the tree of life on my morning path

The other day I went for a morning walk upstream McVicar's Creek. I went with my friend Lilian Mattar Patey. I first bicycled to Shuniah Knox United Church, where Lilian is interim minister, to meet her. We then walked north through the neighbourhood, behind Balsam Pit and along Margaret Street to reach the trail by the creek. Along the path, we saw a bunch of marsh marigolds ringing a swamp. Swamps always catch my eye as 'swamp' or 'bog,' which translate to 'suo' in Finnish, is in the very name of Finland in the Finnish language: Suomi. A few steps later on our path, we saw this amazing tree in someone's backyard. It was shining in the morning light; there was no missing it. The tree reminded me of the comforting and desirous beauty of the Tree of Life. It's sheltering arms, perfect symmetry, expansive canopy, circular space, and dusting of white flower petals caught our eye.  

Continuing on our way, we saw this pile of huge stones. I told Lilian that in Suomenusko, the old Finnish beliefs before Christianity came to Finland, stones as well as trees were seen to have spirits. People conversed with stones and trees for healing and for wisdom, going out into the forest for the medicine of trees and stones. Of course, stones and trees have been symbolically important to many peoples and cultures. I told Lilian, well, I don't need to tell a Palestinian like you of the importance of stones. Today stones are the remnants of the Palestinian houses that Israel has destroyed and demolished. Palestinian youth take up stones as resistance against occupation. Indeed,  a new documentary called The Stones Cry Out uses the metaphor, reality, and spiritual strength of stones to tell the story of the ongoing Nakba of Palestine, focusing on its Christian population and heritage.

Lilian's family story is part of the larger dispossession of Christians from Palestine. In the short 6 m. video above you can hear Lilian tell some of the story of her family's displacement from Palestine. She was born in Haifa, but because of the Zionist militia takeover in 1948 her family was forced to flee and found refuge in Al Quds / Jerusalem; however, they eventually met more tragedy. By telling her family's story, Rev. Mattar Patey hopes that people will broaden their understanding of the Palestinian heritage of what is now called  Israel. In 1948, Jerusalem was designated an international administration zone yet, as Lilian's story is an example, since 1967 Israel has taken large parts of it by force and today by demolition and the continuing displacement of Palestinians from East Jerusalem. Since burying her father, Lilian has not been back to her home.

The Calling of Directions

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In April, which is poetry month, I attended a poetry workshop with Marilyn Dumont, one of my favourite poets. To prepare for the workshop, she asked us to collect words that are part of a history, or that someone at a specific time would use. Naturally, and because I had recently attended a Finno-Ugric drum workshop with Dalva Lamminmaki, I turned to my Finnish heritage. Also, I had been thinking of words that can call up beauty, so I had been scribbling words of pleasing sounds into my scribbler. In the end, I wrote up 10 lists of words. 

Here are two lists: 

bells

reindeer skin

drum

protection

help

susurring

shushing

swishing

journey

antlers

birch bark headdress

keyhole 

spirit animal

dived

descended

climbed

slept

dreamt

marveled

encircled

trembled

honoured

scattered  

rained

At the workshop, Marilyn asked us to play with the word cache we had collected and let the words lead us to new patterns and sounds. We were to convey something palpable through juxtapositions, through sound synchronicities. Dwell in disorder, she said. Pay attention to images, textures, colours. Commit to unfolding language, following sound to discover meaning. Above all, we were not to think about product, but to enjoy playing with language. In my playing, I combined some of the words I had collected and, eventually, playing with space too, I shaped the poem below. I added a title and fiddled with a few words and phrases.

The Calling of Directions

 

Itään: to the East

As stars slept

rocks journeyed

Deep blue dreamt of dancing

Gifts scattered, flying from

the rumble of reindeer,

the utterance unnameable.

Etelään: to the South

On the mountain carved with syllabics

in the forest of illusions

Whispers dreamt red ochre

Rattle rained flying antlers

in a shaman language

          old, drunk, ancestral.

