Monday, January 23, 2006

Elections...

It is election day here, National ones. Because I haven't done last year's tax return yet, and so haven't informed the government of my new address, I wasn't on the voter's list. But my landlord told me all I needed was proof of address and something with a signature, so I took a bank statement and my passport. With my dog in tow, I took my place in the cardboard booth and, whew, voted. It would have been the only national election that I would have not voted in in my entire adult life. I'm hoping for a minority government; if Harper gets full clearance and becomes our next Prime Minister, I fear we'll be joining the States next year when it attacks Iran, and begins yet another unwanted and wasteful war. Why hasn't the Bush administration been charged with war crimes over starting a war in Iraq on false premises? Oh, I am charging at the bit tonight...

Willow Women in-progress #4

It's probably the slowest drawing I have ever done. Is it my 'style'? No. I like to draw a figure or figures, arrange the canvas and paint and water, and throw everything together and let it create itself. Fast. This drawing is the opposite process. Perhaps that's why it seems a meditative exercise in itself. The colours have to suggest themselves out of their own resonance. Waiting for them to emerge takes time, and can't be rushed. Surely like some aspects of our lives.

Sometimes we have to weigh options, and choose carefully. Allowing our choices to come out of a natural inclination. It's an intuitive process, yes, but one that's not foolhardy. All colours, or all options, are carefully considered, and then the one that both 'thinks' and 'feels' right is applied. At first carefully, just in case, and then deepened.

At this point in the process of this drawing I'm considering how we make decisions. Isn't it a lot like the way we create art?

Friday, January 20, 2006

On the location of.

Musica mundana, humana, practica. Conciliance, interconnectedness, unity. Gestalt. Impure purity of the mixture of everything. When the mess appears in the picture of the place, when the angry, bitter edges aren't hidden by the smooth surfaces of the portrait, where the blood courses beneath a fine veneer of skin. Get in close, see the pores, the pulse beneath the eye, the browning teeth. And let go, in that place of closeness, heart beating on heart, where it is dissembling, the sharp smell of breath on the body of desire. Ecstasy accepts where it is collapsing, what in us is repulsing, with the coming towards, where edges melt into, the disappearing. Light sweeps the universe without discriminating. The whole is greater than the parts. Even Apollo weeps. A music of the spheres, more than speculation. Quivering theoretical strings sing. Feel our bodies. We are pulses of electricity, energy, and chemical processes, an organics of living. Think of it as a masterpiece, the orgasm.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Willow Women in-progress #3


If I lighten the paper so that it's closer to the cream white it is in real life, the colour washes out, even with enhancing. Today I only used the colour cast option to make the paper less blue. So the colour of the figures is stronger, closer to what it is here, in this room, in the light from the window. My camera is ready for pick-up at the Sony store: luckily I had extended warranty, and it was covered. Hopefully the photos will be less grainy now.

Where am I at with this watercolour drawing today? Floating land mass; floating sunset; three women clothed with the sun (but no diadems under their feet).

And I, myself, in my aging body, which doesn't know it's not young, bleeding, just like always, for far too many years. Cramps, tired, drawing in spiritually to where death meets life, where rain falls on frozen ground, the winter of my monthly cycle, time for rest, deep meditation, feeling my body fully, celebrating womanhood in quiet solitude, awaiting the end of the process of cleansing, and a return to normal energy. This is an opportune time to explore the depths of my embodied spirituality; and I do try to honour this gift, even if into my fifth decade it becomes wearisome.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Willow Women in-progress


It's not easy to post a work-in-progress, especially when I prefer to wait until something is finished before showing it to anyone. But aren't we all works-in-process in our blogs? This format allows, nay encourages, us to forge ahead with our wayward ideas and stray creativities. It all pulls together eventually. We are creating whole bodies of work here. In draft form, in finished form. So I post the progress of this little drawing, wondering myself where it's going. It's quite gaudy today, and much of my 'art' is about saving what are turning into messes, 'saving' it to the point of livability. When I can live with something, and perhaps I'm seeking bold and sensitive, polished and raw, confident and wavering, manifesting and disappearing, in whatever way that happens, then it's done. If I can 'look' at it without jumping up to 'fix' it, then it's done. There gets to be a point when you can almost look at your work as if you didn't do it. You remember the emotion of your life at the time you did it, where you were in your inner journey, but are no longer involved in the traceries of line or paint or design. It has become something in the world, and not part of your inner landscape where you are busy scribbling, drawing, painting, composing, revising and continually re-orienting your life into the work of ongoing art that it is.

Monday, January 16, 2006

First Draft Drawing: Notes on the willow women...

