Layers of green-backed mountains muscle their way through bruised-blue ocean. Hovering always beside us, they serve as our constant reminder to look this way, west, when lost (an hourly occurrence with me at the wheel). The air is grey, merging as one with the sky that frames it. Those, like us, whose weather experience is unyielding, unnecessarily hot, desert sun, often boast of the abundance of light. But, unlike the pushy, insistent sunlight of eastern Washington, the light here is complex, nuanced, shy and non-committal, like a teenage girl not quite ready for a boyfriend’s advances. Colors and textures are more discernible; faces, buildings, and backgrounds more sophisticated, not blanched and obvious from the brash directness of a boastful sun. This light is earned and, as such, even more deeply appreciated for its whimsical scarcity.
Layers of green-backed mountains muscle their way through bruised-blue ocean. Hovering always beside us, they serve as our constant reminder to look this way, west, when lost (an hourly occurrence with me at the wheel). The air is grey, merging as one with the sky that frames it. Those, like us, whose weather experience is unyielding, unnecessarily hot, desert sun, often boast of the abundance of light. But, unlike the pushy, insistent sunlight of eastern Washington, the light here is complex, nuanced, shy and non-committal, like a teenage girl not quite ready for a boyfriend’s advances. Colors and textures are more discernible; faces, buildings, and backgrounds more sophisticated, not blanched and obvious from the brash directness of a boastful sun. This light is earned and, as such, even more deeply appreciated for its whimsical scarcity.
Rain here is currency, making this a rich place indeed. Its presence is more than just expected. Its certainty brings with it a comfort akin to the smug knowledge that umbrellas bring in clearly delineating tourists from townies. It’s dotage, over-eager but well-meaning, comes like a cleansing of the palette as it were for the hardened but friendly inhabitants who call this home. Anything more than about a ten percent chance of rain means, well, rain. Whatever ‘showers’ means elsewhere, in this place it is code for, Build ark and prepare thyself for an unforgiving shitload of vertical water and avoid umbrellas at all costs.
Tucked beneath the busy sky, layered mountains, and hungry sea lives a population reminiscent of a suburban Woodstock. Hippy loggers. Polite revolutionaries. Sidewalk artist news-junkies. Bag-ladies and street-dwellers with decent grammar. All of the above and us, the lone, traitorous Canadians living in Washington State trying to stumble our way around. That, with downtown streets twisting in corkscrew fashion in and out of side streets that double as alleyways that double as thoroughfares that smirk at our lostness. The roads, having been laid by drunken blind men in oneupmanship sprawl out like some wild, yet picturesque, game of snakes and ladders. Where the hell are those mountains anyway?
Those Canadians, famed for politeness, are the same ones who, upon noticing our Washington State license plate, find every way possible to angrily tailgate us into next week, regardless of our fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit. A worthwhile risk, apparently, to he who must teach a valuable lesson to these wayward American ne’er-do-wells. “But wait,” I inwardly screech, “I’m one of you.” To no avail. This is what Canadian “aggression” looks like. I meet the same guy at a red light and he’s all smiles and waves. Here in Canada, polite is but shorthand for passive-aggressive, a set-up for the inevitable near-clash of non-words.
The reason for this ascent into the murky badlands of Vancouver Island rainforest otherwise known as Nanaimo? To deposit (or abandon, depending on your perspective) our youngest son into the fray where he will begin Jazz Studies at Vancouver Island University (not an oxymoron, I assure you) and a new life figuring out the politics of labyrinthine Canadian niceties. He may have been born in Vancouver but he has spent fourteen of his eighteen years in America’s Pacific Northwest. He is the most American of anyone in our family, a family more Canadian than most Canadians.
The long love we’ve harbored (yes, I went there) for screeching gulls alighting on fishing boats, grumpy clouds bobbing over bouncing buoys, and a permanent smell of pulp laden damp help us navigate the darker waters of parentalisms. Small comfort indeed in the face of driving hundreds of miles away, the face of one’s youngest in the rearview mirror. Good thing I’m given neither to melodrama nor self-pity or I might find myself writing about it.
