Speed-Writing to God

The prompt I was writing to here was to write a letter to someone I trusted as a child. Though I no longer qualify as a Believer, God came to mind. It is a stream-of-consciousness thing which doesn’t attempt huge leaps of logic, so let it simply waft past you rather than trying too hard to comprehend. That is how I wrote it.

Jesus Praying on the Mount of Olives (Artist Uncredited)

Dear God,

I am writing to you, shade of a being I once imagined, shaped by family, friends, and neighbours, details filled in, sometimes false, sometimes fearsome, sometimes heartbreakiingly dear, by the representatives of your faith, female and male, yet still somehow personal to me, unlike any other person’s God, unlike any other caricature of divinity.

I write as a shade myself. I knew, and was, and am formed by that little girl and her haphazardly peopled world, but I no longer have a straight line to her. Her memories are tissue thin and blurry where they still exist. Her decisions are sometimes clear, sometimes lost. Her anger, represented now in dreams as mentally disturbed gunmen and inexorably approaching zombies, is the last strong vestige of whatever blossomed in her breast, along with its near companion, dear companion: conscience, compassion, love.

Ow. My arm hurts as much as my head after writing that so quickly. I’m tired, sore, tempted to go to sleep. What did I even want to say to you?

I remember when we talked a lot. Sundays on the kneeler, certainly, after confession and during penitential prayers, and before confessing, wondering with you what I might have done that I should list, or lying angry in my room when parental punishment struck me as too unfair.

I hear adults laugh at things they felt or wrote when they were young, but I can’t mock our childish agonies, or the indecipherable world that gave rise to them.

I was told that you, God, could do something with my pain, or maybe I only thought that was what grownups had said. Maybe they only meant that God brings and God takes away and I should pray to him and come to terms with that. An explanation might have helped. Or maybe I got one and rejected it. It always seemed there was much less giving than taking away.

I do see things differently now. I have dabbled with the disciplines of gratitude and forgiveness, self-expression and self-care, and self-restraint. I am a calm and happy person most of the time.

But the gunman is still in the church, the zombie in the library, and the child who wished that she would die, if not be loved, if not protected, if not helped up to a higher stair, she huddles in there still, heart pounding, strategizing with her dream companions how best to struggle through the challenge of the night.

And the young adult who pushed through the prairie blizzard shouting into your naked, uninterested ear—she remains, better trained, with more understanding, no longer misled into thinking there will be some sweet and final rescue.

They are there and they are my charges now, and I think I’ve done a better job with them than you did.

That does sound harsh, and my tenderness for you is now revealed. I know you didn’t stand a chance. Though there were genuine , kind, and honest folk, even gods need steadfast, clear-thinking allies in their work, and little succeeds against a whirlwind of misunderstanding and despair.

Care for them, my people. Let the dew of compassion, the sun-drops of faith in themselves and their safety permeate the armour, the veils, the corroded flesh, whatever mars their moments on this earth. And help me to continue letting go, freeing the leash I have tied around myself, freeing my love for every one I see.

Sweet blessings on your work.

Love,

Casey

Thanks as always to the wonderful women at the Callanish Society for our healing writing sessions.

Bottles on a Vast Sea: Letters to the Radio (1) CBC Rewind

Bottles on a Vast Sea:

Letters to the Radio

I listen to thoughtful radio. Sometimes, unavoidably, I listen to thoughtless radio, too, and sometimes that’s even fun.  But mostly if I am going to fill my head with sound I like it to be thought-provoking, informative, hopeful perhaps—I want it to feed me, heart, mind, and soul, in some way.

Of course, this leads to responsive thoughts in my own private cranium, and the odd time I want to express them to the speaker. The obvious way to do that is to write a note to the radio program, an email or a comment on their website or even a tweet. Seldom do I get a reply, though occasionally a producer will say something brief and encouraging. My thoughts go bobbing off on the vast internet sea, to be read or ignored, but there is something useful in doing it even without the response, so I carry on, a little sheepishly, my one-way correspondence with the mute unknown.

After some time of doing this I suddenly thought, somebody might actually be interested in these thoughts of mine. So I am collecting a few together to toss off into the sea again, messages in bottles, on their own solitary journeys once again.

CBCRewind with Michael Enright

ON THE ROAD 1972 (3 July 2013)

I have written before to say how much I love this program.  I'll say it again. So rich.

It was strange to listen today to the boys interviewed so close in time to when I myself left home and hitch-hiked around the countryside. So familiar: the slang, the inquisitiveness, the delight. I wonder, if there had been any girls interviewed (I am using the words we used then, not the ones—Men and Women—I would apply now) if they would have been any more honest about life on the road. Which is not to say these fellows were lying, only that they were leaving out an awful lot, cleaning things up terribly for the interviewer. Or maybe they were a different class of traveller than I generally met.

That sounds like I have some sour grapes but I don’t, though I must say along with the wonders of the road that they describe, which I, too, experienced and still treasure, it was an often frightening and sometimes very painful time. I was younger than any of the interviewees. I climbed out my East Vancouver bedroom window one night three months before I turned fourteen and set out on an adventure that was nothing like what I expected and which I would not have had the nerve to embark on had I had an inkling of what I was about to do.

I wasn’t a successful student or cold weather employee bent on exploring Canada or a young philosopher out to discover life. I was a grade eight dropout and runaway who discovered a mass of young people who were almost adults compared to me, who alternately aided and exploited me, shared their wisdom and their flea-bitten puppies and a world I had hardly suspected. Of marijuana, hashish, belladonna koolaid, and self-appointed gurus who set my adolescent teeth on edge. Of young pregnant women abandoned by boyfriends and trying to use sex to attract a “father” for their unborn children. Of bikers whose sense of humour was frightening and degrading to me. Of guys my dad’s age who had wives and daughters at home but who thought it would be great to be given comfort by a castaway like me. Of gentle First Nations girls who tried to help me after I'd been hurt once more. Drop-in medical clinics, social workers and Christians with a mission to save me, old rubbies who taught me about logging camps and rolling cigarettes and what it was like to live on the street. Well-meaning doctors, disinterested cops, kindly farmers, prurient young men who I thought “liked” me but that wasn’t quite it.

Being on the road taught me about the intense beauty of the West, the towns and orchards and ditches and fields, the southern mountains and the northern taiga. They taught me about history, about European immigrants whose view of the world was so different from mine, about hippies and their ideologies. Jesus freaks, Kraft dinner, panhandling, throwing up, lice. I relaxed a little, started wearing a dog collar (not done in those days), discovered how hard it was for me to risk displeasing anyone, no matter who or what a wanker, realized how comfortable I was with wilderness, how unalike I felt with people, though I loved or though I loathed them.

It’s difficult to express in a few words how enriching those awe-filled times were, despite the hardships. I don’t know who I would have become without that unparalleled opportunity to see a thousand different perspectives all at once, a literal kaleidoscope of eyes, minds, histories, obstacles, and aspirations. I had emerged from the parental home with some creativity and little confidence intact. Crushed by a milieu that thought me weird and my ideas dangerous, being among idealists, however flawed, among people who at least thought it was okay to try new things, be wild, take risks, be unconventional (even though underneath they were as girdled by conformity as their parents were) gave me the first outside world confirmation of my mother’s strange philosophy. That we could be other than what the world tried to force us into. That we were good and alive and valuable. That somewhere in life we might find permission to be truly free.

If one of my nieces or nephews were to take to the road now, I would die of fear for them. I look back affectionately on streets that had no drug more dangerous than heroin, at a country that didn’t yet know mass murderers, where one thirteen year old, anyway, was never forced into prostitution. It was dangerous, gloomy, greedy, and often stupid then. It is a world far more terrifying and cynical now.

And yes, I do pick up hitch-hikers now and then, when I have a car and am travelling. They are younger than I ever learned to be, and every bit as eager to be alive. I wish them well.

On This Rare Occasion I Got a Response

Marieke Meyer (5 July 2013)

Hi Casey:

Thanks so much for your great letter and for telling us about your experience. Very thoughtful. You should write a book (or at least an article) about it!

Marieke

Note: Unfortunately, the episode I was responding to is no longer on the website. At least, I can't find it. You might try writing them a letter!

Picking Up Stitches

Marie Louise

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.

It will not lead you astray.

~Rumi~

In the last five days I have completed five rows of knitting, except for the second row, which my friend Joani finished off when my hand cramped up.

This is a great and unexpected event. Ever since I tried to get my grandma to teach me and she laughed my awkward fingers off the wool—Maybe you should try crochet, she said. It’s easier—I have cast not a single stitch, nor considered that I ever could. I have recently been gearing up to learn to sew a bit, since the simple clothes I like are not accessible easily, but knit? It never crossed my mind.

