Perception is Reality

[image credit: surREAL_by_twistedhero-my favorite kind of art]

picture prompt from Real Toads : explore "surreal is the real" in a poem


Traveler looks out on a world of beauty:
blue skies, rain forests and ocean waves
live within her mind.

She passes a car wreck, and sees
the everyday heroes
assisting the victims, rushing to save their lives,
for life is precious.

She walks Third Avenue, the beat of the forlorn,
the ragged, the broken, the addicted,
the impoverished,
and sees how a  smile transforms the faces
of the hopeless,
the simple acknowledgement of shared humanity
rekindling their hopes for another day,
each life so precious.

When the news clamors of discord and unrest,
when the sound bytes of planetary suffering
and injustice assault her eyes and ears,
she turns it off, goes outside and
raises her eyes to the sky, to the clouds,
to the All That Is,
for she knows well, by now,
that the world of our perception
is the world of our reality,
and life is precious.

Another Day on Planet Earth

[Daughter-in-law Zenny, Jon's wife,  with my son Jeff

in Cathedral Grove outside of Port. Photo by Jon Merk]

Hi kids,
Walking Miss Jasmine this morning, I could hear:
a sleepy rooster,
the gobble-cry of a raven,
junkos at the feeder,
the piercing scold of a bluejay,
a flock of Canada geese
honking their way past.

The horse whickered as I went by - wondering if I might have a stray carrot or two.

The few houses on the street were all quiet and sleepy, people just stirring about getting their morning tea. I headed straight for the kettle when we got back in. Iso love mornings.

The cars, of course, were zooming along Beaver Creek, in a big rush to grab coffee on the way to work.

I am going to Faiza's this morning. Her support hours have been cut, due to government assessment of what this 80 year old, exhausted, sole caregiver (who has mobility issues of her own) for her barely-mobile husband requires in the way of help. So frustrating. I likely will wind up doing the same amount, because she requires it, but for half the pay. Meanwhile the "Home Support" people come three times daily, for a very much higher hourly rate, to take a prepared bowl of soup out of the fridge, nuke it, and give it to Bill. They are "not allowed" to clean anything - that's what I'm for.

Bureaucracy is as unhelpful and as far removed from the problems on the ground as ever.

Jasmine slipped and went down on her injured leg a week ago and did some damage. The vet thinks it is just severe inflammation, but I suspect perhaps she may stay lame, as this time it isnt responding to rest and anti-inflammatories. Poor girl has been so patient through her boring recovery. Surgery was in November and we are still in early stage recovery. (Hey, I sound like AA!)

I am doing better in my grieving over Pup. His death really shook me. But I suspect it was more than his death. He was so tied into my wilderness heart and our years in Tofino, that it reawakened my grief over losing that place. I never really allowed myself to grieve it at the time. Grief has a way of catching up with us. And there have been a lot of losses in my life, as in most peoples' lives.

I still have my moments, and sometimes get blind-sided for an hour or an afternoon. But I am  feeling stronger. It is all part of the deal - love hurts, but we cant say no to it when it comes. Especially when it comes in the form of a wild little wolf puppy with a very huge spirit!

[Zenny at Lake Louise outside of Banff. Photo by Jon Merk]

My adorable daughter-in-law Zenny is arriving tonight for a visit. I am excited! We are going to have some serious Chick time. And we will go to the beach. She lives inland now and longs for the ocean as I do. One beach walk in the near future will do a lot to set my soul right.

One more day alive on planet earth - each day a gift, whatever it brings. Now that time is more finite, I know just how precious each day is.

Enjoy this Wednesday, my friends!

Heaven's Coast

I have just finished reading - for the second time - Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast, the story of his life with his partner Wally through the time he was dying of AIDS. Mark is a well-known poet on  the USA's eastern seaboard, and his memoir of this period of his life is lyrically written. The New York Times called it "a terrifying and elegant book", and it was worth a re-read to me, when I remembered what an elegy it is, with its understanding of grief, conscious living and conscious dying.

