The daytime temperature has not been more than a few degrees above freezing since last Wednesday or Thursday.
On Thursday I met with n.’s worker to give him my sense of how I have let n. down and why n. found life on the street more satisfying and exciting than life at home. In the end, there was a great deal about me, but nothing concrete about n. The system is not going to do much for a kid who threatens to run away when if anybody tries to tell him that he has to live within some rules and take responsibility for his life. The worker has a large caseload and doesn’t seem to have any real contact with n. I learned that the worker admires Robert Bly and the other Jungian poet-gurus of the mens’s movement. He was curious about my bowel habits and he suggested I might want to join a men’s group to let my feelings out. He has a point about dealing with my emotions.
In the evening Claire and I watched 21 Grams which is a very good movie. Sean Penn is a great actor and Naomi Watts gave a powerful performance. The non-linear unfolding of the story created a building sense of doom and an almost unbearable sense of tension and anxiety.
Mike, Steve and I decided to ride to Grant’s Mill again on Friday. It was a day for tights or sweat pants, fleece tops and shells. The river and the creeks have not subsided, so the spring thaw and the run-off must be continuing. There are still small ice flows in the river. Steve’s pictures for April 9/04 show the grey sky and they show us with balaclavas and hoods, and our jacket collars turned up.
One of the pictures shows a building, the Pavilion in Assiniboine Park. It was originally an uninsulated building with concessions and lavatories, and it has been renovated over the years. It is a landmark of sorts, an easily identified meeting place. I was remembering that when I was in high school, I would ride a bicycle from St. James to my high school on Grant Avenue, fall and spring, using the footbridge in Assiniboine Park as the more quiet way to cross the Assiniboine River. I used to cycle past the Pavilion twice a day.
I was up early on Saturday, restless and sleepless. After reading for a while, after sunrise, I took the talk for a walk into the West Broadway area to drop a couple of video rentals at Blockbuster. I blogged and surfed for a while, and shopped for the week’s groceries.
Later in the morning, I visited my parents. My youngest sister Teresa was visiting, as it is part of her routine to take our mother shopping. I have started to visit regularly since early March. My visits have been much less frequent for many years. I stayed at home through University and even after graduation for a couple of years, paying some room and board. I visited regularly until I met Jan and got married. I used to think I was just busy with my job and taking care of my own family and home, but I think depression played a part in my discomfort with my parents and brothers and sisters and allowed me to become isolated and disconnected.
My mother has a progressive dementia. She is comfortable in her home with my dad’s support. She recognizes people and converses well about past events but can’t recall if she has taken her many medications or had a cup of coffee in the last few minutes. My dad is quite deaf. He doesn’t find his hearing aids help much because he can’t filter out the background noises to follow a conversation.
There is a warm feeling when I sit with my parents, in the house where I was raised, hearing the familiar tones of their voices and telling stories about family, neighbours and friends. It is also unhappy to realize that I cut myself off from that, regardless of what blame I can place on my parents for my less happy and more frightening childhood memories, and regardless of my old insights and beliefs about how those events have influenced my character.
After visiting my parents, I dropped in on n. We had short talk about plans for the next week, and what my might do around my time commitments around work and around Claire’s finishing exams. I said I thought I would like to promise to do things with him instead of just dropping by, and then fighting over extra money for his little habits. I told him that his uncle Frank would be calling and taking him out for some outdoor adventure and ATV riding, and he seems to be excited about that.
He would like to come home if we could just accept him as he is, let him play metal music as loud as he liked when he liked, and have his friends over. All he wanted, he said, was to be able to put a towel under the door and have a bong in his room. I asked him how he thought I felt when he and his friends were literally robbing us. I mentioned his raids on his mother’s wallet and purse last August while Claire and I were in Edmonton, and while I was in hospital. He couldn’t remember that I had surgery last summer. I asked him what he remembered about last summer and fall and he couldn’t think of too much.
