Being Canadian

Growing up in Newfoundland in the 60s and 70s I was always conscious of being a Newfoundlander. My whole world was bounded by a triangle from St. Georges to Stephenville to Corner Brook with the odd trip to Barachois Park and to Deer Lake to visit relatives. I didn't even visit the rest of the island much less Canada until I was 17. So I grew up steeped in ocean, trees, rocks, sand and Newfoundland folklore, family history and stories. My Dad was in the  Canadian Air Force when I was born so  I was born in Ontario travelled at the age of six weeks by car in a carry cot in the backseat of Dad's car as we moved "home". Being born Ontario always was the only piece of exotica about me. It was shrouded in mystery. My early experience being Canadian was that we had the maple leaf flag and that for those who had fallen on hard times there was social assistance, welfare, so that they didn't have to starve like my mother's family had when she was young. She spoke of regularly fainting from hunger, having no shoes, no uniform for school and being called "Christmas tree" by the other children and trying to scrape flour from the edges of the cupboards and picking out mouse poop to see if they could get enough for a loaf of bread. So early on for me Canada was an abstract idea with a positive association.
 As I reached my teen years I was in the era of Prime Minister Elliot Trudeau. I grew up believing in bilingualism. I grew up adjusting to the metric system. I grew up believing that Canada was a world leader in peace keeping because it was. I learned all the statistics about Canada's involvements in the two world wars and of Newfoundland's involvement in these same.  I grew up curious about Canada and eager to see something of it. In my final year of high school My knowledge of Canada grew from experiences that changed my life. There were two events: my participation in my high school's play The Miracle Worker and my participation in the Rotary Club's public speaking contest. Both of these were frightening and daunting for me. Chuck Furey, my grade 11 high school teacher, believed I could do these things and so I made the huge effort and succeeded with his help. With the play I traveled with my fellow students and saw more of Newfoundland. It was as exciting as going into space for me. I had to buy two towels at the Avalon Mall, never having traveled before I did not think to pack any, and I still have their remnants as rags and think of this when I use them. Incredibly I won the public speaking contest  and won a trip to Ottawa called "Adventure in Canadian Citizenship. I was so excited and overwhelmed at the same time. I met so many young people from all over the country. We were only five students from Newfoundland and how awe-struck I was to be one of them and to see and have a tour of the Parliament buildings, visit the Governor General's House ( Ed Shreyer himself greeted us), visit an embassy ( mine was Equador), eat dinner at the Chateau Laurier ( an true castle in my mind) and have something from each region of Canada. From NL we had petits fours (not a Newfoundland dish but I loved the name) and I think there were cloudberries involved, but we call them bakeapples so I was bewildered at the time. At any rate my life long interest in Canada and in politics was assured.

The five Newfoundlanders on our adventure in citizenship. I am the furthest to the right. 

At my high school graduation our local MP, a friend of my teacher Chuck Furey, Brian Tobin spoke as our guest speaker. For all of us this was somebody famous. That is my Canada where a small group of high school graduates are important enough for a local MP to come and speak to them about what the future might hold for them.

That is me giving the valedictory speech. Brian Tobin is immediately in front of me. 

At some point in my post secondary studies I visited Ottawa and saw Chuck, who was now the assistant to Brian Tobin, in his office there. I never got over the feeling of feeling important to be visiting someone on Parliament Hill. Just at the beginning of the month I was in Ottawa and took another tour of the Parliament buildings. That same feeling remained of being awed and proud at the same time to be a Canadian. In between these two visits I visited with my daughters and husband because I feel it is so important for each Canadian to see the seat of where so much of our country's history, present and future happened and will happen. This middle tour we did with a francophone  guide and the latest with an anglophone guide. I love that Canada is bilingual. I was ever so proud to be able to speak both official languages and to share this with my daughters and husband and most recently with my son-in-law ( and wee grandson :Canadian in training already).

