Category: Current events
Friday, Jul 31, 2020 | Big Thoughts, Books, Coaching, Confessions, Current events, Driving, Exercise, Family, Friends, Fun, Lists, Manifest, Mothering, Peace, Reading, Space, Spirit, Summer, Yoga |
July Reflections
- What felt good this month? Being outside! The weather has been splendid (I live for the heat), and our back yard is inviting, lush, pretty, full of birds and wild critters (including skunks, but that discovery goes into a different category). I’ve been running regularly, never more than 5km, always early in the morning through the park. This past week, CJ and I have been on almost-daily bike adventures, on paths and trails and quiet streets throughout the city (and I’m so glad he’s still happy to go on adventures with me!). Annie and I do yoga outside every morning, and it’s bliss to lie back and look at the sky. Our family has been using the gazebo area to entertain friends, socially distanced, of course; meeting face-to-face is so much sweeter than Zoom, though I’ll continue to appreciate Zoom for making it possible to see each other when it isn’t otherwise feasible. We’ve been camping, we’ve lounged at the beach. Bottom line: I’m drinking up this season, positively gorging on it, while it lasts.
- What did you struggle with? Resigning from coaching soccer. It was a painful decision. But I wasn’t comfortable returning to the field this summer, and I had to make the call one way or the other. I’m a big believer in finishing what you start, and in not bailing on commitments even when it gets hard; but ultimately it didn’t feel like I was being asked to do what I’d signed up for. In truth, my decision came from deep in my guts, and when a decision rises from there, it’s important to listen. So I said goodbye to the players; with gratitude for other coaches willing to step in. For someone who has difficulty saying “No,” this has been a valuable process to work through. My mental health seems more stable this month, too, and I wonder whether the looming return-to-play was weighing more heavily on my mind than I was willing to acknowledge at the time.
- Where are you now compared to the beginning of the month? More chilled-out. I’ve been reading lots of books, and napping on the couch. Less Twitter too! Haven’t written much new material in the past two weeks … but it hasn’t felt imperative. What feels imperative is feeding my mind with new ideas, hanging out with my kids, seeing friends, sticking to an early morning exercise routine. To everything there is a season. I’m submitting to the flow.
- How did you take care of yourself? This month, I continued to tend to my physical and mental health. I’ve been countering negative thoughts with journaling. I try to notice when I’m being unkind to myself, and to assess whether it’s accurate or based on an irrational or subconscious pattern of thought. I’m doing tons of stretching and strengthening (physio homework). Texting/talking with friends is also good self-care, I realize. I’ve been telling my body how much I appreciate it. I’ve been trying to apply the idea of acceptance as a form of love to myself, as well as to my loved ones. Don’t we all just want to be loved and appreciated for who we are, flaws and all? Becoming takes a lifetime. We’re all going it at our own pace, so let’s walk there together, in kindness and generosity.
- What would you most like to remember? Standing in the driveway, listening to my mom tell stories about her past. Biking behind CJ as he learns to lead the way. Laughing around the campfire. Wind blowing through open car windows. The comet shining like a flashlight in the night sky. The sound of many many birds. Being in motion, going somewhere, even if just around the block. The sky.
- What do you need to let go of? Anxiety, especially about everything that’s out of my control. Maggie Nelson writes about “prophylactic anxiety” in her book The Argonauts (her marvellous, genre-defying, mind-stretching book). In fact, I’m noticing that it’s her own mother who cannot escape from this need to anticipate and rehearse for the very worst, at all times. Maggie Nelson quotes Freud’s definition of anxiety: “Anxiety describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one.” My kids have been helping me notice the many ways in which I apply prophylactic anxiety, which I’ve preferred to call “vigilance,” to a multiplicity of situations in our shared lives. But you know—one cannot be ever-vigilant, ever-watchful. I cannot be. It’s a poor state in which to live one’s life. There’s no fun in it; dire warnings aren’t fun to broadcast or receive, and all but the most crucial are probably counter-productive. Is it the responsibility of a mother to prevent disaster? I feel quite certain that this has been the standard you-are-a-mother-and-this-is-your-job messaging. But maybe, just maybe, it’s not.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, Jul 30, 2020 | Big Thoughts, Confessions, Current events, Death, Manifest, Mothering, Parenting, Peace, Politics, Reading, Summer, Word of the Year, Work, Writing |
The bugs whirring in the trees. The sound of wind through branches. Cars and trucks grinding by on the nearby streets. I am gliding through these days. Maybe I want to keep this time, but maybe I also want to let it be. Let it roll like weather, let myself rest in the grass and look at the sky, so different every time, completely clear this morning with sunlight at the tips of the trees, the leaves lit from behind, green etched on pale blue.
