters, cards, pieces of stories that never got written, clips from newspapers
A big bag of soft rubber balls, for juggling lessons every now and then
The acoustic guitar - Pocketwatch - I got for Christmas from Helene in 1977, and carried around with me when I was a cabbie, plucking through lonely half hours on Inman Square
The trumpet - Trixie - that my Dad bought me, for a hundred bucks, when I got serious about playing in 7th grade
Damian's abandonned golf clubs
Plastic 20-liter buckets for the juice that goes into our wine
Laundry
Batteries, light bulbs, screws and tools
Ponczka's canvasses, painted and not - and sketches and other exercises from her school days
Chairs, stored away for winter, from the back yard, the upper deck, or on their way to the trash
A bottle of expensive champagne, brought by an ex-lover to one of our parties years ago - we're waiting for the time to drink it
Summer jackets, the overflow of scarves and hats, including gifts, bought and handmade
The cat box and a bag of litter
Back up, semi-retired camping gear

It isn't time yet, for Spring cleaning
But a quietly building desire for order makes itself felt
Shuffling the familiar into some new configuration
Creating a model of my everyday, with highlights for the newness it makes possible
I'll look once more at the small souvenirs and tokens, reminding me of evenings and meetings and songs I would otherwise forget. Again, I will fail to discard them, needing their power to evoke the geniis I have been, in their way lightening the alluring weight of memories that carry me nowhere related to now.
Not time yet, but Time - that big wheel, pulverizing ambition, sweeping up the floor, putting everything in its place.

Clear

2011-01-30T12:05:00.000-08:00

That’s how I feel.

Clear as these waters off this beach, early afternoon, Tortola, British Virgin Islands. I’ve gone into the water, have tasted the sea and felt the sand between my toes. I’ve dipped into the waters off four island beaches this trip – both the Caribbean and the Atlantic sides. I don’t care so much anymore about capturing the details, with either my camera or my memory. The experiences will live in me. Perhaps on a cellular level, if there’s anything to this modernist interpretation of how experience gets integrated.

On my first ever trip to the Caribbean, during a swim near the harbour in Grenada, my good friend Thomps gave me a lesson on floating on water. It happens that Thomps is a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, but I’m pretty sure that he’s also a Taoist. He instructed me to simply let go, to relax all my muscles, and let the waters do the rest. Being a clumsy swimmer, used to struggling to move myself across even a small pool, accepting his invitation was not exactly natural. Relaxing in water was something that had never occurred to me. Never would have. But it was so easy.

Almost instantly, this method became my favorite way to experience any body of water. I do it every chance I get. In a bathtub if it’s big enough. What an incredible feeling it is, to relax totally, to progressively give up control of my limbs – feet, legs, arms, head and neck, and to feel the waters carry me. More than that. The lake or sea or ocean cradles me, massages me; it causes my body to flutter and ripple with the smallest wavelets. Like being kissed by the Earth. And, best of all, it bestows upon me a deep and certain feeling of belonging. Yes, I am a creature of this planet. I was designed for it; it was designed for me. I am Home.

Not to say the method is entirely without...risk, shall I say? I’ve had my eyes stung by the salty sea quite a few times. And I’ve swallowed a good bit of it too. And I’ve become so relaxed that I’ve come out of my reverie many yards down shore – or away from shore – from where I started. I can easily imagine falling asleep out there, cushioned by the welcoming sea and blanketed by a warm breeze, while the sun bakes away all cares. What a way to go that would be.

But do you know what’s oddest of all about this method? It’s that so many people don’t believe it’s even possible. They insist that if you don’t actively swim, you will sink. Struggle or die, they say. It is, after all, a very popular philosophy of life, isn’t it?

Island Hopping

2011-01-28T20:30:00.000-08:00

The tiniest places in the world become huge when you are there.

Antigua today, Saint Thomas yesterday, Old San Juan, Puerto Rico the night before. Tiny islands, a few miles long by a few miles across, specks on the map. Each island so different from the others.

San Juan feels loose and open and there’s a sense of life spilling into the streets. The lanes are so narrow, and the sidewalks too, the two and three storey homes jammed right up to the street and to each other, their doorways and living spaces open to the street. But it feels soft and easy anyway.

St. Thomas is a maze of tight, steep green hills, The highlight here was being driven across the island and back, vistas of the valleys and bays opening wide at every turn. The island carries an energy that belies its size. I was in awe, but like the country boy in the big city, wondered if it would be possible for me to live in such a place.

Antigua feels a bit like the accordion of St. Thomas stretched out. The hills are less densely packed; they roll more gently. And ditto for the pace and the mood. Not so striking as St. Thomas, but I feel I could live here.

In some ways, it’s such a superficial way of seeing a place, stepping onto an island at 8am, then off again by 4:30. One could easily find distraction enough among the dockside tourist lures and never venture beyond them. But it’s an easy matter to hire a driver/tour guide who will carry you all about the island for a few dollars, show you to a nice beach, answer questions about the culture, history, economy.

And, for the rest of my life – I’ve realized since tasting so many Caribbean islands over the last few years – whenever I come across a mention of Antigua in the news, a travel piece, novel or song, this very real place will come to mind. That I’ve tasted the air and water, and the local patois, rubbed the currency, licked the grilled chicken juice from my fingers – it will all matter in some way. Eight hours isn’t nearly long enough even to begin knowing a place, but it’s plenty long enough to know that a place exists, and to place it in the world, and for that place to occupy a place in ones consciousness.

Being Good, Being Happy

2011-01-21T14:29:00.000-08:00

Travelling by train in the deep night. It evokes a sense of timelessness, and brings back memories, many of which aren’t even my own, but borrowed from classic books and old black and white movies starring Greta Garbo.

Our vacation begins. Ponczka is my perfect travelling partner, a happy baby, I call her. She thrills at every small triumph, like crossing the border on an expired passport, or smuggling our homemade wine in pop bottles. For her, the train awakens memories of travelling back and forth between Gubin, her hometown, and Poznan, where she escaped to Art High School when she was fourteen, and discovered her independence. For me, it’s travelling through Germany when I was a kid, following our show biz mom from Berlin to Leipzig to Frankfurt and back, eating dinners in the restaurants that stood in the atria of the glorious old stations. And too, my travels back and forth between Seattle and Chicago – two solid days each way – when I worked the summer sales circuit with Encyclopaedia Britannica in the early ninties.

Vacations are to dream about. We dream of what they will be in the preceding weeks or months. And we dream them again afterward, knitting together what actually happened with what might have, so that, in that wonderful freestyle replay of memory, even the ordinary, disappointing moments ultimately grow into our expectation of them, however long after the fact.

I wonder if what I experience is universal, this tug, as the vacation nears, to have it be a transformative experience, the expectation of returning a different man than when I left. I somehow anticipate that, during my vacation, I will rid myself of every vice and shed every excess pound. I’ll read a few books, pen a couple of short stories, and improve my French and tarot reading. I expect I will return home refreshed, enlightened and even galvanized, ready to make manifest whatever ambitions have lain dormant in the cradle of my spirit.

I never expect so much out of fourteen short days, as when I’m on vacation. But it’s a delicious expectation. There’s a vibrant tension between the desire to indulge and luxuriate in freedom and ease, and the desire to make the most of time that feels to be more wholly my own. A balanced tension between wanting to be happy and wanting to be good. And there’s a sought after sweet spot of comfortable exertion, of invigorating effort, that satisfies both wants.

When we exit the train in New York the balancing act will begin. To lounge over drinks with old friends, or hit up the exhibits at the Guggenheim. And when we’re aboard the cruise ship, heading to the warm Caribbean seas, will we be more diligent about visiting the onboard gym or the midnight buffets? And in Old San Juan, will we dutifully explore the historic Fort, attending to every anecdote of our tour guide, or will we stake out a spot on a beach and luxuriate as the sun works its magic?

Vacation time is upon us.

But for the Grace of God...

2011-01-13T22:34:00.000-08:00

...I’d have burdens I couldn’t bear.

I was going to title this post “Housing the Homeless”, but then the biblical phrase rose to mind, which I've chosen to paraphrase. I’m thinking about a few related things: generosity and how it’s affected by what we have and by what we want. I’m thinking about reaching out, and the difference between connecting with and withholding from others. I’m thinking about today’s visit to the welfare office, and how my client was treated there, and about other clients of mine who are struggling, to get or to maintain their housing.

It surprises people when I tell them that one of the biggest challenges my young clients face when they get an apartment is dealing with their friends. Let me paint a picture:

You’ve been living under the Bathurst Bridge. You’ve thrown in with others who sleep there and in the parks, in makeshift cardboard and plywood encampments, and who squeegee and panhandle and fly signs along the avenues. You share a lot with these others. When one shows up with a bottle, it’s passed around. He who brought the bottle – they are mostly males – will likely hog it to some degree, but at least a third of the liquid will go down other throats than his. If someone brings more food than they can consume in one sitting, what’s left will get passed around. Blankets are shared, bikes are borrowed. Folks take turns looking after one another’s dogs. In the sleeping bags at night, body heat is shared, and relationships are born. It doesn’t always have much to do with friendship or with liking, though these are natural bi-products. Sometimes it has more to do with getting by, and with survival. Life is pretty fluid. Someone’s squat tonight is someone else’s tomorrow. Ditto with the favoured panhandling spots, with coats and backpacks, even lovers. Property values and notions of an ordered world become pretty abstract.

