A Letter of Love...

My entry in the Creative Writing Challenge, "Tell a story in the form of a love letter..."

Many thanks to Chez Couronne, who runs the site and blogring.

Roses & Hands...

Perhaps you'd like to see the original yellow roses, & in black & white, & the one I created for the dream...

On the process of healing difficult parts of your life...

I took this photo the day before the only possible permanent job I've had in a year ended due to problems with location, there was no bus service outside of rush hour and it was a 5 hour a day position, it was right before my birthday on March 7th too... That path goes up past the high school and I walk it nearly every night with my dog... Not a great photo, and I'm into frames these days (sorry!), but it was on the edge of... O, those Cherry blossoms!

On the Vision Quest/Fasting

The process of processing takes its own time according to its own rhythms and necessities. The vision quest/fast I did in 1998 on my abandonment issues was very difficult and quite emotionally painful if I recall, but it did resolve those issues to the extent of releasing me from being tied in an unhealthy way to a fear of rejection. Because of my childhood issues, whenever I receive a 'rejection' my response is to over-give, whether it's being extra nice, or a poem, or buying something, and it's usually an inappropriate reaction. I saw that in many ways it was the central crux of my more important relationships, and that I was still trying to 'please' an 'abusive' parent - over and over, living out a primal drama of my childhood. I needed to break the hold of this pattern in my psyche, and one of the ways I did it was to undertake a vision quest where I struggled with this issue, the power of rejection over me. I know my quest was successful because I am no longer attracted to people who are explosive and mean on the one hand, and distant and cold and rejecting on the other (was that ever really true, it sounds so incredible now). Whatever unsound hooks there were in me from my survival techniques as a child were undone, cast away. The vision quest to free myself of my abandonment issues was successful, but it took a few years for me to see that, indeed, a new pattern of relationships had established itself in my life that was much healthier and happier. I developed a strength that enables me to turn my back on, and walk away from, scenarios that would send me back to my helpless childhood.

So I know that working deeply on yourself with determined intent does pay dividends.

We each heal ourselves differently.

My favoured last-resort way is quite difficult, I suppose. Although a 2 - 3 day fast is not that rigorous. But it works for me, and that is what is important.

Let me say that even with a full 3 day/3 night fast, I have never lost any weight. With the 2 days that I fasted last week I may have lost 2 lbs which, after last night's roast chicken (soaked in a brine solution for 4 hours, covered with bacon, stuffed with wild and long grain rice, roasted to succulence) with all the trimmings and my daughter's decadent chocolate cake, well I may have even gained. I would never recommend a fast to lose weight, in other words. And, anyway, then you might get into a binge/purge routine and be worse off than ever. Weight loss is another issue altogether. I don't view it as part of the process I've undergone. The only way it could be would be if I wanted to discover the deeper reasons why I needed to overeat, if that was my problem (it isn't), and heal them at a very deep level in my being.

So with seeing if I gained any insights from my vision quest last week, yes, only one seemingly innocuous nugget, that I'm looking in the wrong area for work (clerical/reception), which was great to know, like huh, and in what area then should I look? Fasts don't follow a question/answer format; it's all process, moving energy along a trajectory, discovering the path as you go.

I'm still discovering this one: how to financially support my family while I continue with my writing and image-making/painting. And answers are coming, slowly, and with effort, in the ways I need to change my attitudes about this overwhelming problem, since I haven't been able to find full time work in a year of continual looking.

Teaching came out quite strongly, though I have no specific academic credentials (besides a couple of degrees) and am thinking of what I need to do to move into the area of education. But that's long term and down the road.

Immediate answers I don't have yet.

Maybe by tomorrow I will, maybe not. I've starved myself open, though. It's like all the cards have been thrown in the air, and who knows how or where they will land.

This post has been very long and reflective, thank you for bearing with me, and I do hope you've managed to take something away from all this that enriches your own life. That most of all. xo

On Vision Quests and Fasting...

