It wasn't that Tristan and Iseult were victims of a love potion that they couldn't remove from the DNA of their cells once eros had altered their chromosomes. It wasn't that they were enslaved to their passion for each other without choice because the potion had altered them forever, opened them to each other fully and definitively and without respite. It wasn't the potion at all. That was a myth. Iseult's mother didn't make a love potion for her daughter and her amour (oh, she knew they would inadvertently drink it on the voyage from Ireland to Cornwall) so they could be trapped in unredeemable desire for each other. She knew that their hearts had already opened to each other. She hoped the love potion would encourage them to follow their passion for each other. But it didn't work. What was wrong with Tristan and Iseult was that they were always trying to do the 'right' thing, to 'please' everybody but themselves: King Mark who Iseult marries, Iseult of the White Hands who Tristan marries, though Kaherdin negotiates as Iseult of the White Hands' brother and Tristan's friend and attempts to help him choose between his divergent loyalties to a peaceful unified state or to his heart. Because of the choice Tristan and Iseult made, to serve others, they found no relief, no solace, no blessing in their love for each other. And their tragedy unfolded and they eventually died because of the jealousy incited among those they tried to live by the rules of convention for...

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Pre-Raphaelite Tristan & Iseult painting by Anonymous: www.angelfire.com/me2/legends/Artpage2.html

I've been wanting to write on uncertainty for a few days, and this has emerged, a prose poem, philosophical, in the dream-time...

"Make your own flute, and learn to play it from the innermost center of who you are, play it from you soul... the woman who loves your song, as you love hers, is the one." Tony Macasaet

Floating on the face of existence, wide ocean of unknowing, do the waves bring us closer, draw us to each other? In the darkness of our isolation, our lives, their solitary attachment to the energy of it all, we can live together, we can die together, but still we are born and die alone. There can be no escape from it. Together and apart, fathom this in the dark sea around us.

In the dream from which I wake in the hot night, we are lying next to each other, sheets over bare bodies, comfortable, touching, on a bed floating in a vast and dark ocean; we can hear water lapping to the edges of all the horizons around us. We are illumined in the night, diffuse spotlights, chiaroscuro lighting, a golden sepia whiteness, our faces warm and content, the soft white pillows we rest on.

Finding closeness in the vast uncertainty, we can agree on this beauty, even as we gaze into the darkness glimmering with stars.

There is comfort in unknowingness.

In the closeness of love in the vast unknowing.

Writing and Line Drawing © 2005 by Brenda Clews

As I share my travels on the road of uncertainty, I am now in a residential area of Toronto. My beautiful friend is away for a few days and I am allowing myself much needed rest. This is the garden house, yoga space, sanctuary, tiny sacred temple that my friend had built at the end of her garden and where I am staying. In the Spring there was a fire, cloth over a bare light bulb, but she managed to get it under control without too much fire damage. The ceiling's been repaired, the soot washed off, and I'm to paint more coats of sealant inside, and offered to compose images of Kuan Yin on parchment paper either to transfer to the walls where I can paint them in a delicate wash of rainbow lotus colours, or that she can keep to use as she pleases (these drawings on parchment are meant to be hung over fabrics). It's a sacred space where she has conducted her healing practice and each night I sleep in a radius of love that dwells here, and that remembers the purifying healing work of this locus, and I am here until the end of the month...and then who knows...

Like a continuous natural chant, the cicadas sing their lovesongs in the darkness. An awning of leaves spanning overhead from two trees, one on either side, are still. A dog barks ferociously in a neighbour's yard, perhaps at an intruding cat, and the owners come out, the woman speaking emotionally in Portuguese, then they go back in, and the silence which carries in its background the songs of the cicadas emerges again. I sit on a white wicker love seat under a spray of tiny white lit stars gracing the tree awaiting my lover's call.

A plane passes overhead and as I look up I see that a third tree fans over me, high up, leaves with fronds like palms. The plane moves across the soundscape invisibly except for its moving lights and soon the distant roar is gone. The stillness of the trees and the way I am canopied by them feels like a sacred grove.

