Sometimes it takes me a while to collect my thoughts and compose my tongue before I can write something worth reading. Other times my heart grabs the bit and pounds out of my chest onto paper and bleeds everything in my arms veins and atrium.
I hope this will be the latter.
When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time outside. Partly because I would run out of patients with most anything that took 20 min of straight indoor concentration partly because my favorite sibling was our dog. Often when I'd indulge in my outdoor escapism I'd grab my moms camera on the way out. I'd normally take one or two pictures of the grass or our geese or something pointless like that and then take an endless amount of pictures of common clouds. Sometimes high lining stratus but mostly I'd hold out for exploding cumulus clouds that would tower and tumble into each other. I don't think any of the pictures on my moms old film fixed lens were great or even good but I'd always try to take the picture when the clouds would almost crash but let just enough light in between.
I know it's cliche but I never get sick of the 'sun bursting through'!
Whenever I move to a city I seem to retire this pass time.
Now for the blood...
It's so hard for me to count myself a city kid. I don't know if it's just some sort of suburban/rural superiority or city = sin complex or just the strange feeling of belonging I get in open spaces. But it's hard for me to stay in cities for long periods of time. Only turns out the sun busts through our cities concrete and contained trees too. Whether in ........
Bel-mo the young girl at my centre who joined and is helping form our 'Safe Streets' program because she's sick of street violence and her brother getting assaulted or in....
Lynda the community programmer in our poorer fort william core, fighting far passed her paid hours to keep schools and community services from moving to fringe city offices. Which would outsource our collective community and diminish the voice of many disenfranchised or in...
the after school drama team who wrote, directed, publicized their own 'anti drunk driving' drama after a student fell victom to a drunk driver or in....
the high school teachers at tbays Native high school working late at programming in order to try to off set the truth that Native students on average receive two thirds the funds urban white students receive or in...
Marty and the other 15, 16 and 17 year olds who make up the Regional Multicultural Youth Council who routinely write to the local papers trying to make the city aware of inadequate social assistance funding or in....
the countless others that live in and fight through clouds to bust brilliance!
If there's something primordial and spiritually right about connecting to GOD through the land and a rural life there's something unmeasurable spiritual in urban community voices raised like sun bursting through.
