the cassandra pages

Mourning, remembering, and hoping

Today is a day of reflection for me. I am mourning every single life that has been lost or shattered because of the senseless, cruel violence of the past year, and I am reflecting on our part in it. I am thinking about the great frustration and helplessness that so many of us feel who have protested government policies, not just now, but going back thirty years and more. These policies have contributed to a war that now seems to be spiraling out of control, harming any chance for a lasting peace, making the entire world less safe, and harming the reputations and integrity of all the countries that are involved. What a complete tragedy. Although I have strong opinions, as well as fear for our own family members in Beirut, today is a day to reflect on man's inhumanity to man, not to point fingers. Why are we the way we are? How do these same tendencies affect life here in Quebec - because they do? What can I, as an individual, do better? How can I amplify my power as an individual to encourage the institutions to which I belong to stand up and speak out for justice and peace, when so many are being silenced? And finally, in such a world, with so much suffering, fear and darkness, how can I be a person who gives hope?

So here are some flowers to lay on this makeshift, virtual altar. They were a gift from close friends on our birthdays, have brightened our home and our days, and last night I finally painted them before their petals start falling. The beauty of the earth stubbornly persists, and if we look, we find it everywhere. Thank God for that. And I'm thankful for every way in which I'm able to experience such things and mirror them back to the world.

A year ago, I was in Edessa, Greece, a small city in a mountainous northern border region that has been torn apart by ethnic warfare for centuries. After reading the news, I went into a large Orthodox church to light a candle, and sit quietly for a while with the icons and the smell of melting wax and incense. Later I walked in the church garden, and looked out over the valley at its orchards, vineyards, and fields. I no longer pray to God to end human wars and suffering; I haven't believed in such an omnipotent deity for a long time. I pray for us to come to our senses. I pray for strength, and to see what I need to do.

View southwest from the old city of Edessa, Greece.


Today, as I look out my studio window here in Montreal, the trees are beginning to turn to their fall colors, and the dark clouds to which we woke are giving way to sunshine and blue sky. A light wind ruffles the leaves of the plants on our balcony. I can hear faint sounds of construction in the distance, because here, homes are being built, not destroyed. For today, for right now, this moment, I am secure and aware of how fortunate I am. I can use this moment to become even more aware, to tune into all of my senses and consciously take in their input. I need to do this several times every day: otherwise I might miss the gifts that are still part of the reality and mystery of being alive. 

 

Centering and Simplifying

When I posted this watercolor sketch on Instagram, one of the comments (thank you, Michael) was that it seemed to capture "the essence of carnation". I thought about that quite a lot, wondering what happens when this occurs. What helps the artist get close to the "essence" of a subject, and is it something that can be "explained," let alone taught?

Sitting down one evening to do this particular piece, several things were going on in my mind. I was drawn by a vase of evergreens and carnations remaining from the holidays, while also wanting some respite from a long day and the constellation of anxieties, sorrows, frustrations and anger with which many of us are living. So I wanted to do something absorbing and, hopefully, to capture some of the beauty and peacefulness in front of me. I decided not to work in my studio, but right there on the living room table, so I brought out my watercolor palette, a large jar of water, sketchbook and brush, and adjusted the position of the flowers for the light angle I wanted.

Then there were a few minutes of considering potential problems. I wanted to do a direct watercolor -- with no pencil under-drawing, or pen-and-ink line -- because I felt that a spontaneous watercolor would better capture the delicacy and emotional feeling of the bouquet. Another issue was how to handle the white flowers against a white background, because their edges would be very hard to see. I decided I'd paint the shadows on the petals, and then add some pencil lines afterward, if needed.

The final questions were the placement on the page, and where to start. I began by mentally calculating the proportion of vase height to flower height and width, and estimating where these would need to be placed on the page. I then started painting with a brush line indicating the top edge of the vase (the whole vase appears in the full painting, as you'll see in the video below) and built the picture from there, placing the flowers before doing any of the foliage. I painted far fewer flowers than were actually in the vase; I just chose representative ones at interesting angles. As soon as I began painting, I became very quickly absorbed in it.

