This

Headshot

Fingers tense in sudden excitement
Palms sweaty, a shallow breath
Held in eager anticipation
BOOM Headshot!
A wicked, glorious glee
And a foe defeated, a player pwned
Bloodlust captured, transformed,
Ameliorated
The gritty pixel, a battlefield of bytes
There are new heroes, new laurels
of respect, cred, and cool
And they are but a construct
An achievement is a tick on a screen

A bloody warrior, avatar of grim justice
ripped now from myth and legend, made
Alive to hew at the ephemeral
seething flanks of an imagined enemy
A boyhood imagination's playground
Transmogrified into half-reality
Power lies in the controller, the flick of a
thumbstick, and a thought commands armies
fleets, a KO, a Superbowl victory
The nectar of triumph, a sweet drought
to a thirsty imagination trapped
in a dull and pallid existence
Where there is no war to win
No fight against desperate odds
or a clarion call to courage

Worth

Who am I?

A question that tugs at the bottom of every soul.

What is worth, what is of worth?

We are made in the image of the Creator, blood, dust and bone. We are reflections of a singular and unfathomable will. We are the children of the Word that fell from His lips onto the world.

There is something inherently of value in us, of us, that we radiate. It is in what we are, it is in the unlimited potential of the DNA in our cells, we are the many, we are the variegated, and we are the host of possibilities. There is something of His eternity in the incredible manifold paths that the complexities of biology offer us.

And that is merely in our form, our shape, our dust. And He showed fit to give us something more. He gave us His breath, the animus, the soul, the ability to choose. He gave us choice. He gave us the capability of understanding.

A question then follows, regarding understanding. We ask, especially to the literal translation: If Eve knew, truly knew the fullest consequences of her actions, would she have bit into that apple? Would she have enslaved us, a world, to thousands upon thousands of years of pain and suffering? Would the mother of us all condemn us in a moment, for the sake of knowledge? And yet, to push the literal translation, even her limited understanding of a choice between God and self would mean that she knew of good and evil.

Regardless, there is something rotten at the core of us all. There is a malignity to us, and it colors every decision that we make. We are bent, and everything we do is thrown askew. Yet, I ask, are we broken, in the fullest sense of the word? Are we incapable of understanding altogether, that we are totally and absolutely lost? Would being this broken not even allow us to be capable of self-reflection? Would we not even know how broken we are, unable to answer the question to why we mess everything up?

Do we mess everything up?

A man called Tolkien said once, “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.”

But. But: Are we not the reflection of a God that is perfect? Are we not the refractors of a pure Light? Is there not something in us that calls to Him? Is there not something in all of us that recognizes we are the vessels of His Light, His greatness? Is there not some worth in that?

We see through a mirror darkly.

So: the problem. We can’t, being the instruments of our own destruction, engineer a way out that destruction. If we see sin as death, in and out of this mortal coil, a death in the little sense during our life, and a death after we pass, then we’re f*cked. It takes something to straighten us. It takes something to repair this “broken” soul.

It takes something like Jesus. For God so loved the world. Notice the language. Notice what it says. He LOVED the world. He saw worth in it. He saw something worthy of redemption. He saw something that needed to come back to Him.

It is true that we cannot manufacture this worthiness by anything we do, for in the end it falls short of its mark, it bends in its skewed flight, it misses the target. It is not complete, it is not perfect. But that we do, that we know, that we try, that very fact is from what we inherently are, the image of God. We seek after His face even though we cannot give the very search its words. We look for transcendence; we look for that purpose, engage in that passion that will deliver us to something better. Worth comes then, when we are our truest selves, an independent agent of the Will of God, spun into the world. We see this, in the image of who Jesus is, and what he’d done. The greatest thing a man can do is lay his life down for his friends, a free act of volition, not some prescribed fate. Our worth is immeasurable, for God took an immeasurably worthy Son and had him die for us. Our price has been the death of the Son of God.