We don't always get it right. Witness residential schools, the internment of Japanese Canadians during WWII, the exploitation of Chinese workers during the building of the Canadian Railway, the exploitation of indigenous workers at Great Bear Lake during the WWII, the ruling by the SCC in 1928 that women were not persons, the banning of Potlatches until 1951, many provisions of the Indian Act such as the one stripping women who married outside of their indigenous group of status, the deportation of the Acadians in pre-Confederation Canada between 1755 and 1763, decisions harming French language and culture for the early part of our history and the, until recently, lack of interest in the epidemic of murdered and missing indigenous women across the country. What we do extremely well, however, is learning from our mistakes. What we do equally well is continuing to implement needed changes and national programs to help all Canadians, not just those whose voices are loudest or most powerful. We can be proud of our country, while remaining on guard for freedom and for the eradication of all types of prejudice and injustice. We don't claim we are the greatest country on Earth because we carry the knowledge of our past accomplishments and our past injustices into our present and our future to continue to make this country better and better, It is not a contest with the world. It is a sacred pursuit of freedom, respect, justice and equity within the Canadian psyche and heart. It is a contest with ourselves to raise each member of each  generation to a better human condition than ever before in Canada and in the world where we can bring our pursuit of the humble and ever-unfolding Canadian dream to help. Our hands will not fail as we hold high the torch passed on to us by those who have given much and gone before us. We will not break faith.

Grief revealed

If we have lived long enough to live and to lose someone we have loved we are on intimate terms with grief. We say this and it is true, but "intimate terms" sounds almost too friendly as a way to describe it. It is too familiar for so many people and yet, even under old scars, the grief finds ways to be fresh. It keeps its strangeness, its power of shock, like a tidal wave coming in amongst the slapping waves which only hint at power and content themselves with the rubbing of stones in a hypnotic repetition of watery breaths. We know grief is always possible. We acknowledge its potential while putting it to one side in our thoughts, unless we have had too many shocks or have been born, like a shell-less  crab skittering in vulnerability, in which case the potential of grief is as palpable as an ever present shadow of looming rock.

Grief and the ocean seem to be immense, powerful,and relentless. They differ in that grief sends its intimate waves of loss and longing on our personal shores in unexpected chills to dull a sunny day more often. The ocean is a great smiter of life, but it can rock in its lullaby of hiss and seaweed a long time before it is stirred to turn its wave fingers into fists. Grief is a regular contributor to our loom of emotions. Sometimes you see it coming and sometimes it swamps you and sends you sputtering : an earthquake of cold fire coursing, almost drowning the soul. 

There is much imagery of grief and the ocean. In 5th grade we studied a poem by Shakespeare extracted from The Tempest. I have never forgotten the haunted way the poem made me feel. 

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

                                             Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

In the same play Prospero eschewing his magic, in a gesture symbolizing Shakespeare's closing of his talent,says he will drown his book after burying his staff  "certain fathoms in the earth,. And deeper than did ever plummet sound." This is the quieter grief of aging and losing power and  remembering more than is yet to come.Even Macbeth waist deep in blood waxes poetical about the ocean saying, "Will all the water in the ocean wash this blood from my hands? No, instead my hands will stain the seas scarlet, turning the green waters red." There is a grieving for lost innocence simultaneous with his awareness that there is no undoing what he has done. Even the ocean in its immensity is unable to quench his guilt. Only those who are strong in the flush of youth, as Romeo and Juliet in whom blood runs quickly like rivers of red, are able to say “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, /My love as deep; the more I give to thee,/The more I have, for both are infinite.” For those who are not yet marked by grief's intimacy,  the infinite nature of the ocean's power is a kindred spirit in passion. Only those who are unbowed by the buffets of persevering grief like and confident in their power can say like Julius Caesar "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures." Ironically, the grief of  betrayal, then death,  at the hands of a friend is soon to encompass him. 

