My dad hunted moose with half-Cree uncle Bill, who married my mother's sister, they lived in a log cabin in the forested wilderness of the Kananaskis valley. When I was a tiny tot. I ran there with a bone in my mouth. Fell on it. My parents didn't have a car, 45 miles gravel road to the nearest hospital but they found a neighbour and got me there, blood streaming out of my mouth. The doctors unhinged my jaw to sew up my tonsils.

There I began my institutional sentence (conscripted)-- "learning my place" in public schooling. The rest of childhood spent inland at Shawnigan lake (Lake of the Dead), Vancouver Island. Named for the lost dead Indians in this stygian bottomless water which never surrendered its corpses. Somewhere their skeletons. Village school, natural childhood, forest, swimming lake, railroad tracks, comic books, Bonanza, Star Trek, endless summers.

My first girlfriend-- a beauty queen--"Miss Alberta"-- woke me out of a bad dream. The spirit of the times (late 1960s) lifted even my sunken boat. I met wild men and women, gypsies, poets, oddballs, scavengers, buskers, tricksters, bards.

De-institutionalized at last by spring, 1972: adventures on the open road, hitchhiking, communes, hostels, semis. Pierre Trudeau arranged some money for youth to have adventures and travel, I hopped on that one too.

Met Mary-- later, Mary Fair, in 1972-- we traveled together until 1980, some at jobs, nine months of it camping sauvage all over Europe.

Met Jenny Spring within a year or so after that-- we traveled together 11 years.

Later I did four years round the dance floor with an uninitiated brujo-- Judy-Ann Jackson. During that time I found out that Mars was Venus's favorite lover.

My choice of paths in life came out of being a nobody-- persona non grata, a zero. I graduated from the family home, school and the real social hierarchy of schoolyard and hall as a full-fledged nobody. If I had felt I was somebody, would I have risked stepping off the very bottom rung of the social ladder, taking off my shoes to walk Indian-style away from it, wearing my cloak of invisibility? Later I learned the skill of strolling barefoot over coast basalt and rough gravel. Of course "the 60s" helped, and again without "the 60s," being a natural coward, I surely would not have had the guts-- I may have gone on clinging to the underside of sheep within the Cyclops's cave and never escaped. Those who perhaps considered me brave, such as one young journalist calling me a "grizzled seargent" may have had "somebodyness," and thus was kept in check by their own visibility.

The ironies and oxymorons increase the interest as it were, in my investment: a mote in the public eye, no, hardly even an iota in the demographics. At some distance and around the corner from the Great Ladder, I was brought up short by the vastness, the grandeur of the free day blue horizon to blue horizon-- "heaven is spread upon the earth," said Jesus in the Thomas Gospels, "but men do not see it." Just a few steps up to the grandstands!-- top tier, when there was one, in Heywood park, gave me a "giant attitude and godlike mood" in my nobodiness and I penned there many of my Giant Attitude thoughts-- a nobody having great thoughts!

I read books in my 20s and 30s, mostly outdoors a la Walt Whitman. The sun was my reading lamp! For me the books were keys to faith-- that is, to experiment with relying on invisible things-- ideas, maps, models without empirical correlation in the society around me. Gradually evolved the courage to act on them. The ability to think emerged in my consciousness around age 29-- the mind coming alive after ten years of Post Traumatic schooling/home/social stress.

I wrote books in my 30s and 40s and claimed the free creative life:

By 50 I was somewhat politicized-- and saw major works coming to completion. "Make a late start to market," said Robert Frost, but "to market it is our destiny to go." I had resistance to it. It limits the free creative life until "success" (money) which can extend it. A playful hero, Henry Thoreau, supported my resistance:

Writing was more than a parallel path to the path of living. I realized that "creative writing" contributes to creating the life off the page, which can then be "off the wall." Hey, who wants to live on a wall? outside the box? Hey, it's pretty nice to be in a box in days of sleet and snow, nights of freezing rain. One big and warm enough for toys, cooking, and sanitation.

Drawing ("hanging a line out to dry on a sheet") and painting was magical and revelatory.

Letting the voice and language find songs across the bridge of guitar chords was depth of soul and a familiar, rare feeling of a vessel large enough for emotions to find form for their maturity.

I collected utterances all along, all the forms of the living word, from media sources and from persons, from inspired monologue to joyous conversation, interview, formal and informal speech, readings with many different tape recorders-- don't know why I wanted to do something as nutty as string utterances like jewels, but liked Jane Roberts's term "Speakers Of The Race." Besides being a conscientiously unprofessional town and country Fool, I created entertainments: strung utterances "for the delight of heaven"--that is, for my own delight and ongoing metanoia. They helped hew my individual path, sometimes between a razor's edge and an abyss. Some have gotten out and entertained others and-- believe it or not-- changed their minds.

Great Wedding

Great Wedding!
Best and worst man
At the centre of the great
Horizon's ring
The earth, its waters,
Plants large and small
The sky, broad sun-brush strokes
Extravagances of light

I've stood near places
Where men stripped the earth itself down,
Harvested soil and wilderness
Wore serious masks in deisel fumes
To roar and clank
And then went home to tacky houses
Ornamented with tawdry
Bric-a-brac,
On weekends to drink, mow the lawn,
watch the tube, wash the truck.

Out by the site remaining
Trees turned away-
Hard, austere,
Excluding by disdain

I came out of Safeway
In Esquimalt on a rainy Monday late
Afternoon past
Stacks of blue plastic boxes,

Out of a Northern Ontario
night
Chevron station on the 401,
Past the lifesavers rack
Past the tire rack,
The 10-30 and the 20-50
Past gleaming pumps

To bugs, fingertips
Of the dark that lightly drummed
A frenzied Age by patiently
Around a solitary lamp out on the edge
Of parking lot abyss

I was far past childhood
When I started the long
Slow double-
Take to see
The emperors were naked.
Much later yet
That I, the Fool, was too-
To the bone-
That was the joke on me.

I pulled up a stone,
A chair, park bench
A throne, a pew,
A rocking chair,
A hammock to the earth's round table, sat
With my extended family,
Crow, slug, worm, cat,
Aspens, grass,
Apollo

Oak tree in old Germany
Sacred: who even stripped its bark
Was nailed through the navel to the trunk, then
Wound around it by his guts

Or hers. Fuzzy sister wasps now.
We suffered them to come
To us as off the ark they darted,
Quick to their feast and festival

Elegant computerized robots
With fuzzy logic planted,
Harvested, gathered, cooked, transported,
Served
We bowed our heads in thanks, our thanks sunk
Deep into the earth
Where all its old inventors, laborers
Went to some reservoir

Up in their heaven here above
We paid our shabby tribute to their aspirations,
Then accepted their embrace.

Zero was the Fool's
Lucky number.
Up to it he counted.
He slipped it on his
Finger like a ring
And disappeared

Hooked on the curved
Finger of a lyric,
I let a woman lead me down the garden path- it was
Where I preferred to go

Thanks for listening.

Jack Saturday