Category: Snippets

A cinematic day

Katharine Asals8 Comments

The day began with breakfast for two at the famous dumpling place on Spadina, and the fortune in my cookie said something stern about <<mettre de l’eau dans son vin>> and as we pushed through the doors and out into the street we debated the meaning of this, the translation, but also the intention of the saying, was it about making concessions, adjustments, or was it about making do with less?

Wandering through Kensington Market, my friend started telling me about a new practice she’s exploring called “Access Consciousness” and how she’s been given a series of questions to ask herself throughout the day – questions like “who does this belong to?” which you ask slowly, repeatedly about emotions, reactions that come up, but then also the question “how does it get any better than this?” which you ask yourself again and again and again, relaxing into all of the truth of the moment and wondering if it possibly could…

HOW does it get any better than this?

How does it get ANY BETTER than this?

How does it get any better than THIS?

This wonderful, meditative question reminded me of the way I feel when working on the 100 Day Challenge I’ve been doing for a couple of months now – it’s purposely not too ambitious, only about the joy of the thing, focused on the simple pleasures of paper, maybe pencil, maybe some watercolours, but who knows, maybe some charcoal depending on the day, depending on the creature, the image.

Seated Hare – charcoal, white charcoal, and watercolour on paper

This week, I am writing about noticing. About paying attention. About exploring what the Universe is telling us. This journey can be both arduous and joyful. It is certainly worthwhile.

Begin here

Paying attention is key to any artistic or life pursuit. It’s how we use all our senses. When we pay attention, we see patterns we otherwise would miss. We hear the chimes of the Universe, taste more intensely, let smell spark memory.

Touch

The most elemental of the senses for artists, even more than sight or hearing, is touch. It is how we relate to our materials. We touch the keyboard, the pens, the yarn, the paint, the fabric, the fragile silk of an emerging flower. Touch the sensitive place behind the ear, the pulse point of understanding.

~ Fran Gardner for The 100 Day Project

* * *

Many blocks further up into Little Italy on such a beautiful sunny day and we sat in the park for what seemed like days, catching up on so many things, but here and there remembering that beautiful question, until it was time to pee so we headed out through a little pathway that had been beaten out amongst some trees and oooo’d and aaaa’d over the little fields of bluebells giving a colourful shape to the path.

How does it get any better?

Up at my friend’s beloved familiar home, we ended up on the back porch as is always the case on a gorgeous spring day, and it was still too cool for the cherry blossoms to have started on the huge cherry tree that dominates the back yard, but I noticed all the textures in little corners of collected objects, of aging wood against cut glass and burnished metal and porous ceramics.

Oh how I miss these kinds of textures that we had everywhere back in the days when we lived in a funny little house with a splendid back yard and a pond and an orange cat and a crumbling wooden fence and moss covered bricks.

After a trundle down Parliament in a busy crowded bus it was getting dark by the time I got to my brand spanking new neighbourhood of concrete and steel and glass, with no gardens, no aging wood or porous ceramics, but lo and behold, there are still moments of magic when the fog from the lake creeps up at dusk and the skies simply couldn’t get any better…

Lens Artists Challenge – Cinematic

All photos apped out with an early version of the Waterlogue app

The Resilience of Swans

Katharine Asals4 Comments

We’ve had some cold snaps here, creating a bit of ice on the lake, but today the temperature truly drops with the arrival of the much hyped polar vortex.

I keep thinking about the swans – this winter is the first time I’ve seen swans here in our harbour.

While kayaking in the summer, I’d noticed a little island full of them over by The Spit – not quite in the harbour but adjacent, over in the wildland park area.

It looks lovely in their spot over there – sandy and green and very few signs of humans, so I’m not sure why this one pair has come to take up residence in the noise and grit of the harbour proper – it doesn’t look very hospitable.

When I first learned or noticed that swans stick around all winter, was back in the days when I was going up to Georgian Bay on the regular, getting out of the city and into nature, and getting to know my first digital camera.

Up there I saw that even as the temperatures plummeted and the water became filled with huge chunks of ice, the swans endured, floating quietly through the cold winter months. What impenetrable layers they must have, I thought, thinking of the thick layers of fat on a duck and imagining something like that underneath all the pretty white feathers.

The sense of this kind of obdurate toughness has been coming up repeatedly in the ongoing saga of my dad’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.

