Uncertainty, perspective, and moss

 

I like David Frum.  He's one of a handful of right-leaning commentators, like Canada's own Andrew Coyne, whom I always read because I need to know how people who don't lean left are thinking.  We can't just abandon ways of thinking on the basis of a thinker's ideology:  they know stuff we don't and have perspectives we ignore.  So last Thursday, Bill and I were finally getting our trip to Victoria, cancelled in February because the day before we were to leave I came down with an unspeakably bad cold, one that's still causing me to crash with post-viral exhaustion. But enough about me.  Back to David Frum. I had grabbed up a handful of magazines to read on the plane, including one with his article "Why the COVID Deniers Won."  We can't just ignore COVID deniers, labelling them uninformed or ill-educated, partly because such labels simply make them more intransigent.  Keeping conversations alive:  that's what civil discourse does, and that's what David Frum does in his careful paragraphs on uncertainty:

"The onset of the pandemic was an unusually confusing and disorienting event.  Some people who got COVID died.  Others lived.  Some suffered only mild symptoms.  Others spent weeks on ventilators, or emerged with long COVID and never fully recovered.  Some lost businesses built over a lifetime.  Others refinanced their homes with 2 percent interest rates and banked the savings.

"We live in an impersonal universe, indifferent to our hopes and wishes, subject to extreme randomness.  We don't like this at all.  We crave satisfying explanations.  We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it's somebody we don't like.  At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people.  This is the eternal appeal of conspiracy theories.  How did this happen?  Somebody must have done it--but who?  And why?" 

Blaming bad events on bad people.  We're in the midst of that right now, with all the uncertainty that entails.  (I won't name names.  In our household, we call him "Oh-oh," short for "Orange Oaf.") Even a brief review of history will uncover authoritarian leaders who made changes to millions of peoples' lives because they thought something--the economy?  Science? War?--worked the way they believed.  I only had to go as far back as Margaret Thatcher to recall an example, though her creation of chaos was largely limited to Great Britain and the Falklands. A war for the Falklands?  Why?

But what does this have to do with a week in Victoria?  Just as I put down David Frum's illuminating article, we were flying low over the ocean from Vancouver to Victoria.  I can't explain what I saw on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, except to say that there were swirls and streaks of smooth, silvery water punctuated by a background that glittered.  How could you possibly explain something as complex as these ocean currents?  How could you explain the islands that lifted from the ocean floor--someone can, I'm sure.  But those islands are also subject to forces too complex to be explicable in the aggregate, like storms and erosion.  Or this fact:  trees put out thousands of seeds every year, but very few actually root.  Why this one and not that?  And how will this tree growing influence the microclimate of the island? 

When you go on holiday, you put aside the daily commitments and habits that can more or less rule your brain and your life and instead commit yourself to wonder.  To being observant.  To asking idle questions.  That is was spring in Victoria--daffodils everywhere, even naturalized on the edge of the highway and in every yard, along with grape hyacinths and a dozen other wildflowers I couldn't identify; tulip trees in blossom; deep red rhododendrons in full bloom; moss everywhere--made shifting gears easy. I'm good at finding the little back roads on Google Maps, so after a day of walking along several beaches in and near Victoria, we took the back roads out to Sooke for dinner.  That was the second dose of wonder for the day, after the ocean and the mountains.  Bill drives the twisty roads and I get the chance to look deep into the trees where the forest floor is carpeted with ferns.  Or to gaze in wonder at something I saw several times we drove out to Sooke and up to Duncan.  The highway would be bordered by sheer rock--the side of the mountain vertical and exposed.  And the rock was home to ferns, mosses, wildflowers, trees, small cataracts.  I wish I had a photograph for you, but these were not good places on the twisting roads to just stop and take a picture.  Imagine the outburst in Victoria gardens when spring arrives in that luscious climate where gardeners have laboured in the fall to plant every bulb that will thrive.  Then translate that to the side of a mountains.

The mosses were a particular wonder for me after reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss, which I highly recommend.  Actually, read everything she's written for the botany and the wisdom; she's a particularly philosophical companion during our traumatic time. She talks about the "ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure."  Mosses that grow on rock secrete acids that slowly turn rock to sand, allowing them patiently to thrive anywhere. There are 22,000 kinds of moss world-wide, occupying their individual niches. They are patience personified.  They can wait long periods for water.  They don't care how fast they grow and are willing to create their own ideal circumstances. And they create ideal circumstances for others.  Where there is moss, there is humidity.  They are perfect nurseries for baby trees.  They can pull moisture right out of the air and are the rain barrels of the trees they live on. They aid decay in the forest so it can renew itself. Where there is moss, the mycorrhizae that allow trees to talk to one another and share resources flourishes.

It wasn't just the moss, but everything growing out of the sides of solid rock that gave me the perspective I need right now.  Looking at these unlikely greenhouses, these massive vertical slabs of rock covered in plants, I said to myself "The earth wants life here and is inventive enough to make it happen."

Like you, I can have a pretty dark view of life right now, particularly as I look at the appallingly stupid willfulness and cowardice of politics south of the border.  But that's not the only place where disaster thrives. Yes, in spite of the mosses, we're destroying our planet, possibly making it uninhabitable for ourselves.  Yes, the IDF has gone back into Gaza and is purposefully killing aid workers. Yes, Trump and Putin are gambling with the lives of millions of Ukrainians with their awkward bromance.  What is it that allows people not to think about the consequences of their actions in the lives of others? Has Oh-oh even thought about what it's like to lose  your job and then multiplied that by hundreds of thousands? Oh, I forgot.  He's a narcissist.  What makes narcissists?  He just tells us it may take a few years, and his great America will arrive, made solely by him, he says. How much hunger and despair will also have been created?

But uncertainty is also a principle alive on our planet, a principle that gives rise to beauty and wonder. Do what you can.  Buy Canadian.  Elect the party you think will be most effective in tending to the needs of the unemployed while Trump has an explosion that none of his advisors has the courage to question. You know, I've almost gotten myself to the point where I think the human race could disappear, and I'd be okay with that. I'd miss the art we create and engage with.  I'd miss the friendly conversations that enliven coffee shops and show us at our most compassionate and curious. But I 'd trust the mosses to experiment their away around to a second draft. 

Mean March

My book on minimalism, forthcoming from Guernica Editions, ends with a chapter on patience, which is really a minimalist response to the world:  if you are patient, there's nothing you need to fix or rant about. The chapter describes February as the month most demanding of our patience:

"February on the prairies can also be a wild card. Some days are warm enough to melt the snow on the side streets; three days later it’s four inches thick again. Although spring supposedly arrives next month, we can still get blizzards and temperatures in the minus thirties. In February, we haven’t arrived anywhere.  We are waiting for a train in a chilly wood-lined station where our voices echo.  We are in the middle of nowhere, in the no man’s land of mood between the new year and the spring equinox.

