Oh, Is That You?!

Out of context, out of mind is not that
the formula? The familiar becomes unfamiliar
and the mind a vacuum confronted with a
face and a familiar voice whose identity
eludes momentarily as when an absolute
stranger approaches and speaks in the
most impertinent manner with an intimacy
that feels downright insulting. As you did
my friend and I looked up at you in a shock
of being accosted in a public space by
someone conspicuously too close for
comfort, confiding in me with a sense of
unrequited assurance while my confused
mind scrambled to make sense of the
nonsensical. That voice, that smile, the
blanched face with features that were so
similar to someone I know, only who might
that someone be? After all, though we've
known one another for years and often
share long, involved conversations making
us conversant with one another's values and
personal concerns it has only been in a
very particular setting, nowhere else. And 
here you are, popping up sans headgear
with a mop of white curly hair atop
familiar features placed on a body too tall
it seems, the very picture of a staid and
elderly gentleman considerably older than
the man whose resemblance fails to surface
until it does. How, I wonder, did he in
turn recognize me in this out of context
out of mind conversion to living reality?

Charade

Blueprinted by nature for a binary
existence we every one of us
with rare exceptions yearn to find
one we will recognize as 
indispensable to our happiness
in life, a soul mate, a shining star
in the firmament of human pleasure
someone who will cherish us and
companion us always and forever
an aspirational search motivating
young and old, male and female
yet if each is unprepared to recognize
in the other a spirit and mind unlike
their own yet compatible with no
requirement to submit to total
immersion rejection is imminent
in a social culture where gratification
must be instant and unqualified
the receiver entitled, the giver not.
Entitlement has an unfortunate habit
of spurning accommodation while
disappointment engenders soul
destroying resentment moving
steadily toward rejection, an 
opportune time for loneliness to
seal the breach of psychic abandon.
Shallow love meant for self not
another heralds hollow desolation.

The Storm Surge

The shrill call of a pileated woodpecker
penetrates the thicket of trees
crowding the forest, as it unerringly
selects a prospect and sturdy chips fly 
when its primitive head and powerful 
beak lay bare the presence of beetle
larvae under the bark of a dying tree.
The battlefield of the sky above
the forest canopy menaces with the
onset of storm clouds shuttering
the brilliant rays of the sun that had
baked treetops just moments earlier
opposed by that golden orb's resistance
frustrated by powerful winds allaying
themselves with aggressively bruised 
clouds bursting with moisture determined 
to once again declare the close of day
its own. It is not dusk that darkens
the forest interior but the swift gloom
overtaking the landscape preparing
for the onslaught that has incrementally
transformed the forest floor from its
tinder-drought stage of depletion where
bracken has succumbed surrendering
to the antidote of parched cracked
earth become a vast acreage of wetland.

The Forest Sighs

The desperate earth sucked dry
of moisture through unrelenting
weeks of torrid heat under a
flaming sun where even the wind
carries its burden of overheated
air and no relief can be found
until nature relents and sends
down weeks of copious rain
interspersed with raging
electrical thunderstorms
racing through the atmosphere
to slake the desperate thirst of
the forest where the forest floor
cracked and hardened 
closed down its green vegetation
now hosts pools of water
unable to penetrate the already
drenched soil where tree roots
begin to drown in the excess
that was once reversed in a
shrivelling storm of heat. Now
the conflict in the heavens above
carries on as extremes of heat
and those of excessive rain 
offer the landscape below 
prostratting waves of heat 
contrasted with an unstoppable
deluge, the skies clear-blue one
moment, charcoal-streaked the
very next, and the forest sighs. 



 

Garden Ease

Ah. the garden, our restful haven bringing
ease of soul to weary minds, a place of
solitude and longing. It is a benediction
of nature's devising, a rescue, an escape
from the mind's toil and the burdens
that life imposes. There we seek the
comfort of nature's kind embrace
the nurturing we so keenly seek in
the confidence it will be found in that
place where minuscule creatures of the
air find solace just as we do, sharing
with us the poetry of divine fragrance
the loveliness of vibrant petals inviting
bees and butterflies, hummingbirds and
beetles to its generous bosom of plenitude.
A serene place it is, restful and gracious
even yet exciting the senses with its
sensuous appeal of languorous beauty
where we turn toward our inner selves
and find there a reflection of the grace
the garden invokes, overriding and
easing the bruises of existence, inviting
us to linger until the peace we sought in
the garden's all-encompassing capacity
to pacify the beast of stress has lifted.