Over the holidays his partner of the last twenty-five years died. It had been coming for a long time and yet in the end happened very quickly, I think catching my dad off guard as he himself has had such a rough year health-wise and is the elder of the two.

Sad times.

Since my dad has been living for some months in a retirement home, we have begun the process of packing up the condo where they lived, and are in and out with boxes and bags, figuring out how to deal with all the stuff of a life.

The other day my brother and I got deep into it with the doorman of their condo building, discussing their dealings with the ongoing issues with the plumbing and renovations, and he said to us, “If I had to go to war, I would want those two with me – they were so stubborn…”. And there was something about the way he said it and what he didn’t quite say that implied a kind of “Okay, sure they’re gay, but… those two homosexuals are some tough motherf***ers.”

Underneath all the pretty white feathers…

Lens Artists Challenge – Resilience

Nothing gold can stay

Katharine AsalsLeave a comment

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

~ Robert Frost

My dad spoke this entire poem aloud as we sat at the exit of the rehab hospital, looking out the window at the emergence of spring, waiting for the ride to get him home.

When I made a crack about “nothing gold can stay” being perhaps not the most uplifting of lines, he came back with “assumptions about Frost being a sunny, feel-good poet” being off base and the like – the sharp engagement with language and writing and expression was clearly intact. So good to know after some 6 weeks of hospital turmoil.

The rehab hospital offered some particularly fine moments – taking dad out for walks through the verdant Willowdale grounds as spring sprung. I downloaded an app of bird song, just to know who exactly was singing so brightly as we wandered from one corner of the gardens to another. There were robins of course, the occasional jay, a waxwing, and several variations on sparrows – the prettiest being the Song Sparrow as opposed to the House Sparrow or the Common Sparrow. But one day there was a fleeting moment of Goldfinch… oh, what a magical name. Must be the gold reference.

In the mornings before heading up to the hospital, I started a practice of sitting on the benches facing the lake and doing 10 minutes or so of meditation.

I have an app for that too, don’t ya know. So I sit there with my headphones on and do my best to clear the mind.

The guided meditations in my app do your basic bringing attention to the breath, but they have a few other tricks to help with the incessant Thinking Thinking Thinking of the brain. My favourite so far is to “become aware of the sounds” that are all around you. Recognize that you cannot stop the hearing of the sounds, that there is a part of you hearing the sounds – your consciousness – and your consciousness is hearing sounds whether you will it to or not. And then be in touch with that part of yourself that is simply hearing sounds and simply carries on breathing all day long. Something that is always there no matter what thought is going on in your mind.

For some reason I see this “consciousness” thing, this place that is somewhere behind and beyond the Thinking Mind, as a kind of vagus nerve shape…

Vagus Nerve illustration

…something that includes and yet is deeper and more extensive than the brain.

I dunno – maybe this image will change over time as I do more meditation, we’ll see.

But there is something about the realizing that sound is happening all around all the time whether or not you are paying attention to it, and using that as a way past the thinking that works better for me than trying a similar thing with the visual world. I guess I’m so visually oriented that analysis jumps in very quickly. As soon as I open my eyes my mind starts in with the ideas: “Would this scene before me make a compelling image?” ” “Is this interesting to look at or not so much?”

Anyways, dad went home that day from the rehab hospital and was home for a few weeks before he ended up in yet another emergency department, and was then admitted to hospital again, and is now in “transitional care”. A bit of a holding zone while he builds his strength again and we work on a more sustainable plan.

Meanwhile, on a weekend getaway to a friend’s cottage, I pulled out the birdsong app, and was brought back into the joy of birds… Hello!!!

So many different birds outside of the city!!!

Yes, plenty of robins and jays, but then there was an Eastern Phoebe! A Northern Flicker! And when I thought I was hearing the Northern Flicker again, no, no, turns out that was a Yellow-Bottomed Warbler!!! Such a world of variety.

And so many elaborate swirling marks when their calls are expressed as waveforms –

Well, I soon realized that the birdsong app, as fun and charming as it is, is also a way of being in that very analytical part of the brain, of not relaxing back into a more experiential way of being in the moment.

And I have to say, I do find water – and the glittering play of light on water – a kind of short cut to clearing the mind and simply being. Being in the present moment.

Nothing gold can stay.