The poet astronaut

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who returned to Earth yesterday after five months in the International Space Station, is a great communicator and entertainer who has almost singlehandedly, it is said, stirred up people’s interest in space exploration again. He tweeted and sang from space and made videos about living at the station that have garnered some 22 million views.

But here’s what strikes me as I look at Hadfield’s amazing photographs and their accompanying twitter-length commentary: the man is a poet.

Hadfield wrote: “These mouthwatering folds of icing are actually Saudi sand”

Hadfield wrote: “Pillowy farms of Eastern Europe, tidily etched in snow”

It could be argued that Hadfield’s photographs are the stunning feature of his twitter communication, presenting as they do new ways of seeing places on Earth. Yet the accompanying words are hugely important and interesting too, sometimes as a matter of information about a location or phenomenon, sometimes as humor (re. photo of the Galapagos — “just far enough apart to give Darwin something to think about”), and often as poetry, by which I mean the use of images or language that brings unlike things together and/or creates or intensifies understanding.

There are so many examples I could cite. “A springtime haze laps on the evening shore of the Alps.” “This lake looks like it’s burrowing its way across the landscape.” “Clouds swoop in on Crimea, a white bird on the Black Sea.” “The first light of the rising sun turns our solar arrays to woven gold.” “The dry folded skin of the Sahara desert, looking like the crust of a pie.” “Brussels gleams like a lace jewel.” “A blackness like endless velvet.” “Clouds over western Europe, rippled like water over a stone.” Wouldn’t you agree that even the words on their own offer insights into Earth from space?

Hadfield wrote: “A lot of the Australian Outback looks like somebody spilled something on it.”

For me, viewing the photographs and reading the commentary is one Praise Be! after the other. (See a collection of “best”photographs here, the twitter feed here). Chris Hadfields’s legacy may be an awakened interest in space exploration but the gift he gives me is Earth (“I’m still in love with what the Earth shows me each day”). Or maybe I should say, his translation of space’s perspective on Earth as put into words.

Hadfield wrote: “The yin and yang of ice and land at Lake of the Woods.”

Three Books about Pilgrimage

I’ve not kept up with writing about what I’m reading, but today, just to stir that pot a little, three book notes, on three books about pilgrimage.

 

 

 

 

 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Random House, 2012). Harold Fry is recently retired. He spends his days doing little besides trimming the grass and sitting about, irritating his wife Maureen, who is easily irritated. A letter arrives from a long-ago co-worker, Queenie Hennessy, dying of cancer and writing to say goodbye. Harold pens a short reply, struggling as he always has, to express his feelings. He walks to the mailbox to post it, and decides to walk to the next box instead. Then he decides to go a little further. And to keep going. Eighty-seven days and 627 miles later, he reaches the hospice with the letter.

This is a wonderful book about a long, long walk and people Harold meets along the way. And much more. Why does he need to speak to Queenie again? Why the silences between Harold and Maureen, and what’s going on with their son? An intriguing premise, mysteries to discover, and lovely writing and insights turn the pages of this book. For me, it rises to the top of two dozen or so books so far this year, in terms of an all-round satisfying reading experience.

Quote: …it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other… Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America by Jeff Chu (Harper Collings, 2013). It seems such a pity, heartrending really, that the title question even needs to be asked. But for Jeff Chu, raised in a devout Baptist home and with parents who still cannot accept his identity as a gay man, it’s a real question. His quest to answer it, to find the God “forbidden to him” because of his sexuality, takes him across America, to very conservative Christian places like the infamous Westboro Baptist Church (“Yes, Jesus hates you”) through more liberal settings, as well as a few such as The Gay Christian Network and Highlands Church in Denver that feel comfortable to him theologically and are also accepting/affirming.

Chu structures the book around the themes of doubting, struggling, reconciling, and hoping. Each section begins with a quote from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Chu interviewed hundreds of people. He tells some of their stories and describes his visits. He tells his own story. On the “conservative” end he’s judged because he’s gay, he says, on the “liberal” end he’s judged for hanging on to what is seen as “archaic” faith.

Parts of this book are hard to read, and I don’t mean the Westboro-type parts – they seem so kookish, they’re easy enough to dismiss – but parts like an odd interview with Ted Haggard (“I tell young men not to go into ministry—don’t do it. I regret going to a Christian university. I regret going into ministry”) and the “cowardice” Chu encountered among pastors, more “sheep than shepherd,” he says. He didn’t even get to the interview stage with nearly all the pastors he contacted. It’s not that they didn’t have opinions, they just didn’t want to go on record, it might jeopardize funding etc. etc.

This is an interesting and important book, but will make most sense to those who understand the fundamentalist/evangelical context of Chu’s upbringing and its particular language around faith and the reason he has had to put a question mark behind the lovely song he learned as a child, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

Quote: I’m not out there being a militant about anything except about the love of God. (Mary Glasspool, first lesbian elected a bishop in a major American denomination)

Birth Mother by Joanna Wiebe (self-published, 2012). Perhaps “pilgrimage” isn’t quite the word here, but definitely a road-trip and a quest. In this memoir, Joanna Wiebe tells the story of her trip to Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica for four months, late 1975 and early 1976. It’s no spoiler to say (since it appears very early) that what haunts her throughout the trip is the fact that she had a baby years earlier that she gave up for adoption – the document blaring FINAL SURRENDER at her – and is trying desperately to forget, but also to remember. She keeps it a secret from her travelling companion and boyfriend, Earl Grey, and waits for the right moment and the courage to be true to her past.

