Working

postcript - September 15th, 2012

There was.

Freedom in that.

I was right.



postscript - May 25th, 2012

quiet.  working in the white space.

I will be back to the ocean by July, and I think there may be some freedom in that.

by then.

I hope.



A postscript - Jan 28, 2012  

I remain so quiet, so absent, from this digital stage.  All that is worthwhile comes inside the white space and that is where I am resting.  Working.  Doing things I don't particularly want to talk about.

I'm absent.  Quiet.  Working.

My mind is so often in places like this

in the middle of my working days

words rattling, corners shifting

in the law, with its tatted seams

and then this lifting edge

bit by bit in the shifted corners

where I took that piece that was ebbing

wrapped it in sunburst and dust

and lodged it with the tide for safekeeping

---------

On Being Called a Pinko

I have been called a "pinko" more than once in my life - in the same mocking tone that is used in all the same old circles.  It started a long time ago when I was a single mother on welfare protesting cuts to daycare subsidies in Ontario, and it has continued on and on into my life as a lawyer - like a long, sad, sarcastic drone without substance, without content but for money, and surely without love, hope, optimism, generosity and tolerance.

I have been growing weary of this mocking by people who are concerned with things that I don't understand.  I'm at once too old to listen to it, and too young to ignore it completely.  At times I have just wanted to retreat into writing, and leave the public - the actively outward - part of my life behind.  Indeed, while I walked on the Camino, I struggled with exactly this. 

I read a letter from Jack Layton to his fellow Canadians today.  When I was in law school, I recall reading a very early Charter case involving Jack Layton and the right to protest.  I can't find the case right now - I'll have to go back into my archives to remember what exactly it was about.  I should remember these things.

Layton should be thanked and remembered for his hope in the face of death and his wish for a country for my children that would cling to, and return to, the fundamental principles of democracy.  The Charter is important. The rule of law is important.  Canadians would do well to try to understand how these things work in practice, and what exactly it is that they protect.

It is relatively easy to live encased in concrete here in Canada, separate and apart from needing one's fellow humans most of the time.  But anyone with an understanding of history knows that this is an odd state of affairs.  Generally, humans have needed each other day to day, far more than this.  We likely will need each other again at some future point.

If and when it comes time for the tide to turn, Canadians can now reach for this:

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

Jack Layton 

It Must Have Been Your Intuition

I'm at the ocean on the east coast of Canada in our new summer saltbox with no plumbing.  The postmistress said to me today:

"My God, how did you land here of all places? It must have been your intuition."

Life's Objects - for example: my mother's teddy bear and paper cranes

My daily pilgrimage at the moment is a late-in-the-day trip to the Pastry Peddler, which is perhaps a bad habit at this stage of life's metabolism.

I was there today, and Rae is working there now, She was wearing the most amazing purple shoes, walking past the lemon squares and cherry cream cheese tarts in the display case.  A mesmerizing spectacle of colour and life exists in this small shop, tucked away in the village.

There are two chairs and a small table in a sunny window.  And in that window, Rae says, she will be hanging folded paper cranes.

I made 1000 paper cranes once in about 1985, and gave them to a friend for Christmas.  They are probably long gone.  But I have never forgotten how to make them. When I was in Zimbabwe  I spent days and days folding them with women at Howard Hospital.

Sometimes there is a conflation of objects.  Sometimes things show up where they ought not to be, or at least where you could never have imagined they might be found.

Like my mother's teddy bear.

Page 65, The Camino Letters: 

My mother was in hospital for the last eighteen months of her life. She would wander. She walked out the front door of the hospital in her housecoat one day and got into a police car stopped at a red light, thinking it was a cab waiting to take her home. She marked her teddy bear so that the nurses wouldn't steal it. She hid behind furniture in the lounge or in the room of other patients. The nurses would sit her in the hall in her wheelchair and tie her to the railings so she wouldn't fall. She undid the knots and they called her "Houdini".

This teddy bear was bought in Rochester, New York in December 1979 and brought to my mother by my father on the eve of her brain surgery at the Mayo Clinic.  It had velco hands at the ends of its teddy bear arms and a small bear that sat between them:  the little bear tucked between the velcro was supposed to be me.

I've lost the little bear, I don't know where it went.  The big bear is old and worn, left with only velcro too old to hold anything tight.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw my mother's teddy bear (or rather its identical twin) in Zimbabwe on my friend Tavengwa's shelf !  This was a shelf in the middle of Mashonaland.

"What are the chances"  I asked my friend Brian

 "Oh, I don't know... about one in a trillion."  Brian said.

Here are pictures of the twin bears. The first one is my mother's and it used to have a mouth a long time ago.  Look at the way the legs of the teddy bears are mirrors of each other.  How on earth did that happen?

My mother's bear

Tavengwa's bear 

Slow Down; Get Slick

The bear runs through the forest carrying seeds on its coat. The bear doesn't pay attention to where the seeds fall, and doesn't worry about where they will land.  The bear's coat is slick.

Proud Woman 

This is a life long lesson for me, and she knew it. 

I am becoming pretty slick. I have no staff.  I have moved my law machine far away from where it is visible.  I do my work.

