Avoid Not the Journey

On March 6, 2021March 6, 2021 By ednafroeseIn death, family, hope, identity, poetry, possibilityLeave a comment

All photos in this post taken by Arnold Voth

Two canoes negotiates serious rapids, against the background of a high cliff.

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. And you may not even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm is all about.”
Haruki Murakami

Something there is about life that is uncannily cyclical. Make what choices we will, sooner or later we will return, however unknowingly, to situations that we’ve been through before. The outward circumstances might be very different, yet the inner core of the experience will be familiar enough that our emotional radar will recognize we’ve been here before. And our inner self, the subconscious that we sense only fleetingly, will know that there is unfinished business to tend to, while our outer self will react instinctively according to old patterns.

Case in point: I was only 44 years old when my father died, my first real experience of death in the family. A consoling friend warned me that grief was more complicated than I might expect. Using an analogy of a glass of wine, she told me that I would have to drink the full measure of grief. If I resisted, I would have to keep sipping, time and again, until I got down to the dregs. Despite my inexperience, I thought that sounded reasonable.

Unfortunately, circumstances demanded an unreasonable response. Our three children were still young, our oldest just into his teens. I was now mostly responsible for my mother who had just been moved into a nursing home. I had barely begun PhD studies and the scholarship money was necessary. Neither time nor emotional energy was available for grieving.

My friend had been right, though. It is possible to postpone grief, but not wise. Every now and then, I was blindsided, often most inopportunely, by uncontrollable weeping, or by hours of emotional paralysis. The glass of wine had to be emptied. Sometimes, I swore that new grief would fill it again when I thought I had already reached the dregs.

Another case: at a formal banquet and dance, our table included one of those men whose professional life had taught him that he should always be in control, even of conversations. Moreover he knew everything about everything. Having heard that I was teaching at St. Thomas More College, he began holding forth about how lax university officials had become about plagiarism and cheating. Although he was not a teacher, he knew exactly how those nasty students should be handled. Every time I attempted to explain the process or my experiences, I was cut off. When the conversation came up again later, in between dances, I abruptly walked away in the middle of the conversation, with not even an excuse.

Safely alone in the bathroom, I took a few deep breaths. I was actually shaking and my heart was pounding. My fear of my interlocutor and my deep embarrassment at an obvious social faux pas vied for emotional attention. Why hadn’t I simply called him out for his arrogance? That could be done with some courtesy. Or, if confrontation felt too threatening, couldn’t I have ended the conversation more politely? Why had I been so intimidated?

Later that night as I lay sleepless, I concluded that I’d just taken another turn around the spiral. As a child, I had learned too well that bad consequences followed when I spoke my mind, whether in direct conversation with authority or in more social occasions. I had developed then a pattern of avoidance: stay silent, keep out of trouble. That wretched conversation in an otherwise lovely evening had activated old emotions; my gut knew that feeling of being pushed into acquiescence. My well-practiced response had been to flee, to disappear.

Old behaviour patterns, I think, are more troublesome than grief, because we usually know the source of the grief. Learned instinctive reactions, though, can lurk beneath the surface of civility for decades. My wallflower impulse remains. However, my increased understanding of where it comes from could (should?) help me choose other actions. Not easy, by no means. Also not impossible.

A final point: the upward turns on the spiral journey are not necessarily inflicted on us against our will. Crucial decisions, major steps in religious or philosophical rethinking, present us with a choice: enter the next round of the journey or avoid it. Poet Margaret Avison, in “The Swimmer’s Moment,” depicts such a choice as a whirlpool: “Many at that moment will not say, / ‘This is the whirlpool, then,’” and will, instead, “refuse” to enter. They will thus be spared “from the black pit, and also from contesting / the deadly rapids.”

Close up of rapids against a cliff. No humans or boats in the photo.

Placid river in Heritage Park, Edmonton. It's sunset and there's a mist rising from the water.

But the choice isn’t merely a matter of maintaining the status quo or daring the whirlpool; there are consequences on either side of that “or.” Those who avoid the whirlpool and the rapids are also “spared” from “emerging in / The mysterious, and more ample, further waters” (italics mine).

The whirlpool-fearers could have lost something important, even wonderful, “And so their bland-blank faces turn and turn / Pale and forever on the rim of suction / They will not recognize.” The turning and returning continues, but without any progress.

Just what Avison intended her “swimmer’s moment” to signify, I’m not certain. Her usual complexity invites readers to explore multiple meanings. For me, the dreaded whirlpool has visual and emotional kinship with the image of the spiral journey. There are indeed times when yet another go-around through particularly painful parts of our progress toward maturity and wholeness seems too much like entering a whirlpool from which there might be no exit into peaceful waters, a defeat that Avison admits is possible. Either side of a choice entails risk, even if the prospect of stasis can initially seem safe. The rosebud that refuses to open can only wilt. Better then to welcome the journey.

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
Anais Nin

The Measure of a Story

On February 18, 2021 By ednafroeseIn books, friendship, Stories, writingLeave a comment

As an avid reader of stories, I should long ago have understood something of what recent conversations, coincidences, and news items finally made clearer for me. Yet it was not the first time I had observed how human learning often proceeds in spiral fashion: we keep circling back to our emotional swamps and stumble through them again, hopefully with greater maturity and more self-knowledge each time around. That is, if we do indeed stumble through instead of walking around them blind-folded. Which is matter enough for another time.

To call my current insight into stories the result of yet another swamp-wading is an exaggeration, though. It was more like returning to a familiar path—the problem of what makes a good story and why that matters—but seeing it differently.

Photo of wooden path through dense rain forest on Vancouver Island, BC.

From the time I learned to read, I devoured whatever fiction came to hand. If I didn’t like a book, I still finished it (having been taught that everything on my plate should be consumed, I carried that miserable discipline into other realms, even the world of stories). Since there were occasions when I needed to defend myself from unwanted moralizing, I learned to read quickly, skimming over paragraphs to get the main gist of the plot, skipping altogether the intrusive lessons I didn’t care to learn. I liked stories, not preachments.

In university English classes, I learned to distinguish between stories that treated their characters with loving respect and stories that were spoiled by a propagandizing bent. With my newly acquired vocabulary, I could now dismiss as structurally flawed all those religious novels I had so disliked in my adolescent years. It hadn’t been my bad conscience or my refusal to accept correct doctrine that had been the problem. It had been the authors who defied artistic principles and stooped to browbeating their readers. I found that reassuring.

And right there, in that loop of the spiral journey, I stepped around, not through, the uncomfortable truth that we do not only read books, but are, in turn, read by them. Our like or dislike of particular stories says something important about us as well as about the stories.

In subsequent years of reading, teaching, and writing, I learned to explore more carefully my evaluation of any given novel, especially when writing book reviews. That’s something of a clinical process, presumably conducted without rancor or prejudice. I did feel uneasy over the occasional negative review, wondering if I had done a book proper justice or if I was missing something.

