the cassandra pages

Truths and Deceptions

Another foot of snow fell throughout the day and evening. The next morning, we went out in the stillness, wet snow clinging to every twig and wire against a dun-colored sky, and began the process of shoveling out. The snowbanks have mounted to nearly three feet; we haven’t seen a winter like this for decades.

Once we had made a path for our feet and the car, we drove to the post office, and then to the town clerk’s office where we handed in our absentee ballots for the Vermont Democratic primary, and took a small handful of chocolate candy from the big glass jar on the counter on our way out. Then we drove across the river to visit my father-in-law, now home from the hospital.

When we entered, he was sitting in his chair in a dark blue fleece dressing gown and light blue pajamas. One of the staff women was seated on a chair near him, taking his dinner order so that the kitchen could send a tray up to his room. He was saying that nothing appealed to him, but if he had to eat, he would just have some rice, a little meat, a salad – and for her to tell them to make it from the inner leaves of the lettuce, not the outer tough ones. “Where do the inner leaves go?” he asked, a little petulantly. “They never give them to us.”

“I don’t know!” she answered, “but I’m with you. I know what I do at home – I tear off those tough outside leaves and go right for the inside ones. I’ll see what I can do. Now, how about a little piece of angel food cake with your dinner? They can put some berries on it, and that way it won’t be so sugary, I know you don’t want anything too sweet…”

We said hello to them both and sat down; the woman finished her paperwork and left. “So, how are you?” J. asked.

“I’ve been off, and I’m not back yet.” He gave a bitter laugh. “In the hospital they gave me that drug – what is it – the one that people get hooked on.”

“Heroin,” said J., joking.

“Yes.”

“Actually didn’t they give you morphine?” I said.

“Whatever. They gave it to me and I went…off.” He waved two fingers in the direction of the window.

“Where did you go?” I wondered if he remembered spending a night in Beirut, as he had told my sister-in-law he’d dreamed a few days before.

“I don’t know. Wherever it is I’m not back from!” He was smiling, but the underlying look on his face was sad and disagreeable. His face was tired and a bit drawn, and there were patches of dry skin on his cheeks and around his eyes, but when he talked he still looked handsome, with flickers of his old vibrancy.

I noticed that something in the familiar composition had changed. “Where’s your radio?” I asked. The big old Grundig wasn’t in its usual place, and Socrates, who usually stood on top, leaning on his staff and listening to the room’s proceedings, had been moved onto the tea table with its faded, dried-up flowers and disheveled pile of books and papers.

“I had them move it into my bedroom, near my bed, so I can listen to it there. But it’s not talking to me. I can’t get the Vermont public station on it. I can’t get anything on it but static.”

“OK, we’ll try later to see what we can do.”

“I really feel miserable. This whole hospital stay was a catastrophe, an utter catastrophe. They took me there against my wishes, and against the orders of my doctor. The nurse stood right there and told me ‘I’m calling the ambulance right now!’ and I said ‘No you are not!’ and she did it anyway, and they took me.” He shook his head. “And of course my doctors were away, so I sat there in that room for four days and they did nothing, no doctor came to see me to do anything significant, until Sunday when I got very angry and told them I wasn’t staying any longer unless something started to happen. Aaagh. What’s the use?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It can’t be helped,” he said. “And I’m also miserable because I realize I’ve spent my life deceiving people.”

“What do you mean?”

“I taught people to think, telling them it was important. That was my mission. I’d watch them in class, and one day the light would go on during some discussion, and you’d see them, realizing for the first time, ‘I can think for myself!’ Parents would tell me, ‘You took my child and taught him, and he’s become completely different!’”

I was confused, since this is the sort of praise he often repeats and seems to cherish. “So what’s wrong with that?”

“Think for what?” he said. “What good does it do? This is how we end up – unable to do anything, good for nothing, while life goes on and the world runs itself down under the likes of Bush. So you see, I deceived them.”

I looked at him, unable to find quick words to make a convincing argument, or any argument at all, but unwilling to offer platitudes.

He fixed me with a piercing gaze. “What are you here for?” he demanded. “What are any of us here for?”

I really didn’t want to get drawn into a hopeless argument, since it was clear by now that he was in a very bad mood.  I waited a few moments, and then answered, “I think we’re here for love.”

He gave me the same withering look he gives when he thinks I’m defending religion, and pretended not to hear. “They learn to think, and then they find out the world is a terrible place, and all the religions are lies, and that when we die” -- he snapped his fingers – “we just die. Like that. Fini. Anyone who can think comes to that conclusion. So what is the point of being able to think?” He looked at me defiantly. “They might as well throw themselves off a cliff.”

