A path of gifts

A 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.

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.



Poem from my Singing Bowls of Horizons.

Authors Authoring Our Lives

"If, seated on high, amidst the authors of our destinies, we could read the book of our life. Which is written. Already written, finished. But we shall never know our story. We are only characters in it. And to think that there will be readers of our book. They will open it. And they'll make fun of the murkiness of our night. Says the author~" Helene Cixious, "Stigmata."


Nothing grand like positing a Divine other as author of our lives, or even ourselves: history is the author of our lives. History creates the book of our lives, where we only live as a character, and even then a character in what becomes our own story, a story that we can never fully know, either. If we remain anonymous bearers of history, our lack of individuality is our story. And nothing is ever 'settled,' the process of revision after revision continues. Perhaps history is an author who never finishes the story that is written and rewritten with each successive generation. There is no final Word, the author cannot be absolutist but only contextual, forever revising the book, the canon, made up of our individual transcripts where we are characters living in a story we can't ever fully know the design of.

I am a lady of hidden books, filing cabinet drawers of journals, piled up, copious writing through the years, and an abrupt end, sudden stopping. Slowly pushing into the stream of life, like here, where we all write our lives, thoughts, concerns, happenings, where we can overhear each other think, revealing those interior places, those places where we posit our lives against the anonymity of history, authoring ourselves in halting, flowing, coagulating, humorous, descriptive sentences of every kind, on every topic, a veritable cornucopia, our offerings. Writing into the future, yesterday's blog gone, like the news, an alphabetic rubble for the future historian to sift through. And some of our stories will remain, the fickle heart of history being what it is, for awhile, of our coming to writing. And then our lives will be placed in the context of. On this inky lonely night without my children, there is comfort in this, knowing that I cannot know the book of my life even while I am writing it.

From my novella-in-progress, "The Move"- sections 50 & 51. Click on the image for a larger, readable size. Suggestions are always welcomed.


Section #50

A man who she met at a garden party, talked to all evening in his kitchen, and went dancing with late in the night at a bar with a jazz band and a toy railroad all the way round the ceiling with a tiny train chugging continuously, that new friend took her to the slough. She should have been packing. She wanted to meet his friend who lived in the wetlands on the Fraser River and wrote books by hand.

Walking on boards placed on the rich vegetation of the rain forest, a pathway opened into another world. She entered a lush and overgrown secret place where creativity flourished directly out of the imagination. Kaja, statuesque and beautiful, like a Germanic goddess, welcomed her. Tall, sensual, curly chestnut hair pulled up and tied, her legs bare and long in shorts, her green eyes shone with vibrancy and mystery. The magical world was her everyday reality. Kaja, and the friend with whom she had come, spent an evening a week sharing dinner and reading their writing to each other, or telling stories. Kaja was too self-conscious to read to a stranger that night, so she told a story.

It was the story of the creativity of life that swept up on the shores all around us, calling us to understanding. The cadences of her telling were visionary and spiritual and philosophic, the poetry of her words swayed on the river, in the air, across the tops of the trees, in the choral streaks of the sunset.

Everything in Kaja’s life had come through spiritual intercession. The cottage on stilts on the river that she lived in was a perfect writer’s cabin. It had appeared as an option that couldn’t be turned down when she asked for an ideal place to live and write. Her boyfriend’s work took him away for two weeks each month, giving her time to write. She worked part-time in special education, a job that fed both her body and her creativity. She had nurturing friends who supported her emotionally. She told story after story of her life where whatever she asked for came to her in profound ways. She said she had to be careful because it was almost too easy to conjure what she asked for.

Anyone would feel fortunate, as she had, to have sat, enraptured, listening to Kaja’s tales, their marvels, her understanding of the way things came to us, how we can shape our lives in ways we desire so that we may do whatever it is that calls to us deeply.

Section #51

A new way of living, or perhaps it is a very, very old way, was opening, it seemed, everywhere.

When things that you needed snapped into place, she could feel it like two grids connecting, two genes intersplicing.

It was easier to do through the medium of money, but money was a poor substitute for the deeper exchange that went on between us all, and of which we are often barely aware.

