I’ve been avoiding this blog because, as usual, the backlog of items to blog has gotten large enough to be seriously imposing, so i don’t want to even begin to deal with it. This is a far cry from my initial intention (and a blog’s raison d’etre) of just slamming stuff-of-interest up there off the top of my head, with little regard for its writerly quality.
So here i am breaking the ice again, with the intention of being a little freer and easier with the posting. I’ll back-date a few of them to a more appropriate day and month, so there won’t be a rush of items crammed into the next few days.
Hm, that sounded awkward — maybe i should edit it…. NOT!
This came out at the Men & the Environment — the next heroic journey conference (Nov. 18 in Victoria). I find it hugely inspiring, and i’ve been carrying a copy around with me since. There are various versions on the net.
A Hopi Elder Speaks
“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this is The Hour. And there are things to be considered:
“Where are you living?
“What are you doing?
“What are your relationships?
“Are you in right relation?
“Where is your water?
“Know your garden.
“It is time to speak your Truth.
“Create your community. Be good to each other. And do not look outside yourself for the leader.”
Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time!”
“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.
“Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above water. And I say, see who is there with you and celebrate.
“At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.
“The time for the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
–attributed to an unnamed Hopi elder, Hopi Nation, Oraibi, Arizona
I spent the weekend at a men’s retreat. This bastion of the 1980s and 90s seems to have plummeted in popularity since the millenium (a Google search on “men’s retreat” brings up a scant 434,000 hits), which brings up the burning question “Why?”. Could it be that men are now so bonded and well-adjusted that they no longer need the rituals and self-affirmations of encounter groups. I doubt it!
Still, i found the retreat idea intriguing, especially since it built on a Men & the Environment conference that featured Victoria’s eco-uber-guru Guy Dauncey, whom i’ve wanted to meet for a long time. Man and the (degradation of the) environment . . . call it a hunch, but is there a connection there somewhere? I went to both events.
So the five stages of men’s retreat for me seem to be: trepidation, hope, deliberate participation, fear of hugs and tears, fun, annoyance, bemusement, getting lost in the woods, and hesitant embrasure. (How many is that?) It was an interesting experience. An eclectic 14 guys — no, men, let’s not shy away from the word — many of whom had experienced the movement years before, some drawn to it, some pushed by crises in their lives.
What did we do in those two days? None of your business is my first response. There’s a reason rituals are guarded — their secrecy gives them much of their force. The big surprise for me was realizing that ritual does have power. Heretofore i’d looked upon it as play-acting or metaphor, and assumed that what efficacy it had comes not from the acts themselves but from their attached cultural significance.
The water altar
I was wrong: the ritual itself induces change in one’s thinking and the conduct of one’s life. And it works in ways that nothing else can. The more i think about it (i’m writing this ten days later), the more i realize the extent to which it has affected me. And the greater my dedication to the arts, which i see as ritual in another guise.
Men’s groups, as it turns out, also come with lots of gushy language and touchy-feely superlatives, to which i am NOT attached in this age of rampant and meaningless exaggeration. (That piece of toast was to die for, it was amazing, it totally changed my life! Pah!) So part . . . much . . . most of my reservations are me being uncomfortable with the physical and the sharing aspect of the weekend. I have pretty much NO experience spilling my guts to men, and that brings with it the correspondingly meager comfort level.
The whole exercise is pretty much one of creating a safe place for men to be with each other in a meaningful way, which is the key. There are plenty of safe places for men — work, the bar, the street, a sports field — but none are particularly meaningful and in none of them do we dare spill our guts or say what’s really on our minds. That’s necessary but almost impossible to find outside of the formal men’s circle.
Would i do it again? I would. I probably will. I might even start organizing a men’s group wherever i end up settling down.
Our three elders/organizers need mentioning:
Michael Tacon, of the Well Foundation, grandfathered the whole thing.
Dr. Steven Faulkner has run men’s groups as part of his medical practice for decades, and was our principal guide through the long Saturday. A steady hand on the emotional volume control. In his words (kind of telling me off for my cavalier treatment of the rites):
[The] purpose of the rituals was to re-enter our own mythological space and reconnect us individually to our universal nature. Once we reconnect to that, then we can return to the work immediately in front of us. Guy Dauncey reminded us that that there is an urgent need for leadership today. We engage where our higher self intersects with our natural skills.
John Shields, ex-priest and current executive director of The Haven (25 years of personal growth courses on Gabriola Island — How could i not have heard about this?‘), wound the weekend up with a striking cosmological perspective of, well, the universe and everything in it. The man has presence. Brought tears to my eyes.
