Love, Fire and the Sea

There are maybe a hundred unfinished pieces hiding behind this one. I sometimes worry that my thoughts scramble before they hit the page. But that's what blogs are for, I think. At least this is what they are for me. A place to download, often quickly, the passing ruminations of a life lived as well as I am able. I am often composing something as I move.

This one is about love, fire and the sea.
I took a long walk down a short beach this morning, past the nudists with their beards and spread-eagles, and through the rotting sea salad that delighted the dog with it's putrid scents. Weaving my way through red alder and big leaf maple branches, slung low over the high tide cobblestones. Patches of sand, and the soft sea air and diffuse sunlight of early October. We are perilously close to the yearly storm cycle, but it's so beautiful today. At the same time it feels to me like the end of an enduring storm season of my own.


I read somewhere recently about a ceremony, a way to cleave away from what haunts you. It sounded good, and maybe everyone needs a little ceremony sometimes. So I took some supplies and kept walking past the populated and narrow band of intertidal zone just as the tide was pushing into its last rising hour. My dog Kimik travelled parrallel to me in the way that he does, sometimes lost in the bushes, only the soft padding of his feet and jingle of his tags as an occasional reminder of his presence. At times I there are glimpses of the white tip of his flag-like tail, and something about that makes me profoundly happy.

It might be worth mentioning that there was a lot of warning about the nudists. Painted on driftwood logs the word "NUDE" is emblazoned across salted wood. Say no more. Beware all ye who enter here.

A thousand years of storm seasons
compressed.

The beginning of my storm season is marked in my accounting of things by the death of my father. That same year there was a series of events, one after another, that seemed to be stacking in layers of loss and magic. In the years after that, although spread a little more generously across time, there was more to come - much of which I was unconsciously engaged in creating, some completely out of my control and all utterly my responsibility to integrate. It has not all been about grief; there have been other things, both miraculous and mundane, like lines of sediment. Gain and wonderment. Pain. A disruption in what I thought was the trajectory and order of my life. A loss of myself, then a re-understanding that is emerging of what I am becoming. A new kind of spaciousness. I have descended, and now I find myself rising back into the light of my own eyes. Emerging slowly at a pace more suited for the shaping of river rock than short-lived humanity, but emerging nonetheless. And I have come to believe that that is ok. It's the best I can do, and perhaps how I am built.

Today on the beach I noticed an internal sense of steadiness, a calm in my bones. I have so often seethed in my impatience with the process. But there has been no rushing it; it has been a complex type of grief, and this period of repair has been long and deep.

Today I am willing to be slow and deliberate. To persist despite a malfunctioning lighter and damp wood. I let the fire burn all the way down, witnessing the pieces of memory, the tokens and words of the past be consumed. Fragments of moments long gone but inexplicably haunting, are reduced to fine white ash and smoke. The fire is ringed with a circle of beach stones. They are disappointment and disillusionment. In the end I take the hot rocks in my hands and toss them away one at a time; they hiss as they made contact with the surface of the ocean.

While I was engaged in this little ceremony, the nudists had arrived. I always find it a bit nerve-wracking to pass by naked people on the beach when I myself am fully clothed. Especially at high tide it's so hard to pass at a distance that feels ok. Even worse because Kimik insisted on getting as close to them as possible, to sniff their dozing faces. But in my becalmed state I had a thought about this discomfort. As I walk by their bare and uniformly tanned asses, I imagine that I myself am returning from my own nudist retreat. For some reason it makes me feel better, even though it isn't true. A subtle yet profound shift in perspective.

I am wandering unguided across this territory of aging. Maybe we all feel that way. Our culture is so steeped in bullshit about age, gender and power.

I have found the cure for heartbreak. This time not in corporeal form, curled up and tangled in a lock of my own hair, even though I have let it grow long again. I found it in the passage of time. In noticing what is close and what is far, and learning to accept that for what it is. In travelling deep into the heart of my own imperfection. In finding all the sharp edges that I still contain. Doing it in my own disorderly and circuitous way.

I am burned down to white ash. And released.

Red Foxes

There is a zen koan about a monk who answers a student's question, claiming one who reaches enlightenment is no longer is influenced by the laws of cause and effect. As the story goes, upon giving that answer the monk is turned into a wild fox for 500 lifetimes. One day he returns to the village, and finds another monk, and asks him for a 'turning word' to free him from the body of a fox. He asks the same question that was asked of him - to which the younger man answers that no one is immune to the laws of cause and effect. At that, the old man is freed from his curse, and tells the young monk that if he takes the people of the village to the other side of the mountain they will find the body of a fox in a cave. He asks them to 'bury it as one of your own'.

This July I listened to a Zen teacher give a dharma talk on the topic of Baizhang's Fox. It's potential meanings and interpretations are infinite and multi-dimensional in the way that Zen Buddhist teachings tend to be. For me the story summoned a long forgotten memory, a visceral recollection of a moment of my childhood. About the time I buried foxes and mourned them as I would my closest human friends or family.

I was 7 or 8 and my family had recently bought a rustic off-grid cabin in northern Ontario (see "Home Places") for our family of 5. It was nestled in a pristine 200 acres of hardwood forests, creeks and wetlands, surrounded by more unclaimed and sparsely populated acres. The long unpaved driveway forked off of an even longer gravel road. That spring and summer we visited the place frequently, going up for a few days or a week at a time, my mum and dad busying themselves with finishing the half-done chinking of the log walls, or building the ice-box that would serve as a refrigerator. I was allowed to roam freely and spent my days exploring the new territory. It was not long before I found a den, a few hundred meters down from the cabin, dug into a sandy slope by the paws of an unknown wildling. I had been taught the art of noticing by my dad, but also had an inherent attentiveness to the details of the natural world. I could tell that the den was freshly made, maybe I could smell the earthy dampness of a fresh dig.

I reported the find to my father who identified it as a fox den. From then on I spent my days watching for a sign of the creature from what I hoped was a respectful distance. I understood not to get too close - my dad had told me that foxes in particular were sensitive to human presence. We went back to the city - perhaps there was still a school year to finish, or jobs to return to, but it was not long before we returned again. Over the course of that next visit I did not see the fox, but I heard her yips on nighttime hunts and felt her wild presence around our cabin. I would anticipate the reflected green of her eyes under the glare of my flashlight on every one of my nighttime missions to the outhouse behind the cottage.

Over the coming weeks and months we returned to our family retreat many times, each time getting more clues of what we now knew was a small family of foxes. A vixen and three kits, living so close to us. We heard them mostly at night, calling to one another in the old farmers' field that surrounded the cabin. Over a hundred years since it had seen a harrow or spade ground cedar, thick swathes of bracken ferns and small clumps of saplings had grown into the field, the encroaching forest providing plenty of cover for wildlife. I found fox tracks in the sandy soil of the driveway, and made regular visits to peek carefully over the hill in the hopes of spotting one of the young. It felt to me like an intense privilege to be in contact with and surrounded by these shy creatures. I made a study of them, drawing pictures, telling stories, and staying alert for any possibility of a sighting. Then sometime early in the summer, I had a very close encounter. I was sitting on our deck and looked up to find myself under the steady and curious gaze of the three young foxes. I was beyond thrilled. It was daylight and they were only a few feet away, calling out to me with their sharp yips and barks. Unafraid.

At this age I was in the thrall of the animal world  (and I still am). There was something magical about that encounter, but I was also aware that it was unusual. The mother fox was nowhere in sight, it was the middle of the day and the kits' boldness had been strange. For the few days we were there the scene repeated itself a few times, the little foxes appearing or calling to one another very close to the cabin. I remember my 7-year old self - how I had the strong sense that they wanted something from me. Their fearlessness, curiosity and the steady way they would look at me suggested a request. Sometimes they came almost close enough to touch - they were no doubt communicating with me. It wasn't until afterwards that I understood what they may have wanted, or the conditions of their lives at the time.

We went home to the city soon after that, and did not come back for several weeks.
When we returned again there was no sign of them. Their now familiar night time calls were obtrusive in their absence. On the second day back I decided to check the den. I found the three of them just inside, curled together, their little red-furred bodies now lifeless and emaciated.

Devastated, I ran to find my parents, knowing my naturalist father would probably know what had happened. I imagine I knew he would also be upset, as one thing we shared was a love of the wild creatures of the world.

It was in that moment of discovery that I understood something about what it meant to be a human visitor in the home of wild animals. I knew then that in some way we, I, had been responsible for these deaths. That simply by being there, arriving and departing at intervals in a noisy vehicle, making human noises and smells and going for wanders around the property we believed to be ours, we were causing harm. In fact, we had been so disruptive that the vixen had abandoned her family.

I don't remember the conversations, or the exact order of the events that followed, but I do know I returned to the den with a shovel in my hand. I sealed the entrance with the dry reddish soil of the hillside, and moved some stones into position over that to keep other animals from disturbing the grave. Every time we returned to the cottage I would check up on it.

I shed rivers of tears over those young creatures - and I wonder now whether these young foxes pre-dated any of the pets I cared for and lost in my childhood. They were probably the first companions I had loved and buried.

This summer during my retreat in July this memory came flooding back in, like a messenger, a strange and long forgotten missive from my former self. It helped me remember something of my essential nature that I greatly value - a care for and awareness the fragility and sensitivity of the wild places and creatures of the world. It also served as a reminder that simply by existing I do harm, but that for what it's worth, acts of repair and honouring are important. I believe this is true in both the human and non-human world.

Photo from Jared Lloyd Photography -
https://jaredlloydphoto.com/2018/08/31/coastal-wolves/

I started writing this post in July, wanting to get the bones of it down while it was still fresh. This past month I spent some time paddling with a group in an area of Vancouver Island that is home to coastal wolves. At our launch there was a welcoming ceremony held by a young Tla-o-qui-aht woman  - she drummed and sang us into our brief time in this coastal landscape. I was reminded that we are visitors in these places. Other humans have lived here for thousands of years, alongside these creatures in a way that is more constant and less erratic than ours. But that the natural world is so much more sensitive than we know. On the second last day we landed our kayaks on a beach - our home for one night only. As we started to unload, popping open the hatches and pulling out our blue Ikea bags and tents, we turned to see some movement on the edge of the forest. A wolf and her three pups, a few months old, trotted out across the sand fifty meters away from us before disappearing back into the trees at the point.

Early the next morning I awoke to the sound of wolf howls, their voices calling back and forth to one another across the forest and low tide beach. Just before we paddled away from the beach, the three pups emerged from the forest once more, curious and seemingly unafraid.

Breaking Down Stone

I stop and face it. The roots of an old cedar spread like latticework across the slope on the trail ahead of me. Mid-conversation I am frozen. This is wonderment. My walking companion continues on without me, but for some reason I am struck silent and still. These roots laid bare, exposed by erosion, but still holding the thin rocky soil of the forest in place. Oblivious, hundreds of human feet travel up and down this hillside day after day, vibram soles and flip flops alike doing their compacting work. The soil between each twisting root branch is beaten down and stripped until it is clear it is only this ancient tree that is holding it all together. Gripping the earth like a fist grasps a ball. An Entish topography preventing the hillside from collapsing in a tumble of rock and dirt the next time it rains.

What holds us together?

I let my eyes travel across the maze of roots on the slope. Tracking the path of each branch, under and over and under again, looking for a sense of where they lead. But each time one crosses another they merge or become lost to an unknown underground world.
These roots are holding fast, and are doing their job to break down stone to create new soil. Their persistence is like a reminder to me. To wait and be patient like trees are, but not for anything in particular. Allowing the world to move at whatever pace it needs, without needing to follow or keep up or move at a speed faster than my own. To hold fast, to have faith in and remember who I am. To remember and know again what is held inside my own root ball. To heed the gentle reminders of wind, sun and rain as they brush against my leaves and branches - and all the beings who remind me daily of what is good, and right and safe in this world. To keep doing my work in the breaking down of stone, however subtle or unseen it might be.

Found

I find myself.
Here on these pages
Of virtual whiteness.
Making marks again.

It's been a slow trickle,
For some reason.
I have found other places for now,
To deposit my explorations in written form.
These meanders through a sea of emotion and impression.
Today I happened upon this page,
Again.
Finding myself
Reminded.

These are strange days,
A life is a
Work in progress,
Always so full
Of surprises.

I learn to roll with them.
Allow them to take me to the next
bend in the road.
To peer into
This inscrutable future.
I know that's the way
It's meant to be.
The not knowing is the point.
So why not be happy
In the meantime.
No harm in that.

I consider now this juncture,
This crux move,
There is possibility here.
Rolling forward
Like a trust fall off a high platform.
Knowing that there is no harm in trying.
No harm in falling into arms outstretched.

Throwing our names into
A million hats
Perhaps is better than throwing them
Into nothing at all.

I entertain the possibility of departure,
But don't get too far ahead of myself.
Just lingering here
In this place of potential movement.
It is a lesson
In not waiting,
But being infinitely patient
With the mystery of the what's next.

Shades of White (Snow-folk of Victoria)

In the past few weeks the famously temperate Vancouver Island has been blanketed with snow. The temperatures have remained below zero down to sea level. Schools have closed, people have lost things they left outside. Gardening tools. Children's toys. Cars. It is unusual that snow actually  sticks to the ground here for very long. More than a few hours is rare. This city hardly knows what winter is, with its greenery and early blossoms. But here it is in 2019 feeling like any other Canadian town, snow being heaped into piles on the side of every driveway and sidewalk. It stayed for days, creating slush puddles at every corner, then setting hard like concrete.

The other morning I saw a woman trying to chip her car out of one of the rock solid drifts with a minute windshield scraper.  The kind that you can hold in one mittened fist and lose sight of. After the plow came to our street parked cars had become encased in the frozen saturated snow. No longer pure white, but shades of freeze-thaw grey.
The woman knelt on the ground and set to work, tiny bits of ice flying into the air like sea spray with every futile strike. It would have taken her all day if I had left her there, no doubt bloodying her knees and hands in the process. Never getting to work.
I think I am the only person in the neighbourhood with a metal shovel under my bed.

Snowmen have been popping up all around town. Some are enormous, unnaturally large as if someone was trying to use up all the surrounding snow. Most are not artfully done. You can tell the snowman-makers here are inexperienced, hurried. Their balls of snow are rough and lacking finesse. One stick-arm bent askew and the other one too short. Oddball snow-children with ill-chosen accessories. A total lack of carrot-noses and charcoal eyeballs. They seem to have been made with a sense of urgency, as if their creators were afraid the medium would melt before they were done. Long before the final ball was rolled and placed. But this year the snow came and stayed for a while, covering the newly sprouted bulbs of our west coast spring. So our snow-folk with their flailing twiggy arms have enjoyed a longer than expected life. Gazing out to sea for a good long while before melting into it.

One Hundred Days

The wonder of moss and lichen.

In early September I started a project. I called it "One Hundred Days of Beauty". My goal in part was to renew a sense of sacredness in the every day and mundane details of my life and the world. To acknowledge that there is a choice we can make, that if we string together experiences of beauty in whatever form they can be found, they will become a bright thread and ultimately a blanket that surrounds us. It is important to be surprised, to find wonder in the smallest of things.

I counted out 100 days on my wall calendar and made a practice of noticing beauty if only for a few moments each day. From September 4th until December 12th I would remember to pause and become aware of a feeling, sight, sound, taste, smell or being, that struck me as beautiful.

Making ice art at Mountain Lamp.

This is how it began:

September 4th
Today as I was walking the dog after work I made a point of noticing, of becoming more present and less caught up in the thoughts that rumbled around in my head. I began to pay attention to the simplest of things. The feel of the air on my skin on this fine September day.
And somewhere in that 40 minutes of slow walking through the divine and mundane places near my home, I found an idea. I think it was caught up in a hedgerow, like a slip of paper that had been blown into the brambles by the wind. An experiment. A reminder to my future self that I really did take the time to smell the flowers, enjoy the beautiful people, things and experiences of this world on a daily basis. A living love letter and a reminder of the innate goodness in the world and in myself.

Until the end of September I made notes about my noticings.
The dappling sun upon ivy bushes.
A neighbour gathering the late urban blackberry harvest.
The late day sun on the water - textures of light and wind.
Fresh tomatoes from the balcony in my salad.
Bird magic. The little brown bird (LBB) who flew in front of my bike for a good 5 minutes this afternoon, diving and soaring inches away the whole time.
Morning light (golden clouds), the smell of rain on parched earth, fall crocuses.
Soft fall air, smell of sun on damp earth.
Floating fog banks lit through with sunlight.
Open windows.
Forest bike ride – damp, green forest.
Dream of a kiss waking me at 3am.
The bliss of a Friday afternoon.
Time spent with important people, circling back to spend time.
My own inner strength returning. Dusk.
Biking to work. Faces. Sun.

Ultimately after a few weeks of this, I found it was more important to be in it rather than record it. I have experienced a tendency with photography - while guiding canoe trips in my early twenties I noticed that when I carried a camera I would look at everything from the perspective of taking a picture. So for many years I stopped carrying a camera while on trips (as a result I would characterize myself as a photographic freeloader).

I can have a similar experience with writing; Ideas bubble up and I start composing as I hike, paddle, ski, chop wood, etc. While it's not a bad thing, and is part of the creative process, I do think there are times when it's best to just be in it. Social media, and for me my blog-writing, has certainly fed my tendency to look at the world through a lens - to stand just one step away from the actual thing. I have a predilection to think in metaphor that does not help either.

  

Beauty in the snow - the generosity of friends, ad hoc
gatherings, renewing my love of the Christmas season.

I find it difficult to encapsulate exactly what has emerged from this intentional period of noticing. So many things, but nothing visible to the naked eye. Life has taken on a different, more fluid tone in the past several months. So much so that the project of a hundred days has simply become a more timeless and routine practice in my daily life. I have felt more moments of simple happiness without any external reason. I have begun to see a lit path. Each moment of beauty like a bulb on a string of lights. Not leading anywhere in particular, but lighting a way. I know where my next step is landing.




It's not that I did not notice beauty before, for I think that has been part of my life's work, but I have somehow reminded myself of myself. I've moved from feeling a little lost to realizing I have been faithfully standing by this whole time. Just waiting for the opportunity to be seen once more. 

For the next hundred days I will be adding another practice. I am taking a break from social media. I will be writing, as there are projects I am working on, but I'm excited to take some time to notice what gets freed up when I unplug from this strange world of disconnected social interaction. 

The joy of sharing time with good friends.
Photo cred. Nicola Mosley