May 15th, 2008 11:24pm
Stephen T. Berg
As someone who’s family has been profoundly helped by naturopathic medicine and herbology and the practitioners involved, Bill C-51 is not merely an affront, it’s more like an attack.
If you’re concerned, not only by reasonable access to natural products, but by an unconstitutional move that puts more and more control in the hands of fewer people, please read Connie Howard’s excellent article (link here) and write a letter…sign a petition…make a noise. This is one piece of legislation that deserves little mercy.
And thank you Connie Howard for articulately, passionately and insightfully turning over this rock.
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Bill C-51
May 13th, 2008 11:45am
Stephen T. Berg
Now back in the inner-city I can ponder my skunk. (Annie Dillard has her weasel, I my skunk.)
The skunk is brought into being through immediacy and for all of her life lives in her given immediacy. She knows, intimately, her active seasons and her times for hibernation. She knows, biblically, her time for the hunt, for foraging, begins at the gloaming. Her’s is a dusky world that she does not question. Her’s is a dank, malodorous world–the fetidness, her preferred cloister.
And what of her scent glands, those two anal sacks that contain a hatred most foul? She disdains their use but will let spray after a single warning. Unlike her Spotted cousin who’s warning is past ostentatious–a high handstand, the Striped skunk stands facing her menace, arches her back, stamps her front feet, and shuffles backward. This was enough to send me scurrying when as boy I cornered one under a grain bin. I poked once, saw the signs, was innocent enough to get the message and left the scene.
The mother under my failing shed need not worry about using her mechanism. Thankfully, her perspicuous grunts that follow my rattling and moth ball seeding has shown she’s not rabid. But what can I learn from her, this solitary creature who prefers twilight?
The wisdom of a skunk is poise and containment. It’s her discipline. Even her markings, a balance of black and white manifest her sang-froid. And she will fight for this balance. Self-respecting, self-transcending, and self-willing–willing an exquisite singularity–she’s a beautiful creature in her own rite.
She’s a hermit in community with bush and beetles who would love to live off of nothing but grasshoppers. She has found her place, was never out of place. I on the other hand, leak will, and waste energy, and live out of joint with this minute.
But now I’ve written her into my life and know that it in some sense it is possible to live like a skunk. The possibilities are immediately present each morning. I can watch the sun glint off the chrome of a passing car.
May 11th, 2008 11:05am
Stephen T. Berg
If a meditation/polemic on Mother God interests you, here’s a link to an article I had published in yesterday’s Edmonton Journal.
(Photo: Cover art for Lost in Wonder -Esther DeWall)
And Happy Mother’s Day!
May 9th, 2008 09:34am
Stephen T. Berg
Pain conspires to separate out our constituent parts and experience them as unassociated. Pain proposes a symptomatic view that can lead us away from our holistic memories. And as in the bodily organism so in the communal organism. Pain will plot to part us. But it will fail. The anonymity that pain desires, that would also lead to its intensification, will be overcome by the interconnection of compassion. The suffering of one will be borne by others, and the healing of the others will be transferred back to the sufferer. Just as a touch, a slight loving pressure, an acupuncturist’s needle in an extremity, will free an endocrine gland for proper secretion, or move the liver to synthesize, or strengthen a heart. Truth is found in the interconnected whole.
May 7th, 2008 10:34am
Stephen T. Berg
Regrettably, the posts have been sparse…I have been travelling and, not so regrettably, I’ve been at the cabin watching….
Blithe seagulls ride thermal drafts and sing in their coarse-throated way. They are high into the blue. High enough to blend in, appearing like micro-clots of cloud. Hairy woodpeckers, dizzy from pounding away at a young poplar beside the cabin, take a break in the sun, re-reddening their tiny crowns. Squirrels scold and tease and robins pull worms out from under a mat of leaves, like perfect quilters pulling fat bits of thread through cloth.
In the mean time I’m obsessing about ways to move a mother skunk along. She’s taken a home under the shed and I fear she may have young. It’s May so the possibility is there. I’ve considered marking my territory with my own urine, not knowing if this is an offence for her, or if it’s of no consequence, or inviting. Who knows, really, the way of skunks.
