The Ghosts of Heroes

“We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.”     - Brad Meltzer                                                

“I took in a deep breath, and smoke twisted around my head as I let it slip through my teeth. “Do you know what my favorite show was when I was a little kid?”

The look again. “I would have no idea.”

“Doctor Who. British sci-fi show.”

“I am familiar with it. Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt—“

“No,” I said. “The new show’s great, but I grew up on the old one. The low-budget, rubber monster show with Tom Baker and Peter Davison. I watched it on PBS all the time as a kid.”

I looked out at the dark ruins of Hollywood, at the stumbling shadows dotting the streets as far as you could see. The only other living person within half a mile was standing behind me, her eyes boring into my head.

“The Doctor didn’t have super-powers or weapons or anything like that. He was just a really smart guy who always tried to do the right thing. To help people, no matter what. That struck me when I was a kid. The idea that no matter how cold and callous and heartless the world seemed, there was somebody out there who just wanted to make life better. Not better for worlds or countries in some vague way. Just better for people trying to live their lives, even if they didn’t know about him.”

I turned back to her and tapped my chest. “That’s what this suit’s always been about. Not scaring people like you or Gorgon do. Not some sort of pseudo-sexual roleplay or repressed emotions. I wear this thing, all these bright colors, because I want people to know someone’s trying to make their lives better. I want to give them hope.”                                          - Peter Clines, Ex-Heroes                            

My place is the place of heroes; of a young, idealistic young man,  who fought the good fight but still lost. Running across a country, through chilling rain, and slogging snow, and unrelenting sun. Dipping his toe in one ocean with a vision to dipping it in the other ocean at the other end of the country.

Fate looks upon our silly human dreams with a bemused smile and a cruel attitude.  To this day, I whisper wishes, I mutter expectations, murmur things with feathers. One cannot utter a hunger too loudly, the Fates listen at doors and walls, their ears straining round a glass tumbler. Don’t speak your dreams too loudly, the Fates will dash them.

Nonetheless, we honoured today the hitching, fettered run of a young boy who wanted to make a difference. The fact that 35 years later thousands gather to re-enact the hopefulness of a romantic lodestar means exactly that.  A dying paladin made a difference. Despite the Fates.

Travels to Lilliput

“Small things are not small things for the small!”

-       Mehmet Murat ildan


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“Awesome does not look the same close-up as it does from far away”.  - anonymous

“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment”.                                                           - Linda McCartney

Awe and wonder come in many forms. There is awe in light - sunlight, moonlight, the light that crisps itself in molecules of snow. There is wonder in darkness – the soft, velvet wrap-around of a moonless, summer night; the shadows secreted in the bark-skin of a tree deep in the Cimmerian shade of the forest.

My place has awe and wonder that I didn’t even grasp until the wonder-full gift of a particular camera lens. A macro lens that acts as a circular doorway into the vast worlds of small beings and locales. Over the last year, I have been learning to see, learning to simply be ‘aware’. I am learning to open my eyes – to my place, to texture, shapes, curves, lines, patterns, light. My place has become like a Muse, constantly tugging at my mind or my heart to “Look! See! Wonder!” Now with the addition of this small lens, I am discovering secrets, bewitched confidences.

Ukrainian nature macro photographer, Vyacheslav Mishchenko, takes us into the diminutive, but movingly emotional, universe of snails. It is magical – the world seen through the eyes of a snail (or any other small creature) is full of pathos, poignancy, and joy, just as our own world is. His photography features snails enraptured by a drop of water; or stretching with ardent longing towards each other. Now I, too, can discover these other universes, these other ways of being. 

Mishchenko advises, “I would ask a photographer to be patient, to develop artistic taste, to be romantic and finally to love nature”. How could I not be romantic or love nature, when disappearing down the small again, large again rabbit hole, like Alice in her wonder-land - in one instant too big, but in the next finding her way into another cosmos through a small door with an even smaller key. 

I am fascinated by the minute, desiccated veins of drying leaves; by the grey worn wood of fences, and doors, and old barns that looks like old wool. By the glittering lines of a spider web that scores an evening sky; or the detail of shape and space in a crow’s shed feather.  I had not noticed these infinitesimal textures or spaces before. 

Thank you, my sweet, for with this gift of a small lens, you’ve made my world bigger.

Prairie Remembrance

“The prairie skies can always make you see more than what you believe.”

                                                                                              - Jackson Burnett, The Past Never Ends      

“Samuel finally understood the sound of the wind after all these years: The winds were a chorus of the prairie’s ever-present heartaches.”  

                                                                                      - Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run

My place is not of this place. I travelled back to what was once ‘home’ this past weekend. To the prairie, of which I am still a part of, or of what is still a part of me. I peered out of the window of the airplane onto the counterpane of squares and shapes that delineated crops and pastures, coulees and slow, meandering river. I puzzled about whether I missed the prairies, I speculated on whether the wind could still mess with my head.

I felt that I, indeed, missed the coulees. The fatigue, the languor of the vast plate of prairie alleviated by the snug contours, the lineament, the idiosyncrasy of the folded, pleated coulees – I have missed them.

I felt that I have missed the sky. The sky that, especially on clear, star-gorged nights, felt like, from horizon to horizon, a star-painted dish had been upturned over my world and there is nothing but stars from my left to my right hand – arching over my head and pooling at my feet. Those skies have been unrecalled. I have missed them.

Or, sweeping across blue skies, pure and cerulean, the wisps of clouds known as mares-tails.  Clouds like a veil, a nebulosity, ol’ buttermilk sky. Skudding across the sky in the endless, mindless wind that makes me feel like curtains are constantly billowing in my head, doors slamming and clattering in my mind.

Yet still, a dawdling, ambagious river counters the precipitate wind. If one can follow the curves and whorls of the river, then the wind that buffets the body and addles the mind can be tamed. I have missed lazy rivers, disinclined to be boisterous.

This place, the prairies, is no longer my place – at least not for the time between. But the absence of it still evokes a bereavement, a sorrow – a melancholy. And though I have come to feel the insistence of a my current place, my 'home', I miss the countenance of the prairie, the tempest that swirls my  introspection.

Of Fen and Polder

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

                                                       Norman Fitzroy Maclean, A River Runs Through It

My paintings always feature trails that dissolve into mysterious areas, patches of light that lead the eye around corners, pathways, open gates, etc.

                                                                                                 Thomas Kindade

My place is a place of magical trails. Each bend in the trail leads to a new view, a new perspective, a new way of seeing. The trail is bounded by two rivers. One is strong and staunch, forceful and stalwart. The other is down-reaching, rooted, and profound. A slough meanders its way alongside the trail, on one side to the powerful river – busy with fishing boats, and tugs, and huge barges heavy with sand or rock; with salmon and sturgeon.  And on the other side to the deep river – cold, black, with seals bobbing their way from salt water to fresh, with osprey nests and hidden coves filled with lily pads, turtles, and standing herons.

A slough is defined as an area of swamp, characterized by lack of progress or activity. But myriad species of duck glide through its waters, otters and beaver present on a rare evening, bears trundle along its banks scooping spawning salmon up onto the trail for ursine family picnics – tired of the summer-long feed of blueberries from the farms that spread outward from the slough. The slough does not lack for activity or enterprise, it is just of the wild sort.

But the light in this magical place is what is special; sunlight filtered through green, water filtered through sunlight; skies of blue, or cloud, or rain filtered through the lens of elegance and grace.