(Sorry this is such a long post, but I just added a small pic from that night at the end, surely it look like I've come through the zone, though still no clear directions...)

Tuesday, June 7, 2005

...so the big riptide rolling my way is that I've been looking steadily for a steady job for an entire year now without success, and temp work is not cutting it, and I can't hold out any longer... even a year at such an income level is nothing short of a miracle... and while I'm great with sacrifice, I must say it's been no fun at all... I finally decided that I'd like to apply to the Arts-Based Research Program in Graduate Education for 2006 but it doesn't look like I will be able to manage to stay here in Vancouver... with some money that's coming my way soon, not enough, not barely enough, I may be able to move us back to Toronto where the job situation may be no better but where my family lives and where I have many friends... I've been very isolated since moving here 2 years ago, which, in a paradoxical ways, has been healing, a watershed in my life, time to remember who I am, though without financial stability, and not ideal by any means... looking for work pretty intensively though and still no job, despite so much effort to find something, anything... is it time to leave, then?... even though I may just be able to cover moving expenses, I won't have enough for storage or 1st and last month on a place, so I'm stressing even more than I have been all year... it's been a very difficult year, only mitigated by all you wonderful people in the on-line journal world, our blogging heaven, and the creative outlet that this place is... it's very hard for me to talk about difficult things that I'm going through while I'm going through them, usually I withdraw and only speak of what went on later, so I am trying to be more open about my difficulties even as I am swirling in the midst of them...

much love...

Wednesday, June 8, 2005

Monarck, that beautiful poet and model, is talking about a fast she currently on. I've been considering a fast for a couple of months. With low-ish blood pressure ~ now is that because of the yoga? I heard that people who do yoga have low blood pressure & that it's normal? I'd like to hear that it's normal... ~ when I fast I can't really keep up a normal day. But that's okay, because when I fast it's because I'm doing a "vision quest."

Often, when I had a cottage on Georgina Island in Lake Simcoe, a Chippewa Reserve, a beautiful spot only about an hour from Toronto, I would go for vision-quest fasts. Always with a specific quest in mind. One time I wanted to struggle with and overcome my abandonment issues, which come from my childhood and my Dad's frequent absence on business trips, but which were paralyzing me in my relationships, and so I fasted it out.

The first night I travelled there, by ferry and car, and spent the evening in front of a roaring fire playing a Native drum, for hours on end, calling in the spirits of guidance, sending out negative energies, whatever felt and seemed right. Looking out over a wide expanse of lake, with a silver maple forest to one side, a neighbour over a ways to the other, I could make as much noise as I liked. So I drummed long and hard and loud.

The next day the fasting continued, only drinking water, and journaling. Any visions, insights, feelings, anything at all got written down as it was happening. As I went deeper and deeper into hunger I had to let go of my attachments, wants, needs, desires, until there was no more craving, no more pain, no more suffering, until I floated free in a state of mind approaching light speed. I've done quite a bit of shamanic work in these states of mind, helping those who've passed on reach the vistas of enlightenment they seek, or whatever (my novel explores this mythology). It's a type of spirituality I am drawn to, and has its roots in the African tribal spirituality of my childhood.

Anyway, I can't think of a single quest that wasn't successful in the terms that I sought. I've learnt how to be secure in myself and not thrown into tempestuous crumbling when I'm abandoned. I've birthed creativity. I've found a deep and abiding connection to a spiritual reality that keeps me grounded and loving in the world.

Not without effort, mind you. When you fast, starve your body, you are pitting yourself against death itself, the threat of death by starvation, though, of course, you never go that far, only far enough to bring everything to the point of relinquishment so that inner change may occur.

At least, I don't fast to purify my body of toxins, but to purify my mind of restraints that don't serve me or my life or those I love.

So, I am considering fasting to find out why I don't have a job. If the issue is with me, I need to discover what is going on and why. If I am looking in the wrong areas for work, or don't understand my path and the ways I may make an income to live on that are better suited to my talents, energies, drives, ambitions, gifts and desire to give, then I need to stop, delve inwards, and change some conscious attitudes that are causing problems so a better flow can occur. Or maybe I'm in this position because I need to make a radical departure. Right now everything is bottled up. It's a terrifying moment.