It took many animated discussions in the world’s best book club (which shall remain unnamed and secret) for me to discover that a book I disliked could teach me more about myself than I cared to know. Among close friends who are fellow readers, maintaining a reviewer’s detachment was not possible. In fact, doing a post-mortem on my distaste for a novel in the midst of questions and counter-opinions could feel like an emotional disrobing.

Even years later, there are still books on my shelf that I cannot look at without flinching. Yet I’m grateful, truly grateful. I really did need to know that (whatever “that” was) about myself, or the next round through whatever emotional swamp that story had stirred up would be pointless.

Path through rain forest is now a descending wooden staircase.

My good friends had pushed me to descend far enough to allow myself to be read by the unwelcomed book.

The past couple of weeks I have attempted to get through the latest book for the aforementioned book club, which now functions via Zoom. The author came highly recommended; I had been eager to read the next offering from the author of Night Circus.

So I was bewildered when, after getting started, I was so easily distracted by other books. Suddenly, I felt compelled to read instead the next novel in the saga of Anne Perry’s Detective William Monk. Even a dense theology book became more inviting than The Starless Sea. Bewilderment gave way to annoyance and then outright guilt. What was wrong with me?

Photo of my tablet on our kitchen table. It's open to the beginning of a chapter of The Starless Sea.

Almost every day, I grabbed myself by the scruff of the neck and forced myself back to my e-book. Twenty minutes later, I closed the tablet, relieved that there were household chores to do. No doubt, the medium in which I was reading wasn’t making my struggles to become involved easier.

Now if I had had an actual book, I would have skipped through chapters, even flipped to the end, hoping that a better awareness of the overall shape of the book might change my mind about it. As of this writing, my e-copy has vanished from my tablet, on its way to another reader, possibly a more generous one. What’s left for me is to brace myself for having to figure out, in front of my friends, why I was so impatient and unloving toward this book.

Once upon a time, in self-defense, I would have turned myself into a reviewer, pulled out old notes from a graduate class on meta-fiction (fiction that writes about writing fiction, something like the popular image of the hand drawing itself), and begun researching all the multiple allusions to other stories in The Starless Sea, for the novel is nothing if not a highly literate gathering of more references to other stories than I have ever seen before.

Lacking motivation for that effort, I took the easy way out and read whatever reviews I could find. That gave me the plot of the novel, such as it has, and a wide array of responses. Some reviewers were delighted, others were not. And one—blessed be her/his name!—pointed out a principle of reading that I should have grasped decades ago. Perhaps I had, without seeing it clearly. It just took the current political climate to give it sufficient importance.

The Starless Sea has a plethora of symbols; it situates itself squarely within story-telling traditions; its descriptions are rich, poetic, even lush. The control of style is excellent and consistent. Thematically, it has considerable depth. It offers almost everything that can be said about the magic of stories and the strange reality that we all live in stories, some given and some made. What it does not offer is characters who engage our hearts. They could be bots for all the emotion they arouse. What matters is the theme, the big idea.

Abruptly I recalled my early resentment of novels that made their characters pawns, mouthpieces for their authors’ moralizing intentions. I had always felt betrayed when books from our church library repeatedly halted the momentum of the story in order to insert mini-sermons – the equivalent of saying at the end of a fairy tale, “and now, boys and girls, you know that you should always tell the truth.” And the story dies at once.

Numerous novelists have written about the making of art: the artist who begins having already decided what “truth” or principle his characters should embody cripples both characters and the artistic process from the get-go. It’s the artist’s calling to serve the work of art, not the other way around. To know what has to be said/concluded before the story begins is to write propaganda, not story.

Which is why writers in the grip of ideology write mostly mediocre fiction with wooden characters who never achieve a life of their own. As a friend and former colleague once pointed out, “In absolute truth, and in such an ideological atmosphere, there is no room for creativity.” An economist by profession, she translated that general principle to her particular sphere of knowledge, “Government policies should be designed for the betterment of humankind, not to perfect free market.” Indeed.

During my long walks in the winter cold, when the mind randomly shuffles ideas and stories, my resistance to The Starless Sea seemed to cross over into other recent conversations in which I had tried to summarize the religious narrative in which I had been raised, and then both of those stories bounced up against the political narrative in the US to which I have given too much listening time.

And I was granted one of those rare moments: “Oh, I see. That’s what is going on here.”

All of the various meaning-making stories we live in or through (fictional or political or religious) are best evaluated on the basis of how characters function within them. What happens to the people in this story? How does this ideology shape the people who adopt it? If a religious doctrine results in the devaluation of individual human beings, if a story cares more about its symbols and general erudition than the people who move in the story, or—to take a small practical scene of utmost importance these days, if an institution cares more about its efficient routines than the well-being of people affected by those routines—something is wrong.

Even the bleakest novel, with seemingly no real moral center, will hold our attention if even one character matters. It may be just desperate courage that engages our sympathy, or a circumstance that seems like our own, but the story has to make a place for us. Otherwise, the idea alone, the abstract theme wins. Otherwise, ideology demands its cult-like obedience and power remains unchecked.

Heroes are heroes when they know not only that they are human but also that other humans matter as much as they do.

All of which is weightier than anything suggested by The Starless Sea, but it was a useful provocateur for one go-around on the journey.

Path through a slightly more open forest. On evergreen tree on the side of the path is leaning at a 45 degree angle, because of prevailing winds.

The Aroma of Freshly-Baked Bread

On January 30, 2021 By ednafroeseIn Bread, Earth, family, food4 Comments

Four loaves of golden-brown bread still on the cooling racks. — An adapted version of Pilgrim’s Bread from the *More with Less Cookbook*

Three circumstances have inspired this nostalgic encomium—it’s also a eulogy—on freshly baked bread: the current fad of baking one’s own bread, my still keen memory of an experimental ten-week gluten-free diet, and the recent birthday of my late mother.

I grew up on wheat, the natural wheat, not the über-processed forms of wheat that now appear in almost every item in the middle aisles of the grocery story. My father grew wheat, sold it in the local elevator, then brought some of it back home again in the form of flour. No additives, no complex processing, just plain milling.

Photo of ancient recipes books of my mothers, yellowed pages and loose clippings, some of the handwriting in German, some of it in English.

Thereafter, my mother’s expert hands turned flour into bread, and much more. She loved everything about the art of baking bread. Always she sought out new recipes, adding notes on ingredients and amount of flour required.

We ate white bread in all its clean goodness, so perfect with butter and my mother’s homemade jam. We ate brown bread (not totally whole wheat but close) and rye bread. We ate her lovely white dinner rolls, most often the Zwiebach that were traditional for Mennonites. I loved popping off the small top and slipping butter into the hollow beneath. I have no idea who thought up Zwiebach; I was content to eat them, especially when I came home from school to discover racks of them, cooling on the kitchen counter.

