Today isn't yesterday.

"(I) refuse to give in to this concept of being separate and disconnected and protecting (my) own little tiny island, and (I) look around and say, 'Yeah, I've been burned. I've done bad things. I've made stupid mistakes. I was naive. Now I know more. But I don't want to let go of the gentleness and the innocence of being naive. I'm not jaded. Fuck you. I still have love and I'm gonna fucking wield it.'"

Carla Bozulich

Scourge.

Personal initiation can only happen after an experience in the underworld. It is only through crisis that transformation and change can occur. This is why initiations are not pretty, leave scars, are memorable throughout one's life, and why a guide or psychopomp is so incredibly vital to the experience.

Awareness and initiation is about the opening realizations and life-affecting alterations that come after the pain, after the observation of the pain, and after the scars caused by the pain are made into tattoos for use to scry into later in our lives.

Between the worlds of the sacred and the profane.

Sometimes there are demons that refuse to leave me alone. Some of them are my personal succubi, tantalizing and teasing in what they might appear to offer, trying to appeal to vanities or dreams that governed me for so long and that I've since been trying to exorcise. Sometimes they appear as proud apparitions seeking to sway me with hopes and ideas again.

I'm torn between decisions. Standing again before the rift in my personal world, peering again into its echoing chasm and hearing my own hurtful words shouted back at me, I'm asking myself about what exactly should I, could I, would I want to handle. Is it better to suck it up and be the strong guy again, to try and demonstrate some bigger sense of leadership and belief, or do I finally give myself permission to be the avatar of my own longer-term happiness and let myself let go? Either way, I suspect my actions wil yet again fall under the smug scrutiny and judgment of others, and others who never seem fully satisfied or compassionate.

These are among the old headaches that I'm tired of, and thought I had finally found my way away from and approaching a peace with having done so.

Like loving the rain.

"I'm as strong as a thousand armies. I'm as soft as a long-stemmed rose."

Social Distortion


It's one of my least favourite ironies that deep, heartfelt affection, agape, seems often mistaken for weakness, for pliability.

This kind of love is lacking around us, and often I wonder if many people would know what to "do" with it if they "had" it. Love can become a possession to some, and then something taken for granted. Once deemed as possessed, it then runs the risk of becoming trivial, and that underscores the potency of love.

In those moments, I sometimes find it's tempting to harden the heart, but how counterproductive that would be.

The well.

"Keep walking, though there's no place to get to. Don't try to see through the distances. That's not for human beings. Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move. Walk to the well. Turn as the earth and the moon turn, circling what they love. Whatever circles comes from the center."

Rumi

Family values.

I was reading Diane di Prima's Recollections Of My Life As A Woman recently. Writing of her grandparents, she cited how her grandmother would abandon saying the rosary when her grandfather entered the room, but how the two of them loved one another despite their differences.

At that moment, I was suddenly struck with the realization that never in my life had I seen my parents together as a loving partnership. Never had I seen them as two adults who shared the same bed in their shared home as they traversed a shared life together. Photographs of their togetherness existed, worn 3x3 black&whites with oversized borders taken in Karlsruhe and Berlin, all locked up in a grey plastic suitcase stored with the artificial Christmas tree and the stamp collection.

Instead, what I saw were two adults tolerating moments of strained silence when they were in the same room together. There was always a subtle tension that I could feel, though perhaps not fully understand. The awkward silences. The brief moments when my father tried in vain to profess his love for my mother, and the suddenness of her monster-eyed fury as she shushed him up and shamed him with a stage whisper. I would be in the kitchen during those moments, listening but trying to not overhear. I would be angry in my father's defense, though he rarely if ever spoke of it with me.

I'd never seen them laugh together, holds hands, kiss. In the one photograph I possess of them, taken during my Communion, I had to ask them to pose together. There was a lot of quiet during the exceptionally few dinners we shared, usually around a major holiday, provided he wasn't under observation at the time and couldn't come.

He tried to collect me from grade school once, and what I remember most was the panic among the principal, my teacher, my mother. I didn't see the big deal and talked with him. It was a treat for me, though I never intended to leave school with him, of course.

"Look," he said as he bent down to me, shadowing the sun as we stood on 75th and 3rd. "What do you see?" I peered into the distance, the busy street, uncomprehending, shrugging my shoulders. "Life," he said.

It was always my father who tried to share matters of depth with me.

My neighbours down the street.