If I can manage it, I'll stop eating tomorrow, and go through until Sunday. If I get a temp job, obviously I'll have to stop the fast. I may try to blog it through; can't promise on that one, but we'll see.

This is a powerful way to bring myself into alignment.

Thursday, June 9, 2005

I realize that I've actually been fasting since yesterday around noon or so if I don't count my 2oz of wine last night, I suppose -:). I'm definitely feeling the Day 2 feeling, and couldn't figure it out. Don't know how far I'm getting, but I'm quite light-headed and overly sensitive to sensual input... light is weirdly bright, sound too crisp... and hunger has transformed into a muted distant roar in my gut, I don't feel it... oh, and my tongue feels coated... my head feels, well, lightheaded, sort of enthralled in an inner drama - (of the digestive system which is signalling all over the place, and getting nothing)... all signs of fasting...

Not feeling any breakthroughs in the way I structure myself yet ~

Though I am busy undoing myself from the inside out. I've been through my entire financial history, realizing all the places where I've made mistakes, and the welcome gifts that sometimes emerge... the universe, on the whole, hasn't been too bad a place to hang out for a lifetime.

But I would like now to have a half decent income, that security. Certain areas aren't working out, I can see that, and perhaps ought to shift my focus elsewhere. I am busy clarifying what it is that I do want...

Don't know about moving back to Toronto, don't have quite enough money, but, well.... we'll see what transpires~

O, it's so silly, all of it! But so very, very serious.

I continue~

Friday, June 10, 2005

Some people can fast and carry on with their normal lives, I can't. It's a beautiful state of mind for clarity and honesty because you're somewhere in the deep centre where there is no incessant chatter. Fasting has never been a state where I could carry any anger or bitterness or any of the stories I tell myself to get through the day sometimes. It's so pure. Just the dizzying body and the spirit, and opening yourself into a better understanding of the self and the world/in the world. I was becoming quite weak, mostly resting, and more light-headed and beginning to see radiant angels about me, hovering, moving gracefully, their garments rich and soft like the brushed clouds of the setting sun, their wings gleaming and folded, soft, silky long hair, Pre-Raphaelite angels, tenderly caring for me, helping me to align my perceptions, to understand, to have deeper, clearer vision...

But my kids were finding me too strange. Sigh. What's a spiritual quest again, Mom? Today is shopping day, too, and I knew I wasn't going to make it out to the supermarket by transit and back unless I ate. My son often does the shopping, he's great that way, but we need a lot of stuff today...

I broke my fast, after 48 hours, or 2 days, with a large, granny smith apple, the juice so tart and so sweet on my throat; a large mug of English orange pekoe breakfast tea, a blend of leaves from Ceylon, Assam, Kenya and Indonesia, the very best, sweetened, with milk, soothing; flavourful white extra-old cheddar cheese in a buttered white-flour tortilla wrap; and then a curried lamb chop, which was slowly cooked with onions, garlic, celery, apple, ginger and Patak's hot madras curry sauce that I defrosted in the microwave and gobbled down!

It's like the city was silent, in moon-lit revery, a hush of magic, and the stillness has been broken and the day has begun and the traffic is moving again.

And, O Nirvana... MoreWhereThatCameFrom, she never left you...








(a tiny pic, late last night, after shopping, for you, don't know how 'post-fast' it is... but it's real, you can see the stress, I think, I share - in the self-portrait mode, a mirror image)

Moments of Decision...

