Fear Fills the Space Between Us

I am re-reading H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald's spiritual journey through grief. I read this book in 2017 during the weeks I was giving the stitches and drains time to heal after a mastectomy due to breast cancer. It seems the bleak scenes I cringed over then, have come to life for me now during this Covid-19 outbreak. The book is rich with dark wet ugly places, like how the pond was a bomb crater, one of a line dropped by a German bomber. The lure of the goshawk for Macdonald transcends any attempt to cover up her story with talk of grand landscapes.

I owned an art gallery in Vancouver in the 80s. Artist Peter Parnell's rendering of this bird was a bestseller. Limited edition sketches sold out quickly. I didn't understand why, although I love most birds. Not the hawk so much. I never had the urge to seek them out or wait patiently in the woods for a sighting like MacDonald. But one year, a couple of hawks began to nest in a tall oak tree in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver, where I lived. They raised their chicks outside my bedroom window.

Why hawks are you drawn to our hobbit, I wanted to know? We are a stress-free zone, where cats laze on sidewalks. dogs routinely walk by Ruthie's Court, and raccoons dine on fresh leftovers. We aim to be docile dwellers, ordinary but not always. One day I was startled by the mother hawk perched on my back fence waiting to seize a hummingbird feeding on a plant hanging in my patio. Fear filled the space between us.

The same fear I felt about the hawk grabs me as I listen to the news or open emails since the outbreak of Covid-19. Everything feels dangerous, half-buried, damaged, MacDonald writes about the Brecklands where she waits to see the hawks. Helen needs the hawks to help her through the grief journey. Right now, I need them to help me face my fears.

The Story Lines In Our Lives

I once interviewed a paleontologist for a chapter in my novel Argonauta. I wanted his thoughts and feelings about discoveries of bodies on a dig, because there is a chapter where one of the characters and her team uncover a body I call ‘the unknown woman.’ Who determines the complex decision to move a coffin or a buried body? Is it realistic to have a memorial like I wanted to write? “It is very appropriate to respect a final resting place,” he affirmed, and then told me his other wild stories and discoveries on digs, but I’m not allowed to share.

I think back to this conversation as I reflect on the Publishing Residency week for my MFA program in Toronto.  We listened to the agents, editors, publishers who knew the business of buying and selling stories.  We were there to pitch our books. The value of our story would be measured by how well it could be told. The art exists in the arrangement of words, says author Philip Gerard.  It’s a daunting exercise but if someone is going to pay $s for a story, I get it, the crafting better be good. After the pitch sessions there was a lot of conversation taking place but I’m not sure if anyone was listening.

The stories we pitched long to be told. Some will find their way out to the land of print, or digital, audio and maybe film. Like the wild discoveries of my paleontologist (acknowledged by name in my book) some may also remain in quiet conversations. Whatever the format, the story lines in our lives are for sharing because our stories help us understand who we are in relation to others, the big picture stuff (think about it) and maybe history (yes your life is important for more people than you realize).          

December: A Mix of Quiet and Chaos

Last week, I was busy in New York with my daughter prepping wreaths, gift buying and tree decorating. Our fir was not quite as big as the one in Rockefeller Square where we took selfies along with the multiple crowds enduring or enjoying the frenzy of New York City at Christmas. I love the vibes for at least a day and then it seems like the words from Chris Tomlin's Winter Song reflect the pace I prefer—quiet, soft and slow. The song refers to the entry of Jesus to earth quite unlike the mighty storm or a tidal wave he might have chosen; rather "he came like fallen snow." Like those cards with Mary as the focal point, Joseph in the background, Jesus in the foreground, and shepherds and animals looking on as they reflect a peaceful family scene. Where’s the noise surrounding Jesus' birth? As the poet Malcolm Guite writes:

            We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,

            Or cozy in a crib beside the font,

            But he is with a million displaced people

            On the long road of weariness and want.   

But at the center of the chaos, Mary, Luke’s gospel tells us, kept these things in her heart. Some translations use the word  'pondered,' which means to combine or bring different ideas into a coherent whole. It suggests that in the silence Mary began to put together the details about the census, the trip to Bethlehem, the angelic appearances and the prophetic word that her child was destined for trouble. The phrase kept these things is not new in scripture. The Old Testament records several–Jacob kept the matter in mind after his son Joseph aroused his brother's jealousy by boasting about his dream. Daniel, likewise, 'kept the words in his heart' after a troubling night of visions. Mary’s struggle to comprehend the difficult matters concerning her life and those she loves is hardly passivity. She may be depicted as submissive femininity but the reality is Mary showed up in the chaos of her times and confronted the hard stuff. There’s a lot of room in Mary, writes Kathleen Norris. December may be full of joy or, for some, empty and dark. The season may not meet all my expectations, but I look forward to moments of quiet reflection and those chaotic events where showing up is part of the celebration. As I write this blog Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong fills the house—Have yourself a merry little Christmas, may your heart be light.

