Author: Katharine Asals

Landscapes lately

Katharine Asals2 Comments

At the grocery store checkout today, I lined up behind a woman with a massive stack of stuff in her cart, 6th or 7th in line. There was only one cashier open out of the 8 potential spots, and an absurd line up behind the one open cash.

She turned to me, impatience percolating. “I can’t believe they have 8 wickets and only one cashier on”.

“Profits are up”, I answered. There’d been a headline in the papers just yesterday – better than expected profits this quarter. Easy to see how they do it.

She took a beat, as if shifting into second gear, the better able to tell me what she really thought. “The greediest family! The only ones greedier are the Walmart family”.

THIS is the landscape everywhere. Across this country, and from the sounds of it, most others as well.

In our neighbourhood, all three businesses within view are closing their doors. The bank of course, it’s just the branch; the Popeyes, also a bit of a regional franchise failure; and the cannabis store beside the Popeyes, well… hard as we all tried, they just didn’t survive.

During my summer out west, I heard jokes about how BC stands for “bring cash”. Plenty of struggles out there as well.

But it was summertime, and so it was time to kick back and enjoy the good weather, and we went to all the beaches up and down the coast – one afternoon of full on Pacific Ocean, but mostly up and down the Strait of Georgia.

Everywhere we went was breathtakingly spectacular. Just insanely beautiful.

But I realized there was one beach that stayed with me especially.

There was something about the proximity of the mountains just across the way on the mainland and the almost protected feeling of the waters in between.

Tiny fish darting at every step, seaweed waving lazily, crabs scuttling in all directions.

Something about this grove of Ocean and Mountains and primeval life forms gave me a sense of a kind of Birth of the World, or the Origins of All Species.

Swimming there I felt almost as if I was swimming in the dawn of creation.

This sensation was the most beautiful reminder of all the stages of the world – all the mysterious pre-human stages, the early human hunter-gatherers, and then the slow slow move to agriculture… and only just recently the massive shifts to industry, to technology, to predatory capitalism.

Nothing is forever.

We can dream a better dream any time we want.

Lens Artists Challenge – Landscape

The Journey

Katharine AsalsLeave a comment

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving.
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving.

~ David Whyte

Saudade

Katharine Asals5 Comments

There is a strange cat in the basement, like a cat that has been painted a dark burgundy.

I am nudging the cat up the stairs towards the back door, and as we pass through the kitchen, Dad is there, hunched and skeletal, getting himself a snack. He makes noises of annoyance at the cat, at the audiobook I am listening to… I promise everything is being taken care of, everything will be alright in just a minute.

***

When I awake I remember of course Dad left us on Wednesday.

He was 90 – a life very well lived.

His departure had been coming for a while, coming for a year and a half and then coming on all at once, coming so clearly and pointedly in the last week that we contacted palliative care and they came and laid out what they could offer – the painkillers, the sedatives.

During the summer I was out in BC for a couple of months, and often feared we might lose him while I was away and it would be something I’d have to live with.

There was an evening where I’d come back from dinner with some new friends and was on the couch in the house where I was staying, messing around with my phone, and I looked up and saw an owl, just there on the balcony, staring at me.

The next day I thought for sure I would get the call that Dad had gone. The owl was so spooky, his sunken black eyes glaring at me I was convinced he was a messenger of death.

For days I drew him over and over, in pencil, in watercolour, on the iPad…

But no, the summer carried on without incident after the owl’s visit, and many evenings were spent in various local bays enjoying the sunsets and watching the seals come out, their little round heads bobbing in the water looking for evening snacks.

Word of the summer : crepuscular.

1 : of, relating to, or resembling twilight

2 : occurring or active during twilight

Back home and into the final weeks of care, soon enough it was clear where things were going, and the spirit of loss and melancholy began to haunt all events.

A friend had a film premiering at TIFF, so I went and tried to be distracted by the bustle, the crowds… but alas, Dad was such a huge aficionado, a devotee of the festival every year until these last few, so my thoughts were with him at every turn.

In recent nights another critter made it’s way into my world – I’d been leaving the balcony door open at night to get some fresh air in as the apartment was full of strange smells.

A moth got trapped inside and would get fluttery in the evenings, knocking against windows and ceilings, clumsy futile movements, harassed, looking for a way out.

Wednesday morning I found the moth dead in the kitchen. And I wondered…

Indeed, it was the final day.

Lens Artists Challenge – Longing