The feast is on the table.Welcome.
The feast tantalizes your senses from the door. Mouth-watering scents saturate the palette before you've even seen the table piled high with platters of care-grown food prepared to perfection, with LOVE.
True friends are here. You've laughed, and cried with these people. There are a few more faces than you recognize. New souls to add into your embrace. New fellows in the field for creations.
And one face is missing, and is painfully missed. The stuff of LOVE.
( my love to Aunt Diane, and my cousins.)
Last night, The Eve, was my FAMILY night. I love my people. I see them all so infrequently. I love them beyond space and time. I know these people. The good, the bad, and the ugly in them, the so incredibly strong, beautiful and brilliant, the vulnerable in each of them. And they, me. We've fought and cried together. We've laughed. We've trashed, and abandoned the whole dysfunctional mess. And we've come around again, and again: wiser, richer, and clearer with LOVE. My people are seekers, warriors, brilliant stars.
Tonight my daughter continues in the festivities. Party star. Rock on little sister! Christmas I always stay home. Some years I do the feast, and host the night. Some years I go it completely alone. Everyone who knows me, knows I will do what I most need to.
Early this afternoon, I met one of my brothers, Mark, in Kitsilano. We rode our bikes together for a few hours. We wound up riding through Stanley Park. I wanted to get inside to take a good look. WOW. Pictures above. Go see it for yourself.
The elegance of nature is beyond the comprehension, or faith of most of us. All of this wonderful lumber, laying around, (half the work done..boom) in a "province" fueled by logging, (another subject for another time, a subject I'd have thought present in the mind of all BC Parks though), and Stanley Park just saws up, and hacks these giants into bite-sized pieces. Thinking: get the roads cleared up and the cars back in here as fast as possible? (makes real sense in the causeway..no where else, in my understanding) firewood for the Tea House? Too sadly, not surprising. Having said this: I read that logging companies are going to be active in the clean-up soon. Sounds exciting. They'll be the experts on this subject.
The actual impact upon seeing this small urban forest so wind-swept is powerful!! And that impact is not only due to the incredible forces that collided there.
The car-less quiet was nourishing.
The freshness invigorating.
Young growth will have its day in the light.
A few thousand trees came down. I hear "we" intend to replant them. Hope this will not be more crazy making. Nature has it's reasons. May I suggest; let it restore itself, naturally, (Years ago, I planted trees in the interior. I've seen the relentless re-creation of nature left on its own, even after slash and burn clearcut!)..Let's get a little more creative here. Opportunity. Let's stop all public car traffic on, at least, the west side, if not throughout the park. What can we dream up as a way to encourage more true green space in our urban midst. Heading toward a future Vancouver: a brilliant example to other large urban communities of refined insight, and intelligence, and beauty. A truly healthfully, livable place. No masses of gas engine vehicles, the size of small tanks, and their required square miles of grid-pattern roadway, and parking space.
Come on. Get a little sci-fi with me here. Let your imagination, and your heart run wild with me. Keeping the present in mind. Still pleasing the estimated 8 million yearly visitors. Let's look at something "innovative", "fresh", "surprise me", "surprise you", far, far sighted thought,... then action. With the results, perhaps, not so apparent within my life time. Perhaps for my grandsons time. My great, great-grand daughters time. What truly life-affirming change would spring from the tiny seeds of our imagination in action here, now?
You don't take nothing with you but your soul...THINK! (Lennon) We all know the song. What will we leave our great grand children's children??
..Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.
Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments....
...and the passage gets so much more powerful... If you don't know it, but would like to, it's; The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran..speak to us of houses..a sumptuous collection of truth and beauty. (paperback 10$ at Book Warehouse).
OK...other stuff to do...other non-stuff to not do.
Merry Merry Buddha-full Christmas to you, one and all.
XXOO
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