University

1.

This Saturday morning was the first day of my week long holiday from work. It was also 4 days after I heard from my father that my grandmother, who had been sick, was now palliative and had only a month to live.

I woke up feeling very tired - tired from work, from expectations, from having to smile, from pain and sadness, from having stayed up too late the night before talking. It was hard to get going and I went out much later than usual.

Outside, the wind was soft and fresh, cool, and the sky was autumn blue. I took Union all the way to the golf course, slowly, because my heart was weighted. My heart was heavy, but my body was light and strong, hollow, with a steady current of electricity animating it, like the sunlight in autumn, golden, cool, subtle and powerful. It had come to me on leaving the house that even though I felt so tired that the idea of travelling outside of my zone should be impossible, I wanted to go up to University and Fischer Hallman and then down University, on the road through the trees. An empty place full of colour. It should have felt impossible, but it didn't. I wanted to do it so I did it.

The steep hill up Glasgow, past the luxurious but too new houses didn't break me to walking as it has in the past. I went right up it, slowly but directly. It is always bright at the top of Glasgow and Fischer Hallman, bright white like the high altitude of a moutain peak, dizzying from the effort of ascent, the sudden light in your eyes, the amazement of being there, the viewing of all directions before the victorious journey back down.

As I turned north and coasted down University, though the wildness that borders the road, hiding houses, making me feel, as it always does, that I've somehow escaped the bounds of agoraphobia and reality and at last found my moving place in the wilderness I dream about, I let my mind empty into the day, into being away, into the air. A passing jogger smiled at me and I thought about how animals don't feel the need to smile at each other, acknowledge each other, when passing - they just go about their business of food gathering and shelter building, and how this felt like a world I would feel so relieved to in - no expectations, no busyness of the mind, no symbols and rituals. On further thought, I realized that of course animals must have some way of acknowledging each other, although perhaps very different than human ways. Maybe what makes their world less mentally taxing is that they don't cringe in anxious anticipation before every encounter - not knowing, as we do, that an encounter is coming. It is anticipaton that makes ritual possible.

At the end of the natural part of University, where it collides abruptedly with Erb St, I enjoyed a strong moment of victory in the sunshine and then enjoyed a leisurely roll back up University, but this time, on the other side of the stream that runs down the west side of the road, on a path in a tangle of trees. For many minutes I bumped over roots and up little hills, through the sparkling dapple of morning sun on leaves, feeling free and unburdened. I came up to one of the exits of the path in a cul de sac, turned east again, and took a concrete path into a park behind the senior's home.

I sat down on a bench in the still damp shade next to the play structure, where it smelled slightly of animal urine, moss, sun and wood, and began to read The Remembrance of Things Past.

After a time, I put down my book. I looked at small leaves turning red on the tree nearby, and a man and woman walking a dog down the path. Now came an orange cat from the green lawn beyond me; he came up to my knees and rubbed, and then climbed onto the bench and put his damp paws on my thigh and kisssed. He crawled up my shoulder and leapt off the bench into the trees. He swam under the bench and noticed things on the ground. I clicked and he came back and rubbed on my legs, leaving white and orange hairs on my black tights. Around and around he wove in this delighting dance, while I took pictures with my phone. It is very hard to take the perfect posed picture of a cat.



Some children who had been playing nearby came into view and the cat ran towards them. They squealed with excitement - four boys and a little girl - and began to crouch down and approach the cat. The cat ran into the woods and they followed him, standing in a little row, crouching, peering, seeing the cat in the obscurity. They looked like a little group of English schoolchildren in an etching. I found myself surprised at their gentleness. Still, I worried for the cat. To not appear to be staring at children from a damp park bench in a deserted park, I took out my cell phone and check my email.

A new email had arrived and it read that my cousin had told my mother that my Grandma now only had 2 weeks to live. I watched the children chasing the cat through the woods now, worried and wondered how the cat was feeling, my stomach heavy with the possible cruelties of life. And yet the park was quiet and the cat was winning, avoiding the children. Who knows what would happen?

I stood for a while, my mind thinking. It was cold under the golden autumn light, a little, and the air felt tighter. I watched the children rustle in the bushes. I wondered if my cousin was exaggerating. She must be. I called my mother and no answer. I sent her a text. The children were moving in and out of the bushes, and no sign of the cat. My heart clenched, my brow wrinkled. I put my phone away and took it back out again.

