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Saturday, July 29, 2006

We had fun last night! The last Friday of each month is an evening we devote to having people over for a 'devotional'. These take many forms, but as most of you know, the Baha'is have no clergy or 'church', so to speak, so our homes in effect become our places of local worship. Last night we were joined by a lovely group. Linda Kirby and Ben Vaughan, of the Church of Christ, Scientist, came along again. Linda has been attending since we first began these events, almost three years ago, and by her own account has only missed one. Ben joined us in June this year, as well. Also, Pam Stellick brought along a new friend, Pierre Archambault, who has a fascinating history, from Catholic to Marxist/atheist to Buddhist to Christian and now, is investigating the Baha'i teachings. Wendy James and Bernie Benoit came across the river with our friend Mary Margaret...so by 8:30 we were nine, gathered on the deck, surrounded by flowers and bird song, and reading or quoting from an eclectic selection of works. All of us kept the current world situation centred in the Middle East closely to mind, and as dark fell, the sense was palpable of how much people of all backgrounds long for peace.

Later in the evening, we moved inside and continued readings and discussions until about midnight. We enjoyed fresh cherries and peaches, Chinese cookies, fruit jellies, muffins, and the lovely refreshment of spirit, convivial and in-depth conversation, and laughter. Our home was truly 'embellished'.

Thursday, July 27, 2006


The day is indecisive. Hot sun, big rain. It is a long, slow summer. In the afternoon, I cut a gladiolus from the back garden and place it on the kitchen window sill to encourage me by beauty when I am doing tasks. The never-ending battle with fruit flies.

In the garden, I crush, savagely, every earwig I can find. They have feasted on the leaves of sunflowers which bloom despite the lacework bitten into their green. One fronts our living room window, reddish brown and taller than a human being. Such a strong stalk for a flower smaller than I had thought. I lose the battle with what I'm told is quackgrass, tenacious, spreading under loam as fast as I can find it. Each day, though, a new discovery.

Yesterday, a revisitation: the poems of Pablo Neruda. Humbled, I open up new works, offer one to you:

landfall

Why do I need a secondary process translation to find out what I, myself, am thinking? Jan Zwicky

a wind: zephyr, chinook, mistral, call it what you will. breeze,
waited scent, wafted. blown. who has seen it?

ill wind, come with wind, or gone.
we try to leave land, then return:
sea and air, our temporary homes, abandoned on a whimsy.
charade.

seeking discovery, we find no answers
in tall catamarans of our minds.
like flying fish, landborne birds,
we spin wheels, tilt windmills
till next apocalypse.

it’s a breeze: draft, breath. Who breathes? slow
currents compose to gales, angered gods whistle,
propel blasts through constituent parts. oxygenation.
a petal drifts through heat haze of summer afternoon
hotter than hell has ever been.

a distant promontory, a mirage. all our senses
shift to cardinal directions. we watch birds soar
as land is sighted, light upon it wishfully.
homecomings are not for strangers.

how do we name? language borrows other places,
sundial turns to shadow. butterfly wings cause tidal wave.
some small miracle, somewhere, longing sailed round islands,
sun and wind. global warming.

restless denizens in each firmament chase seedlings
along chaotic pathways. nothing is random: no maps can find location.
predestinations. gentle prestidigitations from quiescent gods:
a new garden, a tree, leaf blown, a sail.

dervish twirls a dance, no demons follow. land ho, he cries,
and there, truth of windfall. sand. ephiphany?

something true is known. we feel that much, twirl again, skirts
lifted to umbrella air, sea creatures bound for planetary credenzas,
aloft like helium. endure, tarry,
remember invisible space, immanence.

a sign of someone coming.








Wednesday, July 26, 2006


Today let me share a picture of my mom and dad, Edna and Ron Nablo, taken in Saskatchewan on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary.

Monday, July 24, 2006

Monday evening and I offer thanks to my friend Luke, who read the blog and figured out how to fix my challenge, with the result that you can now find some of the links I suggest to you, in the sidebar.

