Category Archives: Uncategorized

Light Under Their Wings

It was 6:59 and my alarm hadn’t gone off as scheduled.  Today is garbage and recycling day and I hopped to it.  Everything out to the curb before the trucks roll by at 7:30 or so.  Focus … empty small garbage baskets into the big can, yank the clear bag full of fine white paper out of its holder (Heavy!), newspapers into a plastic bag, search for any recyclables and plop them into their appropriate bin, huge garbage bag out of the can, replace bag, empty small bag in garage into the big one, replace bag, slap on a sticker showing that I’m a legitimate taxpayer, one blue box inside the other and carry them out to the road, heave ho the fine paper bag out to the same location, try to be quiet as I roll our grey plastic garbage can (with the raccoon-proof lid) to join the others … There!  Done.

What’s next?  Well, pick up the morning paper from our mailbox, of course.  And while you’re out here, why not get the backyard feeders out of the shed and hang them for the birdies?  Okay, oriole one is up.  Walking with the hummer one towards its hook, thinking of coffee (Tea is for expansive days).

And then … I looked up.  The sky was full of seagulls flying right over our house, from the front yard to the back, coming from their overnight sojourn on Port Stanley beach to eat I don’t know what in the fields around St. Thomas.  I glanced up for a few moments and then dropped my eyes to the task at hand.  Until the voice inside said “Stop.  Put down the feeder.  Watch the birds.”  So I did.

The morning sun hadn’t touched our backyard grass, but it was animating the bellies and wings of my silent friends.  And it was silent.  Nary a flapping sound among the bunch of them.  Inside, I stopped as well, letting the flow of hundreds of birds wash over me.

I looked to the south to some big old deciduous trees on the horizon.  Seagulls kept appearing from behind those trees.  I saw one arrow shape of ten birds.  How cool.  Then there were lots of folks floating along in twos and threes.  But also the occasional one flying alone.  I wondered about them.  Did they want the freedom of a solitary flight, not having to make conversation?  Or did they pine for companionship, wishing that somebody would say “Hi”?  I don’t know.  They didn’t say.

I wanted there to be a minute when the sky was empty, so that I could anticipate the next convoy, but it never came.  Always there were birds, revealing themselves over the southern trees, showing me their colours, and then disappearing to the north, over the maple in our backyard.  I thought of an individual seagull – first they weren’t there, then they were, then they weren’t again.  But even if I could no longer see a certain feathered one, their bird essence was imprinted on my sky.  Nobody can ever take that away.

After five or ten minutes of being aloft, I picked up the hummer feeder and walked to its hook.  Slowly.

The Mathematics of Love

What if I started loving one more person this month?  Maybe someone I’ve known for years.  Maybe someone brand new in my life.  And I’m talking about true love – wishing the other person well and not needing anything in return.  My love could be for an eighty-year-old grandma or a little boy who’s scraped his knee.

And what if that person, being moved by my love for them, looks around in their life the following month and sees a human being that they dearly care for, and that becomes the same sort of deep love?  What if every month I added one more precious human?  And so did each of the people I’d come to love.

It might look something like this:

 Month Bruce loves …  The loves of the people Bruce loves Number of people now loved
 1 – September 2014 #1  1
 2 – October 2014  #1, #2  #1 – 1  3
 3 – November 2014  #1, #2, #3  #1 – 2, #2 – 1  6
 4 – December 2014  #1, #2, #3, #4  #1 – 3, #2 – 2, #3 – 1  10
 5 – January 2015  #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 #1 – 4, #2 – 3, #3 – 2, #4 – 1  15
 6 – February 2015  #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 #6 #1 – 5, #2 – 4, #3 – 3, #4 – 2, #5 – 1  21
 12 – August 2015  #1 – #12  Etc.  78
 24 – August 2016  #1 – #24  Etc.  300
 36 – August 2017  #1 – #36  Etc.  666
 45 – May 2018  #1 – #45  Etc.  1035

Wouldn’t that be a gas?