A wooden bowl lined with a napkin holds several buns, some made as Zwiebach. — It’s been too long since I made *Zwiebach*; they lack the perfect shape and balance that my mother almost always achieved.

Not only buns and bread were created in my mother’s kitchen. She loved all varieties of baked goods: cinnamon buns with raisins and just a trace of icing across the top; sweet rolls with a delectable filling made of cooked prunes, chopped nuts, and orange rind; fancy, twisty rolls with cottage cheese in the dough yielding a sweet-savory treat with darker flecks in the crust; golden loaves of Easter bread with icing on top; schnetkje – soft biscuits rich with lard that opened up easily to accept the gooseberry jam. There were cakes and quick breads, pies of many kinds, waffles, pancakes, dumplings, biscuit crusts over baked sausage.

I did not then always appreciate my mother’s skill and hard work; I particularly did not understand her emotional connection to the works of her hands, her pride in what she made.

Back in the early grades, we school children were clearly divided into two social classes: the farm kids who had their lunches at school and went straight home after school on buses or in parents’ vehicles to help with the chores; and the town kids who could walk home for lunch and could play with one another all over the town in their more abundant spare time. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the townies were privileged and thus superior.

So perhaps it was inevitable, given my social insecurity, that I came to view my mother’s bread with some embarrassment. My lunch sandwiches were roughly sliced dark bread and egg salad, or some leftover cooked meat. I felt nothing but envy for the neat sandwiches one could make with store-bought sliced bread and precisely shaped baloney. Exactly the kind of differences that become fuel for small-time bullies.

One occasion, an end-of-school picnic, still haunts me. These picnics usually happened on someone’s farm or near a river. The menu never varied: hotdogs with unbelievably yellow mustard, bright red ketchup, and unbelievably green store-bought relish; some delicious potato chips (a rare treat for me); marshmallows for roasting; and watermelon for dessert. Oh, and jugs of KoolAid to drink.

Children must have been responsible for asking their parents to provide some of the supplies that year, or why else would I have brought dozens of hotdog buns—not purchased but lovingly made by my mother, complete with a perfect egg glaze on the top of each? I remember being ashamed of those homemade buns. I do not remember how it happened that there were already enough hotdog buns and that it was the store-bought ones that were taken to the picnic. Very likely, I wasted most of that precious afternoon, trying to fabricate some story that I would tell my mother to explain why her buns had not been eaten.

What I do remember with painful clarity is my mother’s stormy anger. She was furious that her buns had sat in an empty classroom all day and probably dried out; she was outraged that her efforts to create just the right shape of buns to hold a wiener (food she didn’t really consider food at all) had been entirely wasted. Time has mercifully blunted the full force of my tangled emotions: shame and embarrassment, fear of what the next days would be like at home, terror of being made to deliver an angry message to the teachers, deep uneasiness concerning how I might behave among the rest of the children among whom I never seemed to belong, relief that there were only a few days of school left and then the long summer could begin.

Mercifully, there came a time when my attitudes changed, and my taste buds began to hold greater sway over my choices than what peers, in whatever circle, would think of me. I began doing my own baking, and very quickly discovered the sheer pleasure of kneading dough and watching it rise, the creative joy of experimenting with new recipes and new ingredients, and the simple richness of the taste of homemade bread, and other baked delicacies. I loved it all.

Small loaves of French bread for Christmas dinner

I watched our children go to school, make friends whose families had different customs and values. I often thought ruefully that I was being made to relive some of my mother’s frustrations as our children sometimes seemed embarrassed about how we lived. I delivered some of my precious creations to various potlucks and saw them ignored because they looked different or weren’t made with familiar ingredients.

These days, “home-made” and “store-bought” have reversed their status. At least among my friends and acquaintances, homemade food is valued and the taste of homemade bread treasured above all else. In fact, since the advent of COVID-19, everyone is baking bread again. I’m pleased, especially now that it seems possible to find yeast again.

My mother has been gone for almost 25 years. That’s long enough for me to have re-evaluated so many of my memories in light of the understanding that comes when one actually lives through the stages of life once not understood at all. No 10-year-old can expect to fathom the emotions of the unknowable parent. But a 70-something can look back and grant absolution to that shy school girl who failed to claim pride in genuine creativity and skill and generosity. She can also say, with unfeigned sincerity, “I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t know what you had given then. But I think of you when I turn the dough over in my hands.”

Photo of a loaf of bread on a cutting board. The crust has just been sliced off. — It’s the baker’s privilege to cut and then sample the crust!

All bread must be broken / so it can be shared. / Together / we eat this earth.
Margaret Atwood

It’s the Little Things

On January 12, 2021 By ednafroeseIn books, Earth, fragments, hope, possibility, spirituality, winterLeave a comment

Taken in Eb’s Trails, a nature conservation area, just off Hwy #11 in SK, that is a haven for hikers and cross-country skiers.

The light-hearted, nostalgic post I had written for the second week of January, hoping to ease the sadness of a very limited, lonely Christmas, will not be published after all. It will have to wait for January 2022, when I hope the events and images of the last week will have receded in the rear-view mirror.

Never mind that I don’t want to turn this blog into political commentary. Ignoring recent events in Washington, DC, is impossible. I have, like many of you, no doubt, spent too many hours online, trying to comprehend what was happening on Jan. 6: commentators aplenty have since spoken out; reporters have recorded details; political analysts have weighed in; talk show hosts have called out the willfully blind and the deliberately violent with equal censure; news sites have played videos over and over. There is no need for me to add words to the unspeakable.

Instead, may I share some small moments of beauty and quietness as anchors for sanity?

In between reading Anne Perry’s mystery novels as escape, I have been paying attention to little things: the beauty that can be found in ugliness and ruins; the resilience of growing things, that “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” (Dylan Thomas); the quietness to be found within and from without; glimpses of transcendence in the quotidian. None of which are momentous in themselves – yet they are not nothing.

The tree that graces the beginning of this post has been my computer background since I took its photo in early November. It’s dead, its bark scorched black by fire. Yet its stark lines exude power, as well as silence. It’s exactly the kind of tree that Bill Peet, children’s author and illustrator, would turn into an image of strength, love, and laughter.

Loop Creek Trail, in the Roger’s Pass area (Glacier National Park in BC) crosses the ruins of old buildings used in the construction of a railroad track that is no more.

Part of the ruins of Glacier House, a once-grand CPR hotel built in 1886, closed in 1925, after a new rail line had been built, and then demolished in 1929

Although buildings and railway tracks are inorganic, they can evoke a similar kind of rueful, sad-hopefulness, especially when–as always happens–that indomitable “force” in the “green fuse” takes over the territory again.