I stared back at him and considered. “I can think and I haven’t done that yet,” I said, looking at him directly.

That threw him off guard. Then he grinned; Socrates stood immobile in his new position on the tea tray, his back to me, looking at my father in law, “So why not?” he growled.

“I love your son, for one thing.”

“Well, when we love, we aren’t ourselves – we aren’t thinking, we are lost in the other person. We forget all about ourselves. That’s what I said at the last wedding I performed.”

“I remember that.”

“You and I consider ourselves the pinnacle of evolution, because we can think. But we humans are not the end point of evolution. We’re just… the tip emerging from nature.”  I thought about the article I’d read earlier in the day, about the discovery on an arctic island of a fifty-foot-long fossilized sea monster, the largest marine reptile ever discovered, and the artist’s conception of it rising from the sea on its front flippers, toothy jaws agape, ready to snap them shut on a flying pterosaur. The monster had been dark blue in the painting, the same blue as my father-in-law’s robe. I suppressed a smile at the thought, got up and went into the kitchen and put water on for tea. He kept talking: “Evolution is a continuing process. We can’t see where it will go. I think eventually we will become something altogether different –-" he waved his hand and looked at the ceiling –- “beings of pure spirit, living together in love.”

“Will these spirits die, or will they be immortal?”

“They’ll be immortal.”

“Sounds good! Do you want some tea, while I’m up?”

“No! I can’t stand tea, and they kept bringing it to me in the hospital. And why do people insist on having it every afternoon? I don’t understand it.”

Now it was my turn to pretend not to hear; on the counter there was a slice of cantaloupe in a thick china dish, wrapped in plastic. I lowered my head and cut the melon up into small pieces, thinking he might possibly eat a little of it. My father-in-law had turned to J., who was squatting on the floor, changing the lens in his camera. “Have you listened to the business news today?” he asked. “What’s going on in the world? I feel totally lost, totally out of it.”

(to be continued. This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my father-in-law, to be collected eventually under the title "The Fig and the Orchid". You can find others by searching my category archives under "Family" and/or "Middle East and Islam."

Bach Partita #2 on a black and white day

Relentless snow. In the yard, wrought iron chairs buried under mounding pillows; arching rose canes; circled peony rings, their thin blue shadows.

Type etches a white screen, a page. Notes race over keys, under fingers -- courante, rondeau, capriccio -- drawing lines, circles, bodies; dancing out of the room.

"I'm Still Here"

"You know what we say in Arabic..." said my father-in-law on the phone last week, after we'd told him everything was fine with us. "...If you don't have any worries, invent one." Two nights ago my sister-in-law called to tell us that he was in the hospital again, after another incident of chest pain strong enough that three nitroglycerin tablets wouldn't relieve it. His regular doctor is out of town, on a lecture circuit, so she wasn't there to keep him out of the hospital, as their mutually-agreed-upon care plan had said.

We're going down tomorrow, but today I called and got the main hospital switchboard, where I was asked to spell his last name (something that never happens in Montreal - they know how to pronounce and spell it here). She transferred me to the nursing station on his floor, where I was asked to repeat the name several times more. Finally I heard the beside phone ringing, and the familiar fumbling and delay as he juggled the receiver on its precarious journey from the cradle to his ear.

His voice sounded strong, and he was full of stories about the staff's efficiency; the misfortune of being ill on a weekend when all the doctors were out "enjoying their profits;" the way "all the furniture in the room had been rearranged" since this morning. He had needed to wash up in the shower and to his horror, two young female nurses had been sent to the room. "Imagine! They wanted to go into the shower with me!" he exclaimed. "I told them, 'Over my dead body!'" and they sent a male instead, which was all right. he did everything for me." Even though I couldn't see him, I could imagine his head shaking in wonderment at this latest adventure. He said he was up sitting in a chair, and that he was comfortable but wouldn't be released until Monday, since there were no doctors anywhere around. "A helicopter just flew by the window!" he reported, no doubt seeing the rescue helicopter that transports accident victims and premature babies from the remote areas of the region to the medical center. "Amazing! It's just incredible what goes on here."

He ordered us to enjoy ourselves while we could. "How's your work going?" It was fine, we told him - the irony is that we're working on a publication about end-of-life care in American hospitals - but we didn't say that. We assured him we'd see him soon. "I'll see you then, insh'allah," he said. "In Arabic we have a saying:'The devil never cracks his own pot.' Catastrophes keep happening, but I'm still here."