I am waiting to discover something—what?—new?—about myself? about my purpose? about what I might become? I wonder why I always feel so sure that I am becoming—it seems so optimistic; because of course I am so sure that what I am becoming will be an improvement on this present iteration of self.
I’ve noticed that my flaws are magnified by this time of intense closeness with my little family unit. There are fewer of the everyday, outside, fleeting social interactions that help me to see myself differently; at home, my relationships tend to be more raw, less inhibited by boundaries and graces. In the outside world, I perform civility. Home is where I let my hair down (or wind it into a messy bun, more often!), seen only by those closest to me, who are also most bound to me and therefore most forgiving. Within these close relationships, I see reflected my limitations, my tendencies, my patterns, my behavioural tics and triggers. In truth, it is more often than not painful, humbling.
The question presents itself almost non-stop: Do I want to change? And if the answer is yes, what would I like to become, if not this?
Also, acceptance: this is what I’ve got to build upon.
This weekend, I listened to this On Being interview from 2013 with John Lewis. I’ve been thinking a lot about non-violent resistance, and what it means; and its relationship to my faith and faith tradition in the Mennonite church. I am planted in this soil. Here are my roots. How do I flower and grow and express “love in action”? The idea of resistance infers that against which you must resist—there is an implied relationship, a force that is pushing back. What John Lewis seemed to know is that in order for “good trouble” to bear fruit, you must present yourself at the edge, where you can meet resistance. You must be morally unassailable, dignified, restrained, patient, but also forgiving (of yourself and others). Non-violent resistance is hard, it requires self-discipline, rehearsal, practice (you learn to protect your head with your arms, you learn to curl into a ball on the ground, in practical terms). To win the moral battle, which may or may not move you closer toward your goal, you must be spiritually prepared to suffer. But to meet resistance effectively, you also need clarity of mission. The thing against which you are resisting must be clearly in view.
I’ve been thinking, too, that I lack clarity of mission. I don’t know my own goals. And this is why it feels like I’m waiting. (I’ve also been reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and thinking about the many ways in which human beings cause each other pain and are hurt, despite our best intentions, despite trying to protect ourselves; and how powerless that can make us feel, to act, to respond, to seek out relationship with others.)
re resistance, re mission, re goals, just found this in my notes: I still need to write that blog post about the flaws in the system. Which flaws? Which system?
Too many flaws, too many systems.
On this subject, more to come. But I shall spare you and stop here for now.
xo, Carrie
Wednesday, Jul 22, 2020 | Adventure, Art, Big Thoughts, Book Review, Books, Current events, Fun, Good News, Holidays, Politics, Publishing, Reading, Spirit, Work, Writing |
A marvellous way to escape from the stasis and repetition of the everyday is by reading books. I’ve been reading more books these days than I have for a very long time, reading not merely for professional purposes, but as a fan.
And I just want to say: Read, friends, read!
Read a book! You won’t regret it! Sink in, let your brain get accustomed to taking the long, slow, scenic route instead of scrolling yourself down an endless wall of text. This might sound like self-serving advice, but really, I feel born-again.
Read a book!
It’s an immersion in a way that other forms of “entertainment” and learning are not, because it also involves engagement, as your mind works to build worlds and make connections. There are ideas and images forming inside your brain—new to you, exciting, challenging, alarming, frustrating, fresh and unknown—as you follow the line of words across the page. These brand-new images are transferred into the landscape of experiences, memories, and images that already belong to you. Connections between these worlds pop and crackle and spark something that has the potential to feel revelatory and transformative (at best), or at least interesting, different from your usual point of view.
Inside your mind, as you read a book, you’re actively creating something that is both collaborative and personal. You’re reading something written in a different time that is speaking to where you are right now (or attempting to). I think this is why it can feel like you know an author really well—because you’ve actually made something together when you read their book, even when you’re collaborating across cultures, languages, places, and times.
