the cassandra pages

Conversations between Kingdoms

Loose gravel on mud, an uphill road through woods filled with new ferns, the dripping canopy, a sky trying to clear. Late afternoon light on the mountains, standing stones, the gardens where leaves of all shapes and colors within the general category of green form a sculpture in low relief, ankle- to knee-height above the dark earth.

A thin grey snake slithers under a paving stone.

Golden globes of trollius nod near blue forget-me-nots, violet violets. Under thorny rose canes, earnest purple johnny-jump-up faces; iris of deepest indigo studded with raindrop pearls; pure white starflowers, as crisp as starched linen.

A bullfrog jumps ahead of my foot into the pond.

Leaning over the water I see tadpoles, those macroscopic reminders of our own beginnings, in every size from mere black dots to near-frog giants, tails swishing, heads bigger than my thumb, legs starting to sprout. First we swim, then crawl, then hop...but not this one, the ghostly white carcass of a dead bullfrog lying on the bottom of the pond, starting to decompose, near him a large gelatinous mass of eggs. Healthy frogs peer from quick bright eyes above the surface, hop along the mossy bank and into the reeds.

Lupine, its budded flower stalks beginning to rise toward the sun, carpets the damp semicircle at the end of the pond, and beyond, over the bank, tall choke-cherries, hawthorns with tight clusters of white buds, lush growth of ostrich ferns, and cattails rise like torches in the swampy gully before the land moves up again, covered with mixed forest that gives way in turn to conifers, more conifers, and blue mountains.

Yellow throated warbler. Wren.

I head back to the house where J. sits on the porch talking to our friend K.; the host, G., is in the kitchen from which the smell  of roasting lamb and herbs is wafting. Waiting for the other guests, we all listen for car sounds - the new gravel on the road is deep and slippery after the day's rain - but soon we hear their voices; they too have made it up the long winding driveway and the ebullient greetings soon change to hushed "ohh!"s as they catch their first glimpses of the garden, the pond, the standing stones covered with lichens, the mountains from which the storm clouds are lifting.

Glasses of wine, the surprise of late-afternoon sun on our faces, black flies cheerfully waved away from pulse-points, ankles and ears. Stories of our childhoods in Vermont, rural New York, Detroit, Pennsylvania,  Los Angeles via Hungary -- all of us American originally but one, who grew near here, gathering and preserving enough fiddleheads to eat all year, eating honey and maple syrup rather than any other sugars, spending the winter caning chairs with sea-grass with his father. We never thought it was an unusual life, he said, it was just how you lived here, that was Quebec.

Before dinner, I acquiesce to the quiet urge I've had since arriving, ask a quick permission, and slip away to the separate building that is G.'s meditation and yoga space. I open the door and step inside, into the silence and fullness I knew would be here, the vibrating fullness and emptiness of a place that has become sacred. There are folded blankets and cushions on the edge of the large rug with its subdued pattern of olive and rust, and I notice G.'s meditation shawl of plain cotton that he brought back from the ashram in France. From a different pile I take a pink blanket and a white cotton cushion and arrange them in front of the rough wooden slab, on two sawn tree stumps, that holds a white perpetual candle where a flame flickers in a pool of paraffin. There are some books in a corner; some natural objects, a rock or two - which make me smile; my own shrines always contain rocks - objects from several religious traditions; incense burners; more candles, unlit. In back of me, a cold wood stove and a rocking chair. And on the wall above the wooden plank, a photograph I first saw last year, of rows of meditating people wrapped in white cotton shawls or cloaks in a large candlelit room. He's placed it so that sitting here, you feel like you are in the back of the same room, looking forward.

The minutes pass; going deeper. I know I can't stay long. Wood thrushes sound their cascade of notes in the woods, and finally I turn my head and look out.

The big window that forms half the wall to my right frames a view of the green forest, punctuated by  wet black tree trunks and two narrow paper birches. In the soft last light of the day it is indescribably beautiful. Suddenly thoughts of my mother and my mentor, Herm, gone for many years now, rush into my head. I reach up instinctively and grasp the old pendant hanging around my neck that was my mother's; I rarely wear it but put it on especially before coming here; it is gold with a clear green faceted stone crowned by finely wrought, small gold leaves. Tears spring to my eyes, and then a feeling of immense gratitude. I shut my eyes, breathe deeply, open them again.

