Musing on Muses: International Poetry Day

International Poetry Day! 

Means more to me than International Women’s Day, maybe even more than Mother’s Day…dunno…jury’s still out on that one. 

 

Let’s begin with a poem with one of my favorite lines about writing poetry and living in poems, found in the poem But, by Gwendolyn MacEwan in her collection Afterworlds.

But

Out there in the large dark and in the long light is the breathless

Poem,

As ruthless and beautiful and amoral as the world is,

As nature is.

In the end there’s just me and the bloody Poem and the murderous

Tongues of the trees,

Their glossy green syllables licking my mind (the green

work of the wind).

Out there in the night between two trees is the Poem saying:

Do not hate me

Because I peeled the veil from your eyes and tore your world

To shreds, and brought

The darkness down upon your head.  Here is a book of tongues,

Take it.  (Dark leaves invade the air.)

Beware! Now I know a language so beautiful and lethal

My mouth bleeds when I speak it.

Now I know a language so beautiful and lethal my mouth bleeds when I speak it.  

How deeply did I feel those words the first time I read them?  How perfectly did they speak for what it is to write and live in a world filled with poetry?  So perfectly.

I bring this up because one month from today, I will be one of seven poets to present our work to a lovely and adoring audience in Bellingham at a gathering called the SpeakEasy.

  The focus this time out is on our relationships to poetry.  A series of questions have been posed to each of us to help us examine our lives in poetry.  Questions like:  What does poetry mean to you?  Why does poetry exist?  First poem, favorite poem of our own and from another poet, last poem we’ve written, why do we write poetry, why do we read poetry, and why doesn’t everyone read and write poetry?  All fantastic questions, for sure.  They prompted me this morning to think about how I need to present these answers in an interesting way. 

So I brought it to my morning pages and I hashed it out there.  What emerged was an interesting discovery about my multifaceted, polyamorous relationship with my muses…yes, what was revealed to me was that I have been blessed not with just one muse, but with many.  This revelation does explain how some of my work or my writing time feels like a dissociative identity disorder episode quite like the lad in the movie Split lives with on the daily.  Each of my muses have distinct voices, ways of being and knowing, and views of the world.  Some are ancient/Ancestral, some are young and precocious, and some are middle aged and cynical.  Some are reverent about the medium, some want to blow it up, and some do not give a fuck one way or the other.  One is a lover, dictating only love poems to me or poems of intense longing and desire.  One worships at the altar of nature, inspiring the pieces in praise of flowers, spring, and the places I love most.  One is a philosopher, musing on my place in the Universe, on spirit, and connection to all things.  One, the Ancestral voice, is deep and ancient and rooted in my DNA – filling me with love from my Ancestors…all of them…the ones from here and not from here; the ones from grassland and farmland; the ones from wheat field and battlefield.  Each Muse appeared at different times in my life, each fills me differently, teaches me in ways unique to their histories, and each blesses me in their own way.  Some “feel” “male” to me, some “feel” “female,” and some do not want to identify one way or the other. 

My first lessons were in the language of praise and gratitude.  My earliest poem, that I remember writing myself, was one for a Mother’s Day contest.  Interesting how prominently my mother plays in the firsts in my poetry life:  my first poem and my first published chap book were both for my mother.  In the case of that early poem, it was in praise of a woman who loved me, someone who was the best because I love her, and (among other things) was only interested in hand-made gifts not jewels or fur (not that those were things we could afford then anyway).  It was endearing.  I was 9 or 10, I think. 

From there, the Nature lover shows up just in time for the move, or maybe because of the move to the country.  Dad bought a farm on 40+ acres of hay land and boreal forest, beaver ponds and wild strawberry patches just outside of Edmonton.  The walks into the forest to find the beaver dams, the trek across “the back 40” to my best friend’s house in summer heat or winter blizzard, or perching on fence post piles, during the coldest February nights to watch the Northern Lights dance like Mata Hari, all encouraged this muse to teach me the love of the land.  Wandering those trails, working a garden, even at slaughter time, I was awakened to my connection to the land and to myself through her eyes…the eyes of the Great Mother.  She taught me a great deal about life and death and the changing seasons.  Maybe that is why I nearly wept when I read Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s words (from her book Braiding Sweetgrass) The land remembers you, even when you are lost. 