However, you will see the pleasure that I take in knitted wristlets, of which I have a dozen pairs or more. Wood, wool, leaf and feather, branchlet, sundog, fire. I love the taste and texture of the living world and every time I pass the wool shop—always closed—I stop and linger at the glass, taking in the skeins and skeins of every coloured yarn, the toques and neckpieces, the birchwood needles, the baskets... A feast for eyes and heart.

A friend asked if anyone knew how to make the cables stand out more clearly in his sweaters. I stopped by the store—open for a change—and asked.

And chatted and sat. Was challenged, So are you going to learn to knit now?

This is how I see it.

No. I am not going to learn to knit. I don’t want another craft to labour over, study, perfect. I want a restful pastime. Something to do with my hands besides making something else to eat.

The young saleswoman swore she found knitting more relaxing than yoga, which she teaches. Well, I doubt I would. And with hands full of cramps I can’t expect to do a lot. But a single line? That’s kind of pleasant. Touching the wool, the smooth wood of the needles, admiring the colours of each. Making that simple stitch I saw made so many times so many years ago.

Maybe, after a few more weeks or months, I’ll have enough of my weird uneven rows to stitch the ends together and slide it on my wrist.

Oh, no! I just realized I’d have one wrist left to go. Oh, well. There’s always next year.

“...drawn silently by the strange pull of what you really love...” I love you, Gramma. And I do understand.

My grandma was named Marie Louise. Her mother was from France, her father was from Belgium, and she grew up in southern Saskatchewan. In Forget, in Saint Hubert. At four she went to live with the sisters, she and her sister Julienne. She stayed with them for more than twenty years, visiting her family on some vacations as they moved about trying to strike a living from the land.

She became a mother one day, marrying a man who came in on a threshing team. But how do you mother when you have never seen it done?

So laugh at my unschooled ways. My hurt is your hurt, too. But I love you still and like you eventually did, in the glamour of senility, I have let go of my anger at such acts of insensitivity.

Remember when you looked up at the flowers on the wallpaper and said how beautiful they were? When you heard children play outside and watched with vague curiosity? Remember me sitting next to you? Those were lovely days. Sweet moments and sad ones as you gradually went away. I had those. Who cares if I never learned to knit?

Theresia & Marie Louise, Priest's House, Forget, Saskatchewan

“The Danger of Books”

Some while ago I read the 1949 SF classic Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. (Click here for full text in pdf format.) I very much enjoyed this dreamy exploration of life for one man in a post-apocalyptic USA.

Ish is a scientist, and he approaches the overturning of civilization and near extinction of humankind with an observer's detachment at the same time as experiencing it in all its personal shock and upheaval. It is a pleasure to see through his eyes the slow recovery of his urban landscape by natural forces, and the even slower resurrection of some sort of kinship unit as people gradually come together around him. It is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but an even-handed depiction of what might come to be.

There is a lovely scene where Ish takes his child to a long-disused public library, a place of sanctuary for him but a totally new sensation for the boy.

“He was actually glad to get Joey away. The stimulation of seeing so many books seemed almost more than was good for the frail little boy. Ish was glad that he had not taken him to the university library.”

I know the feeling Ish. Get his feet wet slowly. It's the only way.

“Ernest Hyde" by Edgar Lee Masters

From Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters

Ernest Hyde 

MY mind was a mirror:
It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.
In youth my mind was just a mirror
In a rapidly flying car,
Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.
Then in time
Great scratches were made on the mirror,
Letting the outside world come in,
And letting my inner self look out.
For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,
A birth with gains and losses.
The mind sees the world as a thing apart,
And the soul makes the world at one with itself.
A mirror scratched reflects no image—
And this is the silence of wisdom.

For a free download of the book,

click here.

Marginalia: Pity the Poor Scribe

Have you ever geared yourself up to write—the muse is glowing, the prose is flowing—you hasten to your desk to find:

·         your software isn’t working

·         your laptop battery is dead

·         your pen is blotting

·         your paper is wet (or scribbled on by your three year old)

·         the “e” key on your Underwood is making plodgey “o’s”

You are not alone.

St Brigita of Sweden

 VictoriaLord, writing for The Ultimate HistoryProject*, details the challenges facing the medieval scribe, from poor utensils to poor light, to mind wandering and fatigue, in “The Medieval Scribe and the Art of Writing”.

   Medieval scribes frequently recorded their feelings about their work, the tools they used, and the conditions under which they copied out texts. The monks jotted these remarks down in the margins of their otherwise carefully penned manuscripts. These informal, sometimes witty notes, known as marginalia, hint at the joys and miseries of life as a scribe.  While a few describe the beauties of nature or a lovely day, many enumerate complaints or excuses.

    A typically short comment in one manuscript reads simply, “A curse on thee, O pen,” while a longer message enumerates the scribe’s difficulties that particular day:

    “Cithruadh Magfindgaill wrote the above without chalk, without pumice, and with bad implements.”

Laurentian Library manuscript open to the story of St Brigit and the sunbeam

Such things we have often heard before, but Lord, who studied Paleographology at University College Dublin, has many more interesting tidbits in her short article. For instance:

  Historian and professional scribe Timothy O’Neill argues that the best medieval scribes were probably young teenagers.  Scribes wrote in bitter cold and searing heat. They worked as long as the light was good enough to see by and their marginalia record their fatigue. The work was so pressing that an abbot might grant them permission to skip prayer services so they could continue while the light was still good.  Excellent eyesight, usually a trait that disappears with age, was vital to the task.  The librarian assigned the text to the scribe.  Scribes didn’t choose what they wanted to copy: the work consisted of mechanical transcription rather than intellectual exploration. 

So when you find yourself baffled by your implements, weary of your wares, burdened by the vicissitudes of the writers’s life, remember this poor scribe, who jotted on his carefully copied manuscript:

“Now I’ve written the whole thing,

for Christ’s sake, give me a drink.”

And in the meantime, have a look at Lord’s full article. 

*The Ultimate History Project promotes high-quality, cutting-edge historical scholarship intended for everyone.  

In recent years, an academic job crisis has led many highly trained historians to leave their profession. The Ultimate History Project draws on the skills of many of these scholars, providing them with an opportunity to publish and promote their scholarship.  The Ultimate History Project also encourages faculty members to write for the general public and provides a forum for academically trained historians to work alongside avid genealogists, independent historians, and collectors, enabling them all to collaborate and learn from one another.  

The creators of The Ultimate History Project believe that all history-lovers deserve accurate, interesting, and easily accessible history. We love history as much as you do, and we want to share it with you!

Wholly Alive in This Short, Exquisite Life: Seven Poems I Love

Written, once again, for the edX Art of Poetry course I'm doing. This week we gathered seven poems that mean something to us and wrote about them. It was a wonderful experience--a lot of work for one sitting but to see how they all folded together was a blessing.

1. Sugarskulli: “Ode to Boyhood” (USA)
2. Eileen Kernaghan: “Mohenjo-daro: a poem” (Canada)
3. Seamus Heaney: “A Sofa in the the Forties” (Ireland)
4. Julian of Norwich: “I it am” (England)
5. Togiram (Emile Célestin-Mégie): “M’ap Ekri Youn Powèm/I’m Writing a Poem” (Haiti)
6. Thich Nhat Hanh : “Please Call Me By My True Names” (Vietnam)
7. Mirabai: “The Plums Tasted” (India)

Sugarskulli is Alex Barr (b. 1998, USA), a sixteen-year-old transgendered girl. She says she’s not a poet, but “Ode to Boyhood” shook me as good poetry can when it strikes a personal chord.

She tells about a girl who’s a boy inside, and the clash with family expectations, fellow students, self.

A pink dress, hanging in the/

closet with/

chains in the pearl necklace./

Weight /

Weight, and the color of shame./

Cement/

blocks in the shape of high heeled shoes,/

a mother who makes too many tomboy jokes./

“That’s my girl,” she says “You’re just like your/

dad.” The role of the daughter never fit./

More than just clothes are in that closet.

Recently, a young man I know (now a young woman I know) dove into self-harm, shutting inward, grief. In my youth, I rejected the stereotypes of girlhood—if this was what we were allowed, I wanted out. Then later, the uneasy awareness that though men are cute—so are women. Say that out loud in 1970? Puhleeze.

I could write yards about this, but I won’t, only that Sugarskulli’s pain hits close to home. Her last stanza is one line:

Dysphoria is the ugliest poet.                     

http://allpoetry.com/Sugarskulli

Eileen Kernaghan’s (b.1939, Canada) “Mohenjo-daro” introduces her beautifully written novel about the Indus Valley, Winter on the Plain of Ghosts. I find Kernaghan’s writing absolutely magical, whether in prose or poem; here I’m swept off to a long-dead yet vibrantly once-living place.