I have not been pumping out the poems and content these last few weeks because I took an impromptu trip “home” - where I was raised and chiseled out of cold winter nights and mother nature’s wild embrace. 600+ kilometers north of Toronto. A land of beautiful farms (the “Little Clay Belt” surrounded by unending rocks, lakes and trees (no people).
So forgive my absence but soon I’ll be back letting the world know of its ills and communing with others (like you) who are answering a call deep inside to live in truth and with grace, live as the world - not just on it.
I got in the rental car ‘n zoomed north after a brief visit with my sister in the “big smoke” - what we northerners call “Toronto”. As is my custom, I stopped in Temagami and climbed the firetower to stretch my legs and sing hymns to the silence and take in the immensity of rocks and lakes and trees. When I hit Temagami, something within changes and I do know I’m “home”.
I’m staying at a friend’s rustic cottage. Every morning enjoying my coffee and the peace of wild things on the lake. Relishing the fresh water swimming and silky feel on my skin. We’ll be having a huge party here with my two best friends and many people from my past. Gonna be good for my soul.
Each day after coffee, I drive 10 miles up the road to our farm. Often taking the sideroads and my mind racing down memory lane. Back to my days just 12, 13 years old, working for the neighboring farmers, zooming down the gravel roads on my moped. Free as a bird.
I’m visiting my precious mother. 88 years old, frail, so frail but with a solid, sharp mind. It’s not an easy time but I cherish the moments with her. They could be our last. She is again considering pulling the trigger (so to speak) and activating the “MAID” program - a government program for those wishing to legally end their own life.
I’m usually one with an opinion on everything but with this, I just don’t know … On the one hand, I am for the justice of allowing the liberty of a life to decide its own finality, its end. That’s a human right. Yet, on the other hand, no man nor woman is an island. There is family, are loved ones to consider. Our lives are intertwinned with many others. We are never alone.
The program has a long, necessarily bureaucratic process, that’s good. I try to stay impartial when all the social workers, care givers (the angels) visit and do their thing. Let’s see how it goes.
I read to my mom daily and share some poetry. Today, I went through some boxes of my books, stored here at the farm. I found a letter I wrote my mother almost 30 years ago. I read it too her and will leave it here for you to read.
I was a young teacher, heading to the Czech Republic for a second time after shipping my crates of books by ship. Always the writer, I treasured my time in self-exile, allowing me to see and take in the sights and sounds of this world so much better. I have books in boxes, scattered all over this planet.
At that time, no internet, I read voraciously and debated with the words and writers/thinkers of yore ferociously. I filled notebooks with poems, aphorisms and essays. I still do this … I will to the bitter end, lucky as I am to still be here shouting back at this murderous world, I find myself in. So much beauty before us yet all we see is the temperal trick of power and pretense.
In this letter, you can grasp how I was going through a period of “Christian” mysticism, much like my beloved Doestoevsky and his Prince Myshkin. It’s interesting to hear my own voice in these words from years ago and how I still have that same sense of wonder at “how all this, came to be”.
(P.S. - I think the book I refer to and send my mother was Hrabal’s Too Loud A Solitude. It’s a gem of a read!)
