A video compliation of some of our best wildlife viewings during our Algonquin adventure. Music by me.
The Concept and Portrayal of an All-Knowing God
I have always been a seeker of beautiful ideas. In grade one, inspired by the thrill of something otherworldly, I approached my teacher at recess to express my concern that there needed to be “more mystery in the classroom”. I remember those words exactly. She was baffled but did not discourage me from creating a mystery of my own for the other kids to experience. I hid under the table of the playhouse kitchen set-up and cut out paper “footprints”. Then, before the students got back to the room, I arranged them in a line that wandered the room. Naturally the kids were very excited and intrigued by this mystery. What did it mean? My teacher almost desperately asked me to produce an answer, some kind of plot or point to it all, but I felt my job was done. I wouldn’t admit to the other children that I had done it, and enjoyed the chatter of speculation buzzing over the next few days.
Over years I explored many faiths and philosophies, but when I sensed my belief was not genuine, that there was some deal-breaker within the ideology that I could not accept, I would move on. Often my greatest point of contention was with the portrayal of a God who possessed infinite knowledge and power, yet sounded like a slightly cranky old man.
Or worse, a dictator.
Or a cult-leader who professed unconditional compassion for all his followers while beating them in the back room for daring to look him in the eye.
It is said in Abrahamic religions that God created humans in his own image. That being so, would he not find it an abomination that a single one should be cast aside or eternally damned, as they are symbols of God himself? Even if these strange small beings all inhabit an uncanny valley when compared to him.
And to convince human minds with threats and force might make people appease him with claims of their belief — but no one can be bullied into genuine love. Only submission.
That said, the mysteries of what powers may lie behind the scenes of the observable universe will always intrigue me. Personally, I think they are best left as mysteries — paper footprints across a grade one classroom.
POEM: A Nomad Mind
Her existential crisis, a late-onset failure to thrive, found no crumb of meaning in this hand-to-mouth life. It felt too similar to the assembly line itself. To even think on it, especially when traveling on the streetcar, or in bed at night, or at the grocery store -- that was abomination, admitting to herself that she was but waiting to die. With a practiced breath she steadied her thoughts. In her mind’s eye, she pressed dawn’s dew from a clump of moss and let it drip onto her tongue, parched from singing the stars to sleep. In the outward world, she exhaled slowly, swaying with the streetcar’s pull toward the factory. She smiled, her thoughts stretching like a cat from sleep, refreshed. Wildness had long fled her flesh, her physical life captured in a consumerist orbit around this modern sun-god of eternal hungering. Hers seemed a joyless people, staid and satisfaction-fearing. Such people who would desire to wall up the wind, lest it beguile a curious mind to feel a true and natural power. Such a world inspired only emptiness. She survived because she’d decided her mind was a lawless place. Within, she found a raw landscape, hers alone, where a life could be made idea-foraging, making camp in a moral debate, and seeking the fertile fields of soul. Here her nomadic mind worked out her own domestication, unbound and traveling light, cultivating her existence like an artisan’s craft. Rivers ran for a living, too. Stagnation so quickly turned water to poison. All flow and cycles and seasons felt entropy’s breath at their necks, and never since stopped to see if they were still being chased. The streetcar squealed to her stop. Now she’d cross the street and spend a twelve-hour shift working the line, all the while traversing a rocky steppe of her mindlands, choosing stones that struck her heart as treasure.
[Poetry] Mongolia Awaiting
Were emptiness real,
would I still drift, dream-drawn
to endless steppes of lichen latched
on lonely rock, fearlessly communing
with an existential sky?
For every place is teeming
with spirals of being,
and where I am without void
I find the rite of dancing,
enjoined ecstatically
in the passion of being amongst it all.
Here, sadness has no home,
as I oust my denial of coiling mystery,
and thus crown to glory the Stirrer
of all sightless cycles of existence
everywhere.
[Prose]
She cleared off her writing desk, jaw clenched with effort, and resented that she should feel so at odds with everything.
“What of the future?” her mind groaned anxiously again.
“Oh, what of it?” she bickered with herself. “That old man? The future, as far as one can foresee, is but the withered end, where all dreams dry up under hungering winds of remembering. The future longs for old ways passed by and lacks all forward drive.”