When Death Comes

When death comes, like the hungry bear in autumn
When death comes, and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me
And snaps his purse shut
When death comes, like the measle pox
When death comes, like an iceberg between the shoulder blades
I want to step through the door, full of curiosity
Wondering “What is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?”
And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood
And I look upon time as no more than an idea
And I consider eternity as another possibility
And I think of each life as a flower
As common as a field daisy, and as singular
And each name a comfortable music in the mouth
Tending as all music does towards silence
And each body a lion of courage
And something precious to the earth
When it’s over, I want to say
“All my life I was a bride married to amazement
I was a bridegroom taking the world into my arms”
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
If I’ve made of my life something particular and real
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world

As my wife Jody struggles to stay alive, then despairs, then lets go … and does it all over and over again, I look at my own death.  After I die, I will be remembered fondly by many … for awhile.  My friends will go on in their ever evolving lives, most likely thinking of me less and less as the years pass.  Eventually they will all be dead and I will be an unknown person in historical time.  Maybe this blog will survive and some post will touch someone way down the road.  Or maybe not.  I realize today that I’m okay with all traces of me disappearing from the planet.  I don’t have to write that book.  I don’t have to resurrect my batik and have people enjoy the works of art I create.  I don’t have to burn my love into anyone’s soul so that it stays there eternally.

I don’t know what’s next.  Multiple lifetimes?  Sure, I’m open to that.  The candle of my soul flickering elsewhere in some unknowable realm of being?  Okay.  But perhaps nothing, zero, the void, the end.

I know that when my last hour falls upon me, I will be happy, at peace.  I can feel that already.  To die with a smile on my lips … I think so.  Looking back at countless moments of contact, not at achievements.  Looking back at silence inside, not the chatter of society.  Looking back at standing still, arms by my sides, head bowed, sufficient in the universe.

Touching

I’ve just spent an hour sitting beside Jody’s bed, holding her head and shoulder.  She’s crying a lot about her cancer and her life.  As Jody’s hair has been coming back over the past few weeks, I’ve enjoyed rubbing her head, letting my fingers flow through her hair.  Not this morning, though.  Just holding feels right.

Often in the past, I’ve sent loving thoughts to Jody as I’ve held her.  A personal beam of energy aimed from one being to another.  Not this morning.  Sometimes I’ve practiced tonglen as I touch her, consciously taking in her pain on my inbreath and sending out love on the outbreath.  But again, not this morning.  Instead it’s just the contact, unmediated by thought or intention.  It’s like walking on a coarse sand beach and coming upon a pocket of the finest grains.  Not really better, I guess, just different, and what I’m drawn towards today.

I think of human touch, and the difference between the hand being still and the hand moving.  I’ve received a lot of hugs in my life, and the ones I’ve loved have been still, rather than feeling that the other person was rubbing the skin off my back, or pounding me to a pulp.

On the other hand, Jody has enjoyed me scratching her back, getting all the itches out.  She’s often marvelled at how I can find the spots that are driving her nuts.  And one of our favourite activities has been Jody lying on the couch while I rub her feet.  So movement of my hand can be pretty special too.

Then there’s the amount of pressure applied.  Some of the hugs I’ve received have been crushing.  This morning it’s been a gentle holding.  No thought about how much is too much, just me wanting to touch my wife, and the details falling into place.

Holding hands is such a comfort, with the touch being just firm enough for communion.  Jody and I have wandered many of life’s paths hand-in-hand.  Such a blessing to have a life partner for silent strolling.

As Jody likely continues to decline, what can I give her?  Some words of love, yes.  The meeting of our eyes, yes.  And holding her close, yes.

