A Turtle Islander, most comfortable near salt water, raised on Lulu Island, formed by coastlines.... The snaking shore leads me on, ever onward, to the sound of white noise, surf, a pounding in my ears - tinnitis some call it, but after a while you get used to it and listen to the differences in its pitch, its frequency, its tone, and imagine the encoded signals, communications from another dimension - secret messages. Along the way there are findings, curiosities to discover. Ideas slide across sand and patterns emerge. The substitionary principle appears and shape-shifting begins. Dark shadows flit across the periphery of my vision. Then it becomes harder to determine the bad from the good, the right from the wrong, true from false, and slowly the trust-informed child becomes the bewildered skeptic, careful and reclusive. Recursion. What is it we can believe? Who is it we can trust? The weather changes. Rolling mist separates us from clear sky and puts me in a damp fog. The fire smoke rises into a falling rain seeking the elusive glass ball.
There are metal ones too, found half-way up the west coast of Vancouver Island near Cougar Annie's outpost where I caressed the cheeks of enormous glazed rocks, wept at the suffering evident in their gashed and shattered sides, and kissed them. I joined their private celebration, one white man and a black bear crashing their party but could I really feel uninvited to find myself at this gathering? No, I felt welcome, privileged and humbled to be allowed entry to such a grand ballroom, in such exclusive company, led by Nature herself and no other human contact except the jettisoned remnants of hemispheric sea-traffic under the foreshore trees beneath the bluest skies, in the clearest air - walking on land built by rain and drifting wood, to join the dance with these stones.
Most people don't know I have operated cranes, lived in a cave under the road in Gibraltar, sailed an ice-covered 87' ketch in the north Atlantic, graduated with an English degree from one of Canada's top universities without taking a Shakespeare course, written a skit in Pin-Yin Mandarin, and worked up and down the BC coast as a lightkeeper. Actually there's an awful lot people don't know, and many who don't care so it all works out in the end. We live, we die, someone else lives and dies. There's the sea, here's the shore, a perfect fit, there's no money involved. We just walk over it all and find what we look for, with no reason to continue when our innocence is finally and completely lost. Fractals. Ah, but what is this life? What is life for, for me, for you? That my dear, is the question. And then to live it well, this is something we humans have yet to learn, yet to discover, yet to find, yet to search for. It may be something we have simply lost. Some of us have begun looking, finding our balance, and keep hoping....
Are You In My Tribe?
The tribe I belong to is based in mutuality, reciprocity, and equilateral co-operation. It is a shared potluck group meant for all, not just for the rich or for the poor, for the fat or for the skinny, and recognizes that one person's time is not worth more or less than another's, it does not require weekend retreats for money beyond costs. This tribe is line-of-sight - within touching distance - it values respect, sensitivity, understanding, and justice, freely given from one to another without need for profit, and is based on willing exchange of experience and knowledge. The people of this tribe are connected to mother earth with the understanding that physical health relates to harmony with the natural world, that spiritual health relates to harmony with the universe, and that emotional health relates to harmony with the self and others. Each member is respected for their work in bringing community a little closer to such a reality. Are you in? Pattern recognition.
Rojan is a Cowichan Valley resident and believes poetry has the ability to reveal significant truth. As a visual artist, Rojan embraces the deliberation poetic thinking brings to a subject including text as a medium but feels the art really lies in the thinking, in the reflection, perhaps even more so than in the writing about it. As such, text becomes data, and writing - nothing more than observations for a theory, as though we are the sensors for Spirit beyond ourselves, antennae as it were - articulating and identifying sensory input for a universal cognition. Evidence.
No longer at one of the Pillars of Hercules in a cave under a road, or isolated at some remote coastal outpost contemplating the potential offered by cereal-box promises, this passive observer remains pre-occupied with the state of being, and of being Human, realizing the rise of another potential - the successful Human Inadequate (imposed failure of authentic self-actualization for increasing numbers of social stake-holders). In his struggling with form and content, Rojan has produced six chapbooks of poems, short stories, and personal essays, and is always at work on another text, presentation, image, or song while making music in efforts at preserving sanity in a broken world gradually realizing who the bad guys really are, and it's not who they want you to think. Rojan's words and images can be found at www dot rojan dot freeservers dot com.
ahhh yes, the Pillars of Hercules... when we were younger and "preserving sanity in a broken world".
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