Self-Determination, Seen from Another Side

I was recently involved in an online discussion about self-determination and nationalism, the legacy of Western colonialism, the bullies and the bullied. It got a little hot, with some participants speaking theoretically, some spiritually, some talking about political realities -- but only one or two speaking from the experience of actually living in former colonies -- and it was fascinating to explore our present feelings about monarchies, the Commonwealth, the differences between America and Canada's own versions of "self-determination", and the spectres of racism, slavery, and human suffering that shadow the history of all peoples and their occupiers. And then, of course, there was the resignation of Fidel Castro and speculation about what might happen now in the multi-colored experiment that is present-day Cuba.

So I was happy to read Pankaj Mishra's timely article, Ordained as a Nation, in the most recent London Review of Books: a review and discussion of The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism by Erez Manela. Whether you read Manela's book or not, you owe it to yourself to read Mishra's fine and lucid article. I learned a lot. Wilson, for example, encouraged Egypt's nationalist movement, only to be seen as a double-crosser when he was squelched by the British and French -- and even at his best, Wilson's idealistic internationalism combined with the same condescending white superiority that marked western colonialism.Of course we do know how European and American victors carved up the non-western world in the wake of two world wars, eviscerated nationalistic movements in many non-European countries, and rendered permanently bitter, alienated and suspicious numerous others in Asia,  Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. However, as Mishra convincingly shows, a direct line of thinking connects Wilson both to the current occupants of the White House and to dangerously earnest liberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman: proponents of interventions as ill-conceived and unworkable today as they were nearly a hundred years ago.

The victories of the Cold War – and the giddy speculation that history had reached the ideological terminus of liberal democracy – revived illusions of omnipotence among an Anglo-American political and media elite that has always known very little about the modern world it claims to have made. Consequently, almost every event since the end of the Cold War – the rise of radical Islam, of India and China, the assertiveness of oil-rich Russia, Iran and Venezuela – has come as a shock, a rude reminder that the natives of Delhi, Cairo and Beijing have geopolitical ambitions of their own, not to mention a sense of history marked by resentment and suspicion of the metropolitan West. The liberal internationalists persist, trying to revive the Wilsonian moment in places where Anglo-American liberalism has been seen as an especially aggressive form of hypocrisy. Increasingly, however, they expose themselves as the new provincials, dangerously blundering about in a volatile world.

A Correspondence Begins (1)

A landscape from the Maniototo district of Central Otago, a province in New Zealand c 2007 Tony Bridge. Click for a larger image.

Several months ago, I was approached by New Zealand photographer Tony Bridge, who had read some of my writing here and asked if I might be interested in having a conversation with him about art and life. Although we live halfway around the world from each other, we discovered we're both in midlife, neither young nor old; that we're both professionals who juggle demanding schedules and deadlines (he as photographer, I as a graphic designer) with our personal artistic pursuits; and that we share a lifelong inner artistic search, trying to push ourselves to do the best work we can but also to integrate it with our lives as a whole. Tony and I both seek to understand what we are doing and why; to learn from this path more about what it means to be human; and to use whatever abilities we have developed to contribute to the world in some way. However, we don't know each other well at all yet, so this conversation, which we will both be posting on our blogs, is likely to be an exploration of art and also the unfolding of a friendship. And, taking advantage of the blog form to expand on what would normally be only a two-way communication, we warmly invite and welcome your comments and questions.

January 29, 2008, Montreal

Dear Tony,

Happy New Year, very much belated! I hope you will forgive my tardiness; I've been very consumed with professional work which has had tight deadlines, and with family. But I've been turning our conversation over in my head and thinking about where we might begin a more public dialog.

I keep going back to your photographs themselves - those breathtaking images of "your beloved Maniototo" which stunned me with their beauty. Perhaps we might begin there, and talk about the challenge of beauty itself for the artist, whether in words (for me, primarily) or images (for you). How can a 21st-century artist approach this concept of the beautiful in a fresh way, trying to convey what it arouses in us without creating something that is saccharine or hackneyed, something that goes beyond "calendar art?"

I experience beauty as a primary inspiration and source of hope, but I realize that it is dangerous material in my hands, with the potential to distort my words into something I did not mean, something untruthful -- because it is incomplete without the sense of being seen through the soul of a person who has lived and experienced the unbeautiful, the terrible, the utterly Other. Beauty without this poignancy is not fully felt, to me.