After a hot, humid day of nearly unbearable discomfort, the evening is soft and inviting and enwraps me. A stone Buddha, seated in lotus, meditating, faces my direction; he sits before a prayer mat of washed white stones amidst a fan of leaves. Peace emanates from him, calm, serene. Near him a small statue of Kuan Yin stands; this house a veritable shrine to Kuan Yin. White clay and porcelain statuettes of Kuan Yin are everywhere inside the house, and two large hand-painted colour-glazed porcelain renditions of her, edged with gold in the way only the Chinese who worship her can create, reside in the garden house or yoga space or sacred little healing temple I am sleeping in at the end of the garden.

I feel blessed in the Goddess's radius of energy as it emanates from this house where I am staying, the house of my dear friend. The phone rings, and I answer it, my soft voice, his quieter one over the receiver, joining the singing of the lovesongs of the night.

The aeroplane taking me home, not to a home but to the city that I call home, the city that has enveloped me most of my life, rumbles through the sky. Today Vancouver was a vision of ocean and beach and city and mountains in brilliant sunlight as we rose spectacularly into the sky. With my camera in a bag in the overhead compartment, I wasn’t able to take a picture. The only photograph is the one I carry in memory now.

Will I ever forget those white lines appearing and disappearing as we flew over the waves and up through the scattered clouds? White lines of seafoam writing on the ocean like a calligraphy, signifying the creativity I found there.

Yet it was a city of much difficulty for me. My children not adjusting even after 2 years. I began to feel I just didn’t belong there; but, in the ways of the energies of the world, before I left I found not only a job in a wonderful company, but a possible community through a newfound friend. I left feeling much better about my time there for these simple reasons. And I know I will be back, if only for a holiday.

The uncertainty ahead unfolds with the unrelenting wings of the strange bird I fly on, the drone of a metallic butterfly swooping across the landscape, crossing mountains, prairies, lakes.

In the balance, Toronto weighed in heavier, with a number of different communities, family and probably a university I know well; I never felt like a Vancouverite, but like someone who alighted from another world, that my energies didn’t suit the city, or that Vancouver, as beautiful and fertile as it is, wasn’t my city.

Yet I return with 3 books that I’ve written in the last 2 years, and while they need much editing, they might never have been written had I stayed in Toronto. The natural fertility of the city, its abundant greenery, inspiring creativity perhaps. The creative energy of that part of the world is extraordinary. Surely it has something to do with the beauty of the surroundings.

Creativity on the West Coast is in tune with the flow of the natural energy of the land; in a city like Toronto creativity erupts despite the pollution, traffic, crowding of an intensely built city of brick and concrete and manicured parks. The one an effortless extension; the other a determined statement in the midst of an artificial world, a city where beauty is not a paramount reason for being. In comparison to the casualness of Vancouver, Toronto is a business-oriented city with multiply positioned goals to achieve, to succeed. The natural landscape is a human one, one created by people for people and it is about people. Is that what I missed?

I like the energy of the people of Toronto. It’s a big city energy, even if it only approaches the truly large megalopolises of cities like New York or Tokyo or London or Rome.

It’s a city on the edge of a lake that it has cut itself off from by putting a highway between itself and the expanse of water.

That highway is where millions of people stream, driving in, out, working, loving, living their lives; it’s fast, the expanse of Lake Ontario to one side, the city risen from the flat landscape on the other.

Where I am going, into that core. Where the buildings are high, where the crowds move like large packs, herds, where the beat pounds.

And what will I find in this latest re-entry, this my third time heading back downtown to live in the busy core? The first time I was there in my 20s, I stayed 18 months; the second time, I stayed 20 years. I leave, and am always pulled back...

The plane takes me steadily across the country, my dog and cat in the hold below, during the passage between cities.
The landscape below me is veined with roads, mapping pathways, blanketed by fields in a patchwork of warm earth tones, grain yellow to dark green to dusty oranges to dirt-coloured to pale green, until we come to the vortexes of towns and cities where knots of community energies coagulate.