The Weapon of Hatred

Anger is a dangerous weapon -- one when 
taken to plausible extremes can be atrociously 
lethal. Arsenals are mere devices whose use 
by military for offense and defence, are deadly 
mechanical contrivances available to few. 
Weapons in a civil society are withheld from
access by those not trained to military action 
for the obvious purpose of ensuring that the 
availability of killing machines be kept to an 
absolute minimum in the social compact 
concern of maintaining law and order where
only those assigned as custodians of the law 
may carry and use them. Yet all the aids to 
murder and mayhem are but things, immobile
passive devices which in the absence of a 
handler motivated by all the rage and fury 
that a human mind is possessed with do no 
harm representing in their inanimate state
the very pinnacle of humankind's murderous 
potential lacking the human brain manipulating 
them in possession of hatred, to maim, slaughter.
All this our rational minds can understand.
It is beyond our comprehension however that 
a religion of peace consumes the souls of its 
faithful with the injunction to kill the infidel. 
The savagery dedicated to the mission of 
imposing terror on the world community by 
sinister and random acts of Islamofascism
leave us aghast at the hateful derangement
unleashed within the capricious human mind
anger twinned with hatred, the ultimate evil.

Revisiting Youth

Did it go in? Yes. Are you lying? Yes.
Thus the conversation between two
octogenarians, he administering
post-surgical drops after her eye
surgery in a seemingly endless
therapeutic exercise ensuring the
success of the surgery and its 
aftermath, though to her the reality
of improved eyesight remains in
question. His patience legendary
as it was in contradiction to her
lack of it when they raised their
brood in an earlier lifetime together.
Now in their dotage however they
have discovered the formula of
renewal one they cannot patent nor
would they disclose it for they barely
realize themselves that they have
both reverted to childhood, she
in her proclivity to non compliance
and he in remonstrating for her
own good in role reversals, he
the parent, she the whining child.

Existence

Buoyed and challenged by our innate
intelligence we seek endlessly to
discover the divine through our sense 
of reason curiosity and enterprise to 
discern how and why we exist. Among 
us those endowed since antiquity with 
the imaginative genius to hazard theories
later generations built upon to find
in them answers engendering an 
endless eruption of other questions 
demanding a response to enrich our 
understanding of who and what we
are and why we are as we are forever 
puzzling our place in this vast universe 
inflaming us with curiosity and 
astounding us with its ineffable 
complexity, beauty and timeless
never-ending possibilities few of which 
we unravel to become privy to in the 
vastness of nature's enterprise as she
compulsively creates and re-creates
destroys and re-designs to incisively
reflect each infinitesimally minute gear
in the great machinery of the universe
she imagines into unfathomable reality.

Divinely

How they delight me those priceless
gifts, each a treasure that fills the
jewel box of my memory. These are
jewels of great fidelity to the nature
of existence, each within its capture
of a time, a place, an occasion or a
landscape, someone loved in the
past or smiling from the present
these photographs of timeless
iterations whose value cannot be
compared to anything but the moment
in time when they occurred, held
firm in the mirror of a picture to be
fondly regarded, viewed as one
would a jewel whose value is beyond
comprehension, scintillating with
beauty, emotion, admiration and
the fascination of the magic inherent
in stopping time, holding the moment
embroidering it with entrenched
memories, these are no mere trifles
but splendid, flamboyant and
sparkling reassurances of love and
security, of self, of others, of nature.

Woof!

It's tough being a puppy, there is 
little doubt about that when a human
decides they're duty-bound to stifle 
all our natural inclinations the impulse
ingrained in our prebirth memory 
that emerge just as soon as we do 
compelling us to be natural. And 
natural is emptying our bowels and 
bladders whenever the urge overtakes
marking here and there whether it's a 
backyard or a house, all the same to us
why wouldn't it be? Upon us is placed
the unnatural burden of being our own
 agents in transforming what nature 
has endowed us with to please the 
picky nature of humans. Forbidden 
the delights of aromatic ordure; not 
to nibble nor to roll. The sporty exercise 
of digging in the garden, racing after cars? 
Forget it. We've got to be well 'socialized'
to spare those humans of embarrassment 
at antics that may seem peculiar to them 
but are simply us. No jumping on people
no licking their faces, no fun at all.
There are things our people do that
seem pretty peculiar to us, and we do
nothing to belabour that behaviour. Just
as well we're capable of sussing them
out. Does that prove which of our
species is more highly evolved?

