If you took an Uber in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago, there was a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets.

 

Let there be a man who lived through the winter
Let him fill his inner pocket with rain
and find a farmer
sowing his fields with wind seeds
and let him say to the farmer: “Here I am.”

Three Poems by Tahir Hamut Izgil

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/tahir-hamut-three-poems/

Atlantic article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/the-uyghur-chronicles/

We are heading to the cabin soon. And Helen is busy with other plans as well so after a long fairly quiet period. we may be busy.

 

By this time next week we should be settled in a the cabin. 

Hopefully I will be updating my blog more regularly then as well.

"Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars 

of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond 

the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers 

whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names 

we long remember and passing acquaintances whose
names and faces we take in like a breath and soon

breathe away."

from Local Wonders

Ted Kooser

Florence and Dante

       "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"

       Rutger Hauer

This weekend Helen and I went to the Wallace Gallery to see a Toni Onley Exhibition. The watercolours were quite good and the collages were a revelation. We love this gallery, we can have breakfast at Gruman's Deli and then walk over to see wonderful Canadian art. 

https://wallacegalleries.com/exhibitions/toni-onley

http://grumans.ca/home (potato latkes my favourite)

Reading Thinking

"Everything he wrote, Berger says, was written “during the period of the Wall.… Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere, from crop cultivation to health care…. The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/john-berger-joshua-sperling-biography-review/

"You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from

Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore;

The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door

Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart.

Along the way the self that you were born with turns into

The self that you created, but they come together at the end,"

from A Private Singularity

by John Koethe

full poem available here

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57386/a-private-singularity

‘I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe was a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.” (73)

from The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. LeGuin

"In our short century or less, we generally aim to create a comfortable existence within the tiny rooms of our lives."

from What Came Before the Big Bang?

The physics and metaphysics of the creation of the universe

Harpers Magazine Jan 2016, 

by Alan Lightman

" Fields around are yellowing into harvest

nestlings and fingerlings are sky and water borne"

from Wilderness Gothic

by Al Purdy

Some recent highlights.

The swallow chicks from the nests by the living room eaves

left the nest a couple weeks ago and were feed in the trees by 

the porch. You could really see the dominance of the larger

chicks.

Also shot for the living room window, a White-Throated Sparrow

feeds a Brown Headed Cowbird chick. The White-Throated 

Sparrow is considered a rare cowbird host according to The 

Birders Handbook by Enrlich et al.

A young coyote approaches us on our walk. The parents 

apparently stash them somewhere while they go to hunt. Like

teenagers everywhere they then unlock the door and go to the 

mall. A couple of rocks in its direction convinced it that people

and their dogs are not something to approach. 

This summer we went on four studio trails, where you drive thru 

the country and artists welcome you into their homes and studios

to share their work. It give you wonderful insight in how creative

people can be. We bought painting, pottery and quilts as well,

but we really likes these wooden items by three different artists.

I have long wanted to carve birds so I love the Wren I bought, now

I have to get busy.

Finally the local lake in the evening, my wife and her

family fished here on Sundays so it is a special place

for her.

"This is, I think,

what holiness is:

the natural world,

where every moment is full

of the passion to keep moving.

Inside every mind

there's a hermit's cave

full of light,

full of snow,

full of concentration.

I've knelt there,

and so have you,

hanging on

to what you love,

to what is lovely.

The lake's

shining sheets

don't make a ripple now,

and the stars

are going off to their blue sleep,

but the words are in place --

and the fish leaps, and leaps again

from the black plush of the poem,

that breathless space."

               from At The Lake

                by Mary Oliver

I have not blogged for some time and the winter ice and cold  has limited my 

taking photographs. A few weeks ago I came across some cards based on 

Nick Bantocks's Griffin & Sabine Trilogy. If you have not read it it is the story

 of a couple who have never meet exchanging cards and letters when they

 discover they have a "magical connection" They basically tell each other 

the story of their  lives and then begin to share the stories of their current 

travels. The stories are accompanied by postcards, letters and stamps with 

striking images. I have to admit I liked the third book the least when an 

antagonist was introduced and a more conventional plot was introduced. 

I preferred just hearing their personal histories and the narratives of their 

travels.  I had not been rereading them  long before I began to sense a 

connection, at least for me to the works of W.G. Sebald and I reread my 

copy of Austerlitz, his works largely avoid conventional plot, consisting 

instead of personal histories, chance encounters, descriptions of places seen 

while traveling or snippets from his reading and he includes B&W photos 

in the books.

Both authors dealt with personal history, art, conversation, descriptions, 

memory and I think convey a sense of what I, at least, feel in the internal 

mental dialogue we conduct with ourselves.

For my quotes I have chosen one from Sebald's Austerlitz about how the things

 that comprise our mental landscape will fade with time and the second a quote 

by the astronomer Martin Rees about how much our memories mean in the great 
scheme of things.

“...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as 

I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly 

lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as 

it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects 

which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never 

described or passed on.” 

Austerlitz

"Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans 

who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist 

will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.” 

Martin J. Rees

"Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars 

of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond 

the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers 

whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names 

we long remember and passing acquaintances whose
names and faces we take in like a breath and soon

breathe away."

from Local Wonders

Ted Kooser

When I decided to use the Kooser quote above I had intended

to end with another quote from one of his poems. However while

flipping through the The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English

Verse Chosen by Philip Larkin I found The Ice by Gibson and loved 

the  poem so much I decided to use it instead. Kooser's strength is 

always metaphor and the image of life as a walk through the cars of a 

moving train really spoke to me. I could not resist complimenting it

with Gibson's poems dealing with the stages of life where the elderly

women has attained the wisdom to ignore the jeers of others and 

experience the pure joy of childhood. I love the ability of literature to

allow us to share the experience of others or view the world from a 

different perspective. We all use a variety of sources and mechanisms

to guide our lives and make sense of the world whether it is personal 

experience,  family, community, religion, political ideology, science or 

art etc. I really enjoy using science, nature, literature and paintings 

to inform my world view and colour my experience. And of course

pets and science fiction.

In winter we tend to hibernate here we are going for it.

Saturday I had hoped to go to an Ivan Eyre show but the 

weather took a real turn for the worse so I took some photos

of the usual suspects enjoying the heated bird bath. Today

we started with -20 celsius and have warmed up to -11 so

I am watching the CFL playoffs and thinking about vacuuming. 

"HER day out from the workhouse-ward, she stands,

A grey-haired woman, decent and precise,

With prim black bonnet and neat paisley shawl,

Among the other children by the stall;

And with grave relish eats a penny ice.

To wizened toothless gums, with quaking hands

She holds it, shuddering with deliscious cold;

Nor heeds the jeering laughter of young men --

The happiest, in her innocense, of all:

For, while their insolent youth must soon grow old,

She, who's been old, is now a child again."

The Ice

Wilfred Gibson