Both the railroad track and the former CPR hotel are now mere ruins along good hiking trails. There was a time when the first wealthy tourists were proud to travel there, proud to be the first (in their minds anyway) to be awed by the vast icy expanse of Illecilliwaet Glacier. I do not regret the absence of the hotel; the abundance of wild flowers and grasses that now fill the former foundation are lovely. They testify to their own resilience, growing through whatever obstacles there are, reclaiming their space. I loved them when I took the photos, years ago; now, in the dead of winter (in every sense of the word), they comfort me.

Indoors, my jade plants offer me similar comfort and hope. They remind me that persistence and organic strength does not have to be dramatic. Even barely noticeable will do.

Where the Christmas tree had been trimmed to a nice shape, the ends began sending out new growth.

As if I needed yet another lesson from tiny, stubborn growing things, our live Christmas tree, now facing its last days in our house (indeed, it should already have been denuded of its ornaments and banished outside to await recycling) will not give up its fight to live, to be beautiful, to reach out for tomorrow’s light.

And, occasionally, there are the blessed stumbles into thin places, where the reality of this world opens into the weightlessness of knowing – for certain – that this world is not all there is. To become open to those thin places is not necessarily a matter of travel, although some of my profoundest experiences of transcendence have come when I was away from home.

Along the ocean beach near Tofino, BC, lie piles of driftwood - dead trees which are now beautiful in their ugliness. — On a beach somewhere between Ucluelet and Tofino, BC, at sunset, where we spent an hour watching the light recede and the colors deepen, saying not a word, just breathing in awe, not sure if the wide shimmering ocean or the gnarled dead driftwood was the more beautiful.

What is required most of all, I think, is silence, and attention, whether the turning away from the fever of activity occurs on vacation, or close to home.

As American novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote, “Wherever you turn your eyes, the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.” Indeed. A mere afternoon’s walk along the river in Saskatoon was enough to bring stillness.

Three photos of the South Saskatchewan River with the shrubs along the bank covered in hoarfrost.

The basic condition for us to be able to hear the call of beauty and respond to it is silence.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

Photo of broken shells next to the trunk of a dead tree. — Beach near Tofino, BC.

Even that which is broken and dead contributes its pattern of meaning, whether we see it or not.

“In difficult times, carry something beautiful in your heart.”
Blaise Pascal

Christmas Contradictions

On December 17, 2020December 18, 2020 By ednafroeseIn death, Earth, family, flowers, gifts, hope, spirituality, winter1 Comment

Remembering my oldest brother who died on December 23, 2019

To say or write something new about Christmas is impossible. We have heard it all already: the sentimental, the devout, the reverent, the irreverent, the beautiful, the profound, the cynical, the gloriously happy, and the bitter. Words and songs, candles and cookies, gifts and slights, mutters of “humbug” and shouts of “Merry Christmas!” This year, with every tradition upended and every once-joyous occasion attenuated with “distancing,” all of the above now have an undertone of loss. What is there to say? Not much, I suppose. But there is much to remember.

Our Christmas tree this year, decorated with all our favorite ornaments gathered over the years, but with no gifts underneath. Gifts have all been already mailed.

Like most families, we have known many kinds of Christmases: some suffused with grief over recent loss (funeral flowers were part of the decorations in 1990 and again in 2019); some marred by minor illnesses (extra supplies of Kleenex and toilet paper required); some made awkward with tension (either individual or collective or both); some filled with joy (a long absent family member home again, a new baby whose presence makes everything new and wonderful, food traditions carried on in blissfully busy kitchens). Actually, separating all my Christmases into categories like that is foolish—Christmas embodies hope above all else, and hope keeps company with all manner of disappointments and losses, as well as with deep happiness when hope is proved true.

Both of the primary narratives of Christmas in our culture have space aplenty for the full range of human experience. Both raise expectations to mythical levels; both also point to reality in its greatest rawness. The Christian narrative is of new birth, a miraculous birth that will save an entire people from violent occupation and brutal economic conditions. Some tellings of the story look forward to the redemption of all humankind. However, as a prophet informs the baby’s mother, “a sword will pierce your own soul.”

.. . . . I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different: this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

(T.S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”)

The Christian narrative requires us to think about our role in the miseries of now and in the future of the world that is ever unfolding.

The narrative of St. Nicholas, with its delightful magic of one man giving gifts to the whole world in a single night, seems less demanding, warmer. It invites us to generosity, not only to our families but also to those who would gladly be generous to their families yet have not the wherewithal to do so. The deep human pain in this story of expectations is implied, not often spoken. The contradictions are there, nevertheless. Underneath the story of filled stockings and too many cookies are economic realities that demand attention.

Christmas display in the conservatory next to the former Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, SK. A combination of natural plants, natural stones, and the beauty created by human design of those elements, this place has been a refuge for me in many difficult times.

Nevertheless—and I insist on this “nevertheless”—there is beauty to be found in all levels of both Christmas narratives. The beauty that is given, for which we need only eyes to see and hearts to attend; and the beauty that we create through imagination and ingenuity. In all those forms of beauty, remembered from previous years, I take refuge in this year of the pandemic.

The photos contain no people, no food (which seems appropriate for this year). What I have included is the memory of the last time that all my siblings and I were together, evoked only through what we saw together, and other memories of quiet moments that were simply given and gratefully received.

Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton, AB. Photo taken in 2011

Poinsettias are everywhere at Christmas, never mind that they are a tropical plant that couldn’t survive outdoors in the Canadian prairies. Usually they are red, brilliant deep red, framed with dark green leaves. Red and green, the colors of Christmas. This display, though, was definitely white and blue, human skills turning natural beauty into magical beauty in an ice palace.

Three photos taken of blue-tinged poinsettias in the Christmas display in the Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton.

I remember that at the time I thought this icy display of artificially blue poinsettias verged on kitsch. I was charmed, though, despite myself, by various shades of blue and fascinated with the play of sunlight through the high glass ceilings of the conservatory. Still all that added paint (who knows what the designers used) and glitter, of all things, seemed a sin against natural beauty. I am less critical now. When I see the three reflected figures in the dark blue globe in the center, I am grateful that we were together.

And after all, the entire Christmas experience, in our culture, is artificial. It is a cessation of the usual rhythm of work and school; we bring trees indoors, for goodness’ sake; we import tropical plants; we spend lavishly on gifts and food; we welcome dreams of a better world. So let our homes and our celebrations be nostalgic and extravagant. Let their beauty enrich our souls and then make us aware of how we might change our world to make it beautiful for all, not just the privileged.

Stone and flowers – how could I resist this photo? Also from the Muttart Conservatory.

Once again, a photo makes us see that shadows are an intrinsic element in beauty.

I want to conclude this reflection on Christmas themed beauty with a return to the outdoors, the unadorned beauty that is given to us so generously everywhere we look.

A small park near our home in Saskatoon, taken shortly after a heavy snowfall. No people, no tracks. Just the warmth of stark black and white, life in dormancy, waiting.