Pardon, Please!

Excuse me, it is not my wish to be rude
but I have been appointed by
committee to apprise you of an
unfortunate slack. We do, all of us
very much appreciate your kind
thoughtfulness on our behalf
of that you can be assured, yet
there is something lacking in what we
might call consistency, though we do
very much hesitate to bring this to
your attention. There is an appointed
time that we anticipate and then
behold the time lapses and
through no considered fault of your
own, we know, we are disappointed.
So forgive me for interrupting
your breakfast, I am sure my
peering through your patio doors
surprises you somewhat but
consider it a reminder that we too
would like to enjoy our breakfast
and our accustomed offerings are
absent this morning from your porch
where we have searched in vain..

And So ...

I don't believe in mysticism
hard truth alone engages me and yet
I've told you that we were destined
for one another
that when we first met I
recognized you for you had
entered my dreams and I knew
you while you knew nothing of me.
Receiving that peculiar admission
from me you were neither
credulous nor disbelieving
simply disinterested as though
it hardly mattered. And yes
you were right then
and all these years later
you are still right. While our
destiny has been to live
our lives together
in a kind of predictability
when two people meet and
recognize in one another a
mirror image of all that matters
they are among the fortunate
and accept that privilege. So yes
you are quite correct, nothing
whatever mysterious in my
conviction of a mystical
sleeping encounter with you
but an overactive imagination
and an everlasting twinge on my
memory of the magic of
our shared life force.

In Passing

Immersed, but not of the passing scene
before me swarmed humanity in its urban
passage an urgent call to take possession
of the day, involved and eager, prepared
to meet the demands of circumstance while
responding to the minutiae consuming their
thoughts and actions while I observed from
my immobile perch as they streamed past
oblivious of my presence, the elderly limping
by, the young grouped in the conceit of youth's
enthusiasms, bicycling, skateboarding 
to close the gap between action and time
as others more given to display eschewed
the shorn garments of the carefree as they
haughtily strode along in outrageous costume
inviting paused glances, smiles and sneers
of those dodging wheelchairs and walkers.
People of visible ethnic origin, people of
colour and colourful people, deliberately
flaunting their queer credentials veering 
between genders, muscled young men in a
brevity of garment matching the generous
revelations of young women's gifts of
nature, among them dour women in chadors
dark and morose, hirsute men, young and
not, the halting gait of the obese rolling
along, stopping at ATMs, exiting vehicles
slipping into fitness gyms, karaoke bars and
welfare offices as they pursue their day's
agenda. Were I among them someone else
contemplating the visual array I wonder what
assortment of descriptors I would earn?

Defining Morbid Venom

When state and non-state entities define their
raison d'etre as the destruction of another state
and its people how else to classify it other than
terrorism-inspired annihilation with a view to
committing genocide, a previous and quite
successful effort on the world stage they decry
as insufficiently vigorous and a figment of the
imagination of the victims glorying in their
victimhood thus feeling entitled to the especial
privilege of continuing to exist on this mortal
coil? In one agonizingly extended yet brief
period in human history it took but six years
for Nazi Germany to exterminate six million
men, women, children to rid the world of Jews.
In a more modern era Muslim nations and their
Islamofascist offspring have taken a more
leisurely route of 70 years to eradicate that
stubborn tribe that continues to insist it has a
fundamental human right to live and to continue
gifting the world with its genius in the arts and
sciences while the world, indifferent as ever has
become bored with the inevitability of it all
leaving it to the threatened and the defiant to
look to its own defence, for it has no other choice.

