beauty in the breakdown

I'm unpacking my stuff. Or, as I realized this evening, my stuff is unpacking me. What is it about holding something in your hand that meant the world to you a few years ago, and can still trigger those emotions, and all the while you recognize what it really is (a rock, a piece of cloth, a letter, a dance shoe, a photo)...but can't bear to throw it out?

I imposed upon five of my dearest friends to help me unload my storage box on Wednesday night. Imagine how much less they would have had to hoist if I could have just brought myself to the conclusion that stuff is just stuff and tossed it before I left for Korea? I remember fantasizing about the whole box going up in flames due to a freak fire at All Canadian Self-Storage but, (un)fortunately, that didn't happen. Instead, it followed me. All of it. Across the globe, in my heart, and now to 215 Howard Park Avenue where I just spent the past two and a half hours hacking my way through a jungle of boxes and newspaper wrapping.

I am learning to embrace roots. I am simultaneously learning to discard. Paradoxical chaos.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

high kicks

I've got the fever.

something borrowed

I rarely check my friend Dan's blog because his grammar, spelling and punctuation give me aneurysms but I checked it recently and found this delightful little story. Now at least I know where Dan gets his frugality from...and his desire to avoid a glitzy wedding...but the story is worth a read.

Nik, who is getting married this summer, will have a modern day story worth telling to his grandkids...500 Filipino guests make any story and interesting one. I'd love for Andrew to post about the amazing story of his maternal grandparents' engagement/wedding as well. I like stories like these because they remind me of what is at the heart of marriage; a tenacity and unity that usually comes out when all the pretty extras fall away.

These stories should clash nicely with the crowned prince and princess of Woodbridge's wedding that I will be attending on Saturday. On Canada Day. So the fireworks are in their honour.

______________________________

so it was my grandma's 56th wedding anniversary, but my grandpa is away in quebec, so my mom, dad and i took her out for dinner. she told us about her wedding day...its nuts...it was out on a farm in manitoba...the guests slept in the house and the barn.....my grandma stayed up most of the night making bolognie sandwiches bc that was the wedding meal...they had some salad too i think...the next day my grandma does the hair of all her bridesmaids, but then they leave her so no one can do her hair....the whole wedding cost $50....my grandpa had planned the honey moon, so my grandma didnt know...the plan was that they would drive to 6 different relatives of my grandma's that she hadnt seen in along time and some who she had never met....my grandma was not happy...the last house they stayed at decided that bc they were newly weds they would want their own place fo5 sleeping and not stay in the house with the family, so they put them in this tiny little wooden shack with a mattress that was full of mice poo, and an outhouse that was not up to par, even for those days....after spending two days there they were on their way to their new home...but the car they borrowed got stuck in the mud so they spent the last night of their honey moon sleeping in a car with about a jabillion mosquitos(they are big in manitoba)...they had to walk almost 5 miles to get a guy to pull them out of the mud...my grandma had $6 to her name while my grandpa had $0.....and thats how they started their life.....and yet they are still married...

______________________________

pandora

calling all brawn...
or, actually, all able-bodied persons...
or just those looking for beer & pizza and a fun time...

wednesday, june 28th
6:00 to 9:00(ish) p.m.
215 howard park avenue

• i will be freeing my storage box from over a year and a half of imprisonment
• “many hands make light work” - john heywood (1497-1580)
• respond via email, or call (416.891.8422), or just show yo’self
• feel free to pass this message along to anyone who might want to join us

early morning musings

I love how Indian Grove, the street I look up from my apartment window, looks like Lothlorien forest at 5:00 a.m.

Courtesy of Kate, and apropos of nothing, this quote deserves to be shared:
"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
- C.S. Lewis

In recent news, my friend Nik has become a first-time uncle.

fighting hamsters

courtesy of Mr. Gaz and in memory of Hansi and Dulsi (may they rest in peace)

new moon

I want memories that germinate


I want
the caterpillar to stop eating the thick
leaf of the evening


I want to spread the shed years on us
as a mulch

longing:

a term for radical unwinding of the heart


in the dim unwritten folklore of the heart

sing to me softly


river has been running our forgotten dreams in one long
uncut movie

the only rule was not to know the rules
made elsewhere


ears tuned
to the heavy rumour of your future


now
you snag on my thought like a red kite
in a leafless tree

lapsing

blush by blush into my consciousness


echoes from that dreadful place, the blank page
that pool full of wonderful risk


we are not a simple people and we fear
the same simplicities we crave


this is a casting outward which
unwinds inside the chest

you must wait for wind


as though your poor heart hadn't enough to put up with, now it's exploded, like popcorn battering the lid with fluffy white fists


when you
say "you" with that inflection something stirs
inside the word, echo
infected with laugh

if it is
possible to translate poetry, then,
what isn't?