©2005 Brenda Clews

What am I most grateful for?

Having spent the greater part of my life serving others and trying to fit into, I don't know, their conceptions, or conceptions I had of their ideas of how I should be, I have to say I'm grateful for whatever intelligence and talent have clung to me through it all and sorry that I haven't honoured either but I am trying to rectify that. You all, in the blogosphere, are a big part of this process of coming-into-being...

I'm grateful for the flock of angels who fly with me every day; for feeling as if I can cope, that I am strong; for being able to learn from my experiences in a positive and healthy way; for not being bitter or pessimistic. I'm grateful for my ability to see and feel the world around me; I'm grateful for the brilliance in everything...

And for the delicate smile at the corners of my beautiful daughter's mouth when she tells me she got an almost perfect mark on a major project that she worked for weeks on (she dropped out of school & I ended up homeschooling, so this is good news indeed), the light in her eyes, her delightful petulances, and her laughter and hugs...

And for my gentle and generous son, who's living at his Dad's and who I miss, but who's come through a maelstrom, and who I'm very proud of...

And the soft acceptance of my dog, her soft curly ears, how she's just there, consistently, every day, sweet and huggy, how much fun she is to take for a romp in the park...

I'm grateful for food in the fridge and a roof over my head; grateful for the bounty of the earth and a culture that allows me that; for the inky wash of dawn in the sky and the brightening the sun is bringing to the world. I'm grateful for all the men I've loved; for the beautiful friends I have. I'm grateful to be alive and healthy and brimming with a finally freed creativity; and for all the dark and desperate and lonely times because that enables me to see how fortunate I am to have so much love in my life. I'm grateful for how open my heart is. For how I am not afraid. I'm especially grateful for the coming blessings...

The ability to smile, to laugh. Most of all I'm grateful for love, the ability to love is everything, being loved is everything.

The sky is washed with clear light, it's going to be another stunningly beautiful day.

To post or not to post?

Well, sending you to my website to read the first 11 pages was perhaps daunting, and who has the time? Many thanks to Jean and Laurieglynn for their very helpful comments! This section, from page 99, is perhaps not polished enough, and probably way too long to post as a blog entry. I'm not sure if I should leave it up or pull it. It's about the vast field of interconnections between us all and the many small miracles that happen continually in our lives. I think this section might be central to the theme of my novella-in-progress, The Move. It's perhaps a more theoretic section, and I think it has, I dunno, perhaps too Buddhist an edge to it (all that talk of no arrogance, although I don't actually say non attachment) that I have to scrub and polish out (it's non demoninational, though may have an underlying Buddhist philosophy, oh, heck, that's where I've learnt the most spiritually), and this section is in the midst of sections that are about happenings, events and that illustrate this way of describing gifts, coincidences, small miracles...


Strange luck, strange turns of events, strange eddies in the currents of time, like strange physics particles cohering in unexpected formations, were occurring in ways incongruent to the laws of cause and effect. The energy of a system wasn’t contained in the rationality of its whole, nor in the logical sum of its parts, not all of it. Perhaps there are pockets of other dimensions in this one, oscillating at even higher frequencies. Something like intersecting fields of frequencies crossing each other at nodal points where the pattern of events could take a different turn. Sometimes the fabric of space and time stretched, buckled, spread, allowed. Places where the light trickled richly and pooled. Where the visions were strongest. Where visions could become realized. Contact points where creative poolings occurred out of which magic arose as if from the mists which swirl over the waters of the deep. If you were in one of those places somehow things spawned. Cornucopias of wishes came true. Effortlessly; if you applied effort, or attempted to arrogate the processes, became arrogant, the entryway shut down, closed, moved elsewhere. These were gifts that only appeared through a process of gifting. It was not a doctrine, or definable by any system, religious, scientific or otherwise.

No-one could claim to own or control this process of interconnections. Patents couldn’t be taken out on it. It’s a network that’s larger than the continuum we think we exist in. It intersects with the space-time continuum of cause and effect. It enables crucial connections to be made.