It's then that I notice the fern just outside the window. It's an interrupted fern,* one of Herm's favorites - he used to jokingly call them Fernus interruptus - and it is perfect in its newness, the fruiting bodies on the stem not yet dried, the fronds above and below them light delicate green. I search the woods nearby but it's the only one I can see. We look at each other.

So this is life, isn't it, I say to myself eventually. An interruption, aware of itself, named... with a task to ripen, dry, break open and scatter... while meanwhile roots reach down and fronds unfurl above and below, unconsciously, continually. Beautiful, perfect, complete.

I finish my meditation, fold the blanket again and put it back, open the door and step out into the world.

*(An Ontario site notes that the interrupted fern, Osmunda claytoniana, has the oldest fossil record of any living fern today, going back over 200 million years.)

Memorial Day Update

Quebec farmland just above the border with Vermont, Jay Peak in the distance

Back in Montreal tonight after five intense days in Vermont; Saturday was the memorial service for my dear brother-in-law (the husband of J.'s sister) who died recently, and so there were many family gatherings, many conversations, many meals, and also the happy reunions with old friends who called or came to the service and reception. My husband and I had also organized a meeting of the whole caregiver team for my father-in-law on Thursday, which turned out to be a very productive thing for all of us.

I'll try to write more about all of that when I'm rested, settled, and caught up with work. Tonight I'm listening to the first night of finals in the Montreal international piano competition (on the radio), eating Chinese food we picked up in Burlington on our way through, unpacking, and catching up on email and blogs I haven't read for several days.

The transition began this afternoon when we left the highway and entered Canada at a small crossing point, driving slowly through little farming communities and beautiful farmland that was new to us. We passed a farm where these animals were being raised: they look like reindeer but seemed bigger -- does anyone know what they are? (I must say that the idea of eating Rudolph doesn't hold much appeal.)

It's hard to believe that last year I was driving my father around Chenango County searching for family gravestones - his first real outing after knee surgery. Yesterday he played nine holes of golf and did his usual 75 push-ups in the morning, along with the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises he's done every morning since the 1960s. What a testament to courage and determination!

Finally -- thank you all for your comments on the previous post. I was moved by them and by your insights, and grateful.

What's at Risk?

My morning began (after checking email, of course!) with reading several articles about education. An editorial in the New York Times commemorates the 25th anniversary of the publication of "A Nation at Risk", the report of a national commission in response to “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” I had forgotten about the report and what it found, except that - contrary to what the administration expected - it corroborated the public perception. What was interesting about today's article was the before/after discussion of one of the report's conclusions: that a strong educational system focussed on "the basics" would result in greater economic competitiveness. American educators back in 1981 were very concerned about being outstripped by the much higher-performing, rigorous Japanese and Korean school systems. But then the American economy improved, while the Asian economies began to falter:

With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the link between educational excellence and economic security is not as simple as “A Nation at Risk” made it seem. By the mid-1980s, policymakers in Japan, South Korea and Singapore were already beginning to complain that their educational systems focused too much on rote learning and memorization. They continue to envy American schools because they teach creativity and the problem-solving skills critical to prospering in the global economy.

Indeed, a consensus seems to be emerging among educational experts around the world that American schools operate within the context of an enabling environment — an open economy, strong legal and banking systems, an entrepreneurial culture — conducive to economic progress.

To put it bluntly, American students may not know as much as their counterparts around the Pacific Rim, but our society allows them to make better use of what they do know. The question now is whether this historic advantage will suffice at a time when knowledge of math, science and technology is becoming increasingly critical. Maybe we need both the enabling environment and more rigor in these areas.

My question, on reading this, is much broader: should the purpose of an educational system even be economic competitiveness? Does it distress anyone besides me that this is stated so bluntly as a given fact? First, who benefits from such a goal, and how? Are we raising children who are capable of thinking about the effect of globalization, for instance, or children whose primary goal is to make as much money as possible; i.e., are we raising yet another generation of capitalist consumers, or world citizens? On the other hand, I know that many young people today are quite idealistic - where are those values coming from? And is it only my perception that, 25 years later, an even greater percentage of kids are falling through the cracks, both in terms of secondary education and access to higher education, due to racial inequality, poverty, troubled family environments and many other factors?

