Years ago an unimportant and diffident man was giving a tour of a homeless shelter—of which he was manager. Requests for tours were not overly frequent and they could be pleasant, and the guests were often interesting—which always made the man question his own credibility and worth. Still, his tendency toward introversion and his perpetual hope for a day on his own terms often caused him to feel ambivalent about the tours.

On this particular occasion, as he was walking down the hall leading his guests through the shelter’s medical dorms, explaining, as he always did, the dimensions of the work, the problems of poverty and mental illness and addictions and abuse associated with those living in the dorms, Mr. Fond came shuffling down the hall. As usual his pants were gathered at the front, held up by and one clutching arthritic fist, and his shoes were loose with laces dragging. For a moment Mr. Fond’s eyes searched the tour guide’s eyes—who knew what was wanted. But time taken to lace up his shoes would be a waste; he would soon have them untied, sloppy-loose and would return to shuffling. And so the tour-leader, who was conscious of appearance and wary of spectacle, and able to define the nuances between the two, resolved to smile, greet Mr. Fond, and politely yet efficiently continue his tour without interruption.

But as these two minor bodies closed distance, our man of moral lassitude was nevertheless unable to pass by. And so he stopped. And as he knelt before Mr. Fond, catching the miasma of blotched and liniment-chafed flesh; and as he raised the crusted cuffs of the pants, taking the flat-frayed and soiled laces in his hands, crossing and looping the ends into a double knot; and while feeling the sting of embarrassment from what he thought must be the indulgent glances of the dignitaries standing off to the side, he felt within his solar-plexus a small warm growing thing. It was like a malleable ball of desire deep in the centre of his nervous system that continually changed shape from Mr. Fond, to himself, to the well-appointed noblesse, and back again.

Now he liked this himself-but-not-exactly-himself feeling, and being the selfish sort he wondered how to keep it, own it perhaps—this “it” that now, sitting back at his desk and staring into the glass-brick window, still felt sweet and pleasant, like mulled wine pooling at the pit of his stomach.

And as he stared, seeing dimly through the clouded glass, thinking he saw that bright yellow ball of desire—within or without he didn’t know—his teetering mind fell to reflect upon the occurrences carried out daily by heart-filled workers and volunteers at shelters and hospices and homes and streets around the world—habits of millions of ordinary humans. And he opened to the thought that this “it” was the natural, renewable, waiting-to-be-discovered desire at the centre of every-body and so could hardly be something kept, held or owned, but was always moving, shifting and weaving. Always and everywhere stopping and stooping and kneeling in the name of Jesus, in the name of Allah, in the name of Nothingness, in the name of human kindness, in the name of the Creator, in the name of Kookoomis Manitou Muskwa, in the name of the one Spirit, which is of one genus, which is love.

As our kids grew, she celebrated every small milestone, and every little achievement—which of course in the scheme of life, are never little. That our kids have not only turned-out, but feel free to teach us who they are, is for me proof and vindication of their mother’s early intuition.

Deb kept learning—learned the language of the village, and was sought out by the neighbourhood. She came to teach other children. Children with unique learning abilities—for she never saw differences in abilities, and difficulties with so-called normal ways of learning, as disabilities.

And she took people in, cared for other mothers, single mothers and their children. Our house was not a sedentary house.

In the mean time she blended our families. And so before ever reading Margaret Wheatley, she learned chaos theory first hand. Learned somehow, to trust love’s process and to wait for things to unfold. 

Deb is someone who is driven to learn, and with a knack to bookmark bits of time (a motherly trait no doubt) she completed a Master’s degree in counselling with an emphasis on narrative therapy—the very human notion that we are the experts on our lives and through sharing stories with someone we trust, we can come to a self-awareness that will open up choices for our healing and flourishing.

Narrative, for her, is not merely a technique among others. Finding the truth within conversation, the importance of anecdote, the value of a timely question, earning of a right to speak through listening, all these she has embraced as a way of life.

To my reckoning, she has fathomed the depths and plumbed the limits of self-awareness. And this she freely brings to her counselling and life-coaching.

Of course a keen and accepting self-awareness brings with it a greater holistic awareness and therefore a natural questioning of prevailing systems. It happens that she has found a fuller voice in wisdom’s daughter, the feminine divine, and so has become something of a dissident. Well, it’s a path that chose her as much as a path she chose. These are not easy paths, although they are essential, not only for the one on the journey but for the community.

Like others on this road she has been misunderstood and castigated. She has gotten under skin, infuriated some, simply by standing up.

In my estimation, she has become less Christian, but more Christ-like. She has seen unhappy paradox of the Christian church. With its message of freedom, it still harbours elements of institution, hierarchical adherence, a paternal hangover. These she encountered first hand, and has learned to live beyond them.

