Palimpsest

And I would compare myself to a palimpsest; I shared the thrill of the scholar who beneath more recent script discovers, on the same paper, an infinitely more precious ancient text. What was it, this occult text? In order to read it, would I not have to erase, first, the more recent ones?

~André Gide, The Immoralist

Do Not Cut Our Shrubs

Last year our elderly neighbours decided that we weren't trimming the flora on our side of the fence as savagely as they would like, and so somebody (I believe one or more of their adult children) got up on a stepladder and cut off as much as they could reach over the fence. They cut off the lilacs before they could bloom. They chopped the new and tender growth from a baby's breath bush before it could release its cascades of delicate white flowers.

I was really angry about it.

Later in the season, when my rose of sharon bushes were ripe with dozens upon dozens of flower buds, they did the same thing - chopped off each and every one before they could bloom.

I won't front. I cried when I saw the damage they had done. I was really looking forward to the bunches of purple flowers that I knew would bloom. And then all that potential was gone.

I am not in favour of neighbour wars, especially against the elderly, but this was too much. So this year, before the new growth of the shrubs could inspire my neighbours or their grown kids to whip out the clipping shears and hack saws, I decided to do an intervention.

"DO NOT CUT OUR SHRUBS: Some of them are dying because of what you did last year."

This was actually the second sign I posted. The first read, "DO NOT CUT OUR SHRUBS: You do not have our permission to reach over our fenceline."

Why a sign? So many reasons.

These people have a history of "misunderstanding" anything they do not want to hear. English is a second language for the elderly couple, but it seems to me that they totally get any communication that serves them or is neutral. I did ask very nicely last year that they put away their instruments of torture for the season, sometime between savage clipping number one and savage clipping number two. I pointed out that I would like to do any trimming myself. That request was totally ignored.

I am also fully aware of how passive aggressive and irritating signs like this can be. At the church hall where our tai chi group works out, the pastor communicates with people who rent the hall by using signs like this. "CHILDREN ARE NOT TO PLAY ON THE PIANOS" one of them reads, alongside some standard "LEAVE THE HALL LIKE YOU FOUND IT," and "DO NOT BLOCK THIS DOOR" signs. When a choir that rents the hall took to sitting on a brand new foldout table, a sign went up that said, "DO NOT SIT ON THIS TABLE! YOU ARE BREAKING IT!"

Although no one in our tai chi group had ever sat on the table, we were all upset and irritated by the sign. It's like getting yelled at by someone who can't hear you.

And then there was the handy public humiliation factor. Both of the signs I put up were clearly readable from the sidewalk that runs past my neighbours' house. Although I didn't put their names on the sign, well, anyone who shares a street with this lovely couple knows exactly how hostile they are to plant life.

I could have written a nice note and put it in their mailbox, sure. But I had a feeling that any such note would have gone unnoticed. It's too easy to claim "Oh, we didn't get that."

I wanted there to be clarity.

Sign number one went up two days ago. They took it down. We share a wall between our two attached houses - yelling was clearly audible through the wall.

I put up another sign.

More yelling.

Today, the couple's daughter showed up on my doorstep. While I am not a fan of confrontation, I am not opposed to standing my ground if necessary. She came into the conversation yelling about my lack of neighbourly attitude. She attacked my apparent lack of employment (hey, I'm employed - just grossly underpaid) and my failure to cut my front lawn "on time" (I never get to it, since they are lawnmower happy and seem to take pride in cutting my lawn for me, an aggression no doubt related to judgement about my apparent lack of employment). She cited the fact that we rent this house as evidence that somehow it's okay for them to violate the property line. She finished off by claiming that I was harrassing her parents.

Score. I told her that I would stop putting up signs when I had a guarantee from her that no one would touch my shrubs.

Amidst a large volley of accusations, she told me that now that "her mother" knows not to cut the shrubs, it won't happen again.

I am holding them to that.

Otherwise, the signs will go back up. I know now that they really don't like them.

Some notes on this incident:

It's been a while since I've had a fight with an almost complete stranger. It's weird how deeply the adrenaline penetrates into your whole system.

It's interesting to interact with people who use anger as a default response to any situation. I think from a strategic perspective that getting them angry was maybe the only way to get them to notice what I was trying to say. Polite requests certainly had no impact at all.