Let us hold to the value of this worth, with humility and gratitude. For we are bought, purchased with a coin of infinite value.

Autumn, Interior and Exterior

This sums up how I feel nowadays, in a much more sublime fashion than I can craft at the moment. Go Go PB Shelley

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.

V


Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

A Youth Worker's Manifesto pt. II

These are our youth. They should not be treated the way they are. They deserve our assistance. They deserve our time. They deserve our love. They deserve not to be abandoned or rejected, for who they are or what has happened to them. They deserve to be seen as people, and people of worth.

You want to fight crime and poverty in our city? It's easy. Frighteningly so. You look after the kids that are in greatest danger of becoming the next generation of criminals. You don't subject them to a system that dehumanizes them, and shuffles them, like a worn pack of poker cards, drawn at random.

These are the kids that will sell your son pot. These are the kids that get into the adult entertainment industry because it's easy money, and nobody's told them the consequences of those actions. These are the kids that will steal bikes to sell for drugs. These are the kids that are enticed into gangs because that is the closest thing to family they've ever had.

You want to stop vandalism? You want to stop theft and drug crimes? You want to stop drive by shootings? You want to stop seeing that guy under the bridge, or the guy that asks for your change outside the liquor store? Stop them from becoming that man or woman. It's easy. Frighteningly so.

These kids are not animals. These kids are not monsters. They are like us, but a with a crappy hand of cards. They've had less to start with. They've had more to fight through than most of us can ever imagine. They are resilient beyond what you give them credit for. They have inner resources that beggar me.

Our church shares this burden of our society. Jesus calls us to look after the least of these. Jesus calls after us to look after the children of our neighborhood, of our city, of our province. It is not always some starving child across an ocean that he's calling us to look after. It is not always some face on the tv that stares blankly into the camera. It is the child that is in the rough part of town. The kind that you drive past on the way home and are thankful you don't live there. It is the child of the mom that's in the woman's shelter, who isn't going to school, who doesn't know what home is. This is not to say that the people across the ocean don't deserve our help. They do. But they aren't hungry as a result of our choices. The kid down the block is. He's hungry because dad can't make it past minimum wage, and has a drinking problem that soaks up all the money that should go to food. He can't make minimum wage because we have a government that doesn't support our poor. We have that government because we voted it in, or failed to vote to begin with. THAT is a result of our choice. We ARE our brother's keeper, and we've steadfastly ignored him.

We been comfortable in our cars and SUVs, walking the +15s, and it's time for us to consider the teen that's sleeping under the bridge, a block or two away. It's time for us to consider that the teen that is the same age of your own teen, and you were once the same age as well.

They should be in homes that care and love for them. They should be in foster homes where there isn't abuse, or a lack of compassion and love. They should be in foster homes that aren't overburdened. If they can't get in, they should be in grouphomes that have the staff, the time, and the space for them. They should be in a home where there is consistent people around, with fewer kids per staff, with a house mom and a house dad.

You hear about Focus on the Family, why don't we focus on our family growing larger, opening our hearts to include those that have been excluded. Why don't we consider, as a part of our society that seems to support family values, the notion that family should count for all people, not just the ones in polo t-shirts that sip lattes on the way to another church service in the car that cost more than these kids can even imagine. Why don't we think about loving the people who are unloved, the ones that are hard to love and easy to ignore, forget, and dismiss. We are called to love the least of these. We are called to love the unlovable. We are called to touch the untouchables. They do not exist a continent away, they exist a block or two away. They do not demand your attention the way your radio does, they do not demand your attention like prime time tv does, because they have not been given the voice, and its time we listen to it. Listen! Compassion is what Jesus was about! Compassion is letting go of our privilege and opening our eyes and hearts to those around us. Get involved in street ministry, give money to the poor. Don't ignore the dude that asks for a little bit of change. Feed him lunch instead. Find out who fosters in your church and support them with everything you got. Foster kids yourselves, consider adoption. There are so many kids that want homes, and we have families, with family values in abundance. You want to make a change in society, change this world around you? You want to stop this slide into apparent degradation? Make room in your heart for those that society has spit on, stepped on, and walked on by. Are we willing to be the Samaritan, heretical and rough around the edges? Or are we going to simply push the status quo and just walk on by, deaf to the cry of a society in pain?