"February’s white skies, which have neither camber nor variety, suffocate me with their enormous wool blankets and smother my spirit.  That’s February, that sense of boredom, that nothing is changing, that everything is muffled—feelings, vitality, all muffled in an unending round of uncertain days.  When the white skies meet white snow, I don’t quite know where I am or where the cloud’s ceiling is.  That disorientation that is almost existential—that’s February.

"February calls for patience. It’s fitting that February’s tedious minimalism—this hoary muffled world of days that seem stubbornly to crawl across an empty horizon—calls for patience, which is really a hard-won minimalist response to the world." 

But what about mean March?  That we say it either comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb or that it comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion indicates the uncertainty of its weather. March is the month where grit is everywhere.  It's the month when I dread falling on the ice that's come overnight, following on the previous day's thaw.  So we rejoice at the warmth one day and then we go down on our bums the next morning.  Mean March!  

And yet.  And yet.  A week ago, I had begun to walk outside since I could find a clear path into Regina's Crescents neighbourhood, and it gave me such joy.  I looked around me and saw grit and grey and unenthusiastic trees and shrubbery looking like an old Brillo pad, and I felt such lightness.  This was probably because of the light:  the sun is higher and has warmth in it, and the days are longer.  Our bird brains react to this with a lift.  But the world was not visually beautiful.  I have recently learned that human beings are wired for vision.  The occipital lobe, our visual processing centre, takes up about a third of our brain and registers everything from colour to shape to movement. It's no wonder that when we think about beauty we imagine seeing it.  

So I had to shift my perspective to understand why I was so happy walking down the gritty streets.  The first thing I noticed was birdsong.  Geese and ducks and sparrows and one lone seagull. There was also a very quiet pair of partridges. 

And then I had to make contact with my skin, with the delightful feel of a light breeze on my face.  It didn't feel like my skin would begin to turn up at the corners of my face as a prelude to coming off altogether, as it does on bitterly cold days.  My skin was happy to be out and about.

But it was eagerness that caught my attention, eagerness as a thing of beauty.  There was a father and son throwing a football in a small triangular park still full of snow.  There was my delight in being able to take a walk--no matter what it looked like--not in a mall full of boredom (this is something I've noticed about the people who work in malls), not to the mall muzak but to the sound of birds, not after a fifteen-minute drive that I'll have to repeat when I'm done, but right out my door.  There was eagerness in the conversation of the teenagers who were decidedly, bravely, eagerly underdressed. 

Then last Thursday hit and we were threatened with blizzard-like conditions.  My friend dee Hobsbawn Smith drove in from Saskatoon to launch "One Book, One Province" events focused on her wonderful book of essays, Bread and Water, and said it was awful:  blowing snow and fog--and then sudden blue sky above Lumsden, but with wind continuing to howl.  She wrote that the trip home the next day was even worse, "a shit show. Five accidents. Semis and pickups in the ditch, the highway blocked by semis in two spots, one in each direction, with EMS on the scene." March came in like an eager lion, windy and cold.  It gave us some serene days in the middle, and then roared lustily out again, leaving us with an April Fool's joke today--more snow and temperatures 8 degrees lower than normal. Conditions after the Ontario ice storm are way beyond any joke. People without power for three days. What's up?

Solastalgia.  In 2003, Glenn Albrecht coined the word out of three Latin roots that highlighted comfort, devastation and abandonment, and grief. The word is meant to describe our feelings upon finding that the natural world has been dramatically changed by the climate crisis to the point where we no longer feel at home.  No respectable climate scientist is going to point to March in Canada and intone "Climate change." But we feel the change in our bones--sometimes literally. I feel it in my energy level, in a creeping sense of despair at yet another cold windy day when my body and my psyche is seriously ready for a break from winter. 

But what can we do?  We can acknowledge what economists call "The Tragedy of the Horizon," which is basically our inability to pay attention to the effect our current actions will have on the future and on future generations.  I learned about "The Tragedy of the Horizon" in Joseph Stiglitz's wonderful (and readable) book, The Road to Freedom:  Economics and the Good Society, where he actually envisions a "progressive capitalism" that isn't winners take all. Importantly, Stiglitz distinguishes between "freedom from" and "freedom to," explaining that one person's "freedom from" often compromises another's "freedom to."  His opening example is, literally, explosive.  Freedom from limits on buying guns tops another person's freedom to live.  In climate terms, corporations' freedom from regulation and limitations compromise future generations' freedom to live on a liveable planet.  What if we could just say that?  That our actions and choices today limit future freedom?  It's a good place to begin making the changes we all need to make.  If only we could convince the people who are way more powerful than we are of the same thing. 

Maybe patience isn't always a good idea.

On Vulnerability

I have fallen as I climbed the stairs from the Paris Metro into a rainy, windswept day.  I have fallen in the middle of York Avenue in Toronto--fortunately early on a Sunday morning.  I have fallen turning 90 degrees to dry my hands on a dishtowel.  I have caught my toes on nothing in the Lawson Fieldhouse and starfished onto the rubber pavement that caught my lazy toe. Curbs are my nightmare, particularly in winter, when I think I know where the edge is, only to have my heel hit a little ski slope, and down I go.  Or going up curbs.  If I'm not concentrating, I don't lift my right foot up far enough and my knees hit the pavement. I fell, on average, every 36 days last year. 

In an attempt to understand why I was falling and why my right leg quite consistently froze up mid-stride, I have spent three hours in an MRI.  I have had ten vials of blood drawn and then gone back for two more.  I have had my body mildly electrocuted for a nerve-induction study that would measure how well or badly my nerves were sending signals to my brain or my brain was sending signals to my limbs.  All through this, I have felt this was my fault:  that last winter, after three bad falls on ice, I gave up walking outside when I didn't have to until I was safe, and I let the strength in my right leg deteriorate to the point where it spasmed in weakness every three or four steps. 

But it wasn't my fault.  I have "significant" nerve damage because I have a couple of bulging disks and some arthritis in my back that has pinched nerves in my spine.  My brain was only whispering to my feet and legs.  My feet and legs were sending soft, slow messages to my brain that I was on uncertain terrain.  I nearly cried when the neurologist told me that.  

Because I was an English professor, I've tried to learn from this experience. (I know that sounds like a non sequitur, but English professors--all readers and lovers of art, really, try to learn from everything that is human.)  Simone Weil was obsessed with, among other things, "affliction," those moments in people's lives when they are or feel they are thrust outside normality or outside the human family.  Affliction can be as simple as feeling utterly incompetent in your body because you can't navigate curbs safely or it can be as complex and debilitating as being homeless or being an addict. A character in the novel I'm revising is working on an honours paper on Weil and sees affliction in the  homeless encampment outside the Regina City Hall.  What she sees is people "Beyond suffering.  Degradation and social exclusion and abandonment." My character is young, and she has a better grasp of the enormity of it: it isn't about falling up curbs.  It prompts her to recall Weil's plangent question:  "What are you going through?" Here's my first lesson:  I found that I asked that question more often, sometimes silently, sometimes by opening a door or asking how someone was doing or just seeing someone and making eye contact and smiling, saying hi.