What do you think? And I wonder if Canadian readers see differences between the stated goals of education between the two countries. In Quebec, at least, the values of the society are quite different, and it's hard for me not to think some of this comes from the focus of education, as well as what children learn at home.

Poutine et Paris-Brest

Sunday afternoon, as we were heading toward a birthday party in east Montreal. The city cleans the streets with twin graders, huge snowblowing machines the size of combines, and giant dump trucks that cart the snow away.

Blizzards have nothing on us: we've been consuming enough calories to survive on an ice floe. Saturday night, romanced by a beautiful but very cold evening, we decided to have supper at La Banquise - a lively 24-hour Montreal favorite always filled with young people, which is fairly close to our house. The specialty is...poutine, (scroll down to the third entry) and for the first time in three years, we deliberately ordered some and actually ate it, washed down with a bottle of Cheval Blanc. For those who don't know this delicacy of Quebec, it is a generous pile of expertly-cooked French fries, covered with gravy and cheese curds, plus other toppings, ranging from onions and bacon to foie gras. I ordered lasagna and some very good asparagus soup; we shared the two entrees (the poutine and the lasagna) and the dessert, which was a small, deliciously intense brownie. Then we went for a long walk, and returned home about the time our faces had become stiff, our fingers had been curled into little balls inside our gloves, and we had lost feeling in our noses.

Thus fortified, and feeling guilty, on Sunday morning we had a very light breakfast of coffee and fruit, and went off to the cathedral. It was already snowing lightly. When we walked out after the coffee hour, four inches had already fallen and the pace of the storm indicated it was going to increase and keep on like that for a long while. We had been invited to a surprise 50th birthday party in the afternoon, so we called to make sure it was still on, since the birthday girl and her partner were traveling from far out in the country - "Oui," her father said, "pas de problem."

So we stopped first at our favorite florist, on St. Urbain, where I picked out a bouquet of salmon-colored roses and blue agapanthus, and then we drove slowly through streets in various stages of being kept open or becoming snowed-in, to a neighborhood of small detached homes in the eastern part of the island, the heartland of Quebeçois Montreal.

 

We found a parking place of sorts on the already snow-filled street, and went up the drifted steps. It was a wonderful party. There were only five anglophone guests among the twenty-five or so who had gathered- two women originally from western Canada, and the two of us, and a next-door neighbor whose parents had been French and English, but both Catholic. We were immediately warmly embraced by our friend's family, who we'd never met before, and the champagne flowed as generously as the buzzing French conversation, which to our surprise we could follow and contribute to fairly well. Then came a fantastic lunch, with more wine, followed by a huge Paris-Brest, our friend's traditional birthday "cake" - essentially a giant, flat cream puff filled with hazelnut cream and dusted with powdered sugar.

Night had fallen, and the guests bundled up and made their way out the door -- into the scene in the video at the end of this post. That's my husband at the end, walking toward our car. The plastic tunnels along the street are typical winter car-ports, erected temporarily all around the city neighborhoods where people have the luxury of a driveway. This is not a wealthy neighborhood, but the warmth inside the house was just as intense as the cold outside. It was a happy afternoon for us, and we were awfully pleased to be invited and included in the occasion - and to find our comfort level with the language had really improved quite a bit. I can tell not only from our better ability to communicate and understand, but from the fact that we weren't totally exhausted at the end of the afternoon!

It was still snowing when we went to bed.

Quebec makes a green move, prodding Canada

From CBC Canada today: Quebec to Adopt Strict California-style Emissions Controls

Quebec will become the first Canadian province to adopt California's stringent auto-emissions standards in a move hailed as part of a domino effect toward greener cars.

Environment Minister Line Beauchamp made the announcement early Wednesday at the UN climate-change summit in Indonesia as a group of environmentalists looked on and applauded.

At least four other Canadian provinces are considering a similar plan, and Quebec described its step as part of a historic march toward cleaner cars across North America.