But what do you think?

-Beth

 

February 18, 2008, New Zealand

Hello Beth:

Like you, the last six weeks have been a wild rollercoaster of a ride. Perhaps the analogy of the surfer, riding the Bondi pipeline, is a more accurate metaphor.  At times, I have felt as if I was rushing down the side of the wave, barely in control, with a vast wall of water looming above me, with meeting client deadlines the light at the end of the tunnel.  At any time, I could lose control, and then everything would cave in. Frankly, it hasn't been a necessarily pleasant experience!  Fortunately, I seem to have stayed on my board (mostly) and I'm coming out of this somewhat terrifying experience.  So, in the time available to me for before I head to the North Island, I thought I would begin our discussion.

It's probably an appropriate place to start, the idea of how an artist deals with the issue of beauty.  It brought me back to my artist statement, which you can read here.  In many ways the statement, which I wrote during a long dark night of the soul in Africa, has proved to be a profound and anchoring thing for me.  It was as if all the roads which I have travelled in my lifetime came together.  I arose around 4 a.m., in the liquid blackness of an African night, a blackness punctuated by the strange and alien noises of the creatures that move in it, and after stepping outside for 10 minutes or so to confront it and smoke a cigarette, the penny, as they say, fell into place.  A strange compulsion had come upon me, a kind of road to Damascus experience, and even though I knew I needed the sleep, my mind wouldn't let me, and held me by the scruff of the neck until it was done (about an hour and a half later).  Then I collapsed for another hour or so before it was time to rise and go back to the workshop I was assisting.

I think that writing one's artist statement is a very defining experience.  I know it certainly was for me.  It had brought together all the experiences of my life, and in some strange way gave clarity to what I had been doing, and an indication of the road ahead.  It is the thing I visit whenever I am uncertain of the path I am following, a kind of lighthouse to remind me where I am. 

You see, whenever I revisit it, it is as if I am looking at myself in the mirror, reminding myself of who I am.  And why I am.

Perhaps I can start there.

Over the years I suppose I have journeyed in and out of the different rooms that comprise photography.  I've turned my hand to documentary, to landscape, and portraiture and wedding photography.  I have even, on the odd occasion, shot sport or natural history.  In those times I was really seeking to build my skills and a variety of different photographic areas. You see, all those rooms have interconnecting doors.  Over time, as I worked my way up the spiral from beginner to wherever I am now, I have revisited those things again and again and again, each time trying to add something new to my photographic vocabulary.  I suppose, over time, I have acquired a certain facility.  None of that, however, is really worth anything of itself.  I think it was Edward Weston who said that there is nothing worse than the technically brilliant execution of a fuzzy concept.  In the end, possessing all the tools/toys and having the skills to work for them to their potential is of minimal value.  Adding something to the sum total of human experience is.

I reached a point about 15 years ago where I realised that while my photographs were technically sound, the concepts were fuzzy.  It was a frightening realisation, but a necessary one.  I had reached that point where, if one is both lucky and blessed, one comes to realise that photography for its own sake is of little or no consequence.  I realised that, for all my knowledge, the humble snapshot had a greater intrinsic value than any of my Ansel Adams like landscapes.  I mean, why photograph the landscape anyway?  The original is infinitely superior and far more perfect. Who was I to mimic God's creation?  And so, for a time, I journeyed through the Slough of Despond.  For a time, I wondered whether the 15 years I had invested in learning photography had been a pointless journey down some cul-de-sac.

Then I read a book of Sam Abell's work.  In it, he talks about reaching a point where he really didn't know what whether he wanted to continue in photography or not.  It was only when he read a book on Japanese garden design that he realised the art of photography lies in framing.  This realisation gave the impetus to pick up his camera again and continue on.

It wasn't quite like that for me.  It took me some time to realise that running into this brick wall, and having to confront the question of the point of photography, while difficult, was actually a gift.

Not long after that, I went out for an evening walk, at a time when the city had settled and pulled the duvet up around its ears, and the night air didn't seem quite so cluttered by the business of human consciousness.  It was time to walk, reflect, and think.  They say that angels talk to a man when he walks, and for me the night has always been a peculiarly profitable time for doing this.

