Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
Matthew 11:28
The itinerant teacher who spoke that invitation and offered rest was wearing dusty sandals when he spoke those words, not snowy boots. There were no mittens on his gesturing hands, either. The landscape around the Sea of Galilee was nothing at all like this small park a mere two blocks from our home.
Why this photo should call up that long-ago promise of rest, I’m not sure. Indeed, I can’t even explain why I recently chose this 5-year-old photo as my computer background, after stumbling upon it by chance. Ever since, it has haunted me, drawn me in. It wants to become the subject of some grand reflection, no doubt, but its complete and inscrutable silence has left me without words.
I offer it simply as an invitation to look and meditate. Let your heart be still for awhile.
For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Writing a blog, which I’ve done for almost four years now, is a lonely affair. I’m not complaining, since writing is almost always a lonely pursuit. Every now and then, though, I do think more particularly about my readers and try to imagine where you might live, or what we might talk about if we could have coffee together someplace interesting–in your country or mine.
Writing about Christmas is an additional challenge because of all the designated holidays that I am familiar with, this one has been written about and sung about and indulged in and celebrated more than any other. Surely everything that can be said about Christmas, concerning whichever grand narrative you choose to focus on, has been said – many times over. A wish list, on the other, can be new every year.
Unfortunately, these days the world seems locked into so many conflicts and stupid flirtations with apocalyptic scenarios that the very act of creating a wish list seems frivolous. One could, of course, go big and like one of my grandchildren, add to the list “the moon.” Why not? Why not ask for the utterly unlikely, such as world peace?
Instead, I will retreat as I often do to the small things, for they matter more than we think: it is out of little actions that our habits of mind are formed, and it is out of our habits of mind that we make the big decisions and the crucial speeches that can change the world. Well, our own small spheres at least.
So, the list:
At least once, in the days before and after Christmas, I wish for you the time to watch an entire sunrise, preferably in a place without street lights and power lines. In my part of the world, the days are very short now, and the sun rises after breakfast, as it were. Take a cup of coffee or cocoa with you and watch the subtle first hints of color transform themselves into a blaze of glory. It is always a miracle, especially when the nights have been long and dark.
I wish for you two uninterrupted hours or more in which to curl up in a comfy chair or wide window seat where you can let yourself become utterly absorbed in a good novel. Preferably a classic or a young adult book that will bring you into a world that has a stable moral centre and in which a happy ending can be anticipated.
I wish for you many warm hugs and I-love-you’s. There might be gifts involved as well, but they aren’t that necessary, are they?
I hope that in your home, your office, your favorite hang-out, there are flowering plants. In my world, that’s most likely to be poinsettias, but maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be near a spectacular amaryllis in full bloom. Or maybe where you live, there are gorgeous flowering shrubs outdoors. Let there be someplace where you can smell the earth and savor the complexity of petals with their heavenly tints.
And this last wish might seem perverse or more like an admonition than a wish: I hope that there is at least one opportunity for a phone call or an in-person meeting in which you can say, “I’m sorry,” and be heard and still feel safe. We are none of us faultless. Without a doubt, there are individuals who need to hear an apology that will open up possibilities for better understanding. Christmas inevitably contains some tough stuff; it’s the fall-out, I suspect, from over-wrought expectations of all sorts. I wish for you one interval of time, however brief, in which hope can arise and love increase.
In our church calendar, the last Sunday before Advent is called “In Memoriam.” Part of the morning service is given to remembering all those who were part of the church community, however tangentially, who have died in the previous year. As each name is read, together with their relations, a candle is lit. Gradually the darkened sanctuary is warm with candlelight. We sit in quietness, remembering, perhaps allowing a few tears to slip down our cheeks. But it is good. All these beloved should not be forgotten, for they have played a part in our lives.
These days of Novemberish darkness, when the prairie world where I live has turned into a monochrome study of the color of dead foliage, I am paying more attention to small items of beauty indoors. Besides the satisfaction provided by ever-generous houseplants, I have been given joy by what I’m going to call “memory pieces.” There are other people, besides our family and friends, who should not be forgotten.
Years ago, in our first visit to the Black Hills of South Dakota, the closest grocery store to our campground was in Keystone, the tourist town next to Mt. Rushmore. Amidst a host of typical souvenir shops with all manner of kitsch, from the mildly amusing to the downright offensive, we discovered one shop (called The Indians) that was owned and run by Indigenous artists and entrepreneurs. There were some cheaper articles (rent has to be paid, after all), but mostly the shelves were stocked with beautiful indigenous art work from all over the USA. Our hearts were quieted, our sense of justice gratified.
