I was sipping a coffee in HUB Mall this morning, the end away from where the shooting happened a week and a half ago, and got waylaid by a "Man in the Mall" interviewer for CPAC. He wanted to know, among other things, what I thought of the current federal government. I mentioned my sense that the current PC government had replaced the older Liberal government mostly by taking on all the negative behaviours the Opposition PCs used to accuse the governing Liberals of: arrogance and bullying. Remember the PC ads a few elections ago, and all the talk of "Liberal arrogance"? Turns out the PCs were mostly concerned with the problematic adjective, not the noun.

What I had been wanting to revel in was the fact that my online bank statement yesterday finally read 00.00 in the line with mortgages and personal loans: the house and car are both paid for. This will be the first time in my adult life I am not paying rent or mortgage to anyone. That didn't take long--merely nearly all of what would have been my "normal working life" a generation ago. I would, in that older dispensation, have a whole year before mandatory retirement in which to put that money away for my old age, before being pensioned off. I'm just enjoying the sensation of not going through the monthly routine of transferring the payment from one line on the statement to another. And the thought that I start a new five-year teaching contract on Sunday.

And my "fence" poem has undergone some transformation--becoming a part of a longer poem on what to do when metaphors present themselves for one's edification and exploration. Yesterday's draft of that portion looks like this:

When a metaphor stretches the idea of a line across

creases in the land, undulates its way straight,determined

through folds, dips, hollows, furrows, gullies, valleys,

across rills and rivers going nowhere

creating borders of everywhere always in

between along the way, the connecting separation

made concrete, inked in by wood and wire and glass-topped

bricks and stones linking points planted along the way,

inviting prolonged unification, purpose as well as place,

trajectory into the out there,

try not to straddle;

centre yourself on your own

ambivalence,

find,

locate yourself

on both sides as the guiding line

disappears in both 

directions

What has been catching my eye is some quotations about the role of ritual and ceremony in life and human relationships:

• We should not, however, be rigid in maintaining a separation of the sacred from the everyday. As already mentioned, many everyday practices are formalized as if they were rituals ( Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, 75).
•  
• “esthetic feeling is perhaps most pervasive in what may be called the ‘ritualization’ of life” (Harold Osborne “Education in an Affluent State,” Journal of Aesthetic  Education. 20.4 (1986).
•  
• “There is a real element of trust, I think, when you support someone in ceremony…. You create a foundation of trust.”  (Darrell Racine, interviewed by Dale Lakevold, “An Act of Healing” alt.theatre 9.3 (March 2012, 37).

Which also remind me of a phrase from Shawna LeMay, "Talisman": "...the cherished unlivable ceremonies..."

There's something to be getting on with...