A sweet little chickadee that eventually sat on my hand and helped itself to the peanuts I offered. Taken on the grounds of St. Peter’s Abbey, Muenster, SK.

When I run after what I think I want,

my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety;

if I sit in my own place of patience,

what I need flows to me,

and without pain.

(Rumi)

Write the Letter

On December 3, 2020 By ednafroeseIn family, friendship, identity, letters, Stories, writing6 Comments

The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.
Lewis Carroll

We have had to rely much more on words in these times of no hugs, no touch, no expressive body language—no, I haven’t forgotten video chats and Zoom meetings. It’s just that those ways of “seeing” can feel more like performance than actual in-person gatherings. Compared to sharing dinner with extended family in our home or having coffee with friends in places like my favorite Broadway Roastery hangout, Zoom doesn’t measure up. So words it has to be, whether in phone calls or in letters.

Does that sound rather old school? So be it. As I write ever more emails, determined to maintain some people contact, I do consider my longer emails replacement letters. They’re quicker than snail mail, of course, by far. They’re often more informal, too, defying all those rules I learned in school back in the 1960s: where to put the return address (which was part of the actual letter), how to punctuate it, how to address the recipient, what phrase to use to close the letter and introduce your signature. Conventions were stronger then, more precise.

We wrote our letters on special paper called “stationery,” which we then folded and put into matching envelopes that had to be taken to a mail box. Letters were then, perforce, less frequent and therefore more important. Checking one’s mailbox after the mail carrier had come by was an event. The tension generated by opening a letter—with a special letter-opener—lasted longer than the two seconds required to open an email.

I remember the year my love and I nurtured our relationship almost entirely by letter. Each letter mattered. Surprisingly vivid still, over 50 years later, is my memory of sitting alone in a little carrel on the second floor of the Murray Library on the U of S campus, textbooks shoved to one side. With great deliberation, I guided my fountain pen across the lines of the paper, trying to shape the disparate details of my boring student life into something that would convey my presence to the young man who would receive those written words, one province away, in a small dorm room.

Recently, I’ve been reading the earliest volumes of my father’s diary (all that still remain). They had been written in the early 1930s, begun shortly after his arrival in Canada as a refugee from the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The covers of the simple scribblers are a worn-out black, the pages yellowed and often hard to read. Mostly consisting of brief lists of farm and church activities which were almost the whole of his life then, some entries do include personal notes. A few phrases suggest that he anticipated his diary would eventually be read by others, and he wanted to leave the story of his immigrant experiences.

Chief among those was the writing and receiving of letters. Those written words were his only link with his widowed mother who had remained behind in Ukraine in 1929 when he traveled alone to Canada to find a new future. How carefully he must have chosen his words to convey hope to his family, to share of himself without letting his loneliness overwhelm him, or them. Whole afternoons were spent writing letters, hours in which homesickness must have ached throughout his entire body.

It would be at least another decade and a half before he would be able to welcome his mother, one sister, one brother, and a nephew to Canada. It would be several decades more before he would see his beloved older brother again. A fifty-year separation. I have often wondered how they held onto hope, especially since that fifty years included twelve years of imprisonment in Siberia for my uncle, years in which not a single word was exchanged between the brothers. When letters became possible again, my calm and stoic father wept with emotion. How very, very precious was each letter, written by hand on thin paper to save on postage.

All those years – all those letters. I have no way of knowing what he wrote, or what was written in the letters he received. None have survived that I know of. I wish that even one or two letters had remained, so that I might glimpse the narrative shape that my father gave his life as he progressed from foreign farm labourer to citizen owner of his own dairy farm, or that I might have some sense of who my grandmother was. Did she dare to write about losing a daughter to starvation, about the way that men from her village were simply disappeared? How would she have told her story?

I have saved some letters myself. A few of those I have written—I discovered them among my parents’ keepsakes after their deaths. It was like meeting a younger version of myself, whom I scarcely recognized. Memory, Eduardo Galeano observed, “is always changing with you while you are changing.” Yes, that is true. That is why I wish had more letters that I had written, back when letters were written on paper and kept as treasures.

Some of the letters I saved came to me from Africa, from my big brother, as I thought of him then. I was enchanted by the exotic stamps on the envelopes, fascinated with the delicate blue “airmail” paper that minimized weight. The handwriting was terrible but legible, the writer a story-teller, aware of words. Come to think of it, we both measured our words with care. Despite our very different circumstances—he in a foreign culture speaking his newly acquired French and I in the tumultuous years of learning to be a mother—we both shared and withheld. The limiting of words to four or five pages per month is a wonderful distiller of thoughts.

Now, because I write on a keyboard almost as fast as the words come to mind, my diary entries have become copious, prolix, too easy. The letters I now write to myself in order to find out what it is I think are nothing like the diary entries my father wrote, sometimes six or seven days to a page, a line or two for each. (I see them now as a kind of performative art, the very brevity and repetitiveness of the entries enacting the loneliness and stasis of the immigrant laborer’s world.) It might be well for me to pick up the fountain pen once again, fill it with dramatic turquoise (if that’s what’s required) or staid black, and consider my words before my pen touches the paper and as I shape the cursive letters.

A few days ago, on CBC’s Writers and Company, I heard a reprise of an interview with Eduardo Galeano, a Columbian writer. He had discovered, near the end of a very long and boring book about a priest’s missionary activities, a simple yet profound story: the priest had explained to the Indigenous people what paper was – it was something useful to send messages to friends far away. This seemed so important to his amazed listeners that the name they created for paper was “the skin of God.” For Galeano, that phrase, “the skin of God,” seemed like the true definition of the responsibility of a writer. Writers send messages to friends they have met and many more friends they have not yet met.

“The skin of God”: if that is what I’m writing on, then I had best choose my words with care. And love.

“A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.“
Emily Dickinson

Why Buy Print Magazines?

On November 13, 2020November 13, 2020 By ednafroeseIn hope, Magazines, politics, possibility, writingLeave a comment

Note that this post was written before the US election results and is thus politically out-dated already.

I’d been doing some soul-searching lately about blog writing. Like many other writers who have written about their writing practices, I have periodic binges of self-denigration and convictions of irrelevance. Who reads blogs anyway? Well, plenty of people, to judge by the willingness of companies to advertise on blogs, and the various algorithm-prompted responses that offer me help in making my blog more note-worthy. Okay, so the question becomes not “are there readers?” but “do I have anything worthwhile to say?”

In the midst of that bleak mood, not even relieved by the second mug of coffee that morning and a freshly baked muffin, I read a short piece in a copy of The Walrus that my brother had graciously left with me. It was one of those short items buried in the back of the magazine, a gesture in the direction of loyal readers who read everything in a magazine, front to back (or some, perversely, back to front). In “Not Recommended,” former columnist for The Globe and Mail Russell Smith reflected on some of the changes that have altered the newspaper world entirely, and thus led to his lapsed contract with the GM.

Encountering this well-written, poignant article a mere hour or two after also reading a piece by Jane Coaston, on Vox.com, “Trump’s presidential campaign is Too Online,” seemed a bit of serendipity I could not ignore. Briefly, Coaston points out that Trump has chosen many of his talking points according to what he encounters on Twitter and has failed to grasp that only 10% of Twitter users generate 92% of the content, and that 80 – 85% of the American population don’t follow politics very closely. Hence, Trump’s focus on issues that matter greatly only to the relatively few people who shape their worldview according to Twitter.

Whether you agree with the finer points of Coaston’s analysis or not, or even her resistance to Trump, it seems clear that these days we all face the temptation to let algorithms determine what we read and therefore, what we deem important.

This was Russell Smith’s main point. His personal story of facing ever more pressure to write what would raise the rate of click-throughs is alarming. Apparently, in the digital world, it no longer matters to editors who reads your work or why, or whether what you have written has important influence for the general good. Just make sure that the number of clicks is increasing. That has implications for all of us readers as well, since the number of clicks determines what will show up on our screens.

The juxtaposition of an article pointing to specific risks of living in an online, click-driven world and an article mourning the loss of appropriate arbitration of content in the more thoughtful media did little to help me rethink the meaningfulness of blog-writing—apart from giving me material for this one! However, it did strengthen my resolve to continue supporting good journalism by subscribing to print editions of good magazines and journals.

I value print for several reasons. One of the lesser ones is that I spend too much time at my computer for my own good as it is; reading print magazines offers my eyes needed rest and my body more choices about how and where to sit/stand as I read. Quite frankly, I love the freedom of holding the paper in my hands, wherever I happen to be. May it be coffee-stained and crumbed, for all I care. Or, as my borrowed copy of The Walrus is, water-stained from being carried in a backpack in the rain.

More crucial is that I get to choose – first of all the magazine itself – and then which articles I will read. In the process, I will notice all the articles, all the little pieces in the back pages that give me humor, art news, obituaries, book reviews, poetry, and photo essays. Because the magazine may end up lying open on the kitchen table, or the coffee table, or even in the bathroom, my attention will be caught by that varied, yet carefully adjudicated material. Quite simply, I will read more, not less.

When I have a good news journal in my hands, my attention can remain focused completely on what I’m reading. No blinking, hyperactive ads, no hyperlinks perpetually interrupting my focus, drawing me down rabbit holes of information that merely distract from the main ideas. Attention spans are lengthened by solid print articles, not fractured hopelessly by the kind of impulsive leaping from site to site that makes online reading an entirely different kind of experience. (Which is why sources for this post are listed at the end.)

And what I read will be well-informed, and carefully edited, material. The over-the-kitchen-table, off-the-top-of-my-head, unfiltered, opinionated stuff that social media users are addicted to I can get from friends, or neighbours, or my hairdresser, all of whom I know well enough to be able to place the opinions into context, gauge the level of information on which they’re likely to be based, and decide how many grains of salt I’ll need at that point.

Not coincidentally, reputable magazines that have the time (and money) to assign the requisite research to their journalists offer more hope to their readers than many online, click-driven news clips. It is not a blind hopefulness based on an unwillingness to admit reality, but a hope that is based first of all on a careful analysis of what is and then on fact- and experienced-based possibilities. In the midst of their grim assessment of what’s going on in our culture and our politics, thoughtful, educated writers offer realistic options – options that are based on our moral responsibilities to others, especially to the most vulnerable others.

Above all, my subscribing to print editions of a newspaper or magazine does something for their bottom line. It signals that I care about supporting ethical journalism. It matters to me, for example, whether Mother Jones in the US has money enough to pay reporters to do the patient, time-consuming digging that is required to offer meaningful political analysis and to expose corruption in high places. My subscription provides but a tiny amount of money, compared to what is needed for a major magazine to stay afloat and to do its job well. Still it matters.

I shall keep subscribing.

https://www.magzter.com/article/Culture/The-Walrus/Not-Recommended [NOTE this will give you the first part of the article anyway. A better idea is to buy the magazine and read all of its articles.]

https://www.vox.com/21504280/trumps-2020-campaign-too-online

Living into the Dark Places

On October 31, 2020June 23, 2021 By ednafroeseIn books, death, flowers, gardening, hope, Illness, possibility, spirituality2 Comments

“And don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.” (Rumi)

The first killing frosts have come through. I have dug up my dahlia tubers and put them to rest for the winter in our cold room. The quiet darkness will soothe them after their summer’s exuberant blooming. Our mild fall this year had given them almost an entire extra month in which to parade their flamboyant selves.

A bright red dahlia, about 3 - 4 inches across

I love dahlias (pronounced dayˈ-lee-uh in British English or daˈ-lee-uh in American English). Their colors are exorbitantly happy. From the dinner-plate dahlias—flowers measuring up to 8 or 9 inches across—to smaller patio-pot versions, each flower has dozens and dozens of petals. That miracle alone makes the work of winter storage entirely worth it.

During the anxieties of July and August when a sobering diagnosis combined with the isolation of the pandemic to make each brilliant summer day feel like walking in the dark, I received a hand-made get well card from our oldest granddaughter. She had previously emailed to ask what my favourite flowers were, and I had said dahlias, not stopping to think that they would be rather difficult to draw.

The tender care with which she created each of those many dahlias, with all those many nestled petals, is obvious. Her creative bouquet lives on, pinned to our fridge door (that universal bulletin board). It brought pleasure and comfort especially after I realized that an in-person visit could not happen. It continued to delight me during my gradual recovery in our long mellow fall. All the while, our actual dahlias continued to bloom even past the first mild frosts. Now that cold temperatures have entirely ended the real dahlias’ life – for now – the hand-drawn dahlias remain, and still bring smiles.

I say “for now,” because their life is not at all over. The clumps of seemingly lifeless tubers will rest in our cold room over the winter and when the time is right, little shoots will poke out of those dusty tubers to begin their growth toward mid-summer’s glory.

Gardeners (and farmers), together with all those who live more directly within seasonal rhythms of growth and dormancy, understand that dark seasons are an integral part of life. In our usual lexicon of duality, however, we oppose darkness and light, giving light all the good symbols and equating darkness with evil. Think of our common images: the “dark night of the soul,” “going over to the dark side,” “heart of darkness” (thank you, Joseph Conrad), “we’re in a dark time now.” We all seem to be “afraid of the dark,” at some level or other, not just young children going to bed.

Yet as Barbara Brown Taylor makes clear in Learning to Walk in the Dark, just as trees, flowers, animals, insects, and birds all need daily intervals of darkness in order to flourish well, so too do humans require periods of silence and dormancy. Above and beyond the darkness needed for our hormones to do their intricate work of rebuilding our bodies in the night, our minds and souls benefit enormously from regular absence of artificial light. The stupendous miracle of a star-filled sky cannot be appreciated except where all other light is extinguished (one reason, sufficient all by itself, for camping in what we city dwellers call the “wilderness”).