This past weekend, in related news, we camped at my brother and sister-in-law’s farm, and went to the beach. And we read books. I even stayed up late one night to finish a conventional but highly entertaining murder mystery, borrowed from my brother (Ann Cleeves, The Long Call). I’d finished the book I’d brought camping (Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day), a book with which I had an ongoing argument, as it featured wealthy white British characters, several of whom were artists; at times, I strongly disliked everything about the book, but then bits seemed to capture something important about creating art, especially as a woman, and how valuable it is to have a champion, especially a patron with money and influence, but also how dangerous. In the end, it was the engagement with ideas, the argument with the book itself, that kept me transported and hooked.
Books transport me in so many different ways. Reading Carrianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You brought me into characters who broke my heart, and with whom I craved even more time, and afterward I wanted to talk about these people like they were real; reading Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age was both accusation and encouragement to reflect on my own transactional relationships, even while it pulled me along with a propulsive plot; reading Glennon Doyle’s Untamed stirred up a mixture of emotions, including the desire to protect this seemingly vulnerable writer from her own blind spots, and respect for occasions of raw insight.
I’ve just started Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and already I feel like the top of my head has been lifted to make room for more seeing, more questions, more ways to jab at and unpeel my identity, my ways and means of performing myself.
Writing is not a glamorous job. Progress is made at a glacial pace, if what you’re doing can be even be seen as progress; it might be more rightly called meandering, looping, wondering, wandering. You can’t see what you’re making. You can’t know how it will be received, if it ever gets loose, let alone completed. You don’t know what arguments a stranger might have with what you’ve conjured on the page.
It often doesn’t feel like important or valuable work; certainly it doesn’t feel very useful a lot of the time. But when I read books, I know exactly why I write, and why I’ve chosen this wondering, wandering path. When I read, I feel belonging and expansion, both, at once. When I write, I feel like a giddy participant in a long, ongoing conversation about being alive, being a part of it all, in my own time and place and body, right now.
Right now, Canadian publishing is suffering. (Read this, if you want to know more about the nitty-gritty business of the industry.) But listen up, friends! If you’re lucky, you still have an independent bookstore operating despite the pandemic, and they’re the ones (according to the cited article) who have the potential to keep this fragile/tough cultural industry alive. All the books mentioned above (and many more!) were purchased at Words Worth Books in uptown Waterloo. Order online, pick up in the alley behind the store; or they deliver locally. Do a bit of searching. Find what’s available near you. There are many independent options other than Amazon, and these options are run by people who love books, too. They love reading. They believe in the collaboration between words on the page and individual minds. They want to challenge your horizons, send you on adventures, keep you up late at night. Amazon’s algorithm just wants to sell you more of the same.
Those are my thoughts for today. More ideas, coming soon.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, Jul 16, 2020 | Big Thoughts, Confessions, Current events, Family, Fire, Friends, Manifest, Meditation, Peace, Space, Spirit, Word of the Year, Work, Writing |
When I think about the word balance, a word I’ve considered maybe somewhat irrelevant or inapplicable to my life, what I’m beginning to sense or feel, as much as understand, is that I am always in transition. I almost never arrive anywhere, and certainly don’t stay. I exist in flux even while viewing myself as being a creature reaching toward, aiming toward, permanence.
Yet I am human, mortal, entirely impermanent.
Rituals exist to pin down significant moments; because the moments in my life run together like water. But what I’m glimpsing in the word balance is a peace in accepting this state. I’m seeing the fluidity in my being in all of existence, in the way time moves, and that I move in time. I’m seeing that I am of my time, immovable from the history that surrounds me even if this history will not remember or know me, especially.
During the lockdown, my work was not deemed essential. Because it isn’t. I am not planting vegetables or stocking shelves or administering tests or researching cures or triaging patients or caring for those who need special care. My work has been on the page, and in the home.
I’ve had time. And I’ve noticed that, given the time, I can write and imagine in a bigger way than I had before. I’ve noticed, too, that I continue to feel anxious, to experience existential dread, to float in the brine of my own small shames, to wish often to be better than I am. That has always been with me, will always be with me. Feelings come and go and come again. I’ll always have feelings, mixed up and catching me off-guard and demanding my attention. It’s my response to the feelings that is changing.
