"Limited" by Carl Sandburg

 

A 1955 photograph of the CPR's prestigious train,
  "The Canadian"; seen here pulling out of Windsor Station

That's me on the left, my mother on the right, arriving in Banff
on The Canadian, 1962
 

My father, 1940s, on a Canadian Pacific train

My father on a business trip, on a train

Limited

Carl Sandburg

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coachesholding a thousand people.(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in thediners and sleepers shall pass into ashes.)I ask a man in the smoker where he going and he answers: "Omaha."

On impermanence

 

The thing is to accept (and even like) the very thing about life that upsets one the most because we are moving irreconcilably to death. And that is the impermanence of life. We can't freeze life to when we were most happy. We continue on and on and then we reflect on the past, on when we were happy but, perhaps, didn't know it. We weren't self-conscious in our happiness. It doesn't work that way; we think back, we're nostalgic creatures, and we fix on a time when we were most happy, or we think we were. We fight our emotions and ideas of self-reproachment, we beat them down! Why are we even having them? Because self-reproachment is an act of depression and we live with more or less mild depression all of the time. And we remember the past and wish we could live on an island of unself-consciousness and unreflected happiness. Is it a hallucination? Does it make any sense? We are sad, we grieve for what we had. We hate impermanence. And we are too old to suffer more impermanence, more change. What to do? What to do? 

                                                                                        16 April 2023

"Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud" by John Donne

 

At Mount Royal Cemetery, 2016

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The bedrock, the permanent, is love

 

Sidewalk drawing, May 2016

The stratified rock of time, layer on layer of experience, weddings and funerals, children and family, the bedrock, the permanent, was always love. The effort was for love and an expression of love, as mysterious as gravity, as electricity, as a flock of birds crossing the sky as one entity, mysterious and taken for granted; the foundation of existence was always love. Not birth or life or death or suffering, but love; we know this with age, with advancing years; the permanent is not money or possessions, it is not all the other stuff of life; it is one thing only, consistent and constant, the bedrock, the permanent, is love.

"When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver

 

Cote des Neiges Cemetery, July 2022

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse   to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox   when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,   I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?   And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility,   and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular,   and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence,   and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.   When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.   When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.   I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.   I don't want to end up simply having visited this world