As Mennonite pacifists, we had found the ubiquitous gun culture displayed on t-shirts, gun holsters, posters, etc., deeply disturbing. As life-long hikers in the Canadian Rockies, we were more dismayed than astonished at what the sculptors (aka dynamiters) had done to Mt. Rushmore, formerly a sacred mountain for the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux peoples. The official name of the sculpture is “Shrine of Democracy.” Given that the establishment of American democracy required the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples, the name seems bitterly ironic.
Years later, when we revisited the Black Hills, we spent almost all our time hiking through mostly unspoiled territory, but we did take time to revisit “The Indians” art store in Keystone because I wanted to purchase a few more items to take home with us – items of remembrance. Remembrance of those who are still with us, despite past efforts to erase, or at least forget, their presence.
One of those little glass dishes now sits by our kitchen sink as a soap dish, adding color along with sanitation. Every time I rinse soap residue from the pebbles, I am touched again by the loveliness of the glass work.
The pebbles themselves are a memory of a quiet afternoon on the beach of Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, BC. It was late summer; the grass was a uniform dry brown, the flower beds looked disheveled, listless. They wanted to go to sleep for the winter, but it was still too hot. So we chose not to explore the park. Instead, we went down to the ocean beach, planted our bums near some driftwood and ran our fingers through the sand, picking up tiny rocks to admire their uniqueness.
There is something about touching stone, whether it be a boulder or a pebble or something in between, that feels like eternity. Celtic mystics have written about the “thin places” on earth, where the mystery of the divine Other draws near. Where our human selves become small and insignificant, yet also miraculous and exultant. Pebbles are not usually considered such thin places; they’re just pebbles.
Some places mysteriously become part of the structure of the heart, as much as valves and arteries and veins, though undetectable by ECGs. Jasper, Alberta, at first just a pretty place to work for the summer and make money off generous tourists, turned into a heart dwelling before I understood what had happened.
Lake Annette, in the photo above, was definitely part of that process. Even on my first day in Jasper, as I sorted out what my job was going to be and where I was going to live, I felt wrapped around by the beauty of the mountains. My heart had been wooed already in childhood when I had traveled once or twice through the Rockies. Now, in my first young adult adventures away from home, I found more than grandeur or adventure.
Slowly but surely the quality of silence inherent in the rough gathering of stone and water and pine and spruce drew me in, offering a solitude of soul I think I’d been longing for all along. Oh, I hiked with friends and explored the trails and lesser lakes around Jasper; we borrowed bicycles and rejoiced in our developing stamina; we swung gently on the playground swings in evenings off and watched the sun disappear in a way that it never did on the prairies.
Much as I loved sharing all these moments with friends, and then with a boyfriend, I treasured the times of aloneness when I belonged to the landscape and to myself. Expectations gone. Fearfulness dismissed. I was learning how to breathe and be. To smile and to be happy. Ach, that word is over-used and inadequate here. I was exalted, exultant.
I took the photo above just a few years ago, at the tail end of a road trip in the last days of summer. I had retired by then, metaphorically speaking also in the last days of summer, becoming mellower, less driven, more practiced in the art of resting in silence, never imagining then how important that art would be in the summer of 2023.
We visited Lake Annette again last summer, in 2022. Jasper is, thank God, still a small mountain town. Still dependent on tourists and skiers and hikers, but not over-developed and commercialized past the point of help. The mighty Athabasca River and the surrounding mountains have limited the growth of the town to where it is now and has been for decades. There are signs enough of wealth and privilege, but the hiking trails remain accessible to all, never mind how expensive or ratty the boots of the hikers may be. The campgrounds now boast more massive RVs than simple backpacker tents, but there are still plenty of those tents, with bicycles nearby.
Many of my once favorite trails are now too busy for my liking (the Valley of Five Lakes is practically standing room only on a lovely summer day), yet there are still reflection-perfect ponds near half-forgotten trails where crowds of marsh marigolds celebrate in joy and the shyer wood lilies lurk in shade. There is also plenty of space along the rocky edge of the river where one may be alone to meditate and turn over small stones in the hand. Hours pass unnoticed while inner voices go quiet against the immortal voice of the river.