I’ve also thrown the rest of the mothballs as far as I could under the shed where her run is. I know about mothballs. They worked a couple of years ago when we had a skunk, perhaps the same one, under the cabin. She moved out in a couple days.
I check back occasionally, rattle some wood planks that rest there, and listen for a response. She’s still there. I hear her grunting. It’s a guttural spastic-larynx effort. Something between a cough a hiss and a moan. I try imitating it but it’s beyond me. I haven’t the cords or the chords, for it.
I envy the skunk. A thoroughly humble and innocent creature, that at the same time understands the world begins and ends with her. And who am I to her? A passing annoyance. Perhaps she pities me. Pities my consciousness, my future and pastness. She has no quarrel with me, it is I who am dictated to, she controls the game. And it’s me who’s reduced to hissing and moaning.
May 1st, 2008 06:50pm
Stephen T. Berg
May dawns gray. My screen dawns a dull white. I yearn for the sun and long for words transcendent. Words that commune as much as communicate.
I have most of the tools of communication at my disposal but what I need most is communion. I’m not alone.
We are blessed with a broad spectrum of mediums. But we’re neophytes when it comes to recognizing and understanding this blessing. It almost seems that there is an inverse relationship between the number of methods of communication and true communion. We live in this place, over-turned, unaware, missing the forest for the trees, where communication either obscures or masquerades as communion.
Yesterday, a friend pointed out the difference between communion and communication, and how we often confuse the two. As a father, he had believed that when in conversation with his children he needed an outcome, and that without one there was a failure of communication, an opportunity was missed, a point of intimacy lost. He desired and aimed for communion, but got stuck at communication. A deep desire for communion’s intimacy was lost in a kind of forced communication. When we shine a light on the two, the difference between communication and communion becomes obvious enough. But in practice, we muddy them up. We fall prey to the illusion of utility. That is, we trust communication technique over the art of communion.
Perhaps it’s our culture, perhaps it’s our insecurities, our fear, our impatience. Perhaps we are bewitched by management and order. Communication is hailed as generative of outcomes and so we construct and manipulate and are left without that special kind of energy that enables us to release and wait–waiting being a particular kind of trust.
But the good news is that our adolescent infatuation with technique–the same technique that we also use to shield us from communion–can be transformed. We can grow up. We can awaken to the truth that all streams of media are handmaidens of communion. Beguiled no longer we can take back the end from the means. We can call…just to talk. We can try silence in the presence of friends. We can play, walk, breath, break bread, commune.
If we enter the art, we find that life has its own order. Ours is to trust life to lead us into communion. Ours is to listen to life, as St. Benedict exhorts, “with the ear of the heart.” And it’s here we find communion within time and play. Just so–in the middle of a spontaneous egg fight in the backyard with his son, my friend found communion.
April 27th, 2008 09:45am
Stephen T. Berg
Even driving by at 100 km/hr, you can easily count the slouching clapboard houses of Kandahar. On the east side of the hamlet there is a large boxy building as well, that I believe was once a school. From the highway you can see that all the windows have been broken out, like teeth. And the faded brown siding, having lost all desire, has been sliding off for years.
But Kandahar was once famous for its steakhouse. I remember because The Kandahar Steak House always got mentioned 70 miles east, down the Yellowhead, at Yorkton’s CKOS. At that distance I knew it had to be special. Those were the juicy tender years. An earlier time when I didn’t know businesses had to pay for getting mentioned on the television. I thought that places just had to be good to get advertising.
I remember the Sunday my parents went for a drive with their friends with the express purpose of going to for a steak. They may have gone more than once but I remember that day, because I was instantly envious and vowed that one day I would do the same. And I did…one weekend, some ten years later, while driving back from Saskatoon where I was enrolled in an Agriculture diploma program at the University.
It was early evening when I drove up the gravel drive to the steakhouse. I stepped through a paint blistered door into a red-carpeted room. There was no one else in the restaurant. I found a table and sat down.
A thin, wrinkled, Chinese man came and asked me what I’d like. I asked for a menu and he obliged. Was he annoyed or surprised? My steak was tough, quite tough. A mistake perhaps? Perhaps not. Perhaps they had been tough for some time. I ate in dim silence. Years of anticipation spattered and burned off like bits of marbled fat. It was a gristly, uncomfortable and ultimately lonely meal. In less than a year, after my only visit, the windows would be boarded up and eventually, I suppose, the building pushed in and hauled away. There isn’t a trace of the place today.
Today, even though I suspect that some of its 15 houses are occupied, Kandahar, Saskatchewan couldn’t feel much more desolate or unfortunate. And naturally, one wonders about that name, a name–bestowed upon the settlement by C.P.R. at the turn of the century–meant to honour the British victory in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the 1880s.
Still, I can hear the engaging voice of Linus Westburg on CKOS, and see the large sign atop the burgundy restaurant at the entrance of town, and then the presentation of red place-mat, silver steak knife, and the black-brown cross-grilled T-bone on a white plate. A meat-eater’s Shangri-la.
April 22nd, 2008 09:53am
Stephen T. Berg
It’s Earth Day! Now if we could only see the good earth it would certainly help work up a conscious appreciation. Currently, our slice of earth is covered by great sheaves of snow…snow that’s still coming down at a cruel slant.
But one thing that did help was my morning coffee. Since I normally dispense with paper in favour of porcelain, or in Starbuckian parlance, a-for-here-cup, I got it free–in honour of Earth Day. So take a few minutes off, head to Starbuck’s (where they’re doing their part), order your coffee to-stay and enjoy a free cup…and think about the lovely earth under all that snow.
,
April 21st, 2008 11:38pm
Stephen T. Berg
The author of Sirach, one of the books that you’ll find scrounging around the back porch of the biblical canon, offers this observation. “See with your own eyes that I have laboured but little and found for myself much serenity.”
I like serenity and if “little labour” is the way to find it, all the better. But I have an inkling that “little labour” is not little labour. Even a lazy person can be notoriously laborious. He just labours at avoiding labour. No tranquility there.
No, the “little labour” that puts out the welcome mat for serenity is the releasing a busy-mind. Of course busy-ness, either that excessive striving to keep adding cushions between insecurity and what we perceive as need-to-have in order to feel secure and comfortable, or that work-in-overdrive that helps keep all the self-worth questions at bay, will give serenity the bums rush every time. Now while I don’t know about excessive-labour, I do know about a busy-mind.
Which brings me to describe the brush with serenity I had this past weekend. It came in the low clouds that arrived with everyone else at the funeral of my uncle. Nothing direct, just an absence of discomfort, a kind of apophatic solace. And then the next day, almost as a follow-up, serenity settled upon me as I sat in an empty chapel. And the day after that it tagged me as I crossed the living room floor. It was serenity, I was sure; repose I suppose. It didn’t last but while it did I picked it like low-hanging fruit.
In these few moments I was in the grip of something like a long-view. I saw past, or through, the immediate worry that threatened to overtake, past the named and unnamed fears that loom like thunderheads and anxiously charge the atmosphere. Past those stresses that mock any attempt at creative work, that shred hours that otherwise may have been lived well, that could have produced some good, perhaps even adding something worthwhile to the world.
It was the long-view that was the conduit. It was this that offered me a connection with mortality. And a mortal experience, whether at a funeral or through gazing at a work of art, always questions my priorities, and with surprising alacrity questions what I labour at and give meaning to. The paradox of the long-view is that it nurtures an attentive appreciation for the present. St. Benedict must have known this when–without a trace of contextual morbidity–he penned, “Keep death before your eyes daily.”
April 17th, 2008 08:34am
Stephen T. Berg
Sadness comes in and recedes like the tide. Happiness on the other hand, catches you like a gleam from a lighthouse you didn’t know was out there.
Happiness comes in glimmers…as when listening to a melancholy Burt Jansch while cooking Basmati rice. While at a stop light, talking about the weather with a bottle picker on a bike. At seeing a name beside an e-mail. During a long silence. While walking across an empty lot, the morning sun low and at your back, and watching a thin 30 foot shadow meet the future ahead of you. While giving away a few dollars to a street-survivor you’ve known for years. While shopping for cheese in Safeway. While reading an offer, over coffee, of shedding a burden, taking up a yoke that’s easy. At the prospect of finding rest. For no reason at all.
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The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