Feel that:  The land remembers you, even when you are lost. 

Anyone connected to anywhere will feel the pull of those words in the deepest parts of their soul.  My Nature muse, my land muse, taught me that when I was at the age when I needed most to learn that:  early adolescents…12 or 13.  I needed that land to teach me about impermanence and the fragility, dignity, and transience of life – how living energy becomes living energy once more through other species or in other forms.  My poetry from that time reveals my young heart seeing all of this through the animals I tended to and the gardens I worked, the haying I offered myself up to with my male family, and the skies filled with the language of all sorts of living things.

Not particularly sophisticated, but earnest in its desire to understand and its nod to nature, this piece illustrates the Nature muse’s pull on my creative soul:

Untitled

Our past flies behind us as our future does,

As fast as silvery snow geese with the moon on their wings.

We know not why we go, but only where.

Just as the geese; they follow only the path they know they must.

Not knowing why they must follow their migratory path that leads deeper into their destiny.

Lead only by instinct, these wonderful creatures watch their past fly by,

Just as the clouds they pass do.

We humans are similar,

We can see only as far ahead as our next cloud,

But cannot recapture the beauty of the cloud that we have just passed.

The geese have their leaders, just as people do.

If we were to fly into a storm,

Our leaders would be taking us.

The geese have no choice, but to follow.

People, on the other hand, have the freedom to back out of such situations.

The sad thing is that most humans do not choose to be the leader of their own destiny.

Instead they follow their leader, this is when everyone ends up in the slaughter house.

So be only like a snow goose when finding your destiny.

Follow the instinct you were given, and only your instinct.

For leaders will let you down, or sacrifice you to save their own necks.

But follow yourself and you will probably never regret what you have decided.

May 21/82

Clearly, I was thinking about some shit that only animals could teach me.  I watched those geese come in and go out on the change from Spring to Summer and from Fall to Winter…large flocks would stop by our ponds in the back bush for a rest on the way to their Summer and Winter homes.  It was a gift, to be sure, to be loved so deeply as to learn from these beautiful creatures in this beautiful place. 

The love/longing/desire muse has been teaching me about wooing and praise for many, many years.  While I learned from those murmurs in my head, I also found others who languished in the sweet suffering of longing like I did.  Leonard Cohen, Neruda, Baudelaire, Whitman, Shakespeare, MacEwan, and so many others taught me that this itch in my skin, this envelopment in electricity…the kiss of lightning…was ok.  The crush of unrequited love, the Jupiter-like pull of attraction…even if the target of desire was someone else’s love…all were fuel for passion’s fire and open season on the page.  All was ok on the page.  My muse never judged me.

My muse never judged me/judges me.  This is an extremely important concept to note.  Our muses NEVER judge us, so, if we are to have the most healthy, fertile relationship with them, we must NEVER lie to our muses. 

Ginsberg speaks of this in a Paris Review interview and, when I stumbled upon it in June of this past year, it opened my writing up to a whole new place. I was afraid to write about spaces in my heart and so I was censoring myself in my pages and in my poetry.  I learned this from an ex who decided to read my personal writing in my pages…without permission.  This betrayal made me afraid to write from my “realest” self.  Ginsberg’s words were a wake up call to me:  what happens if you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?...when you approach the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with yourself or your friends.  He tells us that great writing comes from:  It’s the ability to commit to writing, to write the same way you…are!

These words are vital!  If you want to unearth the deepest parts of yourself and offer them up to any art form of your choice, you have to be completely honest with your Muses.  That gets ugly and messy from time to time but, necessary if you want to create something honest and truly representative of your experience in the moment. 

