audreywhitson.com

Category: Music

  • Fall Equinox 2022: Harvest Moon

    Saturday, September 10th, just after 3 o’clock I got a call from my tailor, Kim. I’d left a couple of things for hemming. She was closing early. “We have a celebration tonight,” she told me. There had been some Chinatown festivities at the Farmer’s Market that day, with dragons and lions dancing in the streets, games of chance, a long table feast, music and vendors. Everyone was welcome to the long table. I noticed houseless and residents, settlers and Indigenous lining up for lunch, but I had been in a hurry. Now I hurried to search the Internet: the Moon Festival or the mid-Autumn Harvest Festival is celebrated across Asia. It’s a time when extended families gather to share food, hang lanterns, watch the moon and give thanks.

    Could I come and get my clothes now? I couldn’t get to her shop fast enough, so we agreed to rendezvous at her home (not far from mine) about five o’clock.  At the appointed time, I hopped on my bike, braved football stadium traffic (Calgary vs. Edmonton), skirted the road closures/barricades and arrived just after the hour, the house full of company. Kim was in the kitchen cooking. A daughter and then a granddaughter handed me my articles through the front screen door. This gathering, I thought, was its own passing on, generation to generation, the traditions that bind us; however we call them, to the land. I was grateful to glimpse this family’s celebration, even if just from the doorstep.

    That night, when I woke in the middle of the night and peered out the window, I found the full moon shining through the trees, joined by Jupiter and Neptune. The whole sky was lit up. I lingered in the glow.

    Ten days before I had experienced a harvest moon of my own, a re-aligning of the planets. A few months ago, I made a decision to leave my day job at the end of August to dedicate myself to writing full-time. I had been planning it for a long time. Leading up to the day, colleagues would ask what it felt like.

    Like falling off a cliff and not knowing what was on the other side.  

    Or jumping out of an airplane. I had a parachute, I’d done the training, but would I land okay?

    A kind of death, I told someone else. It is an ending, she agreed. But also a new beginning.

    Well, now I’ve landed and it’s as if I’m experiencing each day from a new angle as I find my way into new routines and new habits. Working full time and writing part-time, there was so much that I needed to cram into each minute. I was good at it: eating and working. Getting to work and getting exercise. Reading and commuting. A double, even a triple life, endemic in our culture, rich at times, but also exhausting.

    It is a blessing to be able to slow down, to do one thing at a time. Walking for the sake of walking. Rising later, more with my natural rhythms. Making lunch when I’m hungry. Doing the laundry any day of the week. Sundays were for so many years my writing shift, now I have whole weekends to enjoy like other people do! And regular work days to focus on my passion.

    Some days I wake with trepidation. Can I meet my many goals? Will I be as productive as I think? Most mornings on rising, I’m reminded of other times in my life when I’ve set out on a new adventures: moves, travels, studies. I feel exhilarated, reinvigorated and alive. The mundane still enters in: the pin valve that broke on my hot water heater last weekend, the neighour’s shower that (somewhat) overflowed into my suite last week. Life still happens. But there’s a simplicity that comes with being able to focus one’s life—a clarity in connection. Like looking at that full harvest moon in the night sky: pure joy, surrounded by all the world.

  • Summer Solstice 2022: Bridging Time, Place and Being

    Merriam Webster has two definitions for the word bridge. Bridge as structure and bridge as a time, place or way to connect or transition. Not here or there. Not now or then. In between. A co-worker told me she walks the High Level Bridge home every Friday from the office. It’s her way of marking the end of the week. A bridge is a liminal space.

    We have a new bridge over the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton. The bridge joins Cloverdale and Boyle Street neighbourhoods. It’s called Tawatina, a Cree word for “valley.” It’s a double bridge: the top deck is for the new LRT Valley Line and the bottom is for bicycle and pedestrian traffic. On the bottom, if you look up, the ceiling is filled with a collage of more than 500 images. I walked it this past weekend.