Empire Bred

She became the toast of the literary set
an accomplished horsewoman, adventurer
explorer, missionary, humanist, medical
worker, observer of nature and the human
condition, indefatigable and forever
curious of the world beyond her ken as
she went forth to acquire experience and
knowledge rather than remain the genteel
aristocrat social convention demanded of
womenfolk which left her invalided and
miserable until she broke free of the gilded
comfort that bound her and began her
worldwide travels in an era when such
ambitions were beyond the fortitude of her
countrymen, themselves known as intrepid
explorers. A fragile figure in health and
physiognomy she ventured far and wide
leaving her future to chance, spurning  all
but the freedom to travel unaccompanied
wherever curiosity took her. Take her it did
throughout North America, Australia and
New Zealand to begin her journeys in 1850.
She rode a horse across Hawaii, clambered
up volcanoes, repeated that in Colorado.
Ventured to Japan to live among and study
the Ainu, travelled among the Bedouin in
Egypt, went on to Persia, suffered typhoid
established mission hospitals, veered off
to India and Tibet to climb the Himalaya
found hospitality in Kurdistan, saw 'David'
worshippers reputedly of the lost 12 tribes
of Israel, visited a harem to conclude her
opinion of its cruelty and vicious intrigues
crossed the great Salt Desert, was subject
to searing contempt by Muslims sneering
at her presence. Oblivious to threat and
hazard Isabella Bird carried on, a woman
in charge of her very own extraordinary life
a chronicler of humanity and writer of
great distinction yet unassumingly modest
in her testament to the verities of humanity. 

Interlopers

Barred owlet: Photo: JSR

Interlopers

We think of it fondly as our very own
little piece of Paradise. It's where our home
was built decades ago, it's where we nurse
our garden, find our respite, our purpose
in life but to enjoy our privileges and we
most certainly do. From our backyard the
soothing query of an owl often floats over
from the nearby forest at night and when
we trace pathways through the forest in
our many leisure hours then too we can
hear them. We are alerted to their presence
when a murder of crows occasionally 
create a pandemonium of circling black
and raucous condemnation, looking up to
see a great barred owl unconcernedly
seated on a bough of a venerable old pine
and nor is it only crows but cardinals too
circle an owl's presence with distraught
cries imploring it to vacate its perch. As 
for we humans the very sight of such a
regally imposing creature tilting its great
head to watch keenly as we stride past with
our two small companion dogs creates an
internal stir of admiration and caution lest
it swoop to claim one of ours, formidable 
predator that it is, on the watch for rabbits
squirrels, mice while parenting its owlets.

Love Song

Your strong, muscular arms surround
me, one hand on the small of my
back, guiding me effortlessly
about as we glide together as one 
to Blue Moon sung by the
incomparable Roy Orbison and
then to When They Begin The Beguine
and Sinatra's croon brings us back
in time and you murmur to me
how the thought of our young years
when Saturday night meant
going out to teen dances brings
into sharp focus how we were then
together enjoying the freedom to
love when songs like They Tried To
Tell Us We're Too Young
presaged our parents' reaction
when at 17 we planned to elope
but agreed to wait until age 18 to
marry and here we are, my love
age 81, me in the grasp of your
loving arms moving together in a
rhapsody of remembrance, recalling
those days and treasuring these.

Plan B

When I was a child my father
a self-educated man born at the turn of
the 20th century in Poland and an orphan
by the time he was twelve, told me
that there would come a time when
the world would be as one with no
differentiation between 'races'
when equality would prevail so there
would be no reason for conflict between
nations and peace would prevail. As it
happened he also felt that the Soviet
Union represented a template for
badly needed universal social change
toward a better world. This is what
he believed, home-spun intellectual
and philosopher. Still a child I exulted
when news came of Stalin's death.
My father died before John Lennon 
sang 'Give Peace a Chance'. Since
then neither my father's prophecy
nor Lennon's appeal have risen to
reality and I have lived much longer
than my father and John Lennon
observing humankind's inability and
unwillingness to becalm its self
destructive impulses wreaking horror
upon horror in mass atrocities to leave
the sphere upon which we depend
deep in blood and tears while searching
assiduously for extraterrestrial life.

