I have nothing to say but will speak anyway. Everyday is a relationship with God. I’m talking with God, listening for God, watching synchronicities. In my dreams I was with lovers, long conversations, like we had as adolescents. Now we are careful as adults. Offence is easy. The world is in rage. As youth we sought commonality. Now they look for differences to pounce upon.
I saw a deer crossing the road this morning and a lone mallard drake in the playing field. Fishermen were heading out in their boats. I was thinking of coffee. No real plans in my heavily unscheduled day. Fishing I believe. Target practice perhaps. Drinking coffee and reading for sure. This vacation is rapidly returning me to those idyllic days on the boat in the Sea of Cortez. Nothing happening. Or the times on the homestead when feeding the chickens was so grounding and uplifting. I was so fortunate to know pet geese as guard geese.
When I was young I wore names like champion, genius, intellectual, husband, professor. Today I look around the park at all the old guys and know they’ve had their collection of names. Mostly they tell me their favourite is father or grandfather. Yesterday was Father’s Day. BLM didn’t even acknowledge it. All the fatherless son’s afraid of their mothers.
I miss my Dad. We’d be out fishing by now. He was a pragmatist. A William James of the 20th Century. Wisdom came with doing. As kids we followed behind him climbing hills, trekking through forests. I never cease to wonder at the foods he’d give us to eat as we struggled to keep up. ‘Rosehips,’ he said and we dutifully chewed on them as we walked.
My favourite time was catching pickerel in Northern Saskatchewan. After we’d caught our limit, he beached the aluminum boat wit the 5 hp Johnson outboard on the sand, cleaned the fish, filleted them and in the pan he always seemed to have fried them up in butter. They tasted so good that to this day some 60 years later my mouth waters with the memory. Sunny days sitting in boats or on the sides of a lake with my Dad. Endless blue skies.
When we drove long distances, he’d sing the one song he seemed to know, “Home, home on the Range, where the deer and the antelope roam, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.” Mom would always be laughing.
The coffee tastes especially good this morning. I’ve switched from a machine espresso to a stove top espresso maker. There’s an art in grinding the Ethiopian coffee beans just right.
My mind is like a ping pong game sometimes. This morning coffee was playing against fishing and coffee won. Sometimes it’s a pin ball machine with a pinball of thought bouncing off all the barriers. Each day I’m here the cacophony of the city’s anthill of intruding thought stills. I’m so conscious of the pressure of congregated sentience in the city and how in the country self is freer. I feel the expansion and safety in looseness. I remembered that feeling living on the acreage. Now it’s returning. I love that feeling. Expanding and contracting consciousness. I love flying dreams as well. I love the freedom of movement in dreams and imagine those in wheel chairs and confined to bed love to dream if their conscience is clear. My grandmother loved to sleep in her final years in our home. She loved the warmth of the sunshine. Little things. Learning to pay attention to detail and appreciate the nuances. I loved the subtleties. When life moves from the solid colours to the pastels. I remember that day I felt the pastels return after the months of reds and blacks. I am so thankful to friends and family.
Across the way a young mother is playing with some kids, aged three to 6 by appearances. She is blowing bubbles and the kids are chasing them trying to break them. They are as precious as the god kids or my nephews when they were small. I knew my nephews as rug rats and now they are amazing men and one has a child with the loveliest lass alive. When I was young I was so keen to climb mountains, see distant lands, sail across oceans, build igloos, spear fish beneath the sea. It was different then. Not better or worse just so different. The stages of life. I love watching the young today. My brother coached his kids in soccer and loved watching them grow from stumbling to gangly then to the adult men today whose limbs work like professionals even if they wind much sooner. Out walking the dog I passed a stooped older guy and enjoyed our few words. . His young dog was a little boston bull dog that jumped straight up and down on stiff legs when he met Gilbert.
I once lived in libraries, spent hours exploring old book stores, then the churches and religious art. The sacred spaces in the city that felt proximate to the serenity among trees or watching northern lights on the Tundra.
God is all. I am living in the mind stuff and star stuff of collective thought and the programs of God who wrote the language. “In the beginning was the Word.” I so loved John so many years. The mystical resonated. Like love making without the sweat and grunts. Moments of distraction and being. The ‘aha’ times. The days she gave herself to me. Opening like a blossom. The unequivocal invitations.
Today’s reading, so applicable, 1 Corinthians 14:33 KJV “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints”
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