Tuesday, Burnaby, Thor Hurricane

All shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.

I awoke early. I’d been dream of Wes Hazlitt from high school.  He was wearing a black turtle neck and tux. He’d been conducting a choir and was walking down among the audience. He only had the slightest limp and no crutches.  

I often dream these nights of heaven. I liked the book Proof of Heaven by the Harvard neurosurgeon described his journey in a coma and his family praying for him.  

There is a hidden strength within me to overcome all obstacles and temptations.  Paramahansa Yogananda

I thought of the three person God, the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  I’m reading the history of orthodoxy, Constantine and the eastern and oriental church.  The filioque was the ‘and the son’ addition when Holy See was Charlemagne.  The Latin Pope claimed to be Pope or Pateriarch of all but the East Patricarch in Constantine believed there were two equal leaders as when the empire split in two with two emperors.  The seven ecumenical counsels were the agreed laws and positions of the church . But the Latin pope began to act as the word of God and make statements without discussion and confirmation at the highest ‘council’.  The Eastern church was by contrast ruled by the word of councils. This is more like Judaism

So the filioque was not agreed or accepted by council.

There was God the father and God the son and the Holy Spirit and they all came from God the father Creator but the filioque believed the Holy Spirit came from God the father and God the son.  It’s a bit ticklish Very much a discussion of how many angels could be on the head of a needle. One suspects the holy fathers drank wine.

There’s an argument that the ‘visionary’ texts like Enoch and revelations were assisted by substances That doesn’t detract from the holiness. All is God.  All is God.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead believes reincarnation occurs as a community. A cast reincarnates till everyone has experienced both sides.

If the red slayer thinks he slaws or the slain thins he has slain they know not well the ways I keep and turn and toss again - Emerson

- god poem 

In Job God and the Devil and wagering together liked old friends.The devil was the first son.  His failing is humus or pride. Milton describes him as preferring to look at his shadow than to turn and face God where the light of God would consume him.  There a bit of Plato in the God and light on the wall.

This world is a ‘perceived’ matter. I may ‘grok’ it but more commonly I experience it at a delay through senses and synapses that have a finite amount of time for transmission. So I’m really experiencing ‘yesterday’.

Dan Brown’s book Secret of Secrets discusses non local consciousness. It’s a metaphor of computers and the cloud. The consciousness is non locals, stored in a ‘cloud’.  That modern tech for ‘God’ and all the ‘book’.  

The mystic would ‘know’ God .  Prayer and meditation and mysterical practices all attempt to have direct awareness of the present and bypassing the ego , memory and thinking , interpreting self.  

This morning I awoke and looked at Laura. She has the most awesome curves. She was lying on her side and her pyramid hip and leg curved in that unambiguous motherhood form. She had thin striped grey and white soft cotton pajamas making her look a little like a prisoner in some erotic heaven. Madigan the dog sat beside her. He is her canine baby .  I think he’s perhaps 5 years old in human terms though his 5 year old age would make him 35 in dog age.  His mental ages doesn’t match his growing age. Dogs live to be 20 at most and I long for him a long life.  Laura and I have known each other a quarter Century.  I feel maybe 17 or 25 or maybe even 35.  I met her when she was 4O with three children.  We’re both so much older now but always see her as that ‘sexy thing’ , the young woman.

In the song when I was 21 it was a very good year, and I see her as a girl in that song at a younger age.  

I’m struggling with a back injury . I have had many trauma’s to my spine.  A plane crass. A motorcycle crash.  A pitchpolloing crash in a Corolla through ditc h after a boat of an old car lost its control on black ice and took me off the side of the highway. Then there was the Chinese feellow who drove through the stop sign and hit me descending Burrard on my bicycle to see the Priest.  Then there was the original parallel bar injury in high school gymnastics. Then there was the carrying milk containers up moving docks to floatplanes. Then the wrestling of dangerously insane men in the asylum stopping them escaping or attacking nurses.  

