RAINFOREST

I’m a prairie girl besotted by BC’s old-growth forests. My husband and I just returned from a few days on Vancouver Island, where we walked the rainforest trail near Ucluelet, following along a wooden slatted path raised above the ground and wondering at the mystical beauty. My dreams are now full of cedars and hemlocks and firs, bark wrinkled with the deep furrows of many centuries, branches sleeved in velvet moss and draped with tangled vines, trunks encircled with climbing, sun-seeking creepers. Stepping in and out of the dappled shadows amongst the towering giants humbled me. The forest floor was crisscrossed with fallen trunks, overgrown with ferns and mistletoe, veiled in green–everything a moist haze of living green so luminous it shone as though giving off light itself. Sounds were muffled and subtle–the plink of a raindrop on a waxy leaf, the far-off cough of a raven, wind whispering mischievously in the treetops far above. And oh! that earthy, mulchy scent pervading everything–a mixture of cedar chest and flower garden.  It was magical. I need to return soon.

          A TOURIST ATRAVEL  

It’s settled: I’m off to France in June for three weeks of Gallic culture! I’ve booked the cutest hotel in Paris for four nights; I’ll be meeting a couple of Parisian girlfriends, but I’m also planning to wander for hours by myself—to take in a couple of museums and the wonderful Les Puces flea market, to buy my new favourite perfume at Galeries Lafayette, and to saunter down cobblestone alleys and the walkways along the Seine River. Maybe I’ll remember some of my French phrases for eavesdropping as I sip vin blanc at a sidewalk café or when ordering bistro feasts. Then I’m off to the South for a visit with my third French girlfriend and her family—including a tour of restaurants, a night in an ancient mas (Provençal farmhouse/mansion), and all the home-grown strawberries I can eat. Superbe!

My friend Dallas shared with me a rivetting article, “Reclaiming Travel,” which appeared last summer in a column in The New York Times. The basic thesis is that today’s tourism (modelled by my upcoming vacation with its focus on rest and restaurants, entertainment, and personal enrichment) is but a faint shadow of real travel (more like a pilgrimage or quest in its cross-cultural, transformational search for meaning). Tourism is largely what we do nowadays; travel is something more rare that changes who we are. The human journey first started, the writers of the piece claim, at our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, when we were condemned to wander—our wandering becoming a wondering about exile and about our true home, with hearts restless for something lost.

Of course, journey is a frequent theme in classic literature; think of Homer’s Odyssey (telling of the Greek hero’s mythic return home after battle) and Dante’s Divine Comedy (a spiritual travel tale tracing the path from the “dark wood” through hell and purgatory to heaven). The meme continues through to stories written today, from Gulliver’s Travels, Innocents Abroad, and Around the World in Eighty Days to Lord of the Rings, A Year in Provence, and Eat, Pray, Love. I could go on, but you get my point.

The motif of travel is omnipresent in the late-Victorian writings of G.K. Chesterton. In Everlasting Man he wrote:

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.

Then, encapsulating the nature of journey, in What’s Wrong with the World Chesterton wrote a couple of lines that I used as the first epigram in my own novel:

Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for.

(If you’re interested in the biblical ground for mankind’s wandering and wondering about the road, homecoming, and rest, you might like to read three short literary/biblical studies I posted in April, June, and July of 2012, here.)

My meandering thoughts today have set me on a course of inner contemplation regarding why I love to visit exotic places and what adventure really means to me. My forebears travelled, in the true sense of the word, to make a home in a foreign land—largely for religious freedom. So my history connects travel with spiritual life. Yet here I am, a few generations later, traversing the globe for personal, emotional, and gastronomical satisfaction. Much as I’d love to pretend I might just find an epiphany on French soil, I concede that my trip is more tourism than true travel. I don’t expect great character growth (though I might be surprised); I just hope I properly pronounce merci!

          BREAKFAST

I don’t like to eat too early in the morning. Today it was ten before I cut up my usual oranges topped with plain yogurt and salted sunflower seeds, added a cappuccino made from freshly ground decaf beans, and for good measure juiced a couple of grapefruit. I’m enjoying this repast as I write—and as I think about the significance of breaking my fast.

I’m never hungry in the morning, though I haven’t eaten for over twelve hours. It takes those first few bites to get the saliva running, I suppose. At first, my body resists; but if I wait until my stomach growls, I sometimes don’t eat till afternoon.

This lethargy is mirrored in my inner life as well. Learning something new takes effort and isn’t appealing at first—until I’ve turned the first few pages or clicked onto an engaging site. But once I’ve started, the intellectual juices get flowing and I feast on ideas. It’s the same with my soul; it needs nutrition as well, and too often the fast stretches long enough that I lose my appetite for things of the Spirit. I need to take the first bite to remember that the words of God are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb (Ps. 19:10).

