plainspeak

polaroids

2007-10-09T21:16:00.000-05:00

I'm working again in the inner city, and as I adjust, life is a still rush of images that wash to clarity in passing, like polaroids.

A young woman curled cross-legged beneath the Remand Centre, her eyes tapping Morse code up at her man, hands flashing over the blue heart chalked on the pavement.

An empty prescription bottle and two syringes left on a windowsill after the long weekend.

Last-minute calls from an election campaigner and a police chief, both aiming to volunteer for a media-covered holiday meal.

A quietly radiant teen volunteer, hair tucked back and falling loose as she tops coffee cups.

Citrus tea in styrofoam: prayer with a guy just off night shift at the men's shelter, and not so long off the street himself.

The man under the neon pink blanket outside the front door; his cracked-white vinyl shoes, his gentle smile.

A gift of small ivy in my window, from a co-worker generous too with her sense of humour, and wisdom.

It's good to be back.

peregrine means pilgrim

2007-08-23T18:56:00.000-05:00

"We think international travel is new, but birds have been doing it for thousands of years."

Josh read about 3 peregrine falcons, tagged in Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary. They winter in places like Columbia and the Bahamas...

(but birds eat too)

2007-08-21T20:55:00.001-05:00

This is the thought I had tonight, watching a Swainson's hawk fight just to stay in place. It's windy in Edmonton these days; fall's coming.

Maybe a rebuttal to my last post? Or can I say an extension: because Jesus says the birds always get fed, and we do too.

setting sail

2007-08-19T22:15:00.000-05:00

My husband and I live near a river valley, and no matter what time of day I walk the view, it's morning. Because there are miracles happening, things seen fresh.

The river itself is opaque jade, slow liquid; up close it's a murky green tea, carrying the dregs of prairie silt and always flowing, yet still. Feast on silence, I write on the occasional shelf of sand.

Today Josh and I heard the soft skraw of something in the red-barked bush. Josh joked about a wheeze, a weasel!, and went off to track it, in his keen gentle way. I stayed down by the water's edge, with the hush and the flow, and eventually we both came round to spotting three wrens. Inhabiting the radius of a birch among the dogwoods, minute throats tuned not to song but to -- can we call it scratch? A delicate thrum and rattle, better than any needle on vinyl, and millions of willow-leaves ahead of machine.

So too the gulls. City-work crunches the timeless river with bridge construction, cranes and dozers letting off noise like smoke, but there are seagulls silently riding the breeze. All that unharvested light and breath to soar! Wheeling the air since they first feathered from God's hands, long before someone dreamed the wheel and axle, the engine, the fuel to feed forward! and faster!

Always flowing, yet still. In marriage, I feel this. Like any leap of faith, it's rewarded with both vertigo and clarity, with a sense of motion and a sense of this one moment. Where does the energy come from? Not my chug of consumption, that's for sure. I want to say it's more like catching a draft of light, a push of breath not my own.

Trusting the wind and the water's current and that peculiar scratch in the throat...

oceans immeasurable

2007-03-18T19:22:00.000-05:00

There's a silky mist settling on walkways and roads, and I take this treacherous weather to mean rest. A spruce tree across from our window is crowned with last years' pinecones, waiting for this years' pollination... but instead of thinking summer I am thinking of a choppy winter ocean.

A poem helps --

"H.D." 1886 -

111. Oread

Whirl up, sea --
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us --
Cover us with your pools of fir.

A short while ago, I sat in the same medleyed-orange chair, with the same spruce-view, and spoke of oceans with a school friend. We are washed with such an ebb and flow of books, profs, practicum; people, people, people with needs, needs, needs... I said, ah let it be, what we speak is just a brief boat on a big ocean. We brave the waves but we are small. Plenty of salt-water below us. Tears, if you like.

There are funny things in the ocean, too. Creatures with huge bulbous eyes, and creatures with no eyes at all. Beautiful hues and grotesque teeth. Sometimes humour and danger at the same time, like a puffer fish.

My fiance's mom fished up hilarious things before she passed away, and scary things. Her mind struggled to keep up with her body and spirit in saying good-bye, and what she dredged from her own life's oceans were jokes and sharp emotions. Bright starfish and stinging urchins.

I think we're all oceans immeasurable. Treasure (and terror) untold. A little skiff to skim the top.

Deep calls to deep...
All your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

(Psalm 42)

2006-12-05T17:48:00.000-06:00

where oh where
have i gone?

blogger,
did you delete me?

post-script

2006-10-24T19:41:00.000-05:00

"To address oneself to the other in the language of the other is, it seems, the condition of all possible justice, but apparently, in all rigor, it is... impossible..."
-- Jacques Derrida

(hmmm... sounds like the incarnation.)

