Looking Back Post 2/3

(I am posting my own responses to looking back over the last year in this blog weekly for three weeks. These are unedited writings done in class, offered here for my students and readers. This is week two out of three - the last one will be next week)

“Whatever arises is fresh, the essence of realization…”

(line from Shambhala lineage chant)

I look out over the back yard from the windows above, and I see space: whiteness expanding our small urban field, melding into the white and blue garage, and blue sky beyond. It is easier from this high up to not see where rabbits have run in circles, or shat in the snow making small minefields, to not to see the still green fallen willow leaves, or patches where grass bleeds through.

And so, though I don’t mean to back into a metaphor for looking back at the end of the year, I have. It is easier now, at the end of December, either see the whole year as clear and white and clean and destined, or as muck and confusion and mud. The fact is, it was, as is life, both.

Quivering

signs of life, january 2014

This is a student piece, written in response to a Rumi quote prompt from a couple of weeks ago. I was impressed with her deeply physical descriptions of being cold, and the description of a civilized city like Toronto being a wilderness. As well, her on-the-spot spontaneous analysis of "side effects" really hit me.

This is my favorite line:

And so this quiver that I quiver is a reminder that I am alive and fragile and only a moment in all of time, waiting for a bus that will be late and trying not to make all of this a bigger deal than it really is.

-----On to the piece--------------

Stay here, quivering with each moment

like a drop of mercury

-Rumi

By Jan Derbyshire

I quiver here like I don't remember quivering before. It is minus 31 with the wind chill factor. I don't understand this wind chill factor. The temperature, I'm told is minus 19 degrees celsius*,but with the wind chill factor it feels like minus 31*. If it feels like minus 31, isn't it minus 31? This is all too much like drugs and side effects. To me an effect is an effect. When they say side effect it makes it sound like something that will happen beside you. If a drug has a side effect of making you gain weight, the fat will just pile up next to you. You can even leave it there when you go out, just call the fat sitter. My point is this-they talk about the wind chill factor like a side effect of the weather. It's true, they say, it feels like minus 31 but don't feel too bad, it's really only minus 19. And who can say what one person's experience of minus 31 is to another person's experience of minus 31.