In this summer when all travel became impossible for me, let alone the usual stay in the Rockies, I have needed all the fortitude I could muster to practice contentment with much solitude indoors. However, that mysterious grace in the universe that drops the right book off the shelf into hands that had expected nothing is still at work. Anam Cara by John O’Donohue had been given to me by a dear friend decades ago. I think I read it then; I don’t remember if I finished it. I was probably not ready for its Celtic mysticism. Now, after having sat, practically invisible, on my bookshelf for who knows how many years, it demanded to be read.
And read it I did. With increasing interest and pen in hand for underlining. I am grateful, if not quite grateful enough yet to bless the weeks and weeks of enforced bed rest that led me to pick up Anam Cara. The section titled “Aging: An Invitation to New Solitude” might once have terrified me. Now, flat in bed for more hours in the day than I once would have thought endurable, I could read this without being frightened: “A new quietness settles on the outer frame of your active life, on the work that you have done, the family that you have raised, and the role that you have played. Your life takes on a greater stillness and solitude.” I doubt that O’Donohue was thinking of the kind of enforced stillness that I was enduring.
Nevertheless, I could see his point that we often “miss out on the great treasures of our lives because we are so restless. In our minds we are always elsewhere. We are seldom in the place where we stand [or we lie!] and in the time that is now.” Between the regrets over the past and the worries of the future, O’Donohue observes, we have little energy left for savoring what is in front of us.
I’m inclined to counter with an argument that we find our meaning in life through learning to recognize divine guidance in the past and setting our goals for the future. There is a time and place for revisiting past mistakes and offering apologies, for instance, just as there is a time and place for resolving to do better in the future and even making promises that can’t be fulfilled in the now.
As always, a single viewpoint doesn’t show us the whole scene, let alone what may be found in the next valley beyond the hill we’re now climbing. Which, I think, O’Donohue understood better than I do. So I grant him the final words.
Stillness is vital to the world of the soul. If, as you age, you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, and the places where your soul-shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to yourself.
This was an unexpected gift for Easter—well, sort of. The first of three, it opened fully only two days after Easter. I have not yet learned the art of caring for amaryllis in such a way that I can plan the likely date of flowering; that this one came so close to Easter was a blessed surprise.
All during Holy Week, I watched the developing bud with intense hope, praying that it would open in time to delight our visiting grandchildren. My disappointment is eased by remembering their eager faces as they speculated just when that swelling bud would begin to divide itself and when the fattest one would finally spread wide to the sun. I did send them pictures! Too bad the photo didn’t capture a subtle glitter on the topmost petals that is visible only in certain angles of light.
The perfect symmetry of this huge flower (6 inches across and slightly taller than that) fascinates me; it draws my eye from the darkest pink streaks down into the verdant green of the throat where the ovary is hidden. The stamens (male) hold the pollen on the anther at the end of the filament; the pistil in the centre (female) has the pollen receptor, or the stigma, at the end of the style. In this photo, the stigma has not yet opened out and curved up to receive pollen. The ovary, which becomes the seed holder in a fertilized flower, develops just a bit later as the flower begins to wilt.
All of that information is courtesy of several websites that I read through before beginning to write. It had not been at all necessary for simply meditating on such exquisite beauty. Gazing at the lines, the color shading, the texture, the balance of the whole—which is so much more than the assembly of the individual parts—created silence within me. Words became unnecessary. Thought itself held still.
Strangely, looking at the photo does not provoke the same response; it simply calls forth a memory of the silence. Perhaps the difference lies in the absence of the light. For the flower seems to hold light inside itself, as if the petals breathe in light as we breathe in air. In their presence, the heart too gains light and lightness.
Serendipitously, as the amaryllis readied itself to display glory, a book nudged itself into my notice: Solitude by Michael Harris. I no longer remember who or what highlighted the title for me, but its subtitle—In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World—demanded attention.
Full disclosure here: there is no doubt that in my case, this book is preaching to the choir; I have ever been a lover of solitude and am usually happy to be in the company of my own thoughts. It is lovely, though, to be told that my lifelong habit of daydreaming, a habit generally dismissed as a waste of time and a self-indulgent laziness, is actually a virtue. Indeed, Harris argues that it is absolutely essential for creativity and for a healthy identity.