Willows. Long, stretchy women. Like mirages in the Sahara. Elongated. Giantesses if you met them. The three muses wandering over the desert. Tribespeople. They are the same as the last drawing, only different. There is a blue astral figure, undefined. Who is she? The sun booms out of her belly. The sun unites all three. They are comfortable in their harsh environment. Without clothes, protection, concealment, camoflage. Thin but not near starvation. These are the women that can find the one succulent shrub in a 50 mile radius and suck its roots until they are nourished with fluidity. Drinking dew. And leave it intact, so that later, once again, they can draw moisture from the plant. They read the stars like navigators, the sun like weathermen, and worship equally the sun and moon. They can sense a dust storm hours away. I'm not sure they carry complex mythologies. Or that it's necessary to have a dense theology. Only the land-dwelling ones, where what is familiar is sacred, the sand, the grass, the burning sun, the hardened soles on the feet. Only the sacred covenant with the embodied self and the land. Their strong womanliness the Shekinah of their souls. They watch; they dance; they make love; they have children; they feed everyone; and it's not effort-full, only what's expected and they sing often. There is no voyaristic gaze from millenia of art capturing them, despite their being white. Civilization barely impacts them. Though they know; indeed they do. They would be comfortable in robes on city streets too. They are free women. I don't know where the men are. Perhaps I shall attempt co-ed watercolour drawings after this one, we'll see.

early mapping of colour and form, 10" x 12", india ink, coloured pencil (so far), cotton watercolour paper, 2006

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Embodiments, Digital Composition... or BlogTalk

Oh yes I do. I create you in 'virtual space.' You don't exist where I am; I don't exist where you are. You are embedded in the digital data that I reframe, reinterpret, transmute and transform into recognizable text, image, sound. You are a binary digit. I am a binary digit. We frame each other. We exist through each other's filters. We are a "consensual hallucination." You appear as a reconstituted body, or a map of pixels, however you prefer. I am a refreshed flicker on your screen. We expand the indeterminism of our bodies by communicating this way. Perhaps you are a preconstituted frame, how am I to know? I participate in the process of reforming you, your words, your photos, your audio clips, in my own image. The "place" where we meet is a vague concretized space; wherever it is, we both meet here often. The result of our "body-brain achievement" is that we have intercepted the stream of data and created each other virtually in virtual space; we've created "an internal bodily space for sensation." Hmnn. Did you know that? "Digital data is at heart polymorphous"; now, now... don't you think that's going too far?



From notes from my sojourn to the Toronto Reference Library this afternoon where I browsed Mark Hanson's, New Philosophy for New Media (MIT Press, 2004), thanks to delightful & inspiring email conversations with Mary Godwin of Body Electric.

Bosc Pears...

On the wooden windowsill. Facing south, but too low for the winter sun. Bodies enclosed in olive brown sheaths. Blending into the wood, they lie, rounded thighs, elegant elongated necks, like decorations. A week passes where daily I hold them, press their flesh. They are like fragile stones.

On the weekend I eat one, its pale honey-coloured flavourless fruit hard and crunchy as an apple's.

Those thick, gourd-shaped, olive-brown hides don't soften. They will never soften. Only a dark spot near the stem of one of the pears reveals ripeness as it begins to collapse inwards to nourish the seeds. Even without the presence of warm soil, they would lie on the windowsill and crumple slowly, decay into new life, its possibility.

I cut them and scoop out their seeds and peel the thick russeted skin and slice them and drop them into a bowl, with apples and cranberries, for a compote. They are not so juicy that they slide in my fingers. Sometimes pears don't ripen, but remain dry and coarse. Licking the pear juice, its faint unmistakable flavour, slightly grainy, like delicate sweet-spiced sun, on my fingers, I smile. Patience to this moment of perfection.

The dog is barking, my lover is here. I crumble the topping of oats, flour, brown sugar, butter, nutmeg, ginger and cinnamon over the mixture of fruit, fresh lemon juice and honey, place the dessert in the slow cooker; later in the day, the fruit will feed my slender pear-shaped body...

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Dance, the Dream, Disappearing Into Each Other...

Only updated because I've hosted the image with Blogger. This is finished, and probably sold. There's something going on, between the crone/younger woman, that I can't decipher myself, and overtop of the blue woman. If you feel inspired, I'd love you to write some poetry or prose, an imagining of what's going on in this drawing...

And it might not be on dancing, dreaming, or disappearing...


Dance, the Dream, Disappearing Into Each Other, 8.5"x11", watercolour pencil on paper, 2006.

Scrawled along the blue woman's leg: "shadow my desire"; up the older woman's arm, "what rises into the self?"; and curling from thigh to breast to arm, "repose curls in on itself."

link to borderless image

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

A recommendation...

You really should take a look at FILMLESSPHOTOS, A Photo A Day From Photojournalist John Lehmann; he's an award-winning photo journalist and one can see why. He started posting photographs on January 2nd, and he's, well, slick, sophisticated, savvy, professional, yes, and extremely talented...

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Scilicet, When Evaporating Condenses, or the Effulgence of Being

Last night I wrote this after reading Rodger Kamenetz's first chapter of his new book on dreams, at his site, talkingdream. Which I think is in here. But all day I knew that some writing was coming, even before Dave so kindly led us to talkingdream. But there are synchronicities, synchronicities you understand...

