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June 21, 2002

Summer Vacating

Summer is here.
It’s finally starting to feel like it, with a little sun and heat, but it’s an uncertain Summer. A damp drought; war and languor; the confusion of a new millennium in an old season.
Time to get out of town.
So I’m going; first serious vacation I’ve had in a good while.
Going to Montana, on a DMTree chartered tour.
I hear they have mountains and valleys and deserts and prairies, and badlands and good lands, and just a lot of lands in general.
I’ve never been out west, and I’m looking forward to it. Which is not the same thing as wanting to get away from Home, but maybe that too. Habit has its uses, but it’s good to break routine from time to time. Tradition is strong enough to bridge the gaps.
And Summer is the season for vacations.

The Park is a survival strategy of the City, and maybe the big lands out west will make it pale in comparison. But there is no comparison, or rather, there is only comparison, and not competition. Seeing the Wonders of the World makes us appreciate Home all the more. And I don’t think any place anywhere has a view like this one.
But it’ll still be there when I get back.
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June 16, 2002

One in a Long Line

Yesterday I wrote of my conversation with the Goddess, but today is Father’s Day, and the masculine case cannot be ignored. The Goddess is a corrective in our culture, and if I’ve sought Her out, it may be an index of my alienation. Regardless, the spiritual dialectic of our sexual dimorphism requires of us some relation to the male God; the one that we meet first as the Father.

When I recall my late father, he is a reminder that I have less than fulfilled my own relationship to maleness. I cannot see the future, but it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever be a father, and in me his line is at an end. I cannot see the future, but I can see the past, locked in a photograph from his estate. There he is with his father; one of two grandfathers I never knew. Both died while my parents were yet young. It must be the early 1920’s, while the century was yet young, perhaps on Sugar Island, near Sault Sainte Marie, where he was born in 1919.

They stand on a dock.
All his life, my Father stood on the dock. He was a fisherman, though not a fancy one; maybe a rowboat on occasion, but mostly standing on the dock, casting towards a receding horizon. And he stood on the dock and saw his loved ones off, and for some of us, he was there to pick us up when we got back.
Now there is a horizon between us.

He gazes out into the water, but it is in the nature of a child to be distracted; it is the duty of a man to face the camera, like my grandfather, dapper in his summer whites and straw boater. I look at my father, and imagine that I can see in the child something of the man that I knew. And I look at my grandfather, and I wonder what of him there is in me.

I have loosed myself from the moorings where most of men have docked. Such power to create as I posses passes into words and images, not into flesh.
I do not grudge the choice.
Still, it seems I have unfinished business with the Father; to somehow bring Him forth, whose absence in me mirrors my own father’s death.
If I would not be an empty mirror, I must reflect His image.
For I am a man, if not a father, and that, I think, will make me a better man.

I say this as a servant of the Goddess, nor does She forget, that for every one of Her children, there is also a Father, in a line that has not failed yet.
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June 15, 2002

Conversation

Now, in this quickly passing moment; while it’s still Spring, let me tell you about a conversation that I have. Walking across the Meadow swath; cresting the slope of the Ravine; following the course of the Loch, I am not alone in thought.
The source of thought I do not know, for things come to my mind that I cannot account for; but if it would be understood, thought must be distilled as Word.
Every word is an answer, and begs another presence; no utterance but assumes an ear attuned to hear it.
The inner ear, the inner voice, converse.
Conversation goes both ways; the ear shall speak, the voice must listen.
Who speaks when we talk to ourselves?
Who speaks for me against resistance?
Who speaks to me through my resistance?

I have heard many voices, and honed my own against them.
I heard the voice of the Friend, loved and admired. Looked for the words that win approval; what would they say to what I think? Can I cause myself to think in such a way as I imagine they would wish?
Influence is a form of reply.
Peer review can be cruel, and our friends often prove as callow as we; yet some few achieve the estate of teacher.
And I have heard the voice of the Teacher, and measured all my learning by it. Tried to imagine the reply of one more knowledgeable than I.
Imagining what we do not know is a way of learning, but hard in the proving. Teachers don’t know everything, though the right words might make it seem so, leaving us to speak as a child to a parent.
And I have heard the voice of the Parent; that first voice echoes far.
More than we know, we are respondent to the words we heard in youth. We hear them still, across the years, the more so when they echo in the mouths of friends or teachers, or even those dear liars that we know, who lie by saying something true, but meaning something else.

All of these have spoken to me, and I reply as best I can.
But impetus precedes response, so who would I address, if I could choose the ear to receive my inner voice?
I must speak to my Love.
Who She is, I know no more than I know where my thoughts come from.
I know Her nonetheless.
It’s Her that I address, to plead my cause; advance my suit; at best, explain myself.
She answers in the dampness of a cold morning in May; a June that stumbles on towards Summer, leaving me wondering...
And I say, “well, yes, but wouldn’t you like to hear some more about me?”
But She knows me by my deeds, and knows the distance between my deeds and my well intentioned thoughts.

Somewhere between thoughts and deeds are words.
Or, words are a kind of deed, which may or may not be of an easy sort, compared to other actions one may take in the World. For my part, I account them beyond value. If I spend mine on Her, it’s in the faith that our conversation will teach me to please Her. That, I think, will make me a better man.
And I know she will love a better man.

A better man may recognize Her in the words of women of this world, and even some men. Knowing that they share Her voice, and learning to hear it, serves reply to my meditations, and corrects me with the force of Life as it is truly lived. And that’s really the better part of what I mean when I talk about worshipping the Goddess; a conversation of the heart, or head, or with a friend.
So if I talk to myself, or if you hear voices, it’s not to be thought strange.
Because we must have something to talk about.
And someone to talk to.
Beyond the conversation is silence: Mystery awaits your voice.
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