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…
Gotta love what you do, babe For that jingle jangle Cause we only get a few days Nobody makes it outta here anyway What puts a shuffle in your shoes, babe? That’s the thing worth chasing Gotta love what you do, babe So not a day goes wasted…
William Prince
A few weeks ago I went with friends to the William Prince concert at Massey Hall.
It was beautiful – dynamic and heartfelt and vulnerable. He told us much about himself – was it 26 days sober that he announced? Such a tender tentative declaration… but in and amidst all of it was a pronounced preoccupation with mortality.
You get a hint of it there in the lyrics: “cause we only get a few days…”
Pretty much since then my dad has been in hospital.
It started in the hallway of the emergency room after a few falls. My brother the fireman had brought him in, and at the time I think we all thought it would get sorted quickly and he’d be back home soon enough, and there’s that trip they have booked in April…
But it has not been an easy ride. And he will not be going anywhere in April.
This morning we were officially 2 weeks into my dad’s stay in hospital.
The Physio gals came by as they do every weekday morning. At one point we had been considering walks around the hallways, but after downgrading expectations, now they are focused on sitting and standing and the corresponding blood pressure readings. So they talk as they go, they ask questions.
“So, have you always lived in Toronto?” they ask, keeping the conversation happening while they verify sitting position blood pressure.
Dad scoffs, a moment where he is distinctly in character, which he hasn’t always been over these two weeks. “I was raised in Philadelphia” he scolds them, as if they should know. “I didn’t come here {to Canada} until I was an adult”.
“Oh, okay”, they respond, indifferent and unoffended, moving him to a standing position to verify how the blood pressure holds up once they have him standing. They just started the new blood pressure meds yesterday, so standing may not last long, we all know.
“What brought you up here?’ is the next question – keeping him going, keeping him engaged. Standing, dad is starting to get a bit fuzzy, blood pressure dropping. He tries to answer. “Education…” he mutters vaguely. They pick it up with enthusiasm, “Oh, did you come up here to go to the University of Toronto?”
Distinctly dizzy now, pressing his weight into the walker, he gives them what they want: “Yes?”, he floats the quasi-question. But I shake my head.
“He was a Prof at U of T”, I clarify. “He came up from the States to teach at U of T”.
Now for a flashback moment in the narrative – there’s, my dad, graduating with a PhD from Brown University, Rhode Island, with my mom and me. How young we all were.
One interesting thing that emerged – after both mom and dad had been offered jobs at Canadian universities as fancy-pants Brown graduates, and I grew up and went off to university in Montreal – I had a delightful roommate, Sabrina Mathews. And one Christmas when I went home to Toronto, I asked my dad if he knew Sabrina’s dad, Robin Mathews? From what I understood he was a bit of a nationalist and had something of an opinion about American graduates getting jobs that maybe could have been given to Canadians….?
“Robin Mathews?!?!!???!”, my dad exclaimed. “I almost lost my JOB because of Robin Mathews!!!” Apparently Robin was quite vocal and activist in his opinions.
Well whaddyaknow. And yet, in spite of all that paternal animosity, Sabrina and I became lifelong friends – friends who always and still share all the things.
Sadly, Sabrina lost her remarkable dad not long ago.
Last time Sabrina was here for a visit, and knowing she was more experienced in the difficult things of aging parents than I, I told her about where we were at with all things regarding my dad.
“It’s a process”, she advised me.
Fair enough. A process without clear indicators.
After the Physio gals left today, the head nurse came in and went through a series of localized and cognitive tests. Dad, bored, answered the questions about dates and symptoms with a pronounced sigh of tedium. At a certain point, regarding heart condition, readings, medications, etc, the nurse said, “given your age, sir, with all respect…”
There was a bit of a pause, a blank. Dad looked at me.
Looking for levity, I said, “getting old ain’t for sissies”.
It’s a line we have toyed with before. Bette Davis and all. But today there was no mischief in dad’s eyes as he held my gaze, level and serious. “NO”, he answered.
Coming home from the hospital, I figured I’d crash in front of the television.
I decided to watch La La Land, which I hadn’t caught when it came out years ago. And gosh, it is one charming movie!
But there is a scene in it where the two leads do a bit of a Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers moment. Of course I thought of my dad. I thought of my dad who had introduced me to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly… the dad with whom I’d watched so many old movies on the tiny little television out on the sunporch… For hours we’d hunched in the creaky wicker chairs and stared at that little television…
And there I had been taught the Sacred Love of Movies.
follow your nose 