I learned that my body is a means, not an end.  When you are young, the experiences of your body are ends in themselves.  It's your body, after all, that delivers you the pleasure of sunshine on your skin or great sex or the high you feel after a wonderful run. Celebrate every one of those delights your body delivers.  Lyra has just now climbed into my lap, and the weight and fur of a loving cat comes to me courtesy of my body.  Sometimes I think that part of our general ennui right now is that our screens make us all eyes, and we aren't experiencing or valuing the delights of our skin, the sound of animated conversations in a coffee shop, or the smell of baking bread. 

Then your hearing starts to go or things don't taste quite as intense as they used to, or you keep falling during your runs. (Though I have to say that cataract surgery has returned to me the vision of a world that is almost psychedelic in its intensity:  I'm seeing colours and textures I haven't noticed for years, seeing them everywhere. Grocery shopping is a gas.) You need to make a shift, to see your body as a container of your experience, your humanity, your knowledge and wisdom, your love of life. It has to get you to that long sleep with as much delight and love and grace as you can muster.  It has become a means.  So you need to take care of it, be gentle with it, accommodate it. I have learned, I think, to stop beating my body up so much with questions about its incompetence, though I've had a beast of a cold for nearly three weeks and I still want to ask "Why?"  Why am I still so exhausted?

You've been subject to my many mantras, particularly the one about being curious.  Or "Be. Here.  Now."  But I've discovered a new one.  "Cope with what is.  Embrace it if you can." I'm asking why a little less often, or cutting the question off mid-sentence.  Exhaustion is what I've got this afternoon.  What am I going to do with it?  A longer nap among the cats? A Miss Fisher mystery, stopping to envision all the delicious clothing?  Certainly I will obsess a little less about my step count and maybe find a good complicated book that I can just stop and think about when the cats feel cuddly. 

Worldviews and Reading

When you open the covers of a novel, you open the door or a gate or a window onto a different world view.

That's how I was going to begin this post, except I realized that this is also true when you read the first few lines of a poem or story.  Then I had to widen my scope even further to say that's what happens when you look at a painting or listen to a piece of music or go to a movie.  Maybe that's one of the sources of art's enduring power, the reason we seek it out, or even part of a workable definition of art, which eludes us still:  we seek a new perspective on our world. My aged scholarly roots in New Criticism and my own taste urge me to add that art is not dictatorial; it requires my participation or even collusion in the process of meaning-making. The work of art cannot say "You must agree with my vision. It's inarguable." If all a writer is willing to give the reader is certainty or a one-dimensional world view, the result is what Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning psychologist, called confirmation bias: "See. That view you already held?  You're right." That's propaganda.  

Yes, the artist puts his or her finger on the scale in the sense that they offer you this world view and not that one.  The writer may believe in hard-won hope or in demonstrable despair. The writer of historical fiction, for example, may hope that we gain knowledge from understanding historical events.  The writer of satire may think the best thing for the human psyche is to have its ego deflated regularly.  And as I spool out examples, it's clear to me that one of the uses of generic categories is that they narrow down our sense of the writer's world view, maybe so it rubs up against our own.  Writers of speculative fiction can create grimdark or hope punk.  Writers of realistic fiction can have the bitter bite of Kesey's Catch-22 or the gentle illuminations of human complexity in Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything, which I finished reading last night. So when I say "I don't really like satire," I'm just acknowledging that there's an obvious mis-match between the satirists' world-view and my own.

But what I want to acknowledge and explore here is that my tastes have changed in ways I find uncomfortable.  When I was young, I could read great draughts of Dostoevsky.  I once taught an entire class on Thomas Hardy, though that was because the prof who was supposed to teach it couldn't.  That was 1997:  I had no difficulty spending a term reading and teaching Hardy, though I couldn't do it now. Hardy's vision of a laughingly brutal universe in which anything that could go wrong would go wrong feels foreign to me--God knows why.  Hasn't that been the tenor of the last handful of years?  Except, hang on, it isn't fate that has caused the genocide in Gaza--let's call it what it is, though let's also be careful not to blame every Jew.  Nor is fate responsible for what Russians are doing to Ukrainians in the territory they capture.  It's us.  It's human beings.  It's the rapaciousness of certain leaders and the willingness--fearful willingness, probably--of others who follow orders.  Greed is the besetting sin of the early twentieth century.  Insatiable hunger for power. It's behind our failure to address climate change and behind the handful of wars that fill me with despair every morning. 

And Hardy knew that.  He was relentless about the damage social structures did to human lives.  But he had this thing about fate that's not consonant with my world view now.  I'm 74.  Fate is right around the corner in the shape of my mortality.  So I need to believe in my agency, my ability to navigate, with a modicum of grace and curiosity, what life is going to throw at me.

In the face of these fucked-up months and years, I can't open yet another gate or door that leads to disaster and brutality and cruelty.  I honestly can't.  So I find myself turning to nonfiction, to books about what we're learning about our world, about the sensory umwelt of bats and about how bats colonies have dialects and how batmothers talk baby-talk to their babies.  Or about how human beings have used notebooks to explore themselves and record their world.  How the very availability of paper bound into notebooks changed the world.  (I'll include a bibliography of my nonfiction delights below.)  Da Vinci's notebooks allowed him to practice drawing in a way that earlier painters couldn't, and so there's a new liveliness to his paintings--not to mention a sense of perspective. 

Jarod K. Anderson wrote Something in the Woods Loves You, a memoir of his hand-over-hand climb out of deep depression and about how nature comforts and illuminates and guides him through that.  I should write a post about it:  it's a beautiful book, honest and inspiring about human self-knowledge--and agency--but not unrealistic about depression. It's organized by seasons, and toward the end, as fall deepens, he can feel something of the darkness descending on him, but knows that he's not helpless in the face of it.  He says "I like to think of the ups and downs of my mental illness as 'brain weather.'" That phrase "brain weather" stuck with me.  Weather is so elemental.  We don't ignore it.  If it's raining, we grab an umbrella as we go out the door.  If it's thirty below, we suit up.

The contemporary moment creates a kind of reading brain weather for me. I find I'm drawn to gentler books, to Elizabeth Strout or Matt Haig or an old Graham Swift.  I want to know how it is with being human in those little daily ways we perhaps no longer take for granted but realize that they are the startling expression our freedom and kindness and generosity and self-reflection, qualities that, in the face of the horror in our newspapers, we suddenly value. And we need to keep them alive.

And maybe the idea of "reading brain weather" explains why we need so many genres and world views in our art.

My current nonfiction favourites include The Notebook:  A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, The Light Eaters:  How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (the title should really allude to plants, animals, and language) by Karen Bakker, and An Immense World:  How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. And of course, Jared K. Anderson, Something in these Woods Loves You. 