    As you walk, you move through the epochs (a mastodon stands under one end of the bridge), the stages of settlement to present day, and all the seasons. You walk under shapes within shapes. A winter river within a winter bear. Beaded flowers overlaying riverscapes, portraits of Métis ancestors. Bees against a blue sky. Stars within flowers. Clouds within clouds. Geometrics within arrowheads, within coyotes, within raindrops. Moose, bison, beaver, northern pike: the North Saskatchewan running through bodies divided first by river lots, then surveyed by sections, then each a checkerboard of neat agricultural settlement. A beaver holding spring water, lodge and forest within; a beaver wearing Hudson Bay stripes. Fish streaming: Sturgeon, northern pike, sturgeon, goldeye, walleye, sucker. Bees, dragonflies. Crows in flight; sandhill cranes ascending. Eagles. Holding landscapes. Swallows filled with fire. Canoes, York boats. A hearth, with a fiddle and dancing. The eyeball of every kind of animal from this place, two- legged and four-legged. All of it on the move: walking, falling, running, flying, dancing.

    And things I can’t describe. It’s an experience: to stand under; to under-stand. Another way of being.

    I heard David Garneau, the lead artist, interviewed. The Garneaus were a prominent founding family of the City and Métis from the Red River Settlement. A neighbourhood is named after them and a Manitoba Maple still grows on the University of Alberta campus at the site of their original homestead. David Garneau is a direct descendant. For this bridge project, he worked with local elders and knowledge keepers who told him what images to draw; he wasn’t always given the meaning of the stories behind them.

    In a way, I think it’s better that way. Some will know the origin stories, some will bring their own stories to the work. But overall, as I overhead someone else say on the bridge, Sunday: “Everything here is connected to the land.” And that’s all we really need to know.

    This bridge is not only a structure, but a place to connect across time and everything living in this place, to heal from our shared history and to move forward together into a new vision. To move forward, on this National Indigenous Peoples Day, in a good way.

  • Summer Solstice 2020: The Fullness

    COVID-19. One word with so many contradictions: death, innovation, anger, selflessness, anxiety, adaptation, depression, creativity. The fullness of life! To date, at least 8,457,305 infections; 453,882 deaths. We hear the counts every night like reports from a war zone. We know it is not gone. The financial fall-out we haven’t begun to comprehend. The isolation affects all of us differently. For me the last few months have been like living in slower motion.

    Focus sharpens in times of illness. We come face to face with mortality. We have time to think. We see and hear in ways we haven’t before. This slowed down time, this slower motion has revealed itself to me like a kaleidoscope, the changes going on around us and within us. We see the turn of the seasons close up. A birds-eye view, this time of concentrated inward reflection in the world. This time of intentional watching has revealed the contrasts and contradictions: Black and Indigenous lives matter! People can work at home and be productive. Children and parents have more time to bond. Those already isolated find they have more ways of accessing the world online. We can cut greenhouse gas emissions, just like that.

    We have to be still. We have to listen. We have to be.

    I offer three strategies for COVID, think of them as spiritual practices. From my own experience: Walk. Walk more. Give thanks.

    Walk or whatever movement you can manage. I had a sprained ankle for the past six weeks, so sometimes that movement has been guarded, sometimes limited to watching the movement of light, wind, and life outside my window.

    In the river valley, I’ve found my way around paths I was afraid to follow before. The Dawson-Kinnaird parks are riddled with animal and human trails in hidey-hole places. I’ve taken them, daily, sometimes twice daily, and learned their routes as I’ve followed my feet. When there was still snow on the ground and long before the leaves, I followed the trails, winter into spring, spring into summer, knowing them one layer at a time, when I knew I couldn’t get lost. And now I can’t. (For the full unfurling I’ve witnessed this spring, visit my twitter feed @audreyjwhitson)