I left it there. I listened. I gave him some new information to consider. I offered to come back often and to be present for him.
On Sunday, again, I was sleepless and awake early. There was an Easter sunrise service at St. Margaret’s Anglican, which is just a block away. I spent the later part of the morning tinkering with bike, and in the afternoon we rode to the Red River floodway gates.
Sunday evening, Easter dinner at Frank’s with my daughter Claire, my parents, my sister Teresa and her husband. Frank’s kids and Teresa’s kids had dinner in front of the TV in the rec room. Claire stayed with the adults. Frank was about an hour late. He had picked n. up and they had gone to ride an ATV near Grand Beach. Frank’s wife Jan was a good hostess, and she teased Frank about being late.
There has been some distance between Frank and me for many years. He has been struggling with anger and depression, and I have been depressed. He reached out a few weeks ago and is trying to help n. and to help me with n. I reached back and we have talked and done things together. I think this was the first time in many years that Frank has invited family – certainly me – for any family function.
There was friendly sense to the teasing and banter, and I had a good time. I thought I was a part of it, and I hope that Claire has started to find a different sense about my parents and brothers and sisters.
My mother was enjoying herself, but with her mind slipping she was more on the edge of the conversations. I guess if I am honest about it, she doesn’t have the resources to be threatening and manipulative, and this makes it easier to be with her. Dad couldn’t follow the conversation. He had his hearing aids off and he wanted to go home soon after dinner.
Monday was a slow day at work. Many people working in government or in jobs that interact with government had a holiday and downtown was quiet. I called home to talk to Claire but she didn’t answer the phone. I became anxious and I went home for a short visit, and then went back to work to try to move ahead with some pressing projects.
In the evening I went to meet n. to go to a movie but he wasn’t there. He had gone out with friends. He called me later, and I visited him and bought him a burger, and we talked for a while. He had gone out and gained access to an abandoned factory and spent his day exploring, chasing pigeons, breaking things. I told him about my bike rides, and about dinner at Frank’s. He told me about his Sunday outing and ATV riding with Frank. He wants me to buy some Warhammer 40,000 models for him, and we wants me to arrange for him to have voice lessons so he can become a metal singer. I said could contribute if I could afford it, after paying for his care with CFS. I thought it would be easier if he stayed in in his placement and got a job to cover some of his own needs. His reply was that he could go to his lessons even if he lived on the street, and then I would have more money for the lessons and for him. I said I would not be letting him decide how to spend the money I set aside for his support.
He started to accuse me of not caring for him, not understanding him, not understanding drugs, not respecting him. I said I didn’t agree. He began to throw lines at me – I had to ask if they were song lyrics or personal poetry. He said I wasn’t listening. I repeated several phrases back verbatim and asked him what he was trying to tell me. I said I felt I had failed as a parent and let him down, and left him on the street with no skills or resources to take care of himself.
I felt the communication was starting to break down. I said I had to go. I talked about calling him to make plans for later in the week.
Pining for the Fjords
He’s not dead, he’s pining for the Fjords.
Rupert Sheldrake was a reputable plant scientist. He enjoyed a good reputation in his field, and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals until 1978, and published articles in Nature in 1973 and 1974. He has links to his published papers on his web site. According to his own Web site, he went to India and worked his academic field from 1974 to 1978. After that he studied in an ashram, and then began to publish more spiritually oriented writings.
Fakirs
When I was six, my parents gave me three books by Rudyard Kipling. There was The Jungle Book, and a book called Stalky and Company which was a fictionalized account of Kipling’s teen years in an English “public school” which was actually a private boarding school. My mother had been the Akela in a Cub Scout pack in Holland and she was encouraging me to join a local Cub pack. The Cubs and the scouting movement in England and Canada used the Jungle Book as their organizational metaphor. (Mowgli was raised by wolves in the Jungle Book, and Cub Scouts are wolf cubs).
The third and best one was Kim, the story of an Anglo-Irish orphan abandoned in Northern India, who lives on the street and becomes recruited into the Great Game of military and political spying, while also finding his own integrity in acting as a helper, disciple and friend to an elderly Tibetan Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage in India to seek the River that sprang forth where the Buddha’s arrow fell. Kim is a rich, complex and enjoyable novel by an undervalued writer, and I have re-read it several times.
In the book, we find several encounters with fakirs. Fakir has a rich sound to an English-speaking listener. It sounds like faker, and it sounds like an obscenity. In the Oxford World Classic Edition of Kim it is spelled faquir and explained in a footnote referring to a religious mendicant, properly a Muslim but including other ascetics, such as Hindu Saddhus. Kipling and his character Kim see a clear distinction between true holy men, like Kim’s Lama, and a variety of yogis (holy men) and pundits (learned men) and other self-serving and corrupted religious characters that they encounter.
Dictionary definitions of fakir inform us that it has an Arabic root, in the word for poverty, and that it refers to the voluntary practice of poverty within the Sufi tradition. It goes back to the early middle ages and corresponds to the radical poverty of St. Francis and his followers in European Christianity. The religious traditions of voluntary poverty inform and inspire socialism, the Christian social gospel, and modern liberation theology. It also seems to inform the creation of communes and alternative communities and movements for voluntary simplicity in modern living, such as Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity books and teachings.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary brings us closer to Kipling’s observations:
The term is also used, however, to refer to itinerant Indian conjurers and alleged god-men who travel from village to village and perform “miracles” such as materializing vibhuti (holy ash) or jewelry. They do other conjuring stunts such as walking on hot coals, laying on a bed of nails, eating fire, sticking their hands in boiling ‘oil’, piercing their faces with long needles, putting large hooks through the flesh of their backs attached to heavy objects which they pull. Some conjurers are even said to levitate or to have performed the famous Indian rope trick.
I think there are many fakirs in our time and place. I include many inspirational/motivational speakers and writers, personal coaches, self proclaimed counsellors, therapists, and healers, teachers of personal growth, leaders of cults and vendors of enlightenment.
It has been said that modern writers and thinkers see farther because we stand on the shoulders of giants. I don’t mean to imply that the evolution of ideas and culture is progressive or that we are being taken anywhere on the wave of history. I think modern writers and thinkers are able to work with the wisdom of the past in their own work. This gives them a new vantage point, and of course it gives them the opportunity to appropriate terms and ideas from the great traditions.
I believe that modern fakirs have been able to strip mine the religious, spiritual, philosophical and scientific traditions of many cultures to manufacture a variety of pleasing psycho-spiritual stories. Some of the fakirs are true pilgrims, devoted to finding God or enlightenment. However many of them are selling junk, for their own financial gain or to gratify their inner child’s need to be the center of attention.
I see a powerful and healthy tension in the word. I would like to use it as a critical tool, rather than as an insult, but I don’t plan to walk on eggshells.
April 7, 2004
I had a short and nasty meeting with n. after dinner. I picked him up at the hotel where CFS (the Child Welfare Agency) has parked him. He forgot that I was picking him up, and then began to hint, suggest, request, demand, bargain and threaten. He wanted a pack of cigarettes. My position on cigarettes and other such items is that I don’t subsidize his wishes. If he wants to have those things, he will have to decide how to get the money for them by making other choices like getting a job.
I stopped at home before going on to my meeting. I discovered that he had already phoned my wife Jan and complained about my failure to fulfil his wish. Old pattern. If I gave him something that Jan didn’t want him to have (if I told a joke or played a prank or expressed a view that she did not support) he would rat me out and she blamed me for corrupting him. If I supported her articulated values and wishes, and denied one of his requests, or disciplined him, he unloaded on her about how mean I was. In fact he didn’t have to say a word. She would react to protect him. What she has always heard, felt and seen and then thrown at me is that I don’t respect and love him, and that his pain and her pain are my fault.
This is not a conscious process with him. He has been trying to protect himself and to meet his needs with the resources available to him. In plain terms, he has been using his parents’ attachment to him – our need to feel good about ourselves and our connection to him – to get what he needs and what he feels or thinks he needs. If parents can’t manage themselves, if either parent can’t stand the bad feeling that comes from setting and enforcing rules, then they let a child’s feelings rule the family. One of our problems was that both parents needed to feel good about ourselves with n., while we had different beliefs and ideals and differing ideas about how to raise him.
That’s the history. I can’t change it.
N. still wants me buy stuff, and reacts the old way when he doesn’t get stuff …. It’s a learned behaviour and he can’t stop. If I contact him, he will react. He will ask for stuff and then accuse me of trying to control him when I don’t get him what he wants. Does this mean I shouldn’t contact him?
Do I have to be afraid of what Jan will feel and think or what Claire will feel and think? I am afraid, and I can’t manage their reactions. I have to respect my judgment and integrity now. Right now, all I can do is listen to him, support him, love him.
Tonight, I listened to him rage about his smokes and I left him at the hotel.
After that I went to a meeting. When n. ran away Jan and started going to meetings of local group of Families Anonymous. I still go. Jan has stopped. I think I know the flaws of a 12 step approach, but it is still helpful for me to go to meetings and share and listen.
Then, a new day.
Cycling log
Steve has started to post 2004 cycling notes and photos on the Bike with Mike page. I have edited my recent posts in this blog to link to his site. Last year Steve posted his own log as Bike with Mike. This year he is giving Mike that log, published in a subdomain of Steve’s domain. I think he will continue to keep his own log and publish it on the web. He tinkers with his site. I will have to check my links to the cycling page on his site and to Mike’s cycling log periodically.
Lost Boy
I reached my n. by phone. He is not living at home. He ran away last fall, just before his 16th birthday to try to find independence, drugs, anarchy, metal music, sex and friends who appreciate his interests. He tried living on the street and he has settled down in a placement through a child welfare agency – at least for now. I have been visiting and talking to him over the last three weeks, after a long estrangement. He seems to have worked out some of his angry sense of having been forced out of school and out of his home by intolerable parental and societal rules.
Registered domain
I got an email from Steve who asked me if if I had registered Sea of Flowers as a domain name. That wasn’t a bad idea, and I registered sea-of-flowers.ca. I haven’t set up the web page redirector yet.
Dispossessed
In looking at some old email in an archive folder, I recollected that I used to sign my email with quotations. For several months or years in the mid 90’s, I used a quote from The Dispossessed, (Harper & Row, 1974) by Ursula K. LeGuin:
It is the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
When I checked Randy’s blog, his entry for April 5/04 mentioned his sf fanzine, Winding Numbers. I wrote several articles for Winding Numbers, including a sercon (that was fannish talk for serious and constructive) or critical, literary review of The Dispossessed. LeGuin has remained one of my favourite writers, for her honesty and intellectualism. I also agree with some of Thomas M. Disch’s comments about LeGuin in his book The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of. Disch considers that LeGuin has been made into a feminist icon by literary critics, and that some of her ideas and themes have been appropriated and misrepresented by critics and imitators. Disch is not particularly enchanted with feminism and magical realism in fiction. His critique becomes sour around these matters of taste, and I part company with him while agreeing that LeGuin has become associated with superstitious lyricism.
April 6, 2004
After supper, Mike, Steve and I took a bike ride of about 26 kilometers through Assiniboine Park, over the bridge on Moray, through Woodhaven, to Grant’s Mill in front of the Grace Hospital. The Assiniboine River and the creeks flowing into it are high with spring run-off. Mike took pictures. Steve has reactivated the Bike with Mike site, and he is trying to get Mike to take it over. The pictures are there. Go to the 2004 log, and click on April 6 in the date column. I have a beard and I’m wearing a a red helmet and blue fleece in these pics. In other pictures this spring I may be seen in a brown camoflage pattern fleece or an orange windbreaker. Steve tends to wear a yellow shell on colder days.
With the change to daylight savings time last weekend we can ride for more than 2 hours after dinner which gives us time for riding and some rest and photography stops.
Meeting Sister Jane
A little over two years ago, in the early months of 2002, I started a court proceeding for a woman who ran a drop-in center at Higgins and Main, in the very deepest, poorest, most alcohol and drug addled part of Winnipeg’s inner City core. (I am, by the way, a lawyer by day). Sister Jane was, at that time, 50 and had been a Catholic nun since she 20. She was living alone, without the support of her religious congregation, and she had terminal cancer.
She had been raised in New Hampshire and joined her congregation as a young woman just at the time that memberships in the Catholic Religious Orders was plummeting. Soon after she joined her Order, she accepted an invitation from a Canadian nun, a self-styled visionary reformer, to move to Edmonton and then to Winnipeg to be part of an innovative spiritual commune.
It didn’t work for Sister Jane. The project tried to fuse transformational psychology with Catholic spirituality. It became the leader’s personal project, and became whatever the leader wanted it to be. Jane found that her leader was controlling and grandiose. Jane swore in Affidavits that the leader introduced a purported therapy in which she initiated naked hugs which progressed to other sexual acts. Jane submitted sometimes but started to resist and react, which angered her leader, who disciplined her within the close confines of their communal life, and expelled her from the commune. She was then marginalized in her own Order because of her alienation from the leader and the rest of her Sisters who were connected to commune and the project.
Sister Jane had remained a member of her Order, but had started to live on her own. She received a little support to find a building and start a drop-in place but she had to recruit a board and to find funds for operating expenses and her own needs from a very early stage. She made friends, and her friends supported her and her ministry.
When she found that she had cancer, she sought some support from her superiors in the Order. In that process she described her personal experiences in the new movement, and she found that she was getting very little support. The Archbishop of Winnipeg listened to her and helped her personally with some other needs, but he did not intervene in the affairs of Jane’s autonomous Religious Order.
When I met Jane, her cancer was in remission and she was trying to understand if she could continue in that Religious Order, or if she had to leave. We started Court proceedings to recover compensation for the harm caused by illegal acts, her cancer came back in the winter of 2002-2003 and she died last summer. Her ministry was curtailed by her illness, and it closed for a while after she died. Her friends have been trying to revive it.
I visited her last spring, before her last hospitalization. Her ministry was based in an old three story bank building. The drop in was on the main floor and she lived in a suite on the upper floors. It was a small apartment, with a little chapel or prayer room. It was small oasis for her in a tough area of town and Jane lived with anxiety and fear.
When I had been discussing her evidence with her, I had tried to understand what she did at a drop-in. Did she provide a social service? Counselling? Teaching? Referrals to other agencies? Some kind of therapy? She explained it as living out the Church’s preferential option for the poor. I recognized that as an articulation of liberation theology, but I don’t think I started to understand it until later. What she did was to be present for people and to listen to them, providing them with a safety and respect. The theologian Rowan Williams, in his book Christ on Trial, How the Gospel Unsettled our Judgment
wrote:
God’s transcendence is in some sense present in and with those who do not have a voice, in and with those without power to affect their world, in and with those believed to have lost any right they might have had in the world. God is not with them because they are naturally virtuous, or because they are martyrs; he is simply there in the fact that they are ‘left over’ when the social and moral score is added up by the managers of social and moral behaviour.
What strikes me about Sister Jane’s work is that she was able to carry on while she herself was deeply wounded. I think I have only been able understand the value of her ministry as I have begun to experience my own pain and powerlessness over the events and the people in my life, and when I have needed to have people listen to me.
Last week a common friend of Jane’s and mine told me that Sister Jane had seen that I was going through some changes – as I certainly have been. I was simply moved to tears that she had the compassion to see me clearly while I thought I was helping her.