Instead of serving time, let time be the servant, offering on the platter of progress an opportunity to slowly peel back the layers of your life, eventually coming to an understanding about what it is that brought you here in the first place.

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Jay Carson chose to make a change. Drawing on personal experience and observation, he took to writing of the rapture and rupture of life and the thin veil separating the two. Instead of the end, a new beginning. Instead of the dungeon of despair, a house of healing. Instead of abject loss, a gift seen for what it is precisely because of loss. The Creator writes straight using crooked lines!

Jay’s creative reflections culminated in this collection of lyric poems and beautiful photographs, published posthumously to honour the author’s courage in the face of a degenerative condition. By turns playful, sober, and sublime, this collection includes imagistic stories of the past; meditations on timeless themes; pithy bon mots; and tributes to nature’s sacred beauty.

Jay Carson was raised on a rural Manitoba farm. He had a varied career, never staying too long in any one place. He drove truck on the ice roads to the diamond mines in the Northwest Territories; farmed; and worked as a professional photographer. He went to university and became a prolific wordsmith in his later years. Jay had a knack for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary; he lived life to the fullest and was a keen observer of the world around him. He was able to paint pictures with his words, making it easy for readers to visualize each scene he described. An avid journaler, Jay always dreamed of being a writer, but death came too soon.