I don't think I have read a better perspective on these topics, and I have done a lot of reading. I thought I'd blog some of the passages I found especially meaningful, for a friend who is going through a difficult passage right now, in the hopes of shedding some light and some hope, and the support of knowing these are passages we all, inevitably, go through in our lives. Here's Mark, beginning in the afternoon and evening hours when his lover is dying :

All that afternoon he looks out at us......I know he sees and registers; I know that he's loving us actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that......I sit there myself all afternoon, the lamps on, since the house is circled in snow and early winter darkness. The afternoon's so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, like a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.

There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface-- as if I could see into him, into the great, hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion that is life going on.

I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living's so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love's deepest reality--where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents.

God moving on the face of the waters.

I say to Wally, while the breath comes more shallowly, All the love in the world goes with you.

.......I don't know what it might have been like for me had I not been present at the moment when Wally died, if I hadn't been there to know that enormous intimacy, that sense of brightness in the depths of the dark, an atmosphere so charged it seemed almost to sing. What if I hadn't felt the movement of energy , the leap of spirit lifting from him?

The price we pay for keeping death at such a distance from ourselves is a great one; holding it so far from us, we cannot see its shine.

{Speaking about the moments when his memories, or something he sees, reminds him of those he has lost, he writes:}

We couldn't keep the dead out of the present if we wanted to. They're nowhere to be found, and firmly here, now. While this is a source of pain, memory's double-edged sword at once wounds and offers us company, interior companionship which enriches and deepens the dimensions of every day.

.....When the world shatters, what does a writer do?.....Always, always, we were becoming a story. But I didn't understand that fusing myself to the narrative, giving myself to the story's life, would be what would allow me to live.

Heaven

Ongoingness, vanishing: the world's twin poles.

Each thing disappears; everything goes on.

The parts pour into nowhere, the whole continues.

And to be nowhere is to be in heaven, isn't it,

in the boundless, loose from

the limits of time and space?

Isn't the whole world

heaven's coast?

....all along I've been this, have been part of this great intimacy and light, that immense kindness that was holding me, supporting me, but I hadn't been able to let myself know it. And I'm laughing and weeping at the idea......how much love there's been in my life, how much suffering....how we didn't know who we were, through the pain, that even that was a part of God.

........A week and a few days after Wally's death, I took the dogs to walk at Hatch's Harbor, along the long dike that leads across the salt marsh out toward the lighthouse and the far point.

[He describes walking under storm clouds, where one spot, and only one spot, was radiant with golden sunlight, alluring, as he walks towards it.]

.....I'd been walking with my head down, crying, feeling my way through my shaky memory of [a Whitman] poem......I was putting one foot in front of the other, not looking up...and I came to the ....lines I had been traveling toward as surely as I had been walking here, to the end of the dike just below the high-washed dunes began.

"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what anyone supposed,

and luckier."

And then I looked up, into the face of a coyote.

He was standing only a little ways from the dike, perfectly still, eyeing us with a calm and frank curiosity, and he was uterly beautiful--big, full-bodied, not the scrawny creature of the night supposed to haunt local garbage cans.......but thick-furred, gleaming, the tips of each gray and blonde hair dipped in sunlight. His eyes were golden, magnetic, inescapable. There was a moment when we all stopped - the dogs, the coyote, myself - and the world seemed in absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere, everything centered around the fixity of our mutual gaze.

I thought, It's a wolf, a timber wolf, and then thought no .... it's one in the afternoon on Cape Cod and I'm staring at a coyote.

Then from nowhere I thought, He's been with Wally, he's come  from Wally. I knew it as surely as I knew the lines of the poem. This apparition, my - ghost, was it? spirit animal? real creature carrying the presence of my love?  Perhaps it doesn't matter. I've never seen one before or since, and never been so frankly studied from the other side of wildness, from a world I cannot enter....the coyote stared back at us, and I could imagine in that gaze Wally's look back toward home--his old home--from the other world: not sad, exactly, but neutral, loving, curious, accepting. The dead regard us, I think, as animals do, and perhaps that is part of their relationship: they want nothing from us; they are pure presence, they look back to us from a world we can't begin to comprehend. I am going on, the gaze said, in a life apart from yours, a good life, a wild life, unbounded.

