Maybe home can be found in that warm sense of disconnect.

Over the past four and a half days, I have slowly made my way south to the land of deep strip mall and gothic eyeliner, to box stores and massive cineplex, to Starbucks at every corner and mini marts named "Hi-Ya"...

I am officially home for the holidays.

I wish I could say I was at a point in my adult life where I felt a connection or a capacity to relate to the people surrounding me here. But I don't. I sit at a local market in London and look around, feeling somewhat - disgusted (honestly) - by the small town, urban hillbilly mentality. Or what I assume is so. I am frightened by my own close-mindedness, in disguise as open-minded metropolitan disdain for their apparent small-mindedness - but I know better. What's going on here is really my own need to feel included. And the fact that I never did - always the artsy, overly-aesthetic creature, without an Opera house or art gallery to call my own. I grew up a fish on a cement sidewalk- and that's one of the reasons why I still like it that way - I have been living in Québec now for 10 years and counting, complaining and equally loving the fact that I remain, and always will, an outsider, a stranger in a (most certainly) strange land.

Myy lived experience, of never having felt connected to my home or the people here growing up, of having always felt different and at odds with my first environments, has led to now assuming that everyone still living here has nothing of interest to say or to contribute to the social fabric. Seriously. It's intense. I am being honest because it's important for me to understand my own biases and judgements - that although I can travel to the middle of nowhere somewhere else and find a heap of gorgeousness in the people there (and I know there is gorgeousness in people everywhere) there is something about this sense of HOME, of THIS IS ME here that is unsettling. Perhaps what is most unsettling of all is my own humanness in it all.

The Otherness of Love

Has been on my mind so often lately - this past year, truly, a ripping or moulding or breaking open into this vast otherness.

I just now did a search online to see what "the otherness of love" would produce, and surprisingly, got very few relevant hits.

Does this mean that I am supposed to write about it? Perhaps. It seems to keep coming up.

For now it's just good to know that it is a focus, a marker, not on the journey but THE journey.

Of all the hours

There's this one, then, one to go.
Before arrivals.
And attempted departures of excess weight.

Could a passing truck
Three-storeys below
Carry it away
If it was thrown carefully enough

With consideration for timing, mostly?
All the bags
and tick-tock
of the internal clock

Which beats out but does not beat out
What goes on underneath

Feeling the Weight.

And so much goodness, hats on Bach and the like.

Orange glow of fish lamp.

Time to retire. Re: tired.

Eyes and feet, but mostly heart.

Primate Behaviour

Kortlandt, who studied chimpanzees in the wild, concealed
within his blind, would sometimes see them find
his eyes, and stare in thought and wander off.
Contemplation and doubt were what he saw
or thought he saw, behind their searching eyes
these times and others, as if they tried
to make sense of an always, or often, puzzling world.

It seems a sad as well as a wondrous thing.

He doesn't say, but he leaves the thought to occur
that our primate nature could be, not as we think
it is: to know, but only to be disturbed,
as these simpler beasts are disturbed, in their simpler world,
that all the unknown should strike us, even though
it stops at that. No more. We stare in thought.

-William Bronk, (from The Empty Hands)

It's been so long...

I am not sure why words here have been so slow in coming. It might have to do with this Master's I am doing currently (which indeed takes up much time). It might have to do with the vast transformations I have been experiencing this past year. Their magnitude and depth leave little-ole' me feeling quiet like in awe. Perhaps the intimacy created in the face of genuine awesome has left my voice hushed or flat-out silent. At least in this form.

For now I am going to simply blame winter. Not that anything needs blaming, really. The hibernation of creature and sound and thought and body is so necessary. Yet I avoid it. We all do. Well, most of us. A cultural disdain for hidin' out and restin' up, I think. A fear of stayin' put...

It sure does run through these veins, that anxiety of being-not-doing. But what happens when the being part starts to take over anyhow out of necessity?

This Beloved Thing

The loving person is one who grasps non-relatively each thing they grasp. They do not think of inserting the experienced thing into relations to other things; at the moment of experience nothing else exists, nothing save this beloved thing, filling out the world and indistinguishably coinciding with it. Where you with agile fingers draw out the qualities common to all things and distribute them in ready-made categories, the loving person's dream-powerful and primally-awake heart beholds the non-common. This, the unique, is the bestowing shape, the self of the thing, that cannot be contained within the pure circle of world comprehensibility. What you extract and combine is always only the passivity of things. But their activity, their effective reality, reveals itself only to the loving person who knows them. And thus they know the world.
In the features of the beloved, whose self they realize, they discern the enigmatic countenance of the universe.

-Martin Buber