Persistence & Change

Today is the tenth consecutive day of the thaw, yet the snow and ice endure.

It’s a telling demonstration of the persistence of Winter’s hold that despite the drips and trickles and streams of water from all the melting, there is no difficulty in finding a chunk of ice or a heap of snow piled three feet high.

However much we think of things as fleeting, it seems to me that the power of persistence holds sway in the world. Winter will not be so gently nudged aside.

February was an epic month – the coldest ever recorded in Toronto. Not for a single second did the temperature rise above freezing, and we became accustomed to the feeling of twenty below. Pipes froze and burst, furnaces failed, and the thought of welcoming the open air became difficult to conjure. People died. And what a way to die.

I’m put in mind of persistence as one of the pillars of existence, alongside its contrary sibling, change. What havoc the two create. But also, what order and flow they bring about.

There is the persistence of the child in the adult.
The change of seasons, going round and round and round.
The persistence of anger,
and the slow dismantlement of feeling that makes us human again.
Memories form like rocks,
insisting on what has been that cannot be undone.
But they are molded by the dancing chisel of truth,
malleable under the unceasing rain of time.

And beauty.
What is most beautiful: hope or what it points to, love or that it grows,
life or that it flickers and extinguishes its bittersweet before we can know it?

Winter comes, it dies, it comes again. It has never really left.
Nor has Spring.

Once Upon a Moment

How does the following passage strike you? It’s from the book Tantra, by Osho.

“...Don’t fight with yourself, be loose. Don’t try to make a structure around yourself of character, or morality. Don’t discipline yourself too much; otherwise your very discipline will become the bondage... Remain loose, floating, move with the situation, respond to the situation. Don’t move with a character jacket around you, don’t move with a fixed attitude.

“But...society teaches you to impose something...: be good, be moral, be this and that. And Tantra is absolutely beyond society, culture and civilization. It says if you are too much cultured you will lose all that is natural, and then you will be a mechanical thing, not floating, not flowing. So don’t force a structure around you – live moment to moment, live with alertness....

“Why do people try to create a structure around them? So that they don’t need alertness – because if you have no character around you, you will need to be very very aware...

“To avoid awareness people have created a trick, and the trick is character. Force yourself into a certain discipline so that whether you are aware or not, the discipline will take care of you. Make a habit of always saying the truth; make it a habit, then you need not be worried about it. Somebody asks, you will say the truth, out of habit – but out of habit a truth is dead.

“...And life is not so simple. Life is a very very complex phenomenon. Sometimes a lie is needed, and sometimes a truth can be dangerous – and one has to be aware. For example, if through your lie somebody’s life is saved...what will you do? If you have a fixed mind that you have to be true, then you will kill a life.”

When I first read it, it kind of floored me. I mean, on one level, it was absolutely ridiculous. It went without saying that Character and Morality are dear things, very important tools of guidance. To do without them would kind of be like to abandon language and the alphabet, and to have to figure it out from scratch every time you wanted to communicate with anyone. And, principles are important precisely because they take you out of the moment, toward something approaching the universal. Principles of character and morality are important because they are distilled from a broad view of causes, situations and circumstance and because they have been tested by time, in a wide range of human conditions. They are trustworthy. One can rely on the principles – “Do Not Kill”, “Do not Lie”, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, without having to pick apart the circumstances of a particular  instance.

Yes, it was very obvious to me that this Osho character had gotten things very wrong. Except that, well...his message is so damned compelling. It got a rise out of me, lots of rises. There was something very naturalistic and right-feeling about what he had to say. And all my objections to is were abstract and cautionary, such as, “If you abandon morality, then chaos and disorder will surely follow”, or “People will use this philosophy as an excuse to do whatever they want. It gives people a way around responsibility.”

To this day, I consider, struggle over, flip this viewpoint backward and forward, up and down, trying to come to terms with it. Of course, there is one fairly easy way out. Which is that, if no moral structure is to be adhered to, and every situation taken on its own merits, well this holds for this philosophy as for any other. I’m no more bound to the position of ‘abandonning morality’ than I am to any other.

But does that get me out of it? Out of what...? If I’m thinking on those terms, I’m right back in the loop again. At bottom line, what this statement says to me is that there’s no way out, except to be out. No way out of being in the moment and...deciding, acting, living, in whatever way this particular moment may call for. And no reaction to this moment can be fully justified – or rejected – based on reference to some other moment. Because any other moment is an abstraction, it’s an evasion of what is, right now. It’s copping out of life.

Isn’t that so?