The coyote was, for me a blessing: different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. That night my friend Mekeel would dream of a coyote wandering the rooms of her house, a powerful and sleek animal who had come to bring her a single word: safe. In the weeks and months after, in the stunned absence, in the hopeless hours, in the immobilized ache those are the words I'd reach for: lucky, safe. I think it was this visitation, this story, that most sustained me. The story itself, the image.....the potent presence and consolation of the animal body, the gaze across the gulf of otherness. To those eyes I would return, over and over: different, and luckier.

...I turned to look at the dogs--both of them poised, perfectly still--and turned back just in time to see the coyote loping away, though at a little distance he was suddenly gone......vanished.

......And I'm suddenly stumbling ahead, toward the stripe of sunlight that remains, gilding the dune between us and the sea......When the snow starts,will my coyote be out there someplace, leaping, nipping at the spinning flakes? Or is he not of this world at all, but a creature of the spirit's coast, passing back and forth between elements and worlds--messenger, emblem, reminder? Wherever he is, he's gone, and the dogs and I have turned up the slope of dune which will lead us to the sea.

We have walked into that golden band of light I've been watching. A wild and bracing wind is blowing off the Atlantic, and suddenly the biting air's alive with big white flakes swirling in a shock of sunlight, and I'm alive with a strange kind of joy, stumbling up the dune into the winter wind, my face full of salt-spray and snow.

A Spirit Too Big to Kill

Ms. Jasmine, lonely without Pup

With thanks to Annell at Somethings I Think About

http://somethingsithinkabout-annell-annell.blogspot.com/

for the line "Spirit too big to kill",

which she wrote for Pup.

The neighbourhood

has gone eerily silent.

The neighborhood dogs

are spooked,

the neighbors, too.

When I pull

into the driveway,

now -

no   barking -

no big old snout

poked

in the bags,

to see if there's

something there

for you.

The house is empty.

Ms. Jasmine

is sad

and quiet,

while through

the empty rooms

she and I roam,

looking at

your stuffed boars,

your big soft bed of foam,

the space waiting for

your ashes,

when you

finally

come home.

Where are you now?

Where did

your large

and noisy spirit go?

This silence

is one I

simply cant

get used to;

it's too quiet,

and that makes me

miss you so.

You had such a big

and luminescent

Presence,

It makes

your absence

all the more

profound.

I didnt want

to let you go,

my wolf-pup,

and you didnt want

to leave me;

that I know.

You stayed longer

than your body

thought was wise.

But your spirit

kept  light

smiling

to the end

within your eyes.

The morning

of the day

you died,

I saw you rolling

like a young pup,

on your back and

wriggling in the snow.

I hoped it meant that

you were getting better.

I wasnt ready

-ever-

to let you go.

But your hind end has

been giving out

for years.

Every time

that you went down,

you got back up.

Even when it failed,

that night,

completely,

still you tried

to rise,

my ever-faithful

Pup.

You barked to go out,

and then it happened:

your rear was gone.

You needed

to be set free.

The decision

was made,

the moment I had

so dreaded,

heartbreakingly

had finally

come to be.

When we prepared the car,

you thought

that it meant

Walkies.

Your excitement 

at going 

got you  on your feet.

You barked

the whole way

as you have,

for fourteen years,

day after day.

Who could have thought

how much I'd miss

your barking,

how loud the silence

once you went

away?

This afternoon

the sun beamed

shafts of brightness

all across

your bare, deserted yard.

It is so empty now

without you in it.

Being without you

is so very hard.

There's a full round

yellow moon

atop the cedars,

rising across the

early evening sky.

The kind of moon

that makes

a wolf pup howl.

For so long,

we've walked together,

you and I.

You refused to get out

at the vet's.

I had to drag you.

You didnt want

to leave me

it was clear.

You fought the

sedation

for a long time.

I fought my tears,

so you would

feel no fear.

Then finally,

and slowly,

it was over.

You succumbed.

I know your spirit

never will.

You  were yourself,

right to the end,

black wolf who

loved me,

who lived

all his life

with a

Spirit

too big to kill.

Your empty yard.

Nurse Log

Nurse log

home to new life

lit by the sun

One Poet's Life

Christine Lowther. Photo by Tina Norvell

The poet as a small child.