So suddenly, your housing worker – maybe me – finds you an affordable apartment to share with the girlfriend of the last two weeks, or with a traveling buddy. Two or three of you together can get a decent place with your housing allowance from social services. If you go solo, you’ll end up in a dank room sporting an anthology of the last decade’s stale odors, and having to share the dismal washroom down the hall that motivates you to save your morning urination for the donut shop down the street.

You like the new place, and the property manager seems fairly tolerant, until he gets complaints from the family upstairs about the drinking party you had with your under-the-bridge crew on your first night. Your housing worker warns you that unless you go middle-class, you’re going lose your new place quicker than you found it. But what can you do when the temperature drops and a couple of buddies come by at midnight, asking to crash on the living room floor? Or when the city clears everyone and everything from under the bridge, leaving everyone to scramble for warm, relatively safe spots? When a friend is sick, or traumatized from a beating, or just out of detox or the Don Jail? Or when the party goes on and on and everyone is drunk, or stoned, or asleep? Are you gonna wake everybody at 2 in the morning and tell them to go sleep in a doorway? Not likely.

Their decision in these situations may not be smart, or mature, but they are very human. Does it have anything to do with it simply being easier to share what you have when you don’t have very much? Maybe it’s more to do with empathy, and with personal proximity to a particular form of suffering, and with suddenly being in a position to save others from experiencing it.

Witnessing the sharing and caring that takes place among my clients is one of those special benefits of the work that I do. I’m amazed over and over again at the virtual Youth shelters that spring up in the apartments of the newly housed – all longing for privacy and quiet and order trumped by the needs of their communities. But it’s this very sharing they will have to put limits on, if they are to re-integrate into the world of the housed.

Our Ugly, Regressive Politics

2011-01-07T11:08:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, I received an email from one of the progressive, activist American political groups that contacts me with updates and calls to action. This particular group was organizing a defence of Obama’s controversial and hard fought health care program, in anticipation of the impending attack by the incoming, republican majority House of Representatives.

I’m fully behind Obamacare, despite its many flaws and shortcomings. To me, it’s a halting, limping half step in the right direction. A much needed step. I’m absolutely opposed to the effort to repeal or weaken it, and so I was eager and willing to add my support to the effort.

However, the message introducing the campaign was disturbing. It referred to a "...Republican majority bought and paid for by Wall Street-run corporations and their shill groups.” And it went on to state that, "Everyone knows that the Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the health insurance industry and other profit-hungry corporations."

I confess that, emotionally, I feel the same way about caricature Republicans. I’m disturbed by their planks and their attacks on Democrats that take a similarly dismissive and denigrating tone. With the merits of health care and of the progressive agenda so clear to me, it’s sometimes difficult to credit anyone who sees things differently as possessing either a mind or a conscience.

But I remind myself that most living, breathing Republicans don’t fit the easy caricature any more than progressives fit the starry-eyed, soft-headed caricature that opponents would make us into. Rather, many are intelligent, caring, patriotic Americans who simply don’t see or calculate these matters as I do. As much as it may frustrate my wish to order the political world according to my values and perceptions, there are people on the Republican right who care about the country, who sacrifice and give selflessly, who agonize over policies and positions, and who come to slow, careful decisions about the strategies and tactics that will best take America forward. Just as I and others on the left do. While I know that there are Republicans who fit the ugly stereotype of the moralistic yet hypocritical and unsympathetic profiteer (just as there are a few bubble-headed idiots on my side) it doesn’t do justice to any political faction to judge it entirely by its most extreme and dysfunctional elements.

We on the left have debated among ourselves the proper approach to health care, the pros and cons of is its implementation, and we waged civil war over the importance of the now defunct “public option". Can it be categorically wrong for others to question, challenge or even to reject it because of some of its less appealing aspects? Is there nothing we can learn from honest, open debate? Perhaps it is true that not many conservatives will discuss and negotiate with open minds. Isn’t that equally true of progressives?

It’s well established that war is made possible by dehumanizing the opponent. It’s infinitely easier to shoot or drop bombs on those we view as animals and demons than on our fellows. Similarly, in politics, it’s so much easier to dismiss the arguments and concerns of the indecent and morally corrupt than of those we love and respect. It’s a cheap, immoral and dishonest approach to tear down another’s character in order to have an easier time dismissing their ideas.

In politics as in life, there are natural dividing lines and natural constituencies. The easiest thing is always to fall in line with the politics of one’s own class, race, religion or other demographic. But it has always struck me how much more powerful it is when an individual or group stands up for a cause that’s not primarily its own. It’s one thing to support gay rights if I myself suffer by virtue of discrimination against gay men. But it’s quite another to speak out on issues of sexual orientation when I’m a privileged member of the dominant heterosexuality. It’s in no way surprising if I – a black man – stand up for the rights of my own people, but quite another thing if I am a white man, looking beyond the privilege of my advantageous pedigree to champion the cause of oppressed minorities.

Similarly, if we are committed to a more mature and dynamic politic, one that embraces differences of opinion as well as of ethnicity, belief system and sexual orientation, and working in the interest of all its citizens, mustn’t we be able and willing to look for the sense and intelligence and compassion in the arguments of our opponents, and even to celebrate them?

Health care, like abortion, and gun control, and freedom of speech, is an issue that will touch on many sensitive nerves and challenge conceptions. But looking carefully at the policies, and openly debating their pros and cons, will generate a better body of solutions than continuing the hateful warfare of self-righteousness that dominates today’s politics. And if we self-styled progressives won’t take this stand, who will?

What's Next?

2011-01-01T23:24:00.000-08:00

It was an offbeat New Year’s Day. Ponczka likes to treat the day according to the superstition that it will become a blueprint for the year to come. Which means she likes to get a few things done: to paint a little, do something constructive around the house, fit in some self-care, attend to friends and family, have some fun, things like that. Over the years, I've taken up this attitude myself.

But today didn’t go exactly according to plan. First of all, we slept in, after being out partying until three. By late afternoon, it was pretty clear we just weren’t going to have the championship day we’d hoped to. Wasn’t a bad day, just not very accomplished. We ate too much, lounged about, went out and spent too much money, and pretty much ignored productive activity.

So, what’s that say about our upcoming year? That 2011 is bound to be a disaster! If we choose to believe in such omens. Which we don’t. Except that...well, I did make sure I got this post in.

Some possibilties are not to be trifled with!

Gratitude

2010-12-31T17:55:00.000-08:00

It’s the end of the year again. And it’s the beginning of the year again. I appreciate that one moment can be both things, and at the same time, merely another point in an ongoing, unending cycle of time. A special day, and yet a day like any other.

I appreciate the days between Christmas and the New Year. They masquerade as ordinary days, but they cannot be, with the letdown after the Christmas frenzy, and the pause, before the re-focusing and recommitment that the New Year represents. Boxing week makes it odder still. Some stores are still crowded with shoppers, but traffic on the streets was thin this afternoon, with lots of offices remaining closed until Tuesday. It’s a week when ordinary time doesn’t quite exist, a kind of suspended time, one foot having fallen and the breath held slightly in anticipation of the other. Normal business happens, but with one less beat, an extra stutter. I was in Old City Hall briefly this morning. But my client, who was arrested last night, had his case put over, and lost his chance at celebrating the New Year with his friends. The quiet, efficient desolation of the courthouse mirrored the schizoid nature of the day, the hurry to get things done and over with, the ambivalent calm of knowing, there’s always tomorrow, always next year.

Increasingly, I take pleasure in the Solstice. It’s become my real holiday of the season, the new year made real by the shift of the planet in its yearly cycle around the sun. The shift in orientation that will bring the light, minute by minute, back into our days. Today, I reminded myself that we’ve just gotten through the darkest three weeks of the year! The next 49 will each bring more sun than these last. Light and warmth, Spring and then...a promised but distant Summer - a fantasy now that will only become real in small, slow increments. By the time Summer is tangible and real, it’s winter that will be the fantasy.

But none of this is what I meant to write about. My intention is an expression of gratitude. Even if today was just another day, I’m grateful to have gotten through it. I sat in one of our offices this afternoon, chatting with Sherry, my team supervisor. I lamented all the work I haven’t done, all the successes I haven’t had just lately, and she kept giving me small assurances, to relax, don’t worry about it, it will work out. And we chatted about other things, having nothing to do with work, and by the time I wandered into the street, I was back into that shaded, ambivalent, suspended time, and in a good way. Things even out. Balance is not only something to aim for, but also something simply to accept – this job, the world, my life cannot be so simply shaken out of balance. Sometimes the best way to find it is to let go, let the rhythm of existence catch me.

It’s been a good year. Every year is a good year. That’s my truth. Despite the suffering millions around the world, and my kids who will sleep on the street tonight – at least in part because I didn’t find them housing this month – I am grateful for so much, ‘my cup runneth over’, and I experience so much joy, even if sometimes in small bites separated by confusion or pain. It will help no one for me to forget or overlook these things, the simple, ordinary pleasures, like counting the minutes of sunlight in a day.

That’s it. Time to get dressed and go out with Ponczka, to dance and drink a bit, and celebrate this special, ordinary night. Love to you all! And may you Thrive in the New Year!

