Ice and Snow

Saddly enough, I am not coming here very often. Yet it is certainly not because I am not thinking of nothing within the premises of my skull.
The sheer volume of the written word nowadays makes for the wish to convey thoughts as something of a rather seemingly useless act, for thousands even millions of people are just equally doing the same. Is it then necessary for one to add its grain of salt to the pile. Well, the main reason one could do so is perhaps not because one would feel it necessary to accomplish it for the glory.
Is it then an act of survival? Mind you, if I were to break myself a leg I should rather call 911 instead of coming here and ask for help. Oh, there have been instances of people in England coming to the help of some other people, say, in Melbourne and reaching the police over there to signal someone in danger somewhere in the city but those are rare cases of salvation. Same applies for soul pain. I should rather see council locally if there is an emergency in that area of my life, except that maybe, juste maybe, someone out there in the etheral would grab my lines and fish for my soul and come to help out. Saddly enough I could be dead by then...
Living alone in the forest might seem like an odd thing to do in this day and age where environments a la Blade Runner are the norm. I have not change. I used to live in the downtown of rather large cities, but as in the case here, I always manage to build myself a little oasis of sort so not to be swallowed by the discouragingly demanding surroundings. Ironically, my little oasis here acts as the opposite of what it would have been in the city, for in the city I was somehow hiding myself from it whereas out here I have to hide out from the bush. It is kinda the negative of the other.
My current lifestyle is not that far from one I would be experiencing, say, in a solitary confinement situation at Guantanamo Bay. Yet, I could not out there go for a bike ride to the nearest Cuban village to get some goodies or come back to my cell with a book borrowed at the local library or a beer bought at the local grocery. How sad. Maybe they ought to change the rules out there and allow all the so-called "terrorists a la Bush" to just do that. It makes solitary confinement so much more pleasant! This thinking is from another era. I imagine an Englishman in the first part of the last century, just being an Englishman and doing just that. In his quest for acting like an educated gentleman, he would do just what I described earlier.
In my case my self-imposed solitary confinement (mind you I have a room at a hotel where I have a phone, the internet, tons of books, etc.) has been such a great condemnation with a trial, a trial that is the period I wish to have it lasts. I keep swimming in so many memories accumulated over the years that I could be at it for quite a while. It's been 1½ years so far out of almost three years away from the city. I've been involved in some many things over the decades, I've known so many people, worked at so many places, I had somehow to do a bit of a clean-up and ask myself what it all meant, what it has meant. I am in no way depressed of having a so-called midlife crisis. Just taking a break and wondering what it could be next.
So I have this cabin which is no bigger than a jail cell I guess but for me it is luxury and privilege. I go at the nearest creek to get my water, heat the place with propane which I go to the nearest town 4 miles down the road to fill up about every four days. I put the 20 lbs tank in the back of my bike and ride on the icy road in a manner that I am not a threat to anyone. I have this big triangle in the back, those orange triangles we normally see in the back of tractors and the like. In the winter time I ride against the traffic, because there is no way I could see the edge of the road, the shoulder, on the right side and I could end up falling off the bike. Being against the traffic allow me to head for the ditch as cars and trucks are seen at the horizon. The traffic around here is very low and sometimes I can ride miles and up to a half-hour without a car passing by. So it's is not as if I had to head for the ditch every ten seconds.
At the cabin I read, listen to the radio, write a bit, take care of my now six cats and think about what to do next. I will eventually get back closer to the city. I have no driver's license. Not that I could not have one. In fact my first driver's license was waiting for me back in 1979 at one of Vancouver Vehicule branches, next to BCIT and... I didn't go get it. Since then I have not had the need of a car, for I always chose to live close to my work and life.
Ironically it is out here I am the farthest from either work or supplies: about 4 miles in one direction and about 6 in the other one. I do everything on bike. In fact in the summer 2005 I was painting a tin roof about 13 miles away from my cabin. Every weekday for two months I would go back and forth on my bike and climb up the hilly distance and come back at about sunset, depending. I thus rode around 750 miles or 1200 km during that period. I was in good shape and the summer had been beautiful.
I am a strange bedfollow. But then I have no one to roll in the hay with. Except perhaps my cats! But that's another thing. I am not that strange in fact. I am a very ordinary guy, just having fun being somehow rebellious and behaving like a unworrying child. I have never been able to understand how it is we were living in the manner we are. To me it never rang a bell. Well, in fact I've tried real hard going at length in trying. In the end it made not much sense. I've never considered having a bungalow in suburbia, a wife and kids, a steady job for the rest of my life. All this has been what I would think of life on another planet, one I would not wish to go and only perhaps look at through a telescope.
That being said, there is a price to pay. Some would consider it unbearable. It's called poverty. In exchange for being chained one is being paid. In exchange for not being chained one is being poor. I chose the latter. Considering though what I see as the pleasure of a chained life versus one unchained (having known both), I would not go back to the former. It is immensely more pleasurable to me being poor than having everything. I swear. I am living a permanent orgasm of just being serene and living simply. It is obvious that the number of people surrounding me has declined dramatically! Yet there are enough people keeping in touch to make me happy.
The fact of the matter is I can go back to civilisation at any time if I wish. It is not as if I couldn't. I might. It would have to be quite thrilling though. All this while though, I have been out here also to find some sort of work I could do using my own intelligence and skills at producing something I would enjoy doing, instead of working for others. That is the main point here. I am saturated with working for others. I could be a workoholic. In fact I might be a workoholic. But I do not wish any longer to realise other people's projects. Been there, done that. All my life. Over and out.
There is in fact enough stuff to write a novel here. It would deal with awakening from the so-called reality and finding oneself totally at odds with the surroundings of human activities nowadays.