 

 

Francis

St. Francis of Assisi wrote this lovely poem, which was later paired with a soaring melody.  Sometime in the 1970s, I attended a Catholic retreat in Lethbridge, Alberta, sleeping in a high school gym.  We were awakened each morning by a choir of angel volunteers, giving us the sweetest daybreak songs.  Later in the day, retreatants and volunteers would channel Francis in singing these words.  It was sublime.  Spirit filled the room.

Make me a channel of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me bring Your love,
Where there is injury, Your pardon Lord,
And where there’s doubt, true faith in You

Make me a channel of your peace,
Where there’s despair in life let me bring hope,
Where there is darkness – only light,
And where there’s sadness, ever joy

Oh Master, grant that I may never seek,
So much to be consoled as to console,
To be understood, as to understand,
To be loved, as to love with all my soul

Make me a channel of your peace,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
In giving to all men that we receive,
And in dying that we’re born to eternal life

Oh Master, grant that I may never seek,
So much to be consoled as to console,
To be understood, as to understand,
To be loved, as to love with all my soul

Make me a channel of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me bring Your love,
Where there is injury, Your pardon Lord,
And where there’s doubt, true faith in You

I would like to sit with Francis in Tim Horton’s, enjoying tea and a muffin.  Having it be okay if no words were shared for a time.  Listening when he speaks.  Letting my own words spill out unrehearsed.  Just being together.  No one the better, no one the worse.  One wiser, I’m sure, but that’s okay.  Both of us tapping into the world’s wisdom, indeed being channels for it.  Not smart or clever or special or renowned.

Just tea for two
And two for tea
Just me for you
And you for me

No Sleep

Late one evening at the end of January, Jody was transported by ambulance from the St. Thomas Hospital to Victoria Hospital in London, so that her collapsed lung could be treated better.  We arrived in Emergency and stayed there for some time until her bed was ready in the Thoracics unit.

I stayed with Jody overnight, mind racing, heart throbbing, doing whatever needed to be done.  Mostly just “being with” my lovely wife.  As morning broke, and my head was getting fuzzy, I realized that I had been awake for 24 hours.  And still there was stuff to do, people to meet, Jody to love.

As the clock struck noon, I was really fading.  A nurse would say something to me, and it just wouldn’t register.  People would walk by the room and they started looking like ghosts.  I thought about driving home to Union for some shut-eye.  I remember fingering Hugo’s keys in my pocket, truly in a state of absent mind, until I clued in to that being a ridiculous and dangerous course of action.

I could feel my mind collapsing, and I just had enough brain cells left to phone Rachelle, a friend of ours, and ask if I could get some sleep at her place.  She was happy to help.  We arranged a time for her to pick me up.

I wobbled my way from the nursing unit down to the Emergency waiting room, marginally conscious of people looking at me.  Oh so dully, I wondered if they thought I was drunk.  I spoke to someone to prove I wasn’t, and God only knows what came out of my mouth.

In the waiting room, I tried to focus on the conversation between an elderly woman and her daughter a couple of rows away, but it was a foreign language to me.  And I was nodding, then jerking myself up before my body would have hit the floor.

Finally Rachelle, smiling at me.  Good grief, what was she so happy about?  I told her I was in trouble but that didn’t faze her.  From the passenger seat of her car, I surveyed a strangely unfamiliar London as we headed west on Commissioners Road and then swirled through a bunch of side streets.

I think we sat at her kitchen table a bit, and I think I drank something, but I don’t really know.  Rachelle led me to a guest room in the basement, and I pretty much fell into bed.  Some inside voice said “You can’t sleep in your clothes” so I struggled with buttons and zippers before falling onto the pillow again.  It was 5:00 pm.

Five minutes later, I was still awake.  I sat up, terrified.  “I’m going to die of no sleep!”  That I remember – exactly those words.  “I have to find Rachelle and tell her I’m dying!”  It was so real.  I was dying.  I pressed down on the mattress to get up and tell her … and then collapsed back on the bed. Breathing fast and shallow.  Eyes stunned open.  Hands shaking ……

And then sleep … for many hours.