On evolution, Biblical Genesis, our individual consciousnesses, bodies, how we put it together…

Scilicet, When Evaporating Condenses, or the Effulgence of Being

Soft canyons iron balls fall into. Unnamable violence. His hands around my neck in the shroud of the dream. I climb spider ladders like fishnet hose. In the morning I forget, the sky is so blue.

Blood rushes like a river's tributaries through my body. The furious tide never stops. Red wash of bone, marrow more alive than stars. Ceaseless production of red.

And on the face of the nameless sea the nameless God breathed. Wind rushing through trees.

The emotion of any poem is its core, and what beats long after. Bones grinding in their sockets. We are scaffolded from within.

Wear the bones, hidden. Hush of blood. Walking heart bombs. Steady beat, in, out, freshly reddened.

Something splinters into an infinity of light, scattering, the refracted holy. Sepulchre of being. Look for the sweetness, it is there. Find the sweet breath, breathe.

Across the continent of the world I lay my pen, weeping. Come, bring yours.

When we entered complexity, there was no turning back.

Refulgence, the brilliant light, an after thought. Past where the sticks fall like loose hay, I dip my fingers through, looking for a needle.

The mist of the evening lifts, and I see you face to face. Curvature maps the trajectory of words flying into feather canyons like iron volleys.

And then I saw it, and knew, before it disappeared into the celestial.

Feather soft canyons of thought.

Each moment I pull myself into you, though I have run away.

The horizon fills with red suns rising.

Stay out here in the space.

Where the winsomely wild.

Exchange shots, vaults of iron; put down your guns. Cling to the vestiges, or let go.

Keep running across the field, though you are coming to yourself. Sometimes the only way to get close is to go away.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Two Black Plumes

Among Christmas gifts were watercolour pencils. This is my first "attempt," and it's a throw-away sketch from a lifedrawing session last Summer (not what I would draw if I were drawing a "Drawing" if you know what I mean). Then again, maybe it is. Don't ask me about the pubic hair, please! Why did I draw it practically up to the navel in both sketches? Ink is unforgiveable, too.

It's called, "Two Black Plumes," 8"x10", india ink, watercolour pencil on paper, 2005. I apologize for the graininess of the writing, it's taken with my video camera; when my digital camera is fixed, I'll re-shoot it.

Do we know the body at all? Or only our constructions of it, our representations/self-representations...

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Chit Chat, snacks, religion, the oncoming cold

-a Tim Horton's™ chocolate walnut crueller, cut in half, buttered, slathered thickly with cream cheese (a decided improvement);

-a few grains of Nescafe™ instant coffee, because it's better with a whiff of the real thing, in a hot mug of barley, rye, chicory and beetroot Krakus™ instant coffee substitute (it's 9:30pm) with 18% coffee cream;

-under a Sunbeam™ electric throw on the low setting, it's cosy in this cold basement apartment, or probably crucial to survival and not-freezing-to-death this Winter;

-Ruined by Reality by the Internal Medicine Doctor at Mad House Madman leaves my heart thumping in admiration and sadness;

-I'm thinking deeply on how attractive Zen is, the promise of fast enlightenment, and how while I read a number of books on it avidly years ago, I've never felt called to it because of its inherent harshness, preferring a tradition that combines Sufi mysticism, Bhakti yoga, Sikh warrior discipline, and an odd mixuture of esoteric Hinduism and Buddhism, or, perhaps, and this makes me smile, sensual nothingness;

-I believe that we can only be indoctrinated into a system by that system: a person enlightened in the Zen™ tradition is only enlightened in that tradition, they are not individuated in a Jungian™ sense, or a saint in a Catholic™ sense - to be individuated one needs to undergo the long process of Jungian analysis; likewise, to become a Catholic saint, one needs to undergo a long tradition of Catholic prayer and worship. Someone enlightened in the Zen tradition is a master of that tradition, but no other; the same for the Jungian, who can't claim their individuation is akin to Zen enlightenment; and the saint can't claim anything other than Catholic canonization. While I know that mastery in any tradition is wonderful to aspire to, I prefer an eclectic blend that suits my idiosyncratic temperament, being true to the idolization of individuality in my era, though I know advertising has mapped me as a 'type';

-a recipe for slow cooker apple, pear and cranberry crisp sits freshly written from the NET beside me and I keep looking at it, almost tasting the fruit and brown sugar and oats, though I won't make it until tomorrow;

-a photograph from last Summer of a statue with half of a set of arms missing that my friend, Anne, bought at a garage sale; I am sure it is a rendition of the Tibetan Buddha "Chenrezig," the Lord of Love. Please correct me if I'm wrong;

-I am pining for Summer, even as Winter begins its harsh encrustation of snow and ice and frigid wind.

New Year's Eve, 2005

Lights, planets forming, rising, speeding missiles, exploding. They set them on fire and throw them into the park. When the spheres of blue, red, white light erupt loudly and shoot erratically at their feet, they hide behind parked cars. And walk on laughing. It is New Year's Eve.

