polaroids

I'm working again in the inner city, and as I adjust, life is a still rush of images that wash to clarity in passing, like polaroids.

A young woman curled cross-legged beneath the Remand Centre, her eyes tapping Morse code up at her man, hands flashing over the blue heart chalked on the pavement.

An empty prescription bottle and two syringes left on a windowsill after the long weekend.

Last-minute calls from an election campaigner and a police chief, both aiming to volunteer for a media-covered holiday meal.

A quietly radiant teen volunteer, hair tucked back and falling loose as she tops coffee cups.

Citrus tea in styrofoam: prayer with a guy just off night shift at the men's shelter, and not so long off the street himself.

The man under the neon pink blanket outside the front door; his cracked-white vinyl shoes, his gentle smile.

A gift of small ivy in my window, from a co-worker generous too with her sense of humour, and wisdom.

It's good to be back.

peregrine means pilgrim

"We think international travel is new, but birds have been doing it for thousands of years."

Josh read about 3 peregrine falcons, tagged in Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary. They winter in places like Columbia and the Bahamas...

(but birds eat too)

This is the thought I had tonight, watching a Swainson's hawk fight just to stay in place. It's windy in Edmonton these days; fall's coming.

Maybe a rebuttal to my last post? Or can I say an extension: because Jesus says the birds always get fed, and we do too.

setting sail

My husband and I live near a river valley, and no matter what time of day I walk the view, it's morning. Because there are miracles happening, things seen fresh.

The river itself is opaque jade, slow liquid; up close it's a murky green tea, carrying the dregs of prairie silt and always flowing, yet still. Feast on silence, I write on the occasional shelf of sand.

Today Josh and I heard the soft skraw of something in the red-barked bush. Josh joked about a wheeze, a weasel!, and went off to track it, in his keen gentle way. I stayed down by the water's edge, with the hush and the flow, and eventually we both came round to spotting three wrens. Inhabiting the radius of a birch among the dogwoods, minute throats tuned not to song but to -- can we call it scratch? A delicate thrum and rattle, better than any needle on vinyl, and millions of willow-leaves ahead of machine.

So too the gulls. City-work crunches the timeless river with bridge construction, cranes and dozers letting off noise like smoke, but there are seagulls silently riding the breeze. All that unharvested light and breath to soar! Wheeling the air since they first feathered from God's hands, long before someone dreamed the wheel and axle, the engine, the fuel to feed forward! and faster!

Always flowing, yet still. In marriage, I feel this. Like any leap of faith, it's rewarded with both vertigo and clarity, with a sense of motion and a sense of this one moment. Where does the energy come from? Not my chug of consumption, that's for sure. I want to say it's more like catching a draft of light, a push of breath not my own.

Trusting the wind and the water's current and that peculiar scratch in the throat...

oceans immeasurable

There's a silky mist settling on walkways and roads, and I take this treacherous weather to mean rest. A spruce tree across from our window is crowned with last years' pinecones, waiting for this years' pollination... but instead of thinking summer I am thinking of a choppy winter ocean.

A poem helps --

"H.D." 1886 -

111. Oread

Whirl up, sea --
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us --
Cover us with your pools of fir.

A short while ago, I sat in the same medleyed-orange chair, with the same spruce-view, and spoke of oceans with a school friend. We are washed with such an ebb and flow of books, profs, practicum; people, people, people with needs, needs, needs... I said, ah let it be, what we speak is just a brief boat on a big ocean. We brave the waves but we are small. Plenty of salt-water below us. Tears, if you like.

There are funny things in the ocean, too. Creatures with huge bulbous eyes, and creatures with no eyes at all. Beautiful hues and grotesque teeth. Sometimes humour and danger at the same time, like a puffer fish.

My fiance's mom fished up hilarious things before she passed away, and scary things. Her mind struggled to keep up with her body and spirit in saying good-bye, and what she dredged from her own life's oceans were jokes and sharp emotions. Bright starfish and stinging urchins.

I think we're all oceans immeasurable. Treasure (and terror) untold. A little skiff to skim the top.

Deep calls to deep...
All your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

(Psalm 42)

where oh where
have i gone?

blogger,
did you delete me?

post-script

"To address oneself to the other in the language of the other is, it seems, the condition of all possible justice, but apparently, in all rigor, it is... impossible..."
-- Jacques Derrida

(hmmm... sounds like the incarnation.)