Whether you call it co-incidence or the guidance of angels, it doesn’t matter.

What you did when a desire and its fulfillment intersected was up to you. What you want will appear, but it might not be what you wanted after all, or perhaps you didn’t recognize it as the fruition of your wishes, or perhaps the lapse between its appearance and your recognition was long enough to lose it. It’s important to be open to possibilities.

That’s where the sudden lightning flash of illumination will appear, as a possibility.

Finding what she was looking for, accidentally, wherever, happened so often she didn’t doubt the existence of a set of connections between us all that appear beyond the accepted communication channels. Finding what you were looking for, what you wished for, was no stranger than seeing yourself in a mirror, after all. You think you exist, and then you see yourself and it’s always a little strange and somehow magical that you are here at all.

As she sipped her hot, aromatic Earl Grey tea, its sweetness on her tongue, she continued to follow her train of thought. She wondered if trying to map this process, even poetically, would scare it away. Like psychic phenomenon, it was resistant to testing. Wish fulfillment was perhaps akin to hitting the jackpot, it would happen, but no-one could predict when or how much or who would be the winner. Only, we were all winners all the time, it was just a matter or recognizing that what you were asking for is being given to you.

For the co-ordinates of this larger system of connections to key in to your mental arena, your flux of thoughts and emotions, there has to be a real need. It doesn’t happen on a whim. It doesn’t happen if you don’t really need it. If you’re fine without what you think you want, then you won’t find anything. If you’re frustrated and finding things difficult and such and such a thing will help, then you will find it. When you’ve forgotten about it. Like magic. That’s the way it happens.

It happens and you can’t make it happen, but you cause it to happen, and when it does it seems like a small miracle.

The book of life is a book of miracles.

It is not about the suspension or violation of the laws of nature. It is about an added bonus to the stability of the world. Something that brings what is desired without shaking the foundations of your life. Parachuted in. Added to. Offered. Gifted. In the immediacy of the moment. As is. Without artifice, exploitation, ulterior motive, in the purity of the present.

It cannot be reduced to the normal processes of communication, or of the market of goods that flow back and forth. But it is a give and take. A call and a response. An offering of gifts to each other.

You will find what you are looking for if you stop looking for it; but first you have to want it, deeply.

It’s not that the energy is freed once you stop wanting, stop thinking about it, stop looking, though that is one way to teach yourself to let go. It’s like desire reaches a fevered pitch and spills over into a silence so rich it spawns whatever was being sought until it is shining before you. It’s a process of love. When you find what you are looking for, you feel profoundly loved.

The small miracles are to remind you that you are loved.

©2005 Brenda Clews

NaNoWriMo?! Oooh, yes, & now the work begins...

50627/50000 words

Okay, so the word count is 50627 by NaNoWriMo's unofficial count. Have I been writing up a storm? Nah. Oh, I've been sweating it, you have NO idea; I've been working with feverish incessant continuity, yes. I've been eating and sleeping this book. Lots of new writing, and lots of old writing. It's autobiographical in the 3rd person, go figure, and interweaves life and fiction, and so I've included many blog entries and emails as I tell the story of the last 8 months of my life. It's all been done in little blocks of writing that criss-cross each other, resonate against each other, dissent or assent, unfolding a story through events and metaphoric and symbolic images. There is huge, mungo HUGE editing to do. It all has to flow with a poetic voice, and that's not easy to create and maintain. I've got to put connectives in, discipline the narratorial voice into a consistent level, add the philosophical dimension of ambiguity and unknowingness while remaining grounded in love and trust, all that. I've done some of the editing/rewriting, buried under my hat wearing tiny spectacles on buses, subways, at the park while my dog wanders freely and without supervision to nibble leftovers on the grass, even in steaming water by the candle light of a dozen tiny tea lights spread along the side of the bathtub, and am satisfied with what's happening, but I have more sleepless weeks ahead of me ironing out this dance pagaent of uncertainties! I've made the word count, yes; I have a single-spaced 130 page manuscript that I didn't have before to work on. That's something to razzamatazz about, for sure. And that, my friends, is what NaNoWriMo is ultimately all about...