Bird bath time

A cottage garden should have some display or presence of water. If you live in the city it's unlikely you will have a stream or creek running through your backyard; I am not too big on fountains or artificial waterfalls although it's a possibility; so the easiest display of water is a bird bath. Birds love to visit a bird bath and sit in the water, they dunk their heads under the water, flap their wings, and then depart. It is a source of endless entertainment. Why do birds take baths? I am not too sure that science has studied this much; even in the fall I've seen birds in this bird bath. Curious, isn't it?

A robin having a cooling bath.

I am a paparazzi of birds bathing in public, there is no privacy anymore...

Sunlight, Water, Soil, Plants

For a good garden you need at least three of four things: sunlight, water, good soil, and healthy plants. 

Not much sunlight, then plant hostas. 

No tap water, then collect on rain water. 

Soil problems, try making compost or buy bags of soil. 

If you need more plants for your garden, then it's time to go to a garden center, or maybe someone will give you seeds or plants from their garden. 

Miss these ingredients and it will be difficult to have the garden you want.

Bee balm

Cone flowers

Day lilies, bee balm

Bee balm, day lilies

After Monet

Two short videos of the effect of light on water. Both filmed at the Nitobe Memorial Gardens on the campus of UBC, July 11, 2010. Homage to the master, Claude Monet (1840 - 1926).

"Holy Wells" in Ireland and Montreal

Recently, on Ireland's RTĒ television, there was a presentation on "holy wells" in that country. A "holy well" is not only a place where you can get water, it is also a sacred place. Many holy wells were originally sacred among pagans and then, when Ireland became Christian, the population assimilated the wells into their Christian faith; this is a fairly common occurrence, churches were built on the remains of pagan temples, and pagan or Celtic holidays were reconfigured into similar Christian holy days.

The history of holy wells reaches back to pagan time, perhaps 5,000 years, a time long before Christianity reached Ireland. There are approximately three thousand holy wells in Ireland where they are known as places of healing; one might visit a holy well to ask for help with a specific problem, or to give thanks that a problem, whether physical or spiritual, has already been resolved.

The holy well is a visible and physical manifestation of mythological, or archetypal and spiritual thinking; it a place where nature presents evidence of the existence of the divine in our lives.

I have been interested in holy wells for many years. The discussion that follows on holy wells also gives some background to the Prologue to Girouard Avenue as well present information on holy wells in our environment. Here is the Prologue in its entirety:

1. The Ancient Well of Ara

There is a well in Tipperary
visited by my ancestors
before they left for Canada.
They said, “This is a place
of sleep and dreams—
drink from the well
and know the mystery
of life.”

Looking down to the water
at the well’s bottom,
they saw the reflected sky
the size and roundness
of a coin with the emblem
of a bird.

On Main Street
where the well
is located, not long
after ships left harbour
and famine crossed the land
a wooden top was fitted
to the ancient well,
the water cold and still
beneath the earth’s surface.

2. The Forgotten Spring

In the big city, at the beginning
of a new millennium, in a park,
the corner of Doherty and Fielding,
where water gathers on the path,
asphalt lifted, broken,
a place always wet
as though it rained last night
although it didn’t, with a seven story
apartment building on one corner
and low-cost apartments across the street,
where six young men stand and talk
on a Sunday morning in summer—
these are not the ancient fields
but a city park where water
rises on either side of a path
from an underground spring,
reminding us of what we used to know,
but have forgotten—the water
insistent, forceful, always desiring wholeness.

Before writing this poem I read very briefly about the ancient well Ara, located in Tipperary. That a wooden top had been placed on it, sealing the well, seemed a good metaphor for the ending of one age, the age of shamanic and visionary consciousness, the age of Bardic poetry and an apprehension of reality that includes that which might not be visible to the naked eye but still exists on some other level of awareness. That age, when the Other World could be more easily penetrated to, ended for most people and emblematic of this ending is placing a top on the well.

Having said all of this, it was interesting to hear on this RTĒ programme that some Irish who were leaving for North America visited, before they left, a holy well. I don’t know, in fact, if this is what my own family members did before coming to Canada in 1837, but I envisioned them doing just that. Creativity, imagination, this might explain my having written this about them, but there is also ancestral memory, whether it is in our physical makeup or in our personality, our genetic makeup, or what have you. I place this “coincidence,” this synchronicity, to ancestral memory.

The next section of the prologue moves us from 1837 to present times. It is over 150 years later, now we are in Montreal, and street names in this area of Nôtre Dame de Grace (NDG), a predominantly English-speaking neighbourhood in westend Montreal, reflect the Irish presence that once existed here. Nearby is Loyola College, founded by Irish Catholics, but since 1973 Loyola has been a part of Concordia University. Many Irish moved to this part of the city so their children could attend Loyola High School and then Loyola College. However, most of the Irish who lived here in the 1940and 1950s have moved away. This neighbourhood was their destination back then, from working class Pointe St. Charles, Verdun, and Griffintown, to Nôtre Dame de Grace, and now the children and grandchildren of these people are scattered across Montreal, Canada, the United States, and beyond.