When people perceive that blame might fall on their shoulders, they will lie and scapegoat anyone they can. When it came down to it, the daughter of this couple blamed her mother - who is eighty and all of four feet tall - for cutting the shrubs. Somehow I don't think she got up on a ladder and used a hacksaw to cut through all four inches of living lilac trunk, but you know, whatever.

Lawn/yard/plant nazis are crazy in many different ways. This is the same family that actively tried to kill an old growth maple on their property. Fortunately they didn't succeed.

What has been cut can grow back.

When I think I'm king, I just begin

Oh, Kate Bush. You barely make sense and yet you speak to me.



I've been listening to The Dreaming again. It's really wonderful. In the aftermath of February, which frankly sucked, I'm feeling the need for a serious infusion of eccentricity.

I always wonder how Kate Bush managed to break through. She's so amazingly weird, and part of that weirdness is the way her lyrics seem to go straight into my brainpan and massage my creative centre. How could this gorgeous genius be allowed to circulate her strangeness to the general public? Don't the authorities know this kind of thing can result in mass happiness and outbreaks of wild creativity?

Things get even more nuts when you look at her videos. She's a highly disciplined dancer, and everything she's got ends up getting channeled into this wild imagery that's both unexpected and iconic. Dunce caps and minotaurs, everybody!

Something Smart

I once knew a guy who was wise in many ways. He said something incredibly brilliant to me during one of many long and fraught philosophical discussions.

"Your oldest friends are not the best representation of who you are. They are a product of who you were when you met them. You've changed, you're a different person now. You can't possibly be the same as you were so many years ago when you thought that forming those attachments was a good idea. Your most recent friends, they're the ones who represent who you are now."

I'm paraphrasing, of course. It was probably much more gorgeously phrased at the time.

True? Maybe not. Fascinating? Absolutely.

(Going straight from this post and into my novel? Probably!)

Invisible Runner

Go and try Invisible Runner by David Ferriz. An aesthetically gorgeous game with a here-and-gone-again protagonist.

Winter

Unlike practically everywhere else in North America, winter has been gentle and kind to Southern Ontario. We've seen almost no snow; there have been a few bitter days but not too many in a row; we've had our fair share of sun.

Sometime just before Christmas, I was out in the woods with the dog. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground. We had just passed the winter solstice. There was sun sparkling on the snow. The sky was blue. I thought about how great it would be to take some photos.

Then the snow melted and the woods were a pleasant but boring brown colour for a long time.

Finally this week we got a few inches of the white stuff. We are just past midwinter / Imbolc / Candlemas / Groundhog day (yes, these holidays all occur on the same day!). In other words, we're on the downhill slope toward spring. So before there's a giant thaw and we get into some serious growing and sprouting, I bring you my midwinter photo essay (2010 edition), starring a bunch of trees and Dizzy the Boston terrier.

These were taken between 2:30pm and 4pm. I just love how even though it's relatively early in the afternoon, the sun makes long shadows all over the place.



Any Boston terrier will tell you that a walk just isn't meaningful without a really big stick to chew on.



Of course you must practice proper chewing technique at all times.



Make sure you spit out any wood chips as you go. You don't want to know what happens if you swallow them.



Proper chewing technique = pure bliss.



These trees are perched on the edge of a deep gorge. A waterfall created it over time. It's not much to look at right now because it's covered in snow, but the trees do look lovely against the blue sky.



I just love the way the sun is backlighting this tree and shrubs so that it looks like the tree is radiating light.



Lots of people use these woods all year round, so the path is well stamped for us.



This used to be an apple orchard. The trees have grown pretty wild, but they still produce apples. Hawthornes have grown in amongst the apples.



You have to search around a bit but there is the occasional touch of green in the woods. This moss is growing on a hawthorne tree.



You can tell by the spikes!



If you take too many pictures, Dizzy gets a little bit impatient.



Now we're out of the old apple orchard and heading into the wild forest.



There are a lot of huge old oak trees growing up on this hill. They always seem to me to be having a conference.



My favourite oak.



If you stand at the base and look up, you can see how imposing this tree is.



Some kind of large gall or growth has formed partway up this tree's trunk. It's almost perfectly spherical. I didn't notice it until after the leaves fell, so I'm not sure if the tree is still living.