Writing on Air

2010-12-21T22:40:00.000-08:00

I hardly ever write letters anymore. And today I wrote in my journal and saw that almost two months had passed since the last entry. Just lately, I've been at the Beast every day (see my post of 21 September), typing extempore, trying to loosen up, letting the knots work themselves out. Otherwise, my main writing outlet lately has been this blog. One of the things I journaled about today is this blogging, how different its been, how much it occupies me, the ways it confronts me. That I'm still trying to figure out my attitude to this.

One thing I am acutely aware of is that you are out there, whoever you are.

When I write a letter - which I think to be one of the most highly intimate forms of expression possible - I address a single person. When I journal, I address another single person - myself - but aware too that, from time to time, others who are close to me may enter into it. That possibility is never entirely lost, however I try to lose it. Probably because of the couple of times when that other has found and read my journal. Both times motivated by the very curiosity - though of a higher potency - as that I'm trying to awaken and address now, through this 'thin air' that the web somehow is.

Coming here, and trying to speak in a thoughtful and uninhibited way with strangers as well as with those I know, challenges in interesting ways. It gets me thinking about the circles and layers of my identity. There are the very obvious things about me, and the things that may still be only partially clear, even to me, when this journey through the world is over. So what do I share here? And whom am I addressing? I waver on these questions all the time.

I originally thought that I would post lots of story fragments here, the pieces that come from my exercises in fiction writing - ideas and sketches and dialogues and urban scenarios. There's been hardly any of that. And I find I'm writing more about the varied incidences and reflections and chance occurances of my lived life. My thoughts shift about where it should go.

Over the years I've thought a lot about the different energies and aspects of my consciousness that are expressed and explored through different forms of writing. I'm a different writer, even a different person, when I write a letter than when I'm crafting a story. And I've thought about what part of the dynamic of letter and journal writing I ought to invite into the writing of stories. It's a question about the process of developing my voice. Because voice, I've discovered, is very distinct from whatever it is I have to say, or even my purpose in saying it. Voice is the how. Voice is at the heart of the relationship between speaker and listener. It's what opens the path and extends the vision.

I've recently become fascinated by the "stats" page that Blogger makes available, that informs me when someone views my blog, what pages they go to, and what country they connect from. Today brought the surprise of a reader from Belize, one who apparently looked at several postings, including my own favorite, "Ways to Approach an Ocean", from way back on May 23. I'm fascinated by that fact. You, out there, connecting with my words and thoughts and offererings.

I'd love to know who you are out there, and to receive your thoughts about what you read here. No expectations, just my own curiosity. What buttons have I pushed, what insights have I triggered, what nerves have I irritated? I hope you'll let me know. Consider this an invitation!

A Show to Hate, A Show to Love

2010-12-16T22:40:00.000-08:00

You could almost call it a guilty pleasure. I find I hesitate and become a bit self-conscious before revealing to people that the only tv show I watch religiously these days is "Biggest Loser". Yes, that's right. The reality show about fat people trying to become skinny people. When I first heard about it a few years back, I'm sure I rolled my eyes and thought it a horrible joke.

Then we got cable, and went instantly from having three television stations to having hundreds. And one evening, mindlessly flipping through the channels, it happened. There I was, watching the Fat People tv show. And I've been on it ever since.

It shouldn't have come as a total surprise, actually. I'm a hundred pound loser myself - well, almost. A number of years ago I sent myself into shock by stepping on a scale in my doctor's office, and weighed in at 326! My own self-delusion at the time was that I was merely a bit on the heavy side. I knew I was around 300, but just barely, I kidded myself. That weigh in broke the back of my self deception, and change started the next day. It took me maybe three months to crack the 300 pound barrier, and several more years to get into the 220's. I still struggle with bouts of inflation - like just now. Bicycle season has ended, Xmas party season is in full swing, and I'm hovering around 240. Not easy losing weight. So when I watch Biggest Loser, I understand. I'm with them. I love watching the contestants working so hard, confronting their demons and doubts, and melting off the pounds, revealing the beauty they've been hiding. And the bottom line for me is that here we have a prime time television show that is truly transformative!

Yes, the show has quite a few reasons to fault it. There's the endless product placement and promotion. There's the constant crying and tugging at heart strings. Then, there's the worry that, well...are all these people just gonna put all that weight back on, once the glitz is over, the personal training ends, and they're back to being regular people in their regular lives? And the most distressing feature to me, really highlighted in the just ended season, is the publicizing of very personal and very painful stories, and the huge risk of causing shame and humiliation to the defenceless. This risk was possibly realized this season, when a leading contestant recounted the putdowns heaped upon her by her family all her life, citing them as the reason for her low self-esteem, and a factor in her abandonment of self, until saved by the Biggest Loser trainers. It was painful to witness her televised confrontation with her parents, to see their shock and imagine the shame they felt being exposed in a way they couldn't possibly have been prepared for.

And yet, I find it's a powerful show, one that goes far beyond most others, in terms of the real, human life stakes it addresses. It's a program that offers a way out to its contestants, not primarily in the form of a pile of cash, but in the form of powerful life management tools. They aren't guaranteed. The show itself has touched on (though not enough, in my opinion) the danger and ease with which one can slide back into old ways, ways most contestants have lived with their entire lives before their brief time on "the ranch".

So, balanced against this one, what is the show I hate? That would be "Dragon's Den". It's a show that invites entrepreneurs to pitch their business or business idea to a panel of moguls, in hopes of getting said moguls to personally finance them. It's not a bad idea, really. It has a strong transformative potential in its own right. It's a real life scenario packaged for television, and presents to its audience something probably not far off the truth, in terms of what entrepreneurs face in their quest for venture capital.

What I loathe about the show is the panel of moguls. Could there be a more cynical, self-interested, manipulative and opportunistic lot? It's understandable that they reject most of the propositions they face. It is their money, and they have the right - even the obligation, one could argue - to invest it with care. But must they talk down to the petitioners as they do, belittling and ridiculing them endlessly? They often show a callous disregard for the products and services in which they have no interest, but are quick to express indignation or turn dismissive if their recommendations meet with resistance or disagreement.

What's worst, in my opinion, is their determination to wrest control of every good idea that comes their way. Despite the professionalism, entrepreneurial vision and creativity displayed by the presenters of these business plans, the moguls seem never to be willing to support as equal partners, let alone as minority share-holders. At the end, Dragon's Den is a show that leaves a bad taste in my mouth

Tai Chi with Bruce

2010-12-14T22:09:00.000-08:00

Isn’t it true that we thrive in large part because of our gifts? That is, whatever we have that is given, though unearned. It’s true of me, certainly.

I’ve had a gift from Bruce McDougall these last nine years or so. Bruce taught me Tai Chi, in the all-purpose Elspeth Room of Dixon Hall’s main building, where we both worked, he as executive director and me as housing support worker and later youth worker.

Bruce was a wonderful man and leader. He was kind and attentive and unflaggingly supportive of our staff. One of his ideas for community building was for those of us who had particular interests and were inclined, to share them with others. I decided on a reading club that never got off the ground – says something of my own leadership abilities. But Bruce canvassed the interested about a mutually good time, and we settled into Fridays at noon.

Soon, Bruce was leading a group ranging from three to six of us in a range of graceful Tai Chi movements, including the single whip, white crane spreads wings, brush knee, repulse monkey, embrace the mountain, stroke the mare’s tail, and wave hands like clouds. I don’t imagine I’d ever have been drawn into the practice of Tai Chi for its own sake. It’s Bruce that was the draw. It didn’t hurt to think I was learning a martial art, except that I’d seen Tai Chi, and wasn’t particularly impressed. Too slow, for sure. And it didn’t seem to achieve much in the way of power or athleticism either. But I was a quick convert.

It took awhile to learn some of the most basic moves. The positioning of the body through the sequences is very specific. Some are difficult on the muscles and joints. Most require a degree of balance, that rises as we enter deeper into the set, the foundation movements being repeated often as they segue way into others.

The strikes and blocks of Tai Chi are surprisingly and economically brutal from a martial prerspective – no wasted movement, every effort to maximum effect; lots of bone crushing and joint wrenching. But the practice of it, moving slowly, seamlessly from pose to sweep to stance, is a flowing practice, a study in all the ways the body can form a circle. It is concentrated and meditative. The bending and arcing of the body becomes a previously unsuspected medium. The 108 movements of Yang style are a lesson in balance. And balance is something that starts as a glimmer, a tickle, somewhere deep in the sensitive body, then it spreads, and it tunes and embraces the senses and limbs, to the point where it becomes impossible to fall out of balance, with anything!

My first efforts at solo practice were a few minutes remembering the turns of my body, and Bruce’s feedback to me, always, to relax my shoulders, to mind my breathing, to be tense only where required. It soon became an almost daily practice, the first intentional act of the day, carried out every morning on my apartment building’s roof deck, before going to work. Later on, I found a group in Grange Park that I sometimes joined. Later on, it was the groups in Greenwood Park. It’s been welcoming and gratifying, to be studied by elderly Chinese practitioners, who after a few minutes of scrutiny, usually say, “Good, good. Who taught you. You have good form.” Or alternately, give me some little suggestion, how to bring a particular element of my body more alive in a sequence.