And today, I remain alive.  Having had a glimpse of oblivion.  Oh my.

 

Happiness

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness
With sadness there is something to rub against
A wound to tend with lotion and cloth
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up
Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change
But happiness floats
It doesn’t need you to hold it down
It doesn’t need anything
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing
And disappears when it wants to
You are happy either way
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
And now live over a quarry of noise and dust
Cannot make you unhappy
Everything has a life of its own
It too could wake up filled with possibilities
Of coffee cake and ripe peaches
And love even the floor which needs to be swept
The soiled linens and scratched records
Since there is no place large enough
To contain so much happiness
You shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
Into everything you touch.  You are not responsible
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
For the moon, but continue to hold it, and to share it
And in that way, be known

One more time, I don’t know who wrote this.  Thank you whoever and wherever and whenever you are.  You could be a monk living in 200 BC or you could be a commuter on yesterday’s subway in Toronto.  No matter.  All that’s important is whether I’ll learn from you.

I agree with the author that when you’re truly happy there’s nothing to rub against, no cause staring back at you in our day-to-day world.  Of course good things happen to us (“I got a _____”,  “_____ loves me”, “I accomplished _____”) but those don’t touch the essence of happiness.   Somehow, it comes from within (or from … somewhere), uncaused.  It is by grace that it touches us.  And so we float.

At this depth of knowing, my neighbour’s happiness, my co-worker’s, my “enemy’s”, is mine as well.  Their smile has no power to diminish mine.  And when I have troubles at work, or my back hurts, or the dog ate my homework, those are only ripples on the surface.  Far beneath is the cool unmoving benediction of peace.

It is true, I believe, that the body is too small a container for this happiness.  It has to leak out – from the mouth, from the eyes, from the hands.  And those dribbles turn into rivulets … creeks … streams … rivers … reaching everyone within eyesight and earshot.  Reaching them on some level anyway, maybe not consciously.

And the source of this boundless happiness is unknown.  We don’t earn it.  We aren’t any type of chosen one.  It falls as gentle rain onto upturned hands.

No One Left Out

When I’m driving on the west edge of St. Thomas, I come upon a meadow that borders Kettle Creek.  For many years, four horses have graced that field, and they like hanging out close to each other.  There’s a tall black fellow, a mid-sized black one, a medium one with dark brown patches on white, and a honey-coloured Shetland pony.  I look forward to seeing them every morning I’m on the road.

Once in awhile there are only three horses enjoying each other’s company. And that hurts me.  I get scared.  Has the fourth one died?  Maybe they’re sick inside the barn.  Maybe their owner has taken them to some wide open pasture, and my friend is getting to run and frolic.  Whatever’s happened, the fourth one always returns in a couple of days.  And I breathe easy again.

It’s just not right when one of the group is missing.  The circle is not complete, and I feel sad.

It seems that this is a recurring theme in my life.  I remember how much it hurt one time in my teenage years when I was hanging out with two friends, Mary and Brian. We were sitting at a round table.  I’d say things to Mary, but mostly she’d direct her comments to Brian.  It was such a vivid experience of being third wheel, and that sorrow has never entirely left me.  So my heart breaks when I see others live through exclusion or absence.

I’m thinking now of a Grade 6 girl.  Bonnie was enthralled with a certain boy band, especially its lead singer.  Many a time when she spoke to the class, she would work in a comment about her heroes.  The rest of the students quickly tired of her obsession … and she was ostracized, subtly at times, blatantly at others.  And I was sad.  Once again our circle was broken.

And then there was the gentleman in the meditation hall, a very large guy who brought with him a rubber cushion, which he placed on his chair.  Any slight movement and we heard the squeak.  Also he moved fast, stepped heavily and plunked his glasses down loudly on the window sill next to him.  The looks from some other retreatants held a clear message – you’re not welcome here.  More sadness.

