In between trying to decide whether or not to get the H1N1 vaccine, I took a break to peruse these gorgeous photos on the Guardian site – a gallery of selected images of 19th-century travel from the British Library’s Points of View Exhibition – from the time when the world was still small… Imagine seeing these from your armchair in the 1800s, especially the one of Thebes.
I was a travel writer. I still am, sort of, but a couple years ago I decided to hang up the shoes removed so many times at airport security and switch directions. There were a few reasons for this. One is that flying is so incredibly, amazingly awful for the earth (not that I won’t ever fly again but flying from Toronto to Detroit??? Ouch!!!!) The second is that I wanted to focus on my first loves: poetry and fiction. So, on this year’s Blog Action Day, although I’ve got lots to say about the upcoming meeting in Copenhagen, and in particular the deeply tragic ambivalence of our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, I thought I’d write a poem… because even in this techno-poppy, distracted day and age, poetry remains the deepest verbalization of our collective conscience.
How Long?
How many years, seasons
cold, day
after day, snow
stuck to sweating windows, sun
spread on the wild
fields, will this
last? Our rambling
conversations, accentuated
by ideas, flashing
mouths
damp with meanings, veiling
the troubled
earth. None of us can
truly see, not
from the windows
of our adventurous
cars, nor even, in our
un-spooling, anxious
dreams. I can’t hear
your voice, each word
a bandage
over reality. Instead, I ask
the birds, balanced
on hot
updrafts, searching
for their nesting
grounds, the white bear
spiraling to dark
bottom, the drifting
hunter, the drowned
fisherman, the dead,
the dead,
how long?
– Lauren Carter
I am a poet and writer working in the small city of Orillia, Ontario, Canada (about 125 kilometres north of Toronto). I write local travel stories for Edible Toronto but am currently focusing most of my creative energies on a novel set on the tipping point of fossil fuel depletion (well, a future tipping point as some would argue that we are already there) and a second collection of poetry dealing with climate change in a personal and historical perspective.
Read other people’s climate change posts at www.blogactionday.org
I am so here. Not only do I love Uxbridge, but now I can eat there easily, too.
In other news, check out the latest issue of Prism International for my poem The Double. On a fine independent book-seller’s shelf near you.
Yes, I’ve fallen off the face of the Internet.
First, there was a canoe trip into a world where the only electricity was the unbridled kind that comes with thunder. And then, in September, I started down a new path. Graduate school. Currently, my sharpened pencils are scribbling out a one-act play for a playwriting course and busy jotting notes in another, all towards a MFA in Creative Writing.
But the best part is that I’m doing what I love to do: making stuff up.
And as I attend more readings than ever before and gaze out over a classroom of people who also appreciate the act of commenting on the world in a creative way, as humans have been doing for millenia, it pains me to hear what our prime minister has to say about the arts. “I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see … a bunch of people at a rich gala … all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough when they know those subsidies have gone up, I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people,” Stephen Harper told reporters this week.
That’s funny. Despite my poetic nature, I always thought I was more or less an ordinary person, with a dog, a mortgage, taxes to pay and, oh, yeah, voting to do. And don’t even get me started about WHO gets to go to those “rich galas”. My invitation – and the ones for the thousands of other struggling artists out there – must have gone missing in the mail…
But, as usual, Margaret Atwood says it better than I can.
Please click HERE to read her thoughtful essay about all this seemingly prehistoric clap-trap (enlightenment, anyone?) and then think about the question she poses: what kind of country do you want to live in? Does it involve a few diverse shades of dissenting voices or is it all just a single tone of Conservative blue?
Wow, what a weekend.
This was the one where my brother and sister-in-law drove me out to the kennel to drop off Ollie, Jason came home from class and we drove north for five hours, picked up bug dope and cream for morning coffee at a Giant Tiger in a town smelling of sulpher and crossed over the old wooden single-lane swing bridge (as Jason said, “I’ve never seen pot holes in wood”) to rumble onto the Island, that place of family legend and poetry.
The first night we ate fried fish on the edge of Ice Lake, surrounded by the warm reception of half-second-cousins I’d met only occasionally and sipped Budweiser out of wet bottles and watched the kids become instant friends, playing tag across the large green lawn.
The next day, we gathered at the community hall for my Uncle Clive’s memorial. With his wife, kids, sister (my mom), nieces and nephew (my sister, my brother and I), friends from New Mexico and New York and my great aunt’s kids and once-removed second cousins from Wiarton and Islanders and other family and friends, we read bits and pieces of his writing and told stories about all the antics he’d so often get up to and recited poetry and ate Tim Bits, Scotch mints, smoked fish, butter tarts, potato chips and my Grandmother’s oatmeal cookies (made by me, from her recipe) in his memory. Near the end, I slipped outside and closed my eyes to feel the steady wind running across the wide fields of earth over limestone shale.
Out at Tobacco Lake, where my long-dead grandfather’s initials are carved into a beam into the old camp called Leaning Spruce (so named for the tree pictured above), we piled into three motorboats and two kayaks and traveled across the lake to a place Clive loved.
On shore, my mom picked up his ashes, held in a Japanese paper box, and said “he’s so heavy.” All hail the Chisholm wit: my cousin Caitlin instantly quipped, “he ain’t heavy, he’s your brother.” Single-malt scotch poured on the box and the bottle passed around and our voices singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Back at the cabin, in a half-hour of abandonment and cathartic glee, we sparked up some cigars and waved the setting sun into the darkening pocket of the horizon, an Island tradition he started, fun-loving (and slightly crazy) man that he was. And we said goodbye again, the (first, second) third and final time, to leave him on/in the island he loved, held in the ripple of water, in the long breath of the wind.
Last night, J. and I bundled up and spent a good hour, on and off, standing in our driveway. We leaned against our car and watched the sky. The solar eclipse started with a small bite out of the side and gradually, ever so slowly, the moon disappeared.
As it sank into the earth’s shadow, the aurora borealis appeared – odd, razor sharp white and green lights slashed across the sky. It was amazing. And oddly, on our street, we were the only ones outside.
Across the road, two girls occasionally stood on their second floor balcony, laughing loudly into the night and talking in that unique small-town dialect of Redneck about how “pretty soon there won’t be any Canadians left. It’ll all be immigrants.”
When I first went outside, I thought they were taking part, talking – albiet loudly – while they watched the show unfold. But then, at the very end, as the final sliver of glowing crescent was about to be swallowed up, they went back inside. They missed the final, hard-earned act. And I realized: they don’t care. They’re outside to smoke. They probably didn’t even notice.
I was glad they went away. This was no time for the mundane, not as we stood in the freezing cold, my husband with ridiculous bare feet inside his untied boots (he ran a hot bath when it was over) earning our quick glimpse of this special, momentary shift in the relationship between sun and moon.
The whole world was crisp and clearly defined – edges sharp, like they are in minus-20 degrees. Smoke from our neighbour’s chimney mixed with misty clouds floating over the sky, intermittently hiding the moon. It was quiet.
And in the silence, we watched the russet cloak settle on that normally bone-white star. I let it unfold, that amazed feeling of wonder at how small we are, settled in this tiny corner of the universe, facing an incomprehensible depth. And how big: able to recognize that depth, to gaze into it with wonder.
Photo by Dan Bennett
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