It awaits

I find myself thinking of it as a malevolent force that constantly waits to ambush me. Like a hulking darkness that hides in the forest just outside my wee house, I can feel its presence.

It can approach so quietly, almost gently, over the course of a few hours, that I am not aware that it has infiltrated. But it has, through cracks and familiar places, until all of a sudden I realize that its taint has smudged everything inside my tiny house. There is nowhere that I can go that it will not have smeared. Nowhere but sleep.

Doesn't the vampire have to ask if it can come in? Not this beast.

Living with chronic pain means that the days that it does not hold dominion are precious. Some of those days I push myself to accomplish more than I should. I think that perhaps I can banish the beast deeper into the wilds of the forest with my control over my small house, stretching my power even to the grounds outside.

I know it will return. Sometimes it comes as a fierce storm and I have to surrender my house to it utterly. Other times it arrives in the cruel guise of an old friend.

Keeping my enemies even closer, I guess.

Beautiful Storyteller

There are stories of beauty everywhere, tales of affection and of powerful love.

These are tiny stories that cannot be captured by art or words. A sudden cool breeze on a too-hot day. Dappled sunlight through green wide leaves. A glance of love--wondering and reassurance--between a young son and his father. The sing-song vowels of a baby.

And you feel a rush; a sense of being loved. Because you are Loved.

He tells His stories differently than we do.

Death of the Interloper

What can one say about a Canadian July so hot and dry that the weeds are starting die off? When they won out over the frail plants I'd expected to be there, I wasn't surprised, but when even they can't thrive?  Well, that's saying something and it just ain't good.

Yeesh.

February Robin

I was surprised to see a robin this morning. This is not him, but a beautiful photo @ Gavatron I found on Flickr that very much looks like how I found him. He was alone, not in a small flock like you usually see robins after they've made the trip back north. High in a crab apple tree, fluffed up to fend off the cold, surrounded by frozen treats still hanging on the branches. He did not look happy to be here--I wonder if he got the memo from the wrong ground hog. I hope he likes frozen fruit! That may be all there is to eat for a while...

Inspiration rises earlier than the worm

I am not a morning person. 

I am the opposite of such a brain-addled creature, preferring the dark recesses of my bed far past what could be deemed socially responsible. 

However.

If I do rise before the dawn--which is an easy venture in the dark days of February--and sit at my computer to write, I find I have a clarity of mind and a sharpness of purpose unattainable at any other time of day.  Email does not tempt me, neither does the laundry in the dryer, nor the clutter in the kitchen. I don't want to read or eat; even my coffee, usually thick with sugar and milk, must be black if I am to drink while writing in the early morning darkness.   

It's all about the story. It fills my head, my room, and all the waiting, pressing world; it blocks out the rising sun and takes the foremost place in all my attention.

It is magical. It is rare. Why?

Because I am NOT a morning person. 

Curses!

The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality and the Financial Crisis

I didn’t really know much about Ayn Rand. I definitely didn’t know the causes of the economic downturn of 2008. I thought I had a good understanding of American politics. If you read Darryl Cunningham’s graphic nonfiction book The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis, you will learn how much more you didn’t know.

It is said that the proof of your intelligence is in your ability to communicate effectively the big ideas that you have.  Using this sentence as a metre stick, I’d have to say (a) my intelligence appears to need work and (b) Darryl Cunningham is an awfully smart man. Using a graphic format to discuss these intricate and multi-layered themes is pure genius. The book is divided into 3 major sections: the first is on the life of Ayn Rand and the people that she influenced, the second is on the how and why of the economic crash of 2008 and the third is on American politics as viewed through the alternating filters of altruism and selfishness.

A way to sum up much of the book is in this graphic format:

Ayn Rand + rabid followers (including Alan Greenspan) = “collective”

Randian philosophy = objectivism [(selfishness = virtue) + (altruism = moral failure)]

Alan Greenspan (@ Ronald Reagan) = Chairman of Federal Reserve for 4 Presidents (spanning 3 decades)

U.S. Government adoption of Randian philosophy (“taxation = theft”) = U.S. Government reduces regulation of banking

Banks go power-crazy = messy recession; felt worldwide.