The streets are snowy, and on the way to a drumming party, I pass groups of raucous students already awash with drunkenness. Women with cleavage in low-cut, short, tight dresses, their thin wool coats wide open, negotiate the slippery, slushy streets in stilettos. They are beautifully made up; I admire their courage and fortitude. In contrast, I am making the snow squeak under my footsteps in boy's size 6 Wal-mart construction-style boots, snowpants, and a faux fur sealskin jacket with the collar pulled up. I cannot bear to be cold, even for glamour. The new year is two hours away, and there is anticipatory shouting on the streets; carloads of kids careen by, honking. It is a strange eruption of public joy. Because it seems forced it has a pallor that usually dissipates once the new year is in actual existence and everybody relaxes.

I find Xing Dance Studio and descend the stairs to the sound of drumming. Inside are about two dozen drummers and as many dancers; the space is large enough, yet intimate. The walls are mirrored and there is a black sprung dancefloor. I haven't danced in a year and feel awkward. I am dressed in a danskin with spaghetti straps, enough cleavage to be presentable, and a long see-through negligee-style black lace dress. As I take off the dress, tie it around my waist, I undo restraints on my hips and let them sway to the music, forgetting whatever self-consciousness I arrived with.

The evening is like a magician's napkin; it looks the same at the end, dark with stars all over it, but unfolded, and shaking starlight on the room. I recognize few people; I've been away 3 years. I dance hard enough to feel sweat trickle inside my danskin, as I pull back my mane of hair, the undersides are damp, and my face bright and rosy with the aerobic movements I cannot help but create with my body to that drumbeat. The woman who captivated the dance floor all evening is in her mid-50s and wears a Middle-Eastern belly dance outfit, her beautiful torso bare and shimmying, her belt jingling to the drums. I shimmy too. Why do I need to synchronize with the other dancers? Around 2am, when the group has thinned, I put my lace dress back on and run, jump, sway, stop, turn, and, shooting somewhere else, continue leaping, stopping, turning, swaying. I kick in the air, my arms above me, and spin and spin. My hair flies everywhere. I'm sure it's lethal and I can't guarantee I didn't whip anyone with it. I let go and sweep around the room like the spheres of light from a firecracker. I run so fast between the dancers and drummers, spinning this way and that, I'm sure I'm dangerous.

By chance in 1997 I ended up at the first New Year's drumming jam put on by Michael Uyttebroek on Richmond Street in a studio on the 2nd floor. It was the best New Year's I had ever been to. There was a black drummer filled with energy and beat; whenever he drummed the entire room literally jumped and danced; it was ecstatic. Michael instituted a Toronto Tam Tam drummer's group after that, and has always put on a New Year's celebration. But the gatherings lost their intimacy when they went to the large space of Dancemakers on Dupont at Ossington. When that closed down, they moved to this smaller studio like a hidden cave in the basement of what was originally a church complex. The drummers didn't form a circle of their own with the dancers dancing outside it; drummers, dancers, hands, drumsticks, feet, twirling bodies, we were all together.

And, collecting all that energy into its multiple peaks, making it shine, was a drummer who rose above the others. His sound bright, his rhythm captivating, his arms powerful; when he played, it was impossible not to dance. What great pleasure he gave me, taking me back to my early childhood in an African jungle and the drumming that I remember so clearly it is part of my soul.

After it was over, surprisingly a number of drummers complimented me on my dancing, saying it was "wild" and "joyful." And I thought my frenzied bursts were hidden in the darkness! Ah, well. I chatted with interesting men and women, including sharing life histories with a man in a long conversation afterwards, walked home alone arriving at 4:30am to a barking dog, and woke nearly 10 hours later. In 2005, yes, I had an outstanding New Year's Eve celebration...

Saturday, December 31, 2005

It was the strangest of years...

I'm writing a book on this crazy and unexpected year. It's over a hundred single-spaced pages, and there's more to go. Can I succinctly summarize? No.

Snow floats in delicate dance from a white sky. That I can see from my basement window. Had anyone told me I would be here a year ago, I would have laughed.

This year I packed myself away and started out, like the Tarot Fool, unburdened and fresh. I left Vancouver and returned to Toronto, without a house to move into, without a job. It continues to be a wild ride.

I am reconstructing my life slowly. And differently. Having left and returned gives everything a freshness. But I am not seeing the same way. People are somehow changed. It's like I can see more deeply, and am surprised by what I discover. No wonder he or she was so loyal! No wonder I always felt oddly hurt by him or her! Perhaps I couldn't see below surfaces before, and now I can. I'm negotiating my way through my resurrected life carefully. Christmas with my mother, normally almost more than I can bear, was surprisingly alright. Relationships with certain friends have fallen by the wayside, especially if they were money or status dependent, which I didn't know before, when I had a fairly large trendy house downtown, but which has become clear since. Relationships with other friends have become even closer. And these seem to be with those who have a larger wisdom about life, who truly come from the heart. Even my sense of this city has changed. I am situated differently and walk down into the core from a residential neighbourhood. Everywhere I go I find friendliness. But I'm not as immersed in this culture as I once was. It's like I'm non attached: I've been elsewhere, gained a knowledge of what it's like to leave everthing, of grieving that loss, and then returned to what was left to find it changed too. I'm an older and different woman now. Not as sparkly, I can feel that. My hair is brown, not blonde, and I am more subdued. Gentler. Moving slowly, as I reconstruct who I am in my various communities. I can never go back to the way I was, yet don't know who I am becoming. But I think it's going to be a whole lot better, happier, more trusting and more fragilely beautiful because I undid myself, let go of safety, of possessions, of all my assumptions and approaches to everything, and am in the process of creating a new life even as I am creating a new view of my world.

