Drunken bachelor life at a cheap hotel in Vancouver

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           This was an important time in my life- a wake-up call, as it were. Because somehow I too had ended up here, amongst the self-condemned. I, the youngest. I, the only working man amongst them. I, the artist, the dreamer, the seeker, the bushman. And I, the loveless. For that was the one commonality which ran through the entire dorm- we were all alone.

The Ivanhoe Hotel was a sanatorium of the sick at heart; a collection of men whose spirits had not made room for their heart, and so who’s hearts had walked away from all true connection to life, and who thus had slowly drifted off of the earth and hung suspended up in the distance, high enough to look down at a world which offered no warmth, no comfort, no invitation to join in and be held, and yet close enough to see others finding warmth, and comfort, and being held.

            There was a terminal loneliness to the place that would have probably brought Mother Mary to her knees with grief were she to visit her compassion upon the place. It was a loneliness that I believe only a man can feel, because the male spirit never truly belongs to the earth; it is forever aloft, and fearing to descend, and it is only when the heart opens up and bonds with another human being that the agony of separation is diminished. And for those men who have had that heart-bond with another, and have betrayed it, or not recognized it, or pushed it away, their spirit has essentially rejected being, and they float off into the heartless place of vision without contact, never again to be allowed back into the warmth and presence of love unless they find within themselves the reasons for their pain, the error of their loveless ways, recognize the privilege and sanctity of that union, and then seek with this new found appreciation for a way back into love, for a home in the lonely desert, and a hug in the chill of the night.

***

These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.