Tuesday, October 17, 2023

History’s Wintry Swirl

 

It is December and we must be brave

For the Plague is snow pellets

Tapping with lacquered nails

On complacency’s window panes 

The viral fog of its breath

Smudges with  misinformation

Obscures clarity’s inclination to care, to cope, 

To caress unfolding moments. 

 

Bravery is shovelling the snow, salting the ice

Giving the stranger his or her footing,

Patience with the variants of darkness,

The willingness to wait, to endure.

 

This is not the Battle of Britain

The screech of the V2’s

Nor the Siege of Stalingrad

But a real chance in history’s wintry swirl

To be brave and to be kind.

 

J.R. MacLean

Jan. 2022


 I-padded

 

here you are

un-breathing glow

on the mattress with me

responsive to touch taps

playful swipes

as your warm screen

takes us places unreal

 

afterwards

you whisper sports talk

and spiritual truths

close by my ear

as hypnogogic mandalas

formed of hockey sticks

lull me to dreamland

 

here you are

at breakfast

breaking news

latest weather

disasters

floods fires and

stuff to amuse

when we hit

the shitter

hearts with friends

scrabble scores

other loose ends

 

at work you’re wrapped

round my wrist

you vibrate when I fall

I tell you I’m okay

no need to make the call

pulse and pressure normal

thanks friend nurse and pal

tonight we’ll sleep together

I’m so comfy

in your thrall


September 2023

 

Sunday, October 23, 2022

On the porch 2022

 On the Porch

9 AM July 10, 2022

 

the squirrel’s twitchy tail tip

signals like a furry flag

from the birch tree’s

forked limbs

bright-eyed head

from round the trunk’s base

pauses trembling alive

goes to ground to forage

long, soft tail spikes

groomed, tailored, symmetrical

bristle from

rat-tentacle core

illumined dull blood red

by the morning sun.

 

 

On the Porch

6 PM July 8, 2022

 

pansies soft yellow

like lemonade

face away from the porch

towards the light of the yard

yellow petals thinned

by sunlight are 

cradled by

deep green starfish

atop slender stems

amidst a vibrant jostle of leaves.

 

day lilies flame orange

cluster spatter everywhere

strain sunwards in unison

wide mouthed supplicants

drink god’s gold

before the final closing

 

and the mildest of deaths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Porch

July 6, 2022

 

the cloud is

a bunny doing the backstroke

at dinner a baby bunny

lounged in the grass

beside the hydrangeas

oblivious to the hawk strike

of two weeks ago

and to the squirrel proof

bird feeder dangling above

 

mourning doves arrive

feather sheen softest brown

black pearl eyes flick

sparks of the sun

one ponders entering 

the garden’s lush wall

where beaked aside

seeds have fallen

but backs out unsure

when I scratch my head

 

a chipmunk reconnoitres

harmless and small

though a bully to bunnies

a startled flutter of feathers

that chirp on the downstroke

and the doves are gone.

 

 

 

 

On The Porch

 

6:57 PM May 18 2022

 

in the sky is a soccer player

running flat out kicking an

oblong rain cloud ball

 

the lilacs to my left 

once towered, 

now trunks as thick as

a ballerina’s thigh

are mere stubs

truncated arms 

reaching from earth to nothing

roots loose

 

they make good firewood.

 

from their midst

(stems like dancers’ upraised arms) 

a new lilac bouquet 

brandishes sturdy young blooms

which emanate beam

sweet scented whiteness 

through my

seated seduced head

and

broadcast love

to distressed bees

everywhere.

 

Saturday, December 25, 2021

Zen, Yoga, and the Church of Pickleball

 Zen, Yoga and the Church of Pickleball

By J.R. MacLean

 

 

 

Pickleball is Spiritual Practice

 

Pickleball is my spiritual practice, a conscious activity that cultivates well-being, builds understanding, enhances awareness and opens the heart. I’ve dabbled in yoga and zen, examples of spiritual practices that have been robustly effective for thousands of years. But Pickleball? Pickleball! The very name is ludicrous though perhaps sexy on an infantile level. Could this fastest growing sport in North America also be a form of spiritual practice? 