I used to torture myself over the fact that I wrote from a place of immediacy, of the “right now” and really didn’t pour too long over the work.  I edit when I type out the pieces but, really, don’t over-work pieces, believing that they are born in the form the Muses intended to deliver them.  I read about poets like Sassoon and Cohen who would work poems for years sometimes before publishing them and I felt that somehow that made me a lesser poet.  Ginsberg said:

I wasn’t really working with a classical unit, I was working with my own neural impulses and writing impulses. See, the difference is between someone sitting down to write a poem in a definite preconceived metrical pattern and filling in that pattern, and someone working with his physiological movements and arriving at a pattern, and perhaps even arriving at a pattern that might even have a name, or might even have a classical usage, but arriving at it organically rather than synthetically. Nobody’s got any objection to even iambic pentameter if it comes from a source deeper than the mind,that is to say if it comes from the breathing and the belly and the lungs. (Paris Review, Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry No. 8)

These words comforted me.  I write from the lungs and the belly in the moment the words begin to appear in my head…the whispers begin in my head.  Sometimes great poets pour over their work for years and, sometimes, they write them, fully blown, from their bellies in the moment.

*Phew*

So it’s all good if I am true to my Muses.

Those ancient voices insist on my honesty, too.  They ask me to show up and to witness to the tentative steps we take when we speak from an ancient place – a place that is usually not given place in a modern world.  I argue that those ancient voices are needed now more than ever – especially in places like school.  Children need to be honoured as learning spirits and we, in turn, must teach ourselves to hear their voices and the voices of those Nature muses. 

All of this was a long way round to honour the day, to honour the day and to hash out what poetry means to me.  I am not even sure I answered the question clearly.

Perhaps that is the whole point: there is no clear answer.  Poetry is as slippery and elusive as it is visceral and rooted.  It is both together and sometimes, often times, all at the same time.  How could it be otherwise?

I give my deepest thanks to my Muses – all of them…the ones I know and the ones I have yet to know.  My world would be dull and lifeless without them. I will keep showing up every morning to put pen to paper and wait to see which whisper tickles my ear…like this one today:

It is a beautiful day!

One to find poems hanging from tree branches

or in the thrusting shoots of tulips, daffodils and hyacinth –

the flowers I always want to capitalise because I hear the name first

and smell the flower after.

It is a day to find poems

and smell them in the warming winds,

feel them in bird calls

and hear the warmth of ripening sun rays reaching,

with great speed,

toward summer haze

and melting days.

It is a day to sneak up on poems in thickets

or on stream

where water dances over stones,

moaning promises of slippery metaphors later,

if you can manage to pull your glace away

from the undulation of the water.

Get outside today!

Leave the ipod at home,

take the pad and pen and call to them with your best supplicant's foot fall,

seduce those poems out of partially opened blossoms

and fully flowing sap.

Grab the poetry net,

and let’s go!

R.L.Elke  March 21/18

May your world be filled with poetry, whether you write it, read it or not.  Walk in the world and pluck them from the trees.  Grab your poetry net and let’s go!

More Medicine than I could have ever imagined.

In August of 2017 my life changed.  One of those life changes you feel on impact.  You step into the space, take a breath, close your eyes and know in every fibre of your being that this moment is the beginning of the end and the beginning of the beginning all at once.

On August 18, 2017 I stepped onto the sacred ground of the longhouse on the unceded territory of the Squamish people and my life changed. On impact.  It was the same day as the total eclipse of the sun.  I sat in the sacred smoke of the fire, weaving the scent into my curls, feeling the presence of thousands of people amongst the twenty-some women there.  It was the beginning and the end and the beginning of the beginning for me. 

I began my Masters Degree on August 18, 2017, exactly 3 months after my 50^th birthday.  The beginning of the end and the beginning of the beginning.  I placed my sandaled foot upon the sacred path I had been praying for for years.  I was seated across from a fire and a man I had dreamed about a decade before.  This was the place.  These were the people.  This was the first step upon the medicine walk to myself, my ancestors, my grandchildren. 