"This is a movement," Beauchamp said. "And it is an inevitable movement — it's one that cannot be reversed."

La cathédrale verte

We had been walking well over an hour, mechanically swatting the mosquitoes and horse flies that buzzed around our heads, through overgrown fields bordered by white birch and pin cherry, and then into a sandy clearing where thin soil was covered by moss and lichens and dotted with the first seedling pines, as thickly sown by the birds and wind as radishes needing to be thinned in a child's garden.

Then we entered the woods and began an upward climb along an old fenceline, thrown up when the farm was abandoned some forty-five years ago, now all but obscured in the tangled forest of hemlock, maple and birch. The footing was rough and we moved carefully, the four of us keeping sufficient distance between us to protect the follower from a sharp whip of a branch in the face, but close enough to see and help if someone stumbled. G. carried her secateurs, the heavy pruners she used to clear the old path during this once-yearly circumnavigation of her 150 mountainous acres; when we came upon a fallen tree or limb too large for the secateurs' throat, we all helped to pull it out of the way. The path had been marked at the time of her purchase, a dozen years ago, by bright pink plastic streamers - forester's tape - tied at eye-level on branches, but the markings were far apart and occasionally one had fallen with its branch or disintegrated, as even plastic will do when exposed for years; we needed all four pairs of eyes to keep ourselves on the trail.

Wherever a little light could reach the forest floor, bunchberries, the ground-hugging variety of flowering dogwood that defines these acidic northern woodlands, grew so thickly underfoot that you couldn't avoid crushing a few; there was gold-thread, and partridge-berry, and dense carpets of various lycopodiums - clubmosses or ground pines - that have become rare further south; partly from habitat destruction, partly from overharvesting by New Englanders who traditionally used them for Christmas wreaths. Everywhere there were ferns, and mushrooms in dusky shades and lurid bright colors, and in a few places, rare, shy woodland orchids.

Up we went, and down into a wet swampy area, and up steeply once again onto a moss-covered small rise where the early afternoon sun streamed in, warming the soft ground beneath us and turning the furry moss from emerald to chartreuse. "C'est une belvedere, la," remarked G., smiling beneath her beige cap with its rolled mosquito net above the brim, before plunging down the steep hill again. Her partner, S., took the lead then, and after another twenty minutes of walking, she stopped suddenly and stood very still, pointing with one finger, as a large partridge emerged from the brush ahead of us, ruffled its neck feathers, and disappeared quickly into the trees.

It had become very dark under the trees, nearly all conifers here, with a greater predominance of cedars, tall and gnarled, with beautiful smooth reddish roots polished like mahogany. S. unrolled her mosquito net over her head and secured it around her shoulders. We heard running water. "La rivière," announced G. and soon we saw it; rushing water dark with tannin, running incongruously and unseen through the middle of these deep woods. "There used to be a huge beaver dam here," G. continued, quietly, "up above here - they had created a veritable lake. And then one year, they simply moved on and abandoned it. You'll see all the dead trees." My three companions stood near a large cedar, talking, while I moved away to the south, edging closer to the spongy bank of the stream; insects hummed in the steamy air; a huge dragonfly rose from a clump of reeds and headed downstream. I sat down on a sphagnum-covered stump and peered into a pool of water above an eddy where a school of striped minnows swam back and forth. A small frog jumped into the water before my feet and disappeared.

"Will they think I'm being unsociable?" I wondered, after a little while, and got up and rejoined the group. For the past hour, my thoughts had been full of memories: of my mother, with whom I had walked in similar, but less extensive woods, and who would have been as captivated by this one as I was, and of Herm, my mentor, a biologist and skilled woodsman who had taught me where my mother's knowledge left off; his love of primitive plants - the ferns and mosses, lichens, liverworts, horsetails and clubmosses - had transferred to me, along with his battered, water-damaged Peterson guide to the same, dropped in a stream much like this one on a walk with me more than forty years ago. I smiled at G.: "I'm very touched by this sort of place, thank you so much for bringing me here," I said, simply, and she smiled back, understanding showing in her eyes. We walked ahead for a few hundred metres; the forest became even darker, trees meeting over the stream. Narrow shafts of light filtered down from the tall canopy onto the moss and shiny russet roots of the cedars; water dripped from leaves above us, and everywhere lush moss crept up the sides of rocks, of fallen trees and their upturned roots, beckoning us to sit, watch, listen.