Bruce was very generous, and central to his message to us about the practice was his own benefit through sharing it. I was pleased, a couple of years later, when, after cancer and treatment, Bruce asked if I’d help him begin to re-remember the long routine. We met a handful of times, but circumstance gradually made those meetings rarer and rarer. His sudden passing in early 2009 underscored the lost opportunity to know him better.

This fall, Bruce’s wife, Kim, asked if I’d like to have his Tai Chi books and his staff. I agreed, and she and I spent time over coffee, talking about life, our jobs, Tai Chi, and their growing daughters. Emma and her French study, and her eminent semester in Paris, got me thinking to get her a copy of George Perec’s “Life: a User’s Manual”. Kendra has a growing interest in medicine.

The staff I brought home was unexpected. I’d been expecting a sword, which I knew Bruce practiced. We’d spoken about whether or not he remembered enough of the sword sets to pass along. I hadn’t known he worked with a staff. The tool, or weapon, is impressive. It’s a bit short of seven feet, so almost a foot taller than me if I stand with it. It’s made of ten slender cords of waxwood, twined around a finger thick center piece. It’s solidly constructed, hard, but with a whisper of bend to it. A very elegant tool, radiating an almost biblical authority.

I haven’t done anything with the staff yet but to heft it. I haven’t taken any steps toward learning one of the many staff sets, beside viewing some videos on the internet. But I’m proud to have the staff, and I’ll treasure it. I’ll come up with occasions to walk with it, if nothing else. In the meantime, what I intend for myself is to get back into a more consistent practice of the basic routine. I no longer practice daily, and it becomes too easy to allow entire weeks to go by without making it out to the park in the morning. I’ll have to recall to mind the tranquility that greets me on those quiet mornings, the energy I finish with, however tired when I started. The sense of balance, the knowledge of the power of flowing with, rather than struggling against. It is a vitalizing art. This practice has shaped me and increased my control, not over life per se, but over my reactions to whatever comes. As I told Bruce way back when, upon realizing it myself, he gave me a powerful tool for the rest of my life.

Leaks & Liabilities

2010-12-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

     I'm fascinated by the huge brouhaha over the WikiLeaks revelations and the issues they raise. I'm not at all surprised at the embarrassment that has been generated for the US government, but I'm taken aback at the extent of the anger and treats being directed at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

     I suspect that there is some damage to US foreign relations that will result from these and future leaks. And it is also unfortunately likely that some lives have been put at risk. But overall, I stand in support of Assange and his actions. I have no doubt that there is a legitimate value to secrecy, to the ages old and authentically human tendency to couch our truths in relativistic terms depending on our audience. And manipulation - that is, trying to get others to do what's good for us by convincing them it's good for them - is not only a staple of politics and diplomacy, but of friendships and marriages and of every other level of interpersonal relationship.

     So, as many have pointed out, the details of the manipulations perpetrated by the US government - one of my governments, by the way - are not really much of a surprise. Which doesn't mean that they aren't an embarrassment. But how should one react to embarrassment?

     My own support of the revelations is mostly based on my desire that the US government move in the direction of becoming a more just and even-handed government. It doesn't surprise, but it continues to disappoint me, that the most powerful government on earth feels the need to support repressive regimes, to suppress democratic movements, and to otherwise act in ways that betray the values on which our democracy is based. So when revelations expose these positions, they reveal a short-sightedness and a moral blindness that I'd like to see abolished from American foreign policy. To my mind, my homeland has been passing up an historic opportunity over the last decades. that is the opportunity, as the unchallenged Strongman of world politics, to create a different political culture, to produce a shift in the rules by which politics is carried out.

     In the late 1970's, Jimmy Carter attempted to bring about a moral American foreign policy. His attempt ended not only in failure, but in ridicule. When he insisted that the US would ally itself only with regimes that were democratic and that met certain standards of humanitarian conduct, he was seen as a leader who didn't understand the realities. And given that the realities of the time included the Cold War with the Soviet Bloc, and a global struggle to win over the non-aligned nations, there is some truth to the critique.

     But in these very different times, with tremendous advances in technology, such as those behind WikiLeaks, a powerful new weapon in the arsenals of democratic movements, shouldn't Carter's standards be up for reconsideration? I approve of the actions of Assange because they serve to tear away the veils of hypocrisy behind which the US government too often hides. I understand the embarrassment. Corrections, apologies, personnel changes and other adjustments will be in order following these leaks and the ones that are sure to follow. But if there's a problem, is it really Assange? All he has done is reveal some unpleasant truths, some indefensable double-speak, some corrupt alliances, and some frank and honest statements that have been whispered behind closed doors. If there is fault in the availability of these documents, then the US government has work to do in improving some of its security protocols. The answer does not lie is persecuting or prosecuting Assange.

     I hope that the administration of President Obama - a leader of whom I do hold some expectations of integrity - will take a broader view of the issues raised by the WikiLeaks affair. I hope that he will use this opportunity to bring more transparency into the conduct of foreign policy. And, to go even further, I hope that he will take the opportunity to raise our foreign policy to a place of integrity and principle, so that the US can truly become what it has always proclaimed itself to be - not just a regime that caters to the appetites and the securities of Americans, but a champion of liberty for the peoples of the entire world.

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

2010-12-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

I spent several hours over the weekend watching Tiger Woods almost score his first tournament win in over a year. And I don't quite get it.

I've always had a bit of the sports bug. Though I'm not one of them, I understand the behavior of sports fanatics who follow their teams zealously, even when they are mired in last place, play pitifully, and have no chance of success. I've had my own teams over the years, the ones you feel joy for when they win, and get depressed over when they're losing. I understand the communal high of entire communities and nations when their teams win championships, and the dip in gross national self-esteem when the nation's team loses the Big One.

But this Tiger thing is a little different. I have to confess that it's as much a celebrity thing as it is a sports thing. But I've never had a celebrity jones. And even in this case, I haven't followed the turmoil in Tiger's personal life. I don't have much to say about the infidelity, the scandal or the divorce. But I am one of those people (there are LOTS of us, I understand) who never watched golf before Tiger, who began watching it when he turned pro, who pay little of no attention to even the major tournaments when Tiger isn't in contention, and who basically took the last year off, because Tiger has had such a lousy year. And the moment I learned that his form was back and that he might actually win this weekend, I was there!

As I say, I don't really understand it. Until a couple of months ago, I'd never hit a golf ball in my life. I don't have any particular draw to Tiger as a human being. And yet, when it comes to Tiger on the golf course, I can't get enough of him.

Part of my fascination has to do with the simple fact that he is, without doubt, an exceptional athelete. But I didn't really know that when he started his career. Part of it has to do with the fact that he's a young man of color who took a sport that was the very reserve and symbol of exclusive, privileged, white, elite society, completely and mercilessly by storm. And over time, what has grown is my admiration for the incredible will, focus and tenacity he has demonstrated throughout his career, overcoming all doubters, beating back all challengers, unashamedly claiming and jealously guarding the title "World Best". Ah, but to possess such confidence and power of mind!

I find the psychology of sports fandom fascinating anyway. I'd love to get hold of a well-researched scientific study on the subject - insight into the tribal dynamic that is tapped into, the projection and identification with idols, the compensation for and escape from the failures and the drudgery of ordinary life, the release for all our violent, competitive urges, and our ego needs. From the point of view of my intellectual curiosity, all of this fascinates me.

But on a gut level, I don't know or much care how many of these factors were at play while I watched the tounament this weekend. I just can't wait for the 2011 season to kick off. And I can't wait to watch Tiger kick some serious ass.

Beer & Buddhism

2010-11-30T21:11:00.000-08:00

Spiritual practice? What does that even mean?

I’ve grown tired of spiritual pursuits. Bored with religious proselytizing. I no longer welcome the Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness that comes to the door. And I don’t engage the Black Muslim who calls me brother with a wave of his newsletter. I’ve about had it with true believers. I’m not even much interested any more in finding something upon which to hang the label “Truth”.

And yet....The spirit is hungry for something. Some thing that sorts sense from nonsense, that gives a direction to all this otherwise directionless living. Some thing to give meaning to passion and prayers.

Tonight, over beer in a Bloor Street pub, we spoke to this. People, sharing what we do, explaining our hungers and dreams, our indulgences and bad habits. It was an evening of personal time with allies from my working world, people who share with me the burdensome tragedy-comedy of lives gone askew. We laughed while we consumed chicken wings and gossiped about our three affiliated places of work. But mostly we spoke of other things: the music we love, social work jobs in Nunavit, club-hopping and the passion of dance, eating or not eating meat, growing corn and making wine, why people come out to a pub to watch Glee, the inequities in sick time benefits.

I was glum and worn down when the evening began. My colleagues cheered me with complaints of their own. “It’s all about the BMW,” I was told – bitching, moaning, whining. Like listening to the blues, it raised me up. Something about shared sorrows. Not so nice when your woman leaves you maybe, but a different thing to understand that leaving and getting left is in the nature of things. It connects you somehow, pulls you down into the deep whorl of being, doing, enduring; this tragic-comic life, the inevitability of things going wrong.