Cunningham does have a solution. He thinks that conservativism has won the day but that liberals need to reassert themselves in American politics (despite the current liberals in power) to bring back true altruism. Cunningham doesn't like conservatives. They "prize hard work, orderliness, and structure...are goal oriented." Liberals, however, "are risk takers...are experimental in their lifestyle choices and self-expression. They are tolerant of different perspectives and values." Cunningham is very sorry but you fit into only one political affiliation or the other. There are no other options. He actually goes so far as to insinuate that these are psychologically defined distinctions that divide all of us into two camps.

Too bad the rest of the world doesn't work out of a two-party system. Canadians don't get mentioned at all. The British don't get much press either, perhaps because they have a four-party system, with voices from seven other parties mixed in. 

Here's another take on this dilemma:

Author Hypothesis:

Selfishness + American political system (Tea Partyists) = need more liberals to fix it.

Reader Doubt:

Psychological profiling of liberals and conservatives = reduction of all people into 2-party system thinking

Reductive thinking = all theses in the book may be skewed

The bottom line is that this book has excellent polemics, but the proposed ideas are still open for debate.  

This article was first published on the Mississauga Library System's Nonfiction Book Club Blog

Book Review: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

H is for Hawk is a book with an ending that the reader truly regrets.

Helen Macdonald's book has a good ending, don’t get me wrong. The conclusion is well-constructed, bittersweet, and possesses a definite point of change in the perspective. The ending is perfectly satisfying, just like the book itself, and yet I am not ready.

A poetically rendered memoir of a woman whose father has died suddenly, the book documents beautifully—and I mean beautifully—her struggle with this great loss. She fails to cope, and withdraws from her job, from most of her friends and family, and gives herself a noble excuse.

She will train a hawk.

Now, for most of us, this would be an outlandish venture. Not for Macdonald, who had been interested in falconry all her life and had even owned falcons herself. Falcons are rather “friendly”, trainable birds; in fact, for Macdonald, “my books all assured me that the peregrine falcon was the finest bird on earth.” Hawks, on the other hand, are “psychopaths”, “bloodthirsty” and have a tendency to become feral even after extensive training. In other words, hawks are a true challenge.

Macdonald knew this. At eight years old, she became acquainted with T.H. White’s The Goshawk, which outlines a spectacular, solitary failure to train a hawk. Even as a child, Macdonald could see the myriad mistakes White inflicted upon his poor hawk, and the book stayed with her as a wrong to be righted. Now was the time.

The presence of White reappears frequently throughout the book, as Macdonald purchases and begins to know her hawk. She is fascinated by the language of archaic romance that historical, and particularly male, austringers (the practitioners of falconry that specialize in hawks) use when referring to hawks. Hawks must be wooed and their “sulkiness” tolerated, "requiring more the Courtship of a Mistress than the Authority of a Master."

Macdonald’s bird, Mabel, becomes an excellently trained hawk, largely due to her owner’s single-minded patience and all-consuming devotion.  While getting to know each other, Macdonald and Mabel learn to play together—an aspect of hawking that was never addressed in any of Macdonald’s books. Even her “goshawk guru” Stuart had never heard of playing with your hawk. Macdonald finds herself in her own kind of romance with her hawk, and is desperately attracted to the wildness that remains in Mabel. Their relationship is a perfect kind of solitary escape.

Now it is apparent to the reader, with Macdonald’s hindsight, that this is not altogether healthy. But this is where the relationship between the reader and the writer tightens. Macdonald is fiercely solitary but we are at her side for the journey. We are her solace, we hear her loneliness. We become the family and friends to whom she is having difficulty reaching out.

This is why it is hard to let her go at the end of the book. She has shared so much with us and with such eloquence that it is almost like shutting a door on a friend. And it is Macdonald that shuts it, not us. Wistfully, I hope to read more by Helen Macdonald.

Originally posted on Mississauga Library System's Nonfiction Book Club blog