Listen!

A Youth Worker's Manifesto pt. I

There is a problem in this city. It is not with the roads. It is not with the buses. It is not with unemployment. It is with how we treat our youth and the people that take care of them. The youth of which I speak are the kids that are in your schools, in your rec centres, in your starbucks and in your youth groups. They are the youth that are in the system, but whether we see them or not, they are in our lives. They have been ripped from their homes by forces that they don't fully comprehend. They have been shaped by choices that are not their own. They have been made into people they are not entirely by their own will.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that society ate, chewed and spat out, left to their own devices. They are the youth that get into gangs. They are the youth that have access to drugs. They are the youth that sleep on our streets. They are the youth that have gone missing. They are our invisibles, well on the way to becoming invisible.

These are our youth.

They are the youth whose mothers passed on their crack addiction when they were born. They are the youth that were abused when they were babies. They are the youth that were left for days without food due to neglect. They are the youth whose faces are bruised by yet another of mom's boyfriends. They are the youth who were born with FAS. They are the youth that were ignored. They are the youth that were beaten without cause. They are the youth that were beaten for any cause.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that are strung out in an alley. They are the youth that break into houses to find something they can pawn so they can score another hit. They are the youth whose boyfriend left them with nothing more than a pregnancy. They are the youth that listened to the wrong man online and disappeared. They are the youth that cut. They are the youth that want to end their lives. They are the youth that can't control their anger, for a reason that they can't explain, because Daddy kept on hitting him when he was little and wouldn't stop crying.

These are our youth.

And we own them more than what we can ever give them.

We house them in grouphomes and foster homes and lock down recovery clinics. We commit them as patients of a hospital of societal illness, slaves to an impersonal system of beds and numbers. We house them with grouphomes that are understaffed and underpaid, with drywall full of holes, cracking lino, and burned out staff. We house them with foster parents and brothers and sisters, who opened their hearts to take yet another risk, another burden on the shoulders of the burdened. We give them case workers who are overworked. We house them in places that are ripe for tempers to fray, with easy access to others for drugs and gang inductions. We house them in the ghettos of our city. We house them without regard. We tell them that this is only temporary. We tell them this until they turn 18.

These are our youth.

We give them staff that are underpaid and told to care for them, and if they can, love them. We give them staff that are paid a pittance and train them in how to stop a kid from trying to kill themselves, how to restrain a kid that’s lost control of their temper. We give them staff that pull 48 hour shifts because there wasn’t anybody else to call. We give them staff that are paid less then someone working at the local Timmy’s. We give the staff six kids with different schedules, doctors, counselors, parole officers, support workers, social workers, teaching assistants, psychiatrists, addiction counselors, and ask them to juggle it all. We give them staff that are the anvil to the hammer that the world has beat into these kids. We give them staff that deal with the behaviors and the memories of the abuse suffered at a previous home. We give them staff that are asked to risk life and limb to some of the kids that are severely unbalanced. We give them staff that are expected to bind the horrific emotional wounds that abandonment causes. We give them staff that can’t work regular hours because it’s shift work, and doesn’t pay enough to hold down as a job. We give them a staff that cares, and then burn them out. We give them a staff that sees these kids for who they really are, youth who actually matter, and then fail to pay a competitive wage.

These are our youth. And these are our youth workers.

And we’ve forgotten about them.

Coffee

The black grind, the black rind

Dark as coal, Dark as kohl

Sinful and bitter as a cynic suckled on the

Fruit of a burnt scorched earth

The smell, the smell, oh gods, the smell,

A siren, a siren, and I give in.