...I wish I knew the point at which one can definably say... I mean there is a moment where the bulk of the direction of something has reached critical mass and cannot be held back and flows over... and in the flowing over, there is a definable something to say, a concrete fact, it is going in this direction, this is the decision made, this is what is happening now... always before the movement towards is the setting of plans, an openness or closure to, a way to slide the events in a certain direction... what is it that decides what direction something will flow in but your decisions about directions... most of life seems to work this way, at least it does for me... it's all various energy patterns, flowing and interweaving, creating and subsiding, connecting and sliding through and disconnecting and drawing back from... like a vast dynamic tableaux, a web of points of singularity all flickering and creating lines between each other according to a complex dance created by each point of singularity, each consciousness deciding its direction within the parameters and variables that are viable... choices constantly being made, from the time we rise to the time we sleep... holding patterns, keeping ourselves together, making crossings, living on thresholds... and always motivated by deep inner inclinations that move like underwater currents directing things to crash and break on the rocks or lap gently upon the sandy beaches... sometimes we float along on the same trajectory without change and other times we radically switch directions... sometimes we are forced, by the general field of connections, or lack of them, to make choices we don't want to make... and this is where I am.

Sorry to be so mysterious, but a riptide is sweeping through my life...

Blue Chrysalis...

Playing today with a too-dark image from a few days ago when I needed a new profile photo---lightening it, seeing what's in the shadows, and discovered a way to irradiate a photo with blue spotlights: I found the blue lights intriguing even as I wrapped myself in them doing and undoing many possibilities. And I wonder if this process of enfolding and illumining in blue light is teaching me something mystical or perhaps silly? Some humour might be apropos these days, as a way to release the tension of radical shifts in the underlayers of my life. It seems that when a woman does something radical to her hair, she's about to do something radical to her life too. Major transformations are in process in the woman who resides over here, at Rubies In Crystal, I suspect... I wonder what will emerge from the chrysalis of blue lights? It is an interesting process that I've been through recently, extreme sensitivity, a withdrawal inwards, the depths where one retreats to, not knowing what is going on or which way to turn, desperations folding in on one, and the way the cocoon that you didn't know had grown around you begins to crack, it's fearful, those blinding splits of needles of light, and not knowing what will emerge, something saddened by experience, weighted, or beautiful, and that can fly in freedom...

Inner Altar - African Angel

(Click on photopoem for a larger size)

Inner Altar - Beads

In the process of writing these...

A Dream...

A Dream...recorded in the night
without a date stamp,
so when, & of Who?


...a face, half of which
is covered by a mask;
the other half,
where the cheek should be,
it's all been eaten away
and it's been reconstructed
with stories,
story after story...

he had no feet
and he is perched
on the window ledge
like a vampire or an angel,

I couldn't tell which...


©Brenda Clews 2005

Star Wars: Episode III

I saw it. A massive tragedy in the classical sense. Pure hubris. Absolutely preventable, but based on deep misunderstanding of the deep wisdom of the self. I am overwhelmed by Lucas's return to the most powerful myth of all, the Biblical myth that is the foundation of Western civilization. It was brilliant. I was so striken by the unrelenting tragedy that we have at the basis of our culture, by this brave portrayal of it, that I was in silent shock all the way home. And of course, the deity's wife dies at the beginning of the dark rule through his hubris. Wisdom, the wife of the fearsome deity, the Shekinah, is hidden in the Bible; she has to find her way through the mystical texts. O Padme! And then the monotheistic empire building, one dark Lord of fire and battle and death to rule them all...already his son, the saviour is born, is spirited away, hidden... And he has a sister, O, thank you Lucas, for his beautiful twin sister, the inclusion of the divine feminine, what is so desperately needed in the religious myths of our culture, visionary filmaker...

The electrical storm, unusual for this city, erupted so powerfully overhead minutes after our return we thought we were going to be struck by lightning tonight...

Sheets Of Light

MP3 of "Sheets Of Light" here

At my Aural Pleasure poetry reading site at Sound Click. I erased all the preamble on this one; even Omar's gone. Just the writing tonight... perhaps, uhmm, a postmodern foray... *hugs, hope you enjoy... (1min15sec).

"The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LXXI

The light is like delicate paper caressing the wall.
Lantern paper. Translucent paper on the sand
of the walls. Should I write the calligraphies
of my heart here? Even before
the wind blows it away.

