Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Take Care of Your Spirit



The USS Arizona Memorial
(Photo from Hawaii Magazine)
Writing about spiritual matters has been the making and the breaking of many authors, so let me begin by saying that it is not my intent to diminish, ridicule, or otherwise judge in any way the beliefs of anyone.  

As noted elsewhere in this blog, I am not a religious person, but I do believe in ghosts.

I'm not talking about the Scooby Doo kind of ghosts that chase those meddlesome kids and compell Shaggy to overdo it with the Scooby Snacks, I am talking about ghosts in the sense of resonance.  The sense that there are no new paths through this life and that our ancestors have "gone on ahead" to lead the way.

I think that each of us have had the experience of being in the presence of ghosts.  It might have been on a forced march while in school to some nearby historical site, or it may have been the discovery of a long forgotten photograph of a parent, or sibling.  Perhaps it came when finally making the pilgrimage to the birthplace of a childhood hero, or when you literally walk in footsteps from the past.

When we were kids, my mother tried her best to connect my brother and sister and me with our Canadian history.  She took us to a place called Upper Canada Village which is in eastern Ontario and, like Colonial Williamsburg, is a recreation of a point in time.  While many of the buildings are authentic to the period and had been moved to the site from locations all around Ontario, it never had the sense of having been truly historical.  It was more like an historical amusement park, but without the rides.  It was interesting to see how a water-powered sawmill worked, or how food was prepared, but it was more a shrine to history than a place where history had been made.

Many years later, I was in Wyoming and on the way to dinner one night, the car pulled to the side of the road and my friends showed me a pair of parallel tracks running off to our right through the grassland.  It wasn't much to look at, but when I learned that these were the tracks left by the wagons following the Oregon Trail west from St. Louis then it became a place--about half-way between Laramie and Centennial--that I recall to this day.  I am not a serious student of American history, but, standing there, I had a strong sense of the many ghosts that had to have passed that point.  That the grass had never grown back to erase those tracks was downright spooky.

My wife and I went to Paris and one of the many highlights of that trip was a visit to the cathedral at Notre Dame.  There are many majestic images to take away from a visit to this crown jewel of gothic religious architecture.  For some it is the famous Rose Window, for some it is the gargoyles that line the roof, others may be inspired by it as the setting for Victor Hugo's famous story.  For me, the resonant image is of worn stone steps.

In order to get to the roof to see the gargoyles, you have to climb a circular staircase of some 387 steps.  Doesn't sound like a big deal and it certainly didn't sound difficult while we were standing in line waiting our turn.  What makes it difficult is that the steps have been worn from the centuries of those who came before.  Your footing is uncertain and you are under a certain amount of pressure to keep up with the person in front of you in order not to incur the wrath of the endless chain of those behind.  

The stair tower is a little bit like a chimney:  it's tall and narrow and lined with stone.  Cold air rushes in at the bottom and the smell of sweat and desperation comes rushing out the top as people quickly recognize how much physical effort is required to actually climb all of those steps.  Aside from the occasional kids who rush past you in their exuberance to see where the Hunchback lives, it is remarkably quiet as this league of overweight pilgrims prays for the stamina to make it to the top without collapsing and promises to begin an exercise regime just as soon as they get home.

You can't climb those stairs, or stand anywhere in that magnificent building and not think of the passion that sustained the generations of builders over the 182 years of its construction.  Day after day, year after year, they worked to capture their beliefs in stone and glass.  And, in the process, they created a place that has inspired the spirit for generations of their descendants.

You don't have to believe what they believe in order to appreciate the church.  There is, however, no escaping the power of the beliefs that drove its creation.  Being in that space is inspiring.  Contemplating the achievement that is Notre Dame helps to understand all that we are capable of.


* * *

I love writing with a fountain pen.  Not only is it increasingly rare to see handwriting practiced at all--and mine could use a lot of practice--but writing with a fountain pen is a little like painting with a fine brush:  the pen lets the writer not only capture an idea, but also something of the emotion behind it.  

My newest pen is perhaps 70 years old.  It belonged to my grandfather--the one I never met--and it came into my possession only recently.  I just got it repaired and I am learning how to write with its fine point.    

I know little about my mother's father.  I know that he was an electrician.  I know that he served in both world wars.  I know that he was well-liked and came from a large family.  I also know that he and my father's father were at Vimy Ridge during WW I, although there is no evidence that they would have known one another.

With such a meager framework, the pen has no context and yet it contextualizes me as a tangible souvenir of one-quarter of my family tree.  It resonates with my history.

As I consider this subject, I recognize the ever-present threat of hypocrisy:  I claim not to be a person of faith and yet I am writing about having a certainty of things unseen and unseeable.

Taking care of your spirit is a strategy to reduce tension and relieve stress.  For some this may mean meditation or communing with nature; for others it may mean being more observant of one's particular faith.  People of faith are known to have experienced more rapid recovery from illness and are better able to deal with life's rich variety of potholes and detours.  The promise of a brighter day, regardless of its source, has inspired many to endure much.

I am forced to acknowledge that I am not that optimistic.  I do not trust in that brighter day.  I know that there are people who do, but that ain't me.  I have today and I want to get to the end of it thinking I did more right than wrong and more good than bad.

I am inspired by ghosts and the things they have done and the spaces they have built.  I know that most of the meaning of life is, like an iceberg, largely unknowable until you run into it.  Though they represent significant hazards to navigation both in the shipping and in the metaphorical sense, it is important to consider the challenges these icebergs may present.


* * *

I need to explain the choice of the photograph of the Arizona Memorial.

When I was in high school Life Magazine was relaunched as a monthly and I had a subscription for a couple of years.  In the December 1981 issue they predictably commemorated the 40th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  On the Table of Contents page there was a small photo taken from directly overhead of the Memorial.

Anyone who had ever seen Hawai'i Five-O had seen pictures of the Memorial but they were always taken at sea level.  It looks like a post-war modernist houseboat where the names of the 1100 sailors lost when the battleship sank are inscribed on the end wall.  What I had never understood until I saw that Life Magazine photo was that the USS Arizona lies just below the surface; that this site, for all intents and purposes, is the shallowest of shallow graves and, as the constant leak of diesel fuel from its tanks shows, one in which the corpse still bleeds to this day.  

In that one image, the Arizona went from being a citation in a history book to being a visceral war wound.  I am not a member of the "Greatest Generation" but I can appreciate the power of everything that the Arizona represents to them.  Even though I have never been there--and am frankly too afraid to go--my life is informed by that image.

It is a powerful testament to the cost of war and a reminder of the value of peace.  The Arizona itself is a testament to self-sacrifice, its crew still aboard.

Human beings are messy, disorganized creatures who can occasionally be united in the service of grand ideas.  We spend more than we earn, we eat more than we plant, we race when we are not being chased and yet we can also seek common ground, follow our curiosity and strive to be better.  And we do, eventually, learn from examples which is why I welcome the presence of my ghosts.

I don't have a good close for this.  There is no tidy resolution, no fortune cookie takeaway.  Taking care of the spirit is a profoundly personal task and, despite what you may have heard, my answer is no better or worse than anybody else's.  However, I imagine that each of us benefits from considering the question.


--Graham Campbell
Associate Director

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Eat Well

I went to visit my mother for Christmas. 

Like most of our visits of late, the length was in inverse proportion to the distance travelled. (I feel as though I spent more time with airport security.)  And, because the visit was so brief, my mom made a Herculean effort to try and recreate the features of those long ago holidays when the family was together.  There were stockings hung by the chimney with care, wrapped presents under the tree and lots of food, including a fully stocked bunker of Christmas cookies.

But, despite all of these preparations, which had to have started right after I told her in October that I would be coming, my mother outsourced the stollen.

Stollen is a German sweet bread that is prepared for the holiday. While it looks unassuming on the outside--kind of like French bread with raisins and sugar frosting--it is dense liken those pills you drop in water that expand and expand until they become a castle, or an airplane, or a Barbie-sized figure. 

For this, what was a relatively late addition to our Christmas morning menu, my mother had contracted with the local Swiss pastry shop and it was one of my Christmas Eve duties to go downtown and pick it up.  This was an assignment that I cheerfully accepted because I have a real fondness for bakeries and I am partial to Swiss bakeries most of all.

Bakeries are like magic shops in the way that a few relatively simple ingredients are transformed into something amazing.  I remember, as a young child, watching my mother make bread and the great treat it was when my grandmother came to town because she would make her wonderful rolls.  It was to a bakery that we would go after ski lessons to replace the calories accidentally burned by exercise with those made by expert, flour-covered hands and then drenched in icing.  Is there anything more delicious after a winter day spent outside than tarte au sucre (literally, "pie of sugar")?

But the real attachment to baked goods and the nostalgia for Swiss pastry is due to my grandfather.

I recall, as a child, looking forward to Friday afternoons because it meant he would come with a cardboard pastry box wrapped in string from the Select Pastry on Ste. Catherine St.

It seems like there were other items in the box, but I recall the croissants and the Black Forest Cake most of all.

It was after this introduction to the pastry arts that I recall seeing a television commercial for Pillsbury "Crescent Rolls."  The shapes may have been similar, but the experience of pulling apart a warm-from-the-oven croissant and putting soft butter on the wisps of bread it watching them melt away could never be equaled by something that came from your grocer's freezer case in an overgrown toilet paper roll.

It was not only the quality of their work, but also the idea that my grandfather had selected these "Select" pastries that made them special.  He was a difficult person to know and, as kids, we were never entirely certain that he wasn't mad at us all the time.  The pastries were a delicious contradiction.

There came a day when the pastries stopped coming.    

After that it was as though we had been set adrift in a world without pastry.  There would be times when some adult, or other, would appear with a cake or other creation, but it was never the same.  You always remember your first time and that goes for pastry as well.

It is perhaps this abrupt disruption in the supply that has fueled my life-long search for pastries as good as those my grandfather brought.  Somewhere there must be a Black Forest cake good enough to be select and, judging from my waistline, I seem intent to keep looking until I find it.

I walked into the Swiss Pastry from which my mother had ordered her stollen and, even before I noticed the counter staff who all shared a fondness for facial piercings such that it seemed to be a condition of employment, I saw a piece of Black Forest cake in the display case.

It was automatic, a process beyond thinking, I instantly recognized it as being identical in appearance to those long ago cakes selected by my grandfather.

It was like stepping into a sugar-frosted time tunnel:  I had to have a piece.

The intent of including "Eat Well" as one of the 10 tools to Live Your Life Well was not necessarily to promote holiday gluttony or even my chocolate shavings and maraschino cherry lined walk down memory lane.  The intent was to promote healthy food choices.  The information management  mantra of "garbage in, garbage out" applies to all manner of systems, including the digestive.   We know about food pyramids and calorie counting and dealing meals and yet, as I write this, I am staring at the picture of the Black Forest cake and wondering how I can "get me some of that."

But it also cannot be denied that food has many powerful associations with memory--both good and bad.  

To make my point, I will cite an extreme example.  My family heritage is Scottish and so I have virtually no standing to write about food.  A thrifty people, we are known for extracting the maximum value out of all of our possessions.  One such strategy was through the creation of dishes that would use otherwise unusable parts of our livestock.  The most famous such dish is haggis.

By just about any measure, haggis is a disgusting idea.  And that's a determination based solely on the finished product.  The mind boggles at the number of possible iterations that must have been tried before settling on the final recipe.  Nothing ever good comes from the sentence, "Taste this and tell me what you think."

Having said that, I will admit to having a fondness for haggis that is driven solely by memory.

My father loved butcher shop items--"special cuts"--that would not immediately come to mind on a visit to the corner store.  He liked things like beef tongue and something called "blood pudding."  I can remember being dispatched to the coldest part of the basement to turn over the tongue that was pickling in a spooky brine between the inner and outer doors.  These "treasures" would be served up to us kids as though we were the most luckiest people in the world, but I am here to tell you that tongue is tongue, no matter how you slice it.

So it was with some trepidation that I responded to the prospect of having haggis.  I was 16 and being permitted to attend an annual event for persons of Scottish heritage.  It was a fancy dress affair featuring a band, a formal dinner and a late night snack.  I was even to be "fixed up" for the event.  Through a colleague of my father's, a date was brought in from out of town.  (Apparently, none of the locals would have anything to do with me.)

It was an event my father looked forward to every year.  He had been president of the sponsoring organization as had my uncle and my grandfather.

It was not something I had been looking forward to because I have never been very socially "ept"  and the prospect of getting dressed up and spending the evening with someone I didn't know was paralytic in its effect.

To detail the events of the evening would be to tread ground covered more skillfully by more talented writers.  It is sufficient to say that cliches were honored, many many cliches.

More than half a lifetime later, I no longer remember the woman's name who was forced to put up with me, but I do remember the pomp and the circumstance surrounding the event and I remember the smart-aleky remarks made by my father's friends concerning me and my prospects with my "date" (she was that far out of my league).  It was the first time that I can recall not being treated like an appendage, like a child, something to be "seen and not heard."  It was kind of a secular confirmation.

Instead of having to go to class and practice reading religious texts, I went to a fabulous party, featuring manners and practices with which I was only marginally familiar.  (I mean, really, how do you keep track of all of those forks?)  

At one point in the evening, around midnight as I recall, the haggis is "presented" like an honored guest.  It is ceremonially cut to a round of applause, kind of like at a bris and then is served to everyone.

Talk about an awkward situation:  your at a formal dinner, seated at a table with people you don't know and with a date who is doing her level best to put up with you and they serve you haggis!  What do you do?  WHAT DO YOU DO?

Women learn a host of ways for handling such situations, but men have only two choices:  we storm out, or we suck it up.  My plate was served and I had to go with either "A" or "B."

As a Canadian, I really only had one choice.  I mean, after all, somebody worked hard to make the dish and it would be rude not to try it.  (We are a polite people.)

And you know what, like the evening, it wasn't that bad.  Not my first choice of how to spend a Friday night, but I am glad that I did it.  

It was shortly after the haggis that my date and I became separated.  I don't remember the circumstances, but I do recall that I was alone for the rest of the evening.  Perhaps she had to leave early the next morning to go back to Toronto, or perhaps the haggis was a deal-breaker.

Facts lose potency over time, what lingers is the association and, to this day, I have a positive association with haggis.  That is not to say that I have had it since, but I can honestly say "it's not that bad" and, in part, be referring to the food.

So eating well is good for your mental health.  That is not to advocate for cold water sandwiches and mineral water diets, but to give yourself permission to live a life that will permit you to develop a broad portfolio of associations with food.  As with most things, moderation is key.

I brought that piece of Black Forest cake home to my mother's house and enjoyed the opportunity to remember my grandfather and a different time in my life.

That was enough and worth every dollar.  There were not enough meals left in my visit for me to actually sample the cake before I left, but it was as tangible a holiday treat as anything else and one of my favorite memories from my trip.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director