Light

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How these flowers change with the changing light. This is full daylight, with the sun to the south shining directly on the house.

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This is the evening light, with a low sun shining from the west straight along the footpath. I am always amazed by what Monet saw in his paintings of light as it fell at different times of the day on various objects. The cathedral face at Rouen is a prime example. Here, in my garden with the hollyhock, I see how its colours change, how texture alters, how different features become more salient at different times of day.

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Sometimes it is hard to believe it is the same flower. We were so surprised when we first saw it, that we nearly pulled it up, thinking it was a weed. Luckily, we didn’t, and it rewarded us with a summer long, now into fall, series of blossoms, not to mention a myriad seeds for next season. We have become quite good friends, this hollyhock and I and we talk together regularly. Sometimes the other plants get jealous, and you can see they have faded slightly, bewildered by  his glory.

Hollyhocks

Hollyhocks

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We have never managed to grow a hollyhock before this summer, yet this one appeared from nowhere and quickly grew to more than eight feet tall. We didn’t plant it and we don’t know where it came from. Some little bird, maybe, on a migration journey from one garden to another. Who knows? What I do know is that these flowers are magnificent. This one has endured the summer’s heat, the occasional thunder storm, strong winds, and heavy rain. We had early frost in September, but it seemed to give the hollyhock strength and it blossomed on and on.

Right now, pine siskins and the occasional American goldfinch settle on our hollyhock and peck at the precious seed pods. Precious, because we have gathered some of the seeds, given others to a good friend, and offered some to the passerines who all too soon will be flying south. Those seeds we have kept we will plant. Hopefully, next year, we will have several of these beautiful plants growing in the garden.

The plant, incidentally, is more than ten feet in length. The vertical height is eight feet. Here, in this photo, it bends to touch its toes, hence the downward slant that it has taken.

Smurfs

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Smurfs at Mactaquac

There’s something special about our Fall, here in New Brunswick. At Mactaquac Provincial Park, just beside the Beaver Pond, a group of travelling Smurfs have avoided the hurly-burly of the camp ground and put up their houses in the woods. Lots of things handy: water, shelter, shade, and the Convenience Store just around the corner and down the road.

The New Brunswick Smurfs, if you can find them, are interesting people. This group has constructed temporary homes in different sizes for the adults and the little ones. We didn’t see Papa Smurf, or anyone else, while we were watching, but he’s probably in there somewhere, with the family, keeping them quiet and waiting till we move away. Then they can all come out again and nature watch in relative safety.

 

GBH

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GBH

Grievous Bodily Harm to some, but to others, Great Blue Heron. I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder. How about Grand Beautiful Harmony? Awesome is an overused word, especially when it comes out as almost an expletive: awesome. Awesome haircut. Awesome meal. Awesome tie. Awesome photo. Awesome heron. Or just plain, old awesome! With an exclamation mark of course, and the air punched up from diaphragm and out through tight lips.

That said, certain moments do fill us with awe: an awe of the wild, of nature’s bounty and beauty, awe of the elements, the stillness of the fall pond, the subdued rifle crack when the great wings first open, or the echoing slap of the beaver tail striking flat on open waters. Poetry in motion: that sudden catch of the breath as the launch into the air makes our hearts, just for a moment, first stop, then beat more quickly.

Falling into Fall

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Falling into Fall

Not just Beaver at the Beaver Pond. Wonderful, this transition from end of summer to start of fall and look, there’s  a little pot of gold at rainbow’s end. By tomorrow, some tiny mouse will have gnawed the edges in search of sustenance. Meanwhile, this moment of perfection caught forever in the transient eye of the passing camera. Tread carefully when you walk these woods. Look everywhere, not just at the path ahead. But watch out for those tree roots. Their little hands will reach out and pull you down and you’ll roll in the already fallen leaves, an old man turned into a child once more. But oh, it’s so much harder to leap to your feet and run, run, run from shadows and the nightmare hands that haunt your dreams and reach out to grasp you.

 

Haircut, anyone?

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Haircut, anyone?

Well, it’s almost time for me to have my hair cut. When I looked in the mirror to shave this morning I looked a little bit like this: beaky nose, eyes closed, well, half-closed and squinting, anyway, and all lathered up. My grand-pappy told me there’d be days like these: usually just before he cut himself shaving at the kitchen sink with his old cut-throat razor. Then he’d disappear into the outside bathroom and reappear with little Vs of toilet tissue pushed into his chin to staunch the still-leaking wounds. All that’s missing here, in this photo, apart from life itself [nature morte: still life] is my grandfather’s pink shaving cream. And a sense of humor: wreckage on life’s beach, the common destiny that awaits us all, flies and all.

A Cobbled Life

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A Cobbled Life

I have been writing away, but keeping it to myself. No more posting original material on Facebook or the Blog. I feel a little bit knotted and washed up by the tide, tied in knots, so to speak. Never mind. There’s lots of old material and photographs to work with. I am tired of reading “publishing on your blog or social media counts as a publication.” Like heck it does! Try going before the Promotion and Tenure committee with articles from blog, photos from Facebook, and a collection of letters to the editor of the local newspaper.

KIRA Video

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Kira Video

So, our July project, a video of the first KIRA poet reading his KIRA poem, is now completed. I read One Small Corner at KIRA and Geoff Slater, Jeff Lively, and Cameron Lively added video to verse in this blend of magic. Thank you so much: I really appreciate this visual rendition of my words. So much so, that for once, I am at a loss for words. I will just let the video speak for itself and myself. Just click on the link below and you will be transported to KIRA and Kingsbrae Gardens on a magic carpet. swift and smooth.