Which leads me directly to another teaching that is having its impact upon me:

The Tao te Ching is a book I’ve known of and have read for going on three decades now, but I’ve been so slow to understand it. And what little understanding I have has come to me in small doses. A particular verse – the 15^th – which for so long was totally incomprehensible to me, has begun to speak to me over the last few months. The piece of it that suddenly slammed me between the eyes is the following, from a translation by Stephen Mitchell, “Do you have the patience to wait, till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving, till the right action arises by itself?”

That passage speaks to me of all the times I’ve tried to manage my life, to make it fit into a kind of formula about “how things work”. It speaks to me of times I’ve acted, not out of any confidence I was doing what was appropriate, but from the need to be in action, to respond to a circumstance. Sometimes, it’s been merely in order to be perceived a particular way: as capable, caring, on the ball. Sometimes, action has been a way to reassure myself, because stillness would have been too much to bear. But in practice, some of my best moves seem to have had a large ingredient of happy, unexpected grace. Grace that sometimes feels like that ‘right action arising by itself’.

How much of life is indeed about being in the right place, at the right time, as my friend Lucie suggested in her comment on my last post? Being there, and not in a hurry to do what you don’t know is to be done? Maybe just giving a decision, a circumstance, a feeling, the chance to form, to ripen. And, instead of picking it, waiting, trusting, and allowing it to fall into your lap?

Looking for that Rhythm

These days and these weeks have been rich and rewarding. Ponczka and I have been immersed in a flow of stimulating and broadening activity, enjoying new and old friends, taking on new challenges, feeling very alive. And yet...

I'm more aware than I've ever been that doing something right doesn't counterbalance the things I'm doing that are very wrong. And it so happens that in my life now, there is a lot of both. But I can't - as I have so often before - think that this living is about averages, and that the good I do somehow erases the lapses, the mis-judgements, the indulgences.

No, I won't take this space to enumerate my failures. But I will note the corollary to the above: it's equally true that my lapses are not capable of erasing the smart, the generous and the creative things that I do. That detail is a precious little aspect of the way things are.

I've been watching a lot of sport, lately. Yesterday, it was Serena Williams versus Agnieszka Radwanska for the Wimbledon crown. One of the things I most love and admire about athletic competition is that the failures of the contestants is at the heart of every contest. Tennis players are always sending shots into the net, misjudging the tactics of their opponents, creating faults and unforced errors. And the pathway to success is always substantially bound up in how they manage these mistakes. However many aces a player produces, it isn't enough if they can't keep any of their returned serves in play. And vice versa. I admire the resolve by which a player manages to accept and somehow compensate for their short-comings. And it seems that the very best athletes are always working at managing their mistakes even better.

On the other hand, in the place where I work, and in the culture of almost all places I've ever worked, there's a substantial effort that goes into over-looking mistakes and weaknesses, in forgiving them and even accepting them as a matter of course, and designing 'harm reduction' methods to contain their effects. I'm not making a critique of the program I work for. It's a wonderful and powerful program of intervention and support, and its ways of dealing with the imperfections of our team are pretty standard, even humane. I thankful that I do not work in an environment where all of my weaknesses are used against me by an opponent who wants to defeat me. If I did, I would't survive very long.

But at the same time, I so admire the process that forces careful scrutiny of failures, in the effort to excel, to improve, to grow, to persevere, to win!

And so... I'm taking inspiration from watching sports, in which contestants are picked apart by their adversaries, and have to dig deep to come up with solutions to help them move on. I'm motivating myself by the examples of Serena and Agnieszka yesterday, battling to the point of exhaustion and beyond, expending grueling effort on point after point, only to see half their efforts fail, and having to push on.

I'm trying to push on myself. I want to hone and develop the tools I already have working for me. And I really need to take charge of some of my shortcomings, find ways to keep them from holding me back. It's not about eliminating them. No, it's more about: how do I manage my schedule better despite the fact that I'm not very punctual? How do I stay on top of my creative projects despite the fact that inspiration and the flow of ideas can't be rationed out among my days and hours? How do I keep a high level of integrity in my relationships, despite the fact that I so like indulging my appetite for doing things my way and on my own?

One of the things I aim to do, beginning tomorrow, is to write here more frequently and regularly. That's another tip I take from those athletes I most admire: their willingness to declare expectations for themselves, to allow their hunger and drive to be visible.

This is shaping up to be such an eventful year. I want to go for it. This year, I intend to leave everything on the court!

Who, What and Why

      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?

Where Music Comes From

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.

In STONE

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

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.

Beer & Buddhism

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.

Misses & Hits

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 World Is Too Big

There’s too much to do. And I move slower all the time.

I turned 56 this year, and there’s no escaping age and the narrowing of possibility.