The theme continues inside me.  Jody and I have been watching lots of episodes from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” on our laptop, her from the hospital bed, me from a chair.  I’d missed the last three or four, and when I started watching again I noticed that the young ensign Wesley Crusher was nowhere to be seen.  He wasn’t on the bridge.  He wasn’t in Ten Forward, the ship’s lounge.  He wasn’t even in the credits.  And the same reaction from me: I miss him and I’m worried about him.  All for a TV character from 1990.

I smile at myself sometimes.  Hopelessly sentimental?  Overly sensitive?  Naw … just me.

 

 

Trees

They just stand there.  No goals, no fears, no deficiencies.  Just perfect in the moment, every moment.  When I need a reminder to simply be, I look at a tree.

A bit east of us on Bostwick Road (Home Road), a very tall deciduous tree welcomes me every time I pass by.  The diameter of its trunk must be five feet.  Part of me wants to know the type of tree it is, but alas, naming things is not one of my strong suits.  And actually, it’s not even an alas.  My friend big guy opens me up when I linger a moment.  His or her name could be Bob or Carol or Ted or Alice … no matter.  He just is.  The fact that he looms so high above me is fine.  There’s no sense of better or worse, bigger or smaller.

Another friend hangs out on the east side of Highway Road as I venture north to London.  On a slight curve, his leaves and branches spread wide, falling at the edges down towards the earth.  Not so lofty, this fellow.  But just about perfectly symmetrical.  The balance draws me in, and in my moments of awareness, I say “Hello, lovely tree.”  He or she smiles back.

In 1969, 1974, 1975 and 1976, another tree helped me keep going.  I was working those summers in the superheated laundry building of the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta.  The sheet mangle was just about mangling me, with sweat usually pouring off my brow.  When the dizziness and exhaustion came, I looked out one of the windows to gaze upon a straggly pine, gnarled by the wind.  It was slightly uphill to that tree, and I knew that just past it, the ground sloped down to a view of Waterton Lake and the surrounding mountains – a vista for the gods.  I knew that something marvelous was just beyond my physical sight, and the laundry tree was my conduit for touching it.

Listen to the trees, Bruce.  Listen.

The Bodhisattva

Bodhisattva: a being (sattva) committed to liberation (bodhi)

So simple.  And yet not at all simple to do

***

The Bodhisattva Vows

Suffering beings are numberless.  I vow to liberate them all
Attachment is inexhaustible.  I vow to release it all
The gates to truth are numberless.  I vow to master them all
The way of awakening is supreme.  I vow to realize it fully

How illogical to think that you could free every single human being from suffering.  And yet … ?   Then how about being attached to nothing and no one, letting them all come into your life and later leave?  Plus staying open to all the sources of wisdom that are embraced across the world, rather than accepting only one

***

Each bodhisattva has delayed her or his departure from the world of samsara until beings everywhere are free of suffering

Samsara means a circular, repetitive existence on this planet, being reborn lifetime after lifetime, making mistakes and suffering each time, learning oh so slowly what we need to.  Am I willing to come back again and again to assist others, rather than accepting a freedom that is well earned?

***

In simple acts of kindness and gestures of cheerfulness, bodhisattvas are functioning everywhere, not as special saintly beings, but in helpful ways we may barely recognize

That woman smiling at you
That man letting you take the parking space
That child doing their best to bake you a cake

***

Bodhisattvas usually are unknown and anonymous rather than celebrities, and function humbly and invisibly all around us, expressing kindness and generosity in simple, quiet gestures

If they’re all around us, I wonder how many of them I see every day

***

Bodhisattvas are extraordinary wondrous beings, bestowing blessings on all wretched, confused, petty creatures.  Bodhisattvas are living in your neighborhood, waiting to say “Good morning” to you

I’m going to see every person who says “Good morning” to me as a bodhisattva.  Perhaps they are.  Perhaps they aren’t.  It doesn’t matter

***