Thursday, March 28, 2019

Reconciliation


led by acolytes firmly seizing
                                       his elbows
  into a bright and airy loft
                                            mid-way up the
mountain
                 he shuffled, head down, eyes only
              partly open
scheduled for his final
                                     hearing,
                                                  before the
                                                                  Grand Panjandram
      seated on a canvas director’s              
                                                     chair
                                                             draped in hemp shirt,
with open sandals, and cotton shorts
                                                 hair and beard
                                                                         neatly trimmed
                            unexpectedly contemporary
the antithesis of those cheap, cliché paintings
                                                                     that project
a sad and off-putting cement
                                                   image
                                                                 of disdainful power
he rose and extended a hand
                                              and a warm welcoming smile
“So…..tell me the whole story, as best you can;
                                                 I welcome you to this time and space
                        where we are now alone and
                                                                    accompanied by the mountain stream!”
well……I…I…am a little taken aback
                                                            I expected a throne, several court reporters
                                            cameras and lie detectors and a robe…..
 I hear that every time someone comes to tell their story
I can easily imagine
So….I am still eager to hear your story
                                        Well, it is a lot like a river that sometimes
               flows, sometimes stagnates in little eddies
                                                            and frequently crashes over
                                 rocks I never suspected and
                                                 never really prepared to ride
I have heard that picture many times….and I often wonder about the
                           foresight and the intuition of the story-tellers…Have they
             not read or heard about their ancestors crashing over the same kinds of
cataracts ?
the plays and histories
                                   the movies and the poems are
                                                                                 filled with warnings
                   yet we seem to think they must be
                                                                      about all the others, and not me
  It does make me sad to hear how unconscious everyone seems to be
                                                      of the real questions needing address
so…..it seems this story began near water, winds, rocks, trees and small
                                                                                                               houses
                                          with fenced dreams and aspirations
                                                                                  and neighbourhood dogs
                      barking when anyone jumped, climbed or kicked down
                                                                                those fences
mostly men with collars, badges, robes, pills or chalk or whistles
                                              hovered around the fences,
                   watching and waiting for the inevitable iconoclast
  …..in order to remind him of his most minute infraction…
fascinated with their duty to rescue the miscreant from the bottom of the
                                                                               water fall
                                          they designed plans, strategies, tactics and retributions
                  based, they said, on something they called scripture
unfortunately, they probably looked at scripture as fixed, literal and their
                              view included selected epithets?

                        Chafing at many of these interventions
 I struggled with their fences and their rationale
                                                            so that  there seemed to be a
                          scarlet branded “T” on my forehead….
                                                         I quickly learned it meant “truant”
and emitted waves to all others of some kind of danger or apprehension
                                                               as soon as they caught a glimpse

whether and how I added to the ‘myth’ is the focus of
                                              much of my reading and reflecting….
                              No doubt I did!
only later did I meet kindred spirits:
                                                       Heathcliff, Jane Eyre, Hagar Shipley,
                                   Hillman, Birney, Pratt, Layton, Graham and Green
and tripped over, kicked down, took a fist to fences, walls, silences and
                                                                          betrayals
                 that attempted to thwart this river
                                                                        by damming its current
seeming desperate for tenderness,
                                                       at each bend in the river
                             I wondered if there might be another
                                                                                    longing for love
only to be greeted by others escaping, fleeing, drowning their pain or
                                                                   seeking vengeance
                                  and in succession barely escaped
                  drowning, being captured, mis-led, and the
swamp of improbable bribes, deceptions, faux commitments and
                                           even ecclesial courts
Have you ever read that little piece entitled, Footprints?
                      Finally, I think I might be “getting it”
                                       those narrow escapes were the times when
I was being carried across the highest and the most dangerous
                                                                             cliffs
                                 unaware that I was the perpetual self-saboteur
                       repeating, re-inventing, re-creating and re-imagining
all those early
                                       dark nights with the
               .22, the 12 gauge, the canoe, the psych ward, the pills,
                 the cellar wailing wall,
                                                                 and the trauma
that my story was never sought
                                               prior to decisions to exclude, alienate, and dismiss
Please, accept my hand of welcome, acceptance and love,
                                                it was there all along,
                           if only you could have seen it……

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

A modest proposal to link private lives to public policy


How dependent we have all become on an implicit separation between the private “issues of our lives” and the public discourse of the body politic. This enmeshment, of course, blurs at best, and blinds at worst, our collective attempts to influence public policy.