History and Heritage

Ample remnants of both describing the
unqualified reality of what was in the ancient
past in the land of history that has left its
ineffable imprint on time and events even as
archaeological remnants pay silent witness to
their place in that distant past and those whose
names have passed into posterity. In Rome
the Arch of Titus gives grim testimony to the
destruction of the Second Temple of Solomon
chronicled by the Jewish-Roman historian
Josephus whose witness account laid bare
the agony of the Israelites who paid dearly
for their insubordination to the conquest of
the Roman Empire refusing to pay homage
to an emperor and his centurions recognizing
only devotion to their monotheistic and all
powerful god who failed to intervene in
punishment to a people deemed feeble in their
devotion yet certain that terrible punishment
would descend, not on their pious heads but
on their tormentors. Before the Romans the
Assyrians rampaged, sacked and destroyed
Solomon's first glorious temple wherein sat
the holy of holies, the sanctuary of the Ten
Commandments given Moses through the 
medium of a burning bush speaking in god's
voice: I am who I am. Ah, where lies
myth and where sits reality? It lies in the
following millennia in a tribe's death by a 
thousand scimitars, massacres, atrocities
pogroms and the final solution whereby six
million Jews were sent post-haste to their
terrible god who loved his people yet saw
no reason to extend divine mercy. Now that 
stubborn people has resurrected their ancient 
land dedicated to survival of the fittest even 
now surrounded by threat of genocide 
refusing to fade in the fullness of time for 
those who oppose their survival claim they 
never existed, nor did threats to their existence 
occur, determinedly revising history and
heritage to the bleak vacuum of oblivion.

Canajun, Eh?

When I was a child my immigrant parents
struggled to survive as best they could and
I grew up in poverty, ashamed of my parents'
accented English in my country whose
immigrant population made it what it is
a land of plenty; natural resources, great
natural beauty and opportunities to succeed.
Succeed they did and their children thrived
and became educated and were proud to be
Canadian. When I was a child other children
on the shabby urban street I lived on shouted
after me 'Christ killer!' so I asked my father
who and what and learned to love being a Jew.
When I was a pre-teen walking on a city street
travelling on a city bus, smiling strangers 
would approach to ask where I was from
where was I born never accepting Canada. 
By then I was puzzled and indignant to learn
that Jews were excluded from elite clubs and
universities. By then I also knew that six
million Europeans had been annihilated in a
vast paroxysm of Jew hatred and listened
incredulously as my parents and their friends
spoke in hushed tones of the emigration of
German Nazis to Canada. When I was just
married I worked alongside a new immigrant
and in a spirit of generosity and welcome
invited her and her husband to our home for 
dinner; an awkward moment arose when 
her husband, young like us, toasted us as 
good Jews and said what a pity it was that
good Jews died among the bad ones. When 
I was a mother of three settling into a new
house, new city, wearing my hair in a long
dark braid, a bicyclist called after me 'go
home, Paki!' Now in my 80s that ancient
scourge has been revived as immigrants and
refugees from the Middle East bring their
incendiary hatred of Jews with them along
with their Islamic tradition of imperialism
in the jihadi heritage of global conquest.

Opting Out

To whose benefit is the doubt? Well
you never know, do you? On the one hand
it is a charitable act of benevolence on
initially bringing to mind that the world
is a notoriously lonely place leaving the
unaccompanied unhappy in a never
ending search for companionship. So he
could of course be one of those who are
in fact legion and not what his overture
might claim him to be, a creep more or
less. It's happy hunting season, you know
on the Internet with the irresistible presence
of so many and varied social sites to prowl
and it takes no energy whatever, simply
following basic barbarian instinct to
strike and hope the note you hit seemed
appropriately musical to the ear of the
woman flattered by a male attestation of
immediate attraction to the deep pool
of her eyes, so forgive him, he could not
help himself, and do you mind? Flattery
often does draw the attention of the target
and then common sense and instinct prevail
identifying the creep. All of this gaming 
has a simple solution: when preening and
posting attractive photos of self, remember
to add date of birth; just settle for 1936.

Consanguinity

It should, blood relations, have the stability
of timelessness but in a society not bound
by the strictures of religious custom and
the inheritance of tribal values perhaps it
simply is a figment of imagination that
the bond between those sharing familial
blood will always be paramount in the
emotions and reactions of those involved.
I never did believe that oft-repeated truism
and perhaps that alone is the explanation
for broad gaps in how I view those to whom
I am genetically related, near and far other
than for curiosity, a proven human trait.
The distance that time and indifference
has brought between me and mine had
little impact on my sensibilities and my
broader interests in life for there was
between us very little in common and no
urge was there for familial involvement.
When we are young the world is a complex
and exciting theatre whose various plays and
productions await exploration and enjoyment.
When we are old it is memories we induce to
rise from the subconscious of our earliest
of stored treasures. In our sleep we evoke the
presence of those once intimately known
long gone, so how do we negotiate reality?