Three days of intense work have transformed our house. My parents are arriving tonight, which meant getting a bedroom ready for them, moving my office to a downstairs room, and while we were at it, Bernie decided he might as well go all out and get the kitchen done. It is just gorgeous. I shall get my daughter to take a picture or two with her digital camera and post it soon.

In the meantime my mom and dad will arrive to fall rain. The zinnias are big yellow balls against the redbrown brick of the house and it feels...domestic, lovely, and like the approach of a fine October.

Ready or not....we are in the midst of renovations and as I go through boxes, clean the top of the fridge, move vases into cupboards, decide what is to be kept and what is not, I am glad this is just a small preparation for the arrival of my parents. It's not a move! although it sometimes feels like one. Today I found pictures my sister Laurel had painted, years ago, of our family as faeries with wings...and they were just the thing to go on my office wall, since I like them a lot but they are not Bernie's favourites, and they also need new backdrops but they are fine in this room. Today I have to buy lights, both for the spare room and another one for the basement. We have also finally got our spa running and tonight will likely be my first soak after a long day of bend and stretch, and perhaps after attending the Baha'i feast. Yesterday I took our second daughter for lunch (at Kelsey's, very good) and then we (gasp) went shopping. Joined Costco and spent way too much time wandering around and purchasing bulk items (toilet paper for both households, enough pepperoni pizza pops to keep my son's lunches going for a month, I hope).

Of such prosaic dailiness is life made: incoming mails, most of which have to do with the manuscript for my second book, which I will mail tomorrow; always, the inevitable junk which does not get filtered out; from time to time, personal helloes, most recently from my niece Jessamine; requests for this and that. Outgoing mails, writing the blog...I thought to go out and dig up the garden but in fact find that there's still too much in bloom for me to do it yet. The yellow zinnias have gone crazy! It seems like the more I cut for flowers indoors, the more want to bloom. I will definitely put in more next spring.

I keep thinking that I have become more present-oriented than thinking of the future, yet already I find myself almost unconsciously planning: bulbs for fall, bulbs for spring, what to cook for dinner, where to go to buy this or that...when will this happen? who will come next to visit? where will I next travel (Chicago, I think, for a book signing)...is it common to always be thinking, "What next? What next?" I enjoy the moment, even the turmoil of the renovations, not the least because it means that Bernie is home more and I can chat with him, or at him while he and I work together.

It's the sense of chat, of audience, of who is listening? Reflections here, group mails there...what is blogging but the desire for being heard, for communication, and it's so much easier to do it to the screen than the necessary work, sometimes, of human interaction. I am sure that there must be books about the psychology of the addictiveness of communicating through screens...I know many people spend inordinate amounts of time somehow connected...but I have to tell you, the connection feels a lot better when you're sitting down with a cup of tea at the end of a busy day and your husband or your child comes along and sits down with you and the chat is real. Complete with smiles and laughter. Yesterday my eldest daughter came home from her job and I was the recipient of one of her tender hellos and a gentle kiss. I still feel the glow, and will sign off to go and feel another touch of sun.

Days of ordinary routines become extraordinary, perhaps through anticipation, perhaps through attitude.

The other day Bernie came home and suggested an unusual diversion...Mini-Putt! So after supper one of our daughters, our son, Bern and I went off to shoot little golf balls into little holes (half-price because of the change of season! 10 bucks for the four of us) and it was just fun. Now we are in the midst of painting and cleaning in preparation for the arrival of my parents on Thursday (Mom's oxygen was delivered this morning) and I take pleasure in small things: we are finally getting our hot tub up and running, I transplanted the tall lucky bamboos into fresh water, another book arrived in the mail (Robert Bly...I find most of his works so fascinating)...I had tea with a friend at Bridgehead yesterday...it's busy but it's satisfying to see the seasons change. Next week Dad and I will get out into the yard together since both of us find that kind of work very satisfying, and will get the gardens ready for winter, including planting many bulbs for spring displays of tulips and daffodils. I have to take out the last of the sunflowers although I admit I have been pleasantly surprised by the endurance of the zinnias. Next week my birthday celebration and book launch, and in addition to my own preparations for that event, family members have offered contributions: my sister-in-law offered to bake her famous butter cookies, my niece her wonderful ginger ones. I myself have a long list of cheesecakes, pies, flan, and carrot cake to make...and other activities as well, including beginning a Ruhi 4 course in nearby Wakefield with my parents, my husband, and some friends.