On these iconic, cuneiform tablets of light,
pillars marching over ancient surfaces,
sails of light, perhaps fleeing the rich shadows
of time itself, love letters to you in luminescent alphabets,
a song of creation creating itself?

In all its tragedies and magnificences,
amid broken columns of meaning,
crumpled, torn bits of marble or parchment,
a festival of light...Cleopatra with her Anthony,
Eloise with her Abelard, Juliet with her Romeo...
Interlacings of the numinosity of love
written on sheets of light.

©Brenda Clews 2005

A Dozen Cherry Trees...

Any editorial suggestions would be much appreciated...

The Reading Meme

I’ve been memed! By Richard Lawrence Cohen! Normally I don’t do meme-extracted confessionals, but here goes…

THE READING MEME

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

While my memory would have to improve vastly, I would like to be able to preserve and pass onto ages of less Dark Ages Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Now I don’t speak French, but the unexpurgated French edition is the one I’d have to memorize. Even though I don’t agree with all her ideas, I think her massive history of everything about how females are made, not born, is one of those pivotal books that only come along once in a long while. Beauvoir, I tip my glass of wine to you…

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

There must be one somewhere…

3. The last book you bought was...?

A few days ago I purchased The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene at a used bookstore on Commercial Drive. I’ve been lusting after this book for some time, Chapters being out of stock when I last tried to order it. That it had just come in when I walked into the store and bought it is one of those wonderful coincidences that I don’t make as much of as Jung would have.

4. The last book you read was...?

Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Francesca Fremantle, from the library. Last November I participated in NaNoWrMo, and wrote a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, a breathtaking experience. Anyway, as the month began I was working in the back offices of a funeral home, specifically in the vault that contains all the hand-written ledgers of the details of the funerary services and final resting places of the departed. The ledgers were amazing documents, and I considered them a modern “Book of the Dead,” and because they were essentially financial records was able to throw a lot of stuff on capitalism into the novel (believing that Capitalism is the “root philosophy” of our culture). So thus began my novel… anyway I had ANI from the Egyptian Book of the Dead appear as a mysterious blogger at one point, and included an otherworld journey based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead towards the end of my novel. Reading Fremantle’s book was just more research on the Bardo Thodol (she has some beautiful, lyrical passages but overall I found her thought too judgmental and rigid for my liking)…

5. What are you currently reading?

The Elegant Universe, and I’m loving it… O, those hidden dimensions, and those dancing, sweet, lyrical strings vibrating… always thought music was the highest art form, agree with Pound, et al, and now, seems, yes, vibrating coils in 11 dimensions are potentially the basis of all matter and thus a prime candidate for Einstein’s beloved unified field theory…

Sigh, okay, like any bibliophile, there are others in varying stages: Being Bodies by Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon, Fruitflesh by Gayle Brandeis, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was by Wendy Doniger, Selected Plays of Helene Cixous, edited by Eric Prenowitz, and, uhmm...

6. Five books you would take to a desert island...

Pl-ease, do you know how complicated this is? I take it seriously. Whatever I say I may indeed have to take with me to an imprisonment on a desert island. Okay, so I’m heavily into Norton’s on the desert island sojourn. Sorry! While it’s only blurbs, and that would be frustrating, I’d have to remember everything else I read from those snippets, and that’d keep me occupied, wouldn’t it, wouldn’t it?

-Norton Anthology of Literature
-Norton Anthology of Poetry
-Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
-Riverside Shakespeare
-Elegant Universe (can’t leave unfinished book behind yet!)
-and some Helene Cixous…O, maybe Promethea, I don’t know

That's 6, but...it's not enough!

And please, can I take the Internet with me? A wireless satellite connection? And some way to recharge my laptop batteries? Pl-ease…

7. Who are you passing this stick on to and why?

thenarrator, cause he’s my friend.
MoreWhereThatCameFrom, cause he’s too mysterious.
laurieglynn, cause she’s too mysterious too.
Lord Pineapple, cause I'm curious.

