Life of a tour guide

 

I spend my life on my bus

Talking the day through
To a bunch of tourist who
Rarely look out the windows
Or up from their phones.
I fill the bus with my voice
Stories and history and
Wonder what my wife has 
Lovingly put in my lunch box.

Inspired by Edward Leon on Unsplash

Morning meditation

Sitting quietly

Endless buds on tree branches

Bliss, dear spring awaits.

Tranquility

A fury of rain drops beat

Against tightly locked windows 

I sit in the warmth of my living 

Room and wonder, ponder, 

Wander through different ways

To occupy this gift of time.

Photos used from Paul Menz on Unsplash

My system for Year of Freedom

 

Still working on the Year of Freedom. I started by creating a mind map of things I wanted…

• to do (e.g. continue with family podcast, restart yoga)
• to think about (e.g. be more aware of my biases, willingness to have uncomfortable conversations)
• to learn (e.g. to write haiku, to drive a car again)
• to explore (e.g. gratitude practices, my inner eccentric nature)
• to express and feel (e.g. lightness of being, the power of emotional language)  

The point of focusing a whole year on the word is to transform my aspirations from something internal into something tangible. I am letting my body and mind find a daily practice.

So, I started a monthly written reflection, a weekly checklist, and a daily gratitude practice. I do not write down what day I am to do what activity. Rather, I put down the ideas and see how well they take growth in my life. And then once a month, I meet with three amazing women to discuss what we have learned, and where we are in the flow of our word. It is a gentle way of inner exploration.. 

Drawing inspired by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

I walked...

 

I walked across the bridge
To nowhere, but felt the pull
Of long days past drawing me
Down beyond unspoken words
Or forgotten caresses to a
Sanctuary of times to come.

 
Drawing inspired by Erol Ahmed and Amanda Klamrowski on Unsplash

North wind, go away

North wind, go away
Spring winds around my ankles

Grass blades sing sweetly.

Drawing inspired by bharath g s on Unsplash

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

My daydreams

These are my daydreams these days... taking a train or plane again to visit my children, going for a walk with a friend and we wander where-we-may with disregard whether we must wear our masks or not, sitting in a garden some place in the countryside and watching the dawn rise over a lake, walking to work in the morning with a sense of lightness, getting into a friend's car who is taking me somewhere new for a day, and of course, someday visiting family and friends in Ste. Lucie, Gibson, Copenhagen, Singapore, Vienna and Grenada.

How I miss you all.

* This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project. 

Constant companion

Can a mind expand without the

Constant companion of the sea

Whose song is both rythmn 

And wave. One after another...

This is. I am. You are. Here.

Humpty Dumpty

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, All the King's horses and all the King's men, Couldn't put Humpty together again."

The Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is a mystery to me. The way that I see it, Humpty Dumpty must have been royalty of sort. I suspect he was the brilliant spoilt youngest son of a very pompous sovereign. The problem with the Humpty Dumpty’s rhyme is that the real lesson or moral of the story takes place before he climbs up onto that wall. 

The moral of the story is not about falling or how useless the king’s men are. No, the story is about how Humpty Dumpty got up on the wall in the first place. What sort of life did he live that he came up against the wall? Why was the wall there? Was he a dreamer? A rebel? Was he running away from stifling sovereignly duties?

I knew a Humpty Dumpty in my childhood. He was an architect, possessed with grand visions about the importance of architecture and his own brilliance. He possessed a fine appreciation for art and nature. He was the first person I met, who felt there was absolutely no separation between the two. Art was nature. Nature art. 

His family and mine were befriended from the time of my birth. Life was fascinating when he was around. For example, he would take us children out digging for Arawak and Carib Indian artifacts. We would be out under the hot afternoon sun, getting mud under our nails, fire-ant bites on our legs, all the while trying to pry the pottery shards from the grips of the earth. He would transport us back hundreds of years to the time when the Arawak and Carib Indians populated the island. 

Then he would reprimand us severely if we whined about heat or thirst or hunger. We were explorers, archaeologists, and not sissies. He could get incredibly angry about things we couldn’t comprehend. 

In the evening, having changed into more formal attire, he would charm a room full of dinner guests. He would talk art, history, and politics. It did not matter what the topic of interest was, he knew everything there was to know. Or, at least so it seemed to me as a child and young adult. 

Eventually, I began to see the wall on the horizon of his life. His furious intelligence turned to fury. His magnificent visions became hallucination. He started to climb his wall built with bricks of egotism, self-centeredness, megalomania, dementia, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer. Tragically, all the King’s horses and all of us king’s men, we couldn’t put him back together again.

(This is a blog post from 2008 that I am republishing under my Growing Up and Growing Old project)

Unsung heroes

We are meeting this morning to talk about our theme year. Today's exercise explores the questions, "Who would you invite to a dinner party if you could choose anyone living or departed?", "What would you talk about?", and "What would you serve?".

Deciding on the guest list was harder than I would have thought it would be. I did this before about 15 years ago, and even though I still more or less like the list of dinner guests, I wanted to invite some new guests. It took a while figure out the right strategy. Finally, I started looking at articles of "women in history". Some of the lists were very Hollywood-biased, others not.

There were quite a few on the various lists that I had now heard of, so I chose five. Then I added Emily Dickinson because her genius was not discovered before her death. Also, I needed a poet in the group. So my guest list is:  

• Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005)
• Miriam Makeba (1932–2008)
• Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
• Junko Tabei (1939–2016)
• Mae Jemison (1956–)
• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

I would like to invite them to have a picnic in the woods somewhere on the east coast of Canada on a warm autumn day. We would explore such questions as:

 
What was it like to live alone with a belief that you know is true and others feel is threatening?
What were you born with that others were not?
Describe your inner creative landscape?
Who or what was your greatest teacher?
 
Photo by Ahmad Omari and Mariah Hewines on Unsplash

Pumping water from the well

(Dave and Karen visiting the grandparents in Oxford Mills, Ontario)

When was the last time

That joy of discovery

Travelled across your smile?

Greeting neighbours

There is the one woman

With her four-legged friend 

(A creme-coloured Labrador)

She often carries and sips from

A white tin cup of coffee as 

She crosses the street light

On their way to the canal.

She knows me as the elder

Who  constantly walks the 

Pathways around the cathedral

Every day, 10,000 steps

All the while listening to my

Podcasts or talking to my

Colleagues at work at home.

We nod and smile at each other

From behind our FFP2 masks. 

There are so few these days

Who do this... smile and greet 

A passing neighbour.

* This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.

Sick in bed

~ reading ~ sleeping ~ reading ~ snoozing 

~ a sigh here, a sigh there  ~ shifting the blankets 

~ sipping my sickness away

Photos by Brooke Lark and Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

The spring coming

I wait for you, spring

Not because of the promise

But the wind singing.

Babinka

A poem from Anna about her grandmother Mária

You didn’t let me write the letter "A" using two stokes,

It needed to be only one.

You didn’t let me blow my recorder through my nose, 

I had to use my mouth.

You made me count ten long seconds,

Before I could swallow a mouthful of cold and sparking coke.

Now you are gone. 

I write the letter "A" using one stroke.

I blow the clarinet through my mouth.

I don’t like coke anymore.

I found you in me.

* This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.