In a continuing search she learned the Enneagram and has became an instructor in the ancient art of understanding personality types. It’s a method that gives tools and language for the foibles and sometimes the impasse of human interaction. With it she has mentored many.

And she has learned avenues for emotional freedom, a necessity in her work, and a way to unburden from those things that need releasing. This knowledge she gives away.

Over the years she has never let herself become distant to growing things. Her connection to woods and green gardens and herbs and rock and water is what nourishes her.

Today she cares for a team of people who care for the very forgotten. Those who some would like swept off the street. In this she does not remove herself, instead she learns from them, befriends and calls them by their first name.

She continues to learn out of curiosity. A mother at heart, she freely gives the best of what she receives. She has become, she is, a wise woman. Happy Mother’s Day Deb.

It balanced there, hung-up by its crotch, straddling cement.
Front and rear wheels gasping, gripping only air.
I had seen a river of sparks through the windshield.
A final solution of iron on rock.
We had slide backwards until the hand of friction
forgave us our weight and impulsion.

The Greyhound bus had crossed a line—so it was said.
It was raining, the highway was slick.
Baron swerved to miss the bus, I saw stone
cliffs and dark sky, cliffs and dark, cliffs and dark,
a drunken-go-round—then
a crow-bar thrown into the cogs.

Balanced on the rail the world rose silent.
Ken threw open the passenger door.
Below us, small, tucked in and asleep, Golden, BC.
Abe, sleeping under a blanket in the back of the truck,
startled up, wet, and quizzical.

We stood on the highway, shoulders up against the dawn.
Keeping lit a shared cigarette.
Baron said, I could have killed you all,
and waited—hoping for the police.
But we did not tell them of the tank of gas, stolen
from the Shell on the Shaganappi.

Or how the evening began without a plan,
in a slumping house by a hospital.
How there had been music, and tales of perfection elsewhere.
We did not say how fevered memories paint
pacific suns over beer joints,
or how kitchen table imagination does not equal experience,

and deliver its flagrancy to the lap of Lotus Land.
One taken, three left, we squatted—our backs
against a cinder-block wall—wordless, waiting
for the Apache’s verdict, while the rod and staff
of a noonday sun anointed the glacial air
and we slept as though beloved.

Days later on Douglas, making a turn on View,
the Chevy Apache went straight.
A tie-rod end had fallen the infinite distance from shackle to asphalt,
leaving the truck free to wander.
The day fell off like a scab.
I laced up my shoes and hitched to a ferry.

Jack is a few years older than me and a lifetime wiser.

A few months ago I spent an hour laughing with him and a couple of his brothers, we were going over 45 year-old memories.

A friend recently wrote an interesting post on why bloggers blog. Guess I’m writing this to dispel the passing of time. Like the way we take pictures sometimes, a silent and unconscious prayer to slow the earth’s turning—seal off, for a moment, our own inevitable slowing.

Jack, as far as I can tell, doesn’t entertain these ghosts. Takes aging and everything else in stride.

As a kid, summer holidays at my cousins was like living in an episode of the Darling Buds of May. Jack (second eldest of nine) showed me the questionable joys of milking cows by hand—how to satisfy and drive cats mad with a wavering stream of hot milk. He showed me, although I never did have the knack, how to get a last mile out of of a 54 Chevy. Showed me how to drive up a river hill flat out, how to spin out and ease down without rolling over.

Jack showed me what it meant to stack green hay bales until your muscles were hard and your back brown from the sun. Showed me how to spit and split wood. How to get yellow and scratched from rogueing mustard and thistle in an oat field. How to swim in a muddy river; how to swim out beyond a shore choked by algae; how to go through a summer without shoes. How to skin beaver, snare weasels—things that didn’t take, but fascinated me. Jack—an ageless, tumble-down-a-hill, fleshed out Huck Finn.

I was there when he played the clown at an auction sale, walking into machinery, rolling in the grass, making me roll with laughter. He was finally told to stop because the auctioneer couldn’t keep the crowd.

He has had rough patches in his life. He gives away much. Sometimes too much. Knowingly, he’s been taken advantage of. Has that kind of heart.

He’s someone no one will write about, he’s never thought to make a mark, write a blog, never desired more than a simple quiet happiness. Never concerned himself with grand ideas or schemes, never wanted anything more than an unencumbered faith.

Jack is not sophisticated. Fact is, he scoffs at sophistication. Not with words, but by living without our culture’s blinding self-consciousness.

It was Paul Ricoeur who talked about a second naiveté, a spiritual progression from face-value thinking, through critical reflection, to a kind of conscious simplicity—a certain reengaged child-like approach to the world. But Ricoeur didn’t know Jack. In my eyes, Jack was born into it; or maybe, for him, the first and second were one in the same.