My mouth, My mouth, the oil seeps in

A Styxian ambrosia

Ghetto Farm Kid

I'm a ghetto farm kid, trapped amid the bustle and noise

Of an urbanity, the hard press of humanity

where I have no choice but to breathe its gasoline fumes,

so different than the smell of diesel,

Wheat, and the hard honest sweat that you get

when your sweeping a bin, or pitching the hay in

On a hot heavy day

I was never meant to be a farmer, to my parents dismay

My course lay instead, in literature, fantasy, the books I had read

They inspired me, widened me, and taught

My mind to ignore the simplicity what lay around

Sowing the ground, the beautiful haunting sound of

A chinook wind, or the sight of hawks hunting in the fields

where the harvest is coming in

And the row of combines marching in the lines

Of swath on a land like quilted cloth

With swatches of green and gold, a pageantry

As old as Cain, who was the first to put hand to the plough

look up at the sky and curse it for its lack of rain

I wanted something more than the duties of the farm chore,

I swore, I would travel, experience more

than the vista of a plain Albertan plain.

I wanted to imbibe the foreign sights and sounds of something other than my tribe

Learn the tongue from the young of another place, chase down and face the

Desire to flee my own space, hearth and home

My feet were itchy, you see?

I scratched that itch, and set them free on a plane trip to Germany

I lived in Berlin, away from my kin, in an city so new and fresh

To my eyes, there was no disguise-ing my newfound love and care

For this city of the Bear

It had an atmosphere, you veritably sense it in the air,

In the clothes that my peers would wear, the mohawk hair

Or the red handkerchief slung round the neck

hung like a flag ready at the beck

And call of a protest at the Berlin Wall

Which had its fall not too long ago at all

You could feel the history in this city,

Sketched underneath the skin of the graffiti tag

Feel it as you touched bullet holes in the Reichstag

From a World War where they exchanged

One dictator for years of cold slow conflict that raged

In this city divided between East and West

You can see it echoed in eyes, hear it in the chest

Of a people who are charged with: Lest WE forget

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Arbeit Macht Frei

You can see it echoed in the eyes

The memories of a people who let the Jews die

But there was a willingness to engage, from the people my age,

In questions political, rhetorical, and cultural,

There was a thirst for debate, a desire to create

A dialogue of mind and thought, a language fraught with

The willingness to encompass more than the limits of

of theology, nationality, and blind ideology

They taught me that it was ok to open my mind

to find conversation late at night in a coffee shop

Open far past the hour of closing

and well on the way to first light

I met the Prof, a man with salt and pepper hair,

Grizzled but with a statesman air,

He used to be an Anglican priest, ordained,

But found he was chained to the bedside

Of the old, and sought to find inside a faith that had died

So he came back to teach English to the senior high,

And to me, this English speaking guy,

A irony I saw and met with a grin, wry

He challenged my concepts, the hardened precepts

of a narrow neo-conservatism, airtight faith, trapped in the chasm

Of propaganda, and as he saw it - Indoctrination,

Opening the mind from the culture I lived in

I had to make the point, No... I'm not an American

So you see, it was trip whose taste left me thirsty

For really good coffee and a company that delights

In the verbal spar, the conversation that ranges wide and far

From the plebeian woes of a city that has no personality

as far as personality goes

It was a good trip for this ghetto farm kid

More Incoming

So, lest I forget my promise to post regularly, I've been writing poetry, that most maligned of art forms, and have a store of creative non-fiction that I've been working on over the summer. I'm in the middle of tranfering things over to my new mini-notebook (whose name is Sapphire, it's blue you see) from my old laptop (known as Sven) that I'm selling, and Brutus (my desktop tower of Doom, whose monitor is known as Svetlana).

I've got a manifesto to share, a exploratory meandering on the notion of worth as a Christian, and beat poetry as well.

It Feels Like Coming Home

I'm in English this year at the University, I'm returning to my first love, after a long absence.

