onehouse

Prairie Drive

Prairie Drive from Hedge Society on Vimeo.

Out the window on the way back from the Route 40 Soup Company.

(Hedge Society is a new blog I'm developping. Stay tuned.)

Picture Blogging: Day 8: Purple Rain

Some kind person hoped the owner would return for this tiny fuzzy purse. They hung it on the doorknob to keep it out of the rain puddles. Found hanging on one of the doors of the Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta when I visited a few years ago.

The road is made by walking.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road--
Only wakes upon the sea.

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
- Antonio Machado,  Proverbios y cantares XXIX" in Campos de Castilla.

Victoria to Calgary

I'm back from a week in Victoria filled with green grass and budding plants. Also filled with trying to get a tiny human being to sleep with various styles of walking, rocking, driving (Not the baby. She refused to drive. We'll work on that), pretending to be driving, burping (once again, more baby than us), feeding, and general shifting of all kinds of positions. Like twister while passing tiny human being off to larger human beings.

Today, my biggest question is "Why did I come home?" That IS a minus sign with a 48 after it.

Sunday Snow Walk

Looking over the river valley from the greenhouse...

Outline of the labyrinth...

Towards the little chapel...

They really do mean little chapel...

Into the woods...

Feeling small...

Back from Rivendell.

I spent part of this weekend at the Kingsfold Retreat Centre. Soulstream was hosting their annual Henri Nouwen retreat. I attended last year but this year I felt like just being around the place - walking, sleeping and picking books out of the library. It turned out to be the perfect thing.

On Friday, after a day of work meetings I sat in the greenhouse by myself and listened to the wind for a few of hours, alternately nodding off, and practicing some centering as the daylight disappeared over the ridge. On Saturday, I spent an hour outside enjoying a mild and sunny morning while lying on river stones and listening to the Ghost River. You can see quite a few mountains from Kingsfold - my favorite is Orient Point especially when it has a little snow on it.

After watching the stars on Saturday night, we woke to falling wet snow on Sunday morning. The mountains were hidden by a bank of clouds, the river was outlined by white and all appeared different as we looked down the valley at breakfast. Perhaps this is why people like Emily Dickinson and Wendell Berry can get such varied meanings and insights from one small patch of land.

I started a few books that I didn't finish - Simple Christianity by NT Wright which is an introductory book to Christian thought but not well suited to me.  I picked up two books by Chesterton on Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis. I need time to inhabit Chesterton's style which I do enjoy so I took note of them for another time. I also read the introduction to Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom to Everyday Life but I had to put it on the later list when my eyes found Annie Dillard's new novel, The Maytrees. Printed in the new Harper Luxe imprint - larger type and bigger pages, this was the perfect short piece of writing for a small retreat. I've always had bad eyes and now with days spent staring at the computer screen, I've actually started putting books aside if the print is too small.

It's an amazing book - written in that clear poetic prose that makes you say "Damn, how does she do this?". I can't say anything more than many of the reviewers except to say read it. Oh and this little bit from the amazon page seems to describe it well:

Dillard has often been compared to Dickinson and Thoreau. Her language in this book can recall Gerard Manley Hopkins, both in its use of compression to heighten and intensify, and in its use of words that are perhaps arcane. I am willing to take fletching and skeg on faith, since their sound and context make them evocative. Lagniappe is a word I could have lived without. But albedo, used here in reference to the look of sand by night, is so perfect that I am grateful to have acquired it. It means reflected light, and, in another context, reflected neutrons. It suggests the deep kinship between ordinary human experience and the vast, ghostly universe of being itself. This is where Dillard's imagination has always lived, in the stark and lyrical awareness of the profundity of the physical world. (emphasis mine)

I also reread Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner - such a fine little book worthy of another visit on a chilly Sunday morning. The weekend ended with a walk, past the little chapel and the prayer walk stations  - just listening to the sound  of snow under foot and thinking of Narnia. One of my friends once complimented Kingsfold by saying he felt Tolkien-esque out there. It's a good description of the place. 

Leavin' on a jet plane.

Yes, my bags are packed I'm ready to go. Dubai to New York and New York to Calgary. After nineteen hours of flying and four hours between flights I'll end up at my house a mere fifteen hours after the first takeoff. You've got to love time travel.

I thought I'd better make a note -la - about the books I've read while they are in front of me.

I started with Farley Mowat's Owls in the Family, the 1961 children's story about Wols and Weeps, two owls that come to live with Billy in his hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. It's a great little whirlwind tale with good illustrations. It generated more conversation than its small size may warrant as my brother and I reflected over lunch about how we used to be able to take off on our bikes across the prairie or into the woods to figure things out for ourselves. There we would run into good kids and bad kids and come face to face with dangers narrowly averted and then pump madly home on our one speed bikes to a mother and father who knew the same kind of childhood freedoms when their farm chores were done.