There's a secret stream bed under all this snow. In a couple of months, water will be rushing through here.



At this point in the walk, the wind was blowing through the upper branches of the trees and making some pretty loud squeaking and squealing sounds. Dizzy sensed a disturbance in the force.



More noises.



What is it?



There are a few different types of woodpeckers in these woods. I once even saw a pileated woodpecker. Compared to the sparrows and chickadees that I usually see, it was huge! It seemed like a pterodactyl. Pileateds leave this kind of large oval hole when they drill into trees looking for food.



When you leave the woods, it's important to take a souvenir with you!



In the field, I found these tiny footprints. Each print was about the size of my thumbnail. Mouse? Rat? Some other hopping rodent with a skinny tail?



His future's so bright, he ought to wear shades.



Next we entered the bird garden. An ornithologist who I ran into on a walk told me that birds created this scrubby brush area by defecating here and leaving seeds behind. Almost all of the bushes that grow here bear some kind of fruit. This area has an amazing concentration of this kind of plant, and is next to an open field where there is very little of this kind of growth. I guess the birds knew what they were doing! You can find all kinds of different birds in here all winter long.



The path home awaits!



Very, very patiently.



Sort of patiently.



The sumac is beginning to look a little worn around the edges. I think the birds have been eating the sumac berries because I'm finding them scattered on the ground around the bushes. My friend Wendy tells me that sumac is edible for humans, too. You can nibble on it while you're on the trail if you rub off the tiny hairs that grow on it. You can also crush it, soak it in water, strain out the berries, and enjoy a drink that tastes a little like pink lemonade.



The white spots in this picture are gulls. Although there was no breeze to speak of close to the ground, there was clearly a lot of wind activity high up in the sky, because this large group of gulls were playing around in the sky. As I watched they flew higher and higher, appearing only as tiny dots like the ones you see here. They seemed to be swirled around by the wind, changing their positions and configurations with amazing speed.



Homeward bound.



Don't forget your stick!



Happy second half of winter, everyone!

Time Part 2

One of the trickiest things about time is its weird subjective flexibility. We’ve all had the experience of concentrating on something we enjoy, and looking up at the clock to find that it’s much later than we could have guessed. Good conversation can be like that. Good writing can be like that, too.

(And there's the opposite scenario, the experience of doing something you hate and watching the time drag.)

Because I meditate regularly, I am familiar with how easy it is to sink so deeply into an altered state of consciousness that time has almost no meaning at all. It’s always surprising to look at the clock after meditation. Sometimes I’ll feel like hours have passed, and it’s only twenty minutes since I first sat down. Sometimes I’ll feel like I was only down in a meditative state for a few brief minutes, and I’ll find that it’s been forty-five minutes or an hour.

So: time is a slippery bastard. Ultimately, our idea that time is something to be measured in steady, regular increments is one of our most delusional notions.

I guess one of the questions that got me into trouble* when I was at a career crossroads was getting into the habit of asking not whether I’d gotten good value for my time, whether I’d been “productive” or “used my time well”, but whether I could look back at the end of the day and feel satisfied. Some days, I noticed, just felt right.

How much time does it take to achieve this sense of satisfaction? If you have to ask, I’d like to propose that you’re thinking about satisfaction in an entirely wrong fashion.

For me, whether a day is good or bad depends entirely on how I feel. And how I feel is in turn dependent on a number of ephemeral and non-ephemeral things: did I write something that made me excited about writing? Did I drink the right amount of coffee? Did I get to play with the dog and cat? Did I do something to make me think more deeply about my art? Did I get outside and clear my head at some point? Did I manage to fit a really good stretch into my day? Did I learn something new? Did I imagine something outrageous?

When asked years ago, I defined a good life as getting into a state of flow and staying in it as much as possible. A concept that was co-opted by western psychology in the early 1990s, flow could be characterized as one of the core methodologies and goals of eastern meditation practices. When you’re in flow, you’re riding on the cusp between focus and relaxation. You’re totally engaged in what you’re doing, and everything else falls away. The question is not how much time you have, but how fully engrossed you are in the task at hand. This applies to doing dishes as much as it does to putting words on the page. In flow, there’s an escape from the pressures of time. In flow, there is access to the essence of joy.



*made me decide to stop doing almost everything else and make a major publication effort