Lorne Meets World

A photogenic thing happened on the way to St. Louis Square.

Take it away, extended autumn…

When Mickey goes bad… * PS – have since learned this is not Mickey, but a forerunner named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Resemblance is uncanny, though, isn’t it?

We interrupt the ongoing (but nearly completed) journey to Rivière-des-Prairies from August to bring you this moment from today…

I’ve asked around, and no one I know seems to think I’m fully enlightened. Perhaps this has something to do with why, for the most part, I continue to take greater pleasure in bursts of blue than in fully cloudy skies.

These were the words that came…

Baruch Atah Adonay, Eloheinu Melech Ha’olam, She’kacha lo b’olamo

(Rough and decidedly unscholarly translation: “Thank you, source of all that is, for bringing beauty such as this into being (and, also, helping me remember to put down my camera, close my eyes, and pay attention to the chilling wind as it sifts through autumn leaves)).”

The posts in this “Rivière-des-Prairies or Bust” series are self-contained, but by way of background…these are “field notes” of my efforts to walk in a mindful way westward from my Mile End, Montreal apartment until I reach Rivière-des-Prairies.

August 19, 2014

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

― Abraham Joshua Heschel

Atheists and anti-religionists, please take heart.  In spite of some of the religious stuff below, if you keep scrolling, something beautiful and nonsectarian is going to happen.  I promise.

Oh, what the hell.  Here’s a sneak preview.

As I write this, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, is only a couple of days away.  The Days of Awe which it initiates are a time for self-reflection and teshuvah, often translated as “repentance,” but more precisely translated as “turning” – turning back to the source of our goodness.  As I think about the year past, the year ahead, and the years to follow, God willing (whatever that expression means, it definitely means something), I would like to honour that source by doing well by intimates and strangers, of course, but also by living, as best I can, with the radical amazement that A.J. Heschel describes.

I got a hit of it on August 19, when my walk westward took me past the ostensibly nondescript du College metro station.

The stained glass inside got me curious.

A glance down the stairway got me kind of excited.

So I decided to camp out for a while.

Then I descended further into the light.

And watched all these people stepping through the light or around it.  Sometimes it seemed the light was seeking them out or they were dodging it.  An understandable response to light – literal and metaphorical.  It’s hard to resist rushing.  Our lives are full of fires to put out and others to stoke.  But sometimes rushing is nothing more than an unnoticed habit, or simply the conviction that here is boring, and there is better.

The metro station is near Vanier CEGEP, a college.  And I found myself wondering if it has a place for its students – in a non-sectarian way, at least – to connect and perhaps deepen their capacity for radical amazement.  Show up, notice something you hadn’t before, get a passing grade.

To Jewish readers, a shana tova, a good and sweet new year.  And to all readers, wishing you some radical amazement today and in the days ahead.  If you come across some, feel free to offer a comment, telling us about it.

“We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.”

― Abraham Joshua Heschel

August 17

All the posts in this “Rivière-des-Prairies or Bust” series are self-contained, but by way of background…these are “field notes” of my efforts to walk in a mindful way westward from my Mile End, Montreal apartment until I reach Rivière-des-Prairies.

Today’s walk took me from the edges of Outremont, a picturesque upper-class neighbourhood, to the Town of Mount Royal, the well-off community where I spent most of my youth.  Both abound with lovely parks and benches in which to enjoy them.  

But I’m on a mission to prove to myself that anyplace is interesting if you stop to take notice, so I wasn’t going to force lovely on myself.  The only thing I was going to force was the commitment I made today to sit for thirty minutes wherever I reached the hour-and-a-half mark.  Which saw me planting myself on the steps of “LED Lighting” on Bates Road, one of a continuum of squat concrete office buildings.  Could I really sit here for a full half hour – especially on a Sunday, with all the businesses closed – and observe anything other than my own boredom?

At times like this, I generally find it best to stop questioning the matter, and invite the world to come alive.

Suddenly, I am aware of a playground in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish school, thanks to the yelping of children, and in the background, the springy sound of a large, bouncing ball.  And I am reminded that ultra-religious people like to bounce balls, too.  The blue sky is stealthily engulfed by a mass of grey clouds.  A car rolls by and I can’t quite believe how much noise a single car makes.  Another car starts, and I can’t get over how much noise another single car makes. 