Today, August 16, 2014, marks the twenty-eighth anniversary of the death of a woman I never met, my mother-in-law, Nina Barkus. That event, combined with the death of my father almost one year earlier, sparked the meeting, the love affair, and subsequent twenty-six years of marriage (so far) between my wife and I.
This is for her and her mother (mam), Nina Barkus.
Rae and her mom, Nina
Grief changes a person. Grief, along with it’s drinking buddies: pain, shame, anger, betrayal – they have a way of reducing a person to his most elemental place, her lowest common denominator. A human being stripped to that bare minimum of barely surviving/survivable raw material. It can push us to become someone we don’t even recognize.
Like a persistent toothache on steroids comes grief; some unimaginable carnivore of light, a predator of hope. It is no respecter of persons. It makes its entrance like a bull in a china shop, impolitely and destructively unexpected. All one can do is stand by, hide somewhere they think to be safe from the onslaught, and observe the damage unfolding before them.
Grief is shameless. It cares not how it comes, undressed and brazenly free of restraint. Like being forced to watch one’s own daughter perform a pole dance, grief strips itself and its participants to places well beyond their own humanity, well below self-defined limits of propriety. It can haunt our conscience as much as our consciousness.
Grief is the chameleon of human experience. It lays in the center of our lives, taking the shape of its container, the color of its environment, so that it becomes maddeningly insouciant, invisible to either scrutiny or even identification. Once identified it shape-shifts again, leaving us now both to grieve and shrink from the exhausting process it is in the first place. It is the never-ending injury to its own insult.
Unlike hope, which, like water, undergirds our elusive oil refusing to mix with the more delicate undergrowth, grief kneads itself into the dough of our lives, leaving us to bloat and swell but with no vision of what might arise in its place. It is a ruthless bully, intent on bruising the softest places where lasting scars are most likely.
Grief most often accompanies a death: of a loved one, a lover, friendships, self-confidence – the list is long. It offers little other than the ominous sense that someone is watching from the shadows, leaving us unnerved as we fumble for the car keys. Just when it seems we’re safely inside, a hand grabs us from behind, refusing us the safety of ‘elsewhere.’ We do not run from it. It runs to us. We do not hide from grief because we end up hiding right behind it. Grief hears our labored breathing every time and quickly finds us out.
Grief is the Goliath of our inner experience. It stands, boasting and blethering on impudently as we soil ourselves before its not inconsiderable size and bully demeanor. “It has killed others greater than I”, we say, as we look way up to find the faceless monster bearing down in full strength upon our pitiable frame.
One could speak as well of the pitiful awakening to one’s own flawed behaviors; ways of seeing things that hurt others and oneself. Poured on top of this kind of grief is the scalding gravy of shame. It is perhaps the worst grief of all since it is often accompanied by a raking internal self-awareness of the negative kind that is seldom polite and never constructive. In fact, it generally becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nothing shapes our grief quite like the knowledge that we may have been the cause of it in another. It has a baldness about it, a merciless fait accompli that, if not well discerned and graciously attended to, becomes our very demise. It flattens the soul, kicking the air out of our spiritual gut in ways we never thought possible.
Having lost my father and both in-laws to cancer (among any number of friends and colleagues) I can confidently attest to the groaning maw of emptiness that accompanies such an ignominious demise. ‘Tis true faith indeed to smile into the great oblivion, unfairly bestowed, and sing.
Well, that was dark, one might fairly say. And they’d be correct. Is there any corrective?
Indeed there is. Having one’s heaviest grief tossed into the lap of another, whose measure of personal pain could never be fully known, but whose faith, unflinching; whose love, unwavering, produces the only known antidote: hope. Grief, be gone, for (s)he who has hope, has everything.
