2012 Winter Greetings

2012

In 2012 we have been blessed with the white stuff before the Winter Solstice (which is not always the case here in Hope, BC, Canada.) Everything looks so "embellished" and the quality of the light changes. The wood stove is working overtime and the goodies everywhere are so tempting.

It has been another good year of abundance, visitors, travels, and friends meeting over coffee and Scrabble.

If we do not see you, you are in our hearts. All the best to you and yours. Have a Happy New Year.

jmb

The Joys of Collecting Rocks - Why Collect?

Why COLLECT?

Maybe a casual remark tossed off by David Spade on George the other night got me started thinking about this. Spade said that, as a child, he was so poor that he collected rocks. Poor? I had never associated a rock collection with poverty. Inexpensive, yes. But collecting rocks was part of the joy of rural living, for sure. We had the freedom to explore without fear or anxiety. Although it is probably true that most of our acquisitions are gathered free of charge, at least until collectors expand into cutting, polishing, and lapidary.

Independence. Another part of rural living was often an absence of other children your own age close by. Yet in our home, the word "bored" was not allowed. "Only boring people get bored," we were assured. The point being, we were expected to learn ways to amuse ourselves when there were no other people around. We were expected to be independent.

Responsibility. Moreover, it was our responsibility, part of our duty as we grew up, to find something to do, to develop interests, preferably interests which get us outside, interacting with our environment, noticing things, asking questions, doing some primary research. Engaging with the world around us. Collecting was a common solution. Some kids collected bird eggs, bird nests, wasp nests, skeletons, skulls, feathers, butterflies, leaves, flowers. Some began "life lists" of birds encountered and identified.

Accessibility. Collecting rocks was something that was easy to do when you lived on a farm. Check out the new load of gravel dumped on the road. Perhaps it is composed of agates, or lava rock, red or black. Just walk out into the fields and look down, especially after the soil has been turned, or after a rain. Quartz and calcite will stand out white in the black till. Mica and tourmaline will wink at you. Feldspar may look pink, or jasper blood red. Iridescence may signal a fossil of some sort. Or you may find a CMO, culturally modified object, such as a "stone hammer" with a band chipped out around the centre, for binding rope to the granite, or multi-colours of flint or chert fashioned into points, scrapers, tools, or utensils. If you live in or travel to the right places, you may find jade objects, or you may be seduced by the multi-facets of crystals (quartz, amethyst), or semi-precious (garnet) or precious (ruby, emerald, sapphire, diamond) stones which are the raw material for jewels. Or gold or copper or silver nuggets washed in the river, or gold dust in the moss. And don't forget the thundereggs, the geodes, with their agate bands or smoky quartz crystals inside the hollow rock ball. Variety. Colour. Translucence. Lustre. Sparkle. Scratch. Mystery. Something will make it a "keeper."

The Joys of Collecting Rocks - The Benefits

BENEFITS

Collectors are Keepers. Once you become known as a collector, people will have a better idea of what gives you joy, of the kind of things you like to keep. They will give you rocks as gifts. My cousin once gave me a dinosaur bone he brought from Alberta. A neighbour gave me a "Gulf of Mexico rose" which looks like a collection of sea shells embedded in petrified sand. A boss gave me a lump of fossilized seashells. Friends took me on a collecting expedition up a high mountain road where we found moulds and casts of sea creatures millions of years old. That same friend gave me a cluster of aragonite crystals, a pale peach colour. Another gave me a bunch of obsidian from Oregon; you can see the conchoidal fracture which makes it so good for chipping to a sharp edge. In some, you can see the fire petrified inside. One of my brothers gave me a massive purple lump of square crystals as a house-warming present. I lost the name, but love it still. It's the colour. And a late beloved friend gave me a selenite ball, a round clump of crystals from the Red River floodway, a connection to home. A client gave me a stone with a hole carved through it. It looks like David's slingshot, some sort of weapon, but it was probably used for fishing with nets. And a man I never saw before or since gave me a polished slab of metamorphosed sea floor found in nearby mountains, when he attended my book launch at the library. And my cousin (actually my Dad's cousin, but we are almost the same age) gave me two slabs of a pale white and sea-green marble-like cut rock which I suspect might be jade. She has others; someone at the dump gave them to her. She has bowls full of rocks decorating her coffee table too.

I know I'm not the only person attracted to these beautiful objects. There is a whole industry surrounding specimens as decoration, natural "objets d'art."