Grief is strict, but it is an able teacher, a skilled pursuer. If we like Odysseus sometimes stop our ears to its sad dirge and haunting longing,  we can learn much from it. We can learn about love, about courage, about strength, about patience, about hope, about the power of despair and about resilience. We can learn about gratitude and kindness and choosing wisely how we spend spend time and how we treat others and ourselves. 

This past weekend I attended a beautiful celebration of love at a wedding of a young woman who grew up with my daughters. When they were all small her grandfather said they were like garden fairies by the pond and tall grasses and trees. Now he has rejoined the universe and his ancestors and we come again to loss and grief like dappled shade amongst the fairy beams of light. 

As I was walking back to the hotel having gone to buy diapers for my little grandson, I passed a funeral home where the hearses and somber cars were preparing for a final journey for someone. In just 15 steps I came to a road under repair with its cones like summer wasps warning of striations in pavement and of being stung by the front loader's  shovel mandible. I thought of new life, new marriage, busyness, change and the requiem of funerals and thought about how the whole of life's experiences can pass in a mundane minute like a drop of water reflecting the greater world. 

For every happiness, there is a grief in store. For every grief there are infinite layers of feeling packed like Matryoshka dolls. For each grief there is also hope and memory and love. While we live, we breathe the air of warmth and frost. We breathe. We live and, if we live, we are granted love or we else we are shells of air only. For the gifts of love, of shared experience and hope I am thankful, for I know loss, pain and despair cannot eclipse them.

 Simon and Garfunkel sang "Hello darkness my old friend" and The Proclaimers sang " I can't believe I ever doubted you: my old friend the blues." J.R.R. Tolkien wrote : “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” There is a loving in grief and a grieving in love just as there is a night for day and a spring in the winter and a winter in the spring. I look for the light in the darkness even if the illumination is feeble. It is always there in its subtle, gentle hope. 

Time in a Bottle of Twilight

It is raining outside. The humidity is palpable like fingers pressing on your pulse, but your whole body is under its pressure. As I was driving home I was looking at the band of uniform grey cloud with its scalloped edges as if some great hand had ripped it to allow the paler grey of sky to show through before it surrendered to indigo and evening and I thought about how valuable very second of time is. It also made me think how grateful I am to be going home to a calm house and no take home work from school as my holidays are not quite at an end.

I have always found twilight to be a magical time for want of a better word. There is something about the quality of light where blue, purple and grey are diluted still by the sun's oblique rays that along with hushed wind and the chorus of cicadas that is mesmerizing. It is as if for a few minutes time is stilled or slowed and anything might happen. Perhaps it is an illusion that each second is so full that it lasts for a minute of seconds. Perhaps like a straw in water light is bending time.

Twilight's magic holds in all seasons. Even the snow-wrapped winter takes on new hope in the rays of twilight.

If we had twilight all day or all night would we come to long for the sun's bright medallion or the bright greyness of a sky pregnant with rain? We always seem to want exactly what we don't have or what we rarely have. When we are young we often wish to be older so that we can have more freedom, more adventures. When we are in exams in university or college we want to be done. When we get a job we want to be successful and make more money and/or earn more praise. Vacations are greeted with euphoria and a return to work with reluctance. When we expect a baby we cannot wait for the birth. When they are born we long for a night's sleep. We cannot wait for the first smile, the first step and the first word. Then we cannot wait for the end of diapers. After working for years we look forward to retiring unless we have been blessed with work that fills us up more than it depletes us. And so it goes until we no longer want to get older or for anyone else to grow up, but we long to slow time down as time seems to have sped up. We look backward more and more with longing for those we have lost and for the shine on life's coin that has dimmed for many. However, in moments of twilight all is balanced ;hope entwines with nostalgia and memories and there are no limits in dreaming. Time stretches out even in its brevity. That is its real magic. 

Summer heat, dreams and visits

"And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And too often is his gold complexion dimm'd:" so wrote Shakespeare in Sonnet 18. 