With any justice, Jack will pull through this. Pull through like he pulled me through one winter morning after a Saskatchewan blizzard.

There were chores that needed doing. Dad was cautious, the chickens could wait for the snow plow. But Jack had no qualms. And I was in for the ride.

The farm was four miles from town. We made it three—stalled and stuck and in a fender high drift. We’d smacked through a dozen drifts—white waves hitting the hull of the one-ton Ford. Jack made up speed between drifts, but we were slowing with each one, the snow coming higher, flying over the windshield.

The last drift was mean. Crusted hard. And we stopped like a nail hitting a knot. Jack looked surprised. Jumped out and started shovelling—the big grain shovel moving with rock-a-billy rhythm—and I thought the truck might just keep moving on its own with all that momentum. He worked the packed snow out from under the truck, out from around the engine, then made a trail through the drifts ahead. Jack in the distance was a dervish of snow covered steam. Crystals hung in the air around him.

I stood watching, freezing in the minus 30. My hands were going numb, arms hanging down, thumbs folded in palms inside my leather mitts. Jack was back at the truck, grinning, "Lets give her a go." Then noticed, and said, "Your freezing, give me your hands." He took them both into his and we stood there in front of the truck grille, his hands radiating hot, thawing mine.

The truck kicked to life, he rocked it back and forth, a few runs and we were free.

Jack is settling into a marriage and a life that is bringing him joy. Three months ago I asked him how he was doing. He said, "If I was any happier they’d have to put me away."

Here’s to you Jack. Get well.

Jack on the left with two brothers, Stan and Mel

One night it rained.
I put on boots and left the house.
I walked until morning.
On a hill I sat in wet grass.
I heard a people of strange tongue.
My heart became a dove and flew toward the valley.
My feet became a deer and raced to the water.
My skin stretched over the brook and I became a drum.
My head became strings that my hands played.
They played the move of sun across my back.
I sang sparrow songs into the evening.
The dark came and I stood.
Grass pulled at my feet.
My boots were worn.
My house was very old.
The rain stopped. 

The occasion: One early morning in Kokura, Japan, while my son Michael was still asleep, I got up and walked downtown. The streets were still quiet and the alleys with all the markets were empty. There was only this old lady (above) bundled against and amidst the fading canopies, bright paper lanterns and patches of colour. I took the picture quickly, not wanting to upset her. She is blurred. When the coffee shop opened I sat down to a Psalm about change and impermanence. Things that are eternally with us. Things that fetch sadness, and things that allow flourishing. The crooked mercies of life.

In April I wait for the ground to become springy under my feet. Do your bare feet recall that cool spongy feeling? You would have been younger. Or old and wise.

And isn’t it a kind of healing when the thoughts that grasses have are released and come to meet you when you step out of the house.

But April, like many months, except perhaps those of winter, come with dependable disappointments.

Having come from cherry blossom festivals and bright plum blooms and the extreme red of Japanese roses, the chill and marrow-stiffening wind comes like a midnight wrap on the door.

And of course, as I write, misplaced by a continent of time, wide awake at the wrong hour, I’m aware that my thoughts here are a kind of burlesque. If I could keep myself to a dissection of April I would be safe, above the grotesque.

But a mind is a slippery fist. You will spar with some buried regret, some aging lament—shadowbox with a barely made out shape on a horizon of fog until it’s Goliathized in your gaze. And you turn your blows upon yourself and go frozen beneath the covers without so much as a pebble of defence.

A hole in the night reaches an impossible depth.

But the mind, too, is an open hand. A magnificent paradox. And will, in a crack of time, forget the strength of its own weakness. And in that clearing you will promise the morning that you’ll rise to the advantage of loss, and see in every frozen fibre of April the calm warmth of summer.

But then I’m not the first to find that clearing. A clearing, says one poet, that you only find when you are lost.

Kokura, Japan, in the middle of April,
there are cherry blossoms, like faces,
eddying in alleys, swirling on pavement
and in tight spiral trails behind bicycle tires.

The faces fall sad, their time, too soon.
The wind, greedy, plucks them off branches,
and sails them out over the water.
The Purple river is covered, calmed by blossoms,

You can walk on this river,
your small face held above the current,
until you reach the delta,
and your thin time of standing ends.

Blossoms part, undone by wide water.
Then a day comes when all the faces,
gathered in by moons of tides,
are thrown up by waves that break and slide.

And the sea’s purple rivers run backward,
in the secret fullness of night, carrying thoughts
that roll up roots and are pressed out, pearled
and bright, waiting, and made for the sun.

Which comes in time, stronger than wind,
to all the resurrected faces, not one missed.

I am in front of an exhibit. Behind glass upon a circular stand is what looks to be scraps of cracked wax. Below I read about the mother who saved the melted skin of her nine year old son, the skin to show the father, a soldier, who is away still fighting, not knowing everything is lost. The mother, shielded from the original blast will soon die of "A-bomb disease."

