Hold out your hands to beauty

PATRICK LANE

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jul. 05 2013
Last updated Monday, Jul. 08 2013

At 74, Patrick Lane remains one of Canada’s most celebrated poets. Last week, he was named to the Order of Canada. And last month he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna – particularly meaningful since the school is just down the road from Vernon, where Mr. Lane grew up and spent his early years scrounging a living. In his address to the convocation, he spoke powerfully of those tough, formative years and, in particular, of an extraordinary incident that has affected his life ever since. It taught him the value of beauty. When he finished, there was silence, followed by rapturous applause.
  

Photo source:  deviantART.com

Back in early December of 1958, I was 19 years old, living with my wife and baby boy in a two-room apple picker’s shack a few miles down the road from here. I had a job driving dump truck for a two-bit outfit that was working on a short stretch of highway just down the hill from where this university was built so many years later. I remember leaving the shack and walking out to stand by the highway in the wind and snow. I stood there shivering in my canvas coat as I waited to be picked up by the grader operator in his rusted pickup truck. The sky was hard and grey. Its only gift that winter day was ice disguised as a fragile, bitter snow.
As I stood there in the false dawn, I looked up for a moment and as I did an iridescent blue butterfly the size of my palm fluttered down and rested on the sleeve of my coat just above my wrist. It was winter, it was cold and I knew the Okanagan Valley where I had lived most of my young life did not harbour huge, shiny blue butterflies, not even in summer. ...

I have never forgotten it and know the encounter changed me. There are mornings in our lives when beauty falls into our hands and when that happens, we must do what we can to nurture and protect it. That we sometimes fail must never preclude our striving.

Read the convocation speech here.

See a video of the convocation speech here.  Lane's speech commences at about the 5 minute mark.

- submitted by Kathleen