I feel a sureness of trust that this return is good, that the city will envelope me again, that I will find myself inspired by the wild and crazy and gentle and brilliant and ordinary and beautiful and loving people around me.

In 2 hours the plane will land in Toronto.

I follow my heart and return home.

That Terry passed away so quickly is, well, I was expecting to be blogging with him for years to come. I glad he is out of pain. I am glad I came to know him, his empathetic poetry and brilliant personas. I will always love him, his humour, his compassion, his creativity...

I am staying at Stephen's, voxcat's, and have met another blogger too - Bonnie, Literature_Chick most wonderful, and she glows in real life, vibrantly. There've been lots of hugs here.

The move yesterday was pure chaos, and packing your personal life, what you surround yourself with, in boxes and watching them slide out of the house and onto a van for transport is unsettling. Especially if you don't know where you're going to be living...

I pulled a marathon packing session of about 38 hours, only sleeping from midnight to 2am Saturday night. Bruises ripening all over my legs and arms from filling boxes, carrying boxes, bumping into boxes...

I filled a 22' truck and it took 6 guys about 6 hours to move me... I'd like to thank yet another blogger for being there by phone for me throughout the insanity, he's an amazing friend, Ira, thenarrator...

And on this overcast and cool day in the fertile beauty of Vancouver, my son's cat seems to have disappeared and I have to leave in an hour to catch a flight, and I'm worrying. Oh, and the movers left all my art from university and high school, and my Winter boots! So Stephen will keep a box for me for shipping later... and also I can take an extra box on the plane, it's cheaper than shipping by courier actually... I'm gonna be loaded down by the time I emerge at Toronto International Airport.

Stephen and Bonnie have been most wonderful to me and it is with some sadness that I leave extraordinary people like these, but the next part of my journey, this living in uncertainty, calls...

I'll be staying at my brother's tonight, and then at a beautiful friend's house till the weekend, though she's away a few days so I can completely relax, then I have no idea...

I live on trust.

Be well, write great blogs, I'll get around to reading as soon as I can.

While I'd rather be at home packing, and there is still way too much to do, until Friday I am at a job where I can while away my time, between calls and mailings, on the NET (instead of finishing packing, oh such stress). For Jean, Adriana Bliss, e_journeys, Mary Godwin, Richard Lawrence Cohen, and Dale, who left such heartwarming messages and a welcome back whenever that may be, and Tamar who sent me an email, thank you, my dear blogging friends...

Last night I went with my new friend Stephen, Voxcat, to his weekly lifedrawing class, and then to English Bay to watch the fireworks, a magnificent display of light and colour and explosion over the ocean and against the backdrop of the mountains, a most wonderful way to say goodbye to Vancouver.

I post three of my lifedrawing efforts. They were 3 minute poses. A challenge for one who likes to linger over drawing. By the third hour I was exhausted with the speed, and began to colour instead. These images contain stories, reflections, ways of composing life and being and may become photopoems later on...


Meadow Dancing
©Brenda Clews 2005


Her Figments and Shadows in Half Tones
©Brenda Clews 2005


Are Those Her Wings, Has She Yet to Put Them On?
©Brenda Clews 2005

Ok, it would make an interesting tatoo. I painted it 20 years ago when I had a dreadfully sore throat and fever. I remember lying in bed, sipping codeine-laced cough syrup straight from the bottle, journal on my knees, acrylics beside me, painting. I was into snakes and mandalas, just coming out of my Jungian stage. It's a small image. Then I got married that year and used it as the image for our Wedding Invitations. My sculptor friend was the only one who remarked on it, and he said, "O my g-d! For a wedding?" C'mon, dear old friend, two ouroboros' are intertwined, the serpents are kissing and forming a heart, there's a wishing star of blessing and guidance, a pearl or moon holding the secret of wisdom, and flames of passion leaping out of the sun... Sigh. Did the marriage last, well, no, but that's beside the point.

"Marriage Mandala" ©1985 by Brenda Clews