(my Dad in WWII, Vernon Delmar Davies)

Acted. Made a difference today. Chose and expressed ourselves tangibly on the basis of core personal values.

Made our donation today to the above worthy charity. A total no-brainer.
Simple cause-effect stuff.

Effect: How did we acquire the society and freedoms most of us in Canada enjoy and take for granted today?
Cause: Patriotic guys went to wars for the rest of us and for future generations and laid down their lives for our country and all of us who live here, and go largely unthanked today. Their graves wait to be acknowledged.

The questions one must ask oneself:

How much do people today appreciate what these guys did? How much effort and self-sacrifice does it take to support this cause? Where does one stand in relation to the past sacrifices of many others who defended our country and us, long-term, even those newcomers to Canada? How much is a donation going to ‘kill’/inconvenience/beggar somebody to make? (Takes about 1 minute online to help keep this no-brainer cause going.)

Right now NSLA has a sponsor-donor doubling whatever contributions are made. That really sealed the deal for me. We are also very impressed by the work and support by young people in support of this cause; they truly put many of us adults to shame by their empathy, sympathy, greater understanding and sincere appreciation.

November 11: Honour the fallen, the war dead. Remember. Do not forget.

(Alberta Desert Dog, 20+ above @ Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, in early January. Meantime -35 and a blizzard back in E-Town. Over 55 degrees difference. No wonder Albertan passengers applauded the pilot when we arrived on the ground at Scottsdale airport.)

have long been cameras (black and white, originally) and now computers and phones with Internet broadcasting, sharing, and ‘permanence’. Our expanded possibilities and ‘presence’ thanks to technology.
Images per se go beyond death thanks to old photos at home and the same or recent images on phone and online.

72 Years: A Self-Portrait (1949-2021)

-Let all your thinks be thanks.
-The basic stimulus to intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
-Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.
-Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

-You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.
-All we are not stares back at what we are.
-In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
-Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.

-We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.
-For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

-To make one, there must be two.
-Only as I am, can I love you as yourself.
-We must love one another or die.
-If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.

-Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.
-Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine good.
-Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
-Now is the age of anxiety.
-I smell blood in an era of prominent madmen.
-The wolves will get you if the moths won’t.

-In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.
-Let not Time deceive you
You cannot conquer Time.

-Death is the distant thunder at a picnic.
-Looking up at the stars,
I know quite well
That for all they care,
I can go to hell.
-For who can bear to feel oneself forgotten?

-All time reading is time well-spent.
-Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
-A real book is not the one we read, but one that reads us.
-I write because I love to play with language.
-The underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between a person and another.
-Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think.

-We were put on this earth to make things.
-A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
-A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
-As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption.
-One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

-Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
-Drama is based on the mistake.
-Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we would always worship false gods.
-There must be two kinds of art: escapist-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that which shall teach man to unlearn hate and learn love.

-We are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know.

Entire worlds that opened up to me beginning with top 40 radio via a 2 transistor radio, watching CBC Saturday night hockey games on our new B & W tv set, reading Classics Illustrated comics, following The Beatles, going to university to take courses I chose, reading classic books, marrying the love of my life at 21, teaching where I wanted, playing music live for others, writing many textbooks on areas I chose, travelling twice in the fall to New England to visit favorite American writer haunts, becoming a poet full-time, while co-creating/facilitating an interesting, civilized family.

Does it get any better than that? Born at the right time. Made the best of my opportunities. Followed my bliss all the way so far.

These pandemic days, I return daily to the myriad worlds of my large book, music, movie, and art collections. Never a dull moment. And great ongoing emotional, mental, and spiritual nourishment. The Palace of Art I consciously built for myself more than satisfies my inner needs in an otherwise limited/limiting, diminished time.

(first ’90s New England trip to Frost Farm, Derry, Vermont; allusions to a local farm custom and his poem “Mending Wall”)

“Let all your thinks be thanks.” –W.H. Auden

“Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say.”

(Another of my favorite poets)

A true master of metaphor, irony, ambiguity, and juxtaposition.

Song: Sweetest love, I do not go

Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me;
But since that I
Must die at last, ’tis best
To use myself in jest
Thus by feign’d deaths to die.

Yesternight the sun went hence,
And yet is here today;
He hath no desire nor sense,
Nor half so short a way:
Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Speedier journeys, since I take
More wings and spurs than he.

O how feeble is man’s power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall!
But come bad chance,
And we join to’it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o’er us to’advance.

When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not wind,
But sigh’st my soul away;
When thou weep’st, unkindly kind,
My life’s blood doth decay.
It cannot be
That thou lov’st me, as thou say’st,
If in thine my life thou waste,
That art the best of me.

Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy fears fulfil;
But think that we
Are but turn’d aside to sleep;
They who one another keep
Alive, ne’er parted be.

This time around on Halloween, re-viewing the first of the 1960 AFI/Roger Corman-directed films starring Vincent Price, closely adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale of moral and psychological corruption and insane self-destruction. Nothing like a creaky old mansion with a tarn and giant fissure aided and abetted by a psychopathic owner, his cataleptic sister, a useless frail butler, and a vigorous suitor who gets more than he bargained for when he visits his gal to free her from the Usher curse.

A strangely ‘slow’, but well-paced nightmare that bursts open suddenly on the home stretch like Madeline from her coffin. Nice color visuals and sets including the Usher family portrait gallery and Les Baxter’s weird musical score. Not much to be edited here and no character is spared from the disaster that is the last of the Usher family and their house saga.

Still entertaining (with some unintentional humor thanks to the usual Price hamminess) 61 years later. Highly recommended.

(Napoleon Kenney and his pig police keeping all the exploited peon-underlings under his/their absolute control. Only in Alberta you say….)

A corrupt fascist party/premier wants its/his own private police force to not lay charges against them and to lay charges against everyone else. Animal Farm more power-grab stuff. Same old. With the public footing the monstrous cost of a nasty, totally unnecessary, ultra-political move. All for the convenience of….the fat-cat pigs! Who else?

below suet in fall.