Beer, of course, is an ages old spiritual practice. No doubt lots older than Buddhism, or any other formal creed with its precepts, rituals or deities. Tonight, it feels like it’s all part of a whole. What my beer teaches me tonight is to be present to the chicken wings. The crack addict waiting for his rented room will be there tomorrow. There’s nothing to do for him tonight. And the kid who had the mental collapse and who needs to find the vet for his puppy, he will show up tomorrow or he will not. And the eviction notice that’s on the way for the guys letting all their street friends crash with them...well, it won’t come any faster or slower because of my worrying.

It’s a beautiful night. The rain isn’t rain, but drops of cool moisture falling from the sky. It isn’t the eve of December, but the graceful arc of the planet as it bends its way around the sun. Whatever is hurting in my life has no intention of punishing me. But darkness follows when the sun goes down, my strength wanes with every passing year, and the edge of the knife is sharp.

Playlist for an Afternoon

2010-11-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

I’m at home today. Won’t go beyond the sidewalk or the backyard if I have my way. Might not put on street clothes.

Coffee all day long. A toke. And music.

First cut: “Music for ‘Todo Modo’”. Mingus. The flip side of “Cumbia & Jazz Fusion”. It’s orchestral classic, mixed with boppin, groovin swing.

The sun is streaming in, after the season’s first dusting of snow three hours ago. It’s warm here in the window seat. The evaporation of minutes, in pleasant, sighing clumps, is soothing this afternoon. My muscles luxuriate in the absence of anything to do.

I’ll do what I want to do today, and ignore all calls from the world. I’ll sort and put away the piles of lps that I've been converting to digital – all the Miles, lots of DeJohnette and Dewey Redman and the Beatles and Julian Priester’s two albums.

Second cut...now let’s see.

“Stand!” Sly & the Family Stone. (that’s the whole album, by the way) Sly and company were the jam back when I was coming into my teens, my independence. Sly was a maniac. His band funked hard, and his style was part pimp, part jester, part clown, and all the way “don’t give a fuck!”

Sly was fun.

There’s a huge manuscript I need to wrestle with, that I’ve been trying to keep beyond reach, and there’s a list of agents to contact. There’s changing the ceiling fan and light in the kitchen. Yardwork, work on the boat to be done. Shopping, cooking, budgeting.

But no, not now, not today. Not that stuff.

I’m gonna nap, gonna read, watch a dvd and eat a steak.

Next up: “Wild Things Run Fast” – Joni Mitchell. Side one. Easy, jazzy Joni, with great musicians and her very own groove.

I’ve emptied the dishwasher, got most of the albums put away, took out the trash. It’s enough to keep the pressures at bay. The cats are about, each making its regular checkins with me. That possessive, belonging love, so beyond my human ego.

The sound of the stereo fills the chambers of this beating house. There’s a brief silence when the side ends....

Fourth on the menu: “In Angel City” Charlie Haden & Quartet West. Ernie Watt on that tenor, man, hittin all the right notes.

Late afternoon now. It feels like I can allow my brain to come out again. A space has opened up, through the music and the light of the day. I step out to the porch to breathe. It’s warmer then expected. Winter’s tease is done for now, another reminder of time, working on every single thing.

I have our wine to bottle. A perfect chore for this afternoon when I now wish that time would pause. Let this easy hour be drawn out and never end, until it ends suddenly.

What did I read the other day that spoke to this? Yes, a metaphor Einstein used, something like: One minute waiting for your loved one – it feels like an hour; one hour with your loved one, it feels like a minute. That’s relativity.”

One more tune. What shall it be?

“The Griffith Park Collection”. A collaboration by Lenny White, Stanley Clarke, Chick Corea, Freddie Hubbard, and Joe Henderson. Smooth, straight ahead jazz.

Misses & Hits

2010-11-24T22:44:00.000-08:00

Do you think about the close misses?
The near tragedy misses? The oh-so-close-to-heaven misses? The time the car almost skidded off the road, the hot one in high school you almost scored with, the chance you almost took - but didn't - that paid off, the opportunity that barely eluded you that would have meant disaster.

For example, I almost made it to Alaska once upon a time. I’d always wanted to go to Alaska, especially after reading John McPhee's "Coming Into the Country". I wanted to experience a little taste of the frozen wilderness, the waters, the mountains, the cold. And I got within a simple phone call of having a roundtrip ticket arranged for, and a place to sleep on a couch in the livingroom of a guy I’d be working beside. We’d be in Fairbanks, selling encyclopaedias at the State Fair, and would each surely make a pile of money. And I could always use the money. And afterward, I might've explored further , away from the city, or to Anchorage.

But I’d just been married a few weeks before, and my wife and I were living a good reach of the continent apart – she in Toronto, me in Seattle. And we’d made plans to be together during what happened to be Valentine’s week, which happened to be the week of the Alaska State Fair, to which I was being invited in the last hour.

At the time, it didn’t seem like so much to pass on the trip. A simple choice that could’ve gone either way, nothing earth shattering. Yet, looking back, I squirm at the casual ignorance of the younger man that was me, who failed to see what a rare opportunity was being given up.

But this happens all the time.

Happened yesterday.

I’ve never witnessed a birth. And a client delivered a baby boy yesterday afternoon. I’d been with her two hours earlier, and she’d invited me to stay and watch, and I’d accepted. But then members of her family arrived, and they delayed breaking her water, and I had an appointment to go to, anyway.

I could’ve missed going without catastrophe, most likely. There’d been a bit of a mis-communication. The place we’d agreed to meet is closed Tuesday afternoons. He might not be there anyway. But then, he might. And weighing in the balance was meeting his bail conditions, and theoretically, whether or not he'd stay out of jail.

Still, I might have missed going, and caught up with him today.

I got the call from the hospital about half an hour after accepting that my client wasn’t going to show. The baby boy had come into the world about that same time, after a short and easy labour. One of the family cut the cord and helped with the afterbirth. Everything had gone well. Mama was happy and relieved.

So I missed one. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to witnessing a birth in this longish life. It may well be the closest I will ever come to being on that very first welcome committee for a New Earthling.

And, by the way, I did catch up with my other guy today, after a good visit with mom and baby.

And then something else happened. I’d decided to treat myself to an early evening movie, just to spend some time numbed out in the middle of a stressful week. But on the way, I asked myself if that was really the way I wanted to spend the next three hours of my life. Two or three alternatives bounced against each other before I decided to go to the Reference Library to do some writing. And I walk in to find myself on the tail end of a long line – the audience filing in to hear Salman Rushdie. I’d noted the date months before but had completely forgotten it.

It was SRO, but I got in, enjoyed his reading andhis great sense of humour. He shared anecdotes about his sons, and talked about integrating family and friends into his work. Lots of his thoughts about writing and about story. And I bought a copy of his "Luka and the Fire of Life", and was graced to have him sign it to my grand niece, Jaiya. The book was written for his second son, and follows "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", which was for his first.

So it’s been a happy tumble of circumstance. I missed one, then picked up a gimme on the back side. Sure, I'd trade Salman for the birth in a heartbeat. But the universe doesn't work that way, does it? You miss some, you hit some, and the world goes round and round.

The Hard Slog

2010-11-19T23:25:00.000-08:00

It's been a tough couple of weeks in the world of Housing and Street Outreach. Clients are facing eviction, dealing with courts and probation, lots of missed appointments and abandonned opportunities.

Earlier in my career I'd have said I was headed for burnout. It used to almost creep up on me without my knowing it. One reason for this is that burnout can come about in a number of ways. It can be the result of taking on the emotional burden of our clients' challenges. Or, it can come from too long a period in overdrive - simply trying to do too much. Another route is to let the formal boundaries between work life and home life collapse, and suddenly find yourself getting calls at home and handling client issues during family time. And it can result from believing that you are the one sure and necessary partner who will make or break your client's success.

I'm better about all these things than I once was. The first time I experienced burnout, it showed up in the imbalanced way I began doing my work - putting a zealot's energy into the transformative features of the program, like goal-setting and personal vision work, but ignoring the basic and practical management elements, like whether clients were completing chores and observing 'lights out'. It was a typical beginner's pitfall: believing - or wanting to believe - that all my charges needed was to be inspired and set free of constraints. My boss at the time sent me home for some manditory vacation time. It took a few days and a little distance from the transitional group home for me to see that he was right.

These days, I'm better at managing my pace, which translates into recognizing the pace my clients are on, and the place they are in, and accepting that these are not easily changed. And still, it's sometimes hard to maintain the faith - to me, essential in this work - that growth is happening every day, whether I see it or not.

I'm glad the weekend is here. I WILL separate from the job for a couple of days, and attend to more personal needs. And hopefully, when I pick it up again on Monday, I'll be a bit refreshed. Faith is easier on a good night's sleep.

Generations

2010-11-09T21:30:00.000-08:00

My Great-Aunt Audrey lived comfortably on the borderlands of her memory. She spent her last years hardly moving from the upstairs bedroom she inhabited in the house of my Aunt Bernice, which was the hub of the family for more than two generations.

I don’t know exactly how old she was, but to me, when I was twenty, she seemed to be in that place in life of not wanting or needing very much. But she took great pleasure it seemed, from having one of us younguns stop in and sit with her for awhile, and listen while she shared some memory of us when we were younger, or even better, of our parents, whom we so much favoured when they were our age.