Many blessings to you all. Many thanks to those of you who have shared in my journey. May you have a most magnificent and happy New Year... xo

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Prodigal return...

I had one of the nicest Christmas' ever. Low key, but with my family, my two brothers and my mother, on the 25th, and then my two children, two neices and one nephew, and bothers, and mother, and doggy, she's welcome at my mother's, on the 26th. Two years away, and what was not enjoyable before, family tensions et al, are gone, washed away. Just quiet gratitude. The way it should be. And why is it that sometimes we have to nearly lose everything before we let ourselves in to what's there, appreciate what we have? Or is it that I was gone for 2 years, and they nearly lost me, and so are being appreciative of me? Whatever it might be, it was very nice and has left me feeling, well, happy.

I wrote in The Move: "The prodigal return. When what leaves comes back. We return again and again to our roots in our memories and our dreams. We never truly leave where we have come from. Our past lives on in us."

But it's more than that. When you go back to what you can never fully leave, it's changed, it's not the same. I am extremely lucky: it's much better.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Happy Festivities!

Happy Holidays... and for those of you dreaming of a White Christmas. Whatever your family, &/or friend, rituals, however you celebrate the birth of the light, enjoy!

(borrowed the delightful White Christmas from Ken's site.)

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Receiving is Giving

I discoverd, looking at my sitemeter, that Freecycle Newswire linked to my post, A path of gifts. It was difficult writing, searingly honest- how fragile I am yet strong. But only strong in the sense of knowing that we give much to each other and it is through our love for each other that we blossom. How happy the giver of a gift can be when they see how wonderful what they have given is to the recipient. The art of receiving is as important as the art of giving. Loving kindness, support for each other, caring, helping, giving, receiving, surely this is what makes the world go round. The beauty of us. Finding that people really do care. Such plentitude in our hearts.

Digital camera gone awry

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Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

What happened to my beautiful digital camera? It's 2 1/2 years old, was not dropped, just started doing this a few days ago- focus is gone, colour bleeds. While the effect is certainly interesting, I need a camera that works!

I have an extended warranty on it that's up next year; I am hoping Sony will cover the repair of this. How am I going to take photos over the festive season, or continue to create my photopoems without it?

Any ideas on what's happened to the camera?

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Master Text/MasterCard

I am dressed in a black suit, leather boots, my curls free but tamed by a conditioner. Lipstick outlines my ready smile. I answer the phone all day at a head office for MasterCard. At lunch I eat leftover tandoori curry in a vacant office and then travel in the mirrored, news-screened elevator down to a coffee shop to buy a lemon-coconut pastry. What am I doing here? The crowds of well-dressed business men and women. I am alien to this moneyed world. I walk through, carrying my pastry, watching like an anthropoligist studying strange creatures who are bulging with hidden aggession beneath cultured veneers of wool and leather, their preened and polished gleaming highlights decking the concourse like Christmas lights. It is the opposite of the third world country I come from; it is the far end of the spectrum politically for me. When I was numb after my marriage ended and couldn't be a college & university editor anymore, I started temping. What drove me into this world is unclear. Yet, alien as I feel, I am comfortable too. I know I look like everyone else. No-one would know how traitorous I am to the very world that undergirds our culture, keeping the flow of money rolling, supporting us all. Or am I? I open my Marguerite Duras library book, Two by Duras, to the words, "Don't be afraid."

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

The Move: Section #38 on seeds...

From "The Move, " something to think about...

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Section #38

Everything begins as a seed. A future is contained in the seed: the full, flowering tree; the whole person exists in possibility. All the information that is needed is contained in the seed. With an adequate mixture of necessary ingredients, it will grow and flourish in all the ways it was meant to.

Perhaps relationships begin as seeds too. What they will ultimately become is contained in the beginning. The parameters are set, even if unconsciously so. Attitudes and expectations, the rhythms of the way it’ll unfold, are prescient at the beginning. If one knows how to read the flickers of intuitions, dream fragments, stray thoughts, then one might discern the possible directions of the relationship and whether it will be ultimately satisfying and endure or not.

Careful and diligent tending is only as good as the seed planted at the beginning.

How else to explain the strange coherencies of her stories and dream images and the turn of events at a crucial time, which would prevent their relationship from flowering, or even coming to be?

It seemed as if this line of the plot had been woven into the seed of their connection before they even discovered their desire for each other.

The twist in the plot line would tear apart what was only the fragile, tender beginning.

There would never be more than that; yet she would remain entangled as if in a fisherman’s net.