Her name was Susan. She was my first “official” girl friend. I was 13. She was tall and shapely and smart with the sexiest braces I’d ever seen. Her reddish brown hair careened off her shoulders like a gentle waterfall. She, like me, was caught in that strange vortex of too-smart-to-be-cool-but-too-cool-to-be-a-nerd. It made her good company. Besides, she was as awkward as I at this whole “going steady” thing. Our conversations were peppered by silences and repeated questions, more silence, then making out. I mean, what better to fill a gaping Junior High School silence? Our romance lasted an epic five weeks.
His name was Rob. That’s where the commonalities ended. He and his family had moved from somewhere in South Dakota to Calgary, into a house a couple blocks from us. He was a rough and tumble kinda guy. I hated how he could always get me to do stuff I wouldn’t normally do. Egg houses. Give wedgies. Terrorize neighborhood pets. Pull out plants and bushes. All manner of man-boy evil. He holds the record for most days missed from any school year at our Junior High. In twelve years of public education, I skipped school, on purpose, twice. I was caught both times. Both times were with Rob. I kind of miss the silly bastard.
It was my first practice with the Beaumont Pipe Band in Calgary. I saw her from across the gymnasium among a crowd of her peers. Her blue-green eyes could have split atoms and her gentle curves, spiky blond hair, and pointy, Joe Jackson shoes (it was 1982) settled that this was a girl to know. I guess I had been staring a little too long and she looked up and saw me. A gleaming smile framed in blood red lipstick against her pale, white skin sealed the deal. I was smitten. We knew then we’d be close. Close enough that, four years later, we were engaged and poised to send out our wedding invitations.
We didn’t. Her name was Vanessa. She died of bone cancer in 1992.
I always thought he had the coolest name. Lazarus Cornelius was East Indian. He was a dapper ladies man and an amazing guitarist. We were friends at College where we sought to study both of the former along with regular classes we stuffed in the cracks of our busy social calendars. He came from numerous generations of pastors from Mussoorie in the northern Indian province of Uttarakhand. Even though he was thoroughly Canadianized (meaning primarily he was a hockey fan, knew the lingo, cared little for politics and bitched about Americans) I thought it cool to have an Indian friend. It made me feel…cosmopolitan and a little chic.
And when you lived in a cow town like Calgary, that was saying something.
So, this is part of a fun blogger’s initiative called a “Blog Hop.” Here’s how it works. I was invited by writer/poet friend, Lesley-Anne Evans, to join what amounts to a writer’s pyramid scheme. The rules of the game? Tag three other bloggers, all of whom will answer four questions about writing and the writing process. We post two weeks after the previous crew. Therefore, every two weeks, the number of bloggers posting grows exponentially!
The goal is simple – to connect writers who blog in a tighter community and hopefully, enrich others looking for answers to their own writing questions. Lesley-Anne is a gifted writer and poet who spends much of her time beautifying neighborhoods, cafes, street corners…wherever really, with poetry “installations.” She also does a fun thing called “Pop-up Poetry.” To see her contribution, click here.
So, this is part of a fun blogger’s initiative called a “Blog Hop.” Here’s how it works. I was invited by writer/poet friend, Lesley-Anne Evans, to join what amounts to a writer’s pyramid scheme. The rules of the game? Tag three other bloggers, all of whom will answer four questions about writing and the writing process. We post two weeks after the previous crew. Therefore, every two weeks, the number of bloggers posting grows exponentially!
The goal is simple – to connect writers who blog in a tighter community and hopefully, enrich others looking for answers to their own writing questions. Lesley-Anne is a gifted writer and poet who spends much of her time beautifying neighborhoods, cafes, street corners…wherever really, with poetry “installations.” She also does a fun thing called “Pop-up Poetry.” To see her contribution, click here.
We begin:
1) What am I working on?