The painting itself took about 30-40 minutes. When I'm working on something like this I'm in a state that's somewhere between meditation and extreme but wordless concentration. I'm not talking to myself in my head, and I'm moving pretty fast because I want the strokes to be quick and alive. I don't fuss over things, but try to create an overall impression as rapidly as possible. The color choices and color mixtures are intuitive and come from experience; this just comes with learned technique and practice. As Zen teaches, you have to master your tools and technique first, and practice over and over so that you can let them go, not think about them, but rely on them when you are in a flow of action. During that time, your attention can be concentrated not so much on what you are doing but on becoming one with the subject -- seeing it with fresh, clear eyes and penetrating to what is essential, while leaving aside whatever is not.

Obviously, that is a goal, but not something I usually achieve! Nevertheless, without understanding it as an ideal, and without having put in years of thought, meditation, and technical practice, I don't think I'd ever be able to come close. Oddly enough, children sometimes approach the essence of things better than adults. They have so much less of a filter; they haven't been told what matters by other people or society, and they haven't learned to care what others think of their efforts -- that judging voice we become accustomed to as adults is not in their heads yet, but --sadly -- it will be soon. As adults, we have to un-learn a great deal in order to open up again.

The result of this process is a picture, yes, but it can also be a period of time that is enormously refreshing. We center ourselves, we concentrate, we forget our ego as we work, absorbed in color and form and the wordless communication between eye, hand, and spirit. It's a journey, and a space in time. There is no way to describe this in detail; as with many things, it's easier to say what it's not.

The detailed drawing above was done on the following day. Here I was trying to see the difference between a careful rendering of the flowers and what I had done in the painting. It's the opposite of the extreme simplification of the watercolor. The drawing was a helpful study in understanding "Chrysanthemum:" its frilliness, the skirt-like stiffness of the petals, the whorls of tightly wound petals that form the centers, the way the darker pigment is concentrated in lines on the edges. Although the drawing is still quite loose and spontaneous, it didn't create the sense of time-standing-still and complete absorption of the watercolor painting, because I was thinking about all of those things and how to explain them in words.

--

Some of you have been asking for some watercolor videos, so I made this short one, which shows me painting one flower from the previous composition, and talking about simplifying what I was seeing while painting. When I watch it, I notice technical things that I don't think about at all, like where I am holding the brush, how much pressure I'm applying. It's helpful for me to watch too.

(Click at lower right to view full screen.)

 

And here's that little sketch from the video so that you can see it better.

I wish everyone some moments of rest and renewal in the coming days. You don't have to be an artist to experience the kind of time-out-of-time that I'm talking about here. Look around you - something is calling for your attention. You don't need to paint it or write about it, just look... and then look deeper for ten or fifteen minutes, being conscious of your breathing, and see if you don't feel that something has shifted for the better.

 

On Not Being a Mother

Every year, Mother's Day comes around, and those of us who are not mothers feel a range of emotions. Likewise, it can be a lonely day for those of us who have lost our mothers. I always think of my own mother, who died on May 23, 2006, and who I miss every day of my life. So there is sadness, gratitude, appreciation, some regret about things I never said or did, but mostly a sense of love -- and awareness that her love for me showed me how to love others. There are many people for whom this day brings just the opposite -- a wish that they had had a sympathetic, loving mother, or perhaps a wish that they had not known their mother at all, or that she had lived longer... I also have friends who have lost their children. What can this day be like for them? There are so many individual stories that deviate from the idealized picture painted by this observance we call "Mothers' Day," and for those people, all the glowing tributes can be extremely painful.