Giving Attention and World Peace

One night last weekend, I was sitting in the living room, which was lit only by the Christmas tree, some lights among the Santas on the mantle, and my task light, listening to Handel's Messiah and hand piecing a sunflower block, when something in my brain exploded, connecting giving attention and world peace in the most unlikely, but perhaps the most meaningful way.  Let me try to trace my thinking.

First, there was my last blog post which encouraged you, during this time of global violence and instability, during a time when "brain rot" is the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year, to think about where you gave your attention.  Don McKay brought this reframing to me when he was editing Visible Cities, and it changes the whole economy.  We "pay" attention like we pay our bills or pay for a coffee--a little casually, a little unthinkingly.  It's only money. But if we "give" attention, we realize that our attention is a gift--both to ourselves and to the particulars of the world we are attending to.

At the same time, I was reading two entirely disparate books that had attention at their centres. One was Matt Haig's The Life Impossible, in which the 72-year-old retired school teacher and widow, Grace Winter, travels to the island of Ibiza to check out a house she has apparently inherited from an old friend.  I should say that when Grace became a widow, she lost the single thing in life to which she gave her attention.  This was because she casually refused to drive her son to the local shops on a rainy day, her attention being elsewhere, and his bicycle collided with a bus. Grieving a child's death is one of the most difficult things parents are called on to do, and I don't think we can criticize anyone for the way in which they navigate a loss that is both emotional and existential.  What can you do with the infinite hole that is the loss of a child? What has the universe become that it can take away a child? Its indifference, if not its malignity, is manifest.  Grace's strategy is to make her world smaller and smaller, dividing it into manageable chunks, by paying attention to as little as possible, unspooling her days watching anodyne, bland TV. 

Like Matt Haig's wildly popular The Midnight Library, The Life Impossible involves supernatural events that are really metaphors for life's challenges and opportunities.  While scuba diving in order to investigate the death of the friend who willed Grace her house, she is touched by a supernatural light that sometimes springs from the ocean and gives people extraordinary powers. Grace now knows what people are thinking, has access to bits and pieces of their past, understands the agitation of lobsters in a tank and manages to break it from a distance, forces a seriously unpleasant man complaining about food at a restaurant to plunge his fork repeatedly into his thigh.  For Grace--probably for anyone waking up from a "seizure" while scuba diving--these powers are deeply disturbing.  The world becomes too much, demanding too much of her attention.  But she manages to focus it on a developer who wants to destroy part of Ibiza with a hotel and spa, saving the landscape and the species he'd like to eradicate from the island, from his insanely destructive plans.  Giving attention where she thinks it will be useful, she manages to tame it but also to unleash its ethical power. And giving attention returns meaning to her life.

Simone Weil, who is apparently having a moment, couldn't be more different from Grace.  While I am revising my novel, Home in Storm Weather, I am re-reading Weil and scholarship on Weil because one of my characters, a history student, is working on an honours paper about the French philosopher.  Waiting in my doctor's office, I came across an essay in The Drift  by Jackson Hanson called "Whose Weil?  Simone Weil, Patron Saint of Everyone," in which he looks at current thought about Weil. He almost makes the argument that you can get Simone Weil's life and thought to make sense only if you ignore a lot. One of the best of the recent books on Weil, Hanson tells us, is A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone's Simone Weil, which she wrote for the Oxford University Press very short introduction series.  Perhaps that is because Rozelle-Stone divides her attention thematically rather than chronologically, which allows her to dive deeply into, say, Weil's ethics or into her belief in beauty.  And the first chapter is, of course, on attention.  There were a number of good reasons for this, not the least of which one of Weil's most famous quotations:  "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."  

Let me give you only a handful of examples.  When Weil was five and Europe was in the midst of World War I, she and her brother Andre "adopted" a handful of soldiers who had no family, sending them most of their rations of sugar and all of their chocolate. Weil herself gathered wood, which her parents would pay her for, spending the proceeds on care packages for the soldiers.  She was one of the first women, along with Simone de Beauvoir, to be admitted to the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, where she came first in the philosophy exams.  Afterward, she taught in small schools around France, often getting into trouble for her involvement in politics, before quitting teaching altogether and taking up factory work. She was a hopeless labourer, slow and awkward and frequently fired.  But she paid attention.  For two summers in the late sixties and early seventies I worked ten hours a day in a factory--$1.69 an hour becomes a luxurious $2.39 an hour at the end of the day--and I can tell you that she paid attention.  She fully understood the exhausting tedium of factory work that left the worker little energy for anything above survival at the end of the day.  That came to inform her vision for a post-war France Charles de Gaulle asked her to conceive when she was working with him and the Free French in London, The Need for Roots.

She died paying attention.  Diagnosed with tuberculosis while working with the Free French, she was told to eat well.  Yet she continued attempting to live on what Parisians were given to eat when Paris was occupied by Nazis.  The coroner said she refused food while the balance of her mind was disturbed; others thought she starved herself in an attempt at Christ-like self-erasure that coloured her life; her closest friend said that she simply couldn't eat at the end of her life. Her first English biographer, Richard Reese sums up the controversy by saying "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love." Her life and her choices are obviously not the best argument for paying attention.  A feminist lens might place her with the nineteenth-century heroines who are simply too good to live, goodness being synonymous with a species of passivity.  So they die in childbirth or languish with consumption.

But the recent interest in her philosophy, and Hanson's question "Whose Weil?" suggests she fascinates at this historical moment for some reason.  Is it because we live in a time when egotism and grievance have gotten out of control and we seek a counterweight? She has given me a question that I ask when I'm struggling with walking.  Yesterday at the Lawson, I took my tenth fall of the year, brought over by nothing but my right leg's reluctance to lift itself above the sticky track.  My own toes brought me down.  And I can get rather self-pitying until I see someone whose struggles are so much greater than mine.  Then I ask, with Simone Weil, "What are you going through?" Her question turns self-pity and fear into empathy. 

But I promised a connection to Handel's Messiah, and I'm going to keep my promise.  As I hand-pieced my cheerful sunflower block I thought about these two women and their ideas about attention.  And then the biblical texts chosen for Messiah inserted themselves between these thoughts, with their emphasis, first on human and political arrogance and then on peace.  And came the thunderclap.  In our everyday lives, we can create peace by paying attention, often to people who are labouring in invisibility or different from ourselves.

Surviving a Trump Presidency

I don't know whether I'm proud or dismayed when I say that I've had several cats who are smarter than Donald Trump.  When I broke my ankle, about twenty years ago now, Twig didn't leave me for the two weeks I spent mostly in bed, except to eat.  When I had Covid-19, Tuck stretched out tightly by my side and Lyra huddled down on my chest, reaching his paw up to place it on my throat or on the side of my neck.  Those are just the most dramatic examples of the behaviour of creatures who know, daily, that their job is to love and provide care if necessary and who understand how love and care are reciprocal.  Lyra and Tuck join me every day for my afternoon nap, when they curl up tightly in my lap or against my hip, as if we were the same tribe, as if differences, even between species, didn't exist.  