Talking about recycling, even putting out those green and blue boxes, without investigating if and how their contents are being injected into processes that protect the planet and contribute to the over-all reduction in toxic emissions, is, like so many instances of the interface between private individuals and public policy. We all pay provincial and federal taxes, on goods and services, as well as on earned income and investment income, without really having a real/effective voice in how those monies are distributed, except through our five-minute marking of a ballot at election time.

Not only is there a significant time gap between our regular and conscientious discharge of our responsibility and our expression of how the municipality/province/nation should operate. There is also little effort or opportunity, except perhaps at water cooler confabs, to shape public policy. No, this is not an argument for peppering our emails with referenda! However, it seems that with the infusion of social media, and the millions (billions?) of dollars spent by aspiring politicians on advertising on Facebook, for example, and the increasing personalization of political discourse, we risk a prevalent and increasing perspective of reductionism of issues to their personality advocates. Twitter, unfortunately, is not readily amenable to the nuances of policy agendas, thought and ideology foundations, and the uber-complexity of schemes both honourable and less so to take political action by the elected representatives. With the news that some 30% of our news in garnered from Facebook and other social media, the established media and the reputable start-ups like Politico, Axios, Rabble, Huffpost, Buzzfeed, Yahoo are struggling to sustain audience concentration, and the advertising revenue that underpins them.

A division, emblematic of the divide in income inequality, seems to be giving energy to a thought/idea/policy/class divide, based on the chosen menu of the individual, in western countries.

Our appetite for complexity, and for responsible and legitimate links between our individual lives and public policy decisions, seems fenced in by the multiple demands on our time, energy, concentration and attention. Glimpsing headlines, or catching a key phrase or word about a news story, or glancing at a photo of a political actor on a screen, or even reading a tweet….these hardly qualify as insight into any complex file. Plus, the sheer number of stimuli and their constant firing into our eyes/ears/minds tend to render many people either numb or detached.

And then, some trumpet blasts a crisis, or an injustice like a murder of an innocent, or the imprisoning of helpless children seeking refuge/asylum on the U.S.-Mexican border, or a new tax is applied to a gallon of gas….and again, our attention is arrested, and we silently repeat one of our personally preferred epithets, slogans, beliefs, attitudes about the person/incident/implications in our face. Most of us are proven to be accessing information sources that confirm and comply with our personal preferences, our leaning attitudes, our earliest beliefs, and our world views. Few of us, demonstrably, shift our views of either persons on the public stage or policy options that agree/disagree with our preconceptions.

It was former Leader of the Opposition and later Prime Minister (however briefly), The Honourable John Napier Turner who coined this phrase for the work and words of the Official Opposition: “BULLSHIT THEATRE!”

Were his words tragically prophetic about the democratic process, both on the part of the opposition, and the party in power, the governing party? Are we, in fact, increasingly witnessing a kind of shouting match of the propagandists, whether in support of or in opposition to any single stimulus (tweet, speech, bill, testimony, court judgement, pandemic, headline etc.)? AND, more importantly, are we serving as complicit choirs, on one side or another, demographically, digitally, analogically, clinically, and financially parsed by those with the largest income/investment accounts/partisan sycophant list, before, during and after specific points in time like elections, deaths, new bills, public hearings, announcements of war, public tragedies like plane crashes, or food or product recalls?

Is this “bullshit theatre” a mere “entertainment” (like the Roman bread and circuses) that keeps people minimally, peripherally, superficially and ineffectually, yet obsessively “engaged” in the public process? Are we unconsciously attuned to the public torrents of words, attitudes, pleas, petitions, and cash-magnets in a mis-taken belief that our email objections to a proposed bill to privatize health care in Ontario will make an iota of difference? Sending those emails feels good; it evokes a flurry of government-member responses, creating the impression that someone is reading them and taking them into consideration. And yet we all know that before any piece of government action to privatize health care is taken, focus groups, private surveys, and personal lobbying efforts have already demonstrated how far the government in question can go to achieve the goal of privatizing health care.

Sending an email opposing a proposed government decision, albeit, is more than NOT sending that email. Yet, the cynic would have to question how that email will be used. Would it be used to draft legislation that goes even further than originally proposed, given that the main source of opposition is coming from a “demographic” that will never support the government anyway? How far does the pawn metaphor extend?
How is one to bring one’s voice into the public discourse? How is one to impel the political class to take action on global warming and climate change?