 

The boomer friendly game currently taking over the known universe has me in its thrall, and as a person who likes to think of himself (a non-spiritual practice) as a spirited person, my current obsession with the game ergo must be due to its spiritual benefits. Sure, endorphins are exercised and aggressions are exorcised by the therapy inherent in repeatedly whacking an aerated plastic sphere. But there must be more to pickleball than an addictive happy place where we can play like children. Or is that in itself simply a case of following one’s bliss?

 

 

The Pickleball Hero’s Journey

 

Mine begins with my basketball buddy Bill, a soft spoken retired professor with some modest Gandalfian characteristics. He, with an assist from the Covid plague, got me out to the dedicated courts at Knights of Columbus park, introduced me to the game, and sold me a paddle. In the spring and summer throngs of pickleball devotees attended those courts and lounged around them as players filled the warm air with shouts and the thwacking sounds of paddled balls. My paddle joined those of the non-winners, and remained there. I was hooked nevertheless, and eager to learn the mysteries of the game. Fortunately there was no lack of pickleball priests and priestesses available to initiate me.

 

There was ‘Too Tall’ Robbie, a charismatic presence who loved to dominate the net and needle the participants. The first time I worked as his partner and miss-hit my first shot he loudly asked if he might have a partner better than a 2.0. This is part of the arcane pickleball rating scale, which I believe goes to 5.0. A 2.0 indicates some one who is unsure of which end of the paddle to hold. Later he kindly told me that I had the ‘ability’ and just needed practice. Then there was ‘Drill Sergeant’ Debbie who delighted in pointing out my foot faults and in roaring at me to “Get up here!” when I lallygagged in no man’s land instead of getting up to the net. There is nothing like the immediacy of on the spot coaching.

 

Immediacy is in fact a huge spiritual component of pickleball. The game can move very fast and he or she who lets their mind wander can quickly find themselves woefully out of position or smacked somewhere delicate by a fast-moving aerated sphere. In this game, as with mindfulness, presence is at a premium. There are also the challenges, which increase in difficulty with age, of remembering your partner’s name, the score, whose serve it is, and which side or portion of the court one is supposed to be standing on. The need for presence and attention is compounded by the need to observe and anticipate the type of shot an opponent is hitting. Are they driving, lobbing, or dinking and does the shot have under, over, or side spin? Are they moving towards or away from the net? Is there an opening where the return shot should be directed? That’s a whole lot to process in the split second available for many shots. Engagement in the moment, with no time to think, is at the core of the pickleball experience just as it can be in spiritual practice.

 

Zen, yoga, and the art of pickleball

 

Once upon a time I had the privilege of visiting a Zen monastery and taking part in a ‘sesshin’, a week of intense spiritual practice in which virtually every moment is ritualized. Imagine having the role of ‘server’ at an orioki meal. Practitioners, who have been sitting ‘zazen’ since being awakened at four AM, are brought their food while still sitting on a cushion on the floor in a meditative posture. Servers, who themselves have been up since four AM, stride into the zendo balancing huge serving bowls while chanting a mantra. They maintain all this while kneeling down in long heavy robes to serve each participant beginning with the presiding Roshi. Much like the pickleball player trying to be aware of paddle positioning, court positioning, ball velocity and direction while approaching the net, the Zen server has to trust his or her ability and instincts. Disaster, or at least a lost point, lurks in both situations. Pickleball, like zen, albeit milder and more fun, is an overt training in staying in the moment. And in both practices, there is always more to learn.