Away from the city, where absolute blackness is still possible, one can hear the owls, the poignant call of coyotes, the way the wind breathes through the leaves, whether in the midst of fecund photosynthesis or rustling their way toward equally fertile decay. In the darkness, human beings can rest or pursue the necessary journeys inward toward spiritual wholeness. We should not shun either darkness or dormancy. Both are essential for self-knowledge without which the virtues of compassion and integrity cannot develop.

Recognizing that physical darkness is essential for our bodies to sleep well, heal well, build new cells properly, etc., is one thing; accepting that emotional darkness is also essential for our hearts and minds is another. We are none of us eager to seek the dark ways of loss and grief and confusion and fear, yet they are an integral—inevitable—part of what it means to be human.

“You can’t pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing.”
Natalie Babbit in Tuck Everlasting

A large yellow dahlia, partly in shadow and against a black background.

What my beloved dahlias can teach me is that to be dug from my familiar place, dusted off, and tucked away into the darkness for months on end, is not the end of me after all. Not even the spring divisions, when the tangled tubers and dried off roots need to be cut into pieces in order to multiply the beauty into more plants is the end of my essential being.

“Fear is not pathology. Hopelessness is not pathology. Grief is not pathology. They are path. Collect the pieces of the broken world and create a container of empathy and love for the crumbled hopes and dreams to be held and tended to with the pieces of light. Honor the holy truth that the forms that love takes will always fall apart—for this is their nature—in order that they may come back together in more integrated and cohesive ways.”
Matt Licata

It is indeed better to live into the darkness, welcome its unknown space, breathe quietly, and be willing to wait for the newness of life, than to seek endless distractions, turn on more lights, deny the pain, grasp frantically for whatever relief might be on offer.

Live into the darkness.

“In a dark time,
the eye begins to see.”
Theodore Roetke

When Tidying Is not Enough

On October 6, 2020October 9, 2020 By ednafroeseIn hope, housework, political violence, politics, possibility, reform, renovationsLeave a comment

Cranberry Flats Conservation Area, south of Saskatoon.
Nature has its own transformations, its rhythms of tidying up.

My father, a German-speaking refugee from South Russia, had two terms for cleaning up: one was German – aufräumen; and the other, we assumed, was Russian – rozmak (it might have been Ukrainian for all we knew since he had grown up in what he knew as Russia and we now know as Ukraine.)

Aufräumen was routine, not to be shirked. It meant tasks like dusting furniture, washing dishes, washing floors, cleaning the bathroom, making beds, washing equipment in our dairy barn, putting fresh straw down for the cows, and shoveling out the manure. It also meant the final stage of any project, pleasurable or not, like sweeping up wood shavings after building something, putting away board games after a Sunday afternoon, packing up books and scribblers after homework was done, storing tools in their proper place after fixing the tractor, rinsing paint brushes and rollers when the walls were done, putting away toys as small children get ready for bed.

Aufräumen – both verb and noun. Its root, Raum, meant room, or sufficient space. With the suffix auf (up, or lift) added, the word conveys quite literally the image of picking stuff up to create more room, a cleaner, more open space. If not done often enough, it led inevitably to the other kind of clean-up. . . .

Rozmak was something else entirely, as my father used the word. It was likewise both noun and verb in his lexicon, naming actions that were drastic, superlative, disruptive. It’s what happened when some area of the house or garage or yard required more than a mere lifting up of stuff to create a cleaner space. Instead, it meant a wholesale dismantling of the current order (more likely, disorder), and restructuring from the bottom up. Inevitably, it resulted in a very full garbage can or huge boxes of stuff to haul away to some charity or rummage sale.

If it was “time for rozmak” (as my father used to phrase it), we children became nervous about our favourite things – clothes, toys, trees, old implements back in the bush that were perfect for imaginative play. Rozmak meant deciding that the entire pantry in the basement needed to be moved elsewhere, never mind if a wall or two had to be knocked out or added; or the kitchen had become unworkable.

The transformation of our own kitchen required first a will to create change and a vision of the possible, and then lots of hard word (not to mention financial commitment).

Rozmak applied as well to organic matter as to inanimate structures.

Fall seems the time in which to be particularly ruthless. My clematis had become impossible. I like to think that my father would be proud of my willingness to “hold *rozmak”* as he put it.

As I learned from my father, rozmak required stubborn determination and an ability to see what could be done and to discard what had once been precious or seemingly so. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. One never knew just how far rosmak might go, what might have to be sacrificed before the designated space became beautiful once more.

Rozmak – almost a made-up word, I have discovered. It was either a mispronunciation on my father’s part or a mishearing on the part of his children who all distinctly remember the “k” sound. The word, my Russian-speaking friend told me, is actually rozmah, denoting “very deep and wide and bold actions.” She used the illustration of a birthday party, which could be a modest and simple affair, a few guests, simple menu; or held with rozmah, with 100 guests and expenses be damned.

That my Mennonite father would have chosen such a passionate Slavic word and applied it to rather utilitarian ends seems typical to me now. Hard-working farmer that he was, devout and conservative, he nevertheless revealed, every now and then, something of a streak of daring, almost a gambler’s recklessness.

Aufräumen and rozmah.

Does it matter whether one is engaged in aufräumen or in rozmak? Other than in the amount of energy and focus required? Not to mention the degree of commitment to the completion of a huge task, and to the survival of the core of whatever is being reconstituted?

These two words from my childhood have been echoing in my mind as I listen to the news and read current affairs magazines. Nothing seems predictable any more or safe; 2020 has challenged our civic institutions in ways not seen since the 1918 flu epidemic or the World Wars.

The October issue of The Atlantic (a US-based magazine I would heartily recommend for its thoughtfulness and thorough research) examines the possibilities for hope in the US. Particularly important is “Make America Again” by George Packer. What Packer offers by way of remedy for the hyper-partisan, now almost impotent legislative system, is a kind of rozmah – a wholesale clean-up that requires a re-evaluation of the core of the democratic project and a willingness to consign to the rubbish heap those practices that have become toxic to the public good.

When we look at our own parliamentary system, I wonder how much toxicity has leached into our corridors of power as well. Does our parliamentary system in Ottawa require just a tidying up of details, a putting away of silly games, and a washing up of dirty laundry? Or is it time to host a rummage sale of political practices and attitudes before rot really sets in? How shall we handle our structures of law and order? Will a dusting cloth be enough or is it time to rearrange the furniture or even knock out a wall or two?

In the midst of such questions, can we please remember that rozmak, even of the most thorough variety, even in its most reckless mood, is not a revolution? Its primary aim is not destruction. Instead, the whole point is to preserve what is worth keeping and make it serve its intended purpose with greater clarity and beauty.