KIRA Promotional Video

Our September / October project is to inaugurate the first KIRA Boutique Retreat (Creative Writing). This will run from September 30 to October 6. I will be one of the facilitators, along with Geoff Slater, the artistic director at Kingsbrae and Jeremy Gilmer, this year’s writer in residence (July 2018). For a description of my own stay at KIRA last year (June, 2017), click on the first link. Click on either the second or the third link below for more information on KIRA and the Boutique Retreat.

KIRA: an intensive creative experience WFNB, August 5, 2017).

 KIRA – Kingsbrae Garden

KIRA Boutique Writing Retreat

KIRA & so much more

 

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KIRA & so much more

KIRA & Kingsbrae Gardens are so much more than an outdoor adventure. They offer a journey into yourself, an exploration of your inner depths, a Jules Verne voyage into the interior of the world that you are: the artist, the creator, the truly spiritual person that you are capable of being.

How do I know? Because I have been there. I have walked those beaches, explored those shores, got my feet dirty in the Passamaquoddy mud, climbed those hills, viewed those islands from both sides. I have been out to sea to see those whales, have crossed the Old Sow from side to side, have imagined myself as a pirate for the shortest of times, crawling my sailing ship around the whirlpool, listening to its sucking sound, watching the seals as they rose from the depths, the sea gulls as they dropped from the skies.

Within the gardens, I have touched those secret places, grasped the flowers, crushed the leaves of herbs between sightless fingers and raised those perfumes to blind nostrils. I have also breathed in the scents of salt borne on a sea wind caressing the cheek, smoothing the brow, bearing away the cares of city and suburb.

Renewal is here and now. It is the sea wind’s kiss, the suck of mud, between the toes, barefoot, the rise and fall of tides, the ocean’s life forced into our lives and floating our cares and despairs away. Nothing of the city lurks here to ambush us, unless you bring it with cell phone, computer, texting, and the dull, grey air that will soon be vanquished and whisked away by the breeze, terns, gannets, the seal’s nose breaking through the sea’s surface, the deer crossing the road, demanding their right of way.

At the end of my own residency in KIRA (June, 2017), I tried to summarize my thoughts about the experience. To read them for yourself, click on this link: Residency, June 29, 2017. I was invited by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick to write about my stay. To read that, please click on this link: KIRA: an intensive creative experience WFNB, August 5, 2017).

To find information about your own potential residency at KIRA, click on this site KIRA – Kingsbrae Garden or this one KIRA Boutique Writing Retreat.

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Life-Long Learning

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Life-Long Learning
KIRA & Kingsbrae Gardens

It’s hard to believe I could be back with my friends at KIRA & Kingsbrae by the end of next month. What an honor and a pleasure to be invited to help facilitate the first KIRA Boutique Retreat on Creative Writing. Geoff, Jeremy, and me … we will make a truly creative dream team. We are working out the details as I type this.

My task will be to work with poets and short-story writers. I have just successfully completed two online courses from the School of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, my  Canadian Alma Mater (MA, PhD). Kerry-Lee Powell offered the first course: Writing Short Fiction II, while the second course, Poetry II, found me studying with Sachiko Murakami.

Life-long learning is so important. Over my life, I am not that old at seventy-four, I have learned that it is the ability to change, to adapt, to learn new things, that marks us out as creative people. Since my escape from imprisonment in the Ivory Tower of Academia (aka retirement), I have ventured into several new worlds, including that of online learning. My two most recent online courses from U of T now stand alongside an online course from Humber College on novel writing. Alas, this course did more to confirm that I wasn’t really a novelist at heart. As we live, we learn. I have now laid aside my three embryo novels to concentrate on my stronger areas: poetry and short stories.

Along with these online courses, I have been through the give (offering) and take (participating) of multiple creative writing workshops. So much knowledge gained. I have also enjoyed several positions as academic editor, associate editor, editorial board member, of multiple national and international publications, in English, French, and Spanish. In each of these new adventures, there was so much to learn.

Now I have the chance to return some of that acquired and accumulated knowledge to others who, like me wish to practice their life-long-learning skills. The unique KIRA combination of conversations, selected workshops, one-on-one talks, round-the-table discussions, evening talks, and readings will open many horizons to writers old and new, and not least to myself. As I live, I learn.

Round-the-table discussions: The Spanish have a wonderful term for this, de sobremesa. This refers to the discussions that take place, around the dining table, when the meal is done and everyone is comfortable in each other’s company and multiple conversations flow.

As for KIRA itself, I look forward to returning to my conversations with the land, the sea, the flowers, the birds, the statues, the alpacas … I love talking to them in Spanish … and the rowdy, old peacock who squawks his joy at evening, when the sun goes down. And don’t forget those Indian Runner Ducks: Beatrix Potter talked to them … and so did I … in fact, in Beatrix Potter’s case, one of her own Runner Ducks, possibly a distant cousin to those at Kingsbrae Gardens, became better known as Jemima Puddleduck. Who knows? Between poetry and painting, you too may find your own version of Jemima Puddleduck … Paco the Alpaca, perhaps?

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KIRA: The three standing stones, though I think of them as talking statues. I stood in the middle between them, closed my eyes, opened my mind, and listened to the magic as the breeze blew through them and sang secret songs to the music of their stone flutes. They filled me  with the sound of their ancient voices, their poems and stories, the magical mysteries of their myths. Come and visit and I’ll show you how to stand still and listen to what the stones have to say. When you allow that poetry to flow through you, you’ll never suffer from writer’s block again!