Life is full of rich gifts, and I am grateful.

Thoughts on education and schools inevitably come to me after time spent there; this past week, I spent two days at Hadley Junior High, where I used to teach, and on this occasion spent some time doing French classes, and a day at the adult education facility, which mostly takes people who have not been successful in the local English high school, and amongst whom I have several former students.

I had the opportunity, fitted in between curricular needs, to chat with several of these young people. Many are bright, but rudderless. Some are struggling, as we all do, with the overarching question, "What am I going to do with my life?" and not knowing how to begin to answer this. What struck me again, in the emphasis on curriculum, is the continued paucity of providing, through education, a spiritual context, a moral overview which would help these 'kids' to know that there is purpose to their lives, that they are not just here because of the random happenstance of their parents' intimacy in the long ago. Students have not, by and large, been taught to ask the big questions about life, and to search out some of the answers through the literature they are reading, or from the history they are studying. Or, if they have big questions, they rarely have an adult mentor with whom to explore answers, so are deeply reliant on friends, who are often times just as confused. The blindness of desire guides the vision of possibility.

For example, one of the French classes was studying the Renaissance and Paintings. Really interesting stuff, potentially, but the questions they had to answer, on worksheets no less, were more about identifying language than looking at the larger issues: why were these painters driven to paint, and what were they saying about their world, and what were the origins and the implications? In all fairness, there were a couple of questions which asked students to extrapolate about spiritual things (the influence of the middle ages, the shift from religion to science)...but at grade eight level, these are big leaps of thought, and they need background...need to be patiently built up...and this is very hard to do when classroom management is most of the battle.

Even in the adult education facility, there is a 'dead space' of vision. I discussed this with one student, Sean, and another, in the afternoon, who had some familiarity with Baha'i teaching. Both of these students, however, were very frank about their reliance on substances (mostly marijuana) whether for escape or for 'altered consciouness'...the supra-spiritual...the 'inner nirvana provoked by physical means'...one of these young men had all kinds of rationalizations about brain process and was attempting to legitimize the use of pot as a consciousness-raiser in its assistance with seratonin levels...the metaphysics of drugs, from a 17-year old. He even brought out the whole Timothy Leary thing. I have SO heard this all before...

but not to trivialize...as I described the day to Bernie, he put another spin on things, reminding me that at least these young people are asking questions, showing the desire of the spirit for more from life than simple crass materialism. There is a premise in Baha'i teaching that we are all on a quest for knowledge. In fact, one of the fundamental principles is "independent investigation of truth"...and one of my favourite sentences from the Universal House of Justice is "Human beings have the right to know." They do not specify what needs to be known, but implicitly acknowledge the deep human drive to know: ourselves, our souls. God, if you will. We cannot know God, of course...the unknowable...but we can know spirit, and soul's connection to the divine. This is not only a religious concept, of course, but is found embedded in many poets...Canadian poet Jan Zwicky says:

…wisdom is thought conditioned by an awareness
of limits to the systematically provable, articulable, or demonstrable.
Whence this awareness?
Plato, I think, correctly identified one source:
on-going, long-term ravishment by beauty.
The Dao hints at another: loss.
And the folk tradition to a third:
working with one’s hands, in silence;
attending, through the body, to the rhythms of the earth
and one’s own mortality.