 

It can be argued that anything, when done with mindfulness, can be spiritual practice. Chop wood. Carry water. Wash the dishes. Dink one off the top of the net. Being completely present and aware for any of these activities, can, with reason, be called spiritual practice. But are there elements particular to pickleball that make it amenable to being a spiritual practice, more so than, say, NFL football or tennis? I put something like this question to my pickleball teacher Alan Sargeant, a person uniquely qualified to answer as he has also been a Yoga teacher for some twenty years.

Says Alan: 

      “Playing pickleball can be meditative. When you are really focussed on the ball and intensely enjoying the game it provides a peace of mind that is spiritual in my view. Playing pickleball regularly can train you to concentrate deeply while being very relaxed. In addition, the interpersonal dimension of pickleball can provide many opportunities to selflessly help others which I consider the practice of Karma yoga or selfless service…It can create more harmony amongst groups of people and a greater enjoyment of day to day living. If humans are enjoying their lives, they tend to be kinder and more concerned with the welfare of the planet.” 

 

Pickleballers do tend to enjoy life. My first teacher, Paul, was always genial, even though he needed shoulder surgery and a hip replaced. Mattie, who welcomed me into the outdoor scene, was always chipper, even after he had a knee replaced the following week. People love to play, and keep coming back, despite the need for a fresh body part every now and then. Good humour flows along with the endorphins. Funny things happen. Dramas unfold. People get injured. Courts have to be squeegeed and wiped with old towels. It is all done with enjoyment because the game itself is so much damn fun. And what is spiritual growth if not enhanced enjoyment of, or perhaps enjoinment in, life as it is?

 

So pickleball is spiritual practice. Or at least it can be, depending on the attitude of the participant. In pickleball, as in life, attitude is everything. If one gets frustrated or down on oneself with every little mistake, or is ultra competitive and too driven to win, then participation in a sport where boo boos and lucky shots happen all the time can be frustrating. Forgiveness (a noted spiritual quality) of oneself and others is as fundamental to enjoying pickleball as is a deep service return. Add the social dimension, which tends to thrive on a small, more intimate court with the consequent opportunities for teasing, repartee and compliments along with on and off the court suggestions that help players become better, and participation can become a joy. I imagine in the old days going to church, meeting the neighbours, singing some hymns or gospel, might have been an experience with similar effects. In going to church, practicing zen, doing yoga, or playing pickleball one gets dressed up in special clothes, convenes with like-minded others,  participates in various rituals, and generally feels better for doing so. All are ways of sharing spirit.

 

Hinduism (the 4000 year old religion) and yoga (Hinduism’s spiritual discipline) see the world, the universe as ‘leela’, which means play or playfulness. In Mathew 18:3 Jesus says: “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” I am grateful, in an unprecedented time of plague, to be able to become a big creaky old child having fun with like-minded pickleballers. It is certainly the most spirited, and arguably the most spiritual, activity of my week.

 

 

Friday, November 5, 2021

 Ode to our Cast Iron Frying Pan

 

Your tempered contours fire forged

Your fecund plain a dance floor 

Finger filtered goodies dishevel 

Shiver goofy in the moment’s heat

Scents vapours mingle merge

Forget the rip from the cling of milky earth

The cold rebirth in the vegetable drawer.

You crucible, you purveyor of nourishment 

Reconciler of flavours, maestro of symphonic sizzle:

Even after closing time, your breast littered, encrusted

Defiled with the unworthy post dance debauched

Can be a vehicle for insight, and for love,

For it is I that must tend to you

After you have yielded sumptuous morsels and

The food goddess has mercilessly cast you aside.

 

Ablution is first, prolonged phosphate free ablution

Your parched vulnerable skin will brook no soap

Lest future meals be tainted; a clear-watered soak

Elbow greased scrape, zesty jet scour, and you are

Clean but dull, spent, scourged by flavour’s ravages.

Now is the ointment moment, the reflective puddle poured

Sunflower oil sloshed into grateful pores

Your hard skin glistening black and newly risen;

Your heft in my hand as warm and real

As the meal disseminating light into the blood’s belly

Grows gratitude in my heart mind  for the feed

And more so for the opportunity to tend your needs

To salve you from the rust that never sleeps

To love even the patches of drudgery scaled

As we clamber towards the abyss.