I used to walk up Belmore to Chester and then continue to Fielding, and walk along the grassy meridian at this part of Fielding. Across the street is Ignatius Loyola Park that covers two city blocks, so it is a huge expanse. Then I would walk by the corner of Fielding and Doherty and one spring day I noticed water running from the park, it ran down an asphalt path from where the baseball diamond was located and into a sewer on Fielding. The asphalt was lifting as water would run along it, and I wondered about this water and where it came from. I remember seeing this water, and there was a lot of it, and noticing how the asphalt bulged and cracked due to the water running under it, freezing, then lifting up the asphalt as it thawed. Every spring there was water there, and it wasn’t from snow melting, it wasn’t run-off from snow melting in the park. Eventually I found the source of the water, it came from a spring locatged behind the baseball diamond on the Doherty side of the park. I intuitively understood what I had found and the significance of this water, this spring. As I walked passed it I knew I was in the presence of more than just water, I was in the presence of something holy.

(You can see this area: go to Google Maps, search “Doherty and Fielding, Montreal,” and then do a “street view” and you’ll see the repair work to the sidewalk due to the run-off from the well.)

There are many underground streams in NDG--they have all been paved over--and the foundations of many homes are being repaired due to damage caused by water from underground streams. NDG was once a place of farms, for instance Benny Farm which became a housing development in the late 1940s for soldiers returning from World War Two. Where we lived on Montclair Avenue had been apple orchards until the house where we lived was built in the late 1940s. Family members used to go for walks along the old Western Avenue (now Boulevard de Maisonneuve West) which was a dirt road, that was back in the early 1940s; they’d walk from Girouard to Hampton. Near where I grew up on Oxford Avenue, along Côte St. Luc Road, we used to play in the fields where apartment buildings were later constructed; until a few years ago there was an old farm house on the corner of Dufferin and Cote St. Luc Road. When I was growing up we were always looking for some nature, some fields, to play in; there were lanes to walk in, behind people's homes, and it seems there was still quite a bit of undeveloped property back then, but you had to work to find it.

I was aware of underground streams in this area of Montreal, all of them paved over or buildings constructed over them. This particular well in Loyola Park, what I have called a holy well, had managed to penetrate the earth covering it and for some years, at specific times of the year, water would run down the asphalt path. You could see the water coming from the earth and others knew of this well. Indeed, a few years ago, when walking through Loyola Park, and passing where the well was located, I noticed that the City of Montreal had made this specific area, where the well existed, into an ecological reserve, they had put a fence around it, planted flowers and some other plants that thrive in wet areas, and encouraged the return of nature. Not much came of this as water was abundant in spring but by the middle of summer it would dry up. It also upset local residents who were concerned that mosquitoes would lay eggs in standing water, they were concerned with West Nile disease. Apparently, some of these people went with buckets and removed the water that was present. I don’t know if there is much left of this well-meaning, but failed, experiment by the City.

What constitutes a "holy well"? We used to drive some distance to an artesian well by a roadside, there were usually several other cars parked there and people filling large containers of water from this well. At first glance, I don't think of that well as being "holy." I think two things can make a well "holy," either found together or separately. First, there is some agreement, some consensus among people, that a certain place is holy. Perhaps miracles can be attributed to the place, or some other supernatural occurences that help form an idea among people that the well has extraordinary powers. Second, a place, a well for example, may be located on a ley line, a place where earth energy may be more abundant than at other places; this example doesn't rely on any consensus of opinion. Perhaps you have walked in nature and suddently felt that you were in a place that was different, more serene or imbued with a quality of silence, or that created a quality of silence in your own mind, and that this space was somehow sacred. I have encountered these places, for instance St. Patrick's Basilica in Montreal is one such place; another, more remote, is an abandoned farm on a slight hill near where we used to live. When I would visit this place I knew that there was something different--spiritual, sacred, holy--that wasn't present elsewhere.

"Waves" and "Waves (2)"

At Jericho Beach, Vancouver, on July 9th, 2010.

Rocks at the Montreal Botanical Gardens

Where The Carp Swim

Carp at the Japanese exhibit, the Montreal Botanical Gardens.

Montreal Botanical Gardens, Chinese Exhibit

Le Grand Seminaire (two)

A photograph (above) of Le Grand Seminaire from Sherbrooke Street West and then some photographs (below) taken on the grounds. 

Beginning with towers (one is seen above), I think of the Tarot cards, and then the Twin Towers in New York City. There is Joyce's tower in Dublin but, also, Yeats's famous tower; there is Robinson Jeffers' tower and C.G. Jung's tower. There is the poet's tower which is an archetype that exists inside the psyche of every poet. 