Aunt Audrey was the repository of family lore, the keeper of the otherwise forgotten details of how we’d come to be what we were, where we’d come from, and why, and of all the comic and tragic turns that had shaped and informed us. I wonder why we didn’t recognize that, and value it more. Most of us, of the generation of her children and grand-children, enjoyed our sits with her, half an hour or an hour at a time, listening as she shared her recollections of uncles and cousins and nieces, their comings and goings, careers and scandals, and their marriages and dalliances, and the children that resulted from them. But we didn’t value them enough.

I spent a month in Detroit, in the month around my twentieth birthday, right after I’d dropped out of University, restless and impatient about discovering all the newness I suspected was out in the world waiting for me. I arrived there straight from Mardi Gras, and would go on from there to Atlanta, then would hitchhike to San Francisco and live there for half a year before returning to academia to give it another try.

Ironically, only a month earlier, I’d begun to record a journal, which I maintain to this day. But I recorded hardly a paragraph about my month in Detroit, and not a word about all that Aunt Audrey shared with me. I was too busy looking for that newness, too caught up in the changes happening inside me to accord much value to the rambling memories of a sweet, old woman.

But I loved and enjoyed my Aunt Audrey. And so I sat with her many long hours during that month. And She told me how this great-uncle had come to Detroit from North Carolina in the forties, and another from Georgia in the fifties. She spoke of the family from Oklahoma whose daughter had married her brother and then become a favorite aunt to most of her own nieces and nephews.

According to my great Aunt, the family had produced business people and craftsmen, hoboes and preachers (my maternal grand-father, her sister’s husband, had been both in his time), gamblers, musicians and crooks. Most of her memory sessions began with a detail, then took off into a broad sweep of family lore. She’d start in about how her sister Birdie loved music and to go to parties, and then remember that their older brother John loved music too, but didn’t care for parties and would only sing in church, which was something he got from their mom, a real church lady, who kept herself occupied as a seamstress, she had such a talent that way. And how she wasn’t so much of a cook, but she had this way of baking biscuits, different because in her childhood she’d been raised in Louisiana, and how their Daddy liked her biscuits fine, but always complained that she didn’t fry chicken right, the way they did in Alabama, where he’d been raised. And how you could always recognize a person from Alabama from the way they pronounced their ‘r’s, drawing them out – “aw-ruh” they’d say. But one cousin had come North determined to leave everything about the South behind him, so had worked hard to speak like the city folk, and so managed to ‘pass’ in that way. But others had been light skinned enough to ‘pass’ the other way, leaving their connection to the family entirely behind and disappearing into the white world.

It was Aunt Audrey that told me where some of the white blood had come into the family lines, in those days before the ending of slavery, and right after, usually some white man with a black woman, but not always: a white woman had born the child of one of my ancestors, then left the child to grow up in an orphanage.

I was most fascinated by her claim that one of our ancestors had been a “full blooded Indian”, and that another had come to America as a slave from Madagascar. She had some speculations about where in the family tree these two were to be found, and some few added details about their lives, but it never occurred to me then to write them down.

My Aunt died before I ever set foot in Detroit again. By that time, I was more aware of the importance of what she’d shared with me. But when I asked others in the family what tribe our native ancestor had belonged to, they knew nothing of him. And when I asked how it was a slave had been brought here from Madagascar – far off any slave trade route I’d ever heard about – they recalled nothing of that story either.

Many times since losing my Great Aunt, I’ve wondered about all the family history I do not know. I have no details to speak of that pre-date the generation of my grandparents. Of my eight Great Grandparents, I have the name of one, not stored in my faulty memory this time, but recorded in a notebook after a talk with another elder from another branch of the family.

And I’ve come to realize that this isn’t uncommon. Occasionally, I’ve met an individual with a reckoning of their ancestry back as far as two centuries or more. But always, it’s a history of merely one strand of their ancestry. That is, one strand of two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen greatgrands, thirty-two, sixty-four, one-hundred-twenty-eight, two-hundred-fifty-six, and on and on and on. Really, that amounts to not knowing one’s history at all.

On the other hand, there was a claim issued in a scientific study a few years back, that everyone on earth shares kinship, that we all have common ancestry. Somewhere in the past, as those familial inputs double with every generation, our connections get broader and broader, to the point where the numbers of direct ancestors is larger than the population of the world at a given time. It's only common sense, really. Whatever beliefs you have about the 'how' of it, the human population must have started off very small, so we all had to come from a common ancestry. An ancestry that spread itself with every generation, to the point where distant cousins could meet and marry with no sign or notion that they were related. Meaning that we are all multiply related.

Imagine the fascinating web, if each of us could go back even a hundred years or so, to know all we wish to know about each of our eight great-grandparents, or the sixteen that parented them!

I regret that I didn’t attend more carefully to the reminiscing of my Great Aunt Audrey. But even without the details, she left me with a great deal. She stimulated a wonder about the past and its connection to the present that has stayed with me. To this day, I wonder about the African, enslaved in Madagascar and carried half a world away, where he generated a line of descendants that eventually led to me. And I wonder about that Native American, and at the connection he made with a Black woman that led to them having children, mingling their bloodlines in my veins.

And I cannot think of them without speculating for a brief moment about all the others I know nothing about at all. Who might they be? What were their stories? And what an amazing thing it is to think that I am, in some small way, a distillation of all of those myriad stories, and the lived lives behind them.

Thank You, Aunt Audrey!

The Dysfunction of Majority Rule

2010-11-05T00:55:00.000-07:00

Something is disturbingly wrong with electoral politics, particularly the two-party, winner take all brand as practiced in my native USA.

I’m specifically disturbed at the way those who win elections by the slimmest margins are so quick to claim clear and unimpeachable mandates and act as though the entire community of the moral and the sane stands behind them, while those who lose by those same slim margins are relegated to the status of the inconsequential.

And this distorting language and behaviour is condoned by the media and by the voting public, as though it were reasonable, as though it had nothing to do with the extreme divisiveness that characterizes the politics of the day. And yet, we, the electorate, bemoan the dysfunction of government and wonder at the excess of partisanship.

This way of mediating disagreements would be considered unreasonable, controlling, arrogant and autocratic in many other areas of our lives. If any reasonably cohesive community of twenty found itself divided eleven to nine of an issue of importance, it would consider itself to be divided, and would seek ways to bring the parties together. The eleven wouldn’t trumpet themselves as champions going forth with a solid mandate. They would recognize that only a slim margin separates them from their opposition, and that a slight shift in circumstance or a change of heart could quickly reverse their standing. But in the current era of national politics, this same margin – 55% to 45% – is treated like undiluted victory for the winners and like humiliating defeat for the losers. The talk is as though the losing position lacks any legitimacy and must give up whatever it is they’ve stood for. And yet, reality proves time and again that this isn’t at all the case.

In 2004, George W. Bush was re-elected as president of the U.S. by a margin of 51% to 49%, following a victory in 2000 in a virtual dead heat (he actually trailed by half a million votes, but won in the electoral college, where it counts). He was then succeeded in 2008, by Barack Obama, who won election by a margin of 53% to 47%, only to then suffer the reversal in this week’s mid-term elections, where overall, Democrats lost to Republicans by a similar margin.

If you follow the media, these represent wild electoral swings, are signs of a bi-polar American populace that swings from steadfastly conservative to radically progressive from year to year. Right wing Bush America was transformed overnight into the liberal, “Yes We Can” Obama nation, and is now suddenly the Tea Party Land.

But we know this isn’t the case. Yes, in our communities we have seen changes of mood, party preference and political priorities. And we’ve seen swings in polls based on reactions to world events, economic conditions, and to policies and politicians and their promises and campaigns. But the friends who were conservative last year are probably conservatives still, and the progressives are likely still progressives. Most of us continue to vote for the party we’ve always voted for. And elections are swung by relative turnout, and by the relatively small numbers of us who actually go through a shift in orientation one or two times during our political lives.

So why this distortion? On some level, it has to do with the manner in which power is delegated. In a two-way race, it boils down simply to which side of that 50% line you land on. In our winner-take-all world, those who finish second are relegated to the role of obstructionists, whatever useful contributions they might make to an honest dialogue, and however circumstantial may be the manner of their loss. But that’s a mentality that sadly will get us nowhere in so far as healing the gaping philosophical rifts that have us polarized. If we can’t – as winners – develop a perspective that honors and respects and seeks to incorporate the contributions and concerns of those we’ve bested, it seems we’ll remain forever on this merry-go-round, on which it’s more important to gear up to destroy one another every two or four years, than it is to govern in a way that serves all.

It’s a senseless world, I think, where two percent becomes the defining piece of the whole, where catering to and winning the “swing vote” becomes all important, where positioning on an issue has less to do with approaching it rationally and effectively than with maintaining protection from attack.

A Talent For Me

2010-10-31T21:59:00.000-07:00

It might just be the most romantic and intimate thing ever said to me. It’s a statement of depth and wisdom that speaks to the complexities of relationship, the requirements for making one work, and that hints at the challenges of time. And, as a writer with a special appreciation for a well turned phrase, I knew immediately that I’d never express it any better than she had.

The subject was us, the relationship between my woman and I. And the speaker was that woman, Marzena, whom I call Ponczka. She said to me one day, as we were wondering at how fresh, alive and rich our relationship felt, after several years together, “You have a talent for me.”

Her words had the immediate ring of truth – that we both have a talent for each other. Because it isn’t that we’re successful because of any mastery over abstract skills or character traits, like honesty, selflessness or a capacity for love. It’s rather that we ‘fit’. There is a compatibility between us that is so strong that we succeed with one another when we are most ourselves. I’ve said something to her that relates to her beautiful summing up, but is much less elegant, that while I know she isn’t perfect, she’s perfect for me. So much is about how we match and compliment each other.

But talent is more than fitting. To be an instrument for generating life, a talent has to be developed. And we’ve both recognized that our talent for one another has been developed through our previous relationships, through our disappointments, through all our absorbing of the realities of life.

We’ve learned, for example, to let small grievances go, as well as the judgement and irritation of unmet expectations. We’ve learned that giving is its own reward, to be appreciated for our own willingness to give, rather than held hostage for appreciation and thanks that may not always come, at least not in the quantity and manner we expect. We’ve learned to accept one another for who we are – and that the difficult things we present to one another are all part of a package. And one of the most potent aspects of our talent – and one we have lots of occasion to laugh about – is that we know what to take seriously in one another’s complaints, demands and declarations, and what to ignore. Well, perhaps not ignore, but...not take so seriously. And it’s not always a matter of the what, often it’s merely about the when or the how of something said or done. After all, part of the blessing of an intimate relationship is the freedom to occasionally mis-speak or mis-behave, even to mis-feel. It’s a freedom of being taken for more than you present at the moment, the grace of being taken for the broader self you are, known and unknown.

I increasingly recognize that because of Ponczka’s talent for me I am able to grow and stretch beyond what I already am, beyond what I already know of myself. Her talent for me is an expression of love and acceptance. It creates a safe, home space, a kind of sanctuary. And the more solid it is, the more I can safely explore, the more I can look outward, trusting that foundation I move from. It’s why I can be such a child with her, and she with me. It’s not taking for granted, but close to that. The difference is in seeing, knowing and acknowledging what’s there, rather than, well...taking for granted.

A talent for me. Yes, recognizing small distinctions, being sensitive to time, having patience to know, to wait, to listen, and a giving quality that is a constant reward to itself. No, I’ll never express it any better than that.

Nothing to Show

2010-10-27T21:24:00.000-07:00

Today I learned of the death of the first of my clients I ever housed through the Streets to Homes program. He was in his mid-twenties and died of an overdose. Adrian (I’ve changed all names here, for the usual reasons) was a kid engaged in an intense battle with his addictions. It was an all-consuming battle, but I can’t truly describe it as a battle ‘against’ his addictions. At times, it was clearly his sobriety that was the enemy. At other times, it seemed it was he himself he was determined to undo. Though the battle seemed to be on-going, and the focus of most of his waking moments, the battle lines were never very clearly drawn. I imagine that his was a battle like many that occur in wars, once romance and patriotism and the veneer of order are peeled away – a confusing horror of weapons wielded in anger but without aim, of blind violence against whatever person or object is near, of rape and vengeance seized upon with an unreigned appetite whenever the opportunity presents itself.

When Adrian was on the street, before he was housed and making some tentative steps toward recovery, while he was still sleeping in parking garages and on top of grates in the downtown core, he was the youngest in a crowd of homeless men who were all locked in debilitating struggles with alcohol and drugs and who formed a loose yet cohesive community. There was Ted, a man in his mid-forties who had himself once been a social worker. Ted also had a claim as the “youngest” of the crowd, in the sense that he had the least direct experience of the streets, having only become homeless a few months before. He was the centre of the group, the one around whom the others congregated, partly because of his age, because of his education, and possibly because his having once been a worker himself testified to the arbitrariness of the catastrophe that had put each of them on the street. But it also had a lot to do with his calm and easy spirit, and his way of pulling the guys into moving the same way, instead of against each another. There was Bernie, in his thirties, who proudly and ardently refused all help from workers, but who loved to welcome and talk with us all the same. There was Donnie, living half the time with the grate crowd and the rest of his time with a mentally and emotionally fragile girlfriend he shared a tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with. In all, there were about ten regulars and hangers-on, about half of them Caucasian and the other half Native, sharing their booze and sleeping space on the grate, caring for one or two dogs, supporting one another through their arrests, visits to emergency rooms and stays in detox when the lifestyle became too intense to bear.

At any given time, two or three of them were strongly motivated to work at getting housing, but perhaps the most serious of their challenges was staying focused and sober long enough to move forward. And one of the most impressive and moving aspects of this community was how, to a man, they alternately supported and pressured Adrian, the youngest, and Ted, the newest of their number, to make the necessary changes to escape the street. This concern was masked in bravado at times, and in the claim that these two were less strong, fit or ready for the harshness of the streets, while they themselves could stand it awhile longer. They had already survived it for years, after all. But beneath the show of deference and concern, one could usually glimpse the fear, that maybe they’d withstood the streets for too long to ever break free. Adrian could be saved because he was still so young, and because his father still came looking for him, sitting with hims in coffee shops and going along on appointments at the OW office, visiting him in Detox and going with him to see the ruined and smelly rooms his benefits might afford, even offering him inducements to try getting clean one more time. Ted might be saved because he’d once had a substantial success in the world, and not in the too-distant past. And he had a wife who hadn't given up and wanted to be with him. And he had a dog, and what a friend a blessing and dog is when you live on the street. Maybe he could make it again.

And in fact, two years further on, Ted has made leaps. He’s been housed for over a year now. He’s reconnected with family. He’s even looking into university, to work at completing a degree. He tried making the occasional visit to the grate, “for old times”, and to reconnect with those who’d kept him alive and going when he didn’t always feel he could himself. But every time he did so, he wound up on a binge, wasted, blacked out, maybe arrested. So he finally stopped going back there. He’s learned to keep his eyes directed forward.

But Adrian didn’t make it. The last I heard of him before today was from Donnie, now housed himself, no longer with the girlfriend, working part-time, but still on the street with the guys from time to time. He told me that Adrian still came around too much, still used indiscriminately, both alcohol and whatever else was put in front of him. And now he’s gone.

Adrian isn’t the only one of my clients to die an untimely death, directly related to street life. There’ve been a few. But learning of his death today really struck me. It brought to mind the early mornings when I’d find him along the sidewalk, cold and shaking violently from early withdrawal, panning for a few dollars so he could make a trip to the beer store when it opened, to start his day right. He’d acknowledge the pain, but would then laugh it off. He’d tell me he knew what he was doing, and that he’d kick all of this. He knew how to. He’d done if before and would do it again, from will power and from the smarts he knew he had. He just wasn’t ready yet. Why pretend he was. The day would come. We’d all see.

The Mayoralty

2010-10-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

The votes are in. Ford will be the next mayor of Toronto. I'm not happy with the result, but - as is always the case in free and fair elections - the people's choice has prevailed.

As was the case when the electorate of my homeland elected George Bush - not once, but twice! - it's a bit jarring to me that my fellow citizens could make such an obviously bad choice. But, as then, I'm forced to recognize that intelligent and well-meaning people can disagree. Not everyone who voted for Ford, or for Bush, is an idiot or a person of no moral character. Good people have made their choice - totally contradictory to my own - based on their own assessment of what will make a good leader, a wise approach to government, and ultimately, a better city to live in.

But I still have my criticisms. And my criticism is aimed more at the electorate than at the elected.

We, the electorate, continue to allow ourselves to be manipulated, by grossly distorted misrepresentations of what candidates have done and what they have intended. We tolerate superficial and uncritical reportage by the media, and the often arbitrary determination by that same media as to which candidates deserve our attention.

And, we allow ourselves to be manipulated via our fears more often than our dreams. We don't hold politicians and candidates to the standards that we expect of ourselves and those we interact with, when it comes to honest dealing and communication, to compromise, to a willingness to give credit where credit is due, and to evaluating and criticizing honestly and with integrity.

If we had a better informed and more responsible electorate, we'd have a higher quality candidate. But we don't credit what a truly difficult job it is to work in government, to negotiate and debate issues among those holding widely differing opinions, interests and values. We create our politicians, by rewarding them and penalizing them as we do,with our votes and our indifference.

This week, I found myself buying into a slogan of a particular campaign. I voted for Pantalone, though it was very clear he wouldn't win, based substantially on his call on voters to act not merely to keep a feared candidate from winning, but to support values and platforms we actually support and believe in.

Now that the campaign is done, and there exists the real possibility of city government turning in directions I cannot support, I have to challenge myself on how to be an involved and contributing citizen in opposition. How does one support the broader aims of well-functioning government and respect for majority rule, while still holding to principles that point to different programs and policies?

It's at least as difficult and important a job being a responsible citizen as it is being a responsible elected official.

Land of the No-Look Pass

2010-10-19T22:59:00.000-07:00

One of the very few things I dislike about my adopted city is that people are so turned inward, and will hardly interact with a stranger in public places. I’ve come to accept that to most of the practitioners of the “No-Look Pass”, this is perfectly normal, healthy, respectful and intelligent behaviour. They really THINK that.

Me – I view it as pretty sad that people walk right by other people and don’t acknowledge the encounter with another intelligent, sentient, human being. Even if, in fact, they haven’t encountered another intelligent, sentient, human being. The potential at least exists.

