Surprise! I thought that this would be a good day to put up one of the pictures taken on Friday night at the Ottawa Creative Writers' Group reading at the Baha'i Centre. For those of you who haven't met me...here I am! I note that my lovely green earrings were a gift from my sister Laurel and the gorgeous shawl was a 50th birthday present from a very kind woman here in our Gatineau community, Hélène Panalaks.

The book I was reading some excerpts from (by way of epigraphs to new poems) is Annie Dillard's incredible Teaching a Stone To Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. Oi, oi! If you have not read her, you must. She is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, of course, but what I loved about her work in this particular book, aside from her palpable love for the environment, is the poetic nature of her prose and the delight in descriptiveness of places she has been and how they have affected her spirit...without any kind of didactic pedantry at all. As R. Buckminster Fuller's jacket citation reads, "Annie Dillard archingly transcends all other writers of our day." Yes. Let me titillate you with just one reflection:

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home-dear and familiar stone hearth and garden-and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word "sojourner" occurs often in the English Old Testament. It invokes a nomadic people's sense of vagrancy, a praying people's knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people's intuition of sharp loss: "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers:our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding."...Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merrily, and a wandering without end. Even nature is hostile and poisonous, as though it were impossible for our vulnerability to survive on these acrid stones.
Whether these thoughts are true or not I find less interesting than the possibilities for beauty they may hold. We are down here in time, where beauty grows.

Oh, I love that last line..."We are down here in time, where beauty grows." The whole passage seems like a fitting way of saying Bon voyage to Gail Ross. I heard today, from our friend Edwina, that Gail has just said goodbye to this place...her sojourn here is over and she has moved on. She leaves many friends. I knew her only for a short time, when I was seventeen, on the islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon, where I lived with her as a Baha'i pioneer. She was from Montreal, and had found the upper floor of a house on the island, and welcomed me in to live with her, a young woman first setting out. It was a safe, lovely, and loving place to land...and Gail, such a friend. I loved a story that Edwina shared with me, about Gail, and I will place it here for you to say a little prayer for her flight to the holy and welcoming places in the next world:

I knew she was in poor health-fibromyalgia or something like that, but she never dwelt on it or even mentioned it. We exchanged e-mails often the past few years and she was always so upbeat and jolly. In fact, I enjoyed her healing prayers and encouragement... and now feel she is watching me from the other world.

A few years ago she took up the harp. One of the last anecdotes she wrote to me was about taking an Air Canada flight somewhere with the harp. Air Canada left it on the runway, only to have the plane run over it! Gail just laughed it off; she got a ...replacement from them. She always looked at the silver lining. So now I can think of her up in the clouds playing her
harp and taking care of me from there. With pink hair.

This post is in memory of Gail, borrowing the words of Annie Dillard, sojourners one and all.