So, I'd like to speak about not being a mother. My mother would have liked me to have children, but I did not. She never said that this was a huge disappointment for her, but I know it was, and it makes me feel a certain amount of regret when I think of her. But it wasn't to be, and it wouldn't have been the best path for me. Looking back now, it's clear to me that not being a mother allowed me to be fully myself, earlier in my life, than many who spent several decades raising children. I was able to develop my talents and abilities from my twenties on, without feeling divided or conflicted, and to understand myself as an individual in ways that have often been reserved for men. I was also able to have a different relationship with my husband than many couples who are parents. Did we miss some of the most fulfilling and joyful aspects of a human life? Of course, but we also had a relationship that was extremely close in other ways. As a woman, did I miss one of the defining experiences of being female? For sure. But because there is a still such a societal taboo against speaking negatively about motherhood, or parenthood, few people talk openly about the positive aspects of being childless, and, in fact, being childless continues to carry a stigma in many societies.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn't see the point of bringing up girls to have dreams about what they wanted to do in life, and then making them settle for less in order to be mothers who would then bring up a new generation of girls with similar conflicts, facing similar obstacles. Very few of my friends were able to successfully or happily "have it all" at the same time -- marriage, motherhood, and a career on the same level as what men had. That was an illusion we had been fed, and it turned out to create many problems, not just for the women who thought they could do all three equally well, but for their relationships and for their children. If men and women are both going to work, then access to birth control is vitally important, and so is access to affordable daycare, laws to protect women against sexual harassments, and equal pay, equal rights, and equal opportunities for advancement in the workplace. This has not changed nearly enough in the intervening decades, and in some cases we are going backwards, to the detriment of women.

 

And on whom does the burden fall? In the printing industry, back when I was a graphic designer, there was a saying, often represented by a triangular graphic: "Price, Speed, Quality: pick any two." I've always felt this could be applied to women's lives with the triangle of "Career, Relationship, Motherhood."  The further you move toward any side of the triangle representing two points -- "Relationship and Career", for instance -- the harder it is to equally sustain "Motherhood". Prioritize "Relationship" and Motherhood", and it's harder to sustain "Career." Choose "Career" and "Motherhood", and you may jeopardize "Relationship." Mind you, I am mainly talking here about women who have a significant desire for their own, serious career, on the same level as men, and who don't hire other people to raise their children. And, to be fair, certainly in some areas of society today, men are doing much more childcare and home making than they did when I was a young woman.

Parenting is one of the most difficult and challenging tasks that anyone can take on, and it is getting harder, not easier, as our world becomes more complicated, more violent, and more uncertain. I am filled with admiration for those who try so hard to do it well, and for those who make enormous sacrifices on behalf of their children. For my husband and me, the question of whether it was responsible to bring children into the world was also a serious one. Loving him as I did, it was difficult for me not to have children with him: I wanted to give life to those people, to know them, to love them. So I am not here to judge anyone's choices, and I'm glad that there are still couples  -- and single people -- who choose to have children, and go into it with hope and courage. Let's also remember that there are many who did not make a deliberate choice to have children, but do have them, and are trying hard to be good parents, often with great difficulties.

But I also want to say to younger women: not having children is a valid choice, and you can have a fulfilling, happy, extremely rewarding life without being a mother. So don't let anyone talk you into doing it, or guilt you into it, if you don't want to, and try not to be sad and regretful if it is something you wanted that just didn't work out. Instead, try to see it as an opportunity, and do something positive with the freedom that you have.

I had, and still have, a lot of maternal instincts and desires. And I've found many ways for those to come out -- in relationships, in organizations, in mentoring, in giving. You don't have to be a parent in order to fulfill your natural desires, and in fact, sometimes you can do more, for more people, if you have greater freedom. 

In this era of recognizing gender and sexual diversity, I think we also need to recognize that there is not one, but a multitude of ways in which the fundamental relationship of  "Mother" and "Child" exists, and that while the idealized one may still be in the majority, it is not at all true or descriptive for a great many people -- so, please, be gentle and aware as we celebrate Mother's Day.

Departures and Arrivals

Paper birch catkins. A watercolor from 2017.

Today is Good Friday for most of the Orthodox Church, and I wish my Orthodox friends a blessed Triduum and a very Happy Easter.

And it's a day when we can feel spring arriving. Last week at this time, Montreal was in the throes of a destructive ice storm that left much of the city without power, and devastated the city's trees. Yesterday it was 22 degrees C. here, and it felt like everyone was sitting out in the sun, blinking with amazement. I had coffee with my friend K. at a favorite café (Café Parma, on the north-western edge of the Jean-Talon market), and we could hardly believe we were sitting outdoors, wearing only light sweaters -- and sunglasses, because the light was so bright. We may have more snow, we all know that's entirely possible, but we also know it won't last.