I love the contradiction in emotion in the first two lines. Summer seems to vanish far too quickly, but on many hot days we long for the cooler more comfortable weather of early autumn. One could say we are never happy. One could also say we are ever in pursuit of balance which vanishes mirage-like as soon as we approach it from either end. Life is not placid. Perhaps it is for some, but for me there are always waves: some gentle like a cradle, some active like small quakes and some huge walls of waves threatening to capsize me and mine. My weather forecasting does not always work. I've been swept away by rogue waves and even a few tsunami waves on occasion. 

Back to balance or rather the pursuit of balance. It doesn't have the ring of "the pursuit of happiness" but I rather think it is more accurate. We want excitement, adventure, new experiences and yet we sometimes want some peace, some quiet, some anchor to keep us steady. Maybe some people are go go go all of the time, but many of us seek balance on the whole. The moon waxes and wanes, the seasons come and go, people are born and people die. To everything there is a season and on a macro level so it is with our lives. We are often too heavy on one side. In our busy world it is often on the side of  work. We are so many of us like Thursday's child working hard for a living. Then at home there is more work to do unless we are privileged enough to afford a cleaner and able to eat out when we wish. The hours drain away from our days leaving us wanting, craving something more- some luxury of time.

Balancing between now and tomorrow
We must be careful not to lose our focus
And fall into the net of the past
If we are to soar hawk-like in the great sky.

The Call of the Ocean

I miss the ocean. The feel of the salt spray which seems to get into your pores seems like a face mask by nature. There is no need for music when you have the crash and hiss of the waves and they hurl themselves on shore and cling with wet foamy fingers to the rocks and sand as they are dragged back to the ocean's cradle. From time time to the wind which roars in an unending crescendo is punctuated by the staccato of a seagull shriek in a measure of three beats. Everything comes in threes. In low tide there is sand , wet, glistening taupe of billions of fine grains and smelling of brine and seaweed and something primeval. In high tide there are the swaths of beach rocks in greys, russets, sandstone, blackish-grey, and white like opaque marbles shot through with silica. So many individuals in shape and size and calling to my eyes like sirens of stone. There is driftwood twisted, scoured, stripped free of bark the white grey bone fragments of trees. Their voices can be felt with the hand like the sound of the ocean in a seashell. Each line once flowed with sap blood and each knot held up a branch in salute to the sun and in supplication to the moon. The ocean which has rocked them with its berceuse, stirred them in its churning and yearning,  has tired of them and cast them shore-ward to snatch fresh fodder from the earth in the tug of war it ever plays. 

Indian Head from Stephenville Crossing, NL 

There are other refugees finding the banks of the sea. Shells; mussels with their blue and white markings like rough pottery, sea urchins like bone pincushions, fiddler crab husks intact or in part their fiddling days gone silent, shark eyes which my mother called conchiloos their spirals inside often exposed like internal staircases with their grandeur eroded, whelks with their unicorn horns, black clams paled to white, scallops as rare as angel wings in pairs. 

Tattered rope frayed in yellow, dull orange or blue- green like locks of synthetic mermaid hair.

Fragments of lobster pots spat up as if in revenge for so many death sentences. 
Broken bottle bits in green brown and white and if you are very lucky in blue. The newer the shinier, but no friend to fingers. The older sandpapered to opacity, frosted to smoothness, almost sugared for the fingers. 

Indian Head St. Georges NL

The Johnny and Jane- come- lately-es : plastic truck wheels, a doll's torso one arm reaching, a piece of CD its disco dancing days past and the pale pink and white torpedo cases of tampons lurking like unexploded detritus to startle the treasure seeker. 

I miss feet crunching over the rocks, Each step bone-jarring, Each step the rocks grabbing at your shoes then receding in small squadrons in depressions that require agility to move on. Their muttering in rock language a challenge and an exhortation to life, to perseverance. 