    Walk more. Make a pilgrimage where you live, another practice I’ve taken up. A pilgrimage in honour of Saint Brighid suggested by a friend of mine in the neighbourhood with Irish heritage, Kate Quinn. I set out on this walk at least once a week early in the morning. During COVID, the streets are quiet. I see the occasional fellow drinking coffee on their deck, smoking a cigarette, searching for bottles in the dumpster or walking like me. Everyone is friendly. I don’t remember a time when I felt so comfortable talking to “the stranger.” We know we’re all in this “unprecedented” time together. I stop at the homes of neighbours I know and pray a blessing over the hedge, “May the cloak of Brighid flow over this house.” Occasionally they see me or I see them through the window, but that is not the point. The point is to be present in the void. The point is to ground myself in my world and to come home feeling more connected than when I left.

    Give thanks. The final strategy for COVID is something I’ve learned from another friend in the neighbourhood and have adopted as my own. I’ve kept gratitude journals over the years and prayed lists too. But this is simpler and means more to me. At the end of every day I write down one thing that has made the day extraordinary: some encounter, some event, some exchange. For me that might mean crossing paths with wildlife; experiencing a piece of art in word, image, or sound; a rich conversation with a friend or receiving a comment from a complete stranger. Often something small in the scheme of things.

    Savour the fullness in the nothingness of this time.

  • Winter Solstice 2017: Darkness and Light

    The last few years I’ve gotten into the habit of putting out photographs in my living room of those near me who have died during the year. Their faces greet me each day as I go about my morning yoga; they smile at me every evening on my return from work. I leave them out for family celebrations, visits from friends, and condominium board meetings. Each is an object lesson, a saint of sorts, a model in living. I contemplate them and then, eventually, I let them go.

    Archeologists say that the oldest human rituals revolve around death. They provide a vessel for transition and grief; they demarcate the boundaries of the living and the dead, this world and the other world. Christmas is a particularly hard season for anyone who is bereaved.

    This year there are two portraits on my mantle: one of an aunt who was a traveller and a reader, who lived on the family farm into her nineties and whose curiosity about the world I admired; the other of a woman half her age, a co-worker of mine, also an independent thinker, a brilliant visionary, who struggled with self-acceptance and, in the end, took her own life. Both are a witness to me; both are teachers. As with all human beings, both carried struggle and joy in their journey, darkness and light.

    In their origin, Christmas carols were part of the people’s rites, going from house to house and singing in exchange for treats; they were not part of the official religious observance. Many are stories of peace and conflict, gift and loss: the contradictions of life held in tension. At the centre of most Christmas music is the image of the holy family and I would argue all families. There is birth but there is also a foreshadowing of suffering, the suffering that comes with growing in this world. The parents have such hopes. The innocent babe becomes a child, becomes an adult. Makes choices, learns or does not learn what is needed to love, suffers, and sometimes dies too young.

    I have come to think that this is the meaning of the holy: the blood, the bone, the breath, the unique story that binds each of us to the soul of the world. All of it, Mystery.

  • Fall Equinox 2017: Music and Prophecies

    I have an image of my child self that I often call to mind. I am probably 10 or 11 years old; it is the 1960s. I am sitting between our family kitchen and living room, my back against the door jamb, my knees pulled up in front of me, listening to the radio that used to live on a shelf underneath the kitchen counter. From where I sit I can see south through the kitchen window to the bush that surrounds our house. Beyond it, I know the fields roll half a mile to our neighbours. If I look east past the kitchen through the porch wall full of coats and the floor mats full of boots, through the back window I can see the barnyard, the cows, the dog, chickens scattered here and there. If I look west I can see the horizon beyond the picture window and the sky. The radio is on: news, music. Wonderful music. The Beatles. Peter, Paul and Mary. Elvis. Simon and Garfunkel. Bob Dylan. Every newscast, an explosion. The radio is the world to me then. I hear the news of riots, cars turned over, cities on fire, police with shields, shop windows smashed. Brutality. Protests, people standing their ground, speaking up. Defiant lyrics. The speeches of civil rights leaders and presidents. People fighting in the streets. Talk of pollution and acid rain. Threats of nuclear war, which my young self cannot fathom. And through it all, song. The adults hold a certain tension in their listening, in their talk. But there’s also an excitement undergirding it all. I feel electrified listening to this troubled, strange, mysterious world. I see the possibility of making things new, conscious that I, myself, am part of the new. I sing along.