The nine-year-old Swedish girl who has defied her parents by taking successive Friday’s off from school to incarnate a human body-and-placard protest against the inaction by various national governments on global warming has found one way. The 95-year-old WWII veteran who is walking from east to west coasts in the U.S. to bring attention to a retired warship has found another way.

The thousands of young people who have erected foundations to bring philanthropic funds to various worthy causes in the developing world have found another.
And yesterday’s blog noted Steve Chase’s bus to bring venture capital to previously unnoticed entrepreneurial ventures in middle America has found another.

What if, in a dream-world utopia, not only would all democratic elections be funded through the public purse, there by levelling the playing field, and hopefully offering authentic opportunities to access the levers of power to those previously denied access because of lack of funds…
AND

WHAT IF public funds were to be set aside, and then allotted to public foundations that seek to implement a social awareness, a public education, and a social movement to achieve worthy public policy for which we all are so desperate.

Private money, while useful, cannot not continue to be the primary resource for social policy institutes. In that world, that private money will naturally seek initiatives that comport with their ideological, ideational, and ethical preferences. That is why some think tanks struggle for funds because they refuse to accept money from governments, corporations or labour unions.

Surely, if we are able to separate national “order” awards from the purview of the government of the moment, we could also establish a separate, yet public, philanthropic account, with a supervising body of impartial jurors, like the Canada Council has done for the arts for decades, to judge the various applications from proposed social policy institutes, think tanks, dedicated to the pursuit of worthy and notable public policy awareness and education, without regard to a political party or its ideology.

Monday, March 18, 2019

Decrying scarcity, parsimony, seniority and resistance




Deeply embedded, to the point of becoming imperceptible, in our Canadian, and  other political cultures, are two qualities that serve conflicting purposes:
The two qualities are “tightfistedness” and “pay your dues” (read seniority trumps integration and acceptance)

Coming from a deep vein of cultural parsimony (in public relations terms: frugality) and status (in real terms: control), these two qualities have their root in scarcity, fear, anxiety and obsession with control. Those in charge, in power at the top, in every organization, school, church, town, city, province and corporation consider their “position” as more valued and valuable than those over whom they preside. They do, however, scrupulously and blatantly try to hide this belief, pretending to be “comrades” or “buddies” or “friends” with those for whom they are responsible. The worst cliché of this pattern is the parent who surrenders, abdicates, abandons his/her parental responsibilities to acquire a “buddy-buddy” relationship with the child(ren).
Ingratiation by “leaders” is so unbecoming and so abhorrent as to be considered reprehensible; it smacks of weakness, co-dependence, obsequiousness and manipulation. Taking many forms, such as flattery, exaggerated cheer-leading, anticipation of the most base desires of the “child” and then going out of the way to meet those desires, as well as refusing to confront when appropriate….these are just  of some of the subtle expressions of abdication.

And then, at the other extreme, is the person in leadership who abuses the post, by demeaning, denigrating, dismissing, ignoring, distorting and otherwise reducing the supervisees into oblivion. However, between the opposite ends of the continuum, are many much more subtle, yet just as nefarious, expressions of contempt, disdain, “challenging and testing” as most male leaders like to phrase it…(read: make him earn a spot on the team).

Imagine, for a brief moment, dear reader, if this kind of culture were to dominate in the classrooms of the nation. No new student would ever be permitted to “cross the threshold of “proving” himself worthy of the teacher’s respect given the brief time allotted to a school year. Tests, designed to demonstrate the student’s grasp of concepts (and probably still data) would be designed and administered to “fail” the student. (Recall the pride of the Economics prof. who announced to his freshman class: “look to the right, then to the left….3 of you 5 will fail this course!”) Opportunities for leadership, too, would be curtailed, restricted only to those who are seniors or at least juniors. Similarly, with new teachers, most of whom have some of the best and most innovative and creative thoughts and strategies just jumping to try them out. They would be held back from taking positions of leadership, while those with seniority, often simply because they have it, are considered the “cultural and thought leaders in the school. I am hearing not to silent whispers, “Schools are different from corporations, town councils, service clubs and churches, and the analogy does not apply!”

Really?