I close my eyes.  The sound of a Hasidic boy yelling “Nein” roars through my ears.  I notice that my jaw is relaxing, which means that a moment ago, it was clenched.  I feel the sun on my arms.  Has the grey sky given way to blue again?  I feel pulsing on the soles of my feet from all the walking, in my arms from all the life.  The sound of the breeze conjures images of tall grass blowing.  Barely conscious that I’m doing so, I turn my palms towards the sun, and recite one of the Birkot HaShachar, a Jewish morning blessing, that doesn’t always stand up well to scrutiny:

Baruch atah adonay, eloheynu mel’ech ha’olam, sh’asah li kol tzarki

Blessed are you, The Generous, our God, life of all the worlds, who acts for all my needs.

I open my eyes, just as a Hasidic man wearing a tallis passes.  We take turns not knowing whether to greet one another. Yes, the sky has gone mostly blue again.  From nowhere, a colony of seagulls has arrived, circling in the sky, the ring expanding as they fan out.  Then, after a while, they are gone except for two of them – grey winged specks against what remains of the grey sky, until they too, are gone.

To what end, all this noticing?  I think of one of my Buddhist teachers saying, “You have no idea where you are on the path.” 

The only thing about which I am certain is that I am pleased I risked some boredom.

August 14, 2014

What do you do if you’re restless to get into motion?  If you’re like many people, you take action.

And if you’re like me, you drive yourself insane considering which action to take.  At least, until you reach the point where you say, “Fuck it.  I’m grabbing my camera, firing up the compass on my phone, and going west.”

I’ve been back in my hometown of Montreal for a few months, and though I’ve covered a fair bit of ground, I’m also conscious that there is an expiry date on my return and much of this city I haven’t seen.  So to liberate myself from my indecisiveness, I’m determined to do something I always daydreamed about when in school (take your pick, elementary school, high school, CEGEP, university, rabbinical college) – getting up and walking straight until I’d circled the world.  So I’m walking west.  I won’t make it around the globe, but at least west will get me to Rivière-des-Prairies.  Of course, I’ll have to make detours to allow for the fact that I haven’t mastered the art of walking through walls, and may feel the obligation to observe ethical imperatives such as being seduced by one bakery or another.  But basically, I’m going west from my Mile End apartment in three-hour installments until I reach the river.  Why west, when the compass has 359 other directions to choose from?  I’m not sure, but it’s what feels right.  What I do know is that west has some familiar territory and a lot of new ground.  Whatever I find there – in the mere ten kilometres, but thousands of footsteps, between home and the river – I will have the chance to test the assertion I like to make that any place is interesting if you’re paying attention.

Speaking of attention, I’ll be toting my spirituality with me, mostly a blend of Buddhism and Judaism.  Don’t be scared, though.  Before I start telling other people how to live, I need to figure out how to live my life.  The only person I’ll be sermonizing is me.  Preaching to the mirror, as it were.  And even though I’m something of a killjoy, I think I’ll slip in some fun, too.

So let’s get started, across my deck, down forty-six spiralling steps into a rag-tag alleyway of tin and wood and concrete and flowers, serenaded by ambulance sirens, garbage trucks, and a young red-headed woman on her balcony scraping at something with sandpaper. 

Here’s some of what I see along the way (if you wish, you can enlarge the images or go to a slideshow by clicking on them):

As I expect I’ll be doing on most of these meanderings, I sit for a while, just to see what arises.  Plunking myself on a small knoll in a parkette at Van Horne and Hutchison,

my eyes settle after a while on the abandoned building across the street.  Dominating the assortment of graffiti is the word “PEUR” – French for “fear” – scrawled in large, jagged yellow letters three times across.  PEUR PEUR PEAR.  FEAR FEAR FEAR.  On the other side of the street, someone has painted the world “ANCHOR” on a building. 

Fear 3, Anchor 1. 

That sounds like just about the right ratio to describe our lives.  To the extent one can really know such things, I think I’ve detected some anchors.  The young Hasidic couple, husband pushing a stroller, wife wrapped in an olive jacket, chatting with attentiveness and ease, like lifelong best friends.  The young Hasidic boy in a blue-striped polo shirt, one hand held firmly by his father’s as they cross the street, the other animatedly gesticulating a story.  Soon, I am surrounded by a frolicking troop of developmentally disabled young people and their counsellors.  One of the kids rolls in the grass for a while with a counsellor, who finally says, “That’s it.  I’m all out of smiles.”  Another keeps chanting, “Scooby Doooo, where are youuuu?” occasionally winning the laugher he’s chasing.  And still another sits happily, lovingly held in a counsellor’s lap.  All anchored, all seemingly secure.

But what is it to be their parents, I wonder, knowing how unlikely it is their children will ever be capable of fending for themselves?  And I think back to the many Hasids I’d passed, walking with haste and speaking urgently into their phones, as if trying to forestall something from going awry.  Not far from me, a couple of guys on their lunch break are spending more time with their phones than each other, as if they’ll otherwise miss out on something crucial, some source of relief and happiness that could pass them by if they are not vigilant.

