This is what you’ll see now if you click on the ‘Beyond Hope’ link in the sidebar:

“Beyond Hope’ is my fantasy novel-in-progress, about a young girl’s journey from a northern BC town to strange otherworlds in Vancouver. The archives have gotten garbled, likely due to a wordpress upgrade (can’t think what else to blame), but if you would like to read the book as it exists so far all in one file, please let me know and I’ll send it to you. I’m on the lookout for readers and would love to be critiqued.

Here’s an excerpt to pique your interest:

“Boy, you missed some fun last night,” Scotty had laughed. “Slept like a rock, hey, rockhead?”

“What are you talking about?” Sylvie snapped. She was never at her best in the mornings, and something about this one made her feel on edge.

“Your precious big baby of a brother is gone, and good riddance, too. Dad turfed him out on his fat ass.”

“What? Carl? Scotty, don’t be a creep, please? Tell me what happened!”

“If you missed the fight, then you missed it. But he’s gone and he’s not coming back. You’re mine now, kid sister! No more knight in shining armour to protect you from my evil attacks! Mwah-hah-hah!” He laughed, pretending to be teasing but the nasty tone in his voice made her shiver.

“Mom, where’s Carl?” she had asked first chance she had. Her mother averted her eyes. Right away she knew something was deeply wrong. That was when the ground fell out from under her life. She hadn’t really believed Scotty. He would say anything to hurt her. But this was real.

“Carl has gone to Vancouver, and your father is very disappointed in him,” her mother said, too carefully.

“What? The city? Carl hates the city! Why would he go there?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Sylvie. Eat your cereal like a good girl.”

“Mom! Why didn’t he say goodbye to me? Why would he do that?” She was very close to tears.

“Sylvie, please, eat your breakfast. You’ll be late for school.”

Her mother didn’t look at her once. And her father was worse. When she ran crying to him, sobbing for her brother, he slapped her hard across the face, shocking her utterly.

“Daddy! Nooo!!” She ran to her room and locked herself in for the day. She refused to go to school or to come out for dinner, and the following morning nothing was said. After the slap, there was no way she could ask her father about Carl, while her mother simply ignored her questions with tightened lips, no matter how hard she begged for information.

Scotty acted like he knew everything and was choosing not to tell her out of meanness, but she suspected he didn’t really know much more than she did. That would be just like him. It was a way of holding power over her but she didn’t buy it. She withdrew from her family, turning to her friends for support and information.

Carl’s former friends wouldn’t talk to her either. They acted like he hadn’t existed. It was the weirdest thing. Her first real clue was from her best friend Tracy.

“Syl, I think I know what it was,” Tracy said hesitantly, with the reluctant air of one sharing truly dreadful news. “I heard my cousin talking with his friends. It’s… they say Carl is gay, and that’s why your Dad threw him out.”

“That’s crazy!” she said automatically, but she didn’t really know if it was. What was gay, anyhow? It was just a word, a nasty thing to call boys who nobody liked. Even if it was true, somehow it didn’t satisfy her. It didn’t mean anything real.

Scotty, of course, soon picked up on this bit of news and lost no time in calling Carl every nasty word he could come up with that stood for homosexual. He hinted that Carl did horrible things to little boys. But Sylvie didn’t care. Carl was Carl. He was her brother, he was good, and she needed him. All the heart and life in her world had vanished with him.

Then, two nights ago, something snapped at that party. Suddenly it seemed clear and obvious what she must do. Carl would have called it an epiphany. She recognized with absolute certainty that life with her family without her brother was more death than life. She had to leave, and it had to be right then, that minute, with no time taken to plan or prepare. She told Tracy where she was going, and Tracy tried to talk her out of it. Of course she would; it was her duty as her best friend. But Sylvie had gone, propelled by a force beyond her capacity to resist, and Tracy had then covered for her. That was also her duty as best friend.

And now she was here.

It’s been a long drought between words, fraught with changes, involving several select settings into which I’ve settled before wafting to the next. Time to get my fingers flexing on these keys and see what oddities I can thusly muster. Ah, so many tales, so little brain with which to arrange them into chronological or sensical order.