I don't think love, care, reciprocity--some of the highest human virtues--are in Trump's emotional lexicon, which is instead crowded with anger, hate, greed, grievance, and vengeance.  His misogyny and racism are evidence that emphasizing difference, calcifying in-group and out-group tensions, has political currency.  He is America's id, and he has given far too many Americans permission to speak the same language--or at least to filter out his obscenities and cruelties and vote for  him because they believe he'll lower the price of gas and groceries.  His language has distorted how we talk to and see one another, emphasizing differences between us rather than the human similarities.  It's one of the first things we need to challenge.

So how do we survive the next four years, whether, as Canadians, we are watching in horror, or whether, as Americans, we are caught up in the madness and touched by it daily? I'm inclined to begin with Henry James, who has said that three things in life are important.  "The first is to be kind.  The second is to be kind.  The third is to be kind." Unexpected acts of kindness make me feel a paradox: how a kind act is so evanescent, yet it's one of the ways we can change the world. It might bloom and lead to another kind act later in the day, or maybe just a smile or a iighter mood.  But that's not the whole point.  Kindness is world-defining.  "This is the world I choose to live in, to help create" a kind act says.  It de-centers the greedy, grieved, vengeful id.

                                
Beauty, too, is world-defining. What is human consciousness that it seeks out something as "pointless" as beauty?  It suggests that the order and freedom that are usually part of what we perceive as beautiful feed human consciousness in an important way. We apperceive order in the natural world, for example, and our valuing of the sound of aspen trees or the bloom of a orchid affirms that we have a place in this world, that there is a consonance between the qualities of the world and the qualities of our minds. But our appreciation of beauty isn't transactional, except that we might share it with someone else.  A lot of the beauty we are moved by is, like kindness, evanescent, and as such can't be measured but merely experienced and shared. How do you measure a sunset or a child's first laugh? Trump has no aesthetic sense. (He hasn't even figured out that suit jackets are supposed to be buttoned when the wearer is standing.) Mar-a-lago is an ugly temple to excess, to things you can measure.   But the immeasurable matters.  We are more than our bank accounts.  Time is not money:  it's an opportunity to glory in the world's beauty and to create an entirely different economy when we share that experience with someone else.

I've been reading way too much about the future Trump presidency (and I'm not going to get into the wholly inappropriate choices for his cabinet here, though their ability to unmake America is terrifying), and numerous journalists have said that in order to mitigate the damage his presidency will do, we need to focus.  Pick one thing that you are going to work towards and give it as much time and effort as you can.  Maybe it's the environment or human rights.  Maybe you want to find ways to push against economic inequality--raises and tax cuts for CEO's and a static minimum wage for the poor--that will doubtless be one of the hallmarks of his administration.  Maybe you think the money Trump is going to spend rounding up immigrants might better be spent creating 3 million homes; they will cost the same amount. Do what you can, beginning by keeping informed.  

Slow down. Put away your phone. Think about where you are giving your attention--with emphasis on "giving attention" rather than "paying attention."  (Thank you, Don McKay for this important distinction.)  Your attention is a gift.  Trump won, in part, because enough of the electorate, exit polls show, didn't pay or give attention to the obscenities or racist comments in his later rallies or to that weird one where he played music and danced, or the sentences that weren't sentences and that led commentators to wonder about his declining cognitive capacity.  Trump will want to keep you busy and anxious--he's brilliant at doing just that.  But what if you remembered that your attention is a gift and spent less time doomscrolling and more time with the people you love and the communities you value? What if you made your primarily relationship this year not one you have with your phone but with the people around you?

Support the arts.  Keep nuance and complexity and humanity alive by going to a concert or taking in a play or spending Sunday afternoon at the art gallery.  What if you re-learned deep reading--something you honestly can't do with your cell phone by your side.  Deep reading is so good for our brains!  One of the most pleasurable ways of learning to concentrate and to think outside ourselves--harder than we usually think and about things we know little about--is to get lost in a book.  Even Pope Francis has weighed in on deep reading.  Both he and philosopher Martha Nussbaum argue that "Without the empathy that literature can instill, 'there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion mercy.'" I've read articles and articles about what Kamala Harris did "wrong," and I'm not sure I fully believed any of them, but what if the election results have everything to do with the fact that too many of us don't read deeply any more and have lost the ability to pay careful attention and to think about someone besides ourselves?

The other wonderful thing about the arts--I'm only scratching the surface here; whole books are written about this--is that they are rebellious.  They push back.  They give voice to the voiceless.  They are critical and think deeply. They give us some of the deepest pleasures we experience. They keep another strand of history--cultural history, not the buffoonery that politics has become--alive. So rebel against the age of Trump by going to the art gallery or to a concert.

The other rebellious thing you can do is to play.  Again, it's without "value."  A cynic, Oscar Wilde said, is a man "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."  We are living in a very cynical time.  But play Wordl or scrabble with your family.  Go down the snowy slopes with your kids.  Design your own quilt or knit mittens with deaths' heads or lady bugs on them.  You're not only pushing back at the deep cynicism of our time, but raising your own spirits.

My notebook tells me I'm not done with this topic, but I'll finish for today.  I began with kindness and I'll end with kindness.  Be kind to yourself.  You're going to need your energy for the longer haul, for the Canadian election, probably next fall, or for the midterms in the U.S. "Self-care," insofar as it suggests scented candles or bubble bath, is not all that effective.  Know and respect the limits of your energy or your tolerance.  But the resilience we often seek in "self-care" is found in community.  And your community--even just your small community of friends--need you.

On Walking

There are dozens of people who are more fit to talk to you about walking than I am.  I'm thinking of Thoreau, whose title I stole--actually he just calls his popular essay "Walking" as if he were an expert on the practice--which he was.  Part of what his radically simplified life earned him, both during and after Walden, was time to walk the woods and wetlands and fields around Concord, so that he created one of the first portraits of an ecology before that word even existed.  As he was dying of tuberculosis at 44, he made tables out of his extensive journals so he could tell you with a great deal of accuracy when the skunk cabbage bloomed in the spring or when you could safely walk across the ice of Walden Pond in early winter.  While Louis Agassiz still believed that woodlands spontaneously erupted, Thoreau could explain to Concord's farmers, who held a meeting just so they could ask him about it, the succession of trees:  why, when they cut down a pine forest, oak sprang up.  Or when they cut down oaks, pines replaced them. He knew intimately the creatures who were forests' midwives, so he could imagine squirrels burying acorns in a pine forest, for example.  