Yesterday was Seamus Heaney's birthday; he would have been 84. I miss him. Here's a small section close to the end of his poem "Station Island," where he talks about meeting a blind stranger who gives him advice in a voice "as definite as a steel nib's downstroke"-- earlier this person has grasped his hand as he disembarks, but the poet cannot be certain "whether to guide or to be guided." In the poem the stranger, or blind seer, also mentions fasting and penitence -- appropriate for Good Fridays present and just past. 

(Read aloud for you, if you like, below.)

Heaney_station island

From "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's,

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib's downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, "your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite,
What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don't be so earnest,

So ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget,
you've listened long enough. Now strike your note.

 

 

Inspiration and Perspiration

I can feel that I'm starting to be ready to wrap up this series of winter drawings, at least for this year. There are two or three others I'd like to do if I can. But this one beckoned persistently, and because I knew it would be a real challenge, I decided I'd better go for it while I still felt inspired.

On the day I saw this scene, we had been fortunate enough to drive through the Adirondacks just after a heavy snowstorm that had thickly coated every single branch of every tree -- the atmospheric conditions must have been very particular. Since the snowfall, there had been no wind, and we were nearly alone on the roads, so it felt like a sort of suspended animation. We left the main road at some point and drove up through deep woods on a narrow dirt road to its top, and then back down into a hollow where there was a stream. The road was icy, and we figured we'd better turn around while we could. Jonathan got out to take a picture of the water, but on the other side of the road, long ago, someone had made a semi-circular clearing, now ringed by this group of trees, completely covered with thick fresh snow: mostly spruces and larches with lacy branches, standing heroically like characters in a play, or guardians of the woods behind them, flanked by a chorus of bare deciduous trees raising their white arms and fingers. No wind blew, no birds sang or hopped from branch to branch to cause cascades of snow -- just the utter stillness of deep midwinter woods on an extraordinary day.

At the time I hadn't planned to do any drawings, but as this series progressed, I kept coming back to that semi-circle of trees, and felt I needed to try.

The complex nature of this forest scene required a preliminary sketch (above). The overall approach was too simplistic and too contrast-y, but I was just trying out different approaches. I wasn't too happy with the spruce tree, but liked the larch on the right, and felt that the handling of the trees in the background would probably work. So then it was a question of beginning again for real, and summoning the patience for what I knew would be a long, challenging effort.

In most of the drawings in the series, I've been able to work back and forth across the whole scene, or from top to bottom in a logical way. But here, I couldn't do that, because there was so much going on that I kept losing track of where I was. So I developed the picture in vertical slices, worrying all the time that I wouldn't be able to integrate the entire drawing across the picture plane. It was complicated, eye-fatiguing, and seemed like it took forever -- I worked on it off and on for three days.

Then, once I was almost done, I had to work quite a bit on the picture as a whole to make the different areas relate to each other, and bring the overall greyscale into harmony. There are some things I'd do differently if I were to do it over (that's not going to happen!) but in general I'm pretty happy with the final result.

--

This process made me think a lot about what happens when inspiration is hard to hold onto -- how do we keep going toward our original goal when things get tough? It's so easy, and tempting, to give up at that point. Part of being a professional artist, designer, writer -- or pretty much any other artform -- is learning how to stick with a project, no matter how difficult it is or how many obstacles come up, and bring about a satisfactory conclusion. If the client has hired you, then that is your part of the contract. Likewise, if the public has bought a ticket to the concert, there is an expectation of excellence.