A moment in each day...

Shadows On The Wall

"Shadows On The Wall": A photo from this morning, a poem from this evening, both together in the image...

Lighthouse Park

Maybe I'm on a kid blog binge: the red tulip was a gift from my son; the apple blossoms for my daughter; so I said to them, I'm going , I need trees. Get on the phone & on the NET, get us out of the house, on the sky train, and on the #250 bus to Horseshoe Bay.

The bus driver forgot to let us off, but I jumped up when I saw Beacon Lane, and he apologized as he let us off at the next stop, and back we walked. So we went hiking, there's nothing much to tell, or maybe another post tomorrow, but here's some pics. Yup: that's the trail; aren't those rocks something; and the lighthouse after which the park is named. It took us only an hour to get there, on a scenic bus ride over Lion's Gate Bridge, along the glistening rim of the Pacific ocean...

O, sorry, Spring out here in British Columbia was 2 months ago, now it's hot like Summer...

Woman of the Sun & Blossoms

Two disparate images today, one on a walk to the park in the hours just after dawn, the other a sketch I did lying in a hammock.

My daughter's the model, though she doesn't look like that, it's not a portrait, but inspired by her. Before she was born, I pulled a Tarot card for her, and it was the major arcana card, The Sun.

I'm calling it, "Woman of the Sun & Blossoms"...

It's just a bit of fun for the day...

The Red Tulip

Solidifying Into Light

If you'd like to listen to a poetry reading, there is a 3 minute recording of this piece at my site at Sound Click: MP3 Recording of "Solidifying Into Light"

I like to work with multi-media approaches, the writing, an image, a reading...

Writing the words of a prose poem in an image is a time-consuming process, as I found when I photomontaged Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls. In "Solidifying Into Light" there is perhaps too much text, yet with much tweaking it can 'work,' if barely.

Creating an image to embed the writing in? It's always a challenge. Today, a photograph, of my amber pendant, my hand beneath the prose poem...

__________________________________

This prose poem arose out of a rather large case of plagiarism at a blog site that has now been closed down.

Pensive Woman

It is crucial to NEVER forget...

Let us never, never forget: Liberation of Belsen.
I haven't been able to stop crying since watching this. Let us NEVER forget. Each generation must remember. NEVER LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN. EVER.

A tree of birdhouses...

The way the branches form patterns, and that blue sky, and those birdhouses are incredible ~ from a master dollhouse maker's studio surely, the detail alone worth admiring. Photos from a walk an hour ago. (If you can't see it, go here: http://img38.echo.cx/img38/8194/birdhousesbc7og.jpg)

Red Breast...

Sky Tangos...

The birth of stars amidst colliding galaxies with their deathly black holes fascinates me...

Collisions of galaxies in the young universe caused prodigious star production even while the black holes at their centres increased exponentially.

Matter suctioned by the dense gravity of black holes flew at massive speeds inwards as gases were blasted to the outer fringes creating the luminescent edges of the merging galaxies.

The light pouring out of such ancient crucibles of creation and destruction creating the very memories we see emblazoned in the night sky through our telescopes.

In such collisions, a thousand more solar masses of stars formed each year than in our slower star-creating counterparts in the modern galaxies we exist in.

But when I look at simulations of colliding galaxies, I see only tangos and hot passion, sangrias and lust, sex and creating babies, the madness of merging amidst looming black holes and bright bursting stardust across the heavenly skies, an explosive terrain of love...

________________________
The photo is an active link back to the article at Space.com, for those of you who want to explore more...

A sweaty butterfly...

I've been languishing since I've found myself, once again, on the temp office work circuit. Which is work in a strange office, then stress a lot in the days between, work a bit in another strange office, stress more, you get the routine. I don't want to buy my monthly gym pass. I can't seem to make it to the park where jogging is free. Dance is too far away, mostly everything takes about 2 or more hours of transit for about 2 hours of dance, and again I don't want to spend the money. So lapse into lax muscles and the only cardio is considering my job prospects. O so lazy...