Many opportunities for Masters Degrees had appeared to me, before me, but none of them felt true to me: not leadership with its destination in administration, not psychology with its call to private practice as a therapist, not SPED specialties or any other traditional academic programs.  None felt like me. None felt right. None presented themselves in a way that suggested I was meant to be there.

Until May 2017…15 days before my 50^th birthday. I invited myself, last minute…into the last spot in the Inquiry trip to Harrison.  There Shawn Bullock tuned me to the calling and I looked to the Grad Diploma department where the Aboriginal Education and Reconciliation diploma reached out to me.  I felt immediately pulled to it because my Inquiry question from the May meeting I crashed just so happened to be How do I reconcile myself to the fact that I work in a system that was created to eradicate my people?  I prayed for answers, for direction, with all of my whole being.  I just wanted to be where I was needed.  And by the middle of June I was accepted to the program. By August I was in longhouse.  By November I was sharing my path to my classmates and my new family. 

From May until this moment, I have received teachings and continuous confirmation that I am exactly where I need to be…that my ancestors have taken me by the hand and guided me here…that I would not have been ready for this until now.  All is as it should be.

And I am so grateful.  Words cannot hold the gratitude I walk in daily for all of this.  I am truly, deeply blessed.

I am constantly called to the old St. Mary’s site…we call it Heritage Park now…to walk and pray and meditate.  After the snow and ice storm in late December, I have been grieving the loss of the trees, battered and broken by the devastating storm. 

Last week I walked to the girl’s dorm site and nearly wept at the piles of broken limbs of my dear trees, gathered up and sawed off without a thought to them at all.  I was feeling the profound metaphor reaching into me: all of this brokenness here where so many had been broken.  So much tidying done to clean up other messes of this place.  The line “did they pray for them when they cut you down?” kept ringing through my head as I approached the site, feeling wracked with pain at seeing the birch tree sawed off without care.

I wrote this poem as I stood among the shattered branches, leaving prayers afterward for the trees and the children:

All of the brokenness has been tidied up…

gathered into neat piles,

bundles,

stacks of shattered pieces.

Jagged edges made clean with blade and power,

lopping off limbs

sawing off bumps

all to make things smooth

clean

safe.

I wonder…

did they pray for them while they did this?

The trees here holding the secrets of this place…

did they pray for them when they cut them down?

R. L. Elke Feb 4/18

I left prayers and sage in the place after I wrote the poem and before I walked toward my car and home.  When I returned on Friday to gather materials for a project, my son called to me to “come see this.”  I walked over to him where he showed me an angel ornament laying on the concrete slab, dirty but undamaged. 

Clearly someone had left it as a votive for the same reasons I left poems and sage…prayers for those who lived here once…the living and the dead.  For me, I saw it as a recognition that my poem and prayers from the previous week had been received and appreciated.  I thought about making it part of my project…as proof that my reaching out had warranted a reaching back but I knew it wasn’t for me.  Dante and I found a safe place to house her and went about our business.

Yesterday I sat upon the concrete slab once forming the front entry step to the girl’s dormitory at the St. Mary’s site now known as Heritage Park in Mission, and I listened to the whispers of those around me.  They told me to share this.  So I honour those whispers…the living and the dead…to bring you this post.

I will, in all likelihood, share more of my progress on my journey through this learning, through these teachings, as I go back to go forward – learning who I am, who my people are, and who I am becoming.  It is my deepest prayer that the teachings revealing themselves to me may also be teachings for you. 

I share these teachings with the deepest love, honour, and respect for all.  Walk in love and healing to your medicine.  All My Relations.

For you from yesterday’s whispers in the park:

This weak February sunlight still feels like July – after what felt like months of rain and cloud and grey – here is the sun, glorious and heavy with the promise that all will be well..that anything is possible if we believe it to be so. 

I returned to the Girl’s dormitory site – the fourth time or fifth time in the past month…third time this week…

the angel still here in her hiding spot, tucked in the root of the giant poplar tree that has taken over the corner of the front entry slab; destroying it from underneath with its roots…crevasses widening yearly until, eventually, it, too will crumble to pieces like the buildings have over the past 134 years.

