Walking to Meadowbrook Golf Course

Life is mostly repetition, woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head... Even going for a walk falls into a pattern, the same route, the same streets and stores and people. So, here I am again, walking to Meadowbrook Golf Course. Life is repetition, people are basically fairly conservative and enjoy the same old same old, the same breakfast for the last thirty years, the same job, the same conversations; repetition gives us stability, it gives us our sanity and, ironically, it gives us the opportunity to be creative and not have to reinvent the wheel every day.  

Photographs taken mid-April 2022.

I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me

I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me

Stephen Morrissey

I've been writing poems since I was fifteen years old, over a half century of writing. Writing poems was never a choice or a decision, it was a calling. Where does the "call" come from? It comes from the soul.

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The "call" to poetry came to me in a dream that told me to write down what had happened in my life or my life would be forgotten; waking after the dream I knew that to forget meant to lose my inner being. It is not just writing poetry that was a part of the call, it was also writing a journal and I began page one of my journal on January 14th, 1965; a few months later I began writing poems. Writing my journal and writing poems was a gift to me from the unconscious mind, it began with the dream.

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First you write the single poem and then a lot of poems, and then you gather these poems into a book, and then you have several books and that is one's body of work. If this is your calling then what you are doing is fulfilling your destiny.

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My poetry is concerned with soul making and it is also soul making itself; soul making is concerned with realizing one's potential as a person, with expressing the deeper meaning of one's life.

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The unconscious mind has a proclivity to wholeness. Whether in dreams or day dreams or writing poems or other forms of artistic creativity, we are driven to wholeness. That is the basis of my writing, when I speak of soul making I am also referring to wholeness, life affirmation, and healthy-mindedness.

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I write poems because writing has been a calling for me and one ignores a calling at risk to one's integrity as a human being. You can ignore many things and not damage your inner being but you can't ignore a calling; ignoring a calling is like having a limb amputated; no, it's worse than that, it's like amputating one of one's own limbs.

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I've been fairly passive in life but that may be because I am also introverted. It may also be because I knew all along what I wanted to do in life, and that was to write poems. Whatever poems I've written have been the result of having to write them; indeed, I had no choice but to write. I have been driven to write, but what drove me? What drove me was the urgency of finding meaning and wholeness in my life, of affirming life.

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Writing poems is what I've done with my life. It wasn't my choice since writing poems was a calling. It came to me, not me to it, and if the writing ended this afternoon I wouldn't care. Now I welcome my final years. I've been along for the journey, not in the driver's seat. I've been an observer and not much of an organizer or initiator of events. But I'm getting old and need a rest. In truth, I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me.

On the bravery of Luci Maud Montgomery

Walk in 2010

On International Women's Day both the CBC and CTV news mentioned this video of Luci Maud Montgomery who, they say, battled rejection, depression, and sexism and was "mentally ill". Negative emotions are now confused and conflated with mental illness, but they are emotions, not mental illness. Montgomery's husband, Ewan was mentally ill and Montgomery had to keep what was considered a stigma secret. She lived in an age of sexism but she also published twenty novels and was the most successful Canadian author of her generation; sexism affected the lives of all women but she seems to have survived and thrived as a writer. She also had to contend with her son acting up, he was a real bounder, and this was a concern for her. Earlier in her life she was conflicted about her choice of husband and she made what turned out to be a bad choice. Was she addicted to barbiturates? I've known people who were addicted to different legal and illegal drugs and they weren't mentally ill. Montgomery faced rejection in her writing but what writer hasn't received multiple rejection letters that make one question one's life work, continuing writing and publishing and also feel depressed? Montgomery committed suicide and if it weren't for legal doctor assisted suicide I would say that this is a mental illness, it is now a decision, an escape route from being kept alive in a reduced state. I see Luci Maud Montgomery as life affirming, she struggled to write her books and she succeeded. She was depressed over her husband's genuine mental illness, he ended up in a sanatorium, but anyone who has someone close to them that is seriously ill knows that worrying and extreme unhappiness, grief and sadness, are not mental illness, they are natural feelings and a by-product of being caught in an existential state that is possibly resolved only by the death of one's loved one. That's depressing but it's not mental illness, it is strength of character. I prefer to see Luci Maud Montgomery as a healthy-minded and brave woman. Hard times can be overcome, life can be affirmed, healthy-mindedness is more common than mental illness.



This is a one minute Heritage Minute on Canadian TV.