Treetops and gargoyles

I spent this morning responding to and marking papers from an introductory non-fiction writing class I often teach at this time of year. One line really caught my attention in a piece recalling being a child and climbing a favourite tree. The last line was "When you're at the top of the tree, you don't think about the ground."

This afternoon I took the memory of that line off to Cally's Teas, a place I have not had much recent time to sit in and just relax and let the words happen. I started in with that memory, and this is what came out:

From the top of the tree

   is no thought of the ground

No fear of falling in the cuddle

   of gently swaying limbs of last resort

The climb not from, but to

  once done is gone, past concern

What matters is the up here and

   the out there, rarefied

Solitude, alone with the heights

  keeping private company with

    the  

           sky

Which evolved by July 23 into:

Gently swaying limbs of last
resort fold around, cuddle,
erase thoughts of solid ground.

No longer in transition,
no fear of falling from the top
of a climb accomplished, alone,

waiting for the tree to grow, gradually
sprout the next inviting step?
Or whispering, "Feathers. Feathers. Feathers"?

 So imagine my surprise tuning in to Shawna Lemay's blog site, CALM THINGS, and finding her quoting this:

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

- William Wordsworth, from The Prelude

I was waiting at Cally's for someone to ask for a poem on a topic of personal interest--and I got a reassuring request from a regular, asking me to write about the surprise one feels after being in a loving relationship for fifty years, having it end in the death of her partner, then finding that she can get that feeling again, with another, even so late in life. I wrote it for her, and for her only.

Then I picked up a line from Sheila Watson's Paris Diary, about a day walking the streets and not conversing with the gargoyles. Again, an image to conjure with. This came out of the hat:

I did not have time

to chat with the gargoyles

on sunny days dark, mad-eyed

crouching witnesses to the passing

scene of busy feet going…

    ... God knows where,

on rainy days grim, spitting

trouble-makers focusing

random drops from above

into malicious streams of cold

discomfort down unsuccessfully

turned collars below.

    What took my time

from chat? Who can recall?

The gargoyles never cared to ask

and my mind wandered.

 

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...