A Trip Without Books

    During my trip to Kingston these past three days, I saw a lot of wonderful things: a penitentiary museum, the beautiful Thousand Islands, a couple of vintage record stores, and a lot of winding streets and suburbs. One thing I didn't see to much of were the old bookstores and libraries which I often tend to gravitate toward. In fact, I had gone through a whole three days without reading or writing at all, and now I am left to reflect on what the whole experience meant for me.
    What I did most noticeably recognize is how not reading and not writing can often force me into a place where I need to listen to the deeper and poetic nuances of where I am travelling. It's a bit like what happened when I was flipping channels in the hotel room this morning, trying to look for the Kingston weather forecast for the day and suddenly stumbling upon a religious program. On this program, there is a priest named Father Fitzpatrick, who is gently sharing a line from the Bible which states that only in the moments of deep silence can one really hear the voice of God within. Another way of looking at this is that when there aren't so many distractions or chatter, or things pulling a person this way or that, one can really hear the deeper rhythms of the universe and get in tune with what they are saying to us.
    One such moment came to me as Judy and I walked through a very secluded street called Rideau Street. As I was walking, I saw around me a sense of things getting old or even falling apart in certain places--of a part of the city in need of construction and renovation, in contrast to the more tourist-attracting areas like King Street or Princess Street. I felt almost a kind of inner sense of emptiness, as though I were seeing an aspect of myself that feels uncertain or 'under construction', such as the uncertain future and not knowing where I will go with my education.
    But later, as we hopped on the bus and headed back to the Kingston General Hospital grounds where we had taken a break before, I was able to see that all the people in this city start and end in the same space. I guess I felt a sense of everyone in the city being connected by the hospital, because it came to represent the cycle of life in the city, for me. I felt the same way while visiting the Kingston Penitentiary. In all the sharing that the volunteers had mentioned, there was this sense that the inmates were not just criminals who needed punishment, but human beings who are part of a complex relationship with the systems of medicine, health, and justice which undergird the societies from which they are raised. And these retired workers in the Penitentiary seemed deeply affected by the inmates with whom they interacted. Again, I had this kind of felt sense that there are complex and mysterious connections between the roles of prison guard and inmate, as though these are only veneers or temporary roles behind which there are more complicated relationships and stories.
     To get back to my original point: while reading is certainly a preferred way of learning for me, not reading for a while gives me a chance to see that there are deeper ways of knowing that may not be fully expressible, even though they can be felt if one is silent enough to detect them. Once I get over my fear of not being able to express things in words, I can enjoy and appreciate these experiences as very golden moments of learning.