I'm almost at the point where I can't remember what it felt like to have a door opening and closing, day in and day out, all day long and then into late evenings when I often felt like a bit of a money trough for others - because it is the lawyers who make the big money after all.  Living life as a trough, why was I surprised when the trough became sticky?

I am getting light on my feet, and there is a whole pile of white space.  The forest feels good. 

Feet and Blood

My feet. My feet are 42 years old and I will have them with me, I hope, until the day I die. I spent the first 40 years of my life completely ignoring my feet and what they do. Mostly, I have lived my life in my mind. I am a lawyer. And working in law means working with ideas of justice, and fairness, and trying to achieve a right result. In my work I hear all about people’s problems with their fellow humans and then I try to use my mind to solve them. I love my work, but often the conflicts and the disputes between people are very silly – mostly about money, or power, or ego, or just plain gossip and ill will.

Quite differently from all of that, when I went for a long walk in Spain eventually I felt as though I was rooted to the earth with my feet, step after step.

In Spain they say this: paso por paso – step after step.

In Zimbabwe they say this:  famba shavanaka - walk well.

My father says this:  put one foot in front of the other, until you walk off the cliff.

I realized on the Camino that solitude is important to cultivate, important to take and protect for oneself. Without solitude life becomes sticky - sticky with life, sticky with people, sticky with the world and its wants.  As I walked in Spain, my daily life was physically tactile. I left my mind and started to feel my way through grief. I began to feel the power of my own body, and the vibration of my own spine. And I started to think about the energy and the sound that lives deep within each human. And about music, and whales, and physics, and math.

I know for a fact that human beings have a sound deep within because I heard it in my brother's arm. When my brother was receiving dialysis, one of his arteries was brought to the surface of his skin and connected with a smaller vein to form a fistula. The sound and the vibration that ran through his fistula was as strong as the ocean.  The truth is that the song and the force of my brother's beating heart could be heard at the surface of his skin.  His very life had a sound.

For most of us, that sound is deep within and more or less silent while we go about the business of living.

In Zimbabwe, I became friends with a woman named Mirriam and spent a lot of time rubbing her foot.  She had lost her left leg and foot to a crocodile, and lost her baby to the river at the same time.

Mirriam told me the story in English, and she mixed up the “I” and the “You”.  So the story became this:

“You holding onto tree” 

“Crocodile eating you leg” 

“You take baby off you back” 

“You put baby on ground” 

“You baby fall into water” 

“You … Kushinga….” 

“You holding onto tree” 

She said:  "My baby died."  I said:  "I had a baby die too."   She said:  "My brother is dead."   I said:  "My brother is dead too."   She said:  "My mother is dead."   I said:  "My mother is dead too."

We understood each other, Mirriam and I.

One day when Mirriam's dressing was changed on the stump of her left leg and she cried for her mother:  "Amai! Amai!"  I had to give her my arm to bite because there was nothing else I could do.

Kushinga is a Shona word that has no direct translation in English.  It was explained to me as a particular form of courage; an active courage; courage in action.

I like to think that the sound in my brother's fistula, that sound in all humans that remains hidden most of the time, is something akin to kushinga.  A quality of sound, a quality of life, that can sometimes become a verb.

A Poem Sent by Kate

When you travel,

A new silence

Goes with you,

And if you listen,

You will hear

What your heart would

Love to say.

A journey can become a sacred thing:

Make sure, before you go,

To take the time

To bless your going forth,

To free your heart of ballast

So that the compass of your soul

Might direct you toward

The territories of spirit

Where you will discover

More of your hidden life,

And the urgencies

That deserve to claim you.

May you travel in an awakened way,

Gathered wisely into your inner ground;

That you may not waste the invitations

Which wait along the way to transform you.

May you travel safely, arrive refreshed,

And live your time away to its fullest;

Return home more enriched, and free

To balance the gift of days which call you.

(credit - John O'Donohue - thank you Kate!)

The arrival of this poem made me think of this ...
a bronze from the Alto del Perdon
Camino de Santiago

Day 4, Chapter 4, Letter to Ted

Lifting the Gaze

When I have blood taken I have to lie down, and turn my face to the wall, covering my eyes with my arm.  I had to have blood taken last week too, lots of it.  It took longer than I would have liked and so I found myself blathering on to the lab technician about my brother - about what a wimp he had been about needles and hospitals until he got sick and spent five years on dialysis because of the autoimmune destruction of his kidneys.  That rid him of his fear.

My brother rode his bike to and from dialysis as much as he could, head up and eyes forward.  He continued to live despite it all. He went to work.  He kept raising his kids.  He kept loving his wife. He kept coaching bowling.  He got used to the needles.

The alternative thoughts - death, pain, darkness - were best not to think about, my brother said. Death, for my brother, was not an option.  Until it was. And then he died.

I have a body like my brother's which turns on itself.  I am immune to most other things.  I haven't had a cold or  virus for four years.  Autoimmunity is what lives in me.  It's stronger than any bug.

My brother taught me that lifting the gaze and being alive is very important work.  That's what he taught me.