But for the professional, this also creates a difficulty. When is the result "good enough," and when is it extraordinary? Because most of us know, deep down, that there is a difference. In music, as in all the arts -- and in sports, for that matter -- peak performances do not happen every day. The public may not know, because technical virtuosity may be there, just as facility in drawing or painting may be there, and the public tends to recognize and reward virtuosity. But technical brilliance alone doesn't create an inspired performance or a truly special work of art; it is not the same as artistry that somehow, intangibly, conveys what is going on in the heart and mind of the artist and conveys that to the audience in a truly moving and memorable way. For that matter, the artist often doesn't know why a particular performance felt different, or why a particular painting or drawing or poem happened as it did: you can't "will" it to happen. The hours and hours of practice and preparation that add up to technical facility are the means to the end, but they are not the end in themselves.

There are an awful lot of professionals who do coast along on a combination of technique, repetition of what has been praised or popular, and doing work that is "good enough." Pushing yourself to do better, to continually grow, requires taking risks -- and that means some of the time you're going to fall short or fail. It also means once in a while, maybe not often at all, you're going to do something that confirms why you began this journey in the first place.

I'm not saying that this drawing is extraordinary in any way, just that it was more challenging than the others I've done so far, and required digging deeper into myself to keep going and pull out a result that felt satisfying -- it asked more of me. Looking back on the last two months of work, I can see that I've learned a lot.

I always pay attention when I feel my inspiration running thin. Perspiration - pushing through to a good result - can only take you so far. The poet Osip Mandelstam once made the enigmatic comment that he always knew when he was getting close to the end of a cycle of poems when he started writing about the stars. He had discovered a clue in his own work. I don't have that; I just have a feeling that I'm not quite there on the razor's edge, the way it was when inspiration first hit and the first works were coming. But concentration and persistence can bring you back to a place where inspiration once again takes over: that's the intangible lesson of this drawing, and maybe of those moments standing in the circle of snow-covered trees.

Déménagement

J. and M. on our terrace in Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal, in 2012.

We're moving. That little statement could mean all sorts of things. But the French word déménagement is so specific, and in this case it means we're moving house. To faire le menage is to do the housework; the word ménagement, without the "dé", means "care and attention". My dictionary tells me that to speak sans ménagement is "bluntly", to be asked to leave sans ménagement mean "forcibly evicted." I like the way the word déménagement reflects the accumulation of care and attention put into one's home over the years, that one doesn't simply pack objects and oneself and move, shift locations, but that when we leave our home, hopefully for another, we also wrap up our memories and our time spent in a place that was not simply an address, but a home.

Tonight is the last we'll spend in the condominium where we've lived ever since coming to Montreal. It is one apartment of ten in our building, which, as co-propriétaires, we all own and care for together. I've been one of the people responsible for the gardens, while J. has had a much larger role as treasurer and a member of the CA, or conseil d'administration, the executive committee that's in charge of maintenance, repairs, hiring and managing helpers, and assuring the smooth running of the building. It's been a great place to live for the past 18 years (how can it possibly be that long?) and we're sorry to be leaving this neighborhood, the park, and especially our neighbors who've become good friends. However, the pandemic showed us that this small apartment simply doesn't work for us as a place to live and work as well. When we were going to our studio every day, it was fine, but during COVID, and since cutting back on our professional work, we haven't been using the studio very much, while, at the same time, the rent there has been going up astronomically under new owners. We looked and looked in this part of the city but couldn't find any good or affordable solution for a larger, brighter, recently-built space that would serve as both living and work space, and also be an appropriate place for us as we grow older, with room for help if we ever need it, proximity to our medical providers, easy access to the international food shopping we enjoy, and some additional amenities. Neither of us wants to be responsible for an aging building at the same time as we, ourselves, age.

Tonight.

To our surprise, we found a recently-developed area close to some of the food shopping -- Middle Eastern, Asian, Greek -- that takes us across the city every couple of weeks. At first we couldn't imagine living there -- so little green space, none of the genteel French atmosphere of the area where we live now, but rather a mix of large, professionally-managed residential high-rises and industrial areas and gradually-developing retail infrastructure -- but when we actually visited the buildings and saw some apartments, which offered so much more for the price than in the more traditional neighborhoods of the city, we began to consider it. In the end, we bought a condominium on the 11th floor of a 12-storey building built in 2018. We've both always had it in the backs of our minds that we might like to live in a modern, light-filled urban space, high up -- I think this realization came after some of the apartments we stayed in in Mexico City and Athens. I'm still kind of shocked that we're actually doing it, but the papers have been signed, we have the keys, the boxes are packed and the bed-frame taken apart -- and tomorrow at 8 the movers arrive. We will close our studio when the lease runs out in the fall, or perhaps before then, since we've packed up or sold quite a lot of what was there. We've gotten rid of a lot of possessions, including books and clothes, in this second major downsizing of our adult lives, and that feels great. In our new space we'll each have a workroom/studio of our own, and I look forward to this very much, and to whatever comes out of the solitude and new inspiration of the big skies we'll see every day.

At the same time as we've been preparing for the move, I've been deeply concerned about my father, and, as I've written here, we made three lengthy trips to central New York to be with him under the rapidly-changing circumstances of his health; he was first with us, then in assisted-living, then hospitalized with pneumonia, then in a grim rehabilitation/nursing facility from which I've been desperately trying to extricate him. This week our application was accepted, and he has moved into one of the excellent New York State Veterans' Homes, where they are glad to begin to know him and care for him as a veteran of WWII. In spite of our personal changes and exciting new beginnings in Montreal, part of me is there, back at the lake, wanting to spend time with my father during this uncertain final part of his life -- so we will find ways to work that out.

19 Years

Today marks nineteen years of continuous blogging here, and I find myself at a loss for words. Partly because it doesn't even make sense to me that I've done this for that long; partly because Cassandra -- like nearly everyone else -- failed to predict the tragedy unfolding in the Ukraine with its huge ramifications for the world's political future; and partly because -- also like nearly everyone else -- I am weary, and unable to package things up into any sort of comforting explanation or pretty picture, either for myself, or for public consumption.

But that's all right. There are times in all of our lives when we simply have to let go of and be still, finding consolation and strength in the simplest things: a raindrop hanging on a branch; a cat playing with a ribbon; the clouds traversing the sky; damp earth emerging from the snow.

Ash Wednesday, in this Time of Perpetual Lent

Lent begins today: the Christian season of repentance, reflection, and renunciation. I went to the noontime services at the cathedral, and when the priest came down the aisle with the bowl of ashes, I rose -- but only reluctantly -- to receive them. It probably would have been more honest to stay in my seat.

After two years of a pandemic that has taken so many to an early grave, and convinced most of us of our mortality if we didn't accept it before, I felt resistance to this reminder, symbolized by the ashes and the accompanying words "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return." In a time of aggression and horrific war, I do not need a reminder of the human lust for power and too many rulers' disregard for life. When we are told that we come from the dust of the earth, and will return to it, I already know all too well the intense pressure the earth is under because of human behavior, and what the future is likely to hold because of climate change.

Furthermore, all of these things are related. Like many of you, I've been reflecting on the failures of institutions and governments, as well as the behaviors of individuals, for two years now. I've felt helpless, and also tried to see where I could be of help, extending myself to others, and feeling immensely grateful for the people who have extended themselves to me. Many of us have tried to do this, and a lot of those efforts have been successful: building and nurturing supportive relationships and groups who have met and sustained each other in creative new ways.

What we do not need right now is guilt, and unfortunately Lent tends to go either in that direction, or toward the superficial, as if giving up chocolate is really going to melt human hardness of heart. Sincere reflection on how we can be more courageous, more loving, more open to each other, and more aware of the interconnection of all living things is always needed and welcome. But as I looked around the sanctuary today, the people I recognized in the pews were people who already do this, and try to live their lives responsibly and lovingly.  These are not people who think vaccines should be withheld from poor countries, or people who don't recycle and drive massive vehicles, or who support white supremacy, or think that despots who want to overthrow legitimate governments are admirable.

And yet these are precisely the problems we are facing, along with many others. What would make me feel some movement this Lent, instead of turning to individuals and saying "This is on you, admit your faults, repent," would be to hear our institutions and governments say, "We have been reflecting on how we have failed in our tasks and our mission to you. We have been self-serving, short-sighted and hypocritical, and we want to repent, to reform, to change, to do better."

You laugh, and you're right to laugh: it will be a cold day in hell before that happens. Our apparent powerlessness in the face of so much that we know is wrong has been one of the most sobering lessons of this time in history. Look at what is happening in Ukraine at this very moment.

And yet. Change seldom comes from above, unless we are fortunate enough to nurture and support truly visionary leaders. Most of the time, we must try to work outward and upward, starting with ourselves, then moving to small groups of like-minded people with passion for justice and change, and then banding together into new institutions, or working to shape and hold accountable those that already exist. Unless we do that, the status quo will prevail, because institutions and governments are not nimble and flexible, but heavy, ponderous, and stuck in their ways, and so they tend to focus on self-preservation rather than change.

If churches clearly stood for justice and "the dignity of every human being", as we proclaim in our baptismal covenant, and were seen to be working openly toward those goals, I think we would actually attract more people. In the case of my own church, we have had active ministries for the homeless, for social justice and the environment, for anti-racism, for the LGBTQ+ community and for young people. We have taken part in the Truth and Reconciliation process with Indigenous Canadians about the abuses they suffered, which, to this former American, was a remarkable example of humility, listening, admission of wrongs committed, and desire to change -- but we're not very good at letting the outside world know about any of this, and our inability to meet in person until recently hasn't helped.

In the public sphere, democracy is threatened everywhere, even here in Canada; all we have to do is look to our southern neighbor to see what could happen. The rest of the world, which once saw America as a bastion of democratic values, sees the hypocrisy, as do those Americans who have been marginalized: the pandemic has shown just how unequal that society is, and how dangerous a hyper-emphasis on personal freedom can be, over the shared good of all. Rather than truth-telling, I'm afraid what we see is perpetual myth-making about American exceptionalism.

But, in the end, change still has to start with me, as with each of us, and it needs to come from positive energy, love for others, and passion for shared goals, rather than guilt. My practice this Lent will be to try to meditate every morning, to discourage feelings of helplessness and despair, and reflect instead on what I am being called to do next -- which may simply be a continuation of what I am doing now; I don't know. I will also bring some of these thoughts to a small group of which I am a part as we reflect together. I think this process of discernment is perhaps the real purpose of Lent, as we seek positive movement in ourselves while the earth moves toward spring.

The Consolation of Snow

My friend Jon Appleton died on Sunday evening at the age of 83.

Yesterday afternoon, a brilliant blue day, we drove to Mont St-Bruno and took a long walk around the Lac Seigneurial; it was the right thing to do. I may write more about this eventually, but for now, I'll let Tomas Tranströmer speak for me. Jon loved Sweden and poetry, and although he also spent a lot of time in warm places, such as California, Hawaii, Tonga, southern France, I always think of him in the north: Vermont, Sweden, Moscow. One of my most vivid memories of him is from a visit to us in Montreal some years ago, when there was an absolutely huge blizzard, one of the heaviest and stormiest I can remember. Being Vermonters at heart, none of us wanted to stay in, so we bundled up and decided to go out and see if we could find a restaurant that was still open. I can still see Jon, wearing his Russian fur hat, cavorting in the snow-filled street and laughing with delight: "This is aMAZing!"

He was a person who lived life as fully as possible, and who for many of his students and friends was -- as this poem says - "a half-open door leading to a room for everyone." Like Tranströmer, Jon suffered a stroke toward the end of his life. It affected his speech, which he gradually recovered, but he wasn't able to continue composing music. During our last visit to him, he showed us the art studio in his retirement complex, where he said he was enjoying doing some painting. And even in the last two weeks he was writing with great pleasure about a new recording being done by Yoshiko Kline of some of his piano works, and working with an editor on the final draft of his autobiography. The creative spark never went out, and the best way I can remember and honor him, and what he gave me, is to try to do the same.

Two poems by Tomas Tranströmer

The Half-Finished Heaven

Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

 

Snow is Falling

The funerals keep coming
more and more of them
like the traffic signs
as we approach a city.

Thousands of people gazing
in the land of long shadows.

A bridge builds itself
slowly
straight out in space.