There is much mention of exercise in Blogland these days. Must be the Spring...

My contribution to the Blogosphere Gym is cheap: a $5.00 skipping rope. Yesterday I set a timer for half an hour and skipped on a board thrown on the scrub called grass out back. I stopped constantly to retie my hair or catch my breath or because I can't manage the simple mechanics of turning a rope over my head and under my feet. Perhaps in that half hour I skipped for 20 minutes. Which is what I wanted to do. Then I did yoga for another 15 minutes, focussing on the spine and abdominals. I finished my 'work out' by walking around the house with two 5 lb weights stretching my arms way back and up and down like a sweaty butterfly for at least another 20 minutes.

Not much you must agree, but net result: today my calf muscles ache, and across my chest. It feels good. And not only was it *free* I didn't even have to brush my hair or wash my face or change from house clothes into jogging attire, just put on some running shoes...

Skipping is a great exercise and under-rated. I wonder why?

Stained Glass light...

As far as stained glass goes, the pattern is not sublime. I bought this glass in 1982 at a small stained glass store on Queen Street in Toronto, back before it became an upscale fashionista district, when there were cafes and used book stores galore. I lived in a condo in a renovated Victorian house near the Art Gallery. All my windows looked out onto brick walls or a parking lot. I missed the sky and wanted to hide the impenetrability of brick, the way I felt cemented in.

My father was dying, my life changing irrevocably; I was in a wild and passionate relationship with an intellectual poet. I surrounded myself with stained glass, some pieces more sublime than others.

After my father died, I bought a house with huge windows and privacy a few blocks away. I could see the sun and the moon in the sky. The stained glass went into the attic for almost two decades.

I moved it with me to Vancouver, finding it bringing back a time I had forgotten, and hung it myself with my power drill.

During the day the windows are open. In the evening I shut them and enjoy the deep and glistening colour. When I sleep I draw the curtains.

In this digital photograph of the stained glass casement windows this morning it looks as if the sun is, is... there is such brilliant light, it seems to be pushing the glass open, the curtains open, drawing the viewer out to its brightness, a whiteness into which the landscape has collapsed, the dark blue lace that I have hung as netting to keep out flies and bees in the Summer becomes a mere few stitches of a design over the whiteness of the sun's field, even the window frame is being submerged in light, a light almost blinding to the occupant within...

What intrigues me is that I was working on a cross-cultural study of light in many different fields when my father died, a piece of work I never completed; it was based on stunning dreams of light...

Can you describe this photograph? It is one of the ones with a light that seems almost visionary. Be poetic...

It is impossible for me to believe that I am entirely my body, that everything that I am is contained here in the cafe in which I sit, looking out the floor to ceiling full wall of windows at the rain gently pooling drop by drop into puddles or wetting the street with a sheen only rainwater can give. The world revolves around me, the musac with its forgettable music and chatter, the scrape of chairs of people arriving or leaving, the muted tones of conversation, someone who has a cold blowing their nose, the sounds of food being eaten off plates, knives and forks scraping, the clacking of a dishwasher being stacked in the back, tables being cleared and wiped, and all types of people who are quietly sitting except for one table of loud laughers. My feet are cold. The street is busy with trucks and cars and pedestrians. Umbrellas float everywhere like dark flowers

How can everything I am be contained here in this remote and anonymous spot? Located here in this curve of space and time, at this edge of the universe, that that's it, that's all there is?

Because most of what we are seems to transcend our bodies, it is not hard to imagine what travels with us, our memories, feelings, passions and desires will travel beyond our bodies into a deathless realm beyond our deaths.

One day perhaps we will understand how energy manifest into matter and how it unmanifests, the secret of life and death.

Perhaps we are runners passing the baton ~ our written thoughts, inventions, works of art, labour, children ~ just keeping the links of civilization alive even as we each appear and disappear, a living force for awhile, and then gone.

