Swallowing Canada Whole

               Courage And Resilience

It takes the perspective acquired only with time to enable us to fully appreciate our past deeds of derring-do. My instinct that we required time and space alone together , my Bride and I, to solidify our union that had us leave all our Canadian familiars, abandon assets and possessions, and, in our early seventies, take off for unknown territory. Where from came the confidence that we could weather those material sacrifices? Where from came the courage to tackle the unknown at such an advanced age? Wherefrom came the courage and resilience?

And, there we were again, starting over, bright young eighty-year-old spirits, ready for new-old adventures when we arrived in Canada,. After a decade exploring old ground intensely cultivated for many millennia in Europe, and specifically in Ireland, we returned to places closer to our origins.

In Europe, things seemed to be ground more fine, rougher edges smoothed over, with buildings, reeking with age, showing an enormous range of differing tastes of bygone times, and lifestyles that have taken on the sheen of cultural tradition. We warmed to them, ignoring (with misgivings,) the bitter centuries and blood that it took to produce them.

There was so much in Europe we loved. We appreciated the distilled beauty of the human struggle to overcome and subdue environments and prettify life with confections and concoctions that entertain all the human senses. A populist peaceful revolution has foisted on governments responsibilities and promises for mass sustenance that we suspect are unsustainable. In spite of this, the strata of social stations we rail against, persist, and are sometimes even more ossified, more intractable of change, inviting incipient revolution.

We see and fear another revolution coming in the form of creeping Islamicisization, using democracy as a tool to sweep away the person-centered freedoms so dearly won over the centuries. Are we facing there an inferno, a struggle that may arise to throw back the demographic wave washing over democracy in this future? It will come, if it does, after our time. We rushed to embrace our hoped-for familiars in the environment to which we have returned.

I had remained hungry for the country of my birth. In my imagination I swallow whole mouthfuls of our never-ending forests, festooning out Northern Ontario and Quebec, our Maritimes, our coastal arboreal cathedrals in the west. I rush to slake my thirst with our countless lakes and rivers, diamond jewels and necklaces on the body parts of our land. I will caress again with my eyes the spaces of our prairies that banish the concept of close. I look to pick over the delicacy of the ramshackle towns in our back-country, often at water’s edge. I treasure the human size of our few cities, dwarfed by the giants elsewhere. We feel the feeling of being back at home.

We see the new palaces on our streets being built into the sky. They appeared raw to us with their newness. We remember the wildness of our interior spaces, rock and ridge, endless plain and arboreal forest. Who can imagine the vastness of our northern spaces, the places where someday we will spin out a future with dreams yet to be elaborated? Glory, glory, glory, we are so happy we have come home.

I scratched at old wounds, delighting in the fresh pain, making penance for our absence from our homeland in the bleeding. Time has not vanished the issues that tempted me from these shores. Feeling impoverished and unarmed, I fled the battlefield, to confront them again, now, afresh, as a Canadian voter. To live is to do battle. I have not contented me with passive resistance. I have with renewed vigor returned to the barricades. The perspective of time gave me new energy. I prepared myself as a ninja for hand to hand combat. I returned as a warrior, newly-armed with purpose.

The panorama of my life experiences have stretched across a globe that has grown so much smaller with time. The ease of communication we have today seems to have made distances so much less important. Spanning such diverse cultural experiences remains profoundly mysterious, defying our capacities to really know, at their heart, the communities we passed through on our journeys, even if our sojourn was a lengthy one. The challenges they face are so much closer to being our own as well.

Mostly what I carry with me from our times are the memories of the intimate interchanges I have had with the few individuals with whom I have had the opportunity to really share time. All the rest that is buzzing around my head is pure speculation shaped by the attitudes I myself brought to the equation. What we have offered here in our homeland had to grow out of that. We seek to be heroic in our contributions.

In the same way, the Canada I may have thought I knew, and understood, was long gone from the reality we faced on return. On our return we embarked on a voyage of discovery not that different from the one we undertook more than fifteen years ago. Nevertheless, I claimed as my right and privilege, the temerity to impose the person I became on an unsuspecting public in my native land.  I am a different person from the one that came away from this land. I hope I have made at least a small splash in the puddle, returning with the knowledge that people can make a difference, individuals do make a difference.

 

Do I present the image of overweening pride, Don Quixote-like, bestriding my world, in my imagination, like some Colossus. This small person, hoary with age, arriving here, threatening to swallow Canada whole? Biting off more than I can chew? Never mind! Like many of you out there, we are heroes in our own eyes.