Light Write poetry/photography exhibition, June 26/14
These days, apparently, poetry is the language I speak. I’m learning to speak this language with more weight (as Lesley-Anne would say!), clarity, and authenticity. But also, simplicity. The degree to which my language learning translates into quality production remains to be seen. But, like my poetry, I’m a work in progress.
I’m pleased and proud to be an active participant in the process of broadening the literary/artistic voice in the Yakima Valley. This is a valley of varied, often harsh, beauty. Many poets, writers, artists, and musicians have stepped up to sing her praises. Recently I was chosen as one of thirty-four poets to contribute poetry for a mixed media art show featuring the work of local photographers. The event? Light Write. Read more about it here.
A snapshot of my work and process will soon be available on an exciting new Facebook chat room, Altarwork. Alongside finishing a new EP with my son, Calum as producer, I’m working on a book of sacred prayers, poetry and liturgy, listening for a book of poetry to emerge with the working title, The Beauty of Wasted Space and helping my wife in her own process of writing a novel.
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Performing at Light Write with Piper Renee-Richmond
On one level, I’m not so sure it does. However, as a poet, I am deeply influenced by old school poets. But, I seek to bring their influence to my own emerging voice, all the while writing in more contemporary genres. It gives a certain “traditional non-conventionality” to it.
I am an advocate of language for its own sake. The beauty of the words themselves brings a joy that predates the images and meanings derived from those meanings. But I also love the challenges offered poets from adapting ideas and thoughts to preexisting forms. It’s my tip of the hat to iambic pentameter, triangle poetry, Haiku or sonnets!
3) Why do I write what I do?
My words here will echo every other writer I’ve ever heard who’ve answered this question. I write because it is a compulsion. That compulsion might be out of anger or frustration surrounding some issue about which I need to weigh in, usually for my own conscience! More often than not I write because I’m inspired to ‘word up’ what I see in the world around me. My experience of that world yields a seemingly endless supply of emotional detritus needing to find its way out. When it does, I’m either writing and/or composing.
For me, poetry is contemplative prayer. It is as much a spiritual exercise as it is literary, and one of the primary ways by which I connect to my center and to the Sacred Center of all things. What is most freeing about this arrangement is how seriously and, at the same time, laissez faire, I can take my approach to the art. At least right now, it grows from much that is yet un-mined in my spirit. If you’re okay with it, I am too.
4) How does my writing process work?
Assuming the process actually does “work”, it differs depending upon what I write. It has also changed. In terms of poetry, it is becoming more about less. It was at one time a game of output. Now, it’s more about input. I read much more poetry than I ever write.
Composing prose is more an act of ‘pin the tail on the donkey.’ I chase around an elusive gem that needs to be caught, tamed just enough to stay on the page, and released back into the world for the consumption of other hungry readers. I have discovered that writing works best for me when I simply barf up whatever is bubbling in my literary stomach and then ‘read the leavings’ for anything substantial, worthy of further consideration. I’m not generally an outline kinda guy!
Well, that’s it for now. Thanks for listening! For the next stop on the blog hop, I’ve tagged the following stellar individuals.
Seymour Jacklin is one of those delightful serendipities. A fellow ex-pat, he is becoming my friend alongside his considerable skill as apoet, blogger, editor, educator, and story-teller. We’re also mutual fans and players of Celtic music! Hear him play right…here.
Kelly Belmonte is a recent friend, having met online as mutual admirer’s of one another’s work. She’s a wonderful writer and a deep soul. But, rather than just tell you, you need to go and discover more about her right…here.
Paul Bowman and I began a friendship journey in 2008 when sharing a cohort in an MA in Spiritual Formation and Leadership from Spring Arbor University. We’ve since graduated from that program and are supportive of each other’s quest to spread salt and light through words to a thirsty world. Find out more about him, his writer-wife and gorgeous kids right…here.
Nanaimo at night. Photo: Rae Kenny-Rife 