On the West Coast of Vancouver Island, on a floathouse about twenty minutes from Tofino, lives my friend, Christine Lowther. She is one of the most interesting and talented women I have ever met.

The float. Christine Lowther photo.

Chris is a true poet. You can see the poems in her dreamy eyes. Chris has three books to her credit, so far: A Cabin in Clayoquot, (memoir), New Power, (poems), and an anthology entitled Writing the West Coast: In Love With Place, co-edited and co-authored with Anita Sinner. Chris and Anita are currently looking for a publisher for a second anthology, on West Coast identities, titled Living Artfully: Reflections From the Far West Coast. Her second volume of poems, My Nature, is coming out this October.

Chris explains: "The title is meant to mean my character, as well as the nature I live in half the year. I also have an urban side to me, a punk rocker that loves dancing and clubbing and excitement. Many of the poems in My Nature also reveal how sometimes I feel quite bleak and negative, despite where I am. It's realism rather than idealism I hope."

The publisher's link to this volume describes it best at:
http://leafpress.ca/Christine-Lowther/My-Nature.htm
I plan to be at the book launch and will report back!

Chris on wheels with Attitude. Photo by Corinne Murray.


Chris is a protector of the environment, who lives to a conscientious standard that I admire greatly. When Chris requested no styrofoam on her package one day, the store clerk said, "Oh, you can just throw that away." Chris blazed back, "There's no such place as Away."

Arrest in Clayoquot. Kate Craig photo.

Christine was on the blockades in the Walbran Valley in '91, and was arrested in Clayoquot Sound in '92. She puts herself on the line for what she believes. Some of us try to do this. Chris succeeds. (Here Chris interjects in capital letters: "Sherry, remember you were at the blockades too!")

Here is a photo of the Eik tree, as printed in the Alberni Valley Times under the heading Ancient Tree Wins Reprieve. Photographer Ron Shaul took this photo for The Province newspaper in Vancouver. The caption says: "Tofino tree activist Chris Lowther is dwarfed by 800-year-old cedar."

This lovely old giant, the "Eik" tree, was in danger of being felled by developers several years back because it was considerd "unsafe". Chris went into action. "All I did," she says,"was block the huge chainsaw long enough for two guys to climb the tree. They set up camp there for 35 days." The media took an interest. The end result: Eik was saved. "It is important to say what a travesty it was to have to go to such lengths to save a single tree in a Biosphere Reserve, especially after the blockades. Eik is now encased in metal to make it "-safe-", but this is surely better than a stump. Because it's 800 years old."

Old grandfather Eik today. Photo from the archive at ten-thousand-trees.blogspot.com

I admire everything about this woman.

Chris's other wheels: photo by Warren Rudd

Chris is the youngest daughter of the late celebrated poet, Pat Lowther, whose work is still vibrantly alive.

Photo of Pat Lowther obtained from library.utoronto.ca

Since the 1997 publication of Time Capsule, a volume of poems found years after her untimely death in 1975, Pat's work has enjoyed a resurgence. This past June, Chris was invited by the League of Canadian Poets to sit on a panel in Toronto celebrating what would have been Pat Lowther's 75th birthday.

Moon jellies: photo by Christine Lowther

Note the photographer's reflection in the water. Photo by Chris Lowther.

The annual Pat Lowther award for poetry was awarded at this event as well. In her mother's honor, Christine gave a presentation: In Celebration of Pat Lowther: A Daughter's Collage. Here is an excerpt from that offering:

"I didn't know my mother wanted to live on a houseboat until after I was living on one myself. There have been numerous little coincidences like this that tend to give me goosebumps. Sometimes I indulge in imagining everything has been somehow lined up for me. That in fact I'm living this privileged life to carry on her dreams, and that my life is a life she would have loved. Of course, she was urban-based and thrived that way; I sometimes fancy, after living in a village of less than 2000 people for 18 years now, that I am living not just for myself but for her too, because now is the first time I've considered spending part of each winter in a city. As well as offering pursuits my little town cannot, seasonal urban sojourns may be a route to feeling closer to her.

A river otter visits the float. Photo: Chris Lowther.