It makes me angry sometimes that, naively or not, I experienced more free-wheelin' time in the woods when I was ten than I do now. I wonder what kinds of things it developed in heart and mind - experiences that a DVD or video game could never duplicate.

Out of my nieces stack, I also read North Child, a clever re-telling of a Norwegian fairy tale with - hurray! - an adventurous heroine front and centre. And then onto Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of An Unwanted Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah. I believe this is the children's version of her adult novel, Falling Leaves.

The Giver, a Newberry winner by Lois Lowry, is inventive and engaging. I won't give away too much or even give a link. Just read it. It's encouraging to read this variety of children's books after shaking my head in despair at boxes upon boxes of branded Disney/Dora/based-on-aTV show pseudo books at a recent secondhand book sale.

I thumbed a few others in the stack that my niece picked out for me but decided to read Flags of Our Fathers. My brother had told me not to watch the movie but to read the book. I was hesitant as I have a visceral dislike of the kind of enhanced prose of American war writers like Stephen Ambrose. But this book avoided adding sentimentality and overwrought cliches to what is strictly a sad and extremely violent part of the waning months of World War 2. I was glad to read this. It's not an easy story and I respect the author(s) ability to try to tell it as they know it without unnecessary embellishment. I'd put up a link but can't find the original cover. I really don't like movie covers on books.

I passed over A Short History of Byzantium when I saw the type size in the paperback version (my eyes! my eyes!) and read London: The Biography of a City by Christopher Hibbert instead. I'm always amazed by my ability to somehow romanticize ancient places and times. It would be kind of like thinking America was always a Rockwell painting. And for London, I have Dickens and if I want to reach farther back, Monty Python ("Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!") to help with the oozing details of the realities of emerging and ancient cities. Speaking of Dickens, I made my way through two BBC series Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House(2005) while I was here. Well worth tucking those away for your own upcoming winter. And Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock with her frozen secrets. Too good. It's a 15 parter done in half hours if you get the BBC and not PBS version. It's meant to reflect the cliff-hanger and serialization of Bleak House when it was first released to the public.

And, of course, while staring out the window and watching the swirling dust, I read Grains of Sand by Martin Buckley, stories of travels in many of the deserts around the world. I will remember this book not for its profound insights but for its welcome lack of the usual "male swagger" found in many of these kind of travel books and for its honest interactions with people surviving and and rarely thriving in some of the harshest environments on the planet.

I perused books on Japanese art and gardening and started a few other books that I'll try to finish at home when the outdoors stops calling and my second winter, my cold one, begins.

Discombobulated.

The blogging, well, it is just not in me this summer even though this past month has been a winter, always behind some sort of window - car, shop, villa - with the air-conditioning humming away. I think I may take a hiatus for August. The bugs start calming down mid-August and in Calgary, it means only another month of gardening will be left. The air can get cool enough at night for a fire and there's a couple issues of magazines to finish up. I may post here and there but not too much. I leave Dubai next week and need to figure out how to get the next magazine printed. "Money, it's a hit." as Pink Floyd sang long ago. Money and arts organizations are a really big hit.

As I've mentioned before I had a discombobulated schedule my first few weeks here. Between the heat, jet lag, and a tooth infection, I was sleeping and waking up at all hours of the day and night. Every time I picked up a book, I'd nod off to sleep like I was 95.

But in the last few weeks, I've managed to finish a little stack. I'm still trying to stick to my idea of reading fewer American writers this year but a few found their way in there. With the combination of my eternally weak eyes, streams of glaring sunlight through the window, or shadows bouncing around heavily curtained rooms, I also started putting down books that had tiny print. Just not worth the headache.

I'll write some of those up over the next few days. Have a drink of somethin' cold wherever you are.

Like a tree..

When I make my way home from the grocery store, (that little silver bit on the left side is part of Ski  -ick -Dubai) I make sure to take the left at the second ghaf tree, an indigenous and endangered part of the eastern deserts. For two years these trees have sat, 5 metres above land being readied for yet another mall. They are a remarkable piece of vegetation - root systems that can go underground nearly 30 metres in order to find groundwater. It's astonishing that these could be endangered, swept away for malls and villas when they have played such a pivotal role in desert life. (Supposedly these two trees will be moved but lately it has come to light that many believe that they are haunted.)

Psalm 1 has become a favorite of mine. I always have such good intentions about reading the Psalms and I start at the beginning of my good intentions. So Psalm 1 over and over again. In my garden in Canada, I am constantly digging out little tree seedlings that develop tough root systems in short order. As I yank on them or, if I find them too late, dig them out with a shovel, I always say, "Psalm 1. Psalm 1."

¹Blessed are those
   who do not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
   or sit in the company of mockers,
²but who delight in the law of the LORD
   and meditate on his law day and night.
³They are like a tree planted by streams of water,
   which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
   whatever they do prospers.

Yes...

I am having ice cream for breakfast.