That was what the oracles of image and dream indicated and she wondered if it was possible to change the genetic structure of a relationship before the damage could occur.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Dreams, ah, no, nightmares...

For a bit, who knows, I'm trying daily writing again... it'll be all over the place, though. Don't expect consistency in narrative, or the narratorial voice. Sometimes lifewriting, sometimes who knows.


In the cold, dark night I awake; the clock is flashing 2:03am. Sigh, why'd I awaken? Now I'll be awake for hours. It must have been a dream. What was I dreaming? I pull the two sleeping bags around me, the down one I wrap around myself inside the cloth one which is zipped up. I lie in a cocoon each night. Tonight I have woken perturbed. I think of the dream. And then I see the image. I must still be half asleep. I see an open cream-coloured photograph album on a dark sidewalk. The image suddenly zooms in. There is a photograph of a body on the sidewalk. Only her torso, her right breast, which is bare and splattered with blood. Everything is black and white except the splattering of blood. I don't see the wounding; I don't see what caused her death. I feel sick. Lie back down, what's that about? She's not me, too young. Worry. Worry. Then the cinemascope goes blank, and some white writing appears, as if on a blog site, and it's something about the children, what's hidden, and I'm feeling a churning in my gut and I don't know why. It's as if there are protected posts that I can't read, the children want to let me know that there's something I should know. I want to protect them, but I don't know against what. I feel helpless, on the other side of knowing, sensing trouble and danger through the blackness behind which what I need to know is protected from my sight. I get up, go to the bathroom, return to my tangles of covers, and fall asleep eventually, waking around 6 to get up for work. The dreams still haunting...

Monday, December 12, 2005

The Lock

It was one of those days. With the large coffee urn and a shoulder bag with a thermos mug of coffee & lunch, I rushed out into the frigid day and just missed the bus. By taking a different route, consisting of running a block, 2 buses and a streetcar, made it on time; but when I got there I found I'd forgotten my purse. The last time I forgot my purse was probably 35 years ago. Someone lent me a token to get home, otherwise I'd have been walking. The 30 cup coffee maker was well received.

At the other end of the day, the same route of 2 buses and a streetcar took not half an hour but an hour.

The lock sticks. Well, it's almost had it, actually. You turn your key for ages and it half opens, and then finally, with twiggling and effort, the dead bolt slides back into its socket and you can get in to let out the dog who's been barking nonstop throughout.

My daughter let me in tonight. Her hair was still damp from a steamy shower, which was odd, because she never showers in the afternoon. And then she unfolded a story of attempts. I'm still shaken. She spent an hour in frigidly cold weather trying to get in. She was wearing sneakers. Her key, which doesn't fit in the front door, got stuck there when she tried to get in that way. She sat in a chair by the side of the house, her hood pulled low. She cried before telling herself to stop, no self-pity. She couldn't feel her feet. She felt tired and thought of sleeping. She finally decided to go to the Community Centre but found it noisily full of children. She came back, managed to get the key out of the front door and went to try the back door one more time.

The lock slid back. She was in. To a very rowsing welcome from the dog, who by now had berserkly barked for an hour.

You can imagine how insane I became when she told me the story. And how I related it to my landlord as soon as he stepped in the house. He went into shock too and has been apologizing all evening. He's getting the lock fixed tonight or tomorrow, has promised to be here when she gets home from school tomorrow since I'm working.

And then I went and bought her a small bag of Tim Horton's sugar donuts, her favourite... have her wrapped up in a comforter with a heating pad, and have put emergency money into her backpack that she is never to spend unless she has forgotten her key or can't get in, and then she's to go to the cafe at Loblaws and buy a hot chocolate and a pastry and do homework at one of the little tables... oh, and phone me. Yes, she must phone me.

That child of mine, who I love, oh who I love, is too dreamy. The two of us, I swear...


Observed at: Toronto Pearson Int'l Airport 12 December 2005 6:00 PM EST

Mainly Clear
Mainly Clear
Temperature
-12 °C (10 °F)

Pressure/ Tendency
102.0 kPa

Visibility
24 km

Humidity
70 %

Wind Chill
-21 (-5 °F)

Dewpoint
-16 °C

Wind
NNW 21 km/h

Sunday, December 11, 2005

A Coffee Urn

Freecycle Logo

Changing the world one gift at a time

In the past week or so I've worked a few days at a Community Services umbrella multi-service organization covering about 16 neighbourhoods of Toronto. Among the communities it serves, some stats stand out: its families are the largest in Metro, averaging about 4 -5 people; it has the highest proportion of single parent families; it has the highest rate of multiple-family households; it has one of the most densely populated areas of the city; as a landing place for new immigrants, it is the most multi-cultural area of the city; a disproportionate number of people live in apartment buildings of 5 stories or more; it has a high proportion of low-income families; there is high unemployment, and some of the areas rely largely on governement transfer payments; it has a high rate of homeless or transiently-housed people, and a high rate of people with mental health problems; there are a large number of food bank families in the region; it has a high proportion of seniors living within its borders. York Community Service has a dedicated, hardworking staff too- many of them are working this weekend to put donations of gifts together for needy families.