It was that old familiar sensation that came back that surprised me. You know, the one that you associate with going back to school, cheesewagons, stale lunch bread, excitement and anxiety all at once.

It was nostalgic, no, it is like living through nostalgia. I'm in English this year, and it's like experiencing my first year all over again. I'm reminded of this as I walk into the first english class of the day, and the teacher is abstract random, like a certain boss I had over summer. I'm reminded of this by the characters that walk in, there's a girl with make up like a geisha, another that is epically Goth, a guy with wire rim glasses who wants to be a author, another, a student from Iceland. You can smell the subculture.

I keep expecting the smell of ozone stress and slight panic I felt all of last year when I was taking the sciences. Instead, I have readings in subjects I find fascinating, instead of nigh incomprehensible. Metaphor is my territory again, no longer am I wandering in the strange land of nucleic acids, Lewis structures and elimination reactions. Some parts of today felt like walking through a waking dream, waiting for me to wake up and realize that I'm on a path I'd turned away from.

I have poetry class next. Oh sweet simile, rapturous rhyme and rhythm!

Yeah, I'm a geek.

Six Months From Now...

Six months from now, I’ll be doing English papers on Shakespeare, and taking courses in Greek mythology, ethics, logic and religion.

Six months from now, I’ll be supporting myself by working part time.

Six months from now I’ll be learning how to draw better.

Six months from now, I’ll have an active blog, instead of month-long dead spaces.

Six months from now, I’ll be taking care of myself, doing what I love to do: which is writing and learning about the literature that has defined our culture, its beauty and depth.

Six months from now, I’ll be in the same place physically, but older, more mature, more joyous than right now.

In six months, I’ll be happy to make supper regularly with my roommate

In six months, my money (not anybody else’s!) will be budgeted to the dollar.

In six months, I’ll be seeing more plays than I’ve seen in the last three years

Sometime in six months, I’ll be playing video games, socially, healthily, and without guilt.

In six months, I’d have been a leader at camp, and an active part of that community.

In six months, I’ll be a catch.

In six months, I’ll be running 10k without stopping.

In six months, I’ll be closer to God, and to reality.

Six months from now, I’ll be fit, and able to beat my roommate in squash, like I once did.

Sometime in six months, I’ll either know how to blow glass, make glass sculptures, or learn how to work a forge.

In six months, my imagination will be expanded.

In six months I will be able to (and will) handle more responsibility.

Six months from now, my heart will not cry out in pain from hopes and dreams deferred.

Six months from now, I’ll be walking a path that I’ve should have walked three years ago.

The Pipe: Worldline

The idea of a timestamp is a curious one. It locks in a word, a phrase, a sentence typed into the temporal ether. You chat, you text, write an email, or a letter, and those words, those ideas suddenly have a place, in all four dimensions. It is no longer floating free. It becomes concrete, solid. Real.

I came across the idea of a worldline, and it struck me as poetic. You could say Einstein, who came up with the notion, was the poet of physics, and indeed the way he interacted with science was with an artist's genius. It goes like this: a worldline is the sequential path of something through both time and space, from the moment it is created to the moment of it's non-existence. A worldline is the string that binds us to place in this universe, as we know and see and perceive it. Invisible to the naked eye, but as real as the touch of the keyboard beneath my fingertips.

When we are gone, when we no longer exist, our worldines ended in this place, that string remains. A record of ourselves is left behind in some form or fashion. In the gametic DNA that we pass on, in our letters, or in some book. We weave together, one string ravelling into another.

A ship's worldline is it's log. It must contain the date and the position, and you can see the course that it charted through the brine and spray. This is my log, as small and insignificant as it is. This is where I can stamp my mark and say: Phil was here.

Spring

Time passes and hope springs eternal
Leaves bud, ready to burst
There's a feeling in this cold, near-spring air
That brings back memories of summer's fragrance
And the promise of verdant warm days
The cusp of change approaches
And summer threatens to spill over
Heralding its journey with the bird's call
And sweet southern winds
That lie around one's neck
Like hearth-warmed mantle

A little something pastoral to change the mood, eh?