As I walked to the end of our cul-de-sac, I happened to look up. There, suspended on the sky before me in all its glory, hung a gloriously liquid full moon.  On the telephone poll above me, in the glare from the street lights, several moths danced and circled and paid homage to the demigod.  I stood entranced, enraptured by a site that for all its simplicity was incredibly complex and somehow perfect.  As the Moth Song continued, I wondered how I could possibly capture its beauty so that others could share what I was beholding.  I wondered how many other people had stood at the end of their cul-de-sac and watched moths dancing in the moonlight.  I realised I had been given yet another gift.  Somehow, this small event was a symbol, a leitmotif for all that is wonderful in nature.

I returned home and lay in bed with the moths still dancing in my mind.  As I did so, I thought back to my boyhood in the wonder of the trees in the forests where I grew up.  They were my friends, my secret companions and the source of my boyhood imaginings.  I realised then, that photography can be a sort of visual shorthand, and that the popularity of the image lies in its ability to summarise, to say in the 60th of the second what might require more time and words.  Those moths dancing in the moonlight was a moment that can be laid down in an image, yet require a novel to convey.  Small wonder then that imagery is increasingly replacing text.  I suspect however that is a topic for a future letter!

Once you realise the power of this incredible tool, the camera, you realise you have the facility to do great good or to do great evil.  In other words, to be human.

As I pondered it, I realised that I could easily take on a documentary project that exposed the harsh underbelly of life in my city.  I could photograph derelicts and street people and those hard done by on the outer edge of society.  But to what purpose?  While this might give me some sort of false sense of doing something for the greater good, using my talents, would I, by going down this road, really be adding anything to the sum total of human experience?

You see, for me, that is a matter of primary importance.  It is easy to take, it is easy to live a life of consumption, it is easy to absorb the planet's resources with little thought for our tamariki, our children.  If I appear somewhat didactic, I make no apology.  Caring for the planet and looking to the needs of those who will follow is of great importance to me.  And because I have some facility with photography, it is my responsibility to use it, to try and make a difference.

So do I draw attention to the ugly, to the hateful, to the distressing? I can, for I have that right,  should I choose to exercise it.  But do I want to?  Will I, by making images of pollution or destruction and holding them up in the mirror of mankind, add anything to the sum total of human experience?  Does a shock value have any lasting effect?

I suppose I thought these things over for a year or so.  And then I remembered.  I remembered the moths in the moonlight, I remembered the trees whispering outside my bedroom as a boy, and I made my choice.

It is easy to be tired, to be visually banal.  It is easy to decorate the surface of the chocolate box, to be formulaic.  I could easily stand on the side of a hill in the late afternoon, waiting for sunset, with a gravel road meandering gently into the distance, and sheep winding slowly o'er the lea.  There are plenty of books that will help me to achieve this kind of result.  There are plenty of competitions that will teach me the techniques and approaches I need to be successful at this type of photography.  Is it however little more than the type of photography that says “I stood there, I photographed that, with a romantic mood is thrown in?”

I think our greatest resource in any form of artistic endeavour is ourselves.  In the end, all artistic works are autobiographical.  As you know, the theme is critical, and for a visual artist, self-knowledge is of the utmost importance.  Of course self-knowledge is not some kind of absolute, some readily package-able and easily-defined quality.  It is a shape-shifter, sometimes a chimera, and endless journey to a destination that is only ever of whistlestop.  If we are lucky.  Beauty is a terrifying and demanding mistress, but she is no absolute; she is as we perceive her.  And I believe that beauty exists in each and every one of us, that moths dance in the moonlight of every human being's heart.

So to my landscape photography.  If I am to see the intrinsic beauty in this scene, I believe I have to come to it with an open mind and, more importantly, an open heart.  I have come to realise that my journey through photography has not been a process of learning, rather it has been a process of un-learning.  To see what is intrinsically beautiful, I have to learn to see it as for the first time, rather than be a Miss Havisham, surrounded by the dusty relics of a lifetime's memories.  And therein lies the challenge.

I suppose I have always had a fondness for aging knights on rusty horses, in search of windmill dragons.

-Tony

Even a Modest Gift

Valentine's Day in the city was full of red hearts, flowers, chocolate overflowing from gilt packages, a day to remember the people I love. It was also a day of terrible news: another school shooting, almost certainly perpetrated by someone who felt hollow and alone and untouched by the same emotion others were celebrating. Perhaps his choice of the day was not coincidental.

This evening, musing on what can possibly make a difference, this quote spoke to me. It's from a book I liked very much that I think may now be out-of-print.

