JANUARY
“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
- G.K Chesterton
Scroll for this month's art experience.
Welcome to January & 2021.
If you haven't closed your other tabs, stilled yourself a bit, put your phone away, and gotten your drink yet, please pause this for a moment and do this! Art has an objective offering, but it cannot succeed in its mission, perhaps at all, without your full participation. Only to the extent we bring ourselves--heart, intelligence, emotional and spiritual sensitivity--can we receive.
These are just under a simple half hour, for a sort of "episode" of beauty, poetry, and art.
This month, the power and unhurried silence of winter captivated me. I'm currently living in California, and, like Joni Mitchell before me, with whom I share a hometown--Saskatoon, Canada--I manage to have something of a idealized homesickness for the ice and snow. Seasons are a powerful thing, and winter is quiet and haunting, bright, compelling, poetic. It lends itself to a warm melancholy only it can instigate.
I won't always centre the month around a season or the month itself--I intend each one to be an entirely unique experience!--but January seemed to beg me to, as sentimentally anthropomorphized as that may sound.
Continue to scroll for "Life's Never Perfect, But It's Good."
A song about reality
Here is a song of mine, "Life's Never Perfect, But It's Good," which was born out of a moment when I was staring out at the beauty of a sunset on the Pacific Ocean behind palm tree silhouettes, contemplating the incredible life I was experiencing--quickly followed by a feeling of being battered by remembrance of something particularly challenging that had been humming in my emotional background.
This is a song reminiscent of Alanis Morrissette's ironically mostly unironic song, "Ironic." But her lines such as the "black fly in your chardonnay" well encapsulate much of the human experience.
I share this in hope that none of us again miss the beauty of life looking for a false and never-to-be-realized perfection.
Gratitude is its own blessing, and ingratitude is its own curse.
Life's Never Perfect, But It's Good
So many gifts that I have carried
So many loves that I have buried, oh
So many hopeful Januarys
So many darkened Februarys, oh
I could come to so many conclusions
But this is the right refrain:
Life's never perfect, but it's good.
Who hasn't felt the disappointment?
Who could say they don't know what joy is, oh?
Things that seem divine appointments;
Others ravaged by the locusts, oh
We all come to so many conclusions
But this is the right refrain:
Life's never perfect, but it's good.
So many songs I've sung in my head
So much love to keep me grounded, oh
I could come to so many conclusions
But this is the right refrain:
Life's never perfect, but it's good
It's good
I wrote this next poem in 2016 when I was working and travelling in England. I wrote it with a British accent reverberating my mind because of where I was, and will often perform it that way for select private live audiences; but I can't quite see my way to doing it recorded because that format lends itself to critique of my semi-decent English impression rather than the quaint enchantment that seems to happen in person.
What I often say when I lead up to beginning in my affected British tones is this: that we have a perennial call to never capitulate to darkness, and this is that call to heroism.
Life is always part battering, and it doesn't help to sink into frustration about what is hard or unfair. It's often better fo us to accept that life is imperfect, and that we need to put on our proverbial "boxing gloves" and find our capacity to fight for ourselves, for those we love, and what is true and good and beautiful.
We must be ever willing to fight for our lives. And we must never capitulate to darkness.
Sonnet One
Do not to love bolt shut the doors of you;
The dark inside will soon grow into death.
Don't listen to the crop of lies that grew
As worlds in bitter sadness robbed your breath.
Do not give way to all Deception's ploys
To lock you in yourself without a key,
To throw you into barren, ugly noise:
Your loveless, silent, brooding misery.
Do not forget the summer days you know,
Though buried in the wailing, winter nights;
Do not forget the dawn in all its glow--
Recall with hope the warmest home-lit lights.
Yes! Find your fight again; do not be bossed!
For darkness isn't winning; it has lost.
Winter Scenes
Take a moment to look at these beautiful winter expressions in the medium of photography. These are sourced to capture the unique dynamism of winter's beauty.
Click on any image to enlarge and scroll all.
Both Preserver & Pioneer:
The Conservative in 2021
(Press the play button above title for accompanying audio.)
The image burned into my mind when I think now of a way forward for conservatives in 2021, pulling on the deeply familiar that often makes for the best art, is that of the pioneer family on the Saskatchewan prairie, where I’m from. The words that come to mind are both “pioneer” and “preserver.”
As preservers, the families that came to prairie Canada brought with them the seeds of civilization rooted in centuries of family, faith, loyalty, responsibility, interconnectedness, culture, and cultivation—in short, the substance and structures of stability and flourishing in a world always marred by human frailty and failure; but they also, as pioneers, embarked on an entirely new adventure that would require an entirely different kind of human innovation, stamina, creativity, perseverance, and ingenuity. We, as conservatives in the 21st century, are quite well-suited just now, I believe, to this analogy.
By the time I was born, of course, we were already four generations deep into civilization in the howling fields of middle-western Canada. I only ever knew grocery stores, technology, highways, snow ploughs, phones, furnaces, sports teams, choirs, pools—all goods bequeathed to me, built on the hard work and love, and yes, failures, of our forebear heroes.
I grew up with hints of the memory of our forefathers coming over from Ireland, Germany, and Austria via the Eastern US States, and my maternal great-grandfather trying and failing as a farmer following his purchase of cheap Canadian land in the early 1900s. I heard whispering stories of the alcoholism that echoed on both sides of the family through the generations, not to be separated from the harshness of the life many faced trying to provide for families in often impossible conditions. But I also heard stories of triumph: first and foremost, that we survived and didn’t leave; that we are here, finding our way four generations down. But there were also the particular stories of triumph: that families were formed and celebrated; that by generation three, everyone would find professional paths, and many would go to university; that my maternal grandfather started a successful insurance business with nothing but a Grade Eight education; that my paternal great-uncle became an incredibly successful contractor throughout Western Canada and even into the US; that a great aunt & uncle were joyfully married for seventy years, never moved from their farm in Anaheim, had ever-fruitful crops, and prayed for protection from the elements with often seemingly miraculous answers.