I think this is a pivotal statement about spirit. Spirit, here, is multi-sourced. Another important exploration is from one of my favourite Canadian poets, Tim Lilburn, in his collection of essays, Living in the World As If It Were Home. He says,

Contemplation’s impulse is to understand the world.
It is not a romantic confection, not a self-consoling gape at chimerae,
but inquiry into being where the truth of being,
being as unutterably particular or unutterably universal,
lies past the certainty language assembles.
It is a form of knowing that strains across the distance
between mind and world and aims to end in union with what it seeks.
But what is union with something that can’t be known
…ideas in the mind of the divine?

These are poets to whom young people should be exposed. Young men should have to read Whitman! Young women, perhaps Emily Dickinson! But also, they need to read of the books of the world...the Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche...one teacher asked me if this young man had read Catcher in the Rye. I told him probably not, since the fellow had told me he's only read two books in his life, The Outsiders and one he couldn't remember the name of. That's not reading! That's intelligence by coercion, learning by consanguinity if at all. Yet it is a sound-bite age: how can I tell a non-reading young man to sink into John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, when he would look at the size of the paperback and weigh it against an afternoon smoking marijuana, and the battle is lost before it's begun.

The time at the schools saddened me, but also left me with lots of thoughts about the terrible needs of this generation, and every generation, to fill their spirits with the 'right to know.' They need to know that there is more to life than just waiting for the next time to get high. Will they regret, when they are my age, that so much of their youth was lost to drugging, or will they view it as part of a process to find their true selves? I don't know, but I know that the people my age who used drugs as palliatives to spirit believe, for the most part, that their lives began when they left drugging behind and opened themselves to the real learning of life, which is always about loving self, and loving spirit, more than any other thing. God is waiting, not in a Christian transcendental paternal way I think, but I hope more in the manner of a loving friend, for all of us to wake up from whatever chimera we think we have found, and open ourselves to our own hearts and to the divine within, and all around.

Pictured here, my cousin Jack McLean with his lovely new granddaughter Ella Joyce. My mother's oldest sister was Joyce. I am sure she's delighted to have her namesake welcomed to the world. Behind Jack is his wife Jennifer Phillips, and his eldest daughter Mukina. The proud mother is Jack and former wife Brigitte's daughter Leah. Congratulations to the whole family!

This has been a busy week, beginning with two days as a 'supply teacher' at my former place of work, Hadley Junior High School. It was lovely chatting with those colleagues who are still there at Hadley, and I was again reminded of the energy of the next generation of young people (which is a euphemistic way of saying there's never a dull moment). I was taking French and Histoire classes and I always enjoy getting to know the students a little: I have often taught their older sisters and brothers. I had a chat with one girl who was trying to figure out how she knew me. It turned out that she thought she might have seen me at a reading, since she has a close family 'aunt' who is Ottawa poet Ronnie Brown, with whom I have shared some times at Bywords. Another student was the grandson of my parents' old friends, the Hanks family, also long-time Canadian Baha'is. Another woman at the school was also supply teaching and we discovered mutual friends, Baha'is from Ottawa, John and Barbara Rager, with whom I studied Ruhi and whom I had seen on Sunday at a devotional hosted lovingly by Deirdre Jackson Farr. Connections and connections.

We are in the midst of preparing for the arrival of my parents a week from tomorrow. This means that the only thing left in our third upstairs bedroom is my desk and the computer at which I am typing this, but all around me the wallpaper has been stripped (Bernie did most of it but I helped, a new experience for me). He will paint this week and then we will take the computer and desk to the downstairs spare room for the winter, and bring the double bed upstairs for Mom and Dad. I'll also redecorate since I am sure they won't mind that I have family pictures and paintings on the walls.

I am also working at getting my second book off to the publishers. This is a book of reflections by young people who have chosen to practice the Baha'i faith. I was, and am, curious about what it is that invites young people to be Baha'is in this rather secular age, so a few years back I set about finding out. The answers are very interesting, some of them poetic, and coming from several countries. A couple have been translated by kind assistants to the project (one from Peru, one from Japan). It's pretty fascinating reading these youth narratives. I'm hoping that other people will enjoy them, too, when the book sees print. In the meantime, I am feeling the excitement of the imminent arrival, hot off the press in the U.S., of Partners in Spirit. In fact, I've been thinking a little less of poetry, lately. Occasionally a line or two comes to mind, but I haven't been driven to the computer in the middle of the night lately by a compelling gift arriving from within my intuitive senses (which is part of the poetic process for me). At least, that's how I think of it.