The conference and the retreat were organized by the Well Foundation of Victoria. It was held at the YM/YWCA’s Camp Thunderbird, near Sooke.
Dauncey, incidentally, lives in Saanich, Vancouver Island, and runs earthfuture.com and puts out the Econews monthly newsletter. If you’ve got those world-in-the-toilet blues real bad, Dauncey’s the pill. (Him and action, at any rate.) The man’s an optimist and a visionary and his uplifting message is oh, so welcome in these dark, dark times. Do yourself a favour and check it out.
I remember this like it happened this morning. I was 17. My girlfriend Dory and i were walking in a park near my home in Montreal’s west island. It was after supper, the fall evening warm and at that stage just before darkness. The boards of the hockey rinks had already been set up, waiting for the first freeze.
We were walking hand in hand, talking. There was a pause. I was usually more careful about what i said out loud, even back then. But for some reason i just blurted it out, a kind of intimate confession. “Sometimes,” i said, “i feel holy.” And it was true: At times a distinct feeling of holiness washed over me, more like a warm breeze than a blinding light, and i just knew without having to know that this was something called holiness and it was a gift, gratis, from the universe. It felt like something very special, but i never talked about it until i uttered that one sentence to Dory. I’ve never written about it since, until now.
Dory, bless her, laughed — not meanly — and poked fun at me. She thought i was trying to be either funny or pretentious. To my surprise i didn’t mind the laughter. I found i hadn’t really expected her, or anybody for that matter, to understand what was a private matter — private not because it’s personal, but because it’s incommunicable. Nothing more was said and the moment passed.
So too, gradually, did my spells of holiness. I didn’t feel that way at all after i entered university, or when i began to work and travel in the world. Too much else to do, i suppose: no time or importance for holiness.
But lately, that feeling has been visiting me again. Not often, and i don’t even remember exactly where or when. But i distinctly remember recognizing the feeling as the same one i was talking about back on the teenaged walk. And i’m glad it has begun to visit me again. Makes me think all this seeking is worthwhile.
.
Toss wisdom and holiness onto the garbage heap
and everyone will be better off.
—Lao-tzu
A woman drives to work in Montreal, on a day like any other. At an intersection near her apartment she stops at a red light and a squeegee kid approaches the car and cleans the windshield. He’s in his late teens, maybe early twenties, and though he looks a little rough around the edges he doesn’t look like a bad kid. She’s seen him a few times before and she never gave him anything, but this time she decides to. All she’s got in the ashtray is a nickel, so she gives him that. He’s not impressed; probably he’s even a bit insulted.
The kid has made this his regular squeegee corner and from that day on she sees him often, almost every day. And every time now, she gives him a nickel. Why a nickel? She figures that it’s something, at least, but it’s not enough for him to go out and buy drugs with.
It goes on for weeks, day after day, weekdays, weekends – whenever they happen to meet at the intersection. She gets rolls of nickels at the bank and keeps them in her car. When he sees her car at the intersection, he heads straight over to clean her windshield and claim his nickel. It’s like they’re friends now; it has become their little joke.
One day she has some time to spare, and maybe he looks a little rougher than usual, so she rolls down the window, gives him a nickel and says, “Would you like me to take you to McDonalds for a meal?”
He hardly hesitates a second before he says, “Yes, I’d like that very much.”
So he gets in, squeegee and all, and they drive to the restaurant for something to eat. They get to talking about his situation, which isn’t a good one, and the woman says, “Would you like some help?”
They talk about that for a while, and then the woman takes out her cell phone and calls a friend of hers who works in a halfway house. Arrangements are made.
After that she doesn’t see him at the intersection anymore, and soon she pretty much forgets about him. The nickels in her car are eventually swept into her purse and spent.
Three months later she’s walking through a mall and a young man walks up to her. She hardly recognizes him, away from the intersection, and he looks a lot different, much more presentable. He recognizes her, though. He has a job now, he says. He has a place to live. And he has something for her, something he’s been carrying around for weeks. He pulls a roll of nickels out of his pocket and gives it to her. They have a good laugh. And then they go on with their lives, feeling a little better about things.
.
The woman is my sister, Rhonda, whose open-hearted acceptance of everybody, foibles and all, is an inspiration to me. I wish i had the savvy that could keep a five-cent joke going for that long, and know that a nickel is sometimes much more than a nickel. She’s an artist of life.
Greg Blee 