 

JR MacLean

October 2021

Sunday, October 11, 2020

A reflection from The Kawartha Soul Project

 Courting Nanabush

by J.R. MacLean

 

In the summer of 2010 I decided to build a basketball court in our backyard. It was admittedly somewhat of a strange choice as our children had grown up and moved out years before. The hoop was already there, installed back in the late nineties when my son Jesse was still a young lad. He used it seldom though, as did I. Installed solidly, complete with concrete-filled post on sloping mossy grass, it remained something of a lonely beacon for many years.


Then in 2009 my literary leanings brought me, through a writer friend, to join the Peterborough Old Boys basketball league. This is a Sunday morning conglomeration of aging jocks and pseudo-athletes (I put myself firmly in the latter category) who compete throughout the winter for a motley collection of ramshackle trophies. Despite the fact that many of the participants are older and even more ramshackle than the trophies, I found that most of those old geezers had skills far in excess of my own. I wanted to hit shots, make layups, get to the foul line. In short, I aspired to be far better than I was. I wanted, and still want, to at least be an average player in that ramshackle league.


Any number of issues impeded my progress in that direction: lack of confidence, lack of endurance, lack of skill, lack of ability, lack of competitive spirit, lack of size, and lack of experience. What I do have, however, is spunk. A plucky willingness to beat my head against a stone wall until one or the other gives in. Some might call it stubbornness, pigheadedness, or being wilfully delusional. But I prefer spunk. The word has a nice ring to it. Like the sound of ripe fruit hitting a concrete surface. Which brings me to the apple tree in our backyard.


If I were to build a basketball court, part or all of the apple tree would have to go. Its trunk was out of bounds, but a good chunk of its foliage would impede any kind of baseline shot. The tree was not a top producer, yielding only a handful of hard little fruits suitable only for the squirrels. Considering all the facts, me and my hard little Darwinian heart went and got the big pruning shears. The tree remains, obligingly growing its remaining branches to the east, away from the court – a sacrificial monument to the first of many difficult choices yet to come. 


Prime among these was where and how to begin the actual court. I was but one lonesome aging man, handy, even super-handy at times, but one busily neglecting his home improvement business in order to write that novel that we all feel we have within us. Finances were limited, but pent-up energy from hours spent tapping laptop keys was not. I would compose the court in pieces, one concrete square at a time. Like the journey of a thousand miles, like the building of Rome, it could only be begun at the beginning. My starting line was the foul line: a row of bright blue tiles traversing a two-foot cement square. This grew square by square into an oblong island that encompassed the vestigial beginnings of the three-point line several feet behind the foul line. By the end of 2010 I'd created another island of squares under the basket. Practice was possible if one didn't mind the crazy ricochets of the air-filled sphere into parts of the yard where no sane basketball should dare to go. Parts such as my wife's gardens, the ones she had lovingly built up over the twenty years we've been domiciled in this particular location. With about twenty squares completed, and a mere eighty or so to go, with the land still badly sloped, I was looking at a completion date of somewhere in the neighborhood of 2015 A.D.. But that reckoning did not take into account 2011, which became a year of lassitude and darkness.


A Dylan song lyric: "They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn". But in the summer of 2011 the brightest hour was right before the volcanic ash swept in, obliterated the sun, and rendered my world view into a dull grey murk. My novel, my beloved precious book over which I had laboured for so long, which, when finished, I had exulted over so excessively – mercilessly selling it to near-strangers – was not taking off as hoped. In fact, it never even sniffed the runway. Oh, the disappointment. The injustice. That my wonderful novel, reviewed so well, enjoyed by so many early readers, would suffer the same fate (wretched obscurity) as ninety-nine percent (at least) of the novels born into this world. There was only one course of action: to man-up, go into a shell, and be miserable. I would likely have done this more fully if left to my own devices, but there were still some niggling responsibilities, along with a disposition that does have a sunny optimistic side, that prevented me from sinking completely into a morass of self-pity, online poker, and self-medication with fine Belgian beer. Responsibilities such as being husband to a terrific wife, father to two terrific, albeit pretty-much-grown, children, son to an aging mother, proprietor of a home improvement business, and creator of the incipient awesomeness of an all-concrete basketball court. So, in a relatively robust moment, I ordered enough gravel to level the back third of our backyard and had it dumped in our driveway.