when the heart
turning the word "forever"
into plainsong
learns to purr


the agitated
hearts and hearticles of what
we cannot say there is at present

the interwoven deerpaths of desire


the small redundant phrases with which one voice
solaces another


is it the listening that loosens,
letting its knots go, or the voice,
sayng those great unsaying to itself until
ovation on the inside equals ovation out?

a time for this,
a time for that, a time to let them both escape into
whateverness, a time to cast
away stones, to stop
building and remembering and building artful
monuments upon the memories.
to leave.
to step off into darker darkness,
that no moon we call new.

Poetry excerpts from Don McKay ("Camber: Selected Poems")
Photography courtesy of TACF Youth Network Band & Co.

young rockers

When rock stars were young.

Evolution of Dance

Oh please do click here.

(make sure you have your volume on)

loverly

Happy birthday to dear K8.

goal

The Portuguese are crazy. It took me over two hours to get from High Park to Yonge and College on the 506 streetcar, through Little Portugal. A disgruntled, elderly lady (no doubt suffering mildly alarming heart palpatations from the banging on the streetcar's windows, and the sound of a fog horn going off next to her head) said that it would be much worse if it were the Italians that had won.

Bring it on.

yee haw

Off to the wild, wild West. Although it can be said that I have a penchant for Southern drawls, I'm much more interested in the warm, warm weather and Freshwind Texas conference that I will be attending in Dallas. Two minivans, ten 20-somethings (me and the band...how Penny Lane a la Almost Famous do I feel?), a two-day drive each way.

All this two days after I (finally) found an apartment to settle into...

Hate to disclose that my rambling rose is gonna meet her Waterloo
I'll let her play but she can't get away 'cause I know just what to do
Anyone knows you can train a rose to be a clinging vine
So from this day hence there'll be a picket fence round that rambling rose of mine

no umbrella

"We all, to some extent, take that shining something in us that felt magical and passionate as children, that something that later swirled amid the confusion of sexual passion and our longing for heart intimacy - we take it and push it through the loneliness, ache, and turmoil of life - through various stages of disconnection and hardness to another abiding place: a kind of resignation. There is something inside of us that says, 'This is the way it is. I had better learn to deal with it.'"

- Brent Curtis, The Sacred Romance

buried treasure

Well, it's true.

Sitting room.

Bedroom.

Kitchen.

Bathroom.

Thanks to everyone that prayed for me over the past...month. It's been a long haul, but it was worth it in the end. Credits go out to Mel who told me that "three's a charm", Linda who has been letting me sleep on her floor for three weeks, Andrew who hijacked me to go apartment hunting in the piss rain on Saturday afternoon, my mom and dad for telling me that things would be OK, Ron for giving me afternoons off and internet access for the search, and www.viewit.ca.

Housewarming party to be announced soon.

Oh, and if you're able-bodied join me on Friday evening for a moving fiesta of epic proportions. My father, Nik, Dan, B, and Kate are off the hook because they've helped me move, like, fifteen times already.

Bonne Fête à Moi

ON THS DAY IN HISTORY

1865 American Civil War ends
1886 President Cleveland marries in White House
1924 The Indian Citizenship Act
1997 McVeigh convicted for Oklahoma City bombing

AMER. REVOLUTION
1774 Parliament completes the Coercive Acts with the Quartering Act

AUTOMOTIVE
1970 McLaren crashes

CIVIL WAR
1815 Philip Kearny is born

COLD WAR
1954 McCarthy charges communists are in the CIA

CRIME
1985 Duo-serial killers' spree is put to an end

DISASTER
1921 Flash floods ravage Colorado

ENTERTAINMENT
1912 Universal founded

LEAD STORY
1953 CORONATION OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II:

LITERARY
1977 Raymond Carver quits drinking



OLD WEST
1823 Ashley's fur trappers attacked by Indians

PRESIDENTIAL
1886 Grover Cleveland gets married in the White House

ENGLAND
1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

VIETNAM WAR
1965 First contingent of Australian combat troops arrives

WALL STREET
1985 R.J. Reynolds buys Nabisco

WORLD WAR I
1915 Austro-German forces attack Russians at Przemysl

WORLD WAR II
1944 United States begins "shuttle bombing" in Operation Frantic

EARTH CHANGING
1980 Sarah Aubrey Hunter was born