Even a modest gift of oneself, tentatively, shyly offered, can be qualitatively different from listening with half the soul, withholding some parts or recesses from exposure to the light of day. Some people never give themselves completely, sometimes because they fear there will be nothing left if they do. From Marcel’s perspective, the full experience of presence requires reciprocity, “the exchange which is the mark of all spiritual life.” (Marcel, Homo Viator) …we might consider that we are given a subliminal knowledge of Being not so we may spend the rest of our lives meditating on Being, but so that we may be grounded in an experience of presence that will sustain us in our relations with other human beings with whom we spend most of our lives and with whom we can journey more openly, not just subliminally, into the heart of Being.

On Presence: Variations and Reflections. Ralph Harper, Trinity Press.

 

Stepping Back

Early morning. Snow, falling steadily, the world muffled like the people who trudge by, snowflakes drifted thickly on the shoulders of their dark coats and on their fur hats and hoods, their necks wrapped in wooly scarves. The room is dim, no shafts of eastern sunlight today. J., unusually, is still sleeping. I light two votive candles and a small stick of incense, and spend the next half hour in meditation. Then I make a cup of tea, and while it cools, stretch my body a little. I look out the window at the snow. The world closes in in front of the white veil; the far trees disappear; colors mute to monochrome, and the close view sharpens: the details on a red parka, a hand-knitted hat, the snow on someone's tapestry handbag. I think of the squirrels and sparrows and wonder where they're hiding, tails curled onto their backs, wings and head tucked into a ball.

How much better the day feels, I'm reminded, when there's the time and silence to begin like this. And that is really up to me.

Last night we lit a fire and ate in front of it, listening to jazz, and then, later, to the radio program "Ideas" on CBC One, about Robert Weaver, dubbed "the godfather of CanLit." He was a rather self-made editor who founded the radio program Anthology, for which the CBC bought and presented short stories and poetry, and went on to be in charge of CBC literary programming for 40 years. Through this forum, Weaver gave a start and years of encouragement to many authors who subsequently brought Canadian literature out of the shadow of its colonial, frontier past, when even Canadians believed that good writing came from elsewhere:writers like Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro.

Weaver, who died recently at age 87, comes across in these interviews as gentle, unpretentious, and self-effacing. An essayist and critic himself, he attached little importance to his own writing. He was, first and foremost, an editor, and it was the letters from Weaver to these fledgling writers that intrigued me: honest, direct, critical, but always encouraging if he felt the raw material was worthy. He sent stories and poems back with suggestions that the best writers often followed, and stayed in correspondence with writers like Munro during years when, as she said, "I was having children, feeling very far from the world of literature, and sometimes wrote only one story a year -- and that one was probably not very good!" Outside of the Canadian literary world, few people even know his name - I certainly didn't - but the interviews with Weaver himself and the authors he encouraged describe his contribution unequivocally; the number of books dedicated to him is another indication. I was touched by his humility, because behind it clearly stood a piercing intellect, discernment, understanding of the writing mentality in all its brashness and insecurity, and kindness.

The second half of the interview airs tonight at 9:05 EST. You can listen online.

Paths

We left Vermont yesterday; my last task was to take the compost and garbage out to their respective containers in the back of the house. We had done a lot of shoveling in front and on the side, where we put our car, but no one had been out back except the small animal who left these tracks - a squirrel, probably. The snow was several feet deep there, on the north side, but halfway down was a crust that was just willing to support my weight. I stood in the remains of my garden for a few minutes: thinking, looking, missing the birds who used to find food here all winter, but realizing I've done most of the work of disconnecting from this house.

I went into my old studio and, spontaneously, decided it was time to bring some of my meditation objects to Canada. I wouldn't exactly call it a shrine, this space where I've sat and pondered life and death and the unchangeable for several decades, but that's probably the closest word to what it actually is. I haven't been ready to take it apart until now.

In a corner of our living room, we now have a very eclectic collection of objects, meaningful to both of us: a small brass dish that was my parents', holding an incense burner and some seed pods from my garden; a small blue-and-white porcelain Chinese bowl; the carved sandalwood box that's always held my incense for meditation; a sandalwood mala and a small bottle of orchid oil sent to me by a friend, from Cambodia; several colored glass votive candle holders; and behind them, an Armenian Orthodox icon that was my mother-in-law's.