Länteen: to the West

Rattle scattered blue sound,

echoing soft inscriptions

Small bells dreamt cold water pearls,

falling forever forward

River rained moon-eyed fish,

          silver-skinned delicious.

Pohjoiseen: to the North

A shape-shifting old woman,

skiing overhead, on the horizon

a surprise of animal gifts

Lime green sky laughing

Snow-maiden follows Drum across

the upper branches of the Great Tree

Travels on a Finno-Ugric drum journey

The scent of burning sage signals the opening of ritual space.

Small bells circle, gently breaking up energy.  As the drum stick swishes across the reindeer skin stretched over the frame, sussuring sounds spiral outward.  

Soon, the drum begins its song, and she is sent on her journey into a tunnel of darkness.

As the beat of the drum vibrates through her, different animals' faces appear one by one before her closed eyes. Squirrel. Blue Jay. Crow. Rabbit. Deer. Dog. Moose. Raccoon. Mole. Bee. Wasp. Butterfly. Mouse...no, it was too big. Was it Rat? No, it was Mouse. Mouse! she wondered incredulously, was Mouse to be her Spirit Animal?

No. Suddenly Ilves appeared.

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His large yellow eyes loomed before her, staring into her soul.

Suddenly, she was on the back of Ilves, the  large huntress. The cat ran through the back woods. It was night, winter, snow covered the ground. Ilves ran powerfully through the dark woods, snaking through the trees, comfortable in its territory. Running, running. The dark night sky, a canopy of indigo overhead, was filled with glittering stars that glinted back from the snow fields. Running, running. Flying past snow covered trees. Flying over snow encrusted ground.

Suddenly, she was sucked into a small hole in the earth, pulled down a vortex, her arms and hands last, waving. The lovi had opened up, sending her deeper on her journey.

She found herself under the earth, swimming amongst the tangled roots of trees, of the birches, poplars, balsams and black spruce above. She pushed the roots aside, swimming through their tentacles. She was unimpeded. Her arms were strong, her hair long, weaving smoothly through the tendrils of roots. She swam and swam. 

She entered deep indigo blue water, dark blue like the sky above. She was swimming deep along the bottom of Lake Superior. The place where silence was born.

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A large sturgeon floated by.

A white door opened to the right, a ghostly portal beckoning her. Light emanates from it, pulsing soft rays of haunting enticement. She swam through the watery portal, passing through it.

She found herself on a cliff. But now she is Ilves. Her hands are large powerful paws and she is running in the forest, along the edge of a high cliff. She runs and runs. Her energy is boundless.

There is a large valley below. She stops to bask in the sunlight, curls up on the edge of the cliff. It is a sunny day, spring.  All seems calm and fresh. Then, she is told to fly off the cliff.

She jumps. She sails, soars through the sky. She lands on all fours on the earth in the forest. She is on a canyon floor. She starts to dig and dig. The earth is black, soft and rich with decay. The scent of decomposing earth fills the air.

She finds a bone, one bone. It is not big. She digs and digs. She finds some pages. They are loose; they flutter in the wind. Then, her digging done, she leaps and flies straight up into the sky.

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It is is night again, indigo blue, the sky covered in stars. She is a woman again. She is floating on her back, streaming through the night sky as if floating downstream in a river. She floats and floats, restful like a baby calmed by a warm bath until she lands by a big rock at the shore of a lake.

She climbs up on the rock and sits and looks across the water. It is Midsummer Day. The waves lap softly. The sun is warm. The air is calm.

She stands up. She is naked.

Christmas in the looking glass

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It's the beginning of December, and I'm already getting irritated by the glee of Christmas that I find everywhere I turn. People all around me, folks on Facebook, work colleagues, and people who should know better are all falling into the well of simulacra, Baudrillard's idea that what is false is more believable and desirable than actual reality.

The more untrue, the more we believe it to be true. The bigger the illusion, the happier our delusion.