I had to walk for my health.  Anyone advising you on how to keep your physical, mental and cognitive health in old age will tell you to walk.  So on January 1, my New Year's resolution--one of two--and I always keep my resolutions because I always make resolutions that will make my life better--was to become a woman who walked.  Little did I know that my health would make that more difficult, more painful, and more necessary. But after 74, the less I say about my health, the better.  It's quite boring, actually, especially since I'm largely healthy.  But in April, if you spread the number of steps I walked three or four times a week over seven days, I was averaging about 1200 steps a day--a paltry amount.  How did it come to this?  How did old habits disappear and new habits inveigle their way into my life so that I stopped walking the marvelous creek bank just a block from my house?  Avoid inveigling habits, those subtle changes to your routines that have outsized effects on your everyday lives! 

Now I'm averaging the recommended 4000 steps every day of the week and remembering why I love it, in spite of the fact that it was often painful and dispiriting. Maybe one reason writers are also walkers, especially poets, is that our lives in our studies, reading and writing, mostly take place in our heads.  If the sky is grey and if I think another hour in front of the computer is going to give me a day's writing that's worth something, I won't be tempted to walk, particularly since in the early days I was weak and my feet felt full of hot bees.  But even on grey days, it's more luminous outdoors.  And soon I got into that human rhythm of putting one foot (mostly but not entirely) smoothly in front of another. My vertigo was another issue, but I decided that a white-haired woman who walked with energy and a cane was more youthful than a white-haired woman who was stooped and hesitant. Just the air and light and movement were a tonic.  I felt as if I was practicing freedom.

When you are living in your head, what constitutes an event?  I honestly don't know.  I suppose it's a surprising moment of inspiration or some kind of breakthrough.  Certainly there's joy:  in my case the joy of getting up each morning and trying to get words to beautifully do my bidding, which might happen once or twice a day.  But at its best, this is flow, not event.

Whereas if you are crossing College Avenue, cane in hand, and a young man speeding down Garnet Street on a skateboard--there's actually a hill there!--yells "Are there any cars coming?" and you look both ways very carefully and holler back "No!" that's an event. You're a tiny part of someone's delight.  Or there is a husband and wife living on Cameron Street close to the bridge over the creek that maintain the most magical garden (which is where the photographs above come from).  One day as I was walking by, the gardener put his finger to his lips and then crooked it to draw me closer.  A bird was warbling in the trees.  "An American Goldfinch," he whispered to me.  "They come this time of year for the sunflowers." Or the time I crossed the bridge to find a pack of four or five dog owners introducing their dogs to one another, a couple of the dogs not sure whether they liked each other.  They were right in my path, but I thought walking into uneasy dogs was not a good idea.  I had time.  It was a beautiful day and I was glad to be outside, an observer to this social occasion.  Soon someone noticed me waiting and there were apologies all round, to which I responded "That's okay.  I got my own private Westminster Dog Show."  This cracked them up:  the dogs were all mutts.

But the more I walked, the more "events" became smaller, subtler.  Like the fact that on a windy day, every plant or leaf or sheaf of grass responds differently, has a different relationship to air.  Or the sounds of crickets or cicadas, and the rhythms they sometimes made together. Or the dragonflies, their iridescent shades of gold and blue and rust and wine red.  I'm so aware of their eyes, how they have a 360 degree view of the world that echoes mine when I feel overwhelmed. Or a single golden aspen leaf would see-saw down a current of air, redefining event altogether.  The march of time became drifting leaves.

I bought my house on College Avenue partly because of the creek bank.  The more I walked this summer, the more I realized there is a kind of community there.  You actually meet people out for a walk, not trying to get quickly from A to B but to immerse yourself in natural beauty--from the roses that fragrantly line the northern bank in the spring to the goats that trimmed those roses late this summer.  So we make eye contact or say hi. There's a kind of code because we are here for the same reason.  Sometimes we'll have seen someone often enough to start a conversation. There's one elderly man who walks his small dog who stops and faces you so to go past him is simply rude.  So you stop.  Last week he told me that he should be the one on the leash since "she" decides where they're going.  "No," I told him.  "This is perfect.  A dog is serendipity on a leash, and at our age we need serendipity in our lives."  He threw back his head and laughed.  "We sure do!" he crowed.

I'm a cat person who loves dogs, so if a dog is going to tug on its owner to take a sniff of my jeans, I'm likely to give it a good scratch.  When I did this last week, the owner asked if I had a cat or a dog at home.  I have two cats, I told him, and I'm lucky enough that one of them is a nursemaid cat who knows if I'm depressed or sick. I don't know why I told him that, except that cat people are inclined to brag about the abilities of their cats to dog walkers. "Are you depressed or sick now?" "No," I told him.  "Fist bump!" he said, raising his hand.  What gave him permission to ask that intimate question and celebrate the answer by grazing fists?  Katherine Arbuthnott tells me that when we're in nature, we're "pro-social," which is to say we're our best selves.  (This may not be true when we're at political rallies or in voting booths.)  That would explain something that happened about a month ago.

The weather ap on my phone told me that rain was coming in 42 minutes, and I needed to get my walk in, so I raced out the door and scurried up the bank:  twenty minutes out and back would give me the number of steps I needed.  Once on the bank, I could see the dark clouds in the southeast that glimmered occasionally with lightning.  As I was passing a low space to the east of the bank where dog owners often play with their dogs, I watched one man throw a frisbee improbably far.  His dog dashed for it so fast that he spent most of the time horizontal--all four feet off the ground.  Despite promontory rumbles, I stood to watch the two of them for a couple of minutes, calling down "A happy dog is a beautiful thing."  He nodded and then gestured toward the storm.  "I hope you're close to home," he said.  "I'm going the wrong way for home, but I needed to get a walk in," I told him.  "I get it," he said before whirling the frisbee again.  

 The lightning shifted and trembled more along the dark clouds in the southeast. I got to my halfway point, checked my pedometer, and turned homeward. By then I was alone on the bank. There had been that one very human touch--hope that I would be safe--and then I was alone with the weather. Now I couldn't see the lightning, but the thunder rolled along the dome of clouds and crackled along the edges.  It knocked on my skull, wanting in.  Then it knocked again, wanting out.  The aspens were agitated, but the grasses shifted serenely in the direction of the wind.  

To be honest, I've felt like an awkward three-legged troll with my cane and my awkward gait, but the weather didn't care and I had the landscape to myself. Turning into my back garden, I gathered up a handful of parsley, oregano, and marjoram for tonight's tomato sauce and got in the back door just as the skies opened.  How does my weather ap get the time just right? 

Late Summer

 I never sleep particularly well in August.  I first noticed this eight years ago when we adopted Tuck and Lyra in early September and I suddenly began to sleep better.  I thought it was these two remarkable kittens.  But the bad sleeping came back the next year and is just part of the August landscape for me.  What is it? I wondered.  This year, as I was on an unforgiving program of walking for my health--unforgiving in the sense that there is no cheating--I decided to look and listen more carefully, particularly as I walked the bank of Wascana Creek, where I can get more clues from nature in its wilder state.  (That was before the goats came and ate nature in its wild state.  I sure hope the City knew what it was doing and that the wild roses and the wolf willow return in the spring.  The goats, though, were charming.  I'm not blaming the goats.) 

