Posts

Reconnecting to the land

Paddling with my good friend Craig Harris yesterday down the western shore of Penelakut Island, I was haunted by an inkling of what it must have been like for a First Nations inhabitant, gliding through the same waters before the colonial era.

Much as I am enthralled by nature, I realized that I am but a tourist on the region’s land and sea; I can only imagine the deeper connection of a hunter-gatherer society, whose people ‘lived off the land’ and whose spiritual awareness was as deeply rooted and binding as that of the surrounding forests.

Before going any farther, an explanatory note: I am a Canadian of European ancestry. The influences that define me have been shaped and interpreted in that context and from that perspective. I do not want to be anything or anyone else. I do want to accept the challenges European social, scientific, and economic development and innovation have led to. The late-20th and 21st centuries have been a necessary time of reckoning. We either take responsibility for creating a better, more inclusive, more sustainable world, or accept the consequences and blame for our selfish, shortsighted decisions and behaviour.

It was from that perspective that I asked: What knowledge could we have gained from the indigenous peoples of North America and the world if only we had restrained our colonial incursions and taken time to learn from them what we had unlearned through centuries of abstracting technological and cultural development that had distanced us from the ‘natural world’?

That haunting question leapfrogged me into the present day, and a more timely consideration. What might we learn through the process of Truth and Reconciliation, as we honour the survivors of our colonial depredations and build a new relationship with them? That we are attempting such a feat makes me hopeful; if we can actually succeed, I will be truly proud as a Canadian of European ancestry.

My favourite gate

Just past Chemainus Farms, heading up River Road toward Highway 1, there’s a gate that always intrigues me. It seems as much an invitation as a prohibition, because it’s centred at the entrance to a green, but has no surrounding fence to prevent curious wanderers and wonderers from simply stepping round it and carrying on. Is it meant to keep people in or out? Is it a remnant from a bygone time when livestock had to be penned in? Does it serve a present purpose—other than to excite speculative imaginings? What’s its story?

Morning Glory

This video includes images of genocides
It’s the dawn
Of a new day
In an old era
In the same old way.

It’s the cycle renewed
Again and again without end
A ceaseless iteration
Of nation against nation
Of despair strangling hope
Shoots of hatred
Tendrils of fear
A choking underbrush
Infesting our gardens of Eden

Who was it said
We must kill, and kill, and kill
Until all are dead
Who would become invasive species?
Whose god roared that battle cry
Under the glaring sun
Denying even the possibility
of innocence
Declaring even the unborn
‘Enemies of our state’
Infected with murderous intent?
Vermin only fit to hate?

Bloodlines.
Worm like veins
Through our sacred soils
Rooting the detritus
That defines us.
Ancient scrolls
And chiseled texts
Implacable as tombstones.

Craig Spence,
August 18, 2024

Off Leash Zone

OFF LEASH ZONE

Lead on! Lead on!
my old, best friend,
beyond the very end
of this leash we both
are tethered to.

Lead on! Lead on!
Even though we do not know,
and dare not say,
exactly where we’re going…
Even though there is no point
within the compass of our ancient souls
to suggest one way or another—
no brilliant star, no station of the sun
for us to fix upon.
Whichever way we face,
that becomes the direction of our knowing.

And yet you pant, and strain,
and snuffle, and sniff,
as if there were some secret
(just around the bend
or crouching under some bush)
that makes sense of it all.

Lead on! Lead on!
Beyond the very edge
of this—our flattened earth—
and be assured, for what it’s worth,
that I must surely follow,
and you are not alone.

Craig Spence

CraigSpenceWriter.ca

A Dream Within a Dream

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM
By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone? 
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

A wisp of a thing

Oh! How I wish the letters
Of the word
Would dissolve
Into the very thing

How I would delight
In that incandescence,
That essence emerging
In my bleary dawn,
Like souls coalescing
Out of nothingness…
Engendered by the welling sun,
And the risen mist,
And the stilled air that I breathe.