One can be instructed in society; one is inspired only in solitude
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I do not yet know what remedies Harris will offer to a world seemingly permanently hooked on online distractions, because, as of this writing, I am only a quarter of the way through the book. Already I’m prepared to recommend it to one and all. One early chapter all by itself – “What is solitude for?” – is sufficient to justify the book. Harris answers that question with three items: new ideas (creativity requires solitude), an understanding of self, and closeness to others. To the likely objection that the last benefit is counter-intuitive, Harris explains, “The ability to be alone, . . . is anything but a rejection of close bonds. It’s an affirmation of those bonds on the most essential level. To be happily alone is to affirm one’s faith in the love of others.”
To be happily alone is to affirm one’s faith in the love of others.
Michael Harris
So, then, two Easter gifts have come my way: flowers and a book. I am grateful.
According to an entry in my father’s diary, my mother gave this studio photo of herself to my father for Christmas in 1931. They had been courting for a few months by then (discreetly, of course, in deference to her strict preacher father), and would marry in October 1934. With about ten dollars in my father’s pocket and with a single cow (or was it two?) in tow behind the buggy, they rode off to a small homestead to begin a dairy farm and their life together. Their first home, a mere shack furnished with apple boxes for chairs, was so drafty their blankets froze to the wall in the winter nights.
As the late-born youngest in the family, I was granted only glimpses of the courageous, hopeful woman in this photo, although I do recognize the intelligent humor in my mother’s eyes. The years of trauma in her childhood had left their legacy: she had been only six when the Russian Revolutions tore apart the Mennonite villages in the area now known as Ukraine; she had been twelve when her family fled to Canada as refugees in 1923. In the charmed early years of their marriage, it would have been possible to forget painful memories and ignore immediate hardships in the joy of beginning anew. Much research since then has made it clear that forgetting is not that easy.
What I remember mostly clearly about her in my growing-up years and later was her focus on endless work on the farm, persistent fearfulness and constant worrying, an unhappy strain of judgmentalism, and eventually repeated illnesses and depressive episodes, none of which I even began to understand until I was an adult with children of my own. Then, dimly grasping the wisdom of playwright Joanna Glass—“If we are women, we think back through our mothers”—I began to research my people’s history and my family’s history.
What I learned is material for other blogs, or more likely for unpublished stories for our children and grandchildren. Here I wish to take delight in that soft, Mona-Lisa smile on my mother’s face. My childhood self never realized that my mother was beautiful and gifted and strong. This photo reassures me that she was all of those, perhaps never more so than in her older years when she struggled against the darkness with not much help. For sure, her family doctor knew too little about trauma’s long-lasting effects on the body and mind, and her church was too inclined to blame depression and frightened anger on a lack of faith. The former prescribed drugs, and the latter repentance and prayer. Both were likely unaware of the unhelpfulness of their assumptions about women, yet both meant well—of that I’m fairly certain. It seems pointless now to point fingers back into the past, using knowledge that was then not available.
Nevertheless, she persisted. Not consistently, not always obviously, sometimes counter-productively. Artistic gifts suppressed and desires dismissed eventually turn bitter. When responsibility for her elder care fell mostly on my shoulders, I was frequently resentful and frustrated. I had even less to offer her than those institutions to which she had looked for help. I simply did not understand, either her needs or my own.
Against those memories, I now treasure earlier glimpses of my mother, and I choose to celebrate the gifts that I did see in her: her artist’s eye for color in fabric and in flowers, her instinct for words, her innate generosity, the twinkle in her eyes (a family trait).
That smile, so barely there? I think it’s love, finding a place in her heart. The commitment is growing, the trust increasing. It is the joy of youth (she is 20 years old), daring to reach toward the future. I did not know her then, but I did see that self, every now and then, in the stories she sometimes told, in the pictures she shared with me. I believe, with Madeleine L’Engle that “the great thing about getting older is that you do not lose all the other ages you have been.” That lovely young woman did not wholly disappear, after all.
The great thing about getting older is that you do not lose all the other ages you have been.
Madeleine L’Engle
In the on-going processing of memories and learning to understand something about all those other ages I have been, I have been encouraged by reading memoirs. One of the best I’ve read is novelist Elizabeth Hay’s All Things Consoled. All stories of human selves are worth hearing and pondering; very few of them are as beautifully articulated as this one.
Its primary chronological focus is Hay’s year or more of being primary care-giver for her elderly parents whom she moved to a nearby seniors residence/care home. As part of that story, Hay also includes a history of her parents, which serves as background for Hay’s own childhood. She makes all her “characters” (family members, friends) wonderfully human; every chapter reveals greater complexities in the larger Hay family and demonstrates the extent to which we all are shaped and bound (and enlarged) by the relationships that have knit us into the people we become.