Suddently the cat burst from the bushes, an orange streak running full speed across the lawn. The children ran after it, and they all crashed into the bushes beyond. I wondered if the cat knew the children, belonged to them. I considered that the cat came here often and was aware of the ways of children, that this was just another morning for an outdoor cat.

I have to trust that the cat knows what it is doing. I put my phone in my pocket and picked up my bicycle to leave the park. I took my phone out and checked to see if my mother had texted and no, she hadn't. My heart was already nostalgic for the time of the bench, the rub, the climb, the jump, the swim, my book, Combray, M LeGrandin. I felt I was leaving a trail behind me as I left the park, wanting to stay and continue the stillness of holidays.

Now I was on the road again. My cellphone fell out of my pocket and crashed on the pavement, the perfect glass screen chipping a little. I picked it up, sighed. My body felt energy returning, light in my muscles, time to ride it out. I took Erb up almost to Fischer Hallman but stopped short of it and coasted down a side road, to find a little path behind some houses near Churchill St. I followed this path to a woods familiar from my university days, with little paths going up and down hills between Keats Way and Churchill and the new subdivision I'd come through.

I sat on a log and checked my phone. No call. I called again. I sat some more, my thoughts bubbling, jutting, bumping. I heard a man singing, so I started moving again. He came up the path after me, a student, dressed in black, with headphones, no longer singing. I found a glade of logs and ferns and sunlight, so faerie and perfect, that it seemed almost shamefully beautiful compared with my morbid thoughts. I sat on a log and realized that it was time now for neither the stillness of holiday, the beauty of meditation, nor the rumble of planning, but for the sitting with pain.

I rested my mind deep in my stomach and let the feelings rise and fall in the quiet wood, with the cars in the distance. Rise and fall, ferns and light, sighing. Writing this now, I don't remember what the feelings were, although I still feel the trouble in my heart. There, now I do. Dropping, heavy, falling, darkness, tightness, pushing ... sit, sit. Feeling shoulders release, the mind become a prairie, the tongue soften. I sat until I felt the lightness come up again, my body holding less weight and the air seeming fresh and warm again, instead of brusque and cold, my hair settling on my head instead of flying about in the wind. Less urgency now, more summer.

My feet sunk into the deep loamy dirt of the path out of the woods as I made my way care-fully back to Keats Way. There is really no where to go. How relieving! I just want to be, and I am, here. Where else?


2.

Now I don't want to write or describe, I want to sit here, very still, and exist. To write feels like to move, to move the mind as the body moves when travelling. To grasp at the next turn, the next landmark, to thrill at an expression or a landscape. To feel the wheel of the heart revolving and revolving, generating, building, spinning into the future. To describe feels like capturing energy in a jar, the perfect stillness of the glass animated deliciously by the spark of a firefly. Now I don't want any animation - I want the jar empty, I want the emptiness in the jar. Impossible to write that, when any word is a step towards fullness. If only there was a way to write backwards, then that might begin to soothe my heart space, release my limbs. If there was a way to write that took away the reader's admiration for my skill, undid the snap of appreciation and recognition, made nothing of me.

3.

I have aired out my tent, in the backyard, read, done some dishes, eaten a sandwich, and read some more, and now I am ready to write again.

4.

After leaving the park, I went, filled with bright sun and good pain, up Amos St to where it turns at the Beechwood Club, and then took a path I discovered last summer over the hill, through the gaudy suburbs, and down through Resurrection College to the University. It was a good and optimistic feeling to be on top of the hill, to be not quite certain that this path did in fact take me down to where I wanted to go, and to feel willing to continue on and find out.

My reason for going to the University was to see a pow wow at St Paul's College. I came to the bottom of the hill where the pow wow was happening and sat under a wide willow tree, watching the dancers prepaare through a curtain of willow limbs in the wind. When the opening ceremonies began, I stood under the tree and watched the dancers come in, of all ages, and form a circle around the main tent, where the singers were chanting and the drummers were beating the drums. I listened to a high wail and responding wails, as the dances and protocols went on. The leader had a gentle, slightly accented voice, the rhythmic rural cadence of the Native English speaker. I felt the rhythm of the chanting come in and flow out of me, from the sunlight, into the sunlight.

After an hour, when the opening ceremonies ended, I came home to rest and feel the stillness of the afternoon come to rest gently on my quietly electric body.