I've been working on a strategic report for them. The man who I'm working for is a professor at York University, where he teaches in Nursing. For the first time in all the years I've been temping I think someone read my resume. He's let me edit, not just copy edit, but rewrite where necessary. Then on Friday he asked me to draft a condolence letter on the death of the founder of a charity organization that supports the Community Service's Holiday Basket program. And when I ran out of work mid-afternoon, he asked some of his co-workers to let me write a few of their emails (nothing important), which was gratifying.

The pay, for a temp job, is not too bad, I'm enjoying work that is more along editorial lines (though it's still secretarial, don't get me wrong), it's not too far by bus, and I can handle the place ethically. The last requirement being extremely important for me to find any contentment in a place of work. I have to agree with their philosophy and what they're doing. Banks (with their credit card interest rates and general practices) just don't cut it, if you know what I mean.

It may turn into a more regular part-time job, I sure hope so. I need the money more than I can say. My household in storage is precariously wavering on a recent NSF cheque due to the bank withdrawing their service fee first, leaving me $1.60 overdrawn, and then bouncing the $500. cheque to the moving company. I've been in contact with the moving company, who I phoned immediately. Don't worry, I'll be yelling at the bank manager when I go in on Tuesday to get the $35.00 fee they charged me on top of the indignity. I've been with this bank for 30 years too (*fumes*), and they made a tidy sum off of me in mortgage loan payments for almost 20 years (*fumes* some more).

Anyway, on a happier note, as you know, I belong to Freecycle, and last night an offer came through of a new 30 cup coffee urn/percolator that the person wanted to go to a charity organization. I immediately wrote back about York Community Services. And he chose me due to my enthusiasm! My ex will pick it up when he brings my daughter home tonight (extremely unusual, that he'd do that), and I can take it into work with me tomorrow.

A gift for the Community Services Centre, for functions, for offering coffee to people and families who come in.

Isn't that just the nicest?

Saturday, December 10, 2005

My daily practice...

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usSince 1995 I've been a Certified Kundalini Yoga instructor. I looked online for the meditation I've done daily for 11 years, the Dhrib Dhristi Lochina Karma Kriya, and found it at two sites: one closer to Yogi Bhajan's version, and one geared to a Western yoga market. I've separated it from any guru worship. Usually it's 15 min a day, sometimes followed by silently focusing on the breath for an equal time, or more usually with a rest after, and once a month I do a 2 1/2 hour sitting. It has had a profound effect on my sense of ethic, of understanding that there are consequences to any action that you take. I understand the concept of reverberation through this meditation. Beyond that, it's an ally, a friend, my daily comfort and teacher. Thought I'd share my practice... *hugs xo

Friday, December 09, 2005

Unconcealing the Concealed: Intercepted Lightbeam

Hmnn, in the midst of editing The Move, a pause which I offer for you to ponder:

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Unconcealing the concealed, hidden, repressed, as a light beam carrying coded information is intercepted and changed, revealing its interception, because the interception itself remains as a record in the light, so unconcealing the concealed changes it.

What if the pathway of language were like a beam of light carrying coded information, and our attempt to understand what is being conveyed changes what is being conveyed because of our presence in the pathway?

What if I were telling you a secret, and, in your hearing my previously hidden secret, your listening intercepted the narratorial structure of that secret, and changed what I thought I was conveying through it?

What if there are no absolutes, and everything is relative, and it's all a matter of perspective?

Would actual memory exist, or only our perceptions of what we remember, that are being changed by our re-remembering, which are like interceptions in our own pathways?

What I mean is, if we're all intricately delicately coded light beams shining, can we shine through each other and make each other appear? Or appear to appear, perception being what it is...

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Writing one's life...

I have a compilation of a lot of bits of writing for my NaNo this year. It's a semi-autobiographical book in small sections that incline towards prose poetry. It's called "The Move" and explores what it means to live without security, grounding, a home. And the discoveries in it are quite profound. It's like there is the world structured by capitalism, an economic grid, where we work, buy what we need, etc. A demand and supply model. What the protagonist discovers is a larger deeper network between people, one that seems to work through 'call' and 'response.' That there's an almost telepathic connection between us all. And that we are in a network of interconnections and are supported simply by being here. Of course I want to get all soppy and say that love is the underlying energy and that we're all cared about, but have to consider how to convey that without sounding didactic...

I'm writing it in the 3rd person because it's, well ya know, too raw. But later I may switch it all to the first person and call it a memoir, who knows. It's a strange place to be, where I am. Here's a photo of the house I owned for 19 years, but sold in 2003, in the heart of downtown Toronto in a very trendy area. It's the slate blue-green house with the tree. My children were both born in the front bedroom on the second floor. The top floor was my study/studio, until I had to rent it out after my marriage ended. There is history; there's always history. Do I feel like I've fallen? Not really. Though others who knew me back then might think so. I'm still the same person. And, the oddest thing, even with almost nothing, it amazes me how stable I feel in so many ways.

