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Month: June 2014

  • The Longest Day: 2014

    Last weekend I took myself into the river valley, though I thought I had a thousand things to do: duties, commitments, chores. No, into the river valley I went on my trusty bike, down the wooden staircase at the end of 92 Street, down into my soul, a forgotten part of the city, past someone’s spilled garbage, past dead spikes of trees.

    Down to Dawson Park I went, carrying my bicycle when it couldn’t carry me. Perhaps I was inspired by the children I’d seen in my neighbourhood lately of mornings, clustered around their mothers, waiting for a bus, waiting for a ride. Jumping like feeding birds at the bells and flashes on the light rail crossings. Pointing, waving to all who will hear (let those who have ears), to anyone on board the passing LRT train. Thrilled to be.

    It’s the trip down the staircase I remember. Here’s what I found: someone’s garden caragana spilling into the valley. Someone’s garden sowing lilac, rhubarb. Fireweed. Someone’s damp blanket, tin cans, old sweaters. Yellow warblers playing treetops, then hide and seek, pitching their sweet-sweet-shweeeeeet call from dead poplars to green willows, all to one purpose: bugs, bugs, bugs.  Robins merry-merrying, clay-coloured sparrows buzzing, crickets in the shady patches humming. And here’s what I thought: “It’s funny how the place with richest life in the valley is the most neglected.” And … “All of this is what soil is made of.”

    So it is with my own life this solstice: some of it groomed, some of it feral and wild, some of it dead and rotting. I may wonder, and you too, what can be fed here in the chaos. We may hesitate to celebrate the now, always looking for that ideal state of balance, that somewhere else, other than here. It’s not perfection in the literal sense, waiting till I get this or that together, figured out, mastered. Solstice just comes, demands to be celebrated.

    Go greet the wild rose.

     

  • When the Rain Stops Falling

    Last weekend I went to see When the Rain Stops Falling, a play by an Australian, Andrew Bovell. It was mounted by the U of A Studio Theatre, whose productions I have always found daring and top-notch.

    One of the opening scenes sent a shiver through me.  The year is 2039. It’s the middle of a storm, by the sea, and a man walks alone. A fish comes flying out of the sky. The man doesn’t know where it has come from, whether an answer to prayer or a freak of nature. He is pondering what to feed a son whom he’s never met, who is coming for lunch. Fish are nearly extinct, only the rich in the most exclusive  restaurants can afford them.

    This play is about our logical future: the rain that will not stop; the fish that are extinct. This is where we are heading. I know that. But has anyone said it out loud in such an intimate way to me before? The many ways our connection to living things has been lost?

    Ironically, or perhaps purposefully, this play is also about our lack of intimacy with each other: how a secret can distort a family through four generations, and the shame lived in silence.  They are in every family tree: the things that keep us apart, the cost of that isolation. The need to know, the search that unfolds, the questions. The memories, no matter how partial, that can guide us if we acknowledge them.

    By the end, when it does stop raining, there’s only the glimmer of a lost memory, of connection, enough though to hope. And the proof, more than a week later, is that I’m still thinking about When the Rain Stops Falling.