She felt some cruelty in her judgment, but tempered it with a tithing of pity.
“Only the present moves. It deserves our full focus if we’re to care about navigating it at all.”
Satisfied, she sat deliberately, her desk more enticing now by being bare.
“Tomorrow is silent, only capable of eternal submission. Now is the place from which to rule.”
She set out a book and leafed it to a blank page, then inked a fountain pen with measured movements. All the while she listened carefully to stray thoughts and fragments of feeling. These vagrants rolled through her as morning fog in hilly pastures, so she noted each expression and let them pass.
“Would thee fight flame with a knife?” she wrote neatly, then sighed a blade-crossed breath.
Self-governance required both the servant and the queen, she thought and nodded once, a bow and an order given simultaneously. Then she pursed her lips and gently turned the still-wet page.
September and October Algonquin Park Adventures
I made a video compilation of my two Algonquin Park trips in September and October! We were lucky to see a variety of wildlife and have some very cool encounters. The music in this video was written/sang/produced by me — if you like it, check out my youtube for many more songs!
[Poem] Two Sides of the Same Coin
You were a mute Hamlet, pacing
the bridge, your stage shaking
from the violence
of an ice jam beneath. You heard
a man drowned
in the black river yesterday, taken
by the whim of a Spring
too eager to live.
You held a quarter like Yorick’s skull, tossing
it to the question To be, or not to be,
while the ice screamed
obscenities
as if to mock your acting.
When the coin spun out and tumbled
out of reach, you didn’t move.
You were numb, you watched
as if beheaded
while a woman bent to retrieve
your lost verdict. She must have seen
your silent monologue;
she must have known
the coin’s value was life and death.
She rubbed the quarter’s edge, raised
an eyebrow, and offered
it back to you, saying,
“A coin has three sides, you know.”
You felt like falling.
You felt you’d already died
and gone somewhere you’d never seen.
Set free, for once, to choose
anything and everything,
something somehow between
the laughter and the tears.
Algonquin Porcupine!
Life Orbits a Hopeful Star
Willow and I are once again in Algonquin and something truly magical happened today. Back in June we had found a fox den with kits and got video and photos of two kits playing with mama. When we went back the next day, we were very upset to find those two kits had been both struck by a vehicle and killed. Willow always feels strongly moved to pull animal carcasses away from the road so other animals scavenging on them won’t also be hit by a car. It isn’t an easy thing for her to do, but she feels it is her duty.
Now in September, we went back to the den and found lots of signs of wildlife and a completely cleanly eaten/decayed animal which we determined from the skull size and fur colour was a baby fox. Maybe even the very one Willow moved off the road. One bone was particularly clean and white, so in honor of those sweet kits, Willow took the bone and plans to make a necklace with it, something in braided leather maybe.
It was just so right, somehow. It felt like a tremendous gift and lifted the sorrow of seeing those kits lifeless — for life is held aloft entirely by cycles. And to honor those kits with the bone is our gift too.
The Secret Life of Stones
She told me that stones lived, crept, and even flew, just slower than our imagined rate of time. Years later I understood how to love a river rock like a bird, for time pulled hard upon my beloved, until we were distant in the same room. Her breath became one unending syllable of a phrase I’d never hear completed. “Ahhhhhhh,” she breathed, and if time ran fast enough for stones to fly, she would say, “I love you.” I had faith enough to love her and this life she now lived, a love undeserving of pity from those who never knew the secret life of stones. I came to move slower, too. “Ahhhhhhh,” I breathed gently, my shoulder pressed upon hers, too scared to refrain from finishing the phrase, after a while: “I love you.” Then, last night some urban creature dug up the fallow flower bed outside our front window. When I drew aside the drapes in acceptance of another day behind us, I wondered about the torn earth -- would time heal this like a scraped knee? I set the question free, turning away from the living land. The garden had only a minor wound, and the stones of the walkway leading from the door were full of thoughts and dreams as always. My beloved was breathing, “Ahhhhhheeeeeeeeee....” I love you.
Where Spirit Stops 