The drama and play of God, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Haida Gwaii, and a real man

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Perhaps in the future everyone will come to recognize the sublime drama and myths in which we live and grow and have our beings. For the conscious drama of the macrocosm is played out in the life of the microcosm, in anyone who lives intentionally enough to be aware of their part in the Play, and therefore willingly involved in its fruition; that is, man is God, applied.

On the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) there was a fellow I met named Franz, whom I would come to know fairly well and would stay at his home occasionally while on the islands. He was a Scandinavian import who, before arriving on the Charlottes, had wandered about the earth carrying sixty-five kilos on his back across the likes of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. He was a true Odin, if every I have met one; a skilled fisherman, hunting guide, dog-musher, butcher, lumberjack, trapper, cabin builder, and horseman. There was nothing unmanly about him, and, to this day, I have never met another person who so remarkably displayed the outward characteristics of the undauntable male spirit. He was another of the rare few individuals whom I would have claimed was a real man, were there any real men left on this earth.

The number of times I had stood at the crossroads and had no idea or care whether to go one way or another is unbelievable. I was lost and it did not matter in what direction I stayed lost. To turn left or right made no difference. So often I just stood still, empty and cold in the directionless arrest of my wandering self. I just stood there, no reason to move.

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These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.