          ISTANBUL

Esma is on a crusade for the perfect lamb meatball recipe to take home to her uncle’s bistro in Manhattan and has purchased sacksful of aromatic spices at the market—cloves and paprika, powdered cumin and beads of coriander, crescent-shaped fennel seeds and purple-black pepper with a brass grinder thrown in . . .

I haven’t written a short story for ages, and just sent one off for critique by: (1) a Christian teacher intimately familiar with Islam; (2) my sister, a poet; (3) an author of 75 books and editor of hundreds; and (4) my daughter, a trendy young reader the age of my character.

Now, back to drafting my novel after a long hiatus!

          SUN, SAND, AND SALT WATER

Sea lions stink!

I discovered this last week as our hired sailboat floated past a colony of them a hundred yards off our starboard side, draped over the rocks of San Carlos like tourists at a Turkish bath (ask me about that story sometime!). They reeked up to high heaven and barked at us derisively—rude creatures—as we headed out to open water in search of whales.

And we found them! Greys and humpbacks spouted fountains as we drew near, then breached and dove and waved goodbye with their mighty, double-finned tails. A barnacle-crusted sea turtle surfaced and then sank beneath our hull; some dolphins joined the party for a while; frigate birds and pelicans welcomed us back when we returned to port after a few hours at sea.

I find I love the ocean. I’m useless in the water itself—can only dog-paddle to save my life (though I do give snorkelling a go when in Mexico, choking and panicking whenever a bit of aqua seeps into my mask). But the briny teal depths are so vast, compellingly mysterious to a prairie girl like me.

Some of my shore-clinging friends from other countries seem intrigued by gophers and antelope and the way snow heaps up around the front door in a prairie winter. And the stench of our common skunk is every bit as foreign to them, I suppose, as the perfume of those sea lions to me.

Maybe that’s the whole point of vacation.  A change of scenery for even a week just seems to readjust one’s viewpoint.

Are any of you travelling this winter? Tell me about your trip!

SEWING ADDICTION!          

Apparently the sewing bug cannot be assuaged as easily as whipping together the two beachy shifts I made a couple of weeks ago. So while helping my daughters shop for sundress patterns, I fell in love with their choice of the 1952 retro-style wrap (Butterick 4790) and made it for myself out of this gorgeous teal (shot with black) Dupioni silk. It looks a bit more “buxom” on me than here, disembodied on the floor, but you get the idea. Imagine it with sexy black heels and a sparkly bag!

Now, seriously, it’s time for me to pay attention to my current editing projects and then get back to drafting my new novel. Maybe I’ll complete another chapter before we head to Mexico on January 30th.

          A TOURIST ATRAVEL

I’m soon off to Los Cabos for a week of Mexican sun with my family! Primarily we’re escaping the Canadian snow, of course, but I’m brushing up on my Español in hopes of real conversation with a waiter at the all-inclusive resort or possibly a visit with our friends from Guadalajara. I want a multifaceted experience: Spanish communion, sandy beach, authentic enchiladas, a few bars of Mariachi.

My friend Dallas shared with me a rivetting article, “Reclaiming Travel,” which appeared last summer in a column in The New York Times. The basic thesis is that today’s tourism (modelled by my upcoming vacation with its focus on rest, entertainment, and personal enrichment) is but a faint shadow of real travel (more like a pilgrimage or quest in its cross-cultural and transformational search for meaning). Tourism is largely what we do nowadays; travel is something more rare that changes who we are. The human journey first started, the writers of the piece claim, at our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, when we were condemned to wander—our wandering becoming a wondering about exile and about our true home, with hearts restless for something lost.

(If you’re interested in the biblical ground for mankind’s wandering and wondering about the road, homecoming, and rest, you might be interested in three of my biblical studies I posted in April, June, and July of 2012, here.)

Of course, journey is a frequent theme in classic literature; think of Homer’s Odyssey (telling of the Greek hero’s mythic return home after battle) and Dante’s Divine Comedy (a spiritual travel tale tracing the path from the “dark wood” through hell and purgatory to heaven). The meme continues through to stories written today, from Gulliver’s Travels, Innocents Abroad, and Around the World in Eighty Days to Lord of the Rings, A Year in Provence, and Eat, Pray, Love. I could go on, but you get my point.

The motif of travel is everywhere evident in the late-Victorian writings of G.K. Chesterton. In Everlasting Man he wrote:

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.

Then, encapsulating the nature of journey, in What’s Wrong with the World Chesterton wrote a couple of lines that I used as the first epigram in my own novel:

Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for.

My meandering thoughts today have set me on a course of inner contemplation regarding why I love to visit exotic places (Istanbul last year, Japan as a student, South Africa in between) and what adventure really means to me (Is it hearing the haunting Islamic call to prayer, sleeping in a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple, holding a baby lion?). My forebears travelled, in the true sense of the word, to make a home in this foreign land of Canada—largely for religious freedom. So my history connects travel with spiritual life. Yet here I am, a few generations later, transversing the globe for emotional and physical satisfaction.