Was it because I finally chose the path of the artist? And let go of the academic path? Is that why the spiral down? Or did I want to discover this place where I am, without any support, to see what I'm really made of?

Sometimes I think I'm very confused, and other times I think I've never had such clarity.

Anyway, today I can either travel a long way to get my daughter an exercise bike from a Craigslist contact (for her birthday, but it would require my 82 year old mother, who would have to drive me out there & back downtown, not a good idea), or go to a coffee shop and try to write or organize what I have (though it's turned cold and I need warm gloves & shouldn't spend money on coffee, sigh). So, hmnn... choices, huh.

I'm meeting another Freecycle member later this afternoon who's giving me a refurbished but unopened HP Laserjet II toner cartridge for my ancient workhorse of a printer, what a gift!

Here's a link to the first section of "The Move":
http://brendaclews.com/id5.html

Sunday, December 04, 2005

A path of gifts

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usA few of you have asked how I'm doing. Finally the words are coming...

Let me preface by saying that I arrived in Toronto August 1st with two suitcases of summer clothes. Without work for 4 months, any government assistance or charity, somehow I have managed to put together a small home for my daughter and I. How this has happened amazes me. It's a path of gifts, of many small miracles.

Money is the very strangest thing of all. I literally have almost nothing. I don't have what I have collected over a lifetime, nor can buy what we need. With that route denied, how things have been coming to me astounds me. Oh, Freecycle™ is amazing; so is my neighbourhood. Little things, I needed a plastic drainer for a dish rack & found one yesterday; I needed a shopping cart (3 in storage, nothing to use), found an old rusted but perfectly serviceable one; needed a printer for my daughter's long Civic's project, was given one by a Freecycle™ member, and she got 144/145 on it; needed a Winter coat, found an Eddie Bauer down coat for $15. at ValuVillage, when I went to pickup a internet cable from another Freecycle member, & my son agreed to give it to me as a Christmas present; we were sleeping on thin plastic camping mats, and over the weeks I found a queen-sized and a 2 twin foam mattresses, all in good shape, and ultra cheap sheets from Wal-Mart; we were eating off 2 plastic plates from a friend's camping gear, and a Freecycle member gave us a slightly chipped but utterly beautiful 4 place setting dish set; I needed an electric broom, sweeping wasn't cleaning our small space well enough, and found one, clean, cord wrapped neatly around it, with some attachments, waiting for me as if was a gift; and on & on. Precisely what I need I find. I rub my eyes in utter amazement. You can have no idea. When I look about me, at the gifts of friends, Freecycle™, and 'finds,' I realize I have created a small home out of nothing. It's stone soup. I didn't know I was such a staunch survivor. But I am.

Even the basement apartment in which we are living was a find, not only the interior space, but it's in a genuinely loving home that is a balm to my ravaged edges, and which I am deeply appreciative of. Still, I do recognize that what keeps me here rather than on the street is a fragile line. My 3-bedroom household is in storage. Even with continued threats from my ex over cutting the little bit of child support, it trickles in and the rent gets paid every month, and some emergency money from my son paid the storage fees right on the edge of everything we own being auctioned off last week. All our photographs, mementos, books, clothes, furniture. All my paintings, and all the writing I've done through the years. Almost gone, but for a last minute reprieve. It's been like that. Living on the edge. Figuratively and literally.

I think about these things as I walk the hour and 20 minutes it takes each way to a Wal-Mart where milk is $3.77 instead of $5.50 as it is at all the supermarkets around here, and somehow manage to feed myself and my daughter on next to nothing at Wal-Mart and No Frills (which I never ever shopped at before, especially Wal-Mart with its closing a store in Quebec that was forming a union, and its child labour issues, and it's employment practices in general, but, oh). When the coffers are empty, my brother will unexpectedly press some bills into my hand, or my son (who's living at his Dad's) will deposit something into my account from his minimum wage part-time job at a supermarket (I weep at their generosity); just today, all options exhausted, a clerical temp job for two days appeared, which will feed us for 2 weeks, if we are careful.

It's a most strange existence, this. There is no luxury, not even a comfortable chair, let alone a couch to curl up in (oh, a perfect one came to me, but we couldn't get it down the narrow stairwell). Still we maintain ourselves. And I'm learning about trust. That's the key, I think. Life is an odd affair. But keep loving and trusting. Where am I going with all this? I didn't intend to write a 'tell all' post. Even I find the description of my present life rather shocking. But then, again, I am working on uncertainty and trust, which is a theme of my novel, "The Move," and now on grounding, settling, housing, coming into oneself... and so I wonder if my dream of owning a house that is large enough for my kids and I will also come true. We do move in the direction of our dreams, don't we? Aren't we the directors of our lives? Don't we create our lives as we live them? We'll see, we'll see.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Blog Against Racism Day

Yesterday was Blog Against Racism Day. You can still participate by leaving the URL to your blog against racism at the post by Chris Clark where they are being collected. Click on the active link above.

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Poem from my Singing Bowls of Horizons.

A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___