    I think about those times now when I listen to the radio, which I still do. The news over breakfast and supper, and the music which I hum along to when I can. But I am also the adult now, and I feel the anxiety that is weighing on the planet. The war talk and hate speech that I hear reported daily. The rhetoric and cheap sentimentality that passes as public policy. Even the weather is ominous. The smoke that has drifted our way all summer, from fires the scientists now assign a new category, past extreme, to catastrophic. Forest fires that even snow and sub-zero temperatures can’t put out. It is only the beginning of the hurricane season in the Atlantic and already we’ve had two once-in-a-hundred-year storms in quick succession: Harvey, Irma, and a close contender for the title, Maria. Whole nations are devastated.

    Maybe that is why I felt an urgency this fall to get back to my community choir practice. Why, even though I have more commitments in my life than ever, I show up and sit in my chair among the second sopranos. Why I mark the music and listen to all the parts, low to high, and sing along for two hours every Monday night. To be one with the human voice, to carry within me those strains of hope and defiance. By the second week of practice, I am going to bed again to the music in my head: Mendelssohn, Bach, Vivaldi, fragments of choruses in languages I don’t understand, from other centuries and this one. Voices to dream by.

    And so it dawns on me what I was doing as a 10-year-old, how powerful the human voice is in the cultivation of consciousness. Music, to lift the heart for the waking work for justice.

  • Midwinter Passage 2016

    Some mornings on my walk to work, if the traffic lights are right, I take a shortcut through the Quarters up The Armature pedestrian mall. When I cross over 103A Avenue at 96th Street, I pass two bronze figures on either side of the mall, I sometimes call The Coyote Men.+ You might call them Sitting Man and Standing Man, Tricksters by any other name. They form a kind of gate to the neighbourhood. In place of their heads and hands, the heads and hands of deer, baby black bear, mother grizzly, turtle, squirrel, chipmunk, raccoon, blue jay, wolf, coyote, fox, hare–I’ve lost count–pop out of collar and sleeve.

    It’s like crossing a threshold to pass them or maybe a gauntlet, and I always make a prayer in touch, glance, or word. Some people leave offerings. I have witnessed a matching bronze boot stuck on one of Standing Man’s small heads, a lacy blue tunic pulled over Sitting Man’s torso, and on another day, a red blanket draped over his shoulders. The Coyote Men offer a preparation for the real tricksters about to come into my day, most of them sitting behind a desk, in a shop, or on a television screen.

    At Midwinter Solstice we cross a threshold too. Its coming marks the mid-point of winter, the division between the old year and the new, the longest night and the shortest day. It’s a hard season for for anyone living with loss. Christmas has so much riding on it, impossible hopes sometimes: the vision of a holy child, a holy mother, a holy family. My disasters this past year have been minor: a burst pipe, a break-in, and a couple of small repairs and rehabilitations to the aging body. Real disaster is this: debilitating illness, violence, and war.

    Whenever we move forward it becomes a question of faith. Will we leave offerings? Will we be protected? Will we pass through? We don’t know what the future holds, only the concreteness of this present moment. There are echoes of this in the vows families, friends and even communities make to each other, sometimes spoken, often silent: for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. We move forward.

    I leave you with an ancient hymn arranged by the contemporary composer, Paul Mealor, whose music it seems to me comes from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Music that is a trickster in its own way, pressing so many facets of the world into my heart: Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Where kindness and love are, there is God. Or Spirit. Or Wisdom.

    +Brandon Vickerd, Wildlife (2015)