Chaos and the Milkshake

I’m returning from my walk along the river that never was.

I couldn’t tell The Maestro when I visited in his last weeks, that Bernard and I were no longer together, I didn’t want to sadden him, to steal away any of the little remaining energy he had left to stay alive; he was so weak with the disease. I never told him that we’d broken off our engagement, that Bernard lied to me, that when we ended things amicably, he was already seeing another woman, that she rang him persistently, when I came to pick up my things, how I knew he was with her, because normally, he picks up every text, every call, but this unidentifiable ring-tone, persistent, his phone within reach on the hall table as we faced one another and said farewell, the moment becoming more and more awkward with each consecutive call.

At our rehearsals, The Maestro would always ask him with a smile, have you married her yet? And told me repeatedly that I had a good man in Bernard. He died believing we were together. But we weren’t. I didn’t share with him the fact that even though Bernard was with her, he kept reaching out to me for more than nine months, trying to connect in any way he could, buying tickets to my show in Halifax, sending me my moccasins back, birthday card, any reason to reach out, but always a different tack. How my answer was always silence. Until finally, in June of 2019 I composed a carefully worded text to close the door forever. Maestro, that is when he let me go. He never reached out again. And that’s where things were when you asked about him, about us. And I just smiled into your eyes, and looked away when I couldn’t hold the truth in any longer. I think now maybe you knew. Because it was you, wasn’t it?

I was writing in my journal in August, consecrating your memory, our last visit together, laying you to rest, saying goodbye. As my pen marked the final period at the end of my entry, that afternoon, my phone lit up with incoming emails, somehow held back since the morning. I scrolled through them and found one marked Firanski. It was Bernard, after so many months of silence. I checked myself and felt that now, after all this time I could reply to him, I was detached, I had done my grieving. He had finally understood and honoured my silence, my journey onward alone.

I opened the email: I was confused, it was sent at 9am, but here it was arriving at 1pm, at the very moment I finished my entry dedicated to you, Maestro, and your passing weeks before. But Bernard had only just heard about your death this morning from his sister, who had known for days, but only reached out to him today. What is this delayed synchronicity? So we opened a new conversation together. Cordial, no wants or needs. No hope. He was still with her in fact. I could be happy for him. But the more we talked, the more the story unfolded and without intention or will, we somehow have found our way home. The Maestro’s wish come true. Your gift to us. In absentia.

After drought comes flood.

I am struck by this new river, engorged, torrential, flowing after heavy rains this morning and I am in awe of its sudden manifestation. And this awe connects to a memory; the recollection, the gratitude and the awe associated with another offering that awaited us only in the second iteration of our couple; another gift, right next door, invisible throughout our five years together; a huge, hidden forest and field in the middle of a sprawling sidewalked suburbia, with branching trails and apple trees and the winding green space with the creek that is today the river. We didn’t discover, uncover, find this life giving space until now, until our second coming. For five years, there never was a river.

I am being moved by it all, while walking, causing other memories to coalesce:  my chance meeting and time with Ojibwe knowledge keeper, Brian Outinen, who spent two days with me, a stranger, sharing sacred language teachings; revealing that in the language K and G are interchangeable and are sounds that represent growth in darkness, the unseen, the unknown… I remember also recalling D and T mean energy, action, fire.                          Madame Pandora emerges, making me think of Dame, meaning “Lady” and woman, Kwe and then I think somehow that connected me to Gaia and Ouranos and then, chaos and my allusion to the milkshake that I ‘borrowed’ from Eve Berger to explain the concept of the beginning of the world to my student Brielle last week when I was tutoring. And then because of darkness, I think of the womb of woman and it comes to me, what if the Greek legend of Ouranos and Gaia is an error, just like the one made by Erasmus, the 16th century humanist who turned pithos, the original storage jar from the myth of Pandora, into a box, pyxis, when he translated greek to latin and consecrated the oral to written form.

More recently, through the advent of women into the spheres of science and archaeology, the myth of Pandora is again being challenged. With the re-evaluation of historical objects through a woman’s lens, the stories change. Pandora is not just another version of Eve, another precocious, curious and dangerous woman, sent by the gods to punish man for his sins. We are finding Pandora actually means Earth, through the depictions of Pandora as woman rising out of the soil, arms overflowing with the bounty of the Earth.

So then I wonder, if Pandora meant the Earth, then who is Ouranos? What if the origin story of Gaia and Ouranos is not of man and woman, husband and wife, but the story passed down orally, misinterpreted by the limited lens to the only men who were able to read and write and who reduced the moving body of truth and understanding of the earth, to a book of half-truths devoid of the connected world that is woman? A disjointed, narrow lens. They never saw the river.

What if Gaia and Ouranos were really mother and child? Earth and it’s (her) issue? Gaia, Pandora, Terre, Earth, and the milkshake, chaos, universe, the darkness of the womb.

This ‘origin story’ or ‘their’ or ‘the’ story is not the whole story, it is a transcription from a certain perspective, like my relationship to the river, like my relationship to the land about me here in my second home of Barrie, where I am a part-time inhabitant, with an outsider’s view. My perception of the environment from many, though infrequent visits over time, provided me with a limited, unchallenged lived experience; I saw a bleak landscape, devastated by erosion and urbanization. Only in this, the seventh year of my relationship, does the river reveal otherwise, washing away my delusion. A once empty, dry riverbed, I’ve walked through perhaps ten to twenty times, is now overflowing, roaring with life and movement. Oh our assumptions. Oh our limited lens, oh the damage we do as we witness the little we know and knew… oh the damage we do as we make conclusions based on the little we know and knew… oh the damage we do as we pass judgement on the universe… Infinite chaos is what is about us, once we let go of control, fear, doubt and our enclosedness, life, the infinite dancer is waiting to surprise us, to hold and console us.