Today I climbed a hill. (This reminds me of a delightful movie, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain...yes, that's the title). Anyway, we live on a hill, quite a steep one, and for several months now I have been trying to convince myself that I could probably climb it. So for today's walk I decided to return DVD's to the corner...which would mean going down, and coming up again. It took me almost an hour, and the down part was a little tricky on the left knee, but climbing...wow! I enjoyed the wild roses, and the gardens I watched...and continued envious of people with swimming pools. I did, however, make it up the hill and home again. Yay! Perhaps after another century of exercise I'll even be able to bike it.

This afternoon Mireille Hutchison and I went to have an afternoon with our friend Kathleen in her lovely garden. To our delight, she was visiting with another friend, Linda Bishop, who is returning to Haifa tomorrow after a few weeks at home in Canada. We had mutual friends in common and sat in the garden, in the shade, drinking juices and Perrier and I sat in delight as I watched a family of four squawky blue jays flitting throughout the garden and the wood behind. There, too, small chickadees, so pretty and delightful, and a female red cardinal (actually orangish in colour) and yes...hummingbirds. After Linda left the three of us went for a Vietnamese dinner (what is it about fresh mint that I so enjoy?). It has been quite a lovely day. Thanks to Kathleen, I came home with black eyed susans, tall mint, and a promise of lilies in the fall.

A promise of lilies in the fall.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Links...

As most of you probably know, Stephen Lewis is a Canadian hero who is the U.N. Envoy to Africa on HIV/AIDS and he has taken on the battle with great passion. This year's Massey Lectures were on the subject of his work there, and can be found in an amazing book, "Race Against Time". Tonight I attended a benefit for his organization. It was very well organized by several CEGEP students, including Melodie's boyfriend Jal (who proved funny and expert as an auctioneer!) and to which my sister-in-law, Geneviève Cardin, had contributed a gorgeous mosaic mirror. Much of the evening I spent chatting with the Tanzanian High Commissioner to Canada. He was sitting on his own and I am never one to be hesitant at going up and meeting someone likely to be interesting. I thought it was very gracious of him to attend. There was also a dynamic speaker, a young man with CIDA, who had spent several years in Zimbabwe doing grassroots work to assist women to build up local projects. I was happy to be present at the event.

You will also note links to websites which have chapbooks or online examples of my poetic work. Do support these independent presses! They do a great deal to help those of us in the writing arts to achieve an audience for our work.

Also, I have given you some addresses which offer excellent information about Baha'i subjects. One of the most beautiful offers e-greeting cards which include many lovely images, including a variety of photographs of the Baha'i shrine and gardens in Haifa, Israel. Do take a look!

www.shininglamp.org

I shall close this posting with a promise from Baha'u'llah, which may bring some of you comfort, some of you reminder, and some of you may be moved to offer a prayer:

"These fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall pass away, and the 'Most Great Peace' shall come."

God bless.

This morning Bernie came up from the garden and showed us a yellow bean, then ate it. This thrilled our daughter: she planted the beans. In fact, we are going to have a bumper crop, and also way too many tomatoes, and pumpkins and zucchini. On the other hand, no human could eat that much lettuce and our other daughter's rabbit left for their new home with her, so we are getting lettuce and spinach going to seed, and the carrots never came up at all. Yesterday, though, I was delighted to discover that the hibiscus (which we've had for a few years and which I put outside every summer) is in bloom again, and the gladiolas continue to do well. Today I will plant some lilies of the valley, which came from my neighbours, who are completely redoing their front lawn from dirt up (and have planted an olive tree, much to my surprise, as I didn't think that you could get those in this climate). She and her husband lived in Israel for a decade and she said that they planted it with prayers for peace.