I wish she were here, that her tenure as chair of the League had not been interrupted, that she could visit me at my floathouse and write about the wonders she would have seen there every day: from mink, martens, otters and bears to jellyfish, sunflower sea stars and dendronotids. She should have been allowed to live. She should have been allowed to write.

By celebrating the poetry of Pat Lowther, we take affirmative action. As my sister [Beth Lowther] wrote so eloquently in Time Capsule (p.19): "...we send out these poems, her words which he tried to take away from us, her voice which will not be silenced. We lift this stone from the water and let it taste the sun again, we send these words back to the world".

Bees on daffodil at the float. Photo by Chris Lowther.

This past spring, a comprehensive volume,The Collected Works of Pat Lowther, edited by Christine Wiesenthal, was published. The voice of this poet lives on today as strongly as ever. And her daughter's voice is growing stronger by the year.

Christine lost her mother when she was only seven. This event of course affected Chris profoundly. But she weathered through the pain of her young womanhood, emerging as a dedicated and persevering poet, who writes through all the stresses and insecurities of daily living.

I admire her work more than almost any other living writer. I told her how much I admired her perseverence with writing. I asked her how she does it.

"I'm a grumpy bitch when I don't have time to write, and some poets don't make pleasant people, and I don't have kids, which helps." Isn't she cute when she's grumpy?

I love Chris's writing. But I also love and admire the woman. Chris has worked through a harsh beginning, emerging as a strong and vibrant character. Here is a glimpse of the life she lives from early spring to late fall.

This is Chris's morning commute: (photos by Chris Lowther)

I so envy her immersion in the natural world for half the year. She drifts off to sleep at night and wakes in the morning to the gentle lapping of the waves, to the eagle's cry, to the sight of morning mist wrapping itself around the pines.

Cozy indoors. Chris Lowther photo

She communes with hummingbirds, with herons, with plants, with sea life. Look at these, all taken by Chris (and grown by her!):

Sometimes she has visitors: a marten, a seal, a river otter, the occasional bear lumbering along the shore. Sometimes the bay fills with moon-jellyfish. I know it is magical to boat out of the bay through their millions of bodies, for I have done it.

Photo by Chris Lowther

In 2002 Anne Henderson made a film called Water Marks about Chris and Beth's lives, reflecting on their mother's life and untimely death. It can be found in libraries and from the National Film Network.

When the book launch for My Nature is held in Tofino in October, you can be sure I will be there to applaud this persistent and dedicated poet.

It is too easy, when life is busy, when one has to work to survive, when energy and time are limited, to let the writing slide, to put it off, to say "I'll do it later." I can hear Chis saying, in my ear, "There is no Later! Write it now!" And, at my advanced age, I have to agree.

Storm at the float. Winter storms are the reason Chris can't live on it year round. Chris Lowther photo.

Taken by Chris from her kayak.


Christine is a marvellous, complex, unique, vibrantly alive, extremely talented poet, who lives as creatively as she writes, with as punctilious attention to detail. Read her - you will be blown away. Honestly.

View from her home, taken by Chris Lowther. Beautiful.

SHINE

(Raymond Brian "Brick" Baker, my dad)

Music is part of my heritage. It's in my genes. I was conceived, marinated and raised in music, and from the time I was small, I wanted to be a singer. My father had begun as a classical violinist, but had then fallen in love with jazz. Still in his youth, he switched to alto sax and clarinet and joined a band, to the dismay of his parents. Ever after, they rued the day they bought him his first saxaphone, blaming the music scene for his subsequent alcoholism and the downhill turning of his life, which had begun so full of promise.

My dad was hugely talented, and he bitterly watched lesser musicians, with whom he had played as a young man, pass him by and rise to some measure of success and fame. He never made the connection between his drinking and his inability to hold a job for long, in the music field or out of it. He had a very hard time with the emergence of rock 'n roll, and used to sit snorting with disgust at the television. "That's not music!" When in his cups, he'd stick out his tongue at the set and make a blowing noise: "Phphphphphphphphphphphpht!" But he was too transfixed with rage to change the channel.

Because of him, and because all the other kids loved them and I wanted to be different, I didnt immediately swoon over Elvis and the Beatles. The music of the '40's serenaded my life: Pennies From Heaven, I'll Get By, Stardust, As Time Goes By. They still have the power to take me right back, to my parents' lives in Kelowna. It is the love songs of their era, not mine, that I remember best.

(My folks on the dock in Kelowna, late 40's)

My mother liked to tell how my dad taught me, at age fifteen months, to do the musician's backwards hand-clap, on the knee, to the beat: "choo-whish-te-choo, whish-te-choo", and how I had the tempo down pat. Nights when the party atmosphere had not yet degenerated into shouting and the crashing of fallen bodies in the living room, sometimes they would get me out of bed, in my ratty plaid dressing gown, to perform for the company. I'd wail winsomely "Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe", do a self-taught little dance routine with a big grin, then go back to bed, feeling like a star. It was only a matter of time until I'd be discovered.

I longed to play an instrument. I would stand beside friends as they played the piano, looking at the musical notes I could not decipher, with tears in my eyes. Music was a magical language and I uninitiated into its mystery. I ached with longing to sit at the keyboard and play, express all the music I felt so strongly inside me. I asked my mother for lessons. But we were poor; she said she didnt want to waste the money.

All I had was my battered little boxed record player. I would close my bedroom door, turn it on, leave the world of pain and confusion I lived in behind me, and enter a new one, filled with music, hope and the dream of a better life.

There was high excitement when my dad came home on the weekend with new albums; in those days they were 33 and a thirds. One time he bought five, a rare extravagance in our circumstances, then got drunk and sat on them, smashing them before he'd even played them all.

I was twelve when I bought my first record with my babysitting money. It was a 45: "Twilight Time". My dad hovered anxiously as I put it on the turntable. As its slow notes and pure tones sounded, he relaxed. "I guess I dont have to worry about your taste in music," he approved. High praise!

(My dad on the wharf on Okanagan Lake in Kelowna, likely in the late 40's)

Briefly, my mom did allow singing lessons when I was eleven. I was sent to an aged old nun, who sat at the keyboard resignedly plunking out the notes, bored and disinterested, as I stood in my school uniform and sang "There Was a Little Green Elf" without conviction. I even was entered into a singing competition and somehow managed to get through it without disgracing myself. Nor did I stun those assembled with an electrifying performance. I just couldnt get too worked up about a little green elf. (I can still remember that song today!) My mother and father sat in the audience, one of the only times I remember them attending an event of mine. The judges, bored, noted down my mark without enthusiasm. It was clear that this was not to be my fast track to fame. I stopped going to lessons and returned to my preferred music, about love and pain.

Also briefly, my mother enrolled me for ballroom dance lessons, to help me with the awkward passage from twelve to teen. There was one shining evening when I performed at the Stanley Park tea room, and stole the show from a roomful of adult performers. Somewhere there's a photograph of me groovin' to the beat, the instructor beaming down at me as I did the Swing, glowing and laughing into the camera.

But it was with my records, in the privacy of my room, where I unleashed my real voice, the voice of my longing, that no one but my long-suffering family ever heard.

I was in my Grandma's back room listening to the radio when I first heard Brenda Lee on the radio. I stood stock still with a shock of recognition. She was singing her big hit "I'm Sorry", and I recognized that her vocal range was exactly like mine. I could sing like her! I had to get her records! I was further excited when the announcer said she was only thirteen years old, like me: a little bitty girl with a great big voice, who was already a star.

Brenda Lee saw me through my teens. My mother called what I did up in my room "coon shouting", as I balefully sang with all the dramatic anguish of my teens. I thought a coon was an animal, and didnt get the connection. I vaguely pictured some men out in the bush, hollering for raccoons. It was only later that I realised, with a start, that it was a racial slur, intended to diminish that heartfelt singing that expressed all the pain I had no words for, all those bright dreams that one day I would lose the acute self-consciousness that prevented me from being the person I knew I was meant to be. One day I would spread my wings and fly beyond this life of pain and limitation. As long as I could sing like this in my room, the possibility existed that one day I would sing before an audience, and they would like it. They would like me. One day I would shine.

It didnt happen. My stronger need was to provide myself with the kind of home and family I hadnt yet experienced, the story book life promised by all the books and movies and the songs that fed my dreams. Marriage, babies and heartbreak claimed the next two decades of my life.

I didnt sing at all during my marriage. But after it, music once again claimed my soul and rode along with me. My children remember me singing. I sang along with Abba, with Joan Baez, with Stevie Knicks, with The Bells, the Beatles and Elton John. In my little house full of children, I sang for the joy of living, for the morning breaking, for the dream of a love that had not yet come. I sang for happiness and hope. I sang the song that was mine.

I have become a great appreciater and encourager of musicians, of anyone with talent. I want them to not be held back by what had held me back. "Go for it!" I tell them. "You're terrific! Shine on!" I encourage them to throw off all the self-consciousness I had not been able to conquer, to feel "good enough", to assume the confidence I was unable to muster. To believe in themselves as I had not been able to, and to go for their dreams. Part of my encouragement is vicarious; they can do what I did not, can live that part of the dream for me, that alternate reality, that road untaken, due to the circumstances that shaped my early world.

Years when I worked in a coffeehouse, I was the most rapt of listeners, the music inside me still aching for release, but this time flying along on the fingers and voices of others. The musicians always said they didnt need a big audience as long as they had me to listen to them :)

Music is still a passion, and I still cant play a single instrument, still am too inhibited to leap about at dances and release the beat pounding within me, to set it free. I stopped singing some years back; I lost my voice when I got ill. It is enough now to listen, to applaud others in their golden moments, to join my being with its music to the All That Is, the great song of life.

Acceptance finally comes that it is too late to be a young star rising; too late to be the youngest published author in Canada; too late to be the person I once dreamed that I would be.

But it isnt too late, it is never too late, to shine.

BOUQUETS TO STRONG WOMEN

My daughter, Lisa, and her brood

Stephanie

Bouquets to strong women:
to single moms with hungry kids,
who say "this is the pits,
but I'll do the best I can",
who work their hearts out
to make sure their kids
have food and shoes,
even if there's never
enough of anything, ever.

To women with bright minds and hearts
trapped inside of bodies that dont work,
who know that sometimes
when we cant choose
the situation we are in,
the only choice we have left
is the attitude
with which we live the life
we have been given,
and who do so with grace
and with a "yes I can!"
because the alternative
is death
and we choose life,
knowing it is a precious gift,
whatever package
it comes wrapped in.

To worn out women,
tired,
at fifty and at sixty,
after a lifetime of struggle
and hard work,
who have not just
survived
but have
transcended,
who face old age alone,
without money,
but with heart
and hope
and humor,
because when the choice is
to either laugh or cry,
we just crack up laughing,
life's so funny;
who gave up waiting for Prince Charming
and are outside chopping our own wood,
because we need the heat,
writing poems about courage
in our heads at the same time.

To all of us
who've come through the fire
and the pain
with whole hearts
still able to see
the beauty of the sky,
I send bouquets!!!
I love the day to day courage,
the smiling eyes,
the wise and worn out faces,
and the "keep on truckin'" attitude
of strong women.

A Song of Love

NASA photo
[Article in the Vancouver Sun newspaper, September 14, 1999: Japanese researchers have been studying a mysterious hum emitted by Planet Earth as its geologic and atmospheric events combine to produce a symphony.]

Above ground,
a cacophony of sound:
roar of ocean, mighty wavetops flinging,
thrum of a million songbirds winging,
crickets under raindrops' patter, pinging,
above ground, the song of life,
Earth's creatures, singing.

From deep within
the heart of Mother Earth,
unheard by human ear
yet sensed within its atmosphere,
its thrum so deep,
as present as
our heartbeats in our sleep,
background to its creatures' chorus
up above,
a steady pulse,
like a mother's,
that we attune to,
our planet,
singing us
its Song of Love.

THE GONG OF TIME

[Note: this is written entirely tongue in cheek, intended as humor - I hope no one is offended:)]

The gong of time rings with a resounding thunk at the moment one looks back on all the years, realizing with a sudden shock how, the last ten years having zipped by in a nanosecond, the years stretching ahead are ominously few. After sixty, one thinks (or tries not to think) of best and worst case scenarios: ten to fifteen years no longer stretches ahead lazily, but looms as a finite entity which must not be squandered.

One tricks oneself into moving through lazy self-directed days, one still wastes whole chunks of time, hours, days, even weeks. There is still next week, next month, next year to clean out the detritus in the cupboards, write the book of one's life, make out a will, tell everyone in your life what they mean to you. Until there isnt.

After sixty, the sense of infinite possibility changes. Once one envisioned white knights who may yet arrive. Now the probable scenario switches to handy-dart drivers, meals on wheels, even hearse drivers who may pull up to one's door unexpectedly. Why unexpected? Why is it that each of us knows that everyone dies, but continues to believe it will always be Somebody Else? Possibilities now include knee replacement and orthotics, the challenge of living on too little money, and the stunning dental lottery by which one races one's teeth to the Final Demise.

One has long since stopped clicking through the leering hairy photos on match.com. Who needs a grizzled bad-tempered wart-encrusted lothario with wandering eyes and expensive tobacco habits cluttering up one's living space? The lifelong pursuit of peace is attained and re-embraced with every bout of solitude, finally underlining that this is my chosen and preferred state, reclaimed after each relinquishment with stronger fervor.

The time factor begins to press urgently when someone who started one's life fully expecting to have books published has been so busy raising children, that she has written only one, as the second and perhaps the most definitive clamors insistently. The time is now to tell my story, proof against my children's claims that they had the most traumatic childhoods on the planet. Yes, even worse than Rwandan children, or those raised in caves in Afghanistan! I remember all those years, all the laughter, all I put into it - my life's blood, a trend that continues into my declining years, head bloody but unbowed. I shall write it down, all I remember, hoping at least one of my offspring will read it:)

Declining years - somehow when I look back at the trajectory of this path I bumbled upon, I see an ascent, rather than a descent. Flailing and wretched, I stumbled by fate and fortune onto some magical turnings, and grew with every decade deeper into myself and the journey. If this be close to the pinnacle, it might give one pause to take stock: the fatigue of shoring up other peoples' journeys; limbs showing the wear and tear of all the self-flogging required to assume a load big enough for two or three, toppling about precariously on my shoulders; days when I can barely stagger about with yelps of pain; finances best not even mentioned; in need of help, after all the helping, and a future that promises no ease of these difficulties.

BUT! The riches! Having raised those children alone with all ofthe energy and heart I could summon. Being a loved and appreciated grandma and now a great-grandma. The coffeehouse years that showed me Another Way. Having made one of the strongest dreams of my life come true in my move to the ocean. Ten glorious years immersed in the wonders of nature, in a community of kindred spirits. Having come home fully to myself, being okay with who I am and the life I have lived. Loving my little trailer, my books and music, my furry companions and the peacefulness of my life, waking up each day to a day that is my own, at last, at LAST!

I heard the gong clearly when my mother died, in that passage conferring the mantle of family matriarch on me. With her passing, there was no longer a buffer between me and my own mortality. Her presence had kept me young, still someone's child. With her death in 1994, perforce I became a grownup.

I see in the younger generation the self-absorption of the young, the youthful unawareness of just how mortal I am, just how finite my years. They think they have lots of time to work out the issues and the anger. They dont know that their perception of the years I gave my heart and soul to rewrites history in a way that erases my life, removes all the joy and striving, all the effort, that I put into our lives together.

The gong reverberates inside more frequently; the press of time ahead being extremely finite, is still there. Yet human nature is such that one wakes to the promise of a new day as if one always will. Unable or unwilling to grasp the reality, even as one sits by the deathbeds of others, that one morning will dawn without one being present to witness it.

In response to death, one can only live, as fully and consciously as one can, appreciating the gifts and the glory, the way a new bud unfurls under the first warmth of spring, or a newborn opens its eyes on a world tinged with wonder.

Walking with my sister and the dogs the other night, after my son had once again unthinkingly flattened me by a careless comment that erased his entire childhood, I moaned, "It's going to be horrible having to go through my Life Review at the end of my life. It's been hard enough living through it once!"

My sister smiled. "I'm sure when St Peter sees you, he'll just say 'dont even bother' and wave you right in," and we both cackled hopelessly.