(As an aside, a story about this great aunt comes to mind. She would often ask, "Can you pray the Rosary while snapping peas?" to which she would universally receive the reply: "Of course not!" And then she would respond, which a signature twinkle in her eye, "But you can pray the Rosary while you snap peas, right?" Such was the mix of faith and good humour that kept them going amidst both the joys and tragedies of life.)
In my family's case, in its of course muddied way, faith, family, responsibility, and community was the glue, along with the shared memory and backdrop of the generations gone before in the “Old Country” of mainland Europe. None of my early family came from wealth, and in fact were essentially peasants back in Europe, and started out as such in North America. The secret to the success over generations that did come—for it hasn’t always come—was in fact from the wealth of goodness that is native to communities rooted in the wisdom of honour, faith, and family.
So what does this mean for 2021 conservatives, concerned about the state of things from a moral, political, spiritual, economic or otherwise perspective?
In the end, when we are doing the slogging work of digging up the deep, stubborn roots of ideology now (like my grandfather did the bushes on nearly every square inch of land at the new family farm when he was five) we need to know that we are working to build something, longer-term, worth all of the suffering we perhaps must undergo. Yes, this may mean a personal farm, analogous or actual, and hope of a place for our own families. But it may also mean a way of life that can re-grow itself into a renewed civilization in a few short generations.
That’s the power of the seed of our tradition. Even if our own personal efforts fail, we will have been a part of the greater success of all of those, in the course of time, striving to create something strong and beautiful together. Perhaps it is our children who will see success.
None of this is to say there aren’t immediate, crucial political concerns that must be evaluated with wisdom and courage; it is rather just to say: what will sustain us for the long-term, and what will inspire us to go on in the face of impossible contradictions and sufferings?
In 2021, I propose we see ourselves as pioneers. We must recognize that there is need to break new ground, as well as to plant new seeds in dry soil with hope of future fruit for the generations.
But we will also need to see that to have anything to plant, we will also necessarily be preservers of what has so far led to the authentic success of vibrant civilizations - these memories of hard work, loyalty, responsibility, faith, family, hope, and commitment.
Each word also therefore contains the other within itself. There are no successful pioneers without a history; and there are no authentic preservers who don’t also intend to plant. One cannot plant without the preserved seed; and one cannot preserve with any hope of it lasting without planting.
We are both the preservers and protectors of the seed, and the pioneers of tilling the soil and re-planting it.
These monthly art bundles or episodes are meant as a place to retreat and strengthen. While I knew after taking stock of the current cultural temperature that I needed to somehow “stake the ground” as a conservative in at least the broadest sense, this “zone of freedom” I am aiming to provide here (in the words of John Paul II as Cardinal Woytyla under communist rule in Poland) isn’t about partisan politics in the primary sense.
I am invested also in those aspects of human life personally, as many but not all of you also surely are, but art is a place where we pause and allow ourselves into a place of human, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual encounter with reality and beauty—and it’s here that we often find the deeper core of the “why” behind our political concerns and battles. When we lose this—the substance, the driver, the point—we can be our own worst enemies, fighting only for empty slogans that can’t survive whatever may now be our version of the analogous harsh Saskatchewan winter winds beating down on humble sod houses.
This long-term vision is part of what I hope to offer to us all in January’s art bundle experience.
We are preservers and pioneers. Let’s rebuild.
This same basic image and path of reflection is also what led to my writing of the following song you will listen to next, called "Winter Lullaby."
Winter Lullaby
A warm, little cottage in the wide, stretching white
Holds a babe and a mother in the thickness of night;
Mama holds her little one safe
And every night she sings:
"Winter's long, my dear;
The snows just pile and pile.
Winter's long, my dear:
So sleep and sleep a while."
The sun creeps up at half past eight
And won't stay long past four.
At the close of each, short solemn day
She holds her babe and sings:
"Winter's long, my dear;
The snows just pile and pile.
Winter's long, my dear:
So sleep and sleep a while."
The night wind whistles days gone by
Long covered in the snows;
All else, so still, waits patiently
For spring while Mama sings:
"Winter's long, my dear;
The snows just pile and pile.
Winter's long, my dear:
So sleep and sleep a while."
Winter at St. Andrews
The last segment of our January 2021 art episode is a poem by Robert Fuller Murray (1863-1894), written about one of Scotland's greatest and oldest trees: Queen Mary's "thorn," a Fife hawthorn thought to have been planted by Queen Mary of Scots in the 1560s, making the tree nearly 500 years old.
The tree is still flourishing in the courtyard of St. Mary's Quad at the historic University of St. Andrews in Scotland, more than one hundred years after Murray wrote playfully of its perennial beauty.
Murray died young--but the poet often finds himself singing out far into the future.
I'm glad you were here today.
You can download January's PDF for main written content and lyrics, as well as audio files for the featured songs and poems by clicking the button below.
Download My Files
BONUS MATERIAL:
Not ready for your art experience to end just yet?
Here is some extra content worth your time:
Preview of "Moon River" cover
Be the first to watch my cover of Audrey Hepburn's memorable performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's of "Moon River" set to realse publicly in a few weeks. Filmed by an award-winning filmmaker in Los Angeles.
Sir Roger Scruton on Beauty
Watch Scruton's famous docu-essay on the abiding power and necessity of beauty in the modern world where ugliness so often reigns. Beautifully filmed and narrated for full impact on a critical theme. (PG)
