Happy 148th Canada – for more than half my life, I have had some truly remarkable, uplifting experiences whilst living here. Too, I shared a great love with my Canadian-born task companion, Merlin.
Regrettably, I could neither find the dimensions nor year of creation for the masterful Charles Pachter flag which I would presume is an Oil on Canvas.
Happy Canada Day – my life experience has been immensely enriched for having remained focussed here in this great land.
I decided to see what an intense observation of couples whom I know very well would produce. I trust my own process enough to know that if I allow it to unfold naturally, the results will have a certain integrity – which I think this series does. This portrait, of Janet and Gordon Belray in their garden, references their commitment to one another in the face of serious health issues, and the hope that comes from the garden – a metaphor of restoration and continuation. I feel that the intensity of their connection to one another and their hopes for their children are suspended in this simple examination. – George Hawken.
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Had a most lucid astral plane encounter with George last night. We sat at a deuce visiting. For me, I have come to realise that whenever thusly situated on the astral plane, the encounter will be languorously rhapsodic. Our eye contact was intense and direct and we hardly said anything to each other which, incidentally, was always the case when visiting in person.
George and I were lovers, long ago, and as I was then his muse our passion inspired the lithograph, Pink Chair, which has been previously shared on this blog. I love this piece and on my return from living in Montréal, the artist was then working on this series of portraits. I had hoped to have been included in the series but alas it was not to be.
Heals the very soul every time! When in Winnipeg at the school of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, I was the only student not included in the mounting of Romeo and Juliet, the company’s first full-scale ballet since David Peregrine and Evelyn Hart had won the bronze prize in Varna, Bulgaria.
This music, this giant of a genius, this album literally saved my life.
I felt such shame at having been excluded; having been properly isolated and rendered invisible, one then had to proceed as though one’s exclusion was not the most hurtful rejection. The only thing that spirited me away from the abyss of self-implosion was this music.
A beautiful, male Jamaican-born nurse had given it to me on the second weekend of my stay in the city. He had played the album after his truly elephantine cock had just ravaged my soul and I did nothing but stay there in bed flying-without-moving – and he was a damn good cook too!
Years later, after Merlin’s passing, I sat in the corner curled up with sage entity mate, Daryll Newcombe – now dead of AIDS, at every performance of Oscar Peterson at the Bermuda Onion Jazz Club on Bloor Street between Bay Street and Avenue Road.
The Bermuda Onion had great atmosphere. More than that, it proved the only Jazz club in Toronto where one’s race did not preclude entry therein.
I was truly healed for being at those performances; I had survived Winnipeg and gone on to meet Merlin. I had to have attended each performance, for Oscar’s sheer genius had not only enriched but it had literally saved my life. So it was that, in later years, I was grossly disappointed by his glaring humanity.
His self-karmic issues notwithstanding, this was one genius of towering, staggering magnitude. Much of the beauty of this giant’s genius is how pure, simple and warmly enveloping it ever was.
Indeed, one has much to be fiercely proud of in celebrating Black History, Black culture, Jazz, because of shamanic healers of the soul like Oscar Peterson.
Dreams are the poetic expression of the soul. 