Time Dilates. Directs. Divines by Margot Van Sluytman/Raven Speaks

I am a pupil of this thing we call life. Swelling and swollen with the capacity to transform and to be transformed by language: Logos Incarnate=Word Made Flesh. Fleshy is this thing. And I am fully aware that Word sculpts me. Oft-times seeks an answer to the query: to what is my life tied? My response is bound with choice. I must forever remember choice. Choice that comes ever clearer the more mis-takes I have made, the sharper the dynamic degrees of un-learning weld my heart to my intellect in a new way. Age-ing and Sage-ing too, sturdy accomplices in this rollicking and rocky gavotte HERe on the body of Godde: Earth. Earth HERself ever evolving and unfolding. Mysteriously. Meticulously. With slow and un-seen purpose. Tied we are the HER and our choices. Each expressions of this vitally significant relationship.

     On my way to the Keynote I was invited to share with the John Howard Society, I watched the summer heat and haze emboldened by the relentless forest fires in Western Canada, finger its way in Central Canada, brush strokes of clotted air painting the sky a raw grey, causing lungs to feel the squeeze, noting that the beauty of the vastness of the un-burning forests through which I was being driven, was in no way diminished, curtailed, or truncated. Trees. Roots down deep. Sipping moisture. Sharing, far below the Earth, millennia of silent stories. Of as yet un-tapped Wisdom. Breathing us. Beckoning us, who journey upon and with HER to listen. And listen closely. Ask. Listen. Do that.

     The cab driver, perhaps forty years my junior, had been friendly from the first moment he met me at the train station. “I like your hair,” he said. Grey. Buzz cut. In his culture, womyn’s hair was most often kept long. My culture too. Long hair. Silent speaking language about ethics, should dos, must dos, and how tos. Pedantry that find seemingly un-bendable ideas about gender roles, societal roles, and indeed personal, professional, and political signals, which in turn let us know if and how and wHERe we belong. Or can. Or might. If we look, sound, appear a certain way.

     I thanked him. And as we drove the twisty drive to the location in that stunning Northern Ontario landscape wHERe I was to speak later that evening, he asked me why I invited. When I told him, he was surprised. And had more questions and lots of thoughts and comments. I was inspired by his joie-de-vivre. His life plans for himself and his parents. He would work in Canada. And eventually return to his home country. He loved his parents, he told me, with a deep and abiding loyalty, telling me further that he was not sure if he could make the choice I did, the choice which in essence was what I would share about that evening. The choice I made when I was sixteen years of age, when my “life ended” too. “You look all right for a dead woman of sixty-three,” he said. His humour was keen, kindred, and treasured.

     He shared his bubble gum with me. On and on we drove. “Be sure you text me when you are ready to go back to the train station.” He gave me his cell. I gave him mine. He wished me success with my Keynote. I thanked him and said: Sawbonna. He asked what it meant. I said, “Google.”

     I was welcomed by Dan, Marg, Meaghan and Ally and later after my talk Hamza, Adelaide, Tenroy and Pierre, and so many others who understood the word I had shared with Mani. They too had abundant questions and that filled me with an awareness of the “rightness” of that moment. Of that moment in time.
     A delightful supper. Then to my room, to digest what had again the act, the fact of keeping the promise I made to my Dad, Theodore, when I leaned over his casket, the age of sixteen I was, he was forty. Two bullets in a callous crime one bright and sunny Easter Monday Morning, “ended” many lives. Mine included. Leaning over his casket, I whispered to him, “I promise you Dad, your death will not be in vain.”

     As I type this HERe and now, my eldest Grandchild is sixteen. Today, Theodore’s Great-Grand-Child is sixteen. He knows of his Great-Grand-Dad. He knows of Sawbonna. He knows that I have not and will not choose a side between victimized and criminalized people and those who work with and for us. Categories both into which we fit. By degrees and in different iterations. Mental illness. Drug Addictions. In a moment our life can be upended. Shocked to the very core of who and how and why. To what my meaning is tied catapulting us to re-story and re-negotiate, our meaning-making and meaning-taking.

     When Mani picked me up the next day. The sun brilliant. The heat glorious. The sky bluer than the day before. He said, “I Googled Sawbonna.” Our conversation flowed easily. He talked of his “girl”, of his dreams, of the children he would have. That he looks forward to being a Grand-Dad.

     We arrived at the train station. Warm good-byes. About five minutes before we arrived tHERe, he asked me, “What philosophy do you think I should live by?”

     We hugged. And he plied me with handfuls of pink sticky bubble gum.

     Sawbonna!

Time Dilates

Because morning does not take no
I am HERe again
Me and Mrs. Dalloway
Septimus Smith
Straw baskets
Sunflowers
Fat hat perched
My coffee strong, hot.
Sighing into Mystery
I sip
Smiling with the sky
SHE
Silent-speaks
©Margot Van Sluytman