My Dad with dreams of past and future

I miss the moods of the ocean. Its greenness, its blueness, its green-blueness, its greyness, its inkiness, its almost silverness, A fickle fashionista of colour but always with touches of lace as if she would always be ready with handkerchiefs in times of tears, cold or fine dining. 

Shorelines change with the passage of time, wind and waves, but the ocean is timeless. It calls to us down to our inner beings, Sirens to our very cells and primeval memories. 

Midsummer, Full Moon Approaching and a World Full of Peril: Hope Holds On

      The moon holds sway over the tides and maybe over people. Lunacy is a term coined to express this. " I cannot help, but wonder at the beauty of the moon. It shines down upon us with no judgement of us. Rich, poor, in love, lonely, well, sick: it cares not who we are, but sends its silver beams as magic balm if we will but lift our eyes up, clouds willing. So Shakespeare said:  ....there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." (Hamlet,2,2) Perhaps the moon, "the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb",is too maligned when we thrust upon it responsibility for our own shortcomings and lack of moral strength. (Romeo and Juliet, 2,2) 

 There has been so much violence and loss in the world lately with many shot as in Orlando and Nice and Turkey, and others with targeted shootings like the mother, Sara Baillie, and her daughter,Taliyah Marsman, in Calgary just this past week, police shootings on both sides and the "honour" murder of  model Quandeel Baloch by her brother in Pakistan. We mourn those lost and promise to not forget, but so many do forget as time passes and the next wave of violence hits somewhere else. I went looking for quotations to inspire me and found these: 

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” 
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small,
large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force;
never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” 
― Winston Churchill“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” 
― Dale Carnegie“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.” 
― Mahatma Gandhi
So I will look up at the moon tonight and think of all those I love all over the world who look upon the same moon whether it is at the same moment I gaze at it or not. The moon links us all in the coolness of its light which sets the stars off like an opal amongst diamonds. What beauty and love there is in this world. I will hold to that.  

Beginnings, endings and in between

The biggest beginning I am part of is in welcoming my grandson Remi to our lives. Though he is still just two weeks old he has already worked his way into our hearts. When I see him or hold him the feeling of love, pride and protection I have is indescribable. I have felt it twice before in this intensity with the birth of each of my daughters. My mother said upon holding her first grandchild, my daughter Samantha, that it was the same as holding your own baby. My grandbaby is a child of my heart and in his veins through my daughter flows the blood of all my ancestors, my husband's ancestors and Remi's father's ancestors. I am grateful to be so blessed with the beginning of my life as a grandmother. I look forward to the wonder of being part of his infancy and childhood and to seeing the person he will become and celebrating his successes and his wonder. He is, like all babies, a beautiful mystery to be revealed little by little. So I must thank my daughter, Samantha, and my son-in-law, Mikhail, for bringing him into this world.

Where will these feet bring him in life? 

In his mother's arms so loved.

   This, too, is the beginning of my summer holidays. I am so tired and so grateful to be on a break. There are many students I have said good-bye to-some for the summer-some maybe forever. Beginnings and endings.

As I grow older and I know more and much less. I see that there is much more of the in between in life. Beginnings and endings are not as clear cut as they once seemed. Love can be never-ending. That is when it lifts us, and holds us, maddens us, incites us, strengthens us, excites us, inspires us and ever grows and changes with the core holding us firmly anchored one to the other beyond distance earthly, in time or dimension. Love can almost end when givers grow unkind with a pain like losing limbs. At the time you do not know if you will withstand it, but you do. It leaves a scar like a knot that was once a branch of a tree. There is strength in a knothole and a beauty in its poignant ghost of a limb. At 53 I am still discovering who I am, still learning and ,hopefully, still seeing, listening, tasting, touching and feeling with the same wonder of a child. When I get overwhelmed by the suffering, the violence, the poverty, the intolerance, the injustice in the world I look for the beauty wherever it is. That takes renewed practice each day. That takes a lot of effort and determination some days. I will be old the day I stop looking and seeing and learning.   I never want to get old in the heart and mind.