tulip

smells like skunk

up close and just a little further away

decorating the landscape

It was a perfect-picture park. There was a setting-sun sky to the west, and the east sky was filled with clouds, heavy grey but with with deep-blues and yellows highlighted from the sun. The sunbaked orange arbutus trees on hill tops accented this background sky. With my one boy haphazardly running and kicking up sand and the other fearlessly climbing every metal play structure, it was Hallmark defined.

Ah...but the trash. My heart bleeds when I see these human droppings. It's hard to turn off this flowing tap.

McDonalds and their fellow drive-through kinfolk indirectly serve billions of eyes as their wrappings are overly and routinely emptied from cars onto roadside, parkside, and everyside beauty. My anger is strengthened everytime these roadside tracings pollute my eyes. I have inentionally looked around for the scraps so that a strong case can be made in my mind and heart against the offense and offenders. This energy expenditure has heated up, boiled in my pulsing veins.

Yet, I'm thankful I'm beginning to find a different way.

It has helped me to remember my Dad. Wherever we were, he picked up trash when he saw it. I remember Dad taking walks during sailing breaks and always came back with a handful of cans and papers. He never gave verbal expression, but quietly bent down and picked up the offending item. I don't think he was even angered by it. He just saw it as part of his job in life to keep things clean, and he never seemed to begrudge folks for creating scattered messes.

As a kid, it embarrassed me to no end to have Dad walking by my side with a handful of scraps as he scanned for the next available trash can. Yet, he taught me in what he did, and those memories are becoming a part of me now. Lately, I speak less and act more.

I have been realizing that my silent criticism of unkown individuals is the same as the original offense. I still scan the grasses for the leftovers. Yet, I don't look to reinforce a negative idea I have of fastfood or of folks who consume it or of folks who deposit its remants. I look for an opportunity. It's an opportunity to serve, make beautiful and restore.

It's really an act of re-creation. A re-creation of Dad, the landscape, and me.

shoreline reflection

We lose a part of ourselves when we have stopped experiencing the joy of seeing a deer even though we have seen hundreds, if not thousands. We become a bit blind when we see the majesty of an eagle in updraft soaring flight and find it commonplace. Experiencing the intimacy of a stream, the mystery of the moon, and the strength of the peaks have become old-school. I once pointed to Mt Baker beaming in its sun and snow covered brilliance. In reply, "Oh." It's as if we are all saying "oh" over and over again to the humble picture show at every turn of our head, every gaze of our eyes.

We are losing the places and spaces where these images, sights and sounds are found. Worse, we are losing a sense of ourselves and God by not sniffing, touching, tasting, breathing and seeing all the details of nature within both the huge provincial parks and the smallest of green spaces in cities. This knowing and experiencing the natural wonders is not only for the sighted or able-bodied, it is for all. Were we to only have one of our 5 senses, it would be enough to say as did the Creator, "This is good, very good."

Like many, then and now, as a boy I would often get bored. We just had a couple of acres of woods, but everyone else did as well. Few friends lived near me, as a result. Connecting with some friends involved a minor odyssey. I would have to travel through the woods, make my way around wetlands, and stay out of sight landowners.

It was a creative endeavor to just get to a friend's house, and though you left home in search of friends to stem your boredom, matters didn't change once you connected. The ritual began with one person saying, "What'll we do now?" The response, "Dunno, wha' d'you think we should do?" And like a faithful amen, "Dunno."

Since video games weren't a hot item at the time, we weren't allowed to have someone else be creative for us. We had to do it to ourselves, and the woods was where it happened. Although nature carried a certain degree of entertainment in and of itself, it was only the controls and not the game itself. It was like being handed a joystick and then forming the game in and through our own brains. Fantasy, play and fun were self-made endeavors, never handed to us. We made guns out of sticks, forts out of trees and holes became bunkers. Fantasy world was not a negative word. It was a place we created in our minds and then enacted in our surroundings.

Is this childhood art of creating a world or an adventure nearly gone? The common cry of many is, "I'm bored" or "This is no fun." And then, there are two options. We as adults may assume responsibility for making it more fun for them. Let’s keep them happy! Or, there is the option of a creative, fantasy world made by someone else that can be turned on.

The world of self-made fantasy, creativity and play is losing ground. It's a skill we all need like walking. It's as if a whole generation of people are saying, "I can't walk" and we carry them, and they never learn to do it on their own.

It's a deep hole we have dug. Entering into a world where youth today and upcoming generations gain a greater and greater sense of personal creativity, a ceasing of that which entertains from the outside would need to occur. Kids would need to get bored and not have any option to have the boredom taken from them in any way other than what they can do for themselves. They would need to reach deep within and pull out an intuitive sense to create, but it has been neatly and nearly locked away.

reflection

God made male and female, and they were given eyes. What those eyes must have seen before the fall. Those eyes first saw One and then the other one. Those eyes would have then seen everything everywhere before the rape of the saw. Those eyes searched the uncharted, endless and abstract horizon. Those eyes gazed wide-open to the wind, and those eyes felt that wind compete with their surrounding moisture. Those eyes saw neither new nor old growth but fresh growth everywhere surrounding them like a living canvas. As fish so naturally, rhythmically swimming in water, those eyes equally as naturally took in that for which they were created.

Looking into those eyes, they would have held the reflection of all that was created, brushed-stroked, molded and formed.

Surely, it was so.

Eyes were made for simple, yet abstract beauty. All the stuff to which God’s words spoke, “It was good.”

Now. Our eyes strain from glare coming from every angle. Images, sights, and every imaginable visual thing where the darkest of sunglasses, even at night, just won’t help.

"Dr, my eyes. Tell me what you see. I hear their cry, just say if it's to late for me." Jackson Brown

I am haunted by waters.

Norman McLean