The first thing I noticed was that the leaves get....thicker.  Does that make sense?  Do they just get dryer and less flexible?  In the early summer, when I sit under the crab apple tree in my yard, I can see where higher leaves cast shadows on lower leaves, which are thin enough to darken.  I noticed the change this year first in the aspens, who for much of the summer make the sound of rain on leaves when the wind moves through them.  Now they sound more like a polite smattering of applause, say sometime in the third act of a play when an actor nails a line and a few people in the audience realize they've been handed the clue to the play.

In my back yard, where I have a thicket of trees, in August an entire flock of sparrows can disappear into the leaves almost completely when my cats show up in the window to watch them.  You only know they are there because a leaf or two might be moving. Watching this carefully, I could see that the leaves are subtly different colours, not the overall of young green.  They absorb the tawny sparrows more easily.

There are, of course, late summer sounds, the drone of cicadas and the pulse of crickets.  There is a place near the Cameron Street Bridge where the cicadas made a dome of sound as I walked along the path.  I was enwrapped in something foreign, something out of another time.

On heavy, hot days, the creek bank almost smells of baking, as if the grasses are giving off a ripe scent.  Perennial gardens are nearly done, except for the odd sunflower or bursts of false sunflower, as if we need some extra light right about now. Or as if they are imitating the golden light of August. Seed pods are everywhere, as if the plants are looking backwards and forwards, both.  Back to the time they flowered and took in enough energy to make seeds and forward to next year.  

Then there are the dragon flies.  There are over 3,000 kinds of dragon flies, and they're found on every continent except Antarctica.  One August I was listening to Krista Tippett's "On Being" podcast when she used a word in the wrong way--which of course made me pay attention.  "You feel a sense of overwhelm," she said.  I immediately told her that "overwhelm" was a verb, though of course she didn't hear me, but then her guest used it and I checked Google, and sure enough, "overwhelm" has become a noun describing the emotional experience of life being just too much. "That's it!" I thought.  That's the sadness I feel about August even while I'm steeped in its beauty.  The two things happen very much at once.  I'm overwhelmed by a moment's beauty in the same instant that I'm aware of that beauty's and that moment's mortality.  It's there in the changing texture of leaves, in the seed pods.  It's in the light, which flares out in wild sunsets and then suddenly turns secretive toward the end of my walk.  

When I was--yes--overwhelmed by this experience of doubleness one year, my therapist asked me to choose something animate I could talk to about these feelings, to explore them.  I choose, almost as an August totem, a dragonfly.  Their eyes have 30,000 facets that allow them to see in ultra-colour, and they can see 360 degrees--before and behind them.  That's how they manage to so skillfully begin to suddenly shoot backwards.  On Wascana Creek, there are red and blue and ochre and brown dragonflies, all different sizes, and each year they give me a chance to think a little bit more deeply about complexity and contradiction. Late August and early September are on the cusp of something, on the cusp of change, in that uncomfortable no-man's-land of being two places at once. Seeing so much brings a sense of overwhelm, but you can't ignore its richness.  Seeing what's before you but always keeping part of your mind attending to what's behind stretches your very way of thinking about time.  But on long walks in late August and early September, in the dusky golden air, that's what is in season.    

Hope Is Local

None of my internet searches turned up the story.  But then I decided to search the tabs on my iPad and there it was, published in The Narwhal with this headline:  "It's the world's first Indigenous-led 'blue park.'  And Kitasoo Xai'xais Nation pulled it off without waiting on Canada."  It was featured in both of my good news newsletters because the United Nations has honoured the accomplishment as did the Marine Conservation Institute when it announced the Blue Park Award on April 17 in Athens, Greece.  Just let me quote:  "The 33.5-square kilometre Gitdisdzu Lugyeks Marine Protected Area on the central coast of British Columbia encompasses Kitasu Bay, an area rich with herring, shorebirds, whales, sea lions and juvenile fish.  The nation unilaterally declared a protected area in 2022 and began pursuing qualifications for blue park status shortly after." Elders appealed to the federal government for help protecting the area in the 1970s, fearing that it was being overfished, but the Feds kept putting off meetings, so they undertook it themselves. "In the circle of life, if you take out one thing--destroy something out of that circle of life--that will affect everybody," Chief Ernest Mason Jr. says.  So the Kitasoo Xai'xais Stewardship Authority and eight watchmen enforced the area's closure to commercial fishing, and commercial operators have been "largely respectful" of the limits imposed. Perhaps they understand that limits help the whole area, the whole ecosystem thrive.  The status quo won't. 

Let me just be kind for a moment and suggest that the Feds were looking elsewhere, were distracted, had bigger fish to fry.  (Sorry.)  Or perhaps I've gotten cynical and think that governments, in pursuit of yet another mandate, have forgotten how to do the right thing rather than the thing their base thinks is right--no matter how ill-informed that base is. So we lack the leadership to identify and solve the problems we can actually address. Can we afford to wait? 

It's why my neighbourhood created the Cathedral Village Forest Project and planted over three thousand trees and over a thousand fruiting shrubs along Wascana Creek in Les Sherman Park. They will cool and clean the air and will create a rich ecosystem around it. Local people know what the local resources are like--where there's space in the park and where volunteers are to be found.

In a time when the world seems to be self-destructing, when too little is being done about the climate crisis and wars are pushed over the top by vengeance or self-interest and little care for those who die, local is comprehensible.  Put some smart, disinterested heads together and you can probably find a creative solution, like the forest in Les Sherman Park or the innovative programs run by the Al Ritchie Community Association.  Neither of these are a fix for the climate crisis or for poverty, which needs to begin with good federal policies. At the same time, though, local solutions tend to be creative and responsive to local conditions. 

I spent a couple of hours with Denis Simard, who is the executive director of the Al Ritchie Community Association, the boots on the ground who realizes the Association's ideas.  Their main goal is to provide support and activities for people in North Central and to create a connective hub for the neighbourhood.  They run innovative programs like one for parents and children under 5. While the children are engaged in play by staff members, the parents are expected to hang around.  That sounds counter-intuitive, but Denis says that the parents are often frustrated by the fact that "there's no manual" for raising children. The parents' time during the play program tries to address that maddening fact of life.  They make connections with other parents and get to observe useful ways of engaging children.  The staff who take care of their children become resources and can provide insight into the kids or strategies for parents.  

Later in the day, kids come by after school for a safe, nonjudgmental space to hang out.  Often they arrive "hangry," or agitated, so the first thing is to "feed their faces," Denis says.  Funny how behavioural problems disappear when kids aren't hungry. The Association runs cooking classes for preteens and teens which are always full, simply because the kids, whose parents are often distracted or coping with difficult circumstances, often find themselves without a meal unless they can make it themselves.  The cooking school is going to try something different this fall:  having kids take a photograph of what's in their pantry or cupboards so that the classes can make use of things that are realistically found in their homes.