Ethics, myths, culture, sciences et al.

Photo Owen Egan • McGill Reporter
I met Margaret Somerville some years ago at her office at McGill University in Montreal. I was trying to do research on ethics and sciences for a radio program. She is the director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. In 2004 she was awarded the first UNESCO's Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science.
I never finished up that research for I found myself asking more questions than answers could be given and being deeply puzzled by the subject matter, I gave up in that form. I started with some strong believes on ethics and found myself being faced with not one but many realities for which they were no clear-cut answers. I think in some ways it was the beginning of my "crisis".
She is the 2006 Massey lectures guest speaker, a week-long (6 -10 nov.) conference that is aired on CBC Radio One's program Ideas at the same time as it is published in book form. Her lecture series is called The Ethical Imagination and the first part "Going on the wallaby, searching for a shared ethics", where she explores the importance of stories, myths, poetry, imagination, moral intuition and the human spirit in finding a shared ethics for an interdependant world.
What is interesting as I was listening to her first lecture, is the comparison I could make with a reading I just had last night at the cabin, a review in 1988 by Tom Robbins in The Seattle Weekly concerning Joseph Campbell being interviewed by Bill Moyers. In fact, some time after, Margaret Somerville just refered to Joseph Campbell this way: Mythologists Joseph Campbell maintained that what is common to all humanity is this experience of awe and wonder, experiences that he would call religious and the resulting creation of myths that helps us gives our lives meaning and purpose, that is experiencing awe and wonder in creating myths are cause and effect. Myths allow us to communicate about intangible realities that cannot be communicated about in any other way. Myths are not literally true but they do not represent untrue lies of fantasies. There are metaphorically true and often they are the only way to communicate the truth they represent." There is an excerpt of her first lecture at the bottom of this article.
I am particularly interested in those subject matters. That is why I want to delve into those areas mainly by reading as much as possible, which has not been the case for a long time, too busy working to try to make a living. I changed that circuitry around and can now report I cut my needs to the bare bones in order to be able to do my research.
You can listen to the first of five conferences on the webpage devoted to the 2006 Massey Lectures.