An older reader like myself, and probably Wiebe looking back, wishes this lively and gifted young woman wouldn’t “waste herself” and put herself at risk, but also roots for her to get home safely. She’s one plucky person, surviving an adventure that includes numerous detours and van breakdowns, running out of money, and quite unexpectedly, the earthquake that rocked Guatemala in 1976. The book also includes beautiful terrain, Mayan history, lots of cooking (some recipes included), and good friendships. And on the drugs question, well, as she insists throughout, she just did “organics”!

Full disclosure: Joanna sent me the book for review. We have a bit of a connection because of common church background, and she’s the daughter of well-known writer Katie Funk Wiebe. But now I’m just playing the Mennonite game.

 Quote: Her tough, hard gardener’s body felt like a tree I could vine on.

Reading places

I’m a reader of plaques and historical signage.

I love to stop at those pullouts along the highway with boards full of words about what happened at this very spot. Maybe it was a battle or a disaster or a significant way-point for some journey of exploration. Maybe it’s the ancestral home of a people group.

I love to discover words while walking  – words on a plaque that tell me who used to live or work in this building, what happened on this street corner, even the name of a “loved one” to whom a park bench is dedicated.

These various words remind me how deep places are, how much longer-lasting than I am, how in flux they are and yet the same. They remind me of the receptivity of places, allowing me to be here, giving me a kind of love. These found words tug me into the place itself, link me to the deeper meanings it contains. And always by insisting that many belong, and I belong: I’m here, reading.

A gesture and a death

A gesture and a death jostle for my attention at Borrowing Bones this morning, so I think I’ll let both of them be and if they illuminate one another in any way, well, so much the better.

Like so many other ‘watchers from afar’ I followed news of the papal conclave and the election of Pope Francis with keen interest, then satisfaction. It’s too early to know how, or if, he’ll manage the challenges facing the church, but media reports are full of pleasure at the signs of difference and new direction: the name, the simpler quarters, the calmer clothing (black shoes, not red), the washing (in the ritual footwashing ceremony just past) of two women’s feet as well as a Muslim’s, his warmth with people. Much of this is gesture, perhaps, though genuine gesture, it seems, and thus: so far so good. (I like Martin Marty’s take on it with an April Fools theme at Sightings.)

One gesture on Easter Sunday was especially moving — the one where he kissed the handicapped child. The way the child embraced him in return and how he then stayed with that embrace seemed to me not so much a sign of Pope Francis’ ‘new style’ as it was an unplanned revelation of his essential spirit. (It can be seen near the end of this short news clip.)  http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/pope-francis-celebrates-easter-sunday-18848773

Worscht en Rhubuaba

Worscht en Rhubuaba. I can’t actually say it, not correctly at least, not having grown up with Low German (though I learned to understand it as a adult living in Paraguay for a couple of years), but I spent Saturday and part of Sunday last week at an arts festival by that name. Meaning sausage and rhubarb. It was a Manitoba Mennonite Creative Arts Festival so the reference was perfectly appropriate, if somewhat nostalgic, given that nowadays Mennonite writing (“if there is such a thing” — a question one of the Round Tables asked) is so large, so diverse, so out of the village. But never mind that, it was a great event, put together by the energetic and talented Di Brandt and others from Brandon University (Dale Lakevold, Audrey Thiessen).

Do I have to, really?

Okay, let’s just say the writing – now that I’m back to it, post the diary transcription project – is a bit of a slog at the moment.

The cover of the latest issue of Write, the magazine of The Writers’ Union of Canada, features a map by Patrick Dias, country unnamed but obviously Land of the Writer. If you’re looking for me, I’m wandering around in Frustrating Canyons, probably on my way to Crumpled Detour.

Crumpled Detour reminds me of a character in Alice Munro’s short story, “Cortes Island,” who says:

I bought a school notebook and tried to write—did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can… Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle—excitement and despair, excitement and despair…

The Pope’s legacy

Pope Benedict’s surprising resignation on Monday, February 11, — the first pope to resign in 600 years, we’re told — has, not surprisingly, unleashed a great deal of commentary, from speculation about the reasons (besides his health) to musings about the retirement of elderly leaders in general. There are tributes and assessments of his writing and achievements. Others are less willing to line up with accolades. It should not be forgotten, they say, how dreadful Pope Benedict’s record is on the sex abuse of children at the hands of church leaders.

I find the words of political commentator Andrew Sullivan (see this column also) significant on the matter of Pope Benedict’s legacy. And after all that, I caught part of the documentary “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” on CBC-TV’s The Passionate Eye on Sunday evening. That night, it was hard to fall asleep.

I mean no disrespect to my dear friends who are Catholic, but in this context, I find the images one often sees of Pope Benedict’s red shoes and white robes chilling; they  seem an indictment.