I return to this spot over and over and over – an archeologist returning to the same place, praying for a find, knowing in her heart of hearts this place is fertile with answers, if she only knew where to dig first. Two decades of connection to this place – this site of conscious …conscience…truth in the misnaming, actually.  Two decades of connection to this same place:

my first Shakespeare directed here, Kerry (my dear friend and mentor) lives here, my soul quietens here.  These trees, this grass – planted by me in some parts – stamped down to powwow drums in the rain as I felt my soul cleansed, emerging from the dust and desperation of long endured artistic barrenness.

I come here to listen and to witness.  The place I re-align to truth and what is real and right in my life. 

People come to the empty plaque/information holders and read the notice that the former celebration of St. Mary’s has been removed by the District of Mission “until replacements are found.”

Terrifying notions when you sit with that:  “Removal by the District of Mission for future replacement.” 

I fucking hope not!  Not for any of it!

Not for the lies

or the purpose

or the children!

NOT FOR THE CHILDREN!

I came here today, called by this place to bear witness to the brokenness that is passed by everyday without thought or honour or prayer. 

Without question or wonder or awareness.

Without outcry or disgust or rage

            that a mere few hundred feet north, in a little grassy knoll, the bones of dead children lay buried…according to those who know and are not believed. 

And it occurs to me that in the days of our nights during shows and learning of this place –

the ghosts in the ghost stories are from the school – from the little knoll a few hundred feet from this place and a few hundred more from the boy’s dorm or the barn or the gymnasium – where former information boards told of the excellent physical education the boys received – including boxing.

Oh, how they loved to box!

These broken pieces of trees litter these sites without notice of the incredible metaphor of the place.  Maybe others feel it, too, but no one stops to pray for the fallen branches

or children some say lay a few hundred feet north of here under a little, grassy knoll beside the maintenance building. 

I want to scream at them – those who wander over here and do not ask why I sit  on the front, broken step of the girl’s dorm amidst the fallen, broken branches –

I want to scream of the rape and the starvation and beatings and attempted genocide perpetuated here like a Canadian version of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen…more polite and less efficient but just as devastating. 

I want to scream at them to notice the brokenness and the ruin!  I want them to moan and keen and beat their breasts with their fists!

I want them to honour the little dead, buried, some say, in the bramble covered knoll a hundred feet or so from here!

I want to rage to the sky and the trees and the mountains until they crumble to dust!

I want to kick over every Oblate headstone and sledgehammer them – shit on all of them and throw them in a grinder until the sand they are made of blows to the four winds and their names are forgotten ad infinitum.

An information plaque in Heritage Park WITH NO MENTION OF THE REAL HISTORY OF THE PLACE AS A RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL SITE.

I have my next steps here.

These whispering dead – the mourning living have given me a plan and a purpose to count coup on these people who forget and to bring light to those who can’t see. 

My first song from my first drum will come here and I will sing for the dead and the living,

for myself and my children,

and for the future hopes of our grandchildren.

I still don’t know why I come here all of the time –

yes I do.

I have been told.

I have been commanded.

Now it is time to do.

*********************************************

I returned today with my sage and my sweet grass to re-search for my course work…to pray for the place and the people, living and dead, who haunt this place.  I learned that the real work is to re-search for the right questions.

That is my prayer.

On my walk out to my car, I was stopped on the trail by a hummingbird.

Yesterday it was a trio of eagles flying high above me.

Answers all.

Thank you, Creator, family, and Ancestors.

Message received.

All My Relations.

This One's For My Sister

So.

Hi everyone.  It has been an age since we’ve been here.  The summer and fall were super busy with enormous changes.  I will tell you about my wonderful summer another time. 

This post is for my sister. 