Fragments towards a Meditation on the Body...

MP3 of this post at Sound Click: "Fragments Towards a Meditation on the Body...", which I'm not sure about, but it's there now...

_________________________________________________________________

On our blogs we post, barely editing, always planning to come back at some future point to edit, only the posts fly by like days...

Anyway, I just put this montage together, the writing moves over small line drawings of dancers I did maybe a year ago...the words shaping themselves are nothing conclusive or that I would want to rest my weight on, barely touching the surface of this subject, the body, but leaning into the writing coming soon on the body where all bodies are created...

This is just a miniscule meditation on what tells me I am alive. A sort of Descartian I Am, or even Buddhist recognition of the. most. basic.

The ground of being, the body, where I begin...

When do you finally come to dwell in a residence so that it begins to feel like "home"? It happened today when I moved our large wooden rocking horse out of my room - the 'clothes horse' literally, where I flung my clothes to pile up - and put in a 'captain's chair' that I recovered years ago in another lifetime. Now I can take out one of the stained glass windows and look at the street and houses and foothills while I read. I know I'm not making sense, especially as I now am in the process of turning a red painted milking bench into a foot stool by stretching an upholstery fabric over a cushion and stapling it. And I can't explain this, and shall take some sort of photo shortly, but as I sit in my 'new' corner and read under the clamp lamp I clipped onto an ancient metal stand, looking at my room, which I quite like actually, in this old and rather dumpy rented house, I feel like I've finally "moved in." And I've been here, not altogether willingly, since July 1, 2003!

I came here to apply to do a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, but they changed the program, it was the strangest thing, really, how it happened, and I didn't even end up applying to Admissions, and then got stuck here, but that's a story for another time.

Or maybe I was destined to come out here to the West Coast all along. Now the psychics I spoke to before I came said it was a very good move for me and that it would all work out wonderfully and they couldn't have been more wrong. The thing is, talking about telepathy and my theory of mind-reading, is that I had no premonition about the changes going on in the program I wanted to join and so they couldn't 'read' the problems I would encounter.

Yes, this is definitely a story I will continue at another time. Here's a photo of moi in ma corner reading, if I can't live with it, I'll try to replace it with a daylight one tomorrow...

Oh, that painting, yeah that's exactly where it's sat for months waiting, someday I'll finish it, who knows...

xo

I'm here because I'm wired to you all by telluric forces. In the midst of the angles of light everywhere. Bliss pouring in the edges of the world. Way too much inner light. I want to spend the day meditating or lying in bed doing nothing. What luxury. But my kids need me, so I watch the Supersize movie with them, gross, really gross, and this just after 8mm last night, nightmares, and then make myself a pure ground sirloin burger with cheddar cheese on a whole wheat bun, sigh. I snatch a 2 hour nap. Luxury. Then dinner for my kids, not me, I only eat once a day, although I snack on & off too. Finely chop celery, onions, mushrooms, garlic, slice the chicken into small strips, put on water for the pasta, butter in the wok, melting and sizzling, then onions and garlic, watch the tiny bits cook, twirling with a wooden spoon, then the chicken, stirring, brown everything, add the mushrooms and celery, and just before its ready, the sliced spinach leaves, oh, and make a simple Bechamel sauce out of butter and flour and milk in the microwave and put in some salt and parmesan cheese and stir the sauce into the chicken and then add the pasta. Even the dog whimpers for some. Easy meal. Go back to my computer and read more blogs. Blog reading takes up the greater part of the day I sometimes fear. Issues with plagiarism at thenarrator's site today, but then, that's what sometimes happens to our most talented. My son, who turned 18 yesterday, and re-organized our entire closet of a kitchen while I was shopping, has gone out jogging with our dog, and my daughter, who was reading on my bed, is napping. It's raining gently outside. I'm living in some kind of continuum where the molecules of the air are bright with light, are bouncing all over the place like little suns, even when all the lights are out.

Photo: our dog, Keesha.