Although Hay does not minimize the achingly tense dynamics between her and her parents, she tells their stories and hers with love. Regardless of what might have gone wrong in the past, Hay celebrates her parents’ achievements, seeking to understand without glossing over failures. Such gracious acceptance is what I want to learn. That and the capacity to listen well which is so often the good writer’s gift – and the good healer’s gift.
One of my mother’s favorite flowers was gladioli. I grow them often, in memory and for my own pleasure.
The above photo is one of dozens of photos that I’ve taken of Pyramid Mountain in Jasper, Alberta. It’s so distinctive, and so dominant that even the most desultory of tourists driving through the small mountain town will learn its name and identify it on photos years later.
When I arrived in Jasper in the summer of 1968 as a university student hoping to earn next year’s tuition, I was lonely. I’d never lived that far from home before. Pyramid Mt was the first mountain whose name I was given, and I quickly came to think of it as a friend. It was always there – solid and beautiful. I won’t say “unchanging” because a major part of its charm was that it never looked exactly the same. The mountain’s iron-red rock caught the light of the sun, or the moon, from all angles and refracted it into grandeur. I was fascinated anew every time I walked “home” after work to my half of a double bed in a tiny bedroom on the crowded upper floor of an old house (most houses in Jasper had been converted to making as much money as possible in the summer tourist season).
In the decades since living in the magnificent and beneficent presence of Pyramid Mt., I have revisited the town many times. Each time the drive along the Yellowhead Hwy feels like a journey home from the minute I recognize Pyramid’s backside, which is a non-descript gray; only intimate familiarity allows recognition from that angle. As we near the town itself, there is Pyramid, ever reassuring, warm as only stone can be.
The ubiquitous cartoon image of a guru sitting on the top of a mountain, dispensing wisdom, is a modern belittlement of an ancient habit of looking up to the hills for divine guidance. As a familiar line from the Book of the Psalms puts it, “I will lift up my eyes to the hills / From where does my help come?” It is not mere happenstance that we describe a powerful awareness of transcendence as a “mountain-top” experience.
Which came first, I wonder, our experiences of the rarified atmosphere so far above sea level or the influence of powerful myths in various religions that equate mountain tops with divine revelation? Moses did receive the Ten Commandments at the top of Mt. Sinai, and long before that, the ancient Hebrew patriarch Abraham was ordered by Yahweh to take his son up onto a mountain, where he learned a dramatic lesson about trust and about the abomination of human sacrifice.
In a disturbing, yet hopeful, reworking of that old story, The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman invites us to pay attention to our own uses of narratives. When I first read the novel, I was aghast at the tragedy at the heart of it, and even more so after I learned just how utterly taboo it is in Jewish teaching to take a life. The various interpretations of the novel that I read in preparation for teaching the novel left me unsatisfied. All of them seemed baffled by the shocking contradiction between an elderly Jew devoted to Torah and deeply in love with God, and an act of killing for seemingly no discernible reason.
I read and reread, noting the obviously symbolic names of Abraham and Sarah and their son Isaac, not to mention daughter-in-law Ruth and grandson Moses. Echoes of the Book of Genesis were everywhere. The modern Abraham and Sarah and their son are refugees, having fled their country after losing two sons in a pogrom in Europe. To see them settle in a Canadian city and begin to make friends was heartening. Until the story turns deeply troubling.
There is a mountain in that unnamed city where the family chooses to settle. It is not at all like Pyramid Mt., more like a high hill, yet it figures largely in Sarah’s imagination, especially after Isaac’s death. It is a disturbing mountain, perhaps malevolent. On it stands an asylum for the insane. It is not a source of wisdom, nor yet of friendship; it just stands there, hinting at some significance, waiting for its time to offer wisdom out of suffering.
At the end of the novel, grandson Moses, now almost a man, finally ascends the mountain to visit his once-loved grandfather who has been living in the asylum for years. In their awkward conversation, Abraham attempts to reclaim his role as a voice of wisdom, but it is with painful humility that he mutters, “I could have blessed you and left you. I could have loved you.” To whom, wonders Moses, was Abraham speaking? Not seemingly to him, but both blessing and love are offered to him anyway. There is an awakening here of some kind, an enlightenment.
The thought came to me eventually that Abraham’s tragic mistake was in claiming the Biblical story of Abraham as his own, believing that he could control God’s blessing on him and give meaning to his own suffering through reliving the ancient stories. Long before he was guilty of murder, he was guilty of spiritual pride, of grasping that which should have been given, or not, as the case might be.