In my thoughts this morning: the power of the mind of the world. There is a passage from the Baha'i writings which I like a lot, from 'Abdu'l-Baha in his Paris Talks, which tells us, " I charge you all that each one of you concentrate all the thoughts of your heart on love and unity. When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love." I have a friend who is a practitioner of Christian Science, which uses the term "Divine mind". I find it interesting, and am reflecting on its similarities and dissimilarities from the Jungian idea of collective unconscious. I am certainly aware of the power of suggestion: as we think, we do. So I do wonder what it would be like if the world's peoples concentrated, as suggested, on a peace and love which could overcome their opponents. There is a power in the universe which can overcome the continued bloodshed, as expressed by Baha'u'llah, and note the section I place in bold:

Unification of the whole of mankind is the hall-mark of the stage which human society is now approaching. Unity of family, of tribe, of city-state, and nation have been successively attempted and fully established. World unity is the goal towards which a harassed humanity is striving. Nation-building has come to an end. The anarchy inherent in state sovereignty is moving towards a climax. A world, growing to maturity, must abandon this fetish, recognize the oneness and wholeness of human relationships, and establish once for all the machinery that can best incarnate this fundamental principle of its life.

"A new life," Bahá'u'lláh proclaims, "is, in this age, stirring within all the peoples of the earth; and yet none hath discovered its cause, or perceived its motive." "O ye children of men," He thus addresses His generation, "the fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race... This is the straight path, the fixed and immovable foundation. Whatsoever is raised on this foundation, the changes and chances of the world can never impair its strength, nor will the revolution of countless centuries undermine its structure." "The well-being of mankind," He declares, "its peace and security are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established." "So powerful is the light of unity," is His further testimony, "that it can illuminate the whole earth. The one true God, He Who knoweth all things, Himself testifieth to the truth of these words... This goal excelleth every other goal, and this aspiration is the monarch of all aspirations." "He Who is your Lord, the All-Merciful," He, moreover, has written, "cherisheth in His heart the desire of beholding the entire human race as one soul and one body. Haste ye to win your share of God's good grace and mercy in this Day that eclipseth all other created days."

Today our friends Wendy and Bernie are having a gathering at their house of many people of different beliefs, coming together for prayers and readings for peace, followed by a barbecue. I hope they send out a lot of positive energy!

This evening I will attend a benefit sponsored by some CEGEP students (and co-organized by my daughter's boyfriend) with profits going to the Stephen Lewis foundation. More good energy.

May some of that positive energy encourage you to concentrate the power of your minds, hearts, and spirits on peace.


Saturday, July 22, 2006

Here we are again...still not in the right place but at least I am getting used to placing pictures where I want them...this is a candid shot which Dad took during the Nablo family reunion in Saskatchewan, July 2005. I like it!

I am still trying to figure out how to properly add pictures to the blog. Here, you see, I have managed to get last year's family portrait uploaded, but am still working on getting things in the sidebar. In the meantime, here are Jesse, Heather, Melodie, Bernie, and Maya, July 2005.

Construction Noise.

As you can see, I have figured out how to get my picture as a posting, but have spent considerable time and have not yet transferred it to where I want it on the page. In the process I have also figured out how to do a variety of other changes, including different scripts so will now be able to change font when I want to. It's fun (or not: read exasperating, frustrating, time consuming...) to figure this out.

The last few days have been contemplative, with a twist. Summer construction or renovations take place all around us and every so often I look up from my book-of-the-moment, or begin to pay attention to a birdsong, and realize that the zzzzzzz of sound from somewhere else is what has impinged on my consciousness. Sometimes it's as innocuous as a lawnmower. Other times, like now, a yappy dog from across the street. Signs of life...sounds of a summer Saturday...an overcast day which is cooler than the last week of scorching heat.

Best news is that yesterday our close friend Fraser Glen called...and he expects to visit in mid-August for a couple of days. Can you hear the shout of delight? He also wants to go to our National Art Gallery, which he has apparently not done before. We will also revisit the Museum of Civilization. I have rhapsodized about both, in letters to friends when we first arrived in the Ottawa Valley in 2000. It's a pleasure to go there each time, although when nephew Tim Doran was here our walk through the Museum was brief and I sent him off to do some exploring on his own. My kids say I can get too much like a tour guide, and I can't keep up with his energy anyway. Hopefully Fraser and I will set a pace I can enjoy. I have yet to visit our new War Museum. It just over the road like the prow of the boat it simulates, the copper sheen still not yet green, near a bridge across the river of two solitudes, the sound of water falling not too far. Much metaphor for a morning.