It's Not Always About Climate Change

A river was just a river until I met my biological family some years ago. At the time I was living in Deep Cove, a seaside village near Vancouver in a sheltered bay, where most of the weekends were spent at the beach swimming, canoeing and walking Rouge, my Irish Red Setter. But once I visited the river where my siblings grew up, the urge to romanticize the calm waters of a river took over. I wrote about the Saint John River as if I knew every rock along the shores. I wanted to belong to that place where ‘life every now and then becomes literature’ as Norman Maclean writes in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. I felt the urge for a new kind of life on the banks of the river. In truth I was a woman that loved the energy of the city especially Vancouver, Montreal and New York. You can’t live there, my friends protested when I told them I was intent on buying a cottage on the Saint John River.

In the past 25 years so much has changed about the city. The cranes moved in and the sleepy communities like Mount Pleasant where I lived had to wake up. Church talk changed to housing or shared housing, buying homes with friends, missional communities, and where to house the clergy. The downtown eastside went upswing for hipsters, and the homeless continued to be pushed farther to anywhere in the city. In general one decides to either fight it or embrace the new landscape and discover the pathways through it.

Currently I live in the Faubourg du Rivage, Aylmer Québec close to the Ottawa River in the midst of likely the worst flood a river has brought in over 100 years. My quiet morning walk along the Parliament Trail on the Québec side has been disrupted by the overbearing power of the water. Families are canoeing into their homes. The army is present, the sand bags cannot be filled fast enough. Can we thank the volunteers enough?

The river will no longer be taken for granted. It will be harder to say casually - I was out strolling or biking along the river, as if one expects the water to calm us, energize us, or invoke any kind of emotion we need to express at any particular moment. No. The river has risen to power. Storming through dams, threatening bridge structures and devouring bicycle paths ; the river will no longer behave.

Although the river has stretched our boundaries and brought us grief, spring will rise with the promises of renewal. Out of the mud, debris, and loss, we will carve out a different path through a revised landscape along with enough grace to embrace the change.

Clarity and Vision

I don’t fish, play lacrosse, or like football, but I recently purchased John McPhee’s, The Patch, because Chapters topped up my Plum Rewards with a $10.00 discount. I read his essay The Orange Trapper in 2013, published in the New Yorker. It is one of my favorites essays for the simple reason that anyone who can write with fascinating detail about chasing after golf balls has my attention.

The first time I read the essay The Orange Trapper I admit I was wrapped up in a ‘golf phase’. My husband, who couldn’t believe he married someone who shared his passion for the sport, although my game was amateur, took me on a golfing vacation to Jekyll Island not far from Savannah, Georgia. We spent three days on the Island and the rest of the week in Savannah. I came home and wrote two short stories with a golf setting.

The other reason I bought The Patch was for the second half of the book--An Album Quilt, pieces written for both public and private occasions. John McPhee cut seventy five per cent out of two hundred and fifty thousand words before choosing what he felt fit the quilt pattern design. I’ll lend you the book if you’d like to read what he felt was good enough for publication. The key is that he had enough material to choose from. An Album Quilt didn’t seem to fit my image of a quilt and what he chose to make the pattern but you may have a totally different

I’m not keen on writing just to fill notebooks or the iCloud, but it’s worth reevaluating what I write about and whether seven-five percent should be viewed as not worthy of publication. I have had the time this past year to re-read my journals, notes, blogs, stories, poetry, and a podcast. My ability to collect massive amounts of research material, horde newspaper clips, fill moleskins, fountain pen my way through Clairefontaine unlined books, thin scribblers, long scribblers, mini note pads, etc… is impressive! Seventy-five percent is a lot of cutting when it comes to what’s worthy of print or even a blog. Yet unlike the Orange Trapper, I once took a risk with a topic as minute as a mustard seed, and it flew over the heads of my writing group, landing in the recycling bin. There’s a lot more to hitting that little ball than colorful language and status detail. What captures readers we all know is a sense that the voice of the author has authority. Like the weasel that Annie Dillard writes about in Living Like Weasels, (another favorite essay) it’s about clarity and pure vision. I’m thinking that I may share how I lost and then found my writing voice in my next blog. Or it may happen there is something more significant from my writing material that I cannot discard.