The stream had divided into two branches, with a small island in the middle. I looked for a crossing place where the rocks rose above the water, relatively dry, at stepping-stone distance, and carefully made my way to the island. The others followed. We sat on a fallen tree, and on rocks, and were silent, each with our own thoughts. Mine were awe, gratitude, and a feeling that I was not alone. I looked out into the forest, my eyes following a path from tree to tree. "Herm," I asked in my head. "Are you there?"

J. came and sat close to me. "What are you thinking?" he whispered.

"I was saying hello to Herm," I said. "I've felt like he was with me for the past half hour." He nodded and smiled, not judging.

Who's to say? Perhaps some of us leave this earth, and some do not; perhaps the spiritual world does not exist at all except in our emotions and longings, our hunger for companionship on this lonely journey of walking with our own mortality; perhaps immortality is to be found precisely in this act of acute remembering, when time and separation dissolve into presence. I do know that on the rare occasions when I am filled with the kind of awe and gratitude that take me beyond inadequate language and the naming of those emotions, beyond self at all into some sort of space where I simply am, along with everything else that is, that has been and will be, it is generally not in the man-made world, but in some place such as this: untouched yet created; quiveringly alive; evolving and dissolving back into the elements from which it was made, continually animated once again into new life by water and light. The one-celled microscopic life of the vernal pools and stream; the moss's spores on their hairstalks, stretching a determined inch toward the distant sun; the marvelously adapted primitive plants that once towered above forest floors like these old cedars, long before flowering plants even existed, let alone frogs, partridges, or clumsy two-footed naked beasts in sewn clothing.

We rose, and set off again, uphill and away from the stream, leaving it to its silence, and the remembrance of dreams.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline

Birdsong and William Baffin Roses

After more than four solid years of blogging, I'm seriously considering pulling the plug on Cassandra and most of my online activities for a month this summer. Call it a fast, a break, a retreat...whatever. It's not that I'm feeling tired of writing or uninspired; in fact, I feel rather the opposite. It's that I think it would be good for me to feel what it's like not to do this for a while; to see what then comes to the surface. Lately I've been intentionally changing my diet to a more cleansing, lighter mixture of foods. I've been doing yoga in the mornings and getting more exercise. I already feel better: lighter and healthier and more energetic. Now I am wondering about my intellectual diet.

Spending the last 24 hours in a remote area just above the border at the home of a friend - a rustic Alpine-ish place totally without electricity,  with a pond and beautiful gardens backing up on a mountain - has made me think about this even more. Eight of us made a communal meal - salmon cooked on an outdoor fire made of wood gathered in the forest, and various vegetable dishes and salads brought by all of us - and ate on a screened porch overlooking the garden while the sun went down over the mountains. No lights, no other dwellings could be seen; the only sounds were those of the forest, a bullfrog, the springs feeding the ponds, and the birds. It was well after dark by the time we finished the cheese course and the grapes; we ate our the dessert of chocolate cake and fruit salad, and drank our coffees and tisanes of lemon ginger tea and dried Chinese hawthorn fruit, served in an old blue and white German teapot with its own votive-heated base, by candlelight while the moon moved in and out of gathering clouds. After cleaning the kitchen, lit by a gas lamp, we all repaired to the fire behind the house, on the edge of the forest, where we drank the host's strong homemade blackcurrant eau-de-vie and sang songs - French Canadian ones in honor of St. Jean Baptiste Day, the national day of Quebec which we were celebrating, and American spirituals. I felt as if I had stepped into a John Berger novel.

J. and I spent the night in our tent, near the pond, listening to gurgling water and frogs, and woke up to birds singing everywhere with the first light. It began to rain, lightly, then harder; we crawled out and put the fly on our tent, dozed and listened. At 7:30 I went up to the house and had a cup of tea. Then our host, a Jungian psychologist with a long interest in Eastern religion (though he's an Anglican we know through the cathedral), led four of us in half an hour of yoga followed by silent meditation, in his small wooden meditation hut. Then we had breakfast, the white tablecloth scattered with bright pink petals from the climbing roses glorifying the white stuccoed south-facing wall of the house.