Can I live with discomfort? The answer is yes.
Disappoint myself or disappoint others? Sometimes the choice is pretty stark. Sometimes you can’t square the circle. Sometimes — often, really — you cannot please everyone, and by trying to do so, you please no one, least of all yourself. What is your inner voice whispering? Does it hurt to hear it?
I’m trying out an experiment. I’ve come to believe that I don’t have time to do most things, let alone all things. Just write. Cook. Read, research a bit. Yoga, run. That’s it. A little bit of housework. Parent, pay attention to my kids. Be a good friend. That’s it.
Whether it brings me anything, doesn’t matter. It’s the ego wants things brought to it. This is my river. Is it service enough to just write? I don’t know. But I’d like to find out. Or try.
Time to unfold, unfurl, spread out. What’s the rush?
What am I hurrying to discover? It all comes to light in time.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, Jul 9, 2020 | Art, Big Thoughts, Confessions, Current events, Manifest, Peace, Space, Spirit, Writing |
Noticing something, as I sit at my desk on this hazy hot afternoon: some days I feel like speaking and other days I do not. Some days I need to absorb information and other days I’m prepared to synthesize material into something else, to pour it out. Some days are wordless, other days alight with language, tumbling into sense.
Today is a reflective day, an observant day, a day when tears rise easily, and my brain is making connections almost riotously, but also chaotically. I’m hungry, absorbent as a sponge, alert to the world around me, but somehow unable to smooth everything I’m feeling and seeing into a scene, an act, a verse.
Fly buzzes against the window screen.
Two men argue loudly across the street. I’ve put ear plugs in, but still I hear them.
It is necessary to be quiet, to collect, to listen, to be attuned to the inner reaches of things; to everything its season. Two days ago, I wrote for hours in a trance-like state, emerging late in the afternoon feeling like I’d lifted the top off my head and aired everything out. I floated for hours afterward, certain I could call this bliss to come again the next day with the proper application of ritual. But it didn’t happen. Today, such bliss seems even further away as I trek between appointments and prepare for tasks I do not wish to do. Such is the flux of life itself; be kind to yourself, I say (speaking to myself, as well as to you).
As I drove home just now, listening to news and weather on the radio, enjoying the brief whirr of air conditioning, I thought: today you are absorbing, collecting, waiting, and that is okay. You have some important decisions to make. You need to give your mind space, not press so hard on it. Words, sense, shape can’t be squeezed out on demand like paste from a tube.
So let yourself do what today calls you to do: Attend. Prepare. Clarity is coming. Let is unfold in its time.
xo, Carrie
Friday, Jul 3, 2020 | Adventure, Backyard, Current events, Driving, Family, Holidays, Running, Sleep, Summer, Weather |
It’s too hot to think.
I’m as cranky as a baby with a heat rash.
Around 3:30AM, I lay awake and thought through how we might get air conditioning. It felt like the heat was lying on my chest, like it was a living creature, a pressure or weight that made it harder to breathe.
On Canada Day, we went to the beach. It felt safe, and it also felt like paradise, to be driving through lush Ontario countryside, undulating green, toward a deep, cold lake. It wasn’t that everything felt “normal,” but despite the differences between this summer and last summer — the complications of living in pandemic times — the possibility for adventure and temporary escape was proven to exist, too.
I’ve been running early in the morning, before it gets extra-hot. Despite all the stretching (dynamic pre-run; static post-run), my lower back aches as I sit here.
I’ve tried to write. But I’m not thinking in any organized fashion.
I’m going to take a trip to Dairy Queen this afternoon with a couple of the kids, we’ve made a plan, and part of my plan is to get a treat to deliver as a surprise to my mom … expeditiously, before it melts. She loves a strawberry sundae.
I’ve got a pile of rhubarb on the counter that needs to be made into something delicious. And loads of fresh greens in the fridge. Tiny eggs from Farmer Claire. Raspberry canes in the backyard loaded with fruit, on the cusp of ripening. Sprays of colourful flowers everywhere. This is a most bounteous season. But maybe not for story-writing.
It’s too hot to sleep.
It’s too hot to think.
xo, Carrie