Catastrophes can fix our minds on a common crisis, pull down political and regulatory barriers that stand in the way of progress, and spur technological leaps, bringing talent and money together to solve big problems
(“How Disaster Shaped the Modern City” by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, October, 2020, p. 69)

Saskatchewan faces an election. Shall we ask our candidates if they are willing to “hold rozmak” where needed, even if it costs all of their political capital? And what do they consider the core structure that should remain in place and be made more humane and beautiful?

A Lamp in the Night

On September 21, 2020September 20, 2020 By ednafroeseIn friendship, gifts, hope, Illness, spirituality, StoriesLeave a comment

It had to be: five days and four nights in a ward of 4 people – 3 besides me. I hadn’t been a hospital patient for 3 decades, for which I’d been grateful. Now I was just grateful that COVID-19 restrictions had eased enough that I could be there. Medical details are irrelevant for this posting (albeit obviously not for me). What matters here are the stories I heard and what I might now do with them.

“The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed.”
B. Lopez, Crow and Weasel

Hospital wards offer little privacy (or modesty, but that’s another issue). Curtains are sometimes drawn around beds, especially at night, but soundproof they are most definitely not. Night times are the vulnerable times, too, when pain or fear or usually both simply must be given voice somehow—to the darkness at least, if not to the gentle night nurse who quietly appears in response to the call button.

Friendships form quickly in such emotional places, if we can call such brief connections friendships. Intimacy might be a better word, an involuntary intimacy that comes from bearing silent witness. Subject as we all were to varying degrees of helplessness, bearing witness was all we could do for one another, for the one or few days that we shared the room.

It took only one day for me to grasp my relative privilege. I had someone who visited, as much as COVID-19 allowed (the other patients came from all over the province), I had someone to whom I would go home when the time came (I would not travel by taxi or return to a solitary residence), I had enough financial security for that not to be a factor in how the healing process would unfold, I had begun from a baseline of good health and stable routines. For me, matters unfolded as they should in a competent health care system, and complications did not arise.

That, I discovered, should not be taken for granted. I had known, intellectually, about worrisome gaps in our social safety net, such as inadequate welfare resources, unmanageable case loads, too much bureaucracy, insufficient finances for all the possible treatment plans that could be helpful, and persistent negative lifestyle choices (if indeed they are genuine choices, which is debatable). On a scale necessary for drawing up budgets and making policy decisions, the gaps could be, and have been, discussed and sometimes ameliorated—or exacerbated, as has also happened.

How those policies play out for any given individual is entirely different. The stories that I heard, whether directly during daylight hours when curtains were opened and sunshine gleamed across the floor and conversation eased the awkwardness of sharing space—or overheard as doctors’ instructions and therapists’ questions, or as half-stifled sobs in the night. I did not know what to do with those stories, how to grant them the dignity the story-tellers deserved, how to hold the suffering honestly, without looking away.

I asked a friend who, as a staff member, dropped in for quick chats now and then, “how can you keep working here, with all the heartache and all the stubborn dysfunction that you must observe?” Her reply was simple: bear witness and give whatever assistance possible because both would make a difference to each patient.

Bearing witness. The phrase has haunted my quiet hours ever since, especially at night when distractions are not there and I feel most vulnerable. Bearing witness. To open one’s mind and heart and imagination and feel pain that is not one’s own yet hurts almost as if it was.

My last night in the hospital had some long wakeful spells. It was not the quietest night on the ward, although the room I was in remained peaceful enough. I lay there, thinking about the woman directly across from me who had, earlier in the day, told me amidst tears of her loneliness, isolation, separation from family and everything familiar. Social safety nets had not kept her secure—all seemed wrong and unhelpful and impossible. I had wanted to cry with her and chafed at my helplessness, at the seemingly intransigent province-wide problems that denied her any hope of change or return to her beloved community. Bearing witness was hard.

Then, in the semi-darkness, as I looked at the outline of her body relaxed now in sleep, I saw something else: beside her bed, hovering above her bedside cabinet, a dark human form, smaller than an actual person, like a statue perhaps, visible only to the waist, with head bent toward the bed, a hand holding a tiny light. As if someone were quietly keeping watch at her side. The head, with its longer hair, had a faint resemblance to Jesus figures but could also have been a woman. Only the silhouette was there, no discernible facial features. As if “bearing witness” had taken on actual physicality.

For several long breaths, I stared. That wasn’t possible, couldn’t be real. I am not a see-er of visions, although I don’t discount the supernatural, having had experiences of something More than materiality. In that moment of suspended time, disbelief and unease gave way to warmth and comfort. She was not alone after all, that fellow patient who had so little control over her life and so little prospect of improvement. Someone cared, someone was watching, offering a little light to see by.

Then another patient in the room shuffled out from behind her curtain and headed for the bathroom. In the brief illumination of the bathroom light, before the door closed, the nameless Witness became instead the silhouette of the IV apparatus standing just close enough to the wall shelves where a dark plastic bag had been stuffed in to create a seeming statue of a human being; the light in the outstretched hand was the glow of the IV monitor. The illusion of a tender watcher was at once dispelled.

Yet not entirely. When the room returned to its semi-darkness, I could “see” the figure again. And I pondered it, until I fell asleep.

The following morning, as daylight lit the room, I awoke and smiled to myself to think how simple objects can reshape themselves in the darkness. The woman who had been “watched over in the night” was now absent for treatment, and before she returned, I was discharged and on my way home. Would I have told her of my “vision” if she had been there? I don’t know. Likely not. As it was, I could not even say good-bye. Such is the transience of meetings in a hospital, and in many other places where vulnerable people come together briefly, hear one another’s stories, then go their separate ways.

Now that I am home and once again sheltering in place, more or less, until recovery is complete, I have more than enough time to ponder the meaning of the illusory watcher in the night. I had briefly wished that the figure had been real, had been an actual manifestation of godly caring. If only we could somehow summon divine intervention! make medical centres magically appear in our northern regions, transform all care homes into beautiful, fully staffed, loving places, make poverty a thing of the past! I know divine intervention is believed possible by many, in more than one religious tradition.

Photo of single small votive candle with a Celtic wooden cross.

What I now also recognize, with gratitude, is that my ward-mate was being cared for: repeatedly, I watched various medical staff talk to her, provide the necessary attention, schedule treatments, bring meals, etc. Over and over again, in those days, I saw competent and gentle care given to others and to me. There had been social workers doing their best to work out solutions, physiotherapists and occupational health therapists teaching necessary skills and making sure that the return to outside life would be feasible. Phone numbers were given, tender hands placed on shoulders in comfort, encouragement offered.

What I also want to carry forward from here is the necessary knowledge that every person I meet has stories to tell, stories that will change my initial impressions and evoke compassion and admiration for the courage that is there. I need to go into the community, when the time comes, with the willingness to see in every face, both the vulnerable sleeper in the bed and the loving generosity of a potential care-giver.