If that is correct in factual terms, then the “status-seniority-hierarchy-trust-worthiness” thing has been allowed to take over. New ideas, on the other hand, are the life-blood of individuals, classrooms, shop floors, board rooms, ER’s, OR’s, court rooms, and especially sanctuaries, whether we are open to acknowledging it or not. And the exercise of power, in its most healthy, effective and humane manner, has to do more than give “token” or lip-service validation to both new people and new ideas. There is a bibliography of material being spewed out of publishing presses, laptops, television and computer screens, and over phones and tablets that demonstrate conclusively the threat from the abuses of power, by those wielding it. Their personal, professional reputations are being deeply wounded by their own acts of co-and-omission. Their attitude of “entitlement” is and will continue to damage the immediate potential for real, far-sighted, well-informed and researched policies in a plethora of sectors, but also to the development of trust and confidence, and “obedience” through loyalty to our institutional structures in our young people.

Call it arrogance, impertinence, insouciance, deviousness, downright absolutism or merely chicanery; this rusting out of the reasonable expectations of ordinary people in how power has been, should be and even must be exercised, through the willful acts, statements, attitudes and even beliefs of many in positions of leadership will, inevitably, (and not because it says so here) bite the culprits. Yet that is not the biggest problem. It has and will continue to bite all of us, given the abdication of reasonable responsibility for the discharge of power and leadership in all sectors.

Of course, the headlines shout the abuses of political power. Nevertheless, we must not let those headlines hide the abuses of power, much less noticeable and less nefarious perhaps, but still imitating “higher” abuses and thereby contributing to a culture of both impotence and dereliction of duty. Whether this dereliction of duty is to the small social club, the small business operation, the public organization or the governance of a jurisdiction (over which there are fewer and less courageous reporters digging into malfeasance, injustice and arrogance, thereby normalizing abuses, through silence and default).

Entitlements, of all kinds, demand exposure, even if they are mere social irritants, like gnats in our soup on the patio. The former executive who demands a head-table seat, supplanting a current executive, so s/he can introduce a guest from the head table (an introduction just as readily and acceptably done from the floor) is abusing his position in the organization. The teacher who takes 90 students back forty-five minutes into a lecture, to bring his principal up to date, is abusing his power, for his own political ambition.

The long-term office holder in an organization, (and this is especially flagrant in churches!) who thinks, and believes that s/he is the gate-keeper on church membership, policy, teaching curricula, bill-paying, renovation and re-decorating is abusing the organization, as well as the individual people in the pews. No self-respecting person, new or old, can or should tolerate such abuse, and yet it happens everyday, right under our noses. And the normal response: “Well, s/he has been here for a very long time, and knows how things are done here!”

Similarly, in corporations, political parties, and most other organizations, long tenures accumulate territories and files of influence just because of durability, and often not because of ingenuity, creativity or adaptability or healthy leadership. And then we all throw up our hands when a new and relatively substantial and obviously worthy idea peeps through our consciousness, as if such an idea would overthrow “the established” tradition/culture/habit/modus operandi. Intellectually, we know and accept that conditions in all situations, circumstances are constantly changing; this is not a trait only of schools where children themselves are growing, developing and changing right before our eyes. It may be more obvious there, because it is in our faces every day. Voices, bodies, faces and even attitudes are in such flux that change is the only reliable constant.

And adapting, riding, surfing, dancing, championing and enjoying the changes are options available to educators, all of them making the profession both enjoyable and rewarding. Why then, following schools, colleges and universities, do we slide back into an attitude that sacralizes permanence, tradition, status, seniority, tenure and then equate those attributes to trust, acceptance, dependability, reliability and trustworthiness.

Are we so repulsed by, frightened by, resistant to, and troubled by new ideas, change, an impertinent question or observation, a new piece of information that challenges our “mind-set” and belief system that, as we do with death, we put it out of our minds, our faces, and our readiness to open and listen?

So, you say, “Well, the context is everything! We can accept a new idea if the project stage is in its infancy, if we are just brainstorming for new ideas, and if we are facing some kind of crisis. Yet, we would quickly become exhausted if we were to face a new idea every day. And how could any new idea really be evaluated, implemented and tested if we were to be open to them all. We have to filter, and discuss and debate the relative merits of each new idea; otherwise we will be failing to do what we have been charged with accomplishing.”

And it says here that each situation, in every country, town, city, village and hamlet is changing so fast, with new information, and new ways of calculating new equations and new expectations of all persons, tools, machines and organizations that our clinging to “how we have always done it” can no longer be called acceptable. We are lagging behind in our willingness, and our ability to tackle the most pressing problems facing each of us: inequality, planetary survival, poverty, resistance to anti-biotics, species eradication, access to education, health care, opportunity and purpose and meaning.