 

The mountain of gravel, delivered at the expense of a furrowed row or two worth of front lawn trashed by the dump truck's wheels, was so large that it blocked a good portion of my garage door. Even the dubious joys of the beer, the poker, and of wallowing in being an under-appreciated author could keep me from ameliorating this situation for only so long. In less than two weeks I was out there shoveling and wheelbarrowing this mountain of gravel into the backyard, spreading it into a plateau which one day would be my basketball court. But, as the book sales floundered so did the level of my industry. You might say that once the plateau was done my efforts...plateaued. Though a few more squares of concrete appered at sporadic intervals, by the end of the summer of 2011, the vast majority of the future court was still composed of gravel. Gravel in which, unbeknownst to myself, the seeds of an even deeper discontent were being sown.

Who would have ever dreamed that gravel could be so fertile? Who would have thought that by the end of May my future basketball court would become an 'unweeded garden' possessed completely by 'things rank and gross in nature'? Not only were the weeds that sprang up from the gravel rank, gross, and plentiful, they were also firmly on the gargantuan side. They towered over my wife's tulip garden like the spindly-legged invading machines from War of the Worlds. The death rays that emanated from those worthies were as nothing compared to what began to shoot regularly from the eyes and mouth of my beloved

and thoroughly exasperated spouse. Something had to be done. I exhumed the whipper-snipper from the garden shed. The 'war of the weeds' had begun. As I flailed about with the whipper-snipper, toppling noxious stalks left and right, revelling in a boyish joy of destruction, something awakened in me, something martial and determined, something akin to the aforementioned spunkiness that had inspired me to write a novel in the first place. I knew deep in my soul that this war of the weeds could not be lost. Victory had to be utter and forever, and this could only be achieved in one way: an impermeable concrete shield was the only thing that would deny the weeds forever. The basketball court had to be completed, and soon. In doing so I would bury for good the disappointments that had been festering in my mind and renew the playful creativity at the heart of my soul.

 

First, though, I had to get my wife off my back. As rightfully and righteously as she was pissed off, I could not fight this battle under her purview, much less her supervision. She had to be mollified, soothed, and distracted. The standard procedure of buying her flowers would be woefully inadequate. As long as she woke up in the morning, looked out the window or sat on our deck to enjoy her gardens, and saw a plateau of gravel speckled with weeds, however mown to a stubble they might be, I was going to be up poo-poo creek without a paddle. In a blaze of inspiration, doubtless much akin to when Michelangelo first discerned the figure of David within a block of marble, I realized what had to be done and did it. I built a nice white fence between herself, her gardens, and my basketball court. In doing so I not only invoked the timeless wisdom of 'out of sight, out of mind', I also created the backdrop where more gardens and pretty potted plants could be gainfully displayed. It was a classic win-win scenario. She had her idyllic botanical refuge and I had my fenced-in playpen. Relieved of the weight of marital imbalance, I was free to engage in that most manly of activities: to strategize and go to war. I picked up the phone and ordered more gravel.