That thought gave me my first academic paper, which is far less important to me now than the truth that Wiseman explored through her novel: we need to be cautious about the stories that we claim as ours, that we choose to live out—and we do live by stories, whether we recognize them or not. Myths (in the original sense of deep stories that explain humanity’s role in the world) are powerful; they shape us even more than we shape them. It behooves us to ask ourselves frequently: what are the consequences of using this story to give meaning? what kind of person does this story make us? Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep asked it differently, “is this book, this story, the kind of company that is good for me? Who am I when I am with this [book] friend?”
What are the consequences of using this story to give meaning?
What kind of person does this story make us?
The mountain still stands, whether it be a friend or a dangerous other. In my mind, Pyramid Mt. counsels love, for all people, for all of creation.
One of my first photos of flowers taken with a digital camera, September of 2009.
I’d never grown morning glories before the summer of 2009, although I’d tried, once or twice. By then, we’d been gardening on our lot for 31 years. We’d replaced trees, removed shrubs and planted new ones elsewhere, moved our veggie garden from one side of the backyard to the other, and begun replacing the front lawn with flowers and shrubs and brick paths.
What hadn’t changed was the hedge of raspberries in the backyard along the fence that separated our garden from our neighbour’s garden. The raspberries had been planted by the original owners back in the 1950s. Since those long-lived raspberries had now developed blight, we’d destroyed them all the previous autumn and dug up the soil completely. Our intention was to leave it fallow for a year, but the empty chain link fence looked so forlorn I decided to give morning glories one more try.
They thrived gloriously.
From mid-summer on, I began my day by counting the sky-blue flowers, newly open every morning and wilted by mid-afternoon, gradually deepening the latent purplish hue in the process. The vines were so happy in full sunlight that they grew and intertwined and bloomed with reckless abandon. My word choices are deliberate. I had not known that those beloved vines were reckless, not until the afternoon when I saw that they had been ruthlessly cut back from the other side of the fence, down to the top of the chain link. Likely dozens of flower buds were now in the garbage, since said neighbour has no compost bin.
I cried. Then I was angry with our shears-wielding neighbour who deemed morning glories intrusive and refused to let them lean, even an inch, into her backyard. It might even have been that very morning I had counted over 70 dazzlingly blue flowers.
Choosing in the end to keep peace with our neighbour and also craving raspberries, we never planted morning glories there again. Instead, we bought new raspberry canes, which have produced abundant berries. Later efforts to grow blue morning glories elsewhere in the yard never came to anything. All I have left of the gorgeous flowers are the photos – and memories.
My discovery of poet Denise Levertov was not actually a discovery. She insinuated her word gifts into my consciousness more gradually, beginning with a guest reading at a Mennonite Writer/s Conference I attended. Weary from a long day of traveling, I did not absorb much from that exposure to a poet I’d never of before, and I didn’t grasp why she was reading her work at a Mennonite conference (there’s no echo of Mennonite genealogies in “Levertov”). But thereafter, in some venue or other, now long forgotten, I read, or heard, “The Avowal,” a poem that has since become a primary text in my ongoing spiritual journey.
Then, finally, a few years ago, I read through Levertov’s Oblique Prayers 1981, and then borrowed two of her volumes of Selected Poems which lived on my bedside table until I had to return them. Her work is complex, sometimes obscure, definitely metaphysical, maybe too vivid, startling. Yet for me that is part of her power. She makes me come to a full stop; she evokes awe, a prolonged, soul-opening “oh!”
As a companion to the glory of my morning glories, here is Levertov’s “The God of Flowers.”
Levertov often sends me to the dictionary: cilium (plural cilia) is “a short minute hairlike vibrating structure on the surface of some cells, usually found in large numbers that (in stationary cells) create currents in the surrounding fluid” (Oxford English Dictionary). In humans, cilia function in the respiratory system, hence the association with “mouth.” But such arcane knowledge helps only so much. In Levertov’s poems, the mind is propelled forward from image to image with all the weird inevitability of a dream.
I linger briefly on “cosmos,” here a double meaning that combines the vastness of the universe (with all its wild improbabilities and infinite reach) and the flower “cosmos” whose petals flare out into an almost flat surface of bewitching shades of pink and magenta with a small sunny yellow centre. Who knows how many flowers have appeared and still grow on our earth: “blossom on blossom, fragrance on fragrance, tint upon tint”? (at what point does blue become purple or vice versa?)