Mirage

Ah Love, I languish at the thought of thee
The ghost of your embrace haunts me
For I have never known your touch
Instead Your spectre follows me
And mocks me
Are you dead?
Or is the whisper I hear
But an echo on the wind,
A moment's idle imagination
Or the distant discourse of lovers
In some hidden glen
The like I have not known or seen
Or felt the soft crush of grass
And Your voice murmuring in my ear
Such like is not mine to have or share

Mix this with two parts angst and one part loneliness. Much inspired by Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther."

Compulsion

Desire's voice drives nails
Of madness into my head
That yearns only for rest
From this fearful enchanted slumber
To wake from this unholy consciousness
It does not stop, pushing me further
Into the valley of its longing
Like water spilling over the cliff
Of suicidal sickened love
It's empty whispers tell me tales
Of satisfaction and gratified wishes
Of hypnotizing dreams and fantasie
That one can wake to
Desire's mirage leads me
Stumbling to false oasis'
In this desert of my life
Thirsty for the springs of companionship
Its whispers turn to sand and dust
Widening the hollow inside my chest
And withering away the face of reason
Till I turn away from its chapped
And blistered visage
Into the wide maw of the howling gale

Solitaire

Love is absent
Mere glimmers of a fool's gold
Dreams rail, chained and pent
And my arms have nothing to hold

Flint

The spark waits to be struck
Of inspiration and blind luck
The mind calls to be lit
By the gift of Perseus, illicit
This hearth is damp, spoiled and spare
And chilled by a lonely wintry air
Throw open the shutters and let in the light!
Too often closed by some imagined night
Stoke the dimly glowing coal
Think phœnix, mind! Soar like a kite

An Insomniac's Second Note

The Muse is strong upon me tonight, so: I've got a bunch of poetry to inflict upon you all.

An Insomniac's Note

After rereading my last post, I have decided we should all move to Norway. It's better there. They have all the things I want already changed, so I'm guessing all the complaining has already been done.

The Soapbox: Today I Vote

Today is a day that I get to exercise my right as a citizen and vote. It’s something that I take for granted, but a right that I honor. Here in Alberta, it is important to note that I have grown up in a era where there has only been one governing party. There has only been one status quo, there has only been one political perspective that has shaped this province.

I have only a few years behind my belt as a voter, but there are a few things that I know. I know that I need to express an opinion, and that I get my chance today. I have taken my Ralph bucks and laughed, I have seen the howling byways of my city get worse, I have seen a province and a city expand without thought of the consequences of that growth.

Earlier this week, I experienced those consequences. Our household experienced an emergency of a medical nature, and as I result, I rushed to the hospital with my roommate in my car, and worry in my heart. We checked him in, and waited. And waited.

And waited.

We left without seeing a doctor. We arrived at the stroke of 10 at night, we left at 4:33am in the morning. The next day, my roommate was able to go to a clinic, and his troubles taken care of. But, for me it was an object lesson in some of the gaping holes in our province.

There are other ways I have experienced them. As a student, my university increases tuition every year, simply to keep up with their expenses. This is the result of the load shifting onto the back of the student, and a lack of support and direction from a government that has been in power for over 35 years. A few years ago, the university cut faculty funding by 15% in order to meet the black. My classes are bursting at the seams, there hasn’t been a class this year that I’ve taken under 200 people, and I’m in senior level courses. There haven’t been substantive improvements in the lot of my university or government support in my lot as a student.

As a youth worker, it was only in the last year that there was a wage increase, after a long period, years of drought. As it is, I make less on an overnight shift than a janitor does doing overnights at a nearby grocery store chain. As a part time worker, my company is unable to pay me overtime, even when I work 16 hour shifts. This is due to the contractual nature of the private not-for-profit business model that the government uses to take care of its most vulnerable: the children of the state. Social funding has seen the scalpel knife many times, and the only people that get hurt, truly hurt, in the end are the unfortunates who are in the system in the first place. I can always find another job than youth work if I chose to.