Al Ritchie Community Association runs stores that are open 10-2 each day, often staffed by volunteers working off a parking ticket who decide to stay because the work is rewarding.  There's that whole room full of clothing that's been sorted, washed, and dried.  All you need to do to "pay" for your clothing is to have your basket weighed and give them your postal code.  No money changes hands.  Donations are always welcome, so if you are cleaning out your closet, take your discarded clothes there. The weight and the postal code are put into software created by "Data for Good," which can help the Association produce reports that highlight their effectiveness and the community's needs. There's also a good-sized pantry with food, renewed every day by donations.  There are a couple of shelves stocked with things you might need for your kitchen or living room--a couple of glasses or a new lamp.  Everything is free.  

Their next phase is geared toward harm reduction.  They have a young woman whose summer job was to get familiar with the harm reduction ecosystem in Regina.  Otherwise, she'll just be hanging out in the stores so that when she is helping someone with food she can get to know them.  In a couple of months, that relationship might lead to a plea for help and she will know where the kind of help they want is available. Patience and human connections are the central resources for this program.

The Kitasoo Xai'xais Nation accomplished what the government had been too distracted to do.  They knew what the situation was like on the ground and what could be lost if they didn't act. They had the expertise and the philosophy of the circle of life that seldom comes into bureaucrats decisions. The Cathedral Community Association knew where there was space for trees and knew it could rustle up some volunteers.  The Al Ritchie Community Association has intimate knowledge of the community's needs and a plethora of creativity. 

Problem-solving is more targeted and more creative when it's done locally--beginning with you.  It's in a kind word.  It's in a garden.  It's there in a decision to eat less meat. Yes, it doesn't "scale up," but there's nothing to scale at all if you don't start.  And it would "scale up" more often, by way of inspiration, if media told more stories about it--hence my cranky response when I couldn't find the story about the Kitasoo Xai'xais Nation and their double award. And it's so beautiful, the moral beauty that rises from the care and good will and ingenuity, creating hope.  

Beauty and Hope

 My body is failing me in some of the most mysterious ways. My New Year's resolution this year was to become a woman who walked, because any advice on getting older will tell you that walking contributes significantly to cognitive, physical, and mental health and longevity. But because our winter and spring was so icy, I didn't walk nearly enough this year, and so my right thigh decided to feel weak and unhappy, often spasming instead of lifting to take a step. I had three reactions to this.  One was to soundly beat myself up in the interests of ensuring that when the ice and snow come down late this fall, I will be walking indoors. How did I get this weak? But then my feet acted up, which is another story, a story that suggested I have neurological problems, that I hadn't just been lazy. Still.  I will walk indoors this winter. The second was to look at other people in wonder, partly because of my thigh, partly because of my vertigo:  do you know how hard walking can be?  And you take it for granted!  The third reaction was to walk.  My physiotherapist gave me a workout schedule and some devilishly hard exercises, like doing squats with one foot in back of your body, forcing the forward thigh to do more work.  I just did them.  I just walked, with my phone in my pocket, counting steps.

I began by walking down back lanes.  They are right out my back door, not down two flights of difficult steps onto College.  There are virtually no cracks in them to trip my lazy leg up.  They're a bit more protected on windy days--which we've had a lot of this year.  And they're less public for a walker who often feels more like a troll than a 74-year-old woman. But spring lured me back onto the street, spring and a cluster of prairie crocuses at a corner house near Crescent School,  Spring and lilacs.  Spring and tulips.  Spring and green. I was lured by beauty.

And I was lured out of my own whining head by thinking about beauty. What is consciousness, that it is drawn to beauty, surprised by beauty, eager for beauty?  Our attention to beauty in plants might provide information about where we will find food later in the summer or early in the fall, but otherwise beauty in nature has little practical use for us.  A sunset?  A butterfly?  Flowers may need to be beautiful (more of that in a moment), but pollinators don't. Here's the thing.  Beauty demands our attention.  Elaine Scarry, in her groundbreaking book On Beauty and Being Just, calls beauty a wake-up call--and she was writing in 1990.  How much more we need beauty to pull us out of our insular cellular worlds--if it can! 

And if you were to walk with me down the street or through an art gallery, we would often agree on what was beautiful--though perhaps not on what was interesting or provocative or important. Beautiful things often have an appealing form--think of the columbine out my back door--yet a wholeness or integrity about them. But you and I wouldn't always agree:  we'd need to talk about whether a columbine was beautiful or just pretty.  Or whether the garden down the street had a significant design to it or whether it was just a gathering of a lot of prettiness.  But we'd want to talk about it.  It would matter to us. What does it mean that something as useless as beauty matters to us?

And why do we return to it again and again?  Few of us say "If you've seen one sunset, you've seen them all."  Or one peony.  Or one blue morpho.  We return to these things again and again, it has been suggested, because we sense that there is a meaning to them that's just out of reach, and if we look again we might find it.

And then there's the second mystery about beauty.  The first wonders why our consciousness pays attention to it.  The second asks why it's in the world.  Pollinators are drawn to flowers by their visual beauty and their scent, but let's go back to that sunset.  Or that cluster of trees that balances unity and variety and line so beautifully. I don't have an answer for why beauty is a quality of the physical world we live in, right down to the subatomic level, but I do know what it tells us.  We fit in this world.  There is some profound consonance between the world outside us as it is and our consciousness.  There is some consonant meaning to our existing in exactly here, exactly  now. That is perhaps the meaning we seek.  That's hopeful.

I am old enough to think back to duck-and-cover exercises, where we practiced uselessly hiding under our desks in the event of a nuclear bomb, and to demonstrating against the war in Vietnam.  But I don't think the world has ever seemed so out of joint with so many threats--from narcissistic and irrational populist leaders to wars that seem to have gone so far beyond a reasonable, useful response, to the breakdown of truth and trust. The larger world seems profoundly broken.  Yet in the prized surprises of beauty, we are reminded, in the words of one of my mantras, to "Be.  Here.  Now."  Beauty reminds us that here is where we live.  It encourages us to pay attention, to come out of our own preoccupations, (like my obsession with my walking).

Or we could ask why we describe acts of generosity, kindness, and courage with the words "moral beauty."  Victor Frankl, in Man's Search for Meaning wrote about the hunger for beauty in concentration camps, about how a beautiful sunset caught people's attention, prompting them to point it out to others, about the surprising generosity he saw time after time in near-starvation conditions when one person gave another the single piece of potato in his soup. That gives one hope.

But here's the most hopeful thing for the time we are living in.  You can make beauty.  It can resonate in the way you set the table for dinner and plate the food.  It can be two flowers from your garden in a simple vase or even a narrow glass.  You can make a quilt or knit a hat or plant a garden--even a single pot.  You can write a kind note to someone who is grieving.  And if  you are "too absent-spirited to count," as Frost once described the speaker of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," you can go looking for it.  Walk at sunset.  Learn which streets in your neighbourhood have the best front gardens or the most beautiful stands of trees.  It's there.  And you and beauty are kindred spirits.