We went to our former church on Ash Wednesday, inhabiting that strange space between familiarity and feeling like guests. Old friends warmly welcomed us but many of the faces in the congregation, and even in the choir, were totally new to me. Today, back at the cathedral, we sang the Great Litany and the first Lenten hymns and I felt a different discomfort, wondering if I can feel at home anymore in a church headed by Rowan Williams and riven with battles over matters I find either totally insignificant, or so important they should have been decided and acted upon long ago. The first of the Lent adult forums was taking place after the service, and was going to be a discussion of "what we believe - and don't - and can't." We didn't attend; somehow neither one of us really felt like getting into that territory today.

"Not much," would be my first answer to the question of what I believe, after the past several years of dealing with loss and change, but I realize, glancing over at that luminous collection of reminders this evening, that would be glib and disingenuous. Like my Unitarian father-in-law, I can take refuge in saying I believe in "the good, the true and the beautiful," but I know it's more than that. It is far more nuanced and veiled than any creed, and I've also come to see and accept it as a path rather than a destination -and even to love it for being obscure, difficult, changing, and relatively un-comforting - the opposite of what I thought I was seeking when I was starting out.

Tracks made by a naked animal that seem distinct one day, are covered by fine, new snow the next, and then melt away.

Winter Cucumbers

My father-in-law's living room is dominated these days by a large rolling table with a big opaque projector-like device mounted on it. By putting a book or other reading material underneath the lens and light, and adjusting some dials, he can view a hugely-enlarged image on the screen. One of his eyes is, as he puts it "no good," but the other has had some minor improvement lately, due to some experimental injections -- enough so that, with the aid of this machine, he can read a little bit again. I don't think he's reading much, but anything is better than the nothing of the past six or eight months, especially for this man whose greatest contentment is to be surrounded by his library and a few objects and pictures that stir his memory.

On Tuesday night we took dinner over to him - just some kibbeh, rice, yogurt and small Lebanese cucumbers, some fried peppers and carrots, good green olives marinated with thyme, some large loaves of Arabic bread - and the three of us sat and ate together, en famille, my father-in-law in his favorite armchair, the two of us on the little blue velveteen couch. When we arrived he had been lying half off and half on his bed, watching the early election coverage. His forehead was bleeding where he had been absent-mindedly scratching it; we told him and he waved one hand dismissively and said, "Who cares? No one's going to see. But I'll wash it off if it bothers you."

I was in the kitchen, wearing his apron ("It looks good on you," he said, which means, "I like the idea of a woman in my kitchen, making dinner") as he made his way from the bedroom to his chair, moving very slowly, one hand reaching out for balance and security toward the chairs and tables he's strategically placed along his normal path. "What's this?" I asked, as he looked over the pass-through above the sink, holding onto the edge of the counter. I grinned and gestured toward a small grey plastic rat perched on one of the cups in his dish drainer.

"Oh that!" He laughed heartily. "It's my mouse. I have two of them, and the ones -- you know, the helpers here - who clean up my place like them and make a point of putting them somewhere different each week, to surprise me."

We served dinner and ate. "These are good, did you make them?" he asked about the kibbeh. I shook my head and said no way, and he smiled, knowing how much work they are. "I'm going to make kibbeh again someday," he said, looking up at the ceiling as he took a bite. And a little later, waving a slice of cucumber: "Are these from your garden?"

"That would be pretty hard at this time of year."

He looked puzzled for a minute and then said, "Oh! Yes, of course."  He ate everything on his plate, after saying it was too much, though it took him quite a while. "Do you have work these days?" he asked, as we sat and watched him finish the last few bites.

"Yes, a lot."

"GOOD!! It must be terrible not to have work. I've never been unemployed a day in my life. Really! I can't imagine how hard it must be for people who don't have work. That's what's so difficult about my situation now. Ten years ago - even five years ago - I was still going strong. Now..." he waved the hand again, as if to send his life and troubles off into the darkness behind him. "Nothing! No good! I can't hear, I can't see to read..."

"Look at these books," he said, bending down in his chair and pointing to a group of books on the lower two shelves. "I had every intention of reading all of these. They're by one of the most important historians of Arabic literature, written during the brief 'renaissance' at the beginning of the last century." I leaned over to look; there was a set of impressive-looking books in black bindings with red and gold Arabic lettering on the spines; assorted monographs in manila and dark brown paper covers; some notes in my father-in-law's handwriting. "Too late!" he said, sighing and sitting back in his chair, where he settled comfortably again with an "ahhhh," even though the old, black, imitation-leather chair cushion was falling forward out of the seat.

"Were there ever any poets in the family?" I asked. "Besides you, of course?"