2006-10-23T11:09:00.000-05:00

Friday nights on the C-Train are many-hued and noisy. Lovely Filipino nannies speaking Tagalog. Venerably turbaned old men speaking Punjabi. Young people of all sorts wearing the clothes and speaking the languages of whoever's in their headphones.

I, with my pale quiet skin, am probably one of the only people speaking English, just because I happen to bump into a classmate in the crowd (she with an aristocratic Nepalese accent).

We are here in Calgary for two years, to talk about social justice. Our program is predominantly white, with a handful of international students representing the upper economic reaches of their home cultures.

What would happen if we threw open the conversation? A Friday night social justice forum, on the C-Train!

Would we careen off-track, or find a better groove?

My confession is that I'm still afraid, most of the time, of what that better groove might be. What it might demand of me. I like my quiet neighborhood, and the nearby space of land and sky where I can go to escape the city. Deer there, and porcupines in abundance. Mountains in the distance.

The C-Train and its environs are okay when I need a gritty fix of the street, to remind me why I'm in social work. But could I move in? The only hint of wildlife there is in the skeletal heaps of shopping carts dumped under pedways.

Fresh air, maybe, with the wind.

human music

2006-09-11T17:00:00.000-05:00

I take the bus to university these days, and have noticed that at my local bus stop, three out of four people are always plugged into their ipods. Everybody has their own floating soundtrack coming from a little digital box...

One night last week my roommates and I piled into a car and drove downtown to see the Orchestra. What struck me about that huge gathering of people, layered up in the vast soaring lines of the concert hall, was how personal it was. I felt the sighs and creaks of the people around me, kept time along with the Asian guys murmuring composers' names and bobbing to the music in the next row. We enjoyed the conductor's French-Canadian jokes and the profound elegance of his hands.

And the musicians! A reminder that music is so tangibly tied to human breath and bone and fingertip. Our spirits, our minds, our lungs and elbows and wrists and thumbs -- our imperfect persons and our idisyncratic personalities -- all matter in music. Something's lost when the music's tidily packaged and mass-produced and served up without the people who made it. Which isn't to say I don't appreciate a good CD, but we all know the real stuff is better, even more real, in fact, when it's live.

Half-way through the concert, a particular oboist played a particular solo from a particular piece by Dvorjak. All these things conspired to make me cry. Down on the main floor, a woman in a wheelchair arched back and shouted aloud for the beauty of it.

She was the music, too.

he said... she said...

2006-09-01T12:57:00.000-05:00

"Yes!"

(we're engaged :)

where there's smoke...

2006-08-10T06:37:00.000-05:00

The other day my little brother and I noticed a wisp of smoke spiralling from a poplar tree. But as we passed by, we saw it was really a swirl of bees.

I thought of the people milling around in white, gathering honey from the edge of a familiar field of weeds I didn't know hived bees.

I thought, too, of the kids we know here at the shelter, the unexpected places of sweetness and fury.

Lord grant us your grace and your truth. Honey and flame.

Ever Present Need - Steve Bell
Lyrics adapted from Daniel Ladinski’s translation of ‘Our Need for Thee’ in Love Poems from God.
Original poem by St. Francis of Assisi.

Darkness is an unlit wick
A simple spark would vanquish it
Truly I could burst to flame
Every time you call my name
Do I do for you the same

God is like a honey bee
Penetrates the soul of me
Dearly draws the sweetness in
Nectar of the meek love is
He in me and I in him

In our ever present need of thee
Grant we fathom peace
Fashion instruments of souls set free
For don’t the caged ones weep...

© 2003 Signpost Music.

flatlander learns to lean

2006-08-02T03:18:00.000-05:00

The marvelous thing about a walking stick is this: it leans you into the strength of a mountain, and the resilience of a tree, and the surprising energy of your own small self putting one foot in front of the other, all the way up and back down again...

Thanks to my brother, Rob, and Turtle Mountain, for the lesson in leaning.

2006-07-28T02:39:00.000-05:00

can't sleep.

My body obviously resents me working nights and is choosing revenge precisely now, when the house is empty and I have eight whole hours of potential rest, alone with my exhausted self.

but no.

Sleep is a naughty child with tangled hair who will run through the social crowd of my weekend with her screaming absence, popping all our conversation bubbles and smearing discontented pink gum on ruined hopes of fun.

oh dear.

The funny thing is, I may miss these quiet moments with myself in the very near future. It's just right now, these moments seem malicious, determined to rob me of my glorious time off with Josh --

I imagine every moment awake now ticking off an equally long and precious moment with him on the sun-drenched road to Calgary...

(yes, I am delusional, in both my hopes and my fears.)

sigh. poor, confused body.
poor, frantic mind.
poor, determined heart.

mother-of-pearl

2006-07-28T02:22:00.000-05:00

The sunset tonight was as subtle as a shell.