When are Western Christians today going to move beyond the myth that they have created about the Holy Land? Believing in the story about Bethlehem in the Bible as if it were alive today? When are the majority of Christians going to wake up to what is really happening in Bethlehem today? Do they know there is an Apartheid Wall built by the Israelis and policed by the IDF that restricts the movement of the residents of Bethlehem? Do they know that the people of Bethlehem need passes and permits? Do they care?

It's this living in the looking-glass world where everything is childishly innocent and joyful that I find so irritating.

Oh Come All Ye Faithful, indeed. Get ye head out of the Christmas card and look hard at the wall.

Einstein's ghost

Walking by a bulletin board, I saw that a local writing group has an open mike next week; the topic is "Mystery." Somehow, the first two lines of a poem immediately entered my mind. I was too busy at school  to scribble down my thoughts, but before I left my office, I tucked "a woman's notebook," an old empty journal Margaret from the Northern Women's Bookstore had once given me, into my packsack (backpack), pedaled home in the dusk, then wrote these lines. 

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Einstein’s Fears

The mystery is how did Albert Einstein’s

ghost appear before my eyes this morning?

He’s a genius, I know, but I wasn’t expecting

his time-traveling shape-shifting presence

on my screen. He wasn’t a hologram

His message from the other side was clear:

A warning to the American people. Materializing

from “the existence of another kind of matter, the ether”¹

he warned of the rise of a new political party,

the Freedom Party, whose name belied its “gangster methods”

“the terrorists,” he said, “have preached an admixture

of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority."²

Before he went back through the pixel portal

of his Letter to the Editor, NYT 1948

He warned of a violent future for Israel

if Menachem Begin’s party gains power on a platform of

Jewish ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.

“Albert,” I called before he disappeared into the

“ether of the general theory of relativity,”³

“Your worst fears have come true.”

Albert Einstein’s words from

²  Letterto the Editor, New York Times, Dec. 4, 1948

¹ and ³ “Ether and the Theory of Relativity,” address delivered May 5, 1920, University of Leyden.

Killing the Ancestor

Awhile back, with dismay I read about the 800 year old cedar that was cut down earlier this year in a  protected forest, Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park, on Vancouver Island. The Ancestor was hauled away by poachers, who saw Her Majesty as commodity, to sell perhaps to make cedar shingles for roofing. How could a tree of this size be hauled away, which would require heavy equipment and perhaps a logging truck, without being noticed? Without anyone seeing the criminal activity? Part of the blame certainly lies with job cuts to park personnel. While at one time, 40 park rangers protected the forests, due to neo-liberal cuts, only 10 full time rangers patrol 1000 parks.  

Today I read about the 3,500 year old Pond Cypress, called The Senator, that was burned down earlier this year by a 26 year old woman who had hidden inside the tree to do drugs with a friend and lit a fire so they could see to smoke crystal meth. This Ancestor was the fifth oldest tree in the world. Tellingly, this tree also suffered from neo-liberal cuts and the neglect of the natural / spiritual heritage. As reported in the Orlando Sentinel:

 The crime against The Senator started decades ago, when Seminole County let Big Tree Park become a haven for drugs and prostitution while doing next to nothing to protect one of the oldest trees on the planet.

Officials with the Sheriff’s Office have long acknowledged the park’s seedy after-hours reputation.

There was no concerted effort to stop the mischief that went on there after dark. No security cameras. No lights. Cursory patrols. Only a fence around The Senator’s base, and apparently not a very good one considering what happened in January.

trying to tanka

I set my goal to write five poems last week for the Random Acts of Poetry outing yesterday. In an earlier post, I posted "Trickster Translation," which I read on air live on the Betty Howls show at LU Radio. I read "The Divine Goodness: A Tree Called Sacred" (which I posted earlier) at Starbucks in Chapter's. I also adapted my rant against John Baird's UN speech that I posted last post, into poetic form; I'll post that later. 

The poem I read at the Farmer's Market was the shortest poem I wrote. It was very hectic at the market as we (the poetry word crew) were amongst the pumpkins, squashes, apples and other winter vegetables. The colour of these foods just draw people to them. 