Our host had just come back from several weeks at an ashram in France, and the talk at dinner included sharing various thoughts and experiences about meditation and monasteries - Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, Orthodox. We spoke about the challenges and rewards of solitude and silence, of city and rural life, of institutional religion and the personal spiritual path.

I am still thinking about all of this, and also not-thinking: still absorbed in the feeling I had last night, and this morning in meditation.

Hate Speech Law in Canada

"Although the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms put free speech and a free press into the bedrock of Canadian law, neither the public nor Canada's courts views these rights as absolutely as Americans have come to view the First Amendment. The Canadian Supreme court has ruled in a series of cases that the government may limit free speech in the name of other worthwhile goals, such as ending discrimination, ensuring social harmony or promoting equality of the sexes.

Canada's most powerful tool against politically incorrect speech is its hate speech code, which prohibits any statement that is "likely to expose a person or group of persons to hatred or contempt" because of "race, color, ancestry, place of origin, religion, marital status, family status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation or age." Prosecutors are not required to show proof of malicious intent or actual harm to win convictions in hate speech cases, and courts in some jurisdictions have ruled that it does not matter whether the statements are truthful."

This quote is from a Washington Post article quoted in Issues and Views. (That appears to be a conservative black website insistent on totally free dissent, and highly critical of laws such as the Canadian hate speech code. If anyone knows more about it, I'd be interested.)

The key difference between the two countries is stated in the first paragraph: Americans tend to see First Amendment rights as absolute, and that the right of each individual to free speech trumps any other consideration, such as the rights of a group or the harm that may be caused to individuals within that group as a result of hateful speech in the media (this law ONLY applies to broadcast or public speech). In Canada, this code remains somewhat controversial, but to me it seems to serve effectively as a way of insisting on a certain level of public respect and civility, as well as keeping fresh the debate about what kind of society people want to live in, and how that society should deal with pluralism.

I'm not going to go into how these issues played out in the recent Quebec election right now, but maybe someone would like to talk about it in the comments...

Yesterday

South of St. Anne-de-Sabrevois, Québec. What you can't hear is the howling of the wind; what you can't see is how fast the snow was moving across the flats.

It was not pleasant outside the car. We stopped twice so that J. could take pictures (I took these from inside!) In places where the plowed snowbanks were higher - around the height of the car - the snow was blowing off the top of the bank in a swirl that went up and over us and the other cars on the road like a huge wave. Although I've lived in snow-country all my life, and have had to deal with blowing and drifting conditions, I've never seen anything quite as dramatic as what we saw yesterday, on the vast flats of cornfields in southern Quebec. It was like a movie of a sandstorm in the Sahara.

The second time, not far from the border, a police car drew up beside us within five minutes. In polite French they asked J. to please move on because it was "too dangerous." They were right that the whiteout conditions were dangerous, but they were also predictable and local: if you parked, as we had, where there was a house or barn or a row of tall, old poplars to break the wind, the snow wasn't drifting and blowing - and the wind was absolutely  steady from the west, so it wasn't going to swirl around and change directions. But that was OK; we were happy enough to move, and as the police car took off ahead of us, we watched it fishtail down the road. The windows were dark in the school windows, and we passed several local roads that were in the process of being closed.

Across the border, we stopped for coffee in St. Albans. An older man in a snowmobile suit was gesturing excitedly to anyone who would listen in the line of people filling up their mugs with Green Mountain coffee at 8:30 am: "The worst conditions all winter!" he exclaimed. "You should see it out there on the back roads!"I wondered if the ice-fishing shanties on Lake Champlain were all blowing across the frozen surface, with fellows like this one slipping and sliding after them, balancing an armload of pails and tip-ups and six-packs of beer.

Accepting Responsibility

I am trying to imagine an America where this headline could be talking about our government, and our citizens.

(This article has a little more about the U.S. involvement in the case, if you haven't been following it.)