I’m starting to lose original parts. They’re going bad, and either needing support, rehauling or removal.

My eyes, my back. That tooth I lost. The sugar imbalance that might’ve become diabetes....

I can’t sprint anymore. My speediest movement is what would’ve been an aggressive jog a few years ago. I’m not the Bear I used to be, when it comes to lifting and moving things. And I can’t just go and go like I once could with a woman I was wanting.

DAMN! I’m just getting old.

And the latest thing is my mind. No, I’m not exactly afraid of Alzheimer’s or some other dementia. One of those may come, certainly. But I’ll do what I can to stay healthy and not otherwise worry about it.

But my memory...

I’m forgetting things all the time. Where I left something. Names. Things I intended to do. So much easier getting caught up in simple complexities like negotiating a website or keeping track of my parking ticket appeals.

Every now and then I’m struck by the sight of a shrunken older man or woman, from whom not only all traces of youth have departed, but who have been bent or twisted by life, as though by a force bearing down on them for decades, and inescapable.

And, like they say, No one ever got out of Life alive.

But the most difficult part, the part that makes the world of possibility seem to shrivel between each breath, is the shortness, the stinginess, the waste and spillage of time.

So many things I haven’t done. And even as I do them – taste new flavours, bend myself into different shapes, consume and let myself be consumed by experiences and just by living – even then, time accelerates by, stripping away the months and the years, faster than I can fill them.

Such a big world. Such a vast world.

I’ve learned to play the sax, but not to drive a semi. And I never swam with a dolphin.

I attended a 10 day Vipassana retreat, and canoed on Lake Temagami, thumbed the interstate from Atlanta to San Francisco, and sipped wine in Kafka’s Prague, but I’ve yet to make the furniture for the roof deck, or see Quebec City, or buy that vinyl copy of Trane at the Village Vanguard.

And I’ve never fathered a child. And I’ve not yet seen Mother Africa.

And though I continue to write, through all these years, I’ll never write that novel I was meant to write in my twenties.

I can not win back any of the wasted time.

I can’t now say yes, and reverse the no from long ago. I can’t now unwrap the successes, or even those failures, I was too afraid to welcome, but which were mine anyway, to help me in the flowering of my life. Even looking backward at it doesn’t bring it near.

So there’s only now. Time ever shifting. And this big world.

And all I can do is use it up.

Coming Out From Under

My relationship with marijuana began in exploration and escape. In my late teens the exploration was about discovering the wide world, the layers and pathways of it. This meant discovering the new, but also re-discovering the familiar, via new experience, new thinking, new ideas, and new eyes. The escape was about leaving behind sadness, and skirting around the heavy consciousness of all the ways I was disconnected from people and places and events around me.

I loved the herb, and it wasn’t long before I was a devotee of “Yo Highness”. Was this addiction? I wondered from an early time. But the answer didn’t much involve me. So long as the exploration kept the world fresh, and so long as self-consciousness was overcome, well, why shouldn’t this be a way of life? It was a way of life that changed my life, and I had no way of considering that I would occupy an altered world for the next fifteen years, or what that might mean.

Three or four years into my near daily use of herb, I evolved a theory about the nature of being high. I speculated that what marijuana did was blend my waking and my dream states, so that under its influence I experienced a softness and malleability in the material world. It seemed that ideas, thoughts, feelings had more weight in this dimension, but also that physical realities counted for less. Understandable that music and art, books and nature drew me in more, and that my “ambition” gave way. Because the things I was ambitious about, my marijuana mind showed me, were less substantial than I had supposed. In the fuzzy, blended state I now inhabited, the meaning and weight of a thing was interlaced with that of many others. In the wild mix of possibility, everything was possible and nothing imperative. All things carried the added import of my dream sensibility as part of its materiality – the world had a kind of sixth dimension, a dimension beyond time.

After indulging regularly for fifteen years, I then practiced abstinence for fifteen. The journey into sobriety felt like a descent through clouds, through the trees and to the ground. And solid ground was an odd thing for some while. “Grounded” was the character that all of creation seemed to take on. Everything, even the watery and airy parts of existence, became very solid and heavy. There was a density, not only to matter, but also to actions and expressions, and to all the other tangibles and intangibles of life – even to such things as ideas, even dreams. Objects and beings no longer vibrated with essential energy, linked in that ideal, metaphysical domain of connectivity that marijuana had induced. This was, as an experience, much like a fall. Solid reality took getting used to. The impermeability of things made me feel like a superman robbed of his powers. This flatness felt dead and hard. It was difficult to adjust to. But only for the first year or so. After that, the herb dreamscape faded. It became the ‘other’ reality once again, and sobriety reclaimed Planet Earth.

