My teacher, Patrick Lane, has been learning to say “no” more often now and at 76 he’s following his heart. That’s what he said at the poetry retreat I attended on the weekend in Honeymoon Bay. He said he likes to take walks to Otter Point near his home in Saanich. There’s an old fir tree he considers his elder and he likes to sit there and listen.

His days may not be quite as simple as they sound as he does teach three retreats a year, offers readings in various locations, travels to accept another award or honorary degree, and continues to write. There’s no panic to write another book though. He did generously show us some of new work at the retreat, giving us copies so we could follow along when he gave a reading one evening.

Last Wednesday, the day before the retreat, Patrick came to Nanaimo and read from his book of collected poems. We were gathered at the Nanaimo Museum for the launch of two chapbooks that came out of the July 2014 and January 2015 poetry retreats. Ursula Vaira, publisher at Leaf Press, designs and publishes them. I’m pleased to be in the January chapbook called Choices from which I read at the launch.

Liz McNally was our emcee and introduced each poet with such care. We are so fortunate to have Liz organize the retreats twice a year with Patrick as they wouldn’t exist without her gathering the poets and attending to the many details involved in having everything unfold smoothly. Liz invited Naomi Beth Wakan, Nanaimo’s inaugural poet laureate, to open the evening.

Patrick read following the nineteen other poets who were present. He spoke of his first wife and their marriage when they were still teenagers. She was pregnant and the high school principal didn’t want her at the high school prom. They went though even though at first she didn’t have a dress to wear. The woman next door, the United Church minister’s wife, loaned her a green velvet dress. She looked so beautiful in it Patrick said.

He shares these intimate stories at his readings and at the retreats. The poem called “The Green Dress” begins:

In the green dress, separate, the floor retreating
from her, so that it seemed she was farther away
than the others thought, around her white walls, severe,
and the doors white, and a single high window, a photo . . .

A poem may begin with a memory but becomes something else if we give up control and let it go where it wants to go.

To help publicize the event, Julie Chadwick who writes beautiful profiles in the Nanaimo Daily News, wrote an article about Patrick. He’s quoted as saying: “Willy nilly, one way or another, through teaching or doing this and doing that, over the years I’ve ended up making a modest living at [writing poetry]. But I mean, I don’t know how you make a living. I’d like to know how you make a life. That’s a more interesting question. Anyone can make a living, but how do you make a life?”

Julie refers to his address to the convocation at the University of British Columbia’s campus in Kelowna where he received an honorary degree in 2013. The speech, later published by the Globe and Mail, went viral. He tells of a time when he was nineteen years old living with his wife and baby boy not far from Kelowna. He was outside in early December waiting to be picked up for his job driving a dump truck when an iridescent blue butterfly fluttered down and rested on the sleeve of his canvas coat. From very far away, the blue butterfly the size of his palm was an encounter that changed him.

He “swore to whatever great spirit resided there in the dark clouds that I would live my life to the full, and above all, I would treasure beauty. I swore, too, that I’d believe in honesty, faithfulness, love and truth.” He ends the speech to the graduating students by saying: “No matter the degrees you have earned and the knowledge you have accumulated, remember to believe in yourselves, to believe in each other. In a world as fearful as our present one, I ask that you not be afraid. Today is merely an hour. Remember in the time ahead of you to hold out your hands so that beauty may fall safely into them and find a place – however briefly – to rest.”

If you visit Patrick’s website, you’ll find links to this speech and others.

At the end of the retreat on Sunday morning as we sat in our final circle, I said that we have to work harder each time we go to a retreat. We expect more of ourselves and Patrick expects more of us in our craft of poetry. He doesn’t want the tired old way of describing things, he wants something different.

I had my 68th birthday near the beginning of July and I can’t help but be conscious of how I spend my time. I could be in a mad rush to put out another book of poetry, publish the novel I’ve been working on or enter all of my poems and essays into various contests. I don’t feel that tremendous desire to be published but I do want to keep writing.

“Don’t hurry,” Patrick advised me. I’d like to spend my days more carefully and have let go of volunteer work so I won’t be doing that again in the fall. In fact I haven’t been planning fall writing circles yet and that feels just fine. I’d like to improve at my craft which comes with practice but most importantly I want writing to be my daily practice. It’s a way to ask questions and sometimes, the poem is able to answer them.

Patrick is realizing he has so much information collected through the years. That information is going into new poems. In one of his new poems, “Kintsugi,” Patrick has used end stop lines, each line ending with a period. Here are the final lines:

I am outside myself, without disguise.
There is only a little left to know. Water returns to water.
The dew in my eyes, a moment ago an ocean.
On the face of a golden puddle the moon repairs itself again and yet, again.

The title of the poem, kintsugi, is a term that refers to “golden repair,” the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mixing lacquer with powdered gold. The repair of a broken bowl is only one of its many possible beauties.