We had a massive fight this week – like one of those fights people rarely come back from and if they do it is years before the faces face each other and the eyes see the pain caused by the words said from pain and anger and desperation – and she told me to blog about it.  She was, of course, being sarcastic, caustic, and generally “ic”y.  We both were.

So, I decided to do just that for a number of reasons; not the least of which was to hold onto my voice after fighting my whole life to have one.  But also because I have been running from this post for a long time – probably just as long as it took me to have the balls (or lack of – depending on your perspective) to be here in the first place. 

I have tried to start a new post for months.  I have drafts of beginnings that end nowhere, go nowhere, do not adequately allow for me to explore this crazy maze I have been blindly bumping up against for about five months…some for my whole life, I guess…or at least as long as I have been a sister.

Time to jump in.  So I will:

I have been a shitty sister.

I have been a shitty sister and I have had to re-calibrate the places I have dumped my frustration and pain and discomfort with pieces of me I did not understand. 

See, in September, my mom was diagnosed with small-cell somethingorotherkind of lung cancer that had spread to her bones, her liver, and her brain by the time the doctors found out she had it at all.

Yep.  Terminal.  She was given six weeks without treatment.  She went through radiation and a couple of chemo treatments and she has been fighting in hospice since early December. 

She is a fucking gladiator.

And I am an asshole.

Yeah…you know, right?  Those of you who read my first chap book and my blog posts know about the complex, difficult relationship I have had with her.  So you will have a pretty good appreciation for the deeper complexities and the bigger mess this makes of my shit…just totally spreads it around.

I had to decide if holding on to the hurts of the past were worth more to me than making a peaceful end to all of this mess. 

I wanted to hold on.  I wanted to stay angry and cold. The distance gave me safety for what was coming…the inevitable end to something I had done a really solid job of convincing myself was already over for me. 

Yeah. It wasn’t.

It really wasn’t.

Good news, though…mom and I have had the chance to talk and air out those places we didn’t go to cuz we had no need to…and I didn’t want to go for fear of more hurt. 

It was a nice moment, actually…the two of us, sitting on the floor…talking about choices we made that maybe weren’t awesome but were necessary at the time in order for both of us to survive. 

We saw each other.  I saw parts of her I knew were there but was never allowed to see cuz she was soldiering on to just get on with “it” – whatever “it” needed to be.

It was nice.

Oh, by the way, the Reluctant Daughter stuff…that is a whole other post.

Not quite ready for that one just yet.

There’s the context.

Now back to the real story – how I am a terrible sister.

I am nearly 5 years older than my sister.  There is just the two of us…and not even like the song.  I made sure of that from the day she came home from the hospital.  She chased my invisible friend Arthur away after a few weeks and that really upset me.  Strike one.

She was referred to as a “good baby” – she slept, she ate, she pooped, and she rarely cried.  A “good baby.”  I was not like that.  I cried. And cried. And cried.  She would probably say that I still am a cry baby…especially these days…she is pretty angry with me.

I dunno.  Maybe I just never got over having my parents to myself and being bitchy about sharing the important people in my life but she really annoyed me from the very beginning and as we grew up, the annoyance grew.  She would reach out to me and I would walk away until my mother made me walk back and make some kind of contact with her over and over until we were pre-teens and teens and the refrain: “she looks up to you and just wants to be like you” echoed through my skull until I wanted to bash it against any hard surface that would let me leak it out.

I wanted her to be her own person.  I was not worthy of such hero worship.  I was domineering and pushy and shut her down.  I did not want her to be like me.  I was shit. I was broken.  I was dirty, damaged, and destructive.  I wanted her to be light and strong and beautiful…like she was born to be.

I pushed her away our whole lives.  Even when we were all we had because we moved so much, I would push her away into newness and unfamiliar faces.  I would tell her to make her own friends when she would want to hang out with me when we were new to a school.  I pushed her away so often and so severely, I am certain that is why she had massive school anxiety – especially when we were new kids…every time we were new kids.

I am a terrible sister.

I needed to make sure that I could stand alone because I knew, for certain, that I was poison and anyone who got too close to me was in danger of catching what I had…whatever I thought I had…I didn’t want her to get it.