And now, for the last time of the season, in all probability, I'm off to mow the lawn.

Beans. Yellow beans and tomatoes, actually. I am again coming from our garden, this sunny mid-September Saturday, with bounty. There is also a lot of basil growing so one of these days, in theory, I'll make pesto. We haven't yet made salsa (although my second daughter did at her house) because the tomatoes have been ripening at a pace which allows us to eat them as they ripen. I am also still able to make some fall bouquets; some of the flowers have finished, but I still have a few lingering sunflowers, many zinnias, and a surprise for me (because I forgot that I planted them), more gladiolas of the double orange/yellow variety. They make a gorgeous autumn bouquet, both in the front yard and in an orange vase in the dining room.

Last night I was invited to give a presentation for my cousin and his wife, Baha'is in Ottawa, and did so to a crowd of about twenty. The topic was "the Creative Process" and I was meant to blend my spiritual search with my work as a poet. I enjoyed doing it and it was well received. I especially liked having Bernie's company; he is so seldom able to come to events with me that to have his company there was a real treat.

We had dinner together beforehand at a Mexican restaurant on Bank Street (NOT Mexicali Rosa's, but I forget the name). Very tasty. I miss good corn tortilla (and a lot of other things about Belize) so it was nice to be reminded, with a dinner of chicken, cheese and veggies inside corn tortilla's, accompanied with rice and beans. I was surprised that they were black beans because I tend to associate red kidney beans more with Central America.

I'm back at the beans!

This morning, rain. Chickadees are hop, skip, jumping under the blue spruce in the front yard. I am delighted to watch them through the silhouette of remaining zinnias, which grew outside my office window to a lovely height, and are butter yellow.

Speaking of flowers: over the last couple of days, my sister Coral has been sending photographs of her family's trip this past summer. They spent a week at Sylvan Lake Baha'i School, and then toured their way through the Okanagan, went to the Calgary Zoo, and then home to northern B.C. Coral is a stunning photographer so I thought I would share a picture with you. I was going to make a collage of them, but technology didn't permit this...and actually, I kind of prefer just showing you one of them. I like the way the image of my niece, Sarah, is blurred against the foreground of the roses. It calls to mind a prayer from 'Abdu'l-Baha,

O God! Educate these children! These children are the flowers of Thy meadow, the roses of Thy garden. Let Thy rain fall upon them, let the sun of reality shine upon them with Thy love. Let Thy breeze refresh them in order that they may be trained, grow and develop and appear, in the utmost beauty. Thou art the Giver, Thou art the Compassionate.

From August 30 through September 9, the Baha'i community of Canada commemorated the visit of 'Abdu'l-Baha to our country in 1912. He was, as many of you know, the perfect Exemplar for us, and in his visit to Montreal, had given eloquent speeches in churches, to the press, and in the Maxwell home where he stayed for a portion of his time here, and which is now kept as a Shrine for visitors to come and to say prayers in the room where he slept.

This picture, courtesy of Bob & France Pilbrow, who are both my neighbours and Baha'i friends, and who spent ten years in service in Haifa, Israel, shows a group of us gathered together to commemorate the visit. We are gathered under a picture of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Such photos are often found in Baha'i homes. Here you see, on the left, Janis Zrudlo, who lives part time in our community of Gatineau and part time in Cyprus, with her husband Leo, seated in front in the jean jacket. Next to Janis, standing, is Monique Bastien, a talented local artist and photograher, and seated between Janis and Leo, Louise Cusson, a warm and lovely woman who joined the Baha'i community here within the last two years. I am in the centre, at the back, with my arms around Monique and around David Erickson, an erudite and sometimes mischievous friend who is the paterfamilias of the community, a poet, a knowledgeable appreciator of music, a scholar, and an appreciator of my lemon meringue pie! At the far right of the picture is Bob Pilbrow, our co-host. His wife, France, is the eye behind the camera.