I see a photograph, a boy standing, arms held out as if feeling his way, sheets of skin hanging off muscle like Spanish moss.

I read of a woman on a street car who watches people on the street. She sees small fires start at the tips of fingers, then she sees the fires spread and cover bodies.

I read about a girl who was making 1000 paper cranes which will grant her wish to live. She dies of leukemia ten years after the bomb. She made 644 paper cranes.

There are 140,000 other stories.

How do you place Hiroshima within Easter? Easter within Hiroshima? With what perspective do you frame 140,000 crucifixions? Is it not reasonable here to see Easter as a joke?

On behalf of the Allies, President Truman thanked God that this "awful (atomic) power has come to us and not to the enemy." Hiroshima was still burning, Nagasaki to come, when he prayed that God, "may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purpose."

I am looking at a tricycle. Another exhibit. It has slumped from the heat that arrived immediately after detonation. I’m in deep here, hanging on to Easter in the middle of Hiroshima.

All my received Sunday answers fail, all the ones I repeated to my children: Easter: the settling of a payment for sins—a human/divine sacrifice required by a righteous God—us just off-stage knowing everything turns out all right at the end. Easter: the right to eternal life for believing the right thing—a new fraternity reserved for those who believe in the one way—the knowledge that after death heaven awaits the steadfast and upright, while in the mean time, we are given a pass to go on playing by the code of lesser evils, the miserable dictates of death, the rules of reprisal and sacrificial violence.

What is Hiroshima except a barely imaginable spectacle of the game of death? With us thanking God that it fell to us to be able to play deadlier than our enemy. The grizzly victory gained, in the name of God.

But what is Easter except Jesus voluntarily stepping into the toxicity of all our deadly ways of securing our lives? And what is the resurrection but an end to the game of death?

If this is how Easter truly is it undermines everything we believe about death. It is the new and dangerous reality that makes it possible to live as though death were not. If it isn’t true, well, then you’d expect things to look much like they do now.

Or, it is true, but we’ve missed the point of the best story ever. Or it is true, but we’ve put in on hold because violence appears always to win. And winning is what counts. Security trumps trust. Which of course it does in a closed system. Or it is true, but only in those church-rehearsed, spiritualized ways that secure for us a personal paradise over 140,000 non-believers. Which of course makes it all false.

But I also see how easy it is to blame the "administration," and be blind to my own participation. What damning prayers—in the name of God, and thus justified—have I whispered for my security, preservation, recognition?

Easter is an event toward humanity, but there is a personal response to Easter. A daily response that has nothing to do with mouthing verses, but everything to do with seeing, in the lynching of Jesus, my propensity to exclude another for the sake of me and mine, which is nothing but the fear of death; and everything to do with a resurrection that makes all that fear, all those death-grip moves to solidify the group, unnecessary.

If there is such a thing as original sin, it is simply this: my participation in sacrificing another for the sake of my group, my nation, my world—which diminishes everything and destroys oneness—an abiding oneness which is God’s desire for us.

If Hiroshima (insert Gaza, West Bank, Afghanistan, Iran…and any number of Old Testament nations) can justifiably be sacrificed in the name of God, can Easter be true?

Easter is the witness that there is nothing behind Jesus, no warrior God in disguise, nothing except love. Easter is not a narrowing of options in the false top-down reading of "I am the way the truth and the life," but an opening up of possibilities in the bottom-up witness of one who is inhabiting death for us—and who returns to us in the ones we exclude. Easter is not assented to, it is undergone.

I don’t know when the cherry trees were planted.

I have a notion these trees are forgotten for 51 weeks of the year. Then suddenly, they explode onto schedules—and into the Kokura dawn, steeping the air with their delicate perfume. In a few days a garland of white-pink blossoms wraps the castle.

Cherry florescence (sakura) drapes the motes and bejewels the slant rock base of the castle. They sprawl above the worn grass and blue tarps and drunken business parties. They look down upon pink-faced children and parents who point and point.

There is a young woman on a plywood stage in front of dusty rows of chairs. Couples and groups of teenage girls stroll by, a few people sit and listen. She croons American pop tunes—Billy Joel is added to the blooms.

And my camera is at my wrist. Everyone takes pictures. And in case there weren’t enough pixels spent on the efflorescence, the castle gift shop will sell you postcards of cherry-bloom close-ups…along with brown bottles of rice wine, Shogun figurines and plastic samurai swords.

But this effulgence, this cherry tree promiscuity, will not be downgraded. I brought my eyes here, but many pause with their hearts. Especially at the Zen temple down a stone path, a short walk away. And especially the old ones—whose ranks I’m joining. They pause wordless under the sakura, between castle and temple.