There is also a long pool of water on the grounds of the Grand Seminaire, overgrown and intimate, with its invitation to dream, to the unconscious, to other pools of water and to water itself, the unconscious mind, a timelessness and place existing beyond space, beyond the here and now but thoroughly involved in the here and now. Water to enter and find, at the ocean's bottom, strange fish from the water's cold depths and perhaps sunken ships and lost treasure. 

Doors are entrances, but they are also exits, and they are firmly closed (possibly not opened for many years and next to impossible to open), or left open and busy, part of the mercantile class, or ominous and forbidding, but always archetypal and evoking the unconscious. 

Always the invitation to the unconscious is there, that place of poetry and creativity, presented in archetypes, in that which is timeless and gives us hope against the soul deadening efforts of everyday life at the material level. What is life denial? It is existing in the here and now, with no God, no prayer, no meditation, no art, no poetry, no dreams, forsaken of the spiritual... and there are those people in our society with their efforts to eradicate the spiritual by condescension and ridicule and life denial. And then, the presence of archetypes, the unconscious, the mythic dimension. There are the life deniers among us, but no one can ever fully succeed in denying life because, always waiting, like water in a spring (so important to the Celts), are the archetypes, the spiritual, the divine presence, which is always there, always waiting to appear, as natural as fresh water bubbling up from a spring on the side of a road. And what is as natural as water from a spring? It is that the unconscious mind is seemingly hidden but always present, always showing itself in dreams and archetypal dream imagery or strange complex behaviour only explainable by psychology. 

The unconscious is present, it is always "behind the scenes" so that life is not as we might rationally want, but as the unconscious decides in its own way, almost a separate entity with its own rules and, importantly, always moving towards psychic wholeness, psychic healing. 

You ignore the unconscious at your own peril. The archetypes are portals into the unconscious, into poetry.

Revised: 31 March 2020; this is substantially the same commentary as when it was originally published; I have edited a few sentences, included paragraph breaks, and so on; some of this is no longer what I would write today. 

In the name of making money and nothing else, what you see in these photographs no longer exists.  

The Trout River in late winter, early spring

At The Cedars on Trout River

The old Morrison property located on the Morrison sideroad -- the house burned down years ago -- and only this shed remains. There are a few places I would say are "sacred sites" and this is one of them, another is St. Patrick's Church in Montreal. A sacred site doesn't have to be associated with any organized religion (sometimes the opposite prevails), there is a quality of quiet, depth of thought, and spirituality that can be felt at these places. Dowsers can locate them, they exist on ley lines, so you can hold out your hands, palm down, and walk along a country road, and feel the living presence of the earth pulsating in your hands. The Morrison property is located at the junction of the Fourth Concession and the Morrison Sideroad, in Godmanchester, Quebec. I remember in the mid-1990s, often visiting the Morrison property, just to sit and think or be quiet for a few minutes. It was one day, perhaps in 1996, that I decided to sell The Cedars and relocate back to Montreal. I was walking past the Morrison property when I realized that where ever I am living, whatever I have done, that who I am as a human being is a part of my essence. I don't have to live in any particular place, where ever I am I carry with me where I have been and who I am. I am on a journey in life and this is it.

An old oak--important for us Celts--in the middle of a field, on the left side of the Morrison Sideroad as you approach the Morrison Bridge that crosses Trout River from Route 138. I can see Route 138 in the distance...

I made this path just by walking on it from our house to the river. Whenever I think of The Cedars, our old home, I think of Trout River. It was a long commute from the city, about an hour and twenty minutes each way for work, but you certainly felt a lot more in touch with nature when you were out there. And the scenery was beautiful; it wasn't stunning or magnificent, but it was beautiful. The Trout River runs across the U.S. border from the Adirondacks, oddly enough an unpolluted river entering Canada from the States, and then in the perhaps ten miles it's in Canada it becomes polluted. Then, just before you reach Huntingdon, the Trout River merges with the Chateauguay River. You wouldn't want to drink the water from the Trout River, but you could swim in it, and it wasn't polluted where we lived except with some run-off from farmers' fields. The only "problem" with the river was that it was very shallow, but this was also a good thing, you could swim in places and enjoy the river, but you could also wade the river. If there was one thing I really loved about this area, where I lived for almost twenty years, it was the river. You couldn't really cross country ski there, the snow blew across farmers' fields and became impacted and icy. I skated a few times on the river, and that was fun. Mostly I'd sit in the summer on a rock in the middle of the river, it was quite narrow (maybe twenty or thirty feet wide where we lived) and read and write poems. Or walk down to the river, it was maybe a hundred feet behind the house, and stand by the river and enjoy being there.

Above: Trout River in early spring. Below: some trees by the river:

Lachine in late fall, near the canal...

A Walk on the Lachine Canal

The Lachine Canal extends from Old Montreal to Lachine; these photographs were taken in Lachine. The early explorers thought they had discovered China, and gave the area the name "La Chine," China...

St. Agnes Church, from the Lachine Canal, in winter.

One of the oldest Anglican Churches in Quebec, St. Stephen's Church is just off the canal.