FLYING BACKWARDS by Catherine Maven © 1998 & 2018 Have you ever watch a film of a bird flying backwards?  The motion, which seen in its natural direction, appears effortless, even graceful, is suddenly seen for the complex war against gravity that it really is.  What you had always taken for simple up-and-down motions turns out to be windmillish.  Have you seen swimmers doing the breast-stroke?  Insanely difficult, forcing their bodies up out of the water by the sheer strength of their arms pushing down against the dragging force of the water.  In reverse, birds flying looks like that. The wings arc backward in curves. The feathers along the bottom flay out, and it’s as though the bird is pushing away from something in horror and revulsion. You are suddenly very much aware that air, like water, is a medium through which the bird must travel, a force against which it must beat in order to defeat gravity. It makes me tired just thinking abo...

June 9, 1998 When I was a child on the farm, our bus-ride to school took over an hour in each direction.   When my best friend Patsy wasn't there, I would let my imagination take over, watching closely out the window as my imaginary friend, a pure white horse, galloped alongside the bus, majestically leaping fences, ditches, and the occasional house, and otherwise cavorting in the pure joy of motion that is a horse.   This horse stayed with me right through the hundreds of school bus rides till the end of high school, and even occasionally showed up to run delicately through city streets beside the bus I took to work or accompany me on long tedious car trips.   I never tried to understand the horse, just watched with awe and heart-surging joy as it leapt, trotted and cantered through the fields of my mundane world.   I once tried to draw it, once to paint it, but my clumsy hands could never capture the radiance of that powerful free spirit who somehow chose...

In the early 1990s, my (then) husband Dave and I participated in the Sufi ‘work’ in Hamilton with two men I remember only as Adnan and Harry. We did chanting, belly-dancing, drumming, and yes, the well-known whirling (the Sufis are the original ‘whirling dirvishes’). At first, it all just felt kind of silly, and I often asked myself why I was bothering. I had given up on religion, so why was I following teachers from a strange Islamic sect? Well, in terminology I’m borrowing from Buddhism, each of these activities was aimed at occupying the ‘monkey mind’, enabling one to (occasionally!) enter a trance-like state, so that the True Self might be heard. I had some interesting epiphanies over the two-year period of doing this work, but the experience I want to tell you about now happened as a result of a drumming meditation. I am never one to do things half-heartedly. If I commit to a practice, I do it with all my heart and soul.   So when we began the drumming circle, drumming v...

by Catherine Maven Copyright © 1989 Once upon a time in a small village was born a baby girl. At first, she seemed like a normal baby, even happier and more easy-going than most babies. The trouble really didn't begin until the little girl learned to talk. While up until that time she had appeared to be a normal child, and perhaps even intelligent, once she learned the question "Why?" she seemed to lose touch with reality and retreat into her own world. For there were no other questions that she ever asked once she'd learned to ask "Why?"   And while it was amusing at the beginning, as it is when all children start asking that question, it soon became apparent that there was something seriously wrong with this little girl. People soon forgot her real name and began calling her Why. She began to be treated as the Village Fool, and that she appeared to be. Her parents were in despair. For because she never asked the question "What?...

The Six by Catherine Maven Copyright © 2008             It is a jolly scene, for a dungeon.   The Six stand side by side in front of the elongated hearth, each with his or her own cooking pot, laughing and stealing ingredients from one another's store to add to their own pots.   Even in the dim light of the fire, you would not consider them a pretty sight.   With matted and bedraggled hair, brown sackcloth garments worn to threadbare, and feet and legs encrusted with dirt, the sparkle in their eyes is paradoxical. They are prisoners in this underground room, if one may use so nice a term.   More like a cave, some thirty feet in circumference, but without egress to the outside world, if you discount the narrow shafts for the air vent and chimney flue.   There is no furniture, either, save the sleeping pallets that line one wall.   The room is lit from some invisible source, and is in light and ...

Dandelion in a Ditch (A Fable) by Catherine Maven 1996 (Edited May 2018) Once upon a time, there was a dandelion growing in a ditch, surrounded on all sides by dozens of her cousin-dandelions.   Warmed by sunshine, or tickled by rain, the dandelion was perfectly content.   But then, in the course of one short day, everything changed.   Ten people walked by the ditch that day, and although Dandelion usually paid no attention to these transient beings, on this particular day she found herself forced to listen. The first person who walked by stooped low enough to smell and stroke the dandelion.   The d andelion was unused to such personal attention, but it felt good.   The person said, "Oh, Dandelion!   You are my favourite spring flower!"   Dandelion was amazed and pleased.   While a moment before, she had been just herself in a ditch, she now knew herself to be someone's favourite flower.   She pulled her stalk a little str...