"No," he said, acknowledging the compliment with a mischievous grin. (He has always styled himself as a poet and philosopher, but lately has taken to saying, "I really just fooled everyone into thinking I was intelligent. That was my talent!") He shook his head. "There was my uncle who wrote mysteries, and had to leave Syria and go to Egypt to live because what he wrote didn't set well with the Ottomans. We had a set of all of his books in our library at home - I can still see them there! - and every afternoon when the family went to take their siestas I stole into the library instead, and read. All my time with those books was stolen - I wasn't supposed to read them, and the adults all thought I was asleep, but actually I was in in the library." He shook his head, remembering, and said something in Arabic. Then: "I'm very disappointed about the poem I was writing - I can't finish it, and it looks like I'm not going to. I was very excited about it."

"I know.  So was I!"

"All the notes are in my study, and now when I look at them they seem to have been written by an alien; I can't remember what I was saying."

I looked at him sympathetically, not knowing what to say. "All gone, all gone!" he exclaimed. "But it's all right - c'est la vie."

Round about Blue

Life seems very full of contrasts these days: ups and downs and goings-round that lead nowhere in particular. Maybe that is part of living this icy winter life in the north, where the days revolve between blue skies and ashen skies and if you aren't careful, you are looking up one minute, and the next you are on the black-ice that lurked under the white snow. The other night, on our way to a potluck birthday party, J.'s feet went out from under him, just like that. He was carrying a white porcelain platter of deviled eggs, and like a deft waiter, didn't drop a single slippery one.

I find I'm battling against some hidden demons myself: the short days; the ill-spirited political arguments; the city navigation amid waist-high snowbanks and short-tempered drivers shoveling out yet again; the early arrival of Lent when I'm not feeling ready to be self-critical and would much rather hold onto my crankiness. There are some more immediate reasons for feeling discouraged, among them the recently diagnosed breast cancer of a close friend and some most-unpleasant dental surgery I just found out I need to have in March. On the other hand, I found out today that my friend's surgery went very well and she has an excellent prognosis, and after a day of feeling miserable, I've accepted that the dental work will be one more step toward an eventual stable situation and greater comfort for me. And the snow and ice, tiresome as they are sometimes, are really beautiful.

At the aforementioned party, I met a Dutch woman who works with very elderly people, and with people who are nearing death. While a jazz combo of young students played in the living room, and the guests drank wine, she and I sat on the stairs and had an earnest conversation about meeting people where they are: about just being there. She's been doing this work all her life. She told me that many people facing death are very angry - that anger is one of the strongest and most common emotions she encounters. "Angry that they're dying; angry at their situation; angry at the Church for letting them down, making them feel unworthy - I see that a lot. And so many people have unresolved issues and relationships," she said. "Things they've been stubborn about and are too proud to relinquish. And so, at the end, they are really suffering. I sit with them, and eventually, if there's enough time and they trust me, stories come out. I never say much. Sometimes people make changes, do things, say the things they need to say, tell the stories they want to tell. And sometimes they don't." She raised her eyebrows and smiled a half-smile; not judging but merely noting the sadness she had observed. "And other people embrace life and the moment, as much of it as they can, even with great limitations."

She told me this story: she had been working once in a chronic care facility, and was asked to fill in for someone who ran an "art cart", taking reproduction paintings around to people in their rooms, most of which had bare walls and were pretty grim. So she started doing that. She'd go into the rooms and tell the people that she had paintings, and they could pick one if they wanted, and she would put it up on their wall. "The people were often in terrible physical shape," she said. "One woman was just a pile of bones in a bed, drooling from one corner of her mouth - she looked absolutely awful - but when I told her what I was there for, she immediately brightened up and told me she would love a painting, that she had had many works of art in her home, and described them all to me - she had really known a lot about art and lived with it. You never know." Other people dismissed the paintings immediately, "Why should I want something like that?" But one day she went into a room and saw that the man in the bed was blind. She had hesitated for a minute, and then told him why she was there. "Even though you can't see it yourself, maybe it would give people who come into the room something to talk to you about," she suggested.

"That's a good idea!" he said. "What kids of paintings do you have?" - for he had been able to see earlier in his life.

"There are lots of different ones. Why don't you tell me what you are imagining?"

"I see a field full of flowers, and a beautiful young woman there, and she looks very happy."

As it turned out, she had a painting in the cart that was very much like that, and she described it to him, and put it up on his wall, and the blind man was delighted. The nurse  was silent for a moment, and then she turned to me and said, "You see? They are teaching me; they show me how to be."