Where does “disdain” come from? Disdain? Really? Not in the flowers themselves, surely. It is we who disdain some flowering weeds, such as dandelions, which are actually stunningly beautiful with a yellow so intense it defies the sun itself. We are the ones who insist on seeing opposites that clash. The position of “clash” at the end of the line creates an extra clanging dissonance in the mind, as if someone had just crashed a set of cymbals or spears had met metal shields.
[Please do read the poem aloud – more than once!]
The inset line beginning with “but” is a deft silencing of noise, and a swift entrance to an increasingly small space – as if invisible cilia had propelled us inward. We are invited to become “minuscule,” to ponder the very source of life and beauty, in “the cell among cells.” Lest the mystery of the process become too mystical, Levertov returns us to a more familiar, grounded reality—soil, bins, hands of gardeners. The irresistible growth is both physical and spiritual.
The “god of flowers” “sits and sits in the mustard seed.” Such an abrupt recital of monosyllables sits us down for the ultimate image of the mustard seed. It is not an accidental selection from multitudes of tiny seeds: Levertov is well aware that many readers will immediately remember a saying of Jesus: “The kingdom of Heaven is like mustard seed” (Matthew 13:31). From an infinitesimal speck of faith comes vital growth and beauty. The leathery hands of gardeners preside over miracles and accept blessings in blue and purple and yellow.
The title declares my new focus for this blog. I will still honor the “stones” and the “flowers” from time to time, but I want to talk about books that have meant much to me and photos that are likewise important.
Back in April 2004, when I visited Grand Rapids, Michigan, to attend a conference, Festival of Faith and Writing, at Calvin University (known then as Calvin College), I was still using a film camera. Remember those? Every picture cost enough to develop that I thought carefully before pressing the shutter. Mostly I took photos to keep a record. What little attention I paid to composition was instinctive and uninformed. However, when I was a child, thanks to my big sister’s influence, I had pored over books of photography from the Saskatoon Public Library. That was my only exposure then to the powerful and unsettling properties of visual art. The concept of photography as a form of art was thus not unfamiliar; it just hadn’t been in the realm of possibility for me.
That changed when I picked up the package of developed photos and discovered that this particular photo of the Seminary Pond had a small sticker attached: “Great shot!” Someone working in the lab thought I had captured something beautiful, something more than green grass, blue water, and white and pink flowering trees.
What that something is, I cannot say. I have not the language to analyze just what happens when foreground and background interact in some mysterious way. Putting that single pink flowering tree in the dead centre of the photo breaks the rule of thirds, of course, of which I hadn’t even heard then. Yet the whole charms me still, and not only because of the associated memories of attending an entirely new kind of conference for me, an experience I shared with two beloved friends.
Wordsmith that I have been for most of my life, I know that no number of books on how to write will actually nail down precisely what it is that differentiates a great text from a mediocre one. The making of a piece of visual art is just as much a mystery. The whole is greater than its parts and exists beyond and above the contexts of those parts.
I didn’t actually read The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival, and Hope by Tova Friedman and Malcolm Brabant (2022).
I listened to it. Which is precisely what should happen, I believe. We need to hear this voice, every painful word of the child who was a mere toddler in a Polish city when the Jewish ghetto became first a prison and then an ever-smaller antechamber to genocidal camps with their gas chambers and mass graves. She was only four years old at the beginning of WW2 when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labor camp and eventually to Auschwitz. She was six when she, along with many other children, was herded into the gas chamber, only to be spared at the last minute by a German bureaucratic glitch. She was one of the youngest survivors to stumble out of Auschwitz when the camp was liberated by the Soviet army. She was probably 8 or 9 before she entered a school in the Polish city in which she had been born, only to be told by classmates, “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead.”
The factual outlines of the Holocaust are well-documented and familiar. However, to hear the particulars through the perspective of a child is beyond chilling. Tova Friedman is in her early 80s as she writes this book in collaboration with Malcolm Brabant (the audio version is read by Saskia Maarleveld). She has the benefit now of her psychologist’s training and a sociologist’s understanding of human group behavior. The result is a poignant combination of childish unknowing and adult maturity, augmented by careful research and excerpts from her father’s written account. For her to have taken on this project speaks to her strength of character (reliving childhood experiences whose horror she now fully grasps gives her repeated nightmares) and her belief that the story must be told.