Yes, 3:1 seems like the right fear-to-anchor ratio to describe our lives.  We all carry fear, a grea deal of it, sometimes of our own invention, sometimes pressed upon us from stark reality.  The next time someone pisses me off (or is that the next time I get pissed off with someone?), I might do well to remember this ratio, and on my good days, summon a greater capacity for kindness.

PS: I have an agreement in principal to buy a gas station. 

It happened when I went looking for some batteries, which were out of stock.  Then I spotted a package of nuts.

“Well now that I’m here,” I began, “it would be rude of me -”

“- not to buy something,” the clerk said.

“Exactly.”

“If you want, you can buy the whole store.”

“Can I get a discount?”

“Sure.  We’ll give you the whole thing for half a million.  In cash.”

“Deal.  I need to go to a bank machine.”

“No problem.  In the meantime, I’ll let the owner know so he can prepare the papers.”

Maybe there’s a lesson in fear and anchors in this too, but I’m too busy figuring out why it took me three hours to walk two kilometres.

Although I’m starting to turn my attention to a blog series I’m planning on launching shortly about Montreal, it appears – unsurprisingly – there’s a little New Orleans still in my system. 

Just a bit ago, while on Rue St. Laurent / St. Lawrence Street, I started thinking about some walks I’d like to take in Montreal.  The phrase “take that walk” playing in my mind swiftly morphed into Kermit Ruffins’ “When I Die (You Better Second Line),” which I’ve been listening to on a daily basis.  Though I didn’t conduct a systematic survey, I’m pretty sure I was the only person on St. Laurent slipping into a strut and waving an imaginary handkerchief.  It didn’t last long, but the moment had to be respected.

(Quick and hopefully painless tutorial section.  What’s a second line?  Basically, it’s a New Orleans tradition where you’ve got the leaders (the “first line”) in a brass band parade in front, then the band itself, then the “second line” AKA everyone else who wants to step into the streets and join in the strutting and marching and joy.  The second lines with which I’m most familiar are at jazz funerals, where the departed is accompanied to the cemetery with dirges, and after they’re laid to rest, have their journey onward celebrated with exuberance.  Or they’re celebrations by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, originally created when African-Americans were unable to obtain insurance and formed their own mutual aid societies, celebrating once a year with parades through the streets in matching suits designed for the main event.)

This past Sunday, following the jazz mass at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church – imagine “cooling off” by stepping out of a non-air conditioned church into a refreshingly humid 34°C – there was a special second line back to Satchmo Summerfest.  

Seeing the pictures I’ve included in this post, a friend of mine responded by saying, “Joy is a serious business in New Orleans.  The only people smiling are the white tourists.”

Well, sort of.  Joy IS a serious business in New Orleans, because joy isn’t always about being smiley.  Not while you’re strutting and dancing and baking in a suit in 34°C, and showing your pride (though these guys were smiles aplenty when it was all done and they found a shady spot with water or beer).  As for the white tourist thing, well kind of but not exactly.  There were plenty of non-white revellers, and a lot of us were either locals or people like me, enough of a regular to be somewhere between local and foreign.  Nor are all the Social Aid and Pleasure Club members black.  For instance, when I joined in for last October’s parade by the Prince of Wales club (video below), one of its heralded members was outgoing president, Joe “White Boy” Stern.

Anyway, that’s all sounding a little too dispassionate for such a non-heady affair.  The point is…

while I live, I better second line

You tell it, Kermit Ruffins (the song’s his, and the visuals are a montage of second line footage from the Treme television series, in which New Orleans itself is the star):

And one bonus video.  The Shotgun Jazz Band performed “Over in the Glory Land” at the festival, and the band at the jazz mass at St. Augustine’s performed it the next day.  A lot of young people get the idea of tradition in New Orleans.

Alright…

Please don’t try this at home.  However, if you’re inclined to change the world, please DO try this in airports (as I did in Philadelphia yesterday) and other public spaces.  Be sure to let me know if it works.

Note: The first two steps are optional.

Step One – Hang out at Satchmofest in New Orleans.

Step Two – Make sure to catch the closing performance by Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers, and kick loose, especially when they finish up with Skokiaan.  (If you’re not familiar with Mr. Ruffins, he’s one hell of a performer, often paid the compliment of embodying the spirit of Louis Armstrong himself.)

Step Three – Take your seat in the airport or other public space.