Time for tea. I will, however, leave you with something to contemplate. Each Wednesday I have been joining a group of friends who study a document called One Common Faith, a 2005 publication from the Baha'is international governing body, the Universal House of Justice. If you want an amazing synthesis of recent history, philosophy, ethics...get in touch and I'll share more. But I thought I would end with this paragraph, for your meditating pleasure, beginning, as it does, with a simple tautology followed by a concise and important differentiation:

"Religion is religion, as science is science. The one discerns and articulates the values unfolding progressively through Divine revelation; the other is the instrumentality through which the human mind explores and is able to exert its influence ever more precisely over the phenomenal world. The one defines goals that serve the evolutionary process; the other assists in their attainment. Together, they constitute the dual knowledge system impelling the advance of civilization. Each is hailed by the Master ('Abdu'l-Baha) as an "effulgence of the Sun of Truth."

Reconciliation of science and religion...sometimes, you just have to look at things from a different perspective.

Picture This:

Friday, July 21, 2006

I have tried to upload my favourite photo to add to this blog. My niece Audrey took it last fall. I am still having computer glitches, however. So each day I'll take a stab at figuring out this site a bit more. In the meantime, the daily routine doesn't change too much. In between wandering around the delights of the garden, cooking and cleaning, and reading (lately summer escape fiction from Ludlum and Clancy...I am saving "The Constant Gardener" for a more serious moment)...and a little writing.

Today I received the summer edition of a Canadian Literary Magazine, "The Fiddlehead." I have only just begun diving into some of its poems but so far they are brilliant. Sometimes I wonder why it's so hard to break into the CanLit mags, and then I see that if and when I do, I'll truly be in amazing company. Of course, there are also disappointments. I found myself published in this year's Poetry Annual entitled "Quills". The magazine looks nice, is well designed...and then at the end, there is an erotica section entitled "Lust". There I found a real mix of quality. Some subtlety but mostly badly written fantasies about doing to and being done to which for me had the erotic value of electric implements. When people mix in too much vulgarity, or liberal use of the f' word as though there were something original in it, the cliché outweighs any possible true passion in text.

Anyway, on to less moralizing or sermonizing. I do enjoy revisiting poets I really enjoy, and I urge those of you with a poetic bent to discover the poems of Atlantic poet Anne Compton if you haven't already done so. Her book, "processional," won the Governor General's prize...and I understand why. It's a rich read, full of earth images and philosophic insights; words to take one beyond the prosaic.

I haven't figured out yet how to add links. When I do, I'll connect you with a few poets I like, and perhaps with some of the Baha'i sites I think are beautifully done. For now, from Compton:

"What a difference a word makes. And how sound/the change?"

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

A recent night-time muse of mine has received some positive response so I thought I would start out my first attempt at a blog by sharing it more broadly. Here is an excerpt of a letter, slightly edited, which I wrote to family and friends. I should note that the letter was written in preparation for an event at Chapters, Rideau branch, in Ottawa, Canada, which was organized by www.bywords.ca for area poets and a musician to share some of their work. Since my poem "i see" was being featured in the Bywords Quarterly Journal, I was invited to participate. The afternoon went well (Sunday July 16) and since then, I have discovered that I am one of the featured poets in this years annual poetry magazine, "Quills", with a poem I wrote inspired by my son, Jesse.

I should also note, for those of you who may not be aware, that I am a life-long practitioner of the Baha'i Faith, which is to say that my terms of reference for spiritual practice originate from having been raised as a Baha'i (by formerly Christian parents) and in adult life, to varying degrees, continue to believe and try to live according to the fundamental philosophies inherent in the teachings of Baha'u'llah, the founder of the faith. I also mention 'Abdu'l-Baha, in the letter; this was the son of Baha'u'llah, to whom Baha'is look as an example of how best to live a spiritual life. From time to time I may post some reflections on my Baha'i practice, but if you want to know "stuff" about the faith, I recommend reading or an internet search (at www.bahai.org/ or http://www.ca.bahai.org/index.en.cfm).

Back to poetry:

Here is the letter.

I will dedicate (dedicated) the reading to the memory of Juan O'Neill, a Cuban-Canadian poet who died suddenly last winter, and who devoted much of his life to the arts, organizing poetry readings and events for many years. I did not know him well, but I miss him at Sasquatch, which is where I did my first "full" reading as a profiled poet.

Then I will share (shared) some of my recent reading, and it is for this that I thought I might write out the remarks for you all. I have been thinking a lot about why poetry has come to mean so much to me, aside from the fact that it teaches me to be more brief than I would otherwise be. I am finding my voice, but it is through a medium that is not much paid attention to. Yet I am beginning to realize that poetry connects, in my mind, with spirit, in ways, perhaps, that prose finds more difficult. My summer reading at the cottage this year included much of the work of the Pulitzer winner, Buddhist professor and legend Gary Snyder. I also immersed myself in a series of essays entitled "Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy", edited by one of my favourite Canadian poets, Tim Lilburn, and with essays by several 'icons' of Canadian poetry: Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky, in addition to Lilburn. ...Here they are, for your rich contemplation, and perhaps to illustrate why I think of poetry as part of our spiritual repertoire:

"The reason for writing poetry is that poetry knows more than those who write it. My job as a poet is to listen, not to talk. I stand here talking at the moment, but if I want to write some poetry, I have to close my eyes or leave you and go elsewhere, and be quiet enough for the poetry to be heard. Poetry is what I start to hear when I concede the world's ability to manage and to understand itself. It is the language of the world: something humans overhear if they are willing to pay attention, and something that the world will teach us to speak, if we allow the world to do so. It is the wén of dào: a music we learn to see, to feel, to hear, to smell, and then to think, and then to answer. But not to repeat. Mimesis is not repetition."
Robert Bringhurst

Bringhurst also says, in another source, his poem "The Stonecutter's Horses": "The land is our solitude and our silence./A man should hoard what little silence/he is given and what little solitude he can get."

I am beginning to have some appreciation for that view!

I also will share this quote:

"Poetry begins at the edge of the ineffable, the silent site where words dissolve and one's understanding has more to do with intuition than reason, with emotion than logic....How can poetry not contain the spiritual..." Lorna Crozier

Lorna Crozier is a well-known Canadian poet originally from Saskatchewan. She now teaches at the University of Victoria, along with her husband, Patrick Lane, also a prolific and prize-winning Canadian poet. I will be studying with Lane at a poet's retreat on Vancouver Island in November... Last year I heard Crozier read at the Writer's Festival here. She said that poetry "comes from a place of immanence, the place where the poem is received." I liked that a lot; I find that if I take time to listen, I hear things in my soul that I had not heard before. I suspect that Baha'u'llah is giving us clues about this when He encourages us to meditate. I have long been struck by 'Abdu'l-Baha's observation that "it is axiomatic that a man cannot both speak and meditate at the same time." For one given so to speech, I find this pithy remark very helpful, and as I get older, am trying to learn to listen much more, not just to the words I hear, but to the underlying stories inherent in the meditative moments; the bird song, the pulse of the sleeping house in the night, the rain sweeping against the house, the sound of distant laughter from a child.

