The other day was the first anniversary of Dad’s death.
I knew what I wanted to do that day – I wanted to go down to the lake and watch the monarchs flying south.
Last year when the call came that he was gone, I stumbled down to the lake and sat in one of those Muskoka chairs they have down there and just watched the water, the birds, the monarchs. September the monarchs are in full migration mode, making their chaotic tiny flutterings out over the harbour.
There was some loose sense, as I sat there, that Dad’s spirit was flying off on one of his travels – he was always off somewhere.
They might be a little lost in the fog here, but…
It’s amazing, the voyage of the monarchs – how many kilometres for them to fly all the way to their winter sanctuaries in central Mexico? Some 3000 to 4000 km?
We see them making their way out over the Toronto harbour, and then on the other side of the islands, they launch out over Lake Ontario itself.
In fact, a couple of days later I took the ferry to the islands with a friend, and we puttered around, looking north towards the city skyline, and the monarchs were everywhere on the islands –
Deep in their favourite flowers, getting fuel for the flight –
Resting up before the longer leg of the journey over Lake Ontario itself –
Of course some of them – no doubt many of them – don’t make it.
Launch and make your move and hope for the best.
Get as far as you can while you can, while the spirit lives within you.
Dad made it to 90 and a few months – about as good as it gets.
Downtown, city center, Times Square kinda vibe, Toronto style.
We saw an Oasis movie – not a great movie, but nonetheless a pretty glorious reminder of the spirit of Rock & Roll. I said to my boy, “it’s like, my Culture, that big stadium rock & roll scene”. Like I remember first going to massive concerts at Maple Leaf Stadium, drugs preplanned and at the ready, when I was 14. And then by 17 it was the smaller venue mosh pit punks vs skinheads scene, where you’d be ready to run if things got really rough.
Afterwards, we wandered the streets of downtown and talked music. I wasn’t sure he remembered the soundtrack from those early years, cause Oasis was just getting big when he was about two or so, but… sure enough, he remembers those tunes. And I’ve always been a sucker for a wall of sound played at full volume…
Now he’s an occasional music event producer himself – I mean he’s got a day job, but he and some buddies bring in some techno shows, so we were talking about how there were so many giants of rock & roll that came out of Britain…
He was saying in the techno scene also, that there’s a lot of really impressive “acts” that come out of the UK.
It must have been way back when we were living in Mexico City that Oasis was just getting big.
But I was kind of amazed that he remembered a whole bunch of the stuff I was listening to through that period from when he was still pretty little until maybe his early teens – the classic British sound got supplemented with a lot of more international sounds, including Mano Negra and eventually a bit of Manu Chao.
With my boy, eventually we settled in town in Toronto for a couple of decades and lived just up the alleyway from the church at the corner, and there was music all the time, music of all genres, a reflection perhaps, of the diversity of the city.
And somewhere along the way he got all grown up.
One of our more recent musical bonding moments was over this video STORM that I sent him.
He responded, “Oh, I used to be a big fan of Yung Lean”. Ahem. Used to be? I mean, okay it’s a lot about the choreographer and the director, but still…
There’s a house – it seems to be an inheritance perhaps, something passed down in the family – but it is an odd shape of a house on an odd street.
Because there is a view of the water here – prime real estate, really – but the street is full of stodgy red brick things, not open airy homes appropriate for life by the water.
I look at the floor plan – really this cramped and crowded house could totally be built out, opened up, a complete overhaul within what the footprint, the property lines allow – there are enormous possibilities…
But as we were getting ready for this next round, for the year ahead, I found myself reflecting back on what the previous year had involved – or was it two years? I’ve kind of lost track and it seemed like a long time… Perhaps part of the nature of the direction, which was South, and the element of Water.
And yes, there has been a lot of water in this past year.
Cause first up, this is where I often take my morning coffee –
Toronto Harbour. Lake Ontario. A coupla flights of stairs down from my place.
Lake Ontario, older than Canada itself, derived it’s name from the Iroquoian root meaning “beautiful lake” or “lake of shining waters,” historians at the Canadian Encyclopedia believe…
Or sometimes I’ll bike over to the new river park they’ve opened up around the corner and hang out with the egrets and herons who have been coming back in groves to the new wetlands, and watch the sun rise over the old remnants of an industrial past…
But last summer was some intensive water – spent it almost entirely in and along the Strait of Georgia, beach days as often as possible, and even a moment from the tip of Saturna Island, a couple of days after seeing a few orcas upon arrival, facing South towards the U.S., and glimpsing in the distance a pod of porpoises on the move, making their way through the water heedless of boundaries and names and human constructions around nationhood… they seemed so storybook, a magical creature out there in the wild.
You might not see them tiny in the distance with a phone photo.
It was a summer of always looking out into those vast waters to see who you might see passing by.
And there was something about those many afternoons in the Strait of Georgia, facing the mountains on the mainland, and being in this narrow stretch of salt water that felt somehow like the Origins of Life…
I don’t know why, but it always felt like that, all the darting crabs, those liminal land / water creatures, their sideways inefficiency… it just felt like the rawness of life in its more primitive forms coming forth, the surging impulse of life as it must have begun, long before things like humans developed.
One of the things I’ve loved about being brought into more awareness of the elements, is how essential they are in our lives. Like teach was saying to us: “if the sun were to suddenly disappear, how long would it be before the necessities for ongoing life disappear?” As in, for food to grow, for heat to keep us warm. And then you do the same exercise with earth – if suddenly the earth could no longer grow food, how long would we last? And then if there was no more water – well now you’re starting to look at a matter of maybe not even weeks, maybe just days that we could survive. And then when you get to Air in the North, well, then it’s no joking matter at all, how intrinsic these elements are to our lives.
And then, on another level what we learn with each of these “directions” and “elements” that we do – East, then West, then South and North – is there is always a kind of emotional component, a layer of the exploration that is somewhere in a kind of psychic understanding of a parent or child dynamic.
The East was the Joy Child of Initiation and Beginnings, the West was the Nurturing Parent, and the South is the Trust Child.
Some of the notes I’ve gathered from the teachings on this are –
South is the place of the Trust Child, also known as the Wisdom Child, in our culture sometimes spoken of as the Wounded Child. But as we immerse ourselves in the element of water, we let go of the boundaries that restrict and confine us. So that, as we step out of the water we can gather to ourselves boundaries that support us, that are appropriate to where we are now.
For myself this past year has been an enormous experiment in trust and boundaries and learning and shifting on these fronts, but the funnier part of the story is…
That after we spent our weekend workshop learning all about the next direction, the North, teach told us we hadn’t quite nailed it, that we all needed to spend still MORE time in the South learning those lessons of the South deeper and better.
So back down the snake or the ladder we slide, to stay with the South and the leaning of the Trust and the boundaries and whatever else it was we missed the first time around…