Step Four – Click on this YouTube video *

Step Five – As Kermit gets going, “a smile on every note” (a quote I read yesterday about clarinetist Pete Fountain, but which applies equally here), look at the people around you. Somehow he seems to be accompanying everybody, whether they’re walking energetically or dazedly, texting, drinking from a water bottle, contending with their kids. Because what he’s doing is playing the beauty of life.

Step Six – Check and see. Good chance you’re smiling.

Step Seven – Good chance what you’ve seen and are feeling will make you better equipped to bring out the smile in others.

Anyway, that’s my theory till proven otherwise.  Let’s build a body of empirical evidence, shall we?

And what the hell, go ahead and try this at home if you like.  I won’t tell.

* Kermit – should you ever see this, and would rather no one had put the recording on YouTube, let me know, and I’ll find some way to change this blogpost while still securing the improvement of the world.

Not sure I’ve ever been so pleased to discover room for improvement in my photography skills.

My pictures of the Gypsy Kumbia Orchestra at the Montreal Jazz Festival show that I would have been well-served by a faster shutter speed.  Oh well, next time.  The important thing is that those guys were flying and a joyous time was had by all.  And besides, they were making me sway against my will. 

Oh, and courtesy of Funkzie Groove, I now understand that The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” is a funk song:

Most of my writing time of late has gone into determining if the book I started writing some years ago still has a pulse.  Time for a blog post, I say…

When I was young, I was easily embarrassed by my mother’s habit, when hearing a few words in conversation from a song she knew, of joyfully breaking into the song herself.

“Is the Expos game against the Phillies a day game or night game?” someone might ask.

“Night and daaay, you are the one,” she would sing back. “Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.”  And then, perhaps after a short self-conscious laugh over her impromptu joy, she would dutifully answer the question.

Meanwhile I would look for a place to hide.  I guess I might as well get over it, given that I realized a few years ago, I have the same habit.

For instance…        

While taking shots of this lamppost I’m in love with at the Outremont Metro station, giving the anonymous underground the quality of hominess, anyone within earshot would hear me singing – loudly and possibly on key – Herman’s Hermits’ rendition of “Leaning on the Lamppost at the Corner of the Street.”  How rewarded these commuters must have felt to be serenaded with such words of wisdom as:

She’s wonderful, she’s marvellous, she’s fabulous, she’s beautiful,
And anyone can understand why,
I’m leaning on a lamp-post at the corner of the street
In case a certain little lady comes by.

Then, after capturing a bit more of Outremont station…

 …I walked around the city for the next two days, sharing the song with everyone else.  Couldn’t help it.  Generosity is something else that comes naturally to my mother.

I’ve also been taking pictures of other things than Metro stations.  For example…

If you’d like to see some other images from my time here, this is a link to about 25 of my “greatest hits”:

https://plus.google.com/photos/117565792703398298858/albums/6029705927308071841?banner=pwa

And if you’d like to know what Herman and his hermits had to say:

A couple of days ago, with time to kill in the vicinity of the Decarie Expressway, I found myself wondering what would come of standing above it and watching the traffic for a while.

Immediately, I felt a rush in seeing the cars and trucks below shooting away as if blown from a supersonic cannon.  I marvelled at how exciting the simple, everyday pace of our lives can be.  And desperate, too.  So little time given to us, so much to do.  Everyone with different destinations day to day, in vehicles that mark our individuality with make and colour and price tag.  Everyone with the same ultimate destination.  We ride alongside one another.  We choose or are given space from one another.  And most of the time, we occupy ourselves with the day-to-day, and postpone thoughts about the ultimate.  As it should be, perhaps.

The video clip below runs a minute or so.  Perhaps you too might experience the rush, and find your own reflections in it.

And then, later that day.  I’m riding the 161 bus out of Mile End, the old world meets new world neighbourhood where I’m living.

“Go!  Canadiens!  Go!” says the sign on the bus.  And well it should.  The Habs will be going into game seven that night against Boston (and, ultimately, pull off an upset with grit, goaltending and classic Montreal Canadiens speed). 

But the exclamation points are a marked contrast against the bus ride.

It’s a warm day, the bus is full, not moving very fast, and I feel my nostrils habitually, almost involuntarily, making an aperture adjustment to filter out the odour of a day’s worth of jostling humanity.  And then I stop.  I want to feel this in my nose.  It’s not a pleasant smell, but it’s the smell of shared experience. 