The Joys of Collecting Rocks - Connections

CONNECTIONS

I love the variety, and the beauty, but the connections I associate with the rocks I collect add meaning both to the rocks and to my life. I treasure a piece of flint from Stonehenge and copper ore specimens I lugged home from Whitehorse. Each rock has a connection to a place or a person or a story. The ancient creatures from the sea floor now on top of the mountains, plant leaves from the age of dinosaurs, river rocks set in lava. I can look at a rock and see, read, a story. How these water-rounded granite pebbles must have sizzled when the green andesite lava engulfed them. How cataclysmic the explosion must have been before these sharp-edged quartz clasts were shattered and then sopped up by the lava flowing over, surrounding them. I think I am most attracted to the igneous rocks -- offspring of the dance of earth and fire. It's something about being an earth lover with a fire sign.


The stories the rocks themselves tell are of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic activity Millennia Before Man. They seem to put an often too-proud and too self-centred humanity into perspective. Small in relation to the planet, the solar system, the universe. Mewling within imagined Time.


I love how my rocks connect me to places and people of my own past and present. Another part of what I love about rocks is the sensory experience they offer. You can see the colour and sparkle. You can hear how each one sounds different, depending on what you strike it with, a chopstick, a knife. You can feel the varied textures and the differences in weight, the heaviness of a hunk of galena, the floating weightlessness of a bomb of pumice. You can even taste some rocks. Salt. Potash. But please, do not lick it after it has been passed from student to student around the whole classroom.


These things are real. Not made by man. Not manufactured steel or tin or plastic. Natural. When I have to pass them on, when I have to move from my house, I shall take their photographs with me, as a way to keep, to maintain those connections.

Book Club Conflict I - The Push/Pull

I've always been conflicted about book clubs. Pulled by the desire to share a passion. Repelled by the fear that precious time will be taken up reading titles chosen by others, titles far down on my own "Must Read" list. Repelled also by the fear of negativity, the depressing spectre of having to listen to books and their writers (who come to seem like friends) being trashed by other readers. Or worse yet, trashed by readers who have not read them, but insist on talking, about how such-and-such is superior. Or about the movie version. Whatever happened to that open-ended question: What is it about this book that makes it worth writing, publishing, reading? What might I have missed?

In the Book Club push and pull, will I be moved by love or fear? Will I stay home or will I go?

Book Club Conflict II - Pre-Reading

Last month's Book Club book was Wayson Choy's Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying.

I begin, as I've been taught, with Pre-reading. What is the book about? Illness and recovery, not a topic which interests me in general. However, the title says "living," "dying," and "memoir," three subjects in which I do have an interest. What do I know of this writer? Wayson Choy is Canadian. A fellow British Columbian. He grew up in Vancouver's Chinatown (described in his memoir Paper Shadows.) To his friends and former professors at UBC, he is known as Sonny. (I know this because I play Scrabble with a daughter of one of his professors.) Wayson was "discovered" in a Carol Shields writing class. His first novel, The Jade Peony, was a One Book Vancouver selection among its other achievements. His second novel All That Matters was nominated for the Giller. I know because I went to his presentation at the StanleyTheatre in Vancouver, when I chose that ticket as my reward for volunteering at the Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival. That night he talked about that book, and this one, as he had already experienced the health crisis which is the focus of Not Yet. I also heard him read from this book in Toronto, where I had abandoned my attempt to speak to him because the line-ups were just too long. I'm Canadian too. I don't do line-ups. And when the line-up started forming outside the Men's Washroom, waiting for him to re-appear, I just shrugged. Give the guy a break.

My Book Club point is: I've read his previous books. I love his writing style. I've heard him speak on the topic, so my hesitation, my general disinterest in things medical or in books about health is trumped by experience. Yes, I will read it, and I will attend.

Portrait of Wayson Choy by John Beebe, from thebukowskiagency.com (Permission requested 2012/09/22)

Book Club Conflict III - Reading Not Yet

I save it until I have time to enjoy it undisturbed, and read it not too far ahead of the meeting night, so that I will not have to make notes or re-read before the discussion. Every time I am interrupted, I long to get back to reading Not Yet. I finish it easily in less than three days. It is a short book with an accessible style. It keeps my interest, engages me.

He speaks about going to China to film a documentary, Searching for Confucius, and I remember vaguely seeing that film on Knowledge Network or Vision a few years ago. I find a trailer on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HSgMgXxelc

He also speaks of his teaching at Humber College (where I attended his presentation but refused to stand in line to greet him.)

The one thing I hate about reading borrowed books (in this case, a Book Club copy supplied in bulk through the local library) is not possessing my own copy to refer back to and to make notations in. So I make sure to go uptown and photocopy my favourite passage, just to have something of the book to keep. And further to that passage, I do a cursory search for something general about Buddhism and about diamonds, the link between Buddha and diamonds. I cannot wait to go.