Incremental

The mantel corner this year

One of the boring (and probably annoying) things about me is that I've always had a lot of self-discipline. The trait got dinned into me early; it's a characteristic of my father, who was always trying to perfect a new table tennis shot, or build something in his self-built house that was absolutely level and true. But my mother, too, made it clear that half an hour of daily piano practice wasn't optional, nor was my homework, nor was picking up my room -- and she'd sit next to the piano with her knitting, talk over the schoolwork, or even sometimes lend a hand in my messy room, to encourage me. There was an expectation that once I'd committed to something, I would finish it, and give it my best effort. Quitting wasn't an option, so I had to learn perseverance and discipline.

In my public high school, nobody taught me how to study the way kids in prep schools learned it. I can remember feeling completely overwhelmed by the workload in university, especially at the ends of terms in my first two years (not for nothing do we still have those exam dreams!) and listening on the phone to my mother's patient advice: divide up the tasks into a schedule, concentrate on one at a time, and just bring them all along, bit by bit. Somehow the research got done, the books read, the papers got written, and the studying accomplished, and even if they didn't all result in excellent grades, I could see that I was making progress, and by my junior year, things fell into place.

The same was true in our design/communications business, where we were often responsible for large projects with significant budgets, lots of moving parts, and tight deadlines. Each had to be broken down into manageable sections and tasks, assigned and overseen, and put on a carefully-organized schedule so that the deadlines could be met. The responsibility for organizing these projects often fell to me.

Now, with those professional years behind me, it's still the way I tend to organize my time, but I also get distracted because although I finally have more time to do my own creative work, there are also more people around me with needs and desires which are important to me. So I find it's even more crucial, if I want to get anything done besides the daily tasks of ordinary life, to be intentional about certain areas: reading, music, language-learning, writing, making things, exercise. I don't make task lists, I don't have a daily schedule, and I don't make resolutions. I just have certain things I try to do every day (exercise, language practice, some reading, ongoing correspondence and/or journaling); some I do more or less weekly (write a blog post, for instance) and others that I just try to move forward incrementally, not necessarily all at the same time (drawing, knitting or sewing, piano/music, larger writing and publishing projects). Hopefully, there is also some unstructured time to dream, relax, think and meditate, and to be social.

The same, last year.

I've been thinking about all of this because of two things.

One: a friend asked me what I'm addicted to, and after thinking a bit, I answered "accomplishment." By that I didn't mean the sort of accomplishment that results in praise, but a sense of having done something with my time, having learned, having grown a little, and having contributed to others. If I don't feel that way, I can get discouraged, angry, even depressed.

Two: the pandemic has insisted that I see myself as the age that I actually am, and that age is no longer young. Mortality has been in my face, and in the face of everyone over 60, whether we like it or not. Regardless of how young and energetic I feel or appear, I've been forced to face the fact that life is finite, and my own time is running shorter.

So how does this penchant for accomplishment fit into that? What if a time comes when I can't work hard, maybe can't see or hear very well, maybe am diminished by illness or simply by old age, or, conversely, am in the role of care-giver -- and the ways I've organized my life and, yes, my mental well-being, don't work anymore? Will I be able to adapt?

Well, it's more likely if you think about it ahead of time. One example from the pandemic has been instructive: it used to be extremely hard for me to imagine not singing in a choir, as this is something I've done every Thursday night and every Sunday for most of my life. But I haven't been able to do it for almost two years, except for our "virtual choir" pieces during year one, and it now seems possible to me that I will never go back to it, certainly not at the intensity with which it once occupied a portion of my life. I had a hard time getting there, but now this prospect is surprisingly OK with me.

While there are dramatic events that sometimes change our lives practically overnight, most change is like this: incremental. It's another timeline broken down into small parts. There's a series of small relinquishments or substitutions; tasks that once might not have seemed important now are much more so, and vice versa; priorities shift. But for now, my intention is to keep at those central, core tasks that form my identity and have shaped my days for as long as it makes sense to do so, while keeping an openness and readiness in the back of my mind for whatever the future holds.

If you have also had thoughts on any of this, I would love to hear them.