 

I was making a quantum leap in concrete production. No more bags of premix to be opened, hefted, and dumped in the mixer. We were going back to the basics of concrete production: A-gravel, Portland cement, and a shovel. Shovelling meant less expense, quicker mixes, and the eventual expansion of my four-square-foot slablets into sixteen –square-foot monoliths in a single pour. Was there a downside to shovelling? Yes. One. It meant literally tons and tons of shovelling, one shovelful at a time. The new mountain of gravel in my driveway had to be shovelled into a wheelbarrow and moved to form yet another mountain in the backyard. This mountain had to be shovelled one scoop at a time, three scoops to one scoop of Portland, into the mixer which could hold about sixteen shovelfuls, then dumped into the wheelbarrow and rolled back to be poured into its rightful place in the forms that defined the basketball court.

 

My so-called friends in the ramshackle league all (or almost all) deftly avoided helping me, so I was quickly confronted with the necessity of dealing with thousands upon thousands of shovelfuls without lapsing back into the welcoming arms of Belgian beer and online poker. Arming myself after a modern fashion, I strapped on my trusty iPod Touch and listened to a book called The Power of Now to remind me again and again to be in the moment and experience the freshness of THIS shovelful and only THIS shovelful. Strangely enough, it worked. I began to enjoy the movements of my body as it swivelled, the subtle adjustments my feet made on the gravel, the crunch of the shovel as it dug in, the way I'd flex my knees to protect my back and try to take an optimum amount with each shovelful, building up skill to fling it ever more accurately into the wheelbarrow. Then there was the challenge of swinging the laden barrow through the narrow alley beside my garage, over the roots of the giant maple, and around the privacy screen where the cement mixer waited. Its weight and momentum were such that if I failed to pay attention, if I thought of this or that in the past or future, I could quickly find myself scraping an overturned load off the no man's land that was the grass of my backyard. It was somewhere in this process, after only one or two of the new, ever-growing-larger pours were completed, that I had another inspiration. I cannot recall when it happened, or where it came from exactly, but at some point amidst all that shovelling and wheeling, pouring and spreading, screeding and finishing, I had a thought that excited me so much that all the shovelling and work that lay ahead was no longer an issue. All that mattered was the implementation of this new idea, an idea that occurred to me with a good three-quarters of the basketball court yet to be completed. My idea was that my basketball court had to be embossed or inscribed with petroglyphs. 

 

I arrived at Petroglyphs Provincial Park early, so early that the uniformed girl opened the gates for me and unlocked the doors to the climate-controlled enclosure which protects the glyphs. We had brought our children there many times in the past before they grew up and left home. I knew the park had wooden templates of many of the glyphs there, as well as sturdy crayons, so their images could be reproduced by rubbing a film of crayon over them, much as I had done in my own childhood with the silver dollars or fifty-cent pieces my grandfather used to give me. Photographing the glyphs was forbidden for spiritual reasons of the contemporary aboriginal Canadian population. So I sat there under the whirring fans of the immense glass structure, rubbing away, only stopping to bother the attendant once or twice for more paper, as other visitors to the park gradually filtered in. It was these rubbed-crayon reproductions that I intended to take back to Peterborough and somehow transfer to the concrete of my basketball court.

 

But how was this to be done? Paper, crayon, and wet concrete are not a good mix. I chose six glyphs from the eight I had copied: Nanabush (a warrior spirit with incongruous but noble-looking bunny ears), a wild boar (which might also be a bison or bear), a turtle, a wide-mouthed face with electric hair (somewhat reminiscent of Munch's painting 'The Scream)', a stick figure of the sun, and ONE MORE. I cut out Nanabush first, making a template that could be filled in with his figure. But the template had to be waterproofed somehow or Nanabush was going to dissolve into a soggy mess. I took him down to the local Staples store and had him laminated. The plastic coating worked perfectly. I had a permanent reusable template that could be placed on wet concrete so the outline could somehow be imprinted. I hit upon the idea of pressing the laminated template down into the wet concrete, then roughing up the glyph's outline – in this case the rabbit-eared Nanabush –  by dabbing it with a paint brush. Then I would sprinkle and dab powdered black mortar colourant that I had left over from a long-ago job so that the glyph would hopefully stand out in permanent black relief that would not deflect the true bounce of a basketball. The idea, with the exception of some colour seepage around the edge of the figures (the boar figure ended up with a hazy, somewhat translucent, udder, which I hoped would be worn away with time) worked perfectly. As the long summer days unfolded to the rhythmic pebbly sloshings of my faithful Black Lynx concrete mixer, the basketball court, complete with creditable artfully-placed petroglyphs, came into being with surprising rapidity. It was around the beginning of August, with three of the six glyphs already in place, that things, surprising things, began to go wrong.