Oh, there are zillions of ideas, many of them siloed on a single bus, or in a single lab, or in a seminar, or in a pub-debate, or in a movie or television script, like little fresh-water springs shooting out from the earth, right in front of our eyes. And, yet, it says here, one of the main reasons they are not gathering public support, especially in our political and corporate board rooms, is that those in power see them as threats to their personal, entitled positions of power.

Steve Case, venture capitalist, was featured on CBS’ 60 minutes, last night, riding his “Rise of the Rest” red bus into the heartland of America, in search of new business ideas. With a jury of his peers, Case reviews submissions, (in Canada, CBC’s Dragon’s Den attempts a similar approach) and award seed money to the most promising business venture. When asked why he spends 20 hours/day riding a bus, he responds, “I love these entrepreneurs and I want to get everyone on the bus! Believing that the east and west coasts of America have received all the attention, developed the new ideas, grown the large percentage of new business ventures, while the middle of the country has been left behind, Case is putting up his own money (and that of other venture capitalists) to try to right the imbalance, not only of business opportunities but also of community hope and optimism.

Of course, it is far easier for a venture capitalist to hire and paint a bus and ride into the hinterland looking for new ideas than it is for a state or national government to do the same thing.

Really?

There are more resources, and more options for a state, or federal government to roll up their sleeves and mount similar venture support systems, if there was a political will to do it. Unconventional? Perhaps. Radical? maybe. Inappropriate? Certainly not! Shaming the various levels of government? Could be.

And yet, governments and many of our institutions are so mired in their own cement perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and habits (most of them directed to serving the private interests of those in charge) that the world is beginning to “burn” while  Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa, Bejing, Mumbai, Rome “fiddle.”

Only this time, that old adage is less metaphorical than literal, for the first time in human history.

And of course, those in power, clinging to their “rungs” on the ladder of social and political status, defer to the “cost” argument as their default position on any new idea. It will cost too much; it is an unproven concept that needs much more study so that we get it absolutely right (“after all, we will not allow ourselves to make a mistake!”) We build bridges to take the traffic of the last decades, not to accommodate the traffic flows of the next two decades. We envision new ‘systems’ by deconstructing the old ones, to suit the political class of the day. (Example, the demolition of the Ontario health delivery system, in order to remove the salaries of administrators, whether or not the system was working effectively. The political class ideology of cost-cutting (euphemistically labelled frugality, putting money in the pockets of citizens, and leaner administration) will only have to be confronted by a future government willing to face the challenges of the omissions and the delays and the decline in services that the cost-cutting will impose.

Frugality, too, imposes a template on the purchase of retired military submarines, fighter jets, (all in need of refurbishment), as it does on payroll cost-cutting like the imposition of the Phoenix system. Known to be inoperable prior to its installation by those civil servants charged with its implementation, only they refused to bring that fact to the attention of their superiors, refusing to bring truth to power, in order to protect their own jobs, reputations and careers. Thousands of ordinary public servants working under this system have received no pay, overpay, or intermittent pay for at least three years, leading to lost careers, internships, houses, families and reputations, through no fault of the federal government workers. Designed as a way to reduce costs, the boondoggle has resulted in budget over-runs of millions of dollars, at last estimate some $50 million more to fix it, if it is ever truly fixed.

Keeping to the “tradition” also raises its ugly head in the testimony of Gerald Butts, he of the Prime Minister’s Office, when he told Trudeau that if he accepted a declined Cabinet appointment from a prospective Minister (Jody Wilson-Raybould, to Indian Affairs, for legitimate and publicly declared reasons of opposition to the hated Indian Act), he would find himself facing interminable refusals from others. How presumptuous! How inappropriate! How arrogant!

Another sign that what “has been” has become sacred, from a process perspective, unless and until, of course, there is a political “need” that overrides the proscribed legal process (as in the political interference with the Attorney General’s refusal to intervene in the Prosecutor’s decision to refuse a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, previously enshrined in law, to please the corporate benefactor of the Liberals, SNC-Lavalin.

We vacillate between occasional bursts of “damn-the-costs” to “frugality in the extreme” as if our governments were careening between two lethal political threats, a crashing rock of public humiliation at spending too flagrantly, and the equally demeaning prospect of parsimony, as if we are unable to envision a balanced approach.
As with our exercise of power, we careen between superficial unctuousness (false modesty) and obsequiousness on the one hand, and overweening abuse even in the most private and intimate exchanges. It is not only the middle of America that has been and continues to be left behind. We are all being left behind in terms of our relegation to the back of the proverbial public bus, many of us clinging to the rear bumper, like so many of those freedom riders in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s.

