To thine own self be true

there is quite a bit of information that arises, things one learns about others in terms of process, for example. Over time, one changes anyway through changing situations, contexts, health, relationships, etc. Such that people one was once close to are often permanently ‘gone’ from one’s life. Whatever was once special becomes memory, if even that. I think it’s interesting, too, that over time, one gains perspective and looks back, accepting often the many changes and departures from one’s life. It is only rarely usually that one reaches back in time to contact with someone from ten, thirty, fifty years ago in one’s life. But it does happen.

I can remember, after having my first book published in 1980, going back to give copies to my grade 6 and 12 teachers. Even a few years back, I went to my old elementary school’s 100th anniversary, making the effort to contact the first female teacher (grade 5) that I liked and enjoyed. Unfortunately, we missed each other, but we did connect by e-mail and since then, remain e-mail contacts on a fairly regular basis and we will finally meet in person (if all goes well) in September 2017 back in Winnipeg. It is fantastic to be able to step through the mists of time, which I also did at my high school’s 50th anniversary and see and talk to people for once only, forty years after we had all been in the same building and same time together. Quite unique.

Over time, I have contacted (at least once) anyone I ever wanted to see or chat with again. Always this has proved to be fun, interesting, and connective. There are many people who talk about doing this sort of thing, but who never do. Hence, the regrets and sense of missed opportunities. I have never had that experience; I have always acted on my will or desire to reconnect through the mists of time and each time I am glad I persevered or took the risk.

Christmas season, however, does make it easier and possible to see one’s closest friends, which I am doing this week. People I enjoy, people who have been long-standing friends; good and nice people, ‘fans’ and supporters. For me, it is a well-deserved break and a chance to (re-)connect with people who mean something to me beyond family. A time to count blessings and feel the spirits raised and connected. Today is lunch with Jerry at the Confederation lounge of the Macdonald Hotel, with my bright literature/arts friend and co-author of my last educational projects. It will be an intelligent, nuanced conversation on the state of the world, education, hockey, and Life. Not a trace of frivolousness or distraction. No masking, no games, no ego, no power, no control. Just two good friends sharing and enjoying one another.

Always at this time of year, at the most frigid of times, I resort to imagination and healthful viewing to warm the cockles of mind, heart and soul. It is as simple as putting on my Visions of Italy, Sicily, and Greece DVDs. And there it all is–all that any frozen humanitarian could ever want–the regions of the beginnings of Western civilization in their warm sunny splendor gloriously from the air! The quaint red-roofed towns, the grey rocky coasts that spill into the sea, the warm sun-baked lands with vineyards, the deserted but often intact ruins and castles and churches, the green trees springing up from the sun-baked streets, the dark blue or green waters and the pale or brilliant blue skies.

The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that the main essence/raison d’etre remains consciousness, (especially that fostered and developed by imagination), the raising of spirits as simple as some will, some consciousness of what is most needed, and then the application of whatever resources. If this means spending $$$ for whatever, it hardly/never matters to me. One must finally minister to one’s self and be responsible for whatever attitudes, soul-moods, and freedom one wishes to have. Will logically follows (‘A man can do all things if he will.”–Alberti), then the availability and application of whatever resources, taking/making the time for such, and exercising those soul-nurturing choices.

-30 Edmonton no longer exists for me as I now go outdoors. Only Sicily–the inner warmth of that state of soul, that so-civilized climate, that sunny warm disposition and sensibility. It all begins with imagination and the truly-conscious individual.

Donald Trump
Justin Trudeau

(decorated her blue Betta’s fish tank today–he’s at Santa’s feet putting in his requests)

Winter City? Frozen North? (fact)
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”
or Sam McGee incarnate.
Too bloody cold for rats.
Snow blown across Xmas potholes.
Someone else’s bad dream
rammed down a senior’s throat
like feckless mayors, windrows
or snow-covered bike-lanes.
City of a dead downtown
awaiting invisible people.
Awaiting the day when the power
conks out for gutted grid-hours
and all will simply freeze and die:
pets, plants, taps, houses, taxpayers.
Or else as some huddle in their monster trucks
idling the pipe-dream mirage
until all that NDP gas runs out.

(after Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North)
dedicated to Dean McKenzie

………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

(We have administered these vast territories of North in an almost continuing state of mind…)

High latitude
vast flatness of poles
wind a whitewash
breathing lungs
stone-cold

(I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas and I find that this is growing apace each year, so that I really want to get it out of my system somehow…)

Cold enlarges consciousness
an inner feeling: hinterlands
We are stirred & sharpened
made precise, altered–
a mental nordicity

(The North is almost everything beyond the comfortable and familiar, everything frozen and dark, treeless and windswept…)

Arctic night
blizzard bone
drift of pelt & parka
polar values
break the ice in rime
evoke an introversion
like isotherms

(When men live in the North their values change…)

permafrost/permavision
cold Judas chill
solitude
& idea-flakes

(They live a lifetime and die when they emerge. They become citizens of a different country–that tapestry of tundra and taiga…)

blue-planed spirit
frozen subsoil
keen surface
cutting/nipping
uninhabited
vanishing point

(There was something spiritual about it, elements of magic having to do with the magnetic pole…)

brush-blade pointillism
breath & breathe
vision elemental
inland seas
frozen sonata

(Something really does happen to people up here…)

ice age cold snap
cold storage
icefields
pro-found snow-bound

(It cares so little and sort of diminished you…)

pack-ice growlers
overhang design
spirit gathers hoarfrost
terminal moraine

(It looks so odd and cold you wouldn’t want to live there…)

chilblain shiver
raw polar night
boreal abstract
a treeline sensibility
gather & evoke
this nordic index.

Frozen North aka Edmonton.
A good day for chestnuts roasting on an open fire as opposed to insanity on the roads as people stress-out shopping and driving to stores everywhere in pursuit of materialistic Christmas.

A good day to stay undercover/s or to enjoy a long winter’s nap as in “The Night Before Christmas”.

I can remember being back at Golden Gate High in Winnipeg, February, 1962, and the radio broadcast of Glenn landing in the ocean and being recovered was broadcast via radio over the intercom in our classroom. A rare historical moment; something real that mattered to all North Americans. He made It! And the Americans firmly entered the Great Space Race.

Days where a man could perish from simply being caught outside.

(relevant viewing: rare DVD ready by Orson Welles of Jack London’s classic freezing-to-death story)