There was this litany of unsung injuries. Each was often a week or days in bed. The car crashes were at most a couple of weeks in bed and off work.  The research says that the hose who had physical trauma in childhood had 10 times the pain and disability after an equally back injury as an adult. I was caned on the back of my thighs at school. My mother strapped my back as a teen.  The teachers and principles strapped me in school.  But that was the hand. 

This back injury was climbing Arthurs seat in Edinburgh. It wasn’t a high climb by any means. I’d climbed coastal mountains hunting deer in Pemberton. I’d hiked above the clouds with Madeleine the intrepid hiker who worked as the base camp doctor in the Himalayans.   The things I did to be with beautiful women. I was with Laura in Edinburgh and I remember I’d been there before with Baiba. On this occasion I’d heard of Arthur’s Seat from Henderson.  

My father had back pain as did my brother. My mother would give him massages at night when he was home from his work as an engineer supervising a hundred and fifty men installing conveyors systems in airports and grocery stores.  He had been in the war, The RCAF, working as a spitfire mechanic when he wasn’t assisting the bombadier on west coast flights.  He told me if Iwas ever in the military “never volunteer’.  All his life hee was closest to his veteran buddies.

As boys and as a family we would joke that dad’s back ache was worst on days of work but not on the weekends fishing. He loved to take mom camping where she’d sit in the tent and screened tent front reading and drinking tea while he told my brother and I on hikes along lakes or drive us in the boat to another lake. He never complained of his back ache then but during the week he’d often moan aand complain. Thinking back now it wasn’t that much really. It’s just hat after dinner he’d like to lie on the couch and watch tv and his back would sometimes be and excuse not to do more.  I am astonished thinking back to how he was always working, Probably his only time not ‘fixing’ things, building garages, building boats, pouring cement, fixing his cars, making skis and toboggans for his boys was that hour or so after meals when he’d watch the news or a hockey game with us lying in his easy boy chair. He’d read technician books but I remember him complaining of his back pain and judging him. 

I believe my pain is psychosomatic.  I don’t exercise enough. I’m overweight. I’m learning humility and forgiveness. I realize that I was a little shit as a teenager and so unkind and inconsiderate of my family from high school to my early twenties when I began hunting with him again.  My brother had children and they became grand parents. I was forever in school and in clinics and married to incredibly brilliant and beautiful women.  My turning my back on my family coincided with my love for wine and later smoking pot.

When years later I stopped drinking after a 10 year run or so, my mother said she was ‘glad to have her son back’.  Alcohol and ego were such.  My father in my eyes since then has grown in stature and I have realized what a mensch he was and how wise. I wish I’d paid more attention.

So now I’ve back pain and it will leave as I forgive myself and my father .  His father was a heavy handed rancher.I was in Scotland and later Aberdeen searching for roots of my father’s family, grandad. I imagine he walked on some of those streets in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. I could have acquired the back pain as a voice from my grandfather’s past. 

I certainly don’t agree with surgeons.  

Grandad would come to visit and Dad would enjoy taking him and his brothers out for dinner . Mom would put them up in our Winnipeg home for the few days they visited. I remember visitting Minetonas chasing his chickens and being put up on the back of a Clidesdale and impossibly high heigh. I remember another time shooting gophers in the cattle fields and later playing in town with cousins and even later completely overwhelmed by a day of bailing hay with my cousin.

We keep in touch with Wayne.  I still do.  There’s Donna too. I sometimes think the pain will god when I visit my father’s family.  

In the next weeks I’ll get e&H hitch to hook up my new Jeep to the back of my Thor Motorhome.I’d like to dive up there perhaps this summer.I’ve the fondest memories of fishing with my dad and riding horses when we were in Saskatchewan.  I’ve not been there or seen any of that side of the family since I was pre teen. My brother returned and visitting as an adult.  That’s certainly a consideration. 

I’m able to work and travel.  Everyone would love to see my dog. He’s a favourite even though he’s anxious uncertain and growls a lot to act tough when he’s often scared. Not at all a therapy dog. I worry about him.  

Time for a day of work and another coffee. Laura has arisen and has taken Madigan out for a walk.