            Especially when it came to the abuse.

I had to keep her safe.  He, the “he” who raped me when I was 8 and 11 came after her…threatened to come after her the second time…when I was 11 and I told him I would kill him if he touched her. 

I would have.  I would have when she was a baby and the first abuser hung over her crib after he had molested me.  I would have after that rapist said he wanted to get her, too.  I would have stabbed him into hamburger if he touched her.  I would have gone to jail in high school for murder for all of the senior boys who told me, in great detail, what they wanted to do to my “hot little sister.”

DON’T FUCKING TOUCH MY LITTLE SISTER!

All of that sounds so heroic but it turned me into a coward.  I pushed her farther and harder away from me so that if anything happened on my watch I couldn’t feel responsible.  I wouldn’t have to feel guilty because I didn’t care.  She was a project to me. Not a person and the harder she tried to get in, the higher I built the walls until no one could get in.

It really isn’t much better today.  I still don’t let her in.  I still push her away – even though she needs me now…we need each other now.  I am still the disappointment to her, and myself (regarding her), that I have always been.  Only now it is complicated with death and shit said that cannot be unsaid.

I have really clear remembrances of dark nights in new houses.  I had a double bed because I was older.  She had a little, single bed.  She would crawl into bed with me because she was scared.  We would “tickle arms” (where you run your fingers over the soft skin on the other side of the elbow) until she fell back to sleep. 

We were all we had and soon we will be all we have again.

I am not sure if we will ever be friends.  I don’t know if that is even necessary.  I do know, though, that I have been a shitty sister.

I have been a shitty sister and I am so sorry I did not know how to be better.  I am so sorry that I am afraid to be better,  to be different, to be what she needs me to be.

I am just sorry.

And I love her.  A lot.

So I thought I would put that out there.

Cuz she told me to.

Haunt them, haunt them, haunt them...

Teacher, when you leave, who will see us?

My lovely Anishinabe professor, Vicky, told us a story of when she was leaving a position some years ago.  She worked with children who were deemed challenging.  She taught them to dance to her pipes and she let them reveal their beauty in movement.  She tapped into their spirit.

She was sharing a teaching from our people about what children really want – what we all want…to be seen…to be experienced as spirit…to be seen in our entirety…in all of our sacredness. 

One of my other teachers, Gabriel George (grandson of Chief Dan George), shared a teaching with us too:  we are all born with 3 things:  character, a gift and a struggle. 

We cannot change our character.  We are born with it.  It is ours.  It is there as a teaching about humility and acceptance.  I can’t change your character; you can’t change my character – we can only learn to accept it.

We are all born with a gift.  It is our main purpose to share our gift with our community and our family and the world.  It is our link from the ancestors – our gift from all we have become with them and because of them. 

We are all born with a struggle.  Our struggle is what we have left to do…it is another link to our ancestors – the lessons left over.  Our struggle is our honour.  It makes us more beautiful in the eyes of the Great Spirit because our desire to live with a good heart and mind puts us in alignment with the best we are…with our spirit.

Our job, as teachers, as adults, is to see the spirit in the child and to make it strong – to help them make it strong…to figure it out…so they bring their gifts to our families and communities.  To let children feel that we see them...we "get" them and who they are is a profoundly necessary piece of our community, our family.  

Our job is to find our own spirit, to honour it, and to let it make the world better for having been in it.

We love Gord Downie because he saw us.  He saw us – in our gifts and our struggles as Canadians and he used his gifts to make us better…to show us our beauty. 

To show us where we hurt each other.

Secret Path was the last thing he did  - his parting gift…a loving honouring of a little boy who only wanted to be seen.

Gord saw him.  And now Chanie sees Gord, too.

Bless you, Gord Downie.  Bless you and thank you, from the bottom of this broken poets broken heart for sharing your gifts.  From one Starchild to another, thank you,

thank you

thank you.

Teacher, when you leave, who will see us?