sunday hush

i took this picture sometime late last year down near cobourg. a friend suggested it was phallic - i can see that, but it’s not what i was thinking. i remember seeing the colour of the metal against the colour of the water and thinking how i liked those colours and the way the metal curved against the flatness of the sea. i also liked the line of the horizon carrying on out of the picture while the rail curves back and sends you to the beginning - the left of the picture and then back out again. it does that for me anyway.



sunday’s a strange day - i mean each day has its own unique flavour but sunday comes replete with associations that go back to when i was little and spent a lot of time in church (because i had a grandad who was a full minister in the methodist church and a grandfather who was a lay preacher). I was often connected to church social events like fetes and women’s auxilliary gatherings and i vividly recall the ‘gotta be quiet and circumspect’ feeling of reverence throughout the manse if we were visiting when my grandad was writing his sermons in his study. when i got older and was going to church in canada - see i was originally from england - it was a presbyterian church and that was very different to the methodist church. looser in some respects, i started to see more deeply the division between who i was and what i was becoming to begin to think, and comparing it to the set of ideas and expectations and beliefs that were being presented to me at church.

i think that the sense of self that develops in people is (at least at first) deeply underwritten by division. we find out who we are as unique individuals initially through separating ourselves from the world. we rebel and try to be in such a way as to push the box we suddenly recognize as constraining us, as far away from us as possible. by recognizing the difference between the emerging who and what we are and the who and what we are that the world around us says they see in and of us we begin to recognize ourselves, but sometimes at the expense of our true self. i found in my own life that i had to push people's expectations of me so far away over such a long period of time, that i actually created a self that overlaid my true self. it seems that much of our life then becomes a matter of making ourselves whole again, while fighting to some degree the call of the world to become what the world initially saw of us. parents and family can have an especially powerful role in this hanging on to expectations of who we are. then friends and colleagues. then our selves.

anyhow sunday’s a hushed day. i love the silence, the quiet, the restraint of the day. my favourite sundays are those when i hear rain falling outside. or in the wintertime, snow. somehow it fills me with something indefinable but it makes me feel the security of my home more than at any other time. i make my way downstairs and turn on the coffee and then wait patiently for it to finish brewing before i make up a mug and then curl up with a book or a newspaper or a magazine and slowly savour my coffee. sounds like an advertisement for something but really it’s just an expression of the benevolence that is available to people through the small acts of kindness we do for ourselves. as i get older and have more time to devote to caring for my self and especially for those parts of my life that i have come to cherish, i find that i am able to take equal pleasure in providing these small acts of kindness to myself and in providing them for others.