In time, a beauty, a richness began to permeate my world again. For some years, I used mood altering substances hardly at all. In a way, it was a return to a consciousness that I’d abandoned in my late teens, those years of exploration. But it was different, in that I was no longer seeking relief through a distracted mind. In fact, I was going inward more, not seeking to numb or distract, but peeling away the reserve that had prevented me from exploring myself. And inside, I found a depth I had once mistakenly thought was only to be found out in the world somewhere. And this new “groundedness” translated into an abundance all through the material and experiential worlds. It was a time when I began to believe and to understand that the miraculous is everywhere.

Eventually though, through curiosity or nostalgia or hubris, I began to use again. Not like before. No more quiet, soft fogs that endured for weeks and months at a time, with only the occasional patch of fasting to refresh the enduring high. Now I used in short spikes, ranging from a single day to sometimes over a week, with stretches of two to six weeks in between. The highs I experience, as an occasional user, are richer and more transcendent than anything I experienced as a chronic user. Herb has become almost a sacrament as used this way, generating deep insights and triggering creative moments of synthesis on a regular basis. But these benefits only come after periods of abstinence. And I’ve learned that while a 1-day high clears in just one or two smokeless days, a binge that stretches to over a week will need a good two weeks or more to wear off entirely.

It is now both transitions between high and sober states that I recognize as revelatory. It’s a two way trip, as across a border between states, that border perhaps like the surface of a lake, or a doorway between dimensions. It recalls to me my early theory, about the blending of the dream and waking states, two modes of being we experience that parallel one another, each with an authenticity and realness when we are in it. The transition in one direction mirrors the transition in the other. There’s a ‘high’ to coming down, to the clearing of the mind, to the shifting away from the dream state, just as there is to the rush that comes after that first toke, the intake of smoke, and the shift, as intoxication comes on. It’s a very different high: slower, re-orienting rather than disorienting, perhaps more of the body than of the mind. It too stimulates creativity and synthesis, in a way that’s more social and interactive and engaged with the world than that other high. It has given me a new understanding of mind and self. It has created in me a new balance. And It is a realm about which my understanding is still growing.

My herb use has had a major effect on my life, and I still struggle over the import of this. Having a differently functioning mind altered the course of my life, and I sometimes find myself wondering whether I was diverted from my rightful path when I started to smoke, or whether I found it. To decide one way or another would require a commitment to particular philosophical or moral positions. For example, that any mind but the ‘natural’ mind represents a diminishment. Or, that the various perceptual and conceptual breaks with orthodoxy that my herb use stimulated represent a liberation. I don’t know that I’ll ever decide one way or another. I tend to think that I won’t, if only because I reject the notion that the "either-or" absolute of such a choice represents the only way of viewing the issue.

One thing that’s certain is that I don’t want to condemn any experience that’s part of my road. I want to believe that “I can reach heaven from Here”, wherever Here might be. It’s a reflection of my faith that all of my experiences can be a part of my positive growth, and that, in the words of the poem Desiderata, “...no doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should”.

My Nature

I don’t much like the color green. I especially don’t like olive. But I love my bike, and one of the things I love most is its color, which is olive green. Today – and surely this will change – I can’t imagine wanting a bike of a different color.

I’m not attracted to skinny women. Yet, I’m infatuated at the moment with a woman I chat with mornings in the coffee shop, and who is quite slim.

I don’t relate to the ritual or the strict guidance of religion, but I find prayer to be a sublime act, and I once took communion during a Catholic Mass (I’m not Catholic in any way) and felt spiritually renewed by the act.

Cars don’t much appeal to me, but I love to drive.

I regularly proclaim that I love all kinds of music, except country, opera and heavy metal. And yet, particular arias have moved me to tears, I love the way KD Lang spins a ballad – or Patsy Cline, for that matter – and I once, unintentionally, saw AC/DC in concert, and was blown away by their gut-pumping soul.

I don’t like my food on sticks or skewers, unless it happens to be souvlaki.

I hate lies and deception, but I love secrets

The public coldness of Toronto I find sad and disappointing; and I love cities where people speak to strangers on street corners and in elevators. But it annoys the hell out of me when people have loud conversations about their business on the bus.

So does it matter that I say what I like and what I don’t? Do I really even know?

And how will it go, when I’m confronted by that next experience that I’ve ruled out in advance?

Or face that objectionable person that I already disapprove.

Are my rules and definitions of myself such fragile constructs? Or just part of a game of dress-up, by which I cloak my broader nature?

I carry fear of so many things, and yet I exist in this world.