In addition to the stories of 'Abdu'l-Baha which we shared that evening, and the lovely hospitality, we saw a film, "Invitation," in which the late Ruhiyyih Khanum, who was born Mary Maxwell and raised partly in Montreal before her marriage to Shoghi Effendi, the grandson of 'Abdu'l-Baha and the Guardian of our faith until his death in 1957. Ruhiyyih Khanum made many, many trips around the world on behalf of the faith and was given the station of "Hand of the Cause" by the Guardian. As you know more about the Baha'is, if you are interested, you will learn that as with any community, there is a language embedded in the knowledge: deepening, fireside, Hand of the Cause, Auxiliary Board Member, Ruhi Institute...names given to features of an ever-expanding world community of believers in Baha'u'llah.

Speaking of firesides...yesterday was our monthly "waffle and wisdom" breakfast. My husband Bernie makes up a big batch of his now famous waffles, we ensure that we have lots and lots of maple syrup, whipping cream, yogurt, and seasonal fruits...and at ten in the morning, friends begin to stream through the door for breakfast and a talk to be given by someone we invite. Yesterday we again enjoyed having a diverse group, including an Ethiopian friend and one from Colombia, to hear Deirdre Jackson Farr speak on the journey to God. Her talk was both simple and deep, acknowledging, of course, the vastness of the subject and the impossibility of containing it...but I always find her eloquence moving. She is able to employ many of the Scriptures, either through preparation or memory, as an integral part of the talk, and particularly emphasized her own journey as she had gained greater understanding of spiritual development through her deepening understanding of the writings.

The afternoon and evening were also spent in uplifting spiritual pursuits, but I want to close this morning with a description of an evening I enjoyed in Ottawa on Saturday night.

Dr. Ray Johnson, and his wife LaNelma, are American friends who pioneered for many years in India, and subsequently were at Maxwell International Baha'i School for seven years before moving back to the U.S. for Ray to work at a university in Kansas. Ray was the principal at Maxwell during the first year I spent there, 1994-1995, so when I heard that he and LaNelma were coming through, I decided to attend the talk. It was lovely to see them personally, of course, but I really enjoyed the presentation itself. Ray used a Power Point presentation very effectively as an adjunct to his words. So often I find that people use the technology to the detriment of the message, emphasizing the technology rather than the message itself. Ray did not; he is still a master teacher/speaker, and used the technology as a helpful tool for writing out quotes, emphasizing points, showing salient photographs...and illustrating stories. I came home and shared two of the stories with Bernie because they were so moving. I do not feel that I should write them out, however, for others: they are his stories, not mine. But I very much enjoyed hearing them. The Johnsons are travelling extensively in Canada and the States, and the presentation is really worth taking along friends who are interested in the subject of the Baha'i approach to the education of children. Watch for them in a city near you! I believe they are in Montreal next, then Québec City, then travelling across to P.E.I. before heading down into the eastern U.S.

I also hosted the Baha'i feast for our community on Friday night, so it has been a very busy weekend with activities for the faith. This week also promises to be full; there are activities both this evening and on Friday night, I have been asked to give a talk in Ottawa, on the creative process, for an Arts event.

I was interested to note that when I received my copy of This Magazine in the mail, I had short-listed again for their poetry contest in this year's Great Canadian Literary Hunt. That was a good surprise.

On to more writing, as the fall sets in and we begin to really anticipate the arrival of Mom and Dad, and gather in the last of our still-ripening tomatoes, the sunflowers, a couple of zinnias...there are still nasturtiums and sweetpeas in bloom, but a chill in the air of an evening. Some years it makes me sad, but this year I have told Bernie that I am going to try to adopt a positive attitude to winter, and by doing so, have my thoughts become my reality. Wish me luck.

My brother Robin is 40 today. Happy birthday to him.

what comes from stillness
a sight of small yellow bird
on red sunflower