Oh! How I would sigh
And beg the pending breeze
To hold off—just a moment more
And not disturb this glowing dream…
This fantasy that must always be
Precursor to despair.

Craig Spence

Death is not an event; it’s a process

We tend to think of death as a sudden event—the moment we transition from life into… its opposite. In truth, death is a process we stave off every day by living. Which makes life an activity, not a state of being.

If I don’t hunt and eat, I die. If I don’t procreate, my future generations will never be. If I don’t mind my step, I will be killed by a car. Every day we must actively live, or we are likely to meet an untimely end. I must exercise and manage my diet, or my ability to live is compromised—and so it goes.

Death is part of the process of renewal. I, as an individual, make my contribution, then give way as new ideas and modes of living are born. Whole civilizations become artifacts and ultimately particles of dust in the inexhorable cycle of life. Worlds come into and pass out of being.

This perpetual struggle to survive is masked in the comfortable environments of the ‘developed world’. We don’t connect the need to work with the ongoing battle for survival. Ultimately, though, that robs our lives of meaning. We are here to give what we can, while we can.

Life is the convergence of energy, matter, and spirit in conscious, willing being. To me, the best possible life is devoted to bringing joy into the world—as much joy with as much grace as I can muster in my brief span.

ImagiNation

Creative writing takes us places we have never been, invents new worlds, converts ideas and memories into things experienced in the mind’s eye. That’s the first half of the creative cycle; reading is the second. It’s the intent of authors and poets to incite creativity in the minds and hearts of readers.

Creative interaction has always been a driving passion for writers, and—fortunately—we live in an era when that fundamental, almost instinctive urge can be channelled into new formats, reaching new ‘audiences’. We can engage our readers (and listeners) before, during, and after the writing and publication of our ‘books’.

Let me share a couple of examples.

I’m rewriting a story titled Entrapments, which I rediscovered after it had sat on my MS shelf for some years. Right now, I’m getting to know the characters. In the mix: an aging prostitute, a journalist, an art critic, an artist, a petty crook… and so on. I’ll be reaching out online for ‘enactors’—people who have lived those personas or are very familiar with them. I want these contacts to feel engaged in the creative process and to enjoy the experience.

My most recently released novel, The Mural Gazer, was the second I have posted online as a work in progress, inviting readers to join me page by page as the story unfolded. My first online novel, The Boy From Under, is also available online. Both can be purchased in print via my Amazon.com author’s page.

Again, the purpose of creating literature online is to engage readers and writers as early as possible and to invite questions and commentary as the story emerges. Other possibilities and benefits?

  • Links can be inserted into an online story as supplementary information and graphics.
  • An audio edition of the story can be made available in the same space as the print edition.
  • Feedback from readers can be welcomed and responded to.
  • Literature can be shared instantly, at a lower price, and with reduced environmental costs.
  • Other books on an author’s shelf can be linked seamlessly…

The potential for writers to meet readers via new digital technologies excites me. It’s daunting, too. But in an era when young people in particular are being drawn more and more into the online universe, authors have to establish a niche—let’s call it ImagiNation!

View From Up the Hill

I’m so used
to looking at things,
not into them
that I’m startled when I witness
the space between our molecules of Being
and come to realize:
It’s not empty,
this infinite sky,
this eternal orbiting of day
into night / into dawn /
into the glare of high noon.

I wrote this morning
in my latest revision of a fiction:

She glanced away
then out the window
at the sunrise he’d witnessed earlier;
it had morphed into the blare of morning light
the gorgeous tints of dawn burned off
by the intense rays
of a risen sun.

Will this epiphany of the dazzling light
and its glorious host of questions
well once again at at the end of day?

Can the invisible be divisible?

Is it my plight to know?

How many times can we split
the atoms of our truths
before we discover the ultimate germs of
Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, and Spirit?

Craig Spence