More than a hundred years ago, a newspaperman stood where I was and wrote about the condition of the graves. He wrote how the stones were in disrepair, some wooden crosses were broken, and with only one or two exceptions, the graves of the soldiers and families of men who fought the Americans here, another hundred years prior, appeared all but forgotten. I know this because the newspaper account he had written was preserved in stone on the small wall I stood beside, where surviving headstones, many broken and virtually blank, were preserved in the concrete. A dead squirrel, mummified and wet from the melting ice, lay as sentry atop the wall.

Behind this was the field where the bodies lay, Garrison Park, the subtle slopes of earth perhaps being the last reminder that graves were present where people threw sticks for their dogs. I spoke to the dead as I strolled through. I felt myself being heard. I felt myself being appreciated for having made some acknowledgements. Only now, as I peek through Wikipedia entries about the site as I type this, do I read that so-called paranormal occurences are common here.

I'm not surprised. I'd think most of these folks are pretty upset.

Was I far from the spot where some British infantryman came up with the idea of lighting the magazine to repel the American invaders? Was the industrial complex to my right built on land reclaimed from the lake, where American schooners blasted their 24-pounders on the earth I was strolling?

Not long after my newspaperman penned his disappointment about the grave conditions, a pork packing company began doing development further east. The account of their land excavation, preserved in the Fort York museum, told of how they casually exhumed other remains which were then carted off among with (and as) construction debris. "I kept some of the bones," wrote that writer.

When I'm driving the 511 streetcar along that stretch of track between Bathurst and Exhibition Loop, I'm cruising through land where the absolutely very first European-made buildings were erected here. They were the garrisons of the original British troops, even before Fort York had been built, when the British were in direct contact with the Ojibway, Mississauga, and Mohawk people here. The loss of these buldings was lamented by the public when Toronto Civic Railways, a precursor to the TTC, destroyed them.

The erection of the Gardner Expressway during the 1950s almost spelled the doom for the fort that remains. As it is, this lonely and isolated place of history is entirely flanked by industrial complexes, roads, refuse. It makes me wonder how the land was, what the soldiers who fought here saw around them, and how they would feel if they knew then what where they fought and bled would eventually become like.

At the base of the Fort York flagpole, where the Union Jack hung limp in the evening chill, and behind the protection of a black privacy fence, fat woodchucks languished happily in their large network of warrens. In this spot they share with forgotten graves, forgotten historic places, and industrial space, they've found some peace. They found their niche for undisturbed happiness.

Truth or consequences.

This weekend, I'm dealing with consequences from some of my recent choices. Consequences I can handle.

In nature, I once said to a friend, there are no punishments; there are only consequences. I heard that somewhere when I was a kid, and it's always stuck with me. It bespeaks of how everything we experience, whether we appreciate it or not, are all the results of our own choices and actions. Part of taking personal responsibility for oneself, for recognizing one's own agency in a matter, means being willing to accept what happenstances come as a result and then dealing with them.

I do think, however, that some of what I'm facing this weekend is a little punitive. There, perhaps, lies the role of punishments, which, perhaps, serves me as a reminder that human culture is not this idealized image of nature per se. People enjoy being punitive.

It's work-related nonsense that I'm dealing with. I made a poor choice and my wrist is getting slapped. My union steward tells me everything will be hunkydory, but meanwhile I get to enjoy a weekend off. Taking advantage of the sudden free time, I took myself out to see Margaret Cho perform, and she reminded me again that there is much to life that we often prevent ourselves from passionately embracing.

Hurry up and wait.

The planets are telling me that I can expect a lot of delayed gratification for a little while, and so far that seems to be true. I had expected to be making preparations to be in Chicago next week, and so far it doesn't look like I will be. This distresses me. I miss the Pixie terribly and these delays aren't producing the results I desire. Also, I'm itching to create, and the stained glass workshops have to wait also.

But this has also afforded me a day of delightful procrastination, which can't be all bad. In exploring other travel options, I'm alerted to nuances in my financial situation that deserve some adjustment. I got some writing done. I drank beer and glutted on some Jude Law films. I even indulged in a nap.

Normally, I'd be kicking myself for not having achieved more during the day. But I also remind myself that there are times and places when simply stopping, being, centering is action enough, especially if the planets themselves seem to be the ones telling you to sit down and shut up for a while. It's a still life kind of day.

Trust.

"Whenever you entrust your heart to a thought,
something will be taken from you inwardly.
Whatever you think and acquire, the thief will
enter from that side where you feel safe.
So busy yourself with that which is better, so
that something less may be taken from you."

Rumi

Love.

"Like sheaves of corn, he gathers you unto himself. He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant. Then he assigns you to his sacred fire that you may become sacred bread for the Gods' sacred feast. All these things shall Love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart."

Kahlil Gibran