Trouble is, many of us have not quite cottoned onto the full implications of  the ways by which power is being abused by even the most “likeable” people, in our clubs, churches, town councils, chambers of commerce, school boards, banks, financial institutions, corporations and of course, provincial, state and national governments, including our national security apparatus, our military and our judicial systems.    

Friday, March 15, 2019

"Falling" a word-play documentary



f
   a
       l
         l
           i
             n
                g
into a rock garden
                             off a five-foot concrete wall
                                                                          on my stomach
apparently set off a movie
                                                     in the unconscious
introducing the body to the v
                                             e
                                             r
                                             t
                                             i
                                             c
                                             a
                                             l
                                                               universe
was it a trap or an invitation?
                                      was it an opportunity or a sentence?
or more likely a pseudonym
                                             for
                                                 loss
                                                       of
                                                         control
                               in spiritual terms
a loss of ego, self, a dissolving
                                                  into something “greater?”
                                                                                       than ‘me’
or a foreshadowing
                                 of “falling” in love….with
                                                                              another?
                                                                                          the etereal?
                                                                                                           God?
repeated when falling from a two-wheeler
                                                         crashing into a car sneaking
                                                                                                   from an angle-park
                                            into my path
                          while the biker gawked at Shannon a passing co-ed
                                              
and later, this time falling  u  p   the stage stairs  and landing face    d
                                                                                                               o
                                                                                                                 w
                                                                                                                    n
                                                                                                          on the stage
                    in Steelworkers’ Hall
                                                       in front of five-hundred laughing adults
 while earnestly and immaturely pursuing the “star” trophy in the
                                   1951 Kiwanis Music Festival… playing John Thompson’s
                       Three Blind Mice

reinforced by an accidental slip on soap,
                                mischievously rubbed
                                             into the rope rug
                                                                       on the diving board
secured by a rusted bolt that
                                                     pierced the shin, leaving the bone exposed…

as if the universe needed more reinforcement
                                         this innocent was coached by a best “friend”
in the proper stance for firing a twelve-gauge shot-gun for the
                                                                                                   first time
“hold it loose from your shoulder, to avoid its kick”
                                          was his instruction before he backed away
                                into uproarious laughter as I
                                                                                landed on my derrier

and then, at sixteen returning from the YWCA camp
                                                          in the half-ton, with the three-ton engine,
                             we slid into the ditch and struck a large boulder,
           tipping the truck onto its left side
                                                              pinning the red leather jacket I was wearing
                                                                            to the road out the driver’s window
another fall,
                    this time,
                                    in a machine
                                                         outdone by the
embarrassment when the town saw the
                                                              crippled Dodge
                                                                                with its Dad-sign
on the tow-truck’s lot hours later
                                                            on Sunday morning

still relentlessly trying to tame the green-broke filly
                                       the envelop with piano exam results
from the Conservatory
                                                         exposed a 63, when a 70
was needed to pass
                                
     and the darkened car that jammed into
                  the right-front “bug” fender, on a sloppy snowy intersection
at Richmond and Central as this sophomore turned in
                             pursuit of a pizza after a day of
              reading Milton’s Paradise Lost
                                                   in prep. for finals at Western

and then falling into the recently thawed
                                  Rosseau River,
                                                          out of a twelve-foot canoe,
                                                             while shepherding an outdoor class of teens..

the movie reaches a turning point
                                                     in a conversation in Callander
with a poet, who quietly asks, after reading some attempts at poems,
                            “when are you going to jump off the cliff?”

had the universe been shouting “Lucifer,” that angel of pride
                              who fell from heaven….into deaf ears?
                 had the universe been trying to get my attention?
                                    had these many “falls” been the universe’s
call to awaken a sleeping,
                                        protected,
                                                       masked  
                                                                      impenetrable
                                                                             frozen
                                                                                        psyche and soul?
without consciousness, was this another archetype of the
                       Anglican/Episcopal
                                                       Chosen Frozen?

little wonder, when confronted by choirs, guilds, and committees, as well as
                                        Bishops and Archdeacons
                                                                                  from inside
I experienced a bucket-full of “cubes”
                                                        needing their own
                                                                                      falls/thaws/meltdowns
                                                                            in silence