I wish our atmosphere could make pearls from pollutants, like oysters do.

if i had my way...

2006-07-21T15:01:00.000-05:00

I'd be a walking 5' balloon, because I'd eat tangy lemon bars every day (sigh... and other sweet churchy recipes).

I wouldn't recognize love. I'd be stuck on a hamster-wheel of emotional thrills and spills.

I'd miss a lot of spectacular weather, in the interest of comfort and warmth.

's wounds

2006-07-19T04:53:00.000-05:00

"If God had a face, what would it look like? And would you want to see, if seeing meant that you would have to believe...?" (Joan Osborne)

Let's call him Rothchild. Rothchild is an old man who only sometimes seems infantile. He wears a knitted rainbow toque all seasons of the year and plucks at his prophetic white beard. Maybe you've seen him sailing the streets of Edmonton with his ship of three shopping carts lashed together, piled high with recyclables. A beautiful way to make a living. Yesterday he was navigating his fleet down the steep curve of 101 St, tenacious and systematic, nosing each cart into the bush off the sidewalk, inching them, equal distances apart, closer to the river. One night he came to the shelter and signed for me to fill an empty milk bottle with water. HOT, he scratched on the pavement with his ancient fingernails, cradling the milk jug like a baby. And curled up with it outside the door until the sun rose.

But if you try to give Rothchild a hug, he'll grope you.

Aiden is much younger, perhaps much less hardened. Unlike Rothchild, he still speaks to the world in general. Speaks with a fuzzy lisp because his teeth are so crooked, sometimes flashes a crooked grin. He's so tall he looks like a Roald Dahl character. Lately he's been wearing shorts, for summer days, and long socks, for air-conditioned shelter nights. He pulls them up to his knees to sleep, and always leaves smudges of mud and dried blood on his pillowcases. Aiden's younger sister won the lottery so he buys tickets every day, and communicates his discontent. F---. Why are you people never prepared? -- when we're out of milk and cereal. Yeah, whatever, leave me alone. -- when we're counting him down to morning wake-up. Nice girls' clothes... -- when we're looking through donations for a jacket that'll fit. Last night I did my own share of grumbling and clung to patience, playing solitaire at the same table as him until he conversed in the only way that seems possible these days: Hey, do you guys have a pair of shorts? These ones have a hole.

Oh, Aiden. So much of you is tattered.

Kevin is proud of his scars, boasts of being "white trash." Scares us all, sometimes, with his conspiracy theories -- alien abductions, terrorists everywhere -- and his imaginations of manliness, basically slaughter and rape. I wonder what rampaging music he's plugged into as he rolls his cigarrettes, wonder what wounding was done to him as a young child, to barricade him into these schizoid episodes. Jean Vanier would say Kevin is more true to the logic of his being than I am. Someone stabbed Kevin's sense of value early on, and he's been bleeding self-hatred ever since. I've been shown more love by family and friends than I know what to do with, but instead of freely giving what I've been freely given, I often let that love slide. Nevertheless, there's a clear shine in Kevin's eyes when he talks about his job at Chili's, and I think he just may be the most faithful dishwasher there.

So love can trump logic, even in Kevin.

These are the shuttered, the torn, the crazy faces of God's boys, and I have to believe his healing gleam, even in their wounds. I have to respond to the jagged bits of love that spill out.

For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. (St. John)

the work of your hands

2006-07-16T04:00:00.000-05:00

I didn't speed on the way to work tonight. Instead I listened to loud music and watched the clouds slouching, Simpons-esque, in the sky (though I'm sure there are even better things up there than yellow cartoon letters).

Here at the shelter we got to see a perfectly executed kickflip. Got to hear some really good advice, from a guy who was silent for about four months, and then suddenly sprung loose with all sorts of wandering wisdom: "In the winter, you know you need sunshine. So you just gotta take the summer in while it's here, because winter will come again...". Another guy talked about playing Ponyboy in his school's production of The Outsiders (best jr. high book ever).

It's been a good week, bittersweet. I miss my sisters -- the newly wed Mrs. Rachel Tomalty!!! (honeymooning it up in Cuba), and the not-so-newly wed Mrs. Katie Wong (teaching again in Thailand).

So I've mellowed out a lot in the past few days. Moped, slept, barely "help!"-ed my way into prayer (as if it's "my way"). Baked bread and ate it, honey-spread, by the river with Josh one night. Visited Ratch in Tofield and went for a bike ride on a flat highway, then a flat gravel road (the extremes of rural Alberta!). Intended to fold laundry, clean the bathroom. Sat chatting and eating Gouda cheese with visiting relatives instead. Picked lettuce from the garden and got bit by stinging nettle.