We’re barely past the full moon which soars higher in the sky, blazing like a silver-white torch, burning brighter than it did in the summer when the moon glows weak and low, barely visible above the trees.

Come autumn, the same moon rides higher and hotter as the days shrink and cool. You can’t measure this heat with a thermometer. It’s a soul heat, a wild strangeness that crazes cats (especially black ones), emphasizing their hallowe’eny qualities.

***********flashback: I’m climbing Mount Baldy. My elevation makes the shadows and reflections on the lake interweave interestingly. I’m standing at the feet of the cell tower which looms forebodingly over the place I lived two scene changes ago.This great footed beast has guy wires anchoring it to concrete; secure and smug, it pulses with monsterish power, terrifying all on its own even without my mind insisting on filling in the blanks with recent inadvertently researched information about the evils of scalar waves and all the ways ‘they’ are out to kill, control and undermine our very souls. I could dress up as a cell tower for Hallowe’en, that’d make the kiddies scream.My whole body vibrates with weirdness standing so close to the cell demon, but what the hey.

Those radiations are merely mutagens, and like the graffito said, “Mutate now, avoid the post-bomb rush.” So if there’s a ‘they’ playing a villain part in this cosmic play, then let’s take ‘their’ best shots against us and redeem them towards transformation. Suck in everything they throw at us and use it to grow ever more variably strong.

Crazy? O yes, thank you. And why the hell not? It’s better than cowering beneath the bed in nameless dread, seeking to escape the inescapable horrors being hurled by this modern world. We can’t escape the bad shit, so let’s embrace it, incorporate it, use it.

Anything can be a tool for transformation and fuel for change. Life is infinitely, radically adaptable. The first pollution crisis was oxygen back in the micro-organismic days when anaerobic bacteria were the dominant life-forms. Oxygen began as the toxic byproduct of the processes of life. It was corrosive and highly volatile, and bye-and-bye a crisis was reached and it seemed that Earth’s newly-minted life was doomed.

Then some smart micro-cookie figured out how to use oxygen so successfully that we now view it as essential for life. Life is mutative, transformative and most of all, successful.

After something like that, you’d think we (life) would have the adaptation thing down. Maybe we have. Look at what’s happening now, what evil humans are doing to our helpless planet, look at the toxins we spew, the forests we raze, the purple hazes and poisoned sunsets. Who’s doing that? Is it you and me? I know better, and so do you; we’re mostly doing the best we can in our small ways. So who?
Here’s my theory: I think it’s Earth, going her merry evolutionary way, bringing in changes, using us to accomplish them just as she used the bacteria in the beginning to create the conditions needed for life’s next stage. We may think we’re all that, but we’re not so much really. We think we can exist outside of Earth, that we are different, extra-special, even that we come of extra-terrestrial origin. We pump our species’ ego with fanciful tales that set us apart, and we call those stories ‘religion’ and ‘the Truth’, but here’s the real truth, as I see it:

The human race is just one functioning subsystem among many, blindly performing our species’ role which is to transform our environment toward our own survival and to Earth’s specifications. We’re enacting the programming in our DNA just like ants performing complex tasks industriously in their anthills even though they don’t know what for or why, and birds who know exactly where they’re going even though they’ve never been there before. What makes us so different?

Ah, it’s our big brains, our fascinatingly complicated minds, right, I forgot. Well, how did we come by these brains? How do we know we’re not using them just as we’re meant to, despite our individual misgivings?

We don’t know anything about the greater purpose of our mass activities. But why should we? We, individuals, have no ‘need to know’, evolutionarily speaking. Our brain cells also may suffer terrible anxiety about what they do, and perhaps they tell themselves urgent stories about how they should do it differently, but still, they’re compelled to continue behaving as they do, coerced by genetically-encoded instructions that they can’t change.

So if humans cause global warming, for example, then who’s to say that’s not exactly what Earth intends us to do? Life will go on, in whatever changed form. The big picture is all that matters as far as the planet is concerned, and she calls the shots.

That doesn’t mean we have to like it, or that we shouldn’t do what we can to clean up our individual acts, but don’t be fooled. Unless the megalithic corporate bodies change their ways too it’s all just cosmetics to make us feel better. It feels good to live in harmony with Earth’s ways, to eat organically, to live simply. I like it. But I don’t believe that what I do as an individual is shifting the direction of climate change, nor an army of individuals, because between the war machine and the megacorps, our polluting activities are a mere drop in an ever-filling and overflowing bucket.

Politics and activism aside, perhaps the real solution to pollution is adaptation, something life has had a lot of practice with. I think Earth likes change. I think she’s playing with paints and body art, crafting herself, ooing and ahing over the cool shifting patterns. And maybe she doesn’t care about the fate of the average individual, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about me. I think she cares for those who care about her. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it. The average individual may not give a (silicon) chip for the needs of Earth as a whole, but I do. So there.

So, okay. On to some new randomly generated topic, just push the button and see what spins to the front. Snake eyes! Oops, wrong gambling game. It’s hard to think with fluorescent lights glaring in my face; fortunately this is a temporary situation. The bad news is, I’m stuck in it for now, until tomorrow. Feeling tired, dragged out after a long night of weird dreams. Today all I want to do is eat. I had two bowls of sautéed cabbage with onions, and it was the most delicious thing ever. Now I want something sweet. Growwwllll. Here I go.

This is raw, uncut and precisely 100 words a section. 

*

I have a work ethic around writing that makes me feel guilty about not exploring and elucidating in writing every idea that occurs to me to write about. I can’t seem to write to order, even on my own promptings. I suffer from what my brother (who has schizophrenia) calls ‘mental confusion’, though to a lesser degree than he, I believe, at least to the extent that I have avoided being labeled with a mental illness.

Except for the one I did get labeled with, but managed to escape by dint of ducking under their radar in every way possible.

*

But I’m not here to write about the things I think about, not the good ideas I have or the novels, poems and articles that unfold like blooming flowers in my brain. I’m just here to fill that daily hundred words, and I’ve let myself fall far behind this month, so I’m just going to write in 100 word increments, more or less. Of course, by the time it appears in my blog it will have been edited and integrated into a single piece as if by magic. I have nearly the whole month of September to catch up on!

*

If I hadn’t made a commitment to myself to finish an entire year of posting my hundred words a day, I might just blow September off. This is an old problem of mine, the pattern I have of dropping commitments, not finishing what I start. It’s like the garden, which at the moment is overrun by weeds and suffering from neglect. I haven’t weeded in weeks, but over the summer, I weeded some every day. I’ve lost momentum, I’m not carrying it through to the end. I hate that I do that. I want to change. I am changing now.

*

The farthest I’ve ever fallen behind. What shall I write about? Don’t want to bore myself.

Muslim women covering their faces to vote: I’ve never been asked to produce photo ID when voting, what’s the big deal? Unless photo ID is required, why should these women be forced to expose their faces? I read a science fiction story about a future culture in which faces were an erogenous zone and women wore masks. Made me see how vulnerable exposing one’s face must be if you aren’t used to it. Leave them alone, big bullies. Why should they strip for you?

*

The mail is slower since the advent of e-mail. Anybody noticed? It takes a week for a piece of mail to crawl from Hornby Island to Shawnigan Lake, a distance I can drive in five hours, ferry time included. What’s up with that?

Conspiracy: ‘They’ like to abuse their power; they make us suffer gratuitously. Postal rates rise while postal service deteriorates, because they have us by the short and sweets and they know it.

Metaphysics: What do you expect when you call it ’snail mail’? Poor critter has no choice but to respond to our collective perception and judgment.

*

So which is true? Neither. Both. Reality is too fractally complex to be defined in words, even many volumes of words. So there. My problem is I know too much, I see too much. I am higher than acid. Acid just randomizes what I already perceive just fine, thank you. But I am not mentally organized. On the contrary. My mind is both stuck in old past patterns and confused by perceptions which differ radically from eye to eye and sense to sense. I am plugged in. It’s not my fault, it just happened that way.

I blame my childhood.

*

As a child, I was planted with seeds of both grandiosity and humility. On the grandiose side, I was made aware that I was gifted far beyond the average. I could ‘go far’. My teachers planted this particular seed, some of them letting me know in overt and subtle ways that they believed I was once-in-a-lifetime exceptional. Grandiose.

Humility came when I got the message from home that it didn’t much matter what sort of grades you got or how good you were at stuff. Everybody is equal and the same, nobody gets special treatment. Good grades? Good for you.

*

Real humility came when I encountered the big world for the first time. I wasn’t nearly the big frog I had seemed in the backwoods ponds that nurtured me. Impressive to a northern teacher with fifty or a hundred students in the school is not so impressive to a city teacher with thirty different kids in every class of the day, all in the same grade.

Woh. All those people freaked me out. I was shocked into surrendering my ambitions, that had burned so bright in my last school, competing with George Belsham for the best test scores in class.

*

Poor little me (there, there), wandering lost as a cloud shoved about by strong winds and crashing into treetops and mountains, don’t you feel for that scared little girl? Of course I do, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Why should we have to be embarrassed if we loved ourselves as children and that we sympathized and commiserated when they got crap thrown at them by their lives? Kids go through hell, and my little kid / I went through more than the norm. Of course I feel sad for her / me, and that’s not self-pity. It’s self-love.

*

When I say ‘Hell’ I mean extreme circumstances, the fire of intensity that we all spend so much energy avoiding because we couldn’t handle the way it felt as children. We were too young! The current passion for extreme sports satisfies the letter of the desire (extremity of experience) without satisfying the essence (to feel deeply and intensely our vulnerability to life, to others and to our own sources).

Humans want to live deeply, to embrace life fully. It’s the way we are designed, upright, heart open, arms all set for embracing. And naked skins for sensuous pleasure. Why not?

*

I haven’t much of a conscious mind, I suppose. My thoughts are heavy, weighty things, and the pot gets stirred so often I can’t keep hold of one thought long enough to really grasp it. Any apparent intelligence is instinctual. Words flow through me and arrange themselves in an order that conveys what body knows without my mind having to engage much except the most basic awareness.

When I first learned to read, I commanded the letters to reveal their meanings to me. They shifted around on the page and then I could read, just like that. It was easy.

*

If you look at anything closely enough, it complexifies. To reduce to the so-called simplest, most basic elements of life, you first go through many layers of ever-increasing fractal complexity. When you look at a stone closely enough, it is indistinguishable from a living cell seen at the same range. Everything lives, everything dances in its own secret heart. It is wrong, inaccurate to say that the difference between animate and inanimate is the difference between life and death. All matter is alive. All life is aware of itself, even if a vague background sense of awareness. All things matter.

*

‘All things matter.’ There’s a play on words in there, but I wonder how many would grok it. Why is it adjudged a waste of time and energy to bother looking at things with love? We don’t even look at people with love, except on special occasions with special people. Why such collective heartlessness?

When I let myself know the truth of what I feel and sense, which is that my attitude toward things is felt by them, affects their experience of existence in some way, I am horrified. I want to push the idea away and call it crazy.

*

It’s truly tragic that love is perceived to be such hard work. Far from it! Love is the easiest thing in the universe. Love is what happens when you surrender everything, give up every fight, agree to lose and win at the same time, embracing both winners and losers as parts of your own self. Love is the body of the Whole relaxing and releasing tension. Love is the default state of things. Why did we decide to be the resistors and battlers within this system of love? There must be something right about it, for nature is never wrong.

You may have noticed that this blog has been down, and while I expect that my blogular disappearance didn’t suck as bad for you as it did for me, still I apologize for any inconvenience. It’s all good now–I exist again! O frabjous day! So, continuing with the blog, currently in progress:

I am ready to shed the pursuit of money as a motivation. I am willing, should my life moment-to-moment choices lead me there, to end up walking strange streets with whatever I can carry and defend. This does not mean I want that, but as long as fear and desire to prevent a poverty-stricken fate remain my sole driving force, then my attention stays sourced in what I think of as the struggle for survival but is really avoidance of inconvenience.

Some way-in-the-back fey part of me longs for and seeks some kind of life on the street, covertly awaits the circumstance to compel me out there where I might be seen and recognized by others of like kind. Oh yeah, a city speaks to me; eventually I suspect I’ll be drawn in to one or another, at least for a while.

Still, the bulk of me would far prefer to feel (and be) empowerful and functional, and one of the measures of empowered function is, or ought to be, the ability to choose one’s path unforced by circumstances such as lack of cash.

I release myself to find the level on which it is right for me to live, with the understanding that I will enter windows of opportunity with alacrity when they open and that I will perform the work that I am called to do with all my heart.

I am open to the possibility (among many other possibilities) of utter bare bones poverty. Being open to it is not the same as desiring it; certain socially paradoxical parts of me do, of course, while other parts of my multiplex brain emphatically desire something entirely different. Come to think of it, the same would be true for just about any possibility I might imagine. In my heart, I encompass the full spectrum of desires, so I need to choose my actions based on other criteria. My many hungry desires compete and strive to be the ones that survive to be fed, and I now relax the controls I’ve imposed on that chaos. Let it seethe, I don’t have to worry about it.

I’ve finally released the pressure it’s taken to keep the doorway to my most-feared futures closed; the friction of resistance was starting to seriously compromise my structural integrity. My last ten years has been at least partly devoted to a mad inner scramble to avoid some form of destitution. Some of it was not my stuff, for when I entered my relationship, I merged identities to a large degree. I used to be more comfortable with poverty before we met. Of course, back then, it was more like: “I’ve always been poor, it’s my lot in life, oh well.” The relationship and the new perspective my partner brought into the mix has helped me to evolve a new way to be with the prospect of being poor and homeless.

Now, it’s more like, “Been there and done that; there’s nothing more to be afraid of there.” No matter what the future brings, I will already have survived worse, barring of course, the diseases of age and death, which this article does not address (can you say ‘can of worms, don’t go there’?).

Still, I do expect my efforts to be materially rewarded; I expect to be supported for doing the work I am here to do. I am giving in to doing what I’m best at, and I do believe that is the path to some kind of, whatever you want to call it, abundance (I am soo tired of that word, but can’t think of a better one).

I do know that I will give my gifts and receive in return as part of the natural ebb and flow of life. Still, I don’t yet know the shape of my future. I will learn more as I experience more. I know that I have the power to jump off this cliff and survive, but whether I’ll learn to fly or drop into the ocean at the bottom and swim hasn’t been determined. My life feels as open as it ever has since my birth; more so. I emerged into this life, took a look around, sighed and slumped into unconsciousness. How boring. This is better.

Issues around poverty go way back. My childhood was spent poor. We used to wake in the morning in the winter to find the drinking water in the bucket by the stove had frozen over.

We lived in what most folks would call squalor, no running water, no electricity, down endless miles of mucky, rutty back bush roads that led straight up the butt of nowhere, at least from the human standpoint. From Earth’s point of view, of course, it was a wealth of wilderness, thronging with ancient spirits and wild innocence, and I was blessed among humans. This innocence was beginning already to be violated; little logging operations like the one my dad worked at were already chewing away at the bush. Compared to now, though, it was nothing. It was true wilderness.

The scale of human encroachment on the wilderness I was born into has exploded on a nuclear scale. From the air, the whole vast province now seems to suffer from mange. Helicopters rake kilometers of trees from mountainsides so precipitous that olden loggers could not get to them. It makes my stomach turn, my heart clench, my temples throb to imagine. The fuss made over the pine beetle seems hypocritical, given the scope of the very deliberate and intentional destruction by humans that has been taking place.

Oh, grimace, groan and gag me with a greasy spoon. Okay, enough. I have to go sing now.