So I will talk about the influence of spirit to the people I speak to this weekend, and I will share with them a poem which I have not yet read in public but which I have workshopped. I am currently attending a class with Ottawa poet rob mclennan as its animator, along with Amanda Earl, Jennifer Mulligan, and Pearl Pirie, all lesser known but quite outstanding poets. I need to learn so much...

and recently rob invited Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell to address us. He gave a very interesting lecture, in which he said that poetry should be these things: a work of art in words, a dynamic tension between the culture it's produced in (the poet's sensibility and the reader's ability to decode it), should have "some sense of eternity, a vast finiteness that a poem can touch" and that a poem can "concatenate words", that in some ways, "every poem already exists" yet the infinite possibilities of the arrangements of words implies that there are yet thousands of poems to be written. Brockwell challenged us to write poems that had "vocal energy", a reason to speak, combined the concepts of temporality and memory, and worked competently with the line and with the word. He then gave us homework; to choose a form modelled on the past and to attempt a poem which did these things.

I chose to follow T.S.Eliot, in a very loose manner, in that when he created his "Four Quartets," he brought together four of his previous poems and combined them as a grand masterpiece of a statement. I did not attempt anything quite so grandiose, but I did decide to make my poem one of ecopoetics. Part of my thesis explored ecopoetry, or the poetry of advocacy/rage/celebration of the need to be tender to the ecology of the world, so I combined four previous poems into one, and titled the whole "ontology" (as I am fascinated by the science/logos of being). I think I may choose to read this poem on Sunday, rather than the one I published, which is called "i see" and which you can find under the Author's Index at the Bywords site, if you are interested: www.bywords.ca is the address.

So I will close my musings this evening by sending you the text of the poem I will use as my synthesis of spirit and form, a poem with "vocal energy" and "reason to speak," which combines temporality and memory, and works as a poem. Please consider my voice in "ontology".

ontology:

1. sand

“The ones who suffer/the ones who suffer,/
lie mutilated,/washed up on beaches,/
these words I sing/for you,”

Di Brandt, Now You Care

from les îles de la Madeleine
& Miquelon’s land spit to Tofino’s
Galapagos

salt water washes deeds
over sunken coral seed pearl grit
by solitude’s land mines:

nuclear core mushrooms
from inside Mururoa

women keen salt
into sable
gather kelp

green, green boils
over spiny urchins. soft flesh

essence: ambergris

what happens to sand
when lightning strikes

incandescent new forms borne

atoms
into the world:

2. cold

blood winter

she was caught in a March storm last winter
in small-town Saskatchewan. black woman

lived a long time there, never
experienced such a fight. elements.

wandered through whiteout, climbed drifts
towards locked alleys, found at last by

RCMP four-wheel drive security. winds
dogged steps like tumbleweed,

her life infected blood. hiv visions (Jesus, hallucinogens)
blood weeds. another refugee woman dug

old knees in soils better suited for tumbling.
the bounty of homelessness whispers its story.

she struggled across nothing that led
to her perhaps death. wondered what caprice

made her Lord leave her on that prairie
red till next cold, nothing white.

3. after light

it's not small, this moment winter crunch of snow
below imagination crisper than possible

it’s not neighbour's kid crackling cross ice deck, toqued
on plastic snow board, shadow absence of Alberta moon

not hay bales, horses, creaky sleigh, tractor, lost
old power. my father walks borrowed boots above sunswept

February rural mile. pancakes, kitchen patchwork black/white
range near hot coffee pot, mother's oxygen wheezes

nor gas fires distant laughters gnarled knitting fingers. sun slants
across that jade plant taller than some human bones

neither silence nor knowing this too shall pass, dark moments
en route through valleys. it's not awareness of pain

suppressed, this multivitamin ground gone waste
in saddened country. more, it’s catch of breath,

air into skin faded to telluric surge beneath frozen feet.
evening waits for what comes next,

not having any reason.

4. open

against forgetting
(for Carolyn Forché)

someone suggested
removal

fruitless trees
to plant an orchard

replacing stones gathered by
sea with semi-precious gems

(soul leaves body)

regret lost silhouettes, black
nightglow sky over valley

roots, stumps, knolls,
craggy wanderings of bark.

memory burgeons into
springs while sap lingers.

old buildings crumble.
some black white

wish, these unnameable branches,
skyward moss, this taste of pebbles.