I guess it's a matter of what I grew up accustomed to. In most of the many cities and towns I’ve lived in, the way has been to acknowledge others in some way. No, not everyone does so, and those who do, don’t acknowledge every single human being they glimpse or pass. That would be impossibly inefficient. It would keep you from living. So people in very crowded places – take New York City – develop shortcuts.

New Yorkers are incredibly interactive in public. They check each other out. They glance, peek, stare, pan, scan, look you up and down, sometimes with a sneer or a nod or a wink or a glare, or a dare. New Yorkers see you, and you know you’ve been seen. There’s a bit of a verbal thing going on too. New Yorkers will blurt, snap, bark, yap and curse at you all day long. It often feels unfriendly. Mostly it isn’t. There’s just not a lot of time for niceties, and people have to be thick skinned, and so, its short and sweet. Snap, crackle and pop. But you always feel acknowledged in New York.

It’s not the warmest kind of acknowledgement, true. Doesn’t necessarily make you feel welcome. But why do you need to be welcomed? You’re here, ain’t cha? Fuckin’ center of the whole goddamn universe! What else do you want?

You want somebody to make you feel good? Welcome you to your stay among really nice, smart, well educated, progressive people, who are all into sharing and generosity and giving up their seat on Metro? You need to go to Seattle. You can hardly walk past anyone in Seattle without them wishing you a good day and smiling at you. If this is new behaviour for you, it may cause you to frantically go through your mental roll-o-dex, trying to figure out why you’re drawing a total blank on this person who obviously knows you from way back, and there’s no way you shouldn’t know their name. But no, it’s not that at all. Seattlites, who are hardly ever from Seattle, by the way, feel like this is how you should treat everyone. They are unfailingly polite. Lots of smiles and nods, please and thanks.

And in Raleigh, North Carolina, they go beyond polite, and are downright friendly to strangers. You stand in a line, or ride up in an elevator with somebody, you’re liable to have a dinner invitation or to have joined a bowling league by the time you negotiate the trip.

It’s not like I’m a social dynamo, myself. I’m on the quiet, keep-it-to-myself side. But I can nod and smile and say “Hey” alright, and I like to do so. Living here, it’s mostly been squashed out of me. Because, yes, I’m shaped by my social environment. It’s harder to give a generous smile to strangers here. There’s the whole cultural expectation you’re up against, the lack of response, the deafening silence in those elevators, the stiffening of bodies, the intake of breath. People don’t take the openness and friendliness so well here. They probably handle it better when they’re in New York or Seattle – some may even get into the spirit of the place, and open up themselves.

But In Toronto, for the greater part, it seems that people are trying to avoid noticing each other. Hardly anybody nods, says hello, smiles or anything else. Casual greetings hardly ever happen, and are ignored when received. Even people who see one another all the time, at the same bus stop, or in line at the grocery, are extremely slow to breach the barrier of not having ever been introduced. And it’s not that people exchange that shy glance that says, “Hi. I see you over there, and I know we’ve seen each other, but hey, we don’t have to push it and actually speak yet.... Maybe next time.” No, here in Toronto, it’s more often a reaction that says: “I refuse to have it even appear that my eyes react normally to a large body entering my field of vision.” People walk right by one another on Toronto streets without so much of a flicker of awareness. It’s Magic Johnson’s No Look Pass” perfected. And it’s equally deceptive and as potentially devastating.

It isn’t that Torontonians are genuinely cold. We just seem to require an excuse to reach beyond ourselves and connect. When there’s a reason, a duty, it’s reassuring how often people come through. Like today, when I dropped my eyeglasses in the street, and two separate individuals called my attention to it. Or last week, when a concerned person started up a conversation about a homeless man who’d spoken to both of us. Not always, though. I was once witness to part of a sequence in which a man had a bladder failure and accidently urinated on a streetcar seat. He fled the crowded streetcar, shortly after which another passenger took the seat. When another seat opened up, the passenger who had just sat down on a urine-soaked seat, simply got up and took a second seat. He, like the original urinator, mentioned nothing about the hazard and stood by while a third person sat in this same seat. There are several other cities – some already mentioned – in which I can’t imagine this happening in near total silence among passengers, who were mostly content to act as though totally unaware of what was transpiring.

There’s a deep timidity in this city that keeps us more disconnected than we might be. In some ways, I expect that the broad sweep of ethnicities and cultures gives us allowance to exaggerate out differences and therefore keep apart. Or perhaps it does reflect a lingering aspect of a British-colonial culture that’s often cited for its reserve. Whatever the cause of it, I wish it would go away.

Since moving to Toronto, I’ve visited both Montreal and Paris, cities I’d been warned were marked by rudeness. But my experience didn’t support that at all. In both cities, I found people to be approachable and helpful, and there seemed to be no great barrier between people. But that could be more a reflection of the experience of travelling beyond ones known world. I’ve had a number of first time visitors to Toronto remark on how friendly and helpful its people are. Maybe it’s all a matter of perspective.

In any case, I resolve from time to time, that I’ll get back into the habit of greeting, smiling and nodding to people, regardless of whether I meet with reciprocity. I usually manage for a while, but then slip back into ways that have become too natural to me. I’m reminded though, of an experience I had that made a strong impression on me.

When I started working with a Housing Program two years ago, my original assignment was to walk the streets, engaging and enrolling the homeless to our services. A number of times, homeless individuals approached me and initiated a conversation merely because I held their gaze and smiled at them. Imagine what it must be like to spend hours every day on the sidewalks and in the malls and parks, and to have hundreds of people walk by and look right through you, as though they didn’t see you, as though you didn’t even exist.

A Look into my Bloggy Mind

2010-10-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

So long without blogging. And not from a lack of things to blog about. In fact, the opposite. My thoughts have been taken up by so many, varied topics lately, that I’ve not been able to focus:

There’s the change in the seasons and how it works on me, shifting my moods, my energies, getting me in the emotional mode of beginning a new cycle. Fall has always been my favorite time of year, and I know it has something to do with the cooling, the slowing down and re-grouping.

There's been so much going on: our sailing adventure; the outdoor Art shows; the Film Festival, and seeing a screening in the Bell Lightbox; Word on the Street, and the invitation I always extend myself, to be unreasonable about buying books; all the ups and downs of street outreach, working with homeless youth, finding new apartments, the threatened evictions, arrests, new relationships and break-ups, the disorientations of addictions and psychoses, even two babies on the way. Then there was a final and unexpected camping trip to Cape Croker...in October.

I’ve read some things about my hometown, Detroit, lately. It has been a severely damaged city for so long. The population has declined by a couple of million over the last three or four decades, leaving large pockets of the city a virtual wasteland. And this sprawling zone of urban failure is now becoming a kind of incubator for experiments in all sorts of urban enterprises. It’s actually made me consider, for the first time in decades, that I might want to live in my hometown again, and be a part of its new beginning.

The mayoral election, and the midterm elections of Obama’s first term, have me considering both the crucial importance of politics, and the mind-numbing, soul-curdling, grotesque turn-off it so often is. Is it the case that we’ve become so dependent on being manipulated and pandered to, that for a leader to present him or herself as a reasonable and open-minded person, willing to acknowledge an opponent’s intelligence and essential humanity, let alone respect and consider an opposing point of view, would instantly disqualify them from leading us?

Speaking of which, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Obama’s “Dreams From My Father”, and what a brilliant, insightful book it is! He manages in these pages to dissect and analyse so many of the questions of identity, loyalty, belonging, race and being that I and so many others of my generation - Black-American Boomers - have wrestled with all of our lives. It reminds me of the power of his “Race” speech in the spring of ’08, which made me a 100% confirmed supporter.

And yes, it’s bringing me closer to writing the blog I’ve had in mind for some time, to be titled, “Why I’m not the First Black American President”.

I’ve been considering questions of belief, conviction and will – how they shape us, and how we then determine to shape others. It seems that we (I include myself in this) carve out areas in which we can feel an absolute certitude about our opinions, positions and values. We mostly try and keep our discussions inside this terrain, where we’re very comfortable. But when someone draws us out, into territory where we’re unsure, we get uptight and uncomfortble. The mental prisons we’ve occupied and fortified become exposed as more vulnerable than we’d supposed. Our chains begin to rattle. Hmmm?

Which brings me to my final thought, the mental tidbit I’ve been turning over and over. It’s that notion that everything we do boils down to love or fear. I increasingly think that’s a good summary of how humans operate. We’re either operating to get more of something we want, or to get away from something we don’t want. We decide a course of action either to bring about a good, or to avoid an evil. We try to create beauty or destroy ugliness. Etcetera, etcetera. But while the wanting and not wanting, the good and the evil, the beauty and ugliness is often purely subjective, the underlying orientation isn’t so much. That basic orientation can define an approach to life. Love or Fear. Create or Destroy. Explore or Protect. Believe that there’s always enough, or that there’s never enough. That things work out, or that they never do.

I know this is an over-simplification. We all do both, see things both ways. Life itself demands a sort of balance here, I think. And yet, we mostly lean to one side or the other. And for me, it’s pretty clear what side I want to be on. So that, increasingly, when facing a difficult decision, or choosing a course of action, I’ll ask myself, “Are you acting out of Love, or out of Fear?” It has surprised me how simple it usually is to determine which.