 

Foremost among these was that my trusty iPod could no longer be trusted. As earlier mentioned, much of my work time I had it strapped to my arm and listened to the Power of Now man Eckhart Tolle, or to my all-time singalong hits with classics roughly spanning the years 1955 to 1975. We can blame this proclivity on certain retrograde planets in my zodiac, or on the fact that I am one of the precious-few baby boomers who understand that there actually was worthwhile music in the days before rock 'n’ roll. Not just worthwhile but seminal, as in seminary, stuff that has a hint of religion in this thing called melody – something that more or less died with the birth of punk rock. One of the finer qualities of melody is that it instructs, even constructs, the spirit in subtle ways that we'll likely never understand. But I digress. I was speaking of my wonky walkman-like device. It began to act very strangely.

 

One fine day as I was pouring away, Eckhart's usually calm and dispassionate voice began shouting its truths in my ear, only to fade quickly to nothing. Now, an appreciation of nothingness is certainly part of his message, but I had no sooner begun to ponder this imponderability, when his voice gradually crescendoed back up into a scream, only to fade quickly again into nothingness. Thoroughly spooked, with eardrums painfully thrumming, I dropped the wheelbarrow handles and tore the buds from the portals of my ears. Pausing – one should never pause when one is pouring concrete because things tend to stiffen in ways that move well beyond the embarrassing into the irredeemable – but pausing nonetheless – I found myself staring down at the Edvard Munch-like screaming-head glyph with its wormy electric hair. Was that reproach I saw in those hollow oblong eyes? Had I transgressed? Were Nanabush and his fellow petroglyph gods beginning to extract their revenge because I was interloping where the uninitiated should not go? 

 

It occurred to me that I had recently been having problems with my laptop as well, that it had been freezing inexplicably, while dire messages warning of overheating and of the need for immediate maintenance had been popping up on my screen with increasing regularity. Freezing? Overheating? Why couldn't it decide how it wanted to self-destruct this time? And why was my iPod behaving so bizarrely? The screaming figure I gazed down at offered no answers, but I was sure that there was no way I was going to bounce a basketball on its face until I found myself a medicine man (or woman) and got myself some answers. I decided to be very circumspect in my pouring operations until I had done so.

 

It was early fall when I made the journey to Curve Lake. Fall in the Kawarthas begins just after Labour Day, despite what the calendar and the various theories of the equinox might say. It was a pleasant drive, with puffy September clouds, and the roadside trees beginning to be tinged with shades of red. Curve Lake is a First Nations territory, just to the north of Peterborough and west of Buckhorn. I had decided that here was my best bet to talk to someone who could answer my questions. Petroglyphs Provincial Park is much further, and though there was usually burnt ceremonial sweet grass on the rock face beside the glyphs, there was no guarantee that anyone with the required knowledge would be present. Also, I had been to the Whetung Gallery some years earlier and bought some Christmas gifts, along with a dream-catcher for my van. While I was impressed by the beautiful gallery and artwork, what struck me most then was the magnificent stone fireplace in which burned a stout fire. In the glow of this, several of the people from very young to very old were hanging out. I quietly joined them on the fringes where I enjoyed the ebb and flow of conversation and silence in perfect comfort. This fireplace struck me as being a kind of refuge, the embodiment of an ancient warming wisdom which is mostly lost in our culture.