Much as I’d love to pretend I might just find a life-altering epiphany on Mexico’s shores in a few weeks from now, the truth is that our short trip is more about tourism than travel—this time, at least. I don’t expect great personal character growth (though I might be surprised); I just hope I don’t get a sunburn!

SILK FROCKS

After a month of inactivity, with my arm sling finally off and the surgical site on my shoulder healing, I felt a great need to create something with my hands before I got back to drafting on my novel. So over the past few days I whipped up two sundresses for our upcoming week on a Mexican beach (Los Cabos in February). They’re simple shifts, both made of drapey silk charmeuse—one in vivid tangerine and the other a dusty eggplant with copper sequin trim.

I love to sew! Of course, this is the reason the main character in my novel loves to sew as well, the texture and weight of cloth in her hand bringing her (as it brings me) a deep tranquility:

From the time she was a child playing with scraps that fell to the floor, listening to the drone and punch of Mom’s antiquated Singer machine, she’d hankered to sew. She learned the smell of the flax beneath linen, savored the variance between silk and wool. She had a habit still of chewing a strand each time she laid out a length of yard goods, ready for the shears. She made a sacrament of touching and sniffing and tasting—a sensual adulation. (The Third Grace, page 46)

I used to stitch almost everything I wore, just for the pleasure of creation. It started with a pink gingham cotton apron in 4-H  and progressed through a high school Home Ec project, and then on to a flirty halter top and a “maxi-dress” that I wore during the hippie days. I even planned to sew my own wedding dress out of rustic unbleached muslin (it was the ’70s, remember, and “natural” was in), but thankfully Mom talked me out of that one. I made adorable outfits for my three babies, sewed my rancher husband a double-breasted suit that he never wore (no wonder!), and—like the character in my novel—I designed costumes for rental at a local shop: a wizard, a princess, a little Dutch maid.

But I’ve gotten out of practice lately, and I’ve gained some weight since I last bought patterns, so the orange sundress was a real challenge. I ended up cutting it too small and then having to pick a lot of stitches and replace the back completely. Both garments hang loosely to allow tropical breezes in; I might pair the frocks with heels for a funky look. But even if I wear the shifts only as cover-ups for lounging on sand beneath palapas, the process of creating will have made it worthwhile. Now I feel ready to get back to writing!

A CHILD OF THE SNOWS    

                                            (by G.K. Chesterton)

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim

And never before or again,

When the nights are strong with a darkness long,

And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,

The place where the great fires are,

That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth

And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn

Where the child in the frost is furled,

We follow the feet where all souls meet

At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,

For the flame of the sun is flown.

The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,

And a Child comes forth alone.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EACH OF YOU!

       MUKLUKS

These mukluks from northern Canada are over four decades old–a Christmas gift from my brother when I was still in my teens. They tromped me through Manitoba snowstorms and kept me warm when snowmobile joyriding over the frozen Red River Floodway. They journeyed along with me to college in Minnesota, and wandered miles of wintry ranchland Sandhills in Saskatchewan, and now take me into my back yard of the wooded Cypress Hills of Alberta to stroll beneath frosty evergreens. They are fulfilling their destiny of journey, I think–uniquely designed, hand stitched, and beaded by some Native on the shores of the Hudson Bay (back in the day before The Shopping Channel found a source for a poor imitation currently sold for hundreds a pair).

I love these mukluks. They’re made of rawhide and lined with what looks like hand-loomed wool, and used to have rustic inner booties made of the same homespun fabric before I lost one. The glass beads are set individually into patterns–not sewn on as decals–but the fur is fake and I’m thinking of having it replaced with rabbit or coyote or fox. Which would you suggest?

I’ll never give these mukluks away, though daughters beg and my own limbs weaken as I slide towards my sixties (chanting, “These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do!”). My mukluks symbolize an era for me, when father and older brother went off to the frozen north to work on construction sites alongside Inuit and First Nations people, leaving me in urban civilization to read Farley Mowat and Robert Service, and to dream of snowshoe-ing over the tundra.

Christmas is coming. I don’t “feel” Christmasy–recent shoulder surgery has left me in an arm sling, incapable of decorating or baking this year. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit it; after all, I don’t expect to “feel” Eastery or Pentecosty. This forces me to remember that Christmas isn’t a feeling, after all, but a 2,000-year-old recognition and joyous celebration of the gift of salvation come to all mankind–and to me, Deb, in my little cottage on the snowy banks of a country creek.

The willows and pines outside are festooned in ice crystals today, the air hangs soft with fog, and my colourful mukluks are a Yuletide decoration for my heart.