Fragility/Strength

The light called me to the beach this morning.

I went, knowing there were few days left till winter.

Knowing the best of the fall colours were past.

Perfection wasn't what I wanted.


What was I looking for?

The wind. The light. The gulls and the spray.

A small group gathered to say goodbye to one they loved. They huddled close against the wind, below the bluff. A gull above. Gliding.

We gather against the wind, all of us here, we cling to one another.

The mourners burned incense. They scattered flowers and fruit at the border of two worlds. Waves accepted the offerings, carried what was given to a place we cannot follow.

The gulls and the light and the fading colour.

Gusts animate the sand. Alive, shifting. Blowing away from me.

And the gulls. I've been blind to their beauty. Look, look.

What could be commonplace here? They turn to face the wind. Dig in.

Have you seen sunlight illuminate their bones?

Have you seen sunlight splinter the water's surface into infinite shards? Alive alive.

Geese push into formation.

The gull flies.

Love the One You’re With

Sometimes I am blind to the beauty in my city. All of us humming along, lives unfolding in ways we want and ways that surprise us, even devastate us. The way we live here in the city, side by side, intimately affecting each other yet not even looking into each other’s eyes, can feel alienating. And yet when you do look, you feel, and life unfolds before you, mysterious and poignant, raucous, reckless, heartbreaking and humbling.

There’s a powerful beauty in the human landscape here, yet I sometimes berate my city for being so big, for the incessant construction, for the car culture and crazy drivers, for the way the city swallows time when you try to traverse it.

There are days when the city closes in. I long for a horizon uninterrupted by anything made by human hands. That is when, in this city, I must go down. Because below it all are the often overlooked places that, when you make time for them, when you remember to enter them, hold the power to restore. And I don’t mean the subway system! ; )

*****

Mine is a city of ravines. Its geography requires us to go down into nature, descend into it, like a memory of what this land was before us.

We dip into the ravines where the rivers of old still run, a shadow of their former selves, but still moving sacredly along ancient pathways to the Great Lake. Walk there and the city falls away as we fall into nature.

It’s like a metaphor for who we are. Our exterior selves, like the city, can be bright and shiny, or hard edged and worn down, a million different faces and facades. Sometimes we present our authentic selves, but not always. Often we present what is presentable. What else can we do?

But below these surfaces we so carefully manufacture is something so precious—our essential nature, which, like the ravines of this city, offer such breathtaking beauty. A beauty that is exactly right just as it is.

It seems a powerful reminder to, like the song says, love the one we’re with—which in the end is our Self.

The Longest Winter

What a good winter it has been for hibernation. If I’d had the option to curl, snout to tail, into a little ball back in September and slept and dreamt away the season, would I have?

Perhaps, but I know how the old stories go. There must be long winters, hard and cold, in every heroine’s tale. Times when the sun doesn’t warm and sets quickly. Times when although we can see the beauty that is every day before us, we can’t feel the beauty. The realization takes us by surprise, and it frightens us, and perhaps adds a chilling layer of longing. The longing to feel again.

But after every winter the light does come back, slanting into our rooms at a new angle and illuminating what was there all along in a way we haven’t seen before. Suddenly we feel a stirring again. A stirring toward something, that unnameable thing we know and don’t know.

The light shifts again, so quickly, and the feeling passes. The days are still short, but lengthening.

But the reminder of the “something else,” of the “something that calls to us” has washed over us and we are not the same. Something inside has quickened and we must tend to it.

About a Bird

The bird is behind the crabapple, to the right of the spruce.

The spruce is sparse of needles and grows crookedly.

Not enough light,

not enough space.

*******

This summer a nest fell from the maple. 

A wonder.

I brought it inside to admire. 

I put it in under a dome of glass.

It became a dead thing

in a museum.

I did that.

I found the bird after lunch, also dead.

*****

The light in autumn is false.

It comes at a slant and casts long shadows that weren’t there in summer.

It makes mirrors of windows.

Birds fly into windows.

These are facts I tell myself.

*****

I dig the hole in the back garden,

behind the crabapple, to the right of the spruce, 

near another bird I buried long ago,

and a baby rabbit found by the back gate in the spring.

*****

The nest is small.

A strip of birch bark spirals down from its tangle of grey twigs.

When I bring it outside, the breeze takes up the strand like a prayer flag.

I lift the bird.

I want to hurry

but I make myself slow.

I feel the still breast.

No frightened, fluttering heart.

I feel the soft yet solid body.

Its oval shape fills my cupped palm. 

I feel its mass.

I look for wounds,

such as a cat might make.

Or a window. 

No blood. One leg awkwardly bent.

What does it mean?

I rest the body into the nest.

The bird would not have lain so.

It would have sat up, tiny legs tucked under its white tummy.

I place the nest into a brown bag.

I need to use the bag.

A temporary buffer between the elements.
Between earth and sky.
Between what flew through today’s cloudless dawn and what lies below.

Between wings that parted the wind and the gravity of a grave.

Do you see?

I put the bag into the hole. I do not pause.

I shovel on the displaced dirt.

The whole is covered.

I put the shovel away.

I walk into the house.

I wash my hands.

Zoe

For Zoe, who crossed over yesterday. So many loved you, especially a certain two-legged one, whom you had to leave behind. But now you are with your first human friend, and we are all sure he was waiting for you, and had been longing to feel your soft black velvet fur again and to look into your soulful eyes. It’s good to know you are with him.

You stayed here just long enough to be healed of your traumas. You had been given just the right humans to help you through your sorrows, and you grew into a happy, more confident creature. That’s a good life.

We’ll miss you, Zoe. Don’t forget to come and meet us when we cross over, too.

XO from Auntie Kath

 

Compassion

Co-suffering, that’s what compassion means. Was that what I felt when, this weekend, I held in my hands a mourning dove and tried, with husband and son, to save it?

The bird had become entangled in our badminton net, which we’d taken down but not put away. The black net stood limp, almost invisible, hanging from a pole at the rear of the garden where birds flutter back and forth among the trees.

My son came running in to say a bird was caught in the net. My heart jumped. I cursed aloud. I so easily jump to anger, at myself, at the boys. Looking for someone to blame.

My husband reached the little bird first. I hesitated. I stood in the kitchen and deliberated. Could I care for this bird? Could I take this on? Would it hurt me too much? What if he died in front of me? Like my dog, who was hit by a car running to greet me when I was in grade two? I thought all this and then ran outside.

Scissors - I think it was my husband’s idea. I yelled to my son to get them. The sound of his heavy steps as he hurried down the deck stairs with the scissors frightened the bird. It panicked and tried to fly away but fell quickly to the ground.

Then my hands were on the bird quickly; no more thinking, just acting. The dove was soft and warm, and at my touch it grew still.

The net had twined itself around wings and legs so quickly and intricately that we could not loosen it. I started cutting away carefully, trying to loosen its strings. My husband was working too, delicately pulling at the net. I snipped and snipped, holding my breath, holding the bird.

And it held onto me. One tiny claw wrapped itself around my thumb. “He's holding me,” I said. My son watched. I looked into the bird’s eye and it looked at me. The moment lasted. And there we were. In it together. Compassion. Co-suffering.

My husband took the scissors since I could not cut strings and hold the bird and have it hold onto me all at the same time. He cut, but no matter how much we cut, the strings around its body did not loosen.

I gently lifted a wing, hoping we could see where the twine was hidden. Nothing. It disappeared amid soft grey feathers.

The bird was fully cupped in my hand now. It defecated on me. Poor frightened thing. But it was so brave, all the time holding onto my finger, like a newborn, looking at me as though for reassurance. “You are so brave, little bird,” I said.

Snip. Snip. We kept working. The bird was separated from the net, but parts of the string stubbornly twined around parts unseen.

I tried to lift its leg again; my husband said that had seemed to help.

I loosened my hand, the one the bird held onto, to try to manouvre its foot. That movement, my breaking the bond, changed everything. It flapped its wings frantically and I could not restrain it, fearing it would hurt itself in the struggle to escape. I let go. For better or worse. What would happen? Any control I might have had over the entire situation and the bird itself was, quite literally, out of my hands.

The dove flew up. It could fly. It flew to the chokecherry tree at the far end of the yard, alighted there for a moment, gathered its wits, and took off into the canopy of trees. It was gone.

We were shaken. We promised to put the net away as soon as we finished playing badminton. Every time. It wasn’t enough to put it aside. The thing was a death trap, especially when it was loose and limp near the wilder part of the garden at the back trees.

I sent love to the little creature right away, in the way that I do, which could be called prayer. I am hoping that because it could fly, and because there were no strings near its head or neck, that the rest of the net will fall away, that we had cut enough of the net that it will drop off as the bird flies and flies.

I hear a mourning dove right now, outside my office window, its distinctive coo-coo-coo coming to me from the maple or the lilac. I noticed it as soon as I started typing. I hope it is our little friend, and that it knows we never meant to harm it. I hope it is happy, healthy and free.

I will never forget its eye on me, and its claw grasping my thumb. I know better now my responsibility to my fellow creatures and my power to harm or help. I know now I must rush out and be couragous, hold compassion in my heart, and love. It does hurt. But it is right.

 Photos are the rear garden on a foggy, rainy day.

Hope

I refuse to show you what it looks like outside my window today. I refuse to look. Okay, I just peeked. It is white and wet. They are calling for freezing rain by the afternoon commute. They did not call for snow, but that is what is falling and ACCUMULATING right now.

Being Canadian, I love to moan about the weather, no matter what it's doing. This Eeyore-like approach to meteorological conditions is a defense mechanism, of course. It helps me bear up under the heavy weight of disappointment. Expecting the worst weather-wise means never being crushed when it snows in April.

But I'm changing, I think. I'm hoping more, which is why I'm peppering this post with pictures that I took a few years ago on a garden tour on magical Ward's and Algonquin Islands. (Find out more about the Toronto Islands here. )

Just to look at these pictures in the midst of an April snowstorm feels like a defiant act of hope.

*****

So, what is all this about personal transformation and hope?

It began when my indoor cat escaped and was lost. I was desperate to find him, and I walked the neighbourhood calling and calling his name (and delivering hundreds of fliers). As I walked and called, I felt how hard it was to hope for something that seemed hopeless. This neighbourhood is a dramatic intersection between built and wild environments. Ravines filled with coyotes, foxes, raccoons and peregrine falcons carve through the landscape, as does a busy six-lane highway lined with strip malls and questionable motels.

Hoping that my pampered indoor feline survived his first foray into the Big Wide World took guts. I felt brave as I called his name. I felt faithful. I knew the odds were miserable, and that's what made my act of hope so poignantly courageous.

As I thought about this partnership between hope and bravery, I realized it applied to so many acts.

*****

Gardening is an act of hope. Who can plant a tree without hope? It is impossible! Who can dig with her hands and not feel hope for the cool dirt that is our Earth? Such an act of bravery and hope it is to plant and tend and love a garden.

And here is another aspect of the nature of hope.

What gave me the strength to keep calling for Jet, releasing his name into the quiet mornings on streets still sleeping? After all, I did not know if he was close by, miles away, dead or just alone and terrified in some dark, close hiding space.

It was love that kept me calling. Hope springs forth from love.

Losing Jet showed me that hoping is not a foolish, empty act, but one requiring great courage. Hoping to make the world better—through gardening, easing a lost pet's suffering, writing a letter to the government about gun control, praying for an abused child unknown to you who is alone somewhere out there in the world—these are acts of immense bravery, not pointless petitions to an uncaring universe.

*****

I'll add one more act of bravery to the list. Writing fiction. Writing your first work of fiction, with no guarantee it will see the light of day as a published piece, doing it anyway because you have a story to tell and only you can tell it—that's brave.

And audacious. 

And hopeful!

*****

So that is how things have changed in my world. I know more deeply that I simply must do what calls to me, and do it bravely, hopefully and with love. It's so very hard to hope without any guarantee that the suffering of innocents will cease, that the cat will be found, that spring will come, that the Earth will survive humanity, that our words will one day live beyond our hard drive...

...but you just have to do it anyway. Hope for more. Act with love. 

That is something—no, that's everything.

*****

P.S. Someone found our cat hiding under their deck,
recognized him from the flier and returned him to us! We are so fortunate!
And I'm still writing.