I agree with her. Over several decades, I have read many accounts of World War 2 and the Holocaust, including The Diary of Anne Frank. I’ve watched movies as well, including the powerful Schindler’s List (1993). Yet I would argue that this recent publication of Tova Friedman’s story is absolutely necessary, in light of recent social and political circumstances. Not that many survivors of the Holocaust are left now to counter the deniers and the minimizers and the trivializers. Anti-Semitism is on the rise again, in tandem with frivolous and self-serving comparisons between legitimate health measures and the dehumanizing, brutal policies of the Nazis. We really do need to hear the story of Tova Friedman, not only to remember what degradation human beings are capable of but to remember also the strength of the human spirit and the power of kindness.
What moved me most of all is the depth of the love of Friedman’s parents, especially her mother. I shall not forget the repeated, trusting “yes, Mama,” in response to instructions no child should ever, ever have to hear (to cuddle up to a warm corpse and pretend to be dead? for hours??). It was the love and trust within a family that made survival possible. Mama’s will to live, in sheer resistance to the Nazi project of extermination, gave life to Tova, who responded by living a full life of service, as listener, analyst, supporter, to those who had also been badly wounded—those who needed much help before they could once again hope and love the blossoms of spring.
Please, go find the book and read it. Better yet, listen to it, so that no single word is lost.
Mystery is the place where we can finger the ragged edges of what we know and begin to make peace with what we will not know. (Stephen Jenkinson)
#1
In my part of the world, days are getting shorter. Sunset begins sooner each day, signalling not only the end of another day but the end of a season. If I wish to continue my cherished evening walks, I shall have to walk in the dark. The summer’s mellow evening light has now shifted to late afternoon, slanting in at a different angle, lower on the horizon.
Letting go of sunlight each evening is a ritual practice for letting go of much else in life. Whether it happens abruptly as the sun drops behind a mountain, or in a lingering blaze of warm colors (as is common on the prairies where the sky goes on forever), sunset blends awe with melancholy. This one day is almost over and cannot be retrieved, reminding us that our lives too will end. Yet the beauty of the sun’s disappearance is so varied, so evanescent, and so necessary—how could the earth and all its inhabitants continue to live without daily darkness and rest?—that we are cleansed by astonishment.
The very word life shouts out promise, potential, opportunity, breath, vibrancy. Life has drive and will and force. It continues its changes forever. That which does not change, that does not obey the principle of death and resurrection into a new form, will die most certainly and finally, declaring its essence to be not-life.
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more lifeless it tends to be.
(Alan Watts)
Sunset has to do with time and change. Celebration and loss, all at once. So we cling to the loveliness, even as we rejoice at the prospect of rest. We gaze at the dance of color and watch the earth around us take off its robes of light, giving way to starlight and moonlight. Who would have it otherwise?
#2
These days, I’m asking myself how to let go and what might need to be let go. A friend is losing independence, giving up the tasks of caring for herself (when will that be my lot?). Another friendship seems lost entirely as we walk different paths now (shall I stop trying to maintain what was?). The pandemic has taken away both political innocence and a certain social ease (can I find hope again in realistic possibilities?).
Some once-loved books have ceased to matter; they will be “remaindered” (to use a publisher’s phrase) and turned into something else that can be made with recycled paper. I’m not sure that the memories I will also have to relinquish can be recycled as usefully. There are no cemeteries for books, and photographs of my library end up looking like artifacts of interior decorating.
Certain shelves of said library remind me that what seemed wise to me once upon a time is now folly, much as teens might look back on their favorite crib toys with a sheepish smile. Not all beliefs continue to sustain, necessary as they may once have been. Circumstances have changed. I have changed. I am now embarrassed to admit that I once had a copy of Total Woman and read it mostly without irony, although I might have felt twinges of critical thinking over the worst of its excesses. As the sun sets on some days, the ending is entirely welcome.
#3
There is a reason that photographers, amateur and professional, have probably all indulged in sunset phases. Melancholy and awe are addictive, yet essential to our humanness. We know very well the flutters of possibility within a new love, and the throbbing ache of a lost love. Regret and satisfaction. Is that reading too much into the result of light passing through more of the atmosphere and hence being scattered by additional particles?
My struggle for words is at an end. Let sunset photos finish this reflection. Each one was taken in a different place and hence calls up different memories, different feelings. I leave them untitled except for numbers, and I invite you, my readers, to let me know which one(s) call to your heart.
Stones and Flowers 
