We lived then in North Vancouver,

Surrounded by second growth hemlock pioneering post-clearcutting and lightning strikes.

Where my sisters and I would fight over sunlight.

Where we were born ready to grow.

I didn’t know then the lengths we could go,

or that the heights would render our roots unchained, I didn’t know

that endurance and strength aren’t the same.

That virtue isn’t pain.

When the woodsman tried to cut me down

and missed,

I entwined within,

(Like a burl under bark)

I grew without wanting to think about the marks it left on me.

I know the autumns did change me.

But anyway,

I was close to growing the new season's leaves and I left my fruit decomposing right where I was supposed to.

Now time slows as I lie on the needle-lined forest floor without a compass;

Wet terrain, circumnavigated by fairy rings, fungus,

I know I was younger then, and if I’m honest,

Each experience means less and less the more that I experience.

I still don’t know if meaning comes from life or from the one experiencing it.

Sometimes,

I can’t believe that the one experiencing it was me.

Can’t help seeing why that means what it means.

Can’t help that I missed being who I’d been;

Missed me

Like an axe off target,

Barely avoiding the bark.

I felt like myself again by the full moon in Capricorn, and that winter I woke to soundless snow.

I hope you know I hope you know I hope you know.

Love is love until it becomes a story.

A story is the meaning we tell to ourselves.

There’s no meaning in everything.

There’s meaning only in anything we choose to love

(and we loved then, in North Vancouver).

Last night the moored boats at the dock rocked quietly under crescent moon.

My dog dreamt from the foot of my bed as I stargazed a pixelated galaxy on my wall.

A hundred kilometres from all of this, a tree fell in the rainforest and no one was around to hear it.

The sonic waves travelled through the air but without the vibrations striking an eardrum

No sound existed.

Last summer, a five hundred year old western red cedar was one of many ancient trees felled in the Nahmint Valley after gaps in government mapping missed this priority-old growth forest.

I had no idea.

I hadn’t heard.

***

I consider the past five years my sponge period.

I want to take in the world in order to wake up to it.

Mourning tragedy brings it more meaning, and it’s a gift to support others in giving their suffering meaning.

Once I was told that prayer is my purpose in this life, and that love is my karma.

I think it’s good for the universe when we grieve loss.

I think it’s good for us.

Especially in a culture that celebrates justice only as a function of hindsight.

In the same vein, taking in tragedy without holding hope clouds possibility.

When we don’t have certainty in loss, there is still gain.

The berry I picked off the bramble is both sour and sweet until I taste it.

The moon is both waxed and waned until I look out my window to see.

The cherry blossoms in April are both open and closed until I smell them in the air on the street.

The ocean is both cold and warm until I dip my feet.

Reality exists by act of observation.

(So I wonder,

If multiple states are possible,

Is the state determined by observation, or revealed by it?

So I wonder,

If multiple ways are possible,

Is its meaning determined by the observer, or revealed by them?)

Regardless, I guess

What I do know:

Noticing is care, and care is meaningful.

Noticing is care, which means that

Prayer is purposeful,

and that’s because there’s one who hears it. If only even the Self.

Maladaptive daydreams,

Thought machine,

Lessons in fragility,

I chose to see the best in us while looking at the worst in me,

Coffee, strawberries, Kafka,

Macrocosmic contemplation and action potentiation,

Music is time’s decoration,

Time is a dimension

Of moments,

Music saves lives,

Music listens

To the process

This is me lately

Working on my concept of time,

Late for everything

Feeling it all nonstop

But I won’t admit that I believe the signs,

Because it’s true people project their thoughts of self on the inside,

(so maybe it was always about me).

Still,

I did care for you.

Carried the thought of you.

Had a soft spot for you.

Sometime ago, she saw him. Climbing the western wall on the Sea to Sky.

He was unexpected and unafraid. Every move was a graceful levitation upwards, and every hold he grasped was perfectly arranged, as if the metamorphic rock had shaped itself in anticipation for him.

He didn’t fall — not once.

Now she runs her fingertips over crystals of granite.

Magmas solidified over years, and storms, and sunlight.

Climbing?

She says

Climb on.

He catches her fall. He kisses her neck.

She combs her hands over the wall until they find a nipple in stone and latch.

He takes in the rope.

It was sometime ago that they met. It was winter, it was off-season.

They devoured each other’s lives but vowed to never share one together. Not even for one night.

Yet it was inevitable.

They later pressed their bodies into the soil and surveyed their speckled stars,

Speaking truths with careful tongues and hungry hands,

And the words disappeared from them into the midnight sky along with their hot breath — but the mountains remember.

As they always have, and as they always would.

It took every iota of her being to unlearn the number of things she wished she didn’t know, and the number of things she wished she did,

But she did unlearn, and with every climb she ascended from it, and with every climb she fell. He caught each one, cradling her by the harsh protection of her harness and his control over the rope.

I trust he’ll catch me, she promised the rock as she jammed her fist in the crevice and walked upwards.

Now she sees him, climbing the wet wall at Sulley’s Hangout.

The unmaintained route slick with lichen and sweat. She promises with every slip or drop that she’ll catch him.

But not once did he fall.

Dave was in his twenties when he began his career in the forestry industry.

He loved mathematics and was a skilled engineer. He graduated top of his class at UBC and carried the scholarships he gained therein to his masters at Yale.

He saw Iris for the first time on the ferry from Nanaimo to Vancouver in 1952. Two weeks later he asked her to marry him.

She felt it was all too soon, but he was sure.

They moved to a logging camp off the forest service road connecting Port Alberni to Bamfield.

This community was home to hundreds of forestry workers and their families employed at that time by MacMillan Bloedel.

The camp was called Franklin River.

They raised three children there until moving to the mainland.

They were never rich in money, but certainly in love for one another.

Like many academics, he was socially reserved and very awkward.

At times his words could cut.

One summer his son Robbie was playing in the backyard plum tree when he fell and had the wind taken from him. Dave called him a fathead and told him to brush it off.

So he did.

He loved his garden where he planted heirloom squash and root vegetables and iris bulbs that grew very tall flowers for his wife.

He was deeply sentimental about his ancestry and made detailed charts of the family tree.

(Sensitive, intelligent men are often very afraid of their own mortality, I notice).

Once he told me that if you stroke the back of a dog’s head very lightly it will put them into a deep sleep.

I tried it on the family dog and it worked.

He said that’s how he escaped a pack of wolves on the Alberni inlet once.

Franklin River closed in the early eighties.

I discovered it as a huge, dusty excavated land mass a few years ago while driving through.

I knew I had found it when I saw a sign that read “Franklin Pit.”

The silence was reckoning and I wasn’t sure if I was trespassing.

He heard the owl call his name at the age of 88, lying in bed in their family home.

In the basement was a Hammond M-111 he had bought his son in the home organ craze of the seventies.

I can distinctly remember its tone.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

Before the beginning there were no heavens and no earth.

No time or matter.

Meanwhile, the Word is reason

Built into existence’s fabric.

The Word is the universe that experienced itself.

You see,

To be a body is to experience

The limits of the senses,

But what is imperceptible to us

Exists still and still exists.

Thisness.

Suchness.

To bypass

These filters is to see invisible frequencies, and what is language if not seeing sounds?

When I hear the Sound of Silence I am taken back to sixteen.

“I think of anyone you are the most like me.”

I have a lot of clarity

Over this now.

Like,

Sensitivities

Are gifts when grounded in the filtered view.

Life’s complexities

Are gifts I can use to get through to you.

I’m disoriented by the disingenuous, but

Those who came before us knew that storytelling was medicine.