In the field behind our house I saw an albino thistle. Those recessive blades of grass that look like they've been dipped half-way in red paint. A dandelion gone to seed, the size of a mini-basketball. Robins grown hefty like the high school football team, prepping for fall. A fuzzy Remy-orange caterpillar, primed only to win the gorge-yourself-on-a-leaf race. A beetle with a green shell, as tough as the top-coat nail polish Katie forgot in the bathroom drawer, but shimmery like velvet. Dragonflies with cool maneuvers that would beat a fleet of helicopters hands-down, any day.

It may be a blithe assumption, but in these, the details of my days, I can't help translating care. There's something intricate and generous and a little bit stunning in the people and places I love.

O Lord,
our Lord,
how majestic is Your Name
in all the earth...

When we consider the work of your hands...
who are we, that You are mindful of us?

How to Cook a Green Banana

2006-07-01T07:11:00.000-05:00

1. Grab the aforementioned fruit on the way out the door in the morning.

2. Toss the banana on the passenger seat of your car and forget about it.

3. Park in a sunny location and leave for approximately 8 hours.

4. Return to car, and now fragrant banana.

5. Shuffle around on the seat, encounter warm brown fruit.

6. Mmmm... Enjoy!

blink

2006-06-24T00:33:00.000-05:00

A seep of exhausted tears on the way home from work today...

Am I enough? I often wonder. Have I done enough?
These are lying questions, I know, knowing God, but there you are (there I am).

I am reading Ezekial lately. I find comfort in his vision of the cherubim in the presence of the Lord. Covered on all sides in eyes -- to apprehend all of God's glory? all of human suffering?

This is a mystery to me. I am stunned by both.

Another mystery to me, and another comfort: all of God's glory weeping out in all of human suffering...

Christ crucified.
Enough.

Where’s the scrawl?

2006-06-15T04:25:00.000-05:00

you ask. How do you cover it all? I reply. --Sarah Harmer

So many moments.

Just hard to hold to, scrubbed down by nightshifts, mind polished smooth as the ballroom floor in this renovated office building. Conscience restless as the people out there on the floor, tossing and turning in the air-conditioned hum of nearly 4 a.m.

One of our beautiful boys came in tonight with nothing on him but a pieced-together crack pipe. Nothing else to his name these days.

Another boy got a job and brought everybody two flats of doughnuts, which we crowed over and feasted on.

"Good-night, shelter parents," says another as he heads to his mat.

And the girls, the girls are women who follow these boys...

One craving apples in her first trimester.
Another with a tiny daughter in ICU, born just this week.
Yet another, eight months pregnant, whose shirt reads Future Development -- an arrow pointing to her tummy!

rue and gladness

2006-06-14T03:01:00.000-05:00

western meadow rue and wild ripe strawberries,
both in the fields and ditches close to home.

meanwhile, back at the ranch...

2006-06-01T10:53:00.000-05:00

A month here already? The aerial view, brown velvet and biege cuordory fields, has shifted to green ground I like hiking with Josh, and I am breathing poplar fuzz.

Driving to work I see whole fields of dandelion fluff lit up by big Alberta skies.

At work I do the rounds, count off kids sleeping on blue vinyl mats, bare feet scarred by Edmonton concrete and cocaine. Crystal meth, too, bites open wounds in people's faces and feet.

One guy came in late last night, said he'd got lost in the gospel of Mark and read chapter after chapter, circling the inner city bus route a few times as he willed the words of Jesus to fill him on the inside. He's sick of filling himself with liquor.

His memory's a garden, everything rooting.

"You know, if good seed finds good soil," he said, "the fruit will be thirty, sixty, even a hundred times as much!"

housekeeping 2

2006-05-29T06:25:00.000-05:00

A picture I can't leave on the shelf...

housekeeping

2006-05-16T04:21:00.000-05:00

Every time I move home again, I realize how ridiculously full my closet is.

Oh... no, I didn't intentionally mean I realize how ridiculously much I have, though I do have way more than I need.

I was simply noticing that my closet is crammed with stuff, and I seriously need to clean it out and/or quit bringing home new stacks of photos to put on the already-sagging shelf.

One day it will collapse! A beautiful mess of sarongs and old journals...

That closet has collected bits and pieces of my life for sixteen years now, and it's still the pale yellow I asked to paint my room back then. Sometime in junior high I inscribed some favourite quotes in there. You know, for whoever might go looking around the corner in a suburban closet for inspiration. Or for my biographer, once I turned famous.

I thought about painting over the adolescent-purple ink, an embarrassment now,

but I'm still figuring out what to keep and what to chuck.

oh my word!

2006-04-25T04:13:00.000-05:00

do I ever need an editor... :)

what follows is my "bye for now" to Thailand. bear with me as i process this...

peace out,
s