At the front of the bus is an Orthodox Jewish man with a black kippah, and closer to me, a younger one with a beatnik’s beard and a designer variation on tie-dye.  There’s a black man in front of me in a jean suit (kind enough to defer to me when a seat becomes available) and another, not far behind him, in a glistening, silver suit, while towards the front, a young black girl in pigtails conjures associations with Norman Rockwell’s civil rights paintings.  A woman with a beautiful profile; a man across the aisle distractedly keeping time to an imagined drum beat with a water bottle, slapping it again the place where neck and shoulder meet.  A young woman who I think is Russian can’t help from laughing at the antics of a couple of pre-adolescent schoolmates.  I want to tell the girl with the blue hair, out-of-season woolen socks and a knapsack with an “Are you dead yet?” decal that she is beautiful, because I suspect she has no idea. 

And we are without our masks.  We are not acting for colleagues or friends or family.  We are just ourselves, pensive, contemplative, not wearing exclamation marks.  We don’t seem to be especially happy or sad, but we are reflecting at the end of a long day, which may be falling upon the end of a long week, a long year, a hard life.

I don’t only want to see what I’m seeing, though.  I want to do something with it.  So I tell myself that, when in the future, the conduct of people is other than I would like and I am tempted to act with impatience or indifference, that I will try instead to remember this shared journey.

I’m living in Montreal for the next while; an opportunity to spend more time with my family here, and to better know the city in which I grew up but left in my early twenties.

It also seems to be an opportunity to interact with my intuition a little more.  For instance, yesterday when I awoke, I spent a while starting at the parallelograms of early morning light on the wall.

And for some reason, the song “Take Me to the River” came to mind.  So I decided – or it was simply decided – I would make the five-mile walk along Clark Street down to the St. Lawrence River.

Doing my best to pay attention to the details, I noticed sunshine on my chest and birdsong in the air, the pleasure brought by a gradual downhill slope and the subtle discontentment that accompanied the uphills, my irritation with some people and my willingness to exchange it for curiosity about their behaviour.

And more people than were probably interested, were exposed to my spontaneous vocalizations of “Take Me to the River,” along with finger pumps accompanying the trumpets inside me head.

Also, oh yeah did I see stuff.

If interested, you can check out the entire web album (30 images in total):

https://plus.google.com/photos/105048799489063157726/albums/6013001022224491937?cfem=1

And finally, for good measure, here’s a version of Take Me to the River I’ve always liked, from The Commitments movie:

Rambling through the day – to, through, and out of High Park – I noticed a father guiding his daughter across an intersection with his foot while chatting on his cell, and a man walking in the park and texting, and two women in the park with buds in their ears, missing out on the birdsong – and I was inclined to judge them.  What happened to being in the world when in the world?  Then, remembering I have my own kind of expertise with non-presence, I pulled back on judgement and felt a little sadness for us all; the pressure we feel to always plug on, the diminished ability to ever plug out.  But watching a swan protect its nest by chasing a goose through Grenadier Pond, I was reminded that it’s not necessarily supposed to be easy.

Also, I saw some stuff:

Normally I ascribe a theme to what I post here.  The best I can come up with for this one is…

Hey!  Look at all these pictures without snow in them!

Mile End, Montreal

Balmutto and Charles, Toronto

Yonge Street

I know, I know…I should get with the program and give up my preference

of old and dilapidated over new and behemoth.  Just doesn’t seem to be in me.

Black and white aren’t colours? 

In watching the transition from winter to spring, I’ve been taking turns enjoying it and negotiating with it to happen faster.

(So far, I don’t seem to be calling the shots.)

Along the way, I’ve gotten to see fire and ice and whimsy…

What these images don’t quite capture was the adventure my afternoon companion and I enjoyed today in “progressing” along the ice in High Park.  But Paul Simon’s “Slip Sliding Away” does.  Plus it has this beautiful and heartbreaking verse:

And I know a father who had a son

He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he’d done

He came a long way just to explain

He kissed his boy while he lay sleeping

And he turned around

And he headed home again

Darned if it didn’t happen again.

Winter. February. Who needs it?

Let’s go shopping instead.

But on the other hand, isn’t the way of getting the most out of winter to step into it instead?

Apparently so, at least this afternoon.

Okay, so it’s been trying to hide, but seen in downtown Toronto the last couple of days…colour! 

Question: are we required to offer gratitude to the browns, beiges and grays for helping us enjoy the reds and the blues?

Wanted out badly this afternoon.  Tempted to go to a movie, and use a big bag of popcorn as a hand warmer.  Reminded myself that there’s a decidedly finite amount of sunlight to be had this time of year.  Went instead, almost against my will, to the meeting place of the Humber River and Lake Ontario, and got to see this:

So often we think of winter as an occasion of loss – there goes the green grass, there fall the leaves, and the birds have left for their timeshares down south.  But lately, when I remember to lift my shoulders from their seasonal hunching, I’m noticing what the “loss” reveals:

And this morning, this has me thinking, “One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor”