Ancient cedars

The air, sweet with pine and soft hush after the chainsaw’s whine is stilled. Carl is guide to the lively, sharp-toothed blade slicing green wood that will be my winter’s comfort. Once split, one season of sun and the keen screams of wind raw from the river, strips the living water from these felled trees. I am looking at the decadent center of each round when I hear Ben talking about the beached grey whale lying dead at Tsawassen’s tide line. He is telling us that sometimes if bulldozers or backhoes cannot drag the 50 tons of carcass close enough for the sea to slip her waves beneath the gravid weight, men thrust dynamite inside each orifice and cut open still more wounds to bear their explosives. Blubber, bone and blood blown sky-high, shattering this lover of water, this song-ful leviathan of the deep. Warm, red stain of a mammal like you and I, now scattered across the sand like the pieces of Osiris by his brother. I am shocked into stillness. I can see the bones shining, suddenly exposed to air.
I seek refuge in the rings of this tree. I ground myself in round circles telling me of its history, the dark strands woven with the light, the transforming of wind and earth and rain, the turning of day and night into something of grace and green. Some say whales carry the memories of all the world inside them. In what dark cavity can they find a place for this?
Clay breaks silence in a whisper. I hear his reverence. Words set adrift in the air like an offering. Sentences compressed like the incense of trees. Ancient Canadian trees.Cedars twisted in limb and gnarled with age like bonsais. Some, he said, seeded themselves in tiny crevices of rock before the first Crusade. Long before Columbus touched the continent those cedars were sipping air from their tenacious holds in cracks scarring rock ledges of the Niagara Escarpment.




Wiry roots wound tight in grains of soil fallen from the talons of eagles. I wonder why I have never heard of these trees? They possess the inner secret of how to thrive in the earth's cracked seam. The way they live 2000 years on air and emptiness. Tempests raging all around them.There must be something in the heartwood itself. Something they must take inside them like the rock takes in the light. It makes me think of those wise women and men who sit still and let everything flow through them. Peacefully abiding. Meditating in the mouths of darkness with the eye of the heart wide open. Opening the way for vast emptiness. Opening the way for the infinite moment. Round and whole and perfect, turning eternity's golden wheel. Opening the way for the light.

Chrysanthemums

I sat watching the river early this morning. A great blue heron and I shared the slanting arrows of rain. They entered silent and quick as slivers, breaking the skin of the slough. The bird was concentrating all its stillness on what lay beneath the silted tide.
Myself, I was transfixed with fire. Cacophony of chrysanthemums, long stems bearing their spiked crowns aloft, shining chrome yellow, crimson, and traffic cone bright. A corolla of flames rising between slate sky and water bleak as zinc. Somebody had left a bouquet in a plastic Schweppes tonic bottle carefully cut and tied with a strand of twined wool, white and blue fastened to a bench overlooking the Fraser. Rain dark as a beaten shield falling around this golden shrine, alight, luminous as fireworks bursting in the gray cataract of the morning.
Sometimes, I think I'll go blind from the looking. The eye longs to draw its dark curtain across the unthinkable. We strain toward the invisible, hungering for some shape of beauty, the flash of light to feed us, the one thread binding us to the center of things. We lose sight of eternity when all the time it burns bright as an ember inside us. See here, the dark cerement of earth and sky alive, this offfering of fiery petals more brilliant than any pyre.
I wanted to return with a splash of gin, to dissolve my witness into the pure tonic collected in memory of the dead. To honour the way one tender gesture can for a moment return them alive to us. But I lingered, and oh the glory to see the heron unfold its wings. Silent angel rising. The river flowing serene. Blades of marsh grass were swaying, gently bending in memory of her passing.

San Francisco, Mexico. On the trail to Casa Kali.

photograph by Isabella Scandolari

The heart has built its nest
in an ecstasy of thorns.
Coracle of protection suspended
in branches woven
like a tattooed crown.
It was always the dangerous
you loved the best.
The bright hook. The torn flesh.
But now, when i look on
that cage of twisted limbs,
the suffering,
I see only the bright blue
blessing. All that openness beckoning.
Each black barb
enfolded
in the light's invitation.

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