Late August Clouds

I suppose there are any number of things I could prattle on about this last August day but I choose what has chosen me; clouds.

I must confess that it is difficult for me to even sit here for these few moments to compose this brief piece as the sky is calling to me in whispers of azure and cyan with brilliant, slow moving grey-white clouds like pearly everlasting drifting on the cliff edge breeze.

I am planning on driving east today to Monticello where my parents spend the summer on their shore frontage of my grandparents old farm. I will drop our son off to spend the weekend birding with my parents and my uncle and visiting with other relatives keen to savour the long weekend's offerings.

We will likely scope out blackberries to pick and take a stroll on the sandstone beach below the cape before the girls, and my husband and I return home this evening.

But in order to do any of this, if I am to drive an hour east, I must first write out my strange intoxication with the sky on this last day of August. It feels as though it is calling me to honour the truths of my present by being in the present and witnessing how even the clouds upon the sky are ever changing. Breathe with me, breathe with this.

My dear sister Janice has returned to her family on the west coast after spending the bulk of the summer here with us. Bidding her farewell is always a difficult thing for me. Our relationship has often been a complicated one--we are sisters after all--but I have always adored her and she has always adored me. Being the two oldest with two children the same age we share similar life experiences even though we live a continent apart for most of the year. This summer our hearts crossed a lot of bridges to meet each other in a place of openness and acceptance. We witnessed firsthand the fabulous reality that we can become anew in each new moment so long as we grant each other that breathing, growing heart space.

Yesterday she spent most of her day flying across the sky, through clouds not unlike those which I am gazing upon today. I am gazing this morning as though bewitched by their splendour and I am reminded that we ourselves are like the clouds. Far too often we think of ourselves as fixed entities--I am Jill and you are You-- but really we are fluid like the ocean and the sky. We are waves of light and love, we are shape shifters in our mind's eye and co creators of the world in which we live. The beauty of the clouds is not unlike you. It is you.

Miss you already dear Janice but welcoming September into my heart one cloud moving breath at at time.

Thank you Janice! Thank you August. Thank you sky--for being You!

xoxo 
Intoxicated by clouds, but now ready to let them go...
Jill

Photo taken by Lucas MacCormack
Monticello, PEI 2017

Where I'm From

Pin point it on a space-time map:

1:05am

Friday, August 17^th, 1973

Charlottetown,

Prince Edward Island,

Canada,

Planet Earth,

Earth-Moon System,

Solar System,

Milky Way Galaxy,

Local Group,

Virgo Supercluster,

The Observable Universe.

Breathe and hold-

One final laborious push and I appeared in the maternity ward of the Charlottetown Hospital where both my paternal grandmother and my mother had trained and worked as Roman Catholic nurses.

Me, Gillian Marie McGuigan, first born of five,their singular Gold Cup and Saucer parade girl I was that day. 

My mom, nurse angel, is a
creative, loving homemaker and lifelong learner;
my dad, the endless provider, a loving,
quiet and detailed problem solver/computer guy extraordinaire.
Both birders, so artistic and so hard working.
But that is not the whole truth of where I’m from.

I’m from the same myriad of places which each in their own way have brought us all into existence.

Trace your fingers on the bark of an evergreen nearest you and you will feel the rough and willing touch of ancestral longing. A longing which is etched into each of us for the preservation of a species that was perhaps not ever destined for more than a maybe answer to where we are headed and, despite science and religion's best efforts, to why we are here.

If three hundred years ago you had told my ancestors in Ireland, Scotland and Africa that I would be sitting here today laced with cellular remembrances of their homelands, same starlight in my eyes as theirs, yet looking and living as I do, no doubt they would think you crazy. 

 But I am here and I did come from their distant histories by an entanglement of story lines that only a skilled author could render.

And what if someone then was told we’d know where humankind found its origins? And also, that during the same relative time/ space as that wild discovery, too many descendants of those humans who lived so desperately close to Earth would be at least partly to blame for the ridiculous mess we are in today as perpetrators of greed and a foolhardy disconnection with same Earth. 

Would they have thought you crazy? 
Do you think we are crazy now?
And what is crazy anyhow?

Climate change and a sixth mass extinction?
Guns, warfare, inequality, grinding poverty, endless growth?
Measuring our worth according to GDP?
Measuring worth at all?
And what of
opti-genetics on transgenic mice,
Nano-robots fighting cancer,
Reality TV in a plasticized world?

How about falling so wildly in love with an idea that you would walk off the face of the earth just to see if the idea might float? 

What about falling in love, period? Is that crazy?

Where I am from is two people who met by chance, fell hopelessly in love, and in time, decided to hop in the sack together. I am the end result of one of those encounters; a kind of give and take only possible through courage and naivety combined. That and the biochemistry of hormones.

Where I am from is truly a strange and beautiful place with a graceful and stumbling quality about it. A world so full it can scarcely contain it all:
 
Family and community and brokenness and wholesomeness too.
Wonder and laughter, love and fear and bliss,
Wide, bright expanses and dark cramped quarters, and  little known
wounds in far away lands and far back times. And kindness, do not forget kindness.

I am from small talk in small towns on an achingly beautiful little bit of fading away sandstone in a great big, turbulent sea.
I am from some sort of wonderful orchestral wavelength that an ancient part of me knows is truth and beauty.
That and the unequivocal forbearance of spirals and fractals as well as the survival of heartbreak and other dis-ease. 

And if I thought any of it was especially special I would have said so already.
Except I did.
My mom and my dad are ultimately where I am from.
That and an endless universe of possibilities
of which I am both one and many.
Jill MacCormack
http://www.johnagowan.org/elements.html
Africa cover by Weezer