 

There was no fire this time, just a gentleman of late middle age reading a newspaper. We struck up a conversation readily enough, and I soon discovered he was the founder and owner of the gallery. The fireplace, which he was getting the wood in for the next day, was decades-ago the sole source of heat in what was a much smaller building. I rather haltingly explained my basketball court obsession and my use of petroglyphs, stressing as well as I could the artistic context of what I was doing. I refrained from asking for an on-the-spot exorcism of my iPod. The gentleman was quick to reassure me, and took me on a little tour of the various potteries, paintings, and books he had in the gallery that incorporated the petroglyph symbols. One of the painters had actually stayed with the petroglyphs for a number of days to absorb their inspiration. The owner spoke simply but glowingly of his experiences with the gallery, with his only complaint being that he never got to go anywhere while his brother was off seeing the world. What pleased him most was that younger family members were now involved in running the place, and I sensed an assurance that his work in the gallery would likely continue on for many more decades.

 

With my concerns about violating native traditions lightened, I did likewise to my wallet, buying a coffee mug for my son and some earrings for my wife. There was a gas station just to my left as I drove out of the gallery entrance. There, an attractive female attendant was pumping gas. She looked at me and smiled and nodded, not at all as a come-on, but as if to say, "Hey, it is good to see you here in our community". That welcoming gesture further warmed my heart as I drove the Curve Lake road back out to the Buckhorn highway. My thoughts went back to a Toastmasters meeting I had attended close to twenty years earlier when a similarly attractive First Nations young woman named Fern had spoken to us about native lore and how they viewed their encounters with animals and birds. She said that every such encounter had a meaning: seeing a fox would mean one thing, while seeing a deer would mean another. Seeing two deer would mean yet another. The time of day when one saw the creature was important, as was which way they turned or flew when they left you. These thoughts were still with me when I turned onto the highway heading back towards Peterborough. As soon as I completed my turn I noticed a very large crow flying some fifty feet ahead of me. He was perhaps ten feet in altitude above the height of my van, and he followed the road as I did.

 

I knew that crows have a very special place in First Nations lore. Like Nanabush, the mythological rabbit-eared petroglyph figure, crows are very powerful and something of a trickster, somewhat along the lines of the Fool in a Tarot deck. Thrilled that this one's flight coincided so closely with my thoughts, I hunched forward over the steering wheel, my old dreamcatcher swinging as always from the rear-view mirror. The highway was empty so there was no problem matching my speed to the crow's. I followed him for perhaps some thirty seconds in a state of mystified elation, wondering which way he would veer off and what it might possibly mean. The thought flashed through my mind that to the right was probably better, as a leftward direction had more connotations of trickiness to it, at least in my mind. The sun, lowering towards evening light, brought out the inky feathered textures of his wings, and deepened the greens and splashes of autumn colours in the roadside trees. Time seemed to suspend itself, with black wings painted against white clouds embraced forever by blue. I giddily thought that the crow might fly with me all the way to Peterborough. I could see the look on my wife's face when I introduced her to my new friend. But after a few more long exalted moments, the spell was broken. The huge crow turned neither left nor right. Instead he gained altitude, lifting up and up until I had no choice but to drive under him, and he was lost to sight somewhere above the van. Though I checked all my mirrors repeatedly, I did not catch sight of him again. His work, it seemed, was done, and his most stylish exit was to disappear.

 

It took a few more weeks to complete the basketball court. The problems with the iPod eventually cleared up without any overt intervention on my part. The laptop, despite the addition of a new hard drive, remains quirky, but barely on the good side of usable to this day. The court, though still in some need of fringe landscaping, is glorious. Though my reasons for building it were murky at best, I'm sure it will remain a useful fixture for many years. Perhaps, if I manage to stay vertical long enough, I'll eventually shoot hoops on it with my future grandchildren. The important thing is that something inside of me glows when I look at it or step onto it amongst the petroglyphs. Something timeless, quirky, and a little crazy, like a tiny glowing inner star that lights, however dimly, the path my soul needs me to take.