There is a philosophy of the status quo at work in the province, and I wonder if we will ever see political change that instead of fulfilling cliché phrases like “forward looking,” and “value added,” and “sustainability,” actually looks at the problems of the province and substantively moves on them. A change that sees public transit as a real and valid option to the long commute in the car. A change that sees the sick at the very first opportunity, their cares looked after immediately. A change that supports the next generation of workers, the students, the shapers of our society. A change that protects and ensures the future of our most vulnerable. A change that supports the people that protect and care for them. A change that doesn’t serve the interest of the few that have shares in oil and gas, but the people that own that oil and gas. We, the people of Alberta. A change that protects people from the vultures of landlords eager to make a profit. A change that sees that no person should be homeless. A change that sees an environment as worthy of protection in its own right. A change that looks less to the padding of the coffers, and more to the blood and sweat of the people that generated that money.

We have wealth. We have a hard working ethic. We have bright minded people in our province that struggle to get by. We deserve better, we deserve more than a government that is the mouthpiece of corporate interests. We are more than the oil and gas beneath the ground we live on. And it’s time we see that.

The Pipe: Dream Space

Dreams take up space. They make a home in your heart, and reside there for a time. Sometimes they pass away, like friends you know you'll never see. And sometimes other dreams, like new friends, come by and make life exciting again. And sometimes, like old friends, they come back after a while, and you strike up a conversation you never thought you would have again.

Let me tell a story about myself. I was in high school, in a place that was so terribly out of touch with my inner landscape. I read books like an addict, devouring imagery and story and character like a starving child. I particularly liked books about fantasy and science fiction, because it was about things that never happened in Vulcan, Alberta, Canada. The middle of nowhere. I like books about fantasy, because they always had some farmboy character that started out where I was at, young and naive (and from the middle of nowhere), and through his adventures became strong and powerful and honorable.

I also was a cabin leader during the summers at a camp I had gone to in my childhood. I had begun the painful journey about understanding the evils of the world, the real life evils, through camp. I had campers that were difficult to deal with, kids that wouldn't listen and would commit bizarre acts, like trying to spray one's self with the fire extinguisher (no flames were present), randomly hitting people, and kids that would run away. I seemed to attract them, and through the many camp experiences I began to see that I could not ignore the pain that was present in their lives, and their inability to articulate it, or do anything about it. I knew then, in a way that I couldn't myself express at the time, that I wanted to be their witness. A witness to the stories you will not necessarily hear on the news, a witness to stories that usually don't have happy endings, a witness to things that would make your ears bleed.

And I also began to write, while in high school. I wrote fan fiction. Which, over time, became better fan fiction. I wrote essays that pushed the boundaries of my vocabulary, essays that would provoke my teachers to discussion about something other than the bland political facts that were being shoveled into my brain. I learned that I love Shakespeare, especially speaking it aloud, and especially Hamlet.

Finally I began to love coffee, an attraction that began in away only it could, in Germany, in Europe. My first drink, alcoholic, was a Cafe Amaretto. It was also the first experience I had with espresso. Luckily, my attraction was to the latter, not the former. I had many coffee shop discussions with passionate German youth, my own age, about politics, religion, and everything in between. We stayed past closing in coffee shops, the owner watching with a merry gleam in his eye. I wanted to be that owner. I wanted to provide that place where words could be bantered, and the lattes free flowing, and closing was when I decided to.

I took part of a writing program offered to high school students through the University of Calgary. It was called (W)rites of Passage. Clever, no? We were encouraged to write fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction. I immediately chose fiction, and pondered over the subject. My first inkling came from a discussion at camp. If I had a superpower, what would it be. Being the bleeding heart that I was at the time, I wanted (among other superpowers), the ability to be an empath, to feel other's emotions, and somehow transmute them (for good or ill). So, I began to write a short story. I wrote. Then I wrote some more. Then I realized it was close to the deadline, and I had written no short story, but a novella. Some 22 pages of times new roman 12pt font. Completely original.

There was a crowd of people, mostly family of the students that came to hear, that listened to an excerpt of that short story. It was official, we were told. This was an academic conference, and having present papers at it, we were officially published authors. Oh man, I felt it. It was a glow that I could have all my own. It was one of the best moments, day, of my life. Apparently, people even liked it.

So. I entered into university, on a degree that combined Business and English. Business for that coffee shop I would someday own, and English, so I could develop my writing. It was a beautiful dream, and my first year of university was bliss. It was a dream that I had.

Can you hear the "but"? But, life happened. I had a series of bad experiences once I began living on my own. I had some really good ones too, but they were intermixed with a story of addiction and broken hearts, and a search for a purpose. I became convinced that I should become a doctor. I thought that it would be the best thing that could do with this mythical "potential" I was told that I had. I appropriated the dream for myself with others. And for a time it flourished. I struggled though. I struggled with school, I found science hard. I found it harder than anything else that I had put my mind to up to that point. It didn't come naturally to me, like the way that words sometimes can. I had to force myself to learn things that I couldn't see a reasonable end to learning them. I failed a math course, when I never failed a course in my life. And I was too stubborn to see that this dream took up too much space.

I gave up the life, with its unpredictability, of becoming a writer. I traded in one dream, set it aside for later, promising that I would come back to it after I was done being a doctor. And for a dream, being a doctor is a good one. It's intoxicating, I love House and Grey's Anatomy. I love hearing the expert words they speak, their quick judgments saving lives. I love the idea of being a doctor. But I hate having to learn to get there.

Intuition is often how I approach things, not concretely, not sequentially. I come upon things by the sides, around corners. I struggle with pushing details through my cranium. I can't encapsulate them and cage them, and set them in a row. So learning math is as hard as learning another language for me. Learning biochemistry is like living in another country. I can do it, but at the cost of an effort that takes a lot out of me. And it would herculean for me to do with an A grade.

So I'm realizing that as noble a dream being a doctor is, the rest of my life suffers. My art, as poor and scarce as it is, would wither while I pursue that dream. My relationships with people would be sacrificed. Time would (and has) become a thing I could never have. Sanity would probably be left behind.

And realizing that, saying it verbally, has lifted an immense weight off my shoulders. I've been thinking about letting this thing go for over a year. I've been wondering if I could do it and still be the person I want to be, and now I know.

And now I can have a conversation with an old friend.

I Can Believe in This Kind of Dream

One of the reasons I link to RLP is that he says things that make me light up inside. In a world of darkness, depression and cynicism, sometimes a dream is all you can have:

I’ve had a vision, you see. I’m a little embarrassed to say so because I’m not really a vision sort of guy, but I keep having this crazy idea that maybe the age of exclusivity is passing away. It’s passing away slowly, like racism and nationalism and indifference to the health of our environment, but it IS passing away. Religious exclusivism had its day, but the sun it setting and a new dawn awaits. There are now people in every spiritual tradition who are willing to admit that theirs is not the only way. These people will admit that the intelligence behind creation seems to work with different people in different ways and with a cultural language that fits them.

Imagine if the spiritual people, the dream keepers of the sacred, archetypal stories that arise from our collective unconscious, were to embrace one another and celebrate the ancient beauty of our various traditions. Imagine if we spiritual people held hands across the world and called for peace instead of causing religious wars, which is what we are doing right now.

If that were to happen, the people of our world might see us differently. They might see the beauty and necessity of caring for our myths and traditions. Even brother and sister scientist would celebrate our ancient stories which are, after all, our earliest attempts to understand the world around us.

Peace would be our hallmark, and we would preach that it is the birthright of everyone born on this planet. And we would be set free to pursue truth in all of its wondrous forms.

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

This man deserves props. Props to you RLP!