Earlier in the week, I tried my hand at writing a tanka, which is an ancient Japanese form. There are five lines, each with a specific syllable length: 5 7 5 7 7.  Often, nature, the seasons, and emotions are the theme. Of course, as a novice of this form, I fell short. After I finished it, I realized I had written 5 7 5 7 5 instead. Well, modifications are part of the tanka's popularity in the West today, so I hope I can be forgiven. Next one I write, I'll try to be more faithful to tradition. 

Here's what I came up with:

Homeward

sweet smell of decay
yellow paper leaves crushing
surprise shout of red
My bike under the grapevine
I fall into hush. 

As properly I need two more syllables in that last line, here it is again with 5 7 5 7 7 form:

Homeward

sweet smell of decay
yellow paper leaves crushing
surprise shout of red
My bike under the grapevine
Headfirst I fall into hush. 

FinnThunder play: Old Woman & the Barefoot Maiden

My sisters and I have been busy. Here's part three of our contribution to FinnThunder 2012, starting tomorrow. Our performance piece is a one act play. The characters are an Old Woman (Vanha Akka), Crow, a corpse, Spring Maiden, Suvi, Black Swan, Tuonen Tytti (Queen of Death/Tuonela), Spirit dancers, and a Narrator! Sat. July 28, 2 pm, Finlandia Club, Bay St. Thunder Bay. $10 or free with FinnThunder day pass or weekend pass.  

The inspiration for the Suvi summer woman who ends our play was this old book that I once found at a Finlandia Club rummage sale. It's a book of poetry from the 1940s in Finnish. The poems are wonderful old poems, all dedicated to nature, to the lakes, rivers, sky, clouds, flowers, fields, and cliffs. The book cost me either 10c or 25c. Suvi means summer, the heart of summer. I laid the book in my bed of thyme and doesn't she look pretty there!

Finn Thunder: song performance

My sister, Della, will be performing/singing her story Echo of the Ancestors, this coming Sunday at the FinnThunder Festival. Hope to see you there!

ancient lions I have known

The Lion ~ by Gwendolyn MacEwen

To love is to be remarkable, and flawless.
It is to wear the yellow crown of a flawless beast
Forever.

It is to inhabit the flawless and exceeding universe
Forever.

It is to summon the wonderful numbers
Which add up to the mighty stars.
It is learning to divide and multiply by these numbers.

I swear by all the famous, ancient lions I have known
That the mighty children yet to come
Will foster finer stars.

For they are the true lords, born of morning,
Whose coming will call us down
Like a deck of cards.

To love is to be remarkable, and flawless.
It is to wear the yellow crowns
Of all the gods.
Lion bas-relief on the Ishtar Gate, Babylon. In the 1920s-30s, Ishtar's Gate was excavated in Iraq then taken (stolen) in pieces by the archaeologists and reconstructed in Germany. Most of Ishtar's Gate glorifies the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (the largest part is, however, in storage), with parts of the gate and lions in museums all over the world, including the ROM in Toronto. And what's in Iraq? A fake gate.
A piece of the Processional Way of the Ishtar Gate at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. I took this photo last summer when I visited the ROM. I was stunned when I came upon the lion bas-relief. At first I thought it was a fake, a replica. I stood in front of the lion for quite some time, shocked as I realized it was authentic. I felt distress. How is it that a piece of Ishtar's Gate is in Toronto and in Iraq there is only a fake? Of what injustice am I hailed into?

word of inspiration: listen

On New Year's Eve, in my kitchen as I was making a pot of tea with dried rose petals that my sister-in-law, Zeina, gave me before I left Lebanon this summer, sprigs of fresh lavender from the garden planter I brought into the house before the night frosts, and a bag of bramble and strawberry leaves and linden flowers, my sister was telling me that rather than a New Year's Resolution, the buzz on blogs was about having a one word inspiration to set the course for your creative and spiritual focus for the coming year.

"Oh," I immediately said, "I know my word. My word is LISTEN."

From my red 1969 Webster's Dictionary:

list, [Original form of listen, which is a lengthened form from A.Sax. hlystan, to listen, from hlyst, hearing, like Icel. hlusta, to listen, from hlust, an ear, allied to A.Sax. hlosnian, to hear; W. clust, an ear; L. cluo, Gr. kluo, to hear; and to E. loud.] To hearken; to attend; to listen--listen, lis'n. To attend to closely with a view to hear; to give ear; to hearken.

Here is my list of 10 things to Listen to, although I am sure that Listen will bring me what I need to Listen to, unasked and unexpected. Nevertheless, as a start to listening, here is my list for Listen:

1. listen to what someone is saying. Without interrupting. Without distractions. Without multi-tasking. Without trying to make him or her feel better. Without telling him or her what my opinion is on it. Just listen with intent to another person voicing what she or he wants to say.

2. listen to what other people are not saying. Listen to their silences. Listen to long pauses between words. Listen to what is left unsaid. Accept the silence. Let the silence be. Attend to silence.

3. listen to the rustle of birds' wings as they fly overhead; listen to the winter chirping of purple finches, chickadees, and sparrows; listen to the croak of crows; listen to the many trickster callings of starlings.

4. listen to my inner voice of wisdom. Listen when she speaks as a young girl. Listen when she speaks as an old woman. Listen when she scolds. Listen when she guides. Listen when she speaks from a place of experience. Listen when she speaks from joy. Listen when she laughs. Listen when she howls like a wolf. Listen when she twitches her ears like a rabbit.

5. listen to elderly Finnish Canadian people speaking Finnish.

6. listen to poems, to the sudden breath-stopping surprises unleashed from their words

7. listen to random phrases: baby cardinals; begin to write; dress myself with snow; open the window; stirring the stars; it's nearly night again; begin recording your dreams; visited by owls; moon like a canoe; shedding pink petals

8. listen to things that are not normally seen as speaking to us: trees, a street, clouds, the river flowing under the ice, the haunted moaning of the ice by the lake shore, dog paws padding on packed snow, the squirrel munching a maple key, the wind creeping through cracks in this old house; the snow, drifting

9. listen to curiosity when she comes by. Listen to her when she comes dressed as an old Italian man who lives alone with hummingbirds in his front porch, pigeons in his eaves, and tears in his eyes.

10. listen to breath.

the blue glow of Earth

"the soft blue glow" of Earth below the Moon. photo by Douglas Wheelock, NASA astronaut.

A necessary diversion from my shopping story: the wonder of our beautiful Earth. I stumbled upon these amazing photos and I wanted to share their magic with you. They are Douglas Wheelock's photos and words from space. He tweeted images and words from space this past fall. I have spent most of the last hour going through his photos, dumbstruck by the sheer wonder and sacredness they evoke. The peace and awe that Wheelock shares through his words is tangible. You can find more of his incredibly beautiful and stirring images here.

"On this sacred night, when the aurora looked like rain, I reflected back on my childhood dreams of flying a spaceship through the infinite expanse of space... to be among the mosaic of billions of stars, and visit other worlds. Now as I look from space at our planet I realize that had I been born and spent my childhood here in space... how much greater and more vivid my dreams would have been to visit this blue planet."

"Another breathtaking sunset…we get 16 of these each day in Earth orbit, each one a treasured moment. That beautiful thin blue line is what makes our home so special in the cosmos. Space is cool…but, the Earth is a raging explosion of life in a vast sea of darkness."

night view of the Nile River

"An explosion of color, motion, and life painted on the canvas of our wonderful world. This is a section of the Great Barrier Reef off the eastern coast of Australia, captured through a 1200mm lens. I think even the great Impressionists would be awestruck with this natural display."

"My 100th Tweet!...Of all the beauty of our planet, I am completely